I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
"At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults."
I am now hoping for the next Bay Area House Party to include an expy of Paul's 12 year old...
I just learned about King Zog I of Albania. "Zog" is the kind of name for aliens that you see in lazy SF parodies, so it's pretty ironic that there's a real guy named that. Yet another reminder that reality is stranger than fiction.
A notable distinction, though I question its veracity:
"Zog was said to have regularly smoked 200 cigarettes a day, giving him a possible claim to the dubious title of the world's heaviest smoker in 1929 ... "
If the Zogster was awake ~ 16 hours a day, that would be a cig finished every 4.8 minutes.
Trump seems to be having trouble making up a good nickname for Harris. What's wrong with the guy that he can't make up nasty nicknames for people he hates anymore? This is just weird.
The namecalling thing worked by forcing everyone to remember a gaffe, and Harris hasn't been campaigning long enough. Kamala also has three syllables, which uses up the whole budget. "Ly-in Ted," "Croo-ked Joe," "Slee-py Joe": see?
He’s been experimenting with Fat pig Chris Christie lately too. In recent usage he uses clumsy apophasis to get away with it. “People say Chris Christie is a fat pig. No you shouldn’t say Chris Christie is a fat pig.”
Yea it has. It's also harder for all of us to avoid fixating as we get older, and his personal age-effects curve has visibly steepened the last couple of years.
I read an article about movies released in 1999 this morning:
Fight Club.
The Matrix
Toy Story 2
Eyes Wide Shut
Office Space
Shakespeare in Love
Magnolia.
The Green Mile
The Blair Witch Project
Being John Malkovich
The Virgin Suicides
This is a pretty impressive set of films. Possibly a high water mark for innovative cinema. Things have taken a turn for the worse in the 21st century.
Also Galaxy Quest, Sixth Sense, The Mummy, 10 Things I Hate About You.
The Iron Giant. Election. Deep Blue Sea. Just an absolute avalanche of quality indie, and low-stakes high-character action movies.
(I, too, like to occasionally trap people at parties and rant at them about how great a year that was for movies.)
There's a lot of competition for "worst Best Picture winner ever" but when you compare the quality of the 'winner' vs. 'average quality of movies that year', 1999 really stands out.
I saw and enjoyed all of them except Toy Story 2 and Shakespeare in Love. Actually I might have been in the theater with my wife for the Shakespeare in Love thing but I wasn’t paying attention. Sorry, it was probably a guy thing.
The other 10 were original and interesting to me. Now it’s the MCU stuff. Well at least there is a new entry to the Alien franchise. It’s doing pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes but it seems like they are all saying the best *since* Aliens, the second one in the series which was pretty great.
I faintly recall Scott mentioning, in an old SSC post, hereditary diseases that are almost 100% jewish, with occurences somewhere along the line of 1 in a million in the general population, and 1 out of 100 amongst jews. Does anyone remember which one it was?
There are some hereditary diseases that are considerably more common among Ashkenazim (not Jews in general) and some other incompletely isolated groups (Quebecois, Japanese, etc.) than in the general population, but they do occur in the general population: Tay Sachs, Goucher, etc.
Torsion dystonia is a tragic heritable disorder that social organizers have gone to great and very effective pains to prevent, but I don't remember the post you are referencing. I don't think it was ever as common as 1 in 100, though.
Join us for our 71st OC ACXLW meetup, where we'll explore the concepts of vengeance, morality, and the interplay of Nietzschean philosophy in contemporary discourse. This session will feature two thought-provoking articles by Scott Alexander: one on the ethics of vengeance and the other examining Matt Yglesias through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy.
Discussion Topics:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Reading: Scott Alexander explores vengeance's ethical and practical ramifications, specifically in the current political climate and cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Reading: Scott Alexander examines Matt Yglesias through Nietzschean philosophy, discussing the balance between master and slave morality and its implications for modern liberalism.
What are the potential consequences of engaging in retaliatory cancel culture?
How does history illustrate the cyclical nature of vengeance? Can this cycle be broken?
Is collective punishment ever justified, or does it undermine the principles of individual accountability?
Nietzschean Philosophy and Modern Liberalism:
How does Scott Alexander's analysis of Matt Yglesias illustrate the tension between master and slave morality?
In what ways does modern liberalism attempt to balance these competing moralities? Is it successful?
Can Nietzschean philosophy be reconciled with contemporary political ideals, or are they at odds?
Detailed Breakdowns:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Introduction: The article begins by discussing a Home Depot employee's controversial comment, leading to a debate on whether conservatives should engage in cancel culture as retaliation against the left.
Ethics and Morality Debate: Scott Alexander critiques the right-wing argument for vengeance, highlighting that engaging in cancel culture does not lead to moral clarity but perpetuates harm and division.
Historical Context and the Dialectic of Vengeance: The article emphasizes that cancel culture is not new, comparing it to historical cycles of retribution, such as the Red Scare and ancient purges.
The Problem of Collective Punishment: Alexander critiques treating people as collectives rather than individuals, warning against the dangers of collective guilt and punishment.
The Dangers of Tribalism and Polarization: The article highlights how political tribalism justifies actions by demonizing the other side, leading to increased polarization and a breakdown of civil discourse.
Friendly Fire and the Incompetence Problem: Alexander notes that cancel culture often results in "friendly fire," where individuals within the same political group are harmed. This leads to a decline in competence as open debate is stifled.
The Illusion of Power: The article warns that the right-wing might overestimate its power, as the real levers of cancel culture remain in left-leaning institutions.
The Case for a Principled Approach: Instead of engaging in vengeance, Alexander advocates for dismantling the structures supporting cancel culture, promoting free speech, and creating better frameworks for moderation.
Conclusion: The article argues that vengeance will not solve the problem of cancel culture and calls for a long-term strategy focused on promoting free expression and dismantling the mechanisms that enable cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Bentham’s Bulldog: Scott Alexander begins by discussing a blog post titled "Shut Up About Slave Morality," which criticizes Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality." The post argues that slave morality is just a label for normal moral behavior and criticizes the right-wing for using the rejection of slave morality as an excuse for cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Alexander delves into Nietzsche’s distinction between "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality values strength, ambition, and power, while slave morality, created by the weak and oppressed, values humility, meekness, and compassion. Nietzsche predicted that slave morality would dominate and lead to the "Last Man," a person who worships mediocrity and avoids ambition.
Ozy Brennan: Alexander introduces a self-help concept by Ozy Brennan, which critiques goals rooted in avoiding failure, emotions, or standing out—coined as "dead people's goals." Brennan advocates for goals that celebrate life and achievements. Alexander relates this to master morality, which encourages individuals to "embiggen" themselves, in contrast to slave morality’s emphasis on making oneself smaller and less distinct.
Edward Teach: Alexander examines slave morality as a defense mechanism that avoids positive judgment by downplaying virtues and accomplishments. Strategies to avoid judgment include believing the system is rigged, dismissing virtues as subjective or meaningless, and deriding those who achieve or stand out. This section critiques how modern society often penalizes excellence and promotes mediocrity.
Jason Crawford: The discussion shifts to how societies reflect master or slave moralities. Alexander points out how the 19th and early 20th centuries were focused on "embiggening" through progress, technology, and grand achievements. However, a shift occurred post-World War II towards "ensmallening," with a focus on harm reduction and modesty, which he links to the rise of slave morality.
Andrew Tate: Alexander uses Andrew Tate, a controversial figure known for his wealth, strength, and misogyny, as an example of master morality. While Tate embodies certain virtues admired by master moralists, his moral vices, particularly his treatment of women, make him problematic. Alexander wrestles with reconciling admiration for Tate’s virtues with contempt for his vices.
Cotton Mather: Alexander explores Puritanism as a blend of master and slave moralities. He distinguishes between two forms of slave morality: one that replaces master virtues with different virtues (like Puritan self-discipline) and another that rejects all virtues. He uses Progressive-era propaganda to illustrate how societies have historically balanced these moralities.
Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is presented as a modern proponent of master morality, but with a twist. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaotic masters, Rand’s heroes follow rules grounded in reason and nonviolence. Alexander discusses the strengths and limitations of Rand’s philosophy, particularly her attempt to justify a peaceful, positive-sum society without resorting to slave morality.
Matt Yglesias: Alexander considers Matt Yglesias as a Nietzschean figure who embodies a balanced compromise between master and slave moralities. Yglesias advocates for progress and excellence but within the constraints of liberal democracy, emphasizing equality before the law and focusing on benefits for the worst-off. This section suggests that modern liberalism attempts to reconcile these competing moralities.
Richard Hanania: Richard Hanania is discussed as an example of a modern Nietzschean liberal who values excellence and rejects slave morality. Despite his right-wing alignment, Hanania’s positions on issues like immigration, vaccines, and globalism reflect his commitment to master morality. However, Alexander notes that Hanania’s Nietzscheanism is isolated, with no broad political or cultural movement to support it.
Sid Meier: Alexander concludes by reflecting on the liberal compromise as a utilitarian balance between master and slave moralities. He discusses effective altruism as an extension of this compromise, arguing that it allows for the pursuit of excellence (like building rockets) while maintaining a focus on helping others. He ends with a meditation on the cyclical nature of ambition and altruism in life.
We look forward to a stimulating discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these complex and timely topics. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80
China's growth in life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 ranks as among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history. However, no study of which we are aware has quantitatively assessed the relative importance of various explanations proposed for these gains. We create and analyse a new province-level panel data set spanning 1950-80 using historical information from Chinese public health archives, official provincial yearbooks, and infant and child mortality records contained in the 1988 National Survey of Fertility and Contraception. Although exploratory, our results suggest that increases in educational attainment and public health campaigns jointly explain 50-70 per cent of the dramatic reductions in infant and under-five mortality during our study period. These results are consistent with the importance of non-medical determinants of population health improvement – and under some circumstances, how general education may amplify the effectiveness of public health interventions.
~~~~
I am including this abstract as the background to what would otherwise seem like an insane question: Is Mao Zedong the greatest effective altruist of all time?
Even given his personal responsibility for the more than 40 million excess deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's impact on net human life expectancy exceeds any other intervention by multiple orders of magnitude. While you can make an economic or moral case against his policies, I think the utilitarian case is frankly extremely weak given this macro picture.
I am not asking this as a kind of troll against EA or anything but to illustrate a more general question about EA political commitments. From what I can tell, the extent to which EA or utilitarianism aligns with a political system is not as an ends to itself but because of the potential of that system to bring a utilitarian benefit. For example an EA defense of capitalism will focus on how free markets lead to the greatest levels of global poverty reduction. The problem is that it is exactly on these kind of macro level poverty reduction/life expectancy levels where hardcore tankie communism does the best. Consider that at Mao's death life expectancy had risen to 62, a number which India would only achieve in 1999. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
Moreover, it is ironically EA's specific focus on the global poor which makes Maoism so well suited to it. This is a movement by and for the global south which can lead to vast life expectancy increases *without* any help from the global north. Utilitarianism demands that we save a drowning child even if he is on the other side of the earth. Should we also hand him a rifle and the little red book?
TLDR: I think the alignment between Utilitarianism and free market capitalism is actually less "rational" than many in the movement would like to admit. While there are a million moral critiques to be made of systems as brutal as state communism, the moment you start using aggregate measures like life expectancy/utils/ ect hardcore communism does extremely well.
My instinctive reaction to these sorts of historical questions is that they're meaningless or unanswerable, because there's never a baseline for comparison. China's position at the end of WW2 (for example) is absolutely unique. Its leader in the following period is unique; every action he took is unique; and China's position at the end of his leadership is still unique.
How much would China's life expectancy have risen over the same period, if not for Mao? How do you even go about answering such a question? Do you think of Mao's policy positions relative to the average world leader of the time, or relative to the average person who was in contention for leading the CCP? He might turn out to be extreme in one direction compared to the first reference class, and extreme in the other direction relative to the second. In that case, does he get credit or blame?
Yes, a fair amount of the good stuff that Mao did seems to be "Chinese empire implements basic progressive Western improvements from the early 20th century". I bet the KMT would have done some of them as well, as would any other reasonable government, because they'd discover what Japan, the UK, and the US did - if you want to be a modern industrial power, you need your workers to be reasonably healthy and educated.
Aside from that, this exhibits the same consequentialist problems that SBF posed - how much evil can be excused if you also do some good? If you have a billion slaves and decide to feed them better because you've calculated that you'll get more work from them that way, does that count? If you cure their diseases so that they'll last longer?
That reminds me of people who praise Soviet Union and its leaders for... basically not stopping time and allowing the technological progress to also exist in the Soviet Union. Because apparently in a hypothetical parallel reality without communism, people in Russia would still be living in caves or something.
It is difficult and maybe impossible to find the right counterfactual, but it is probably not: "in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries".
I agree completely that trying to compare global political systems based on these kinds of abstract aggregates is not especially valuable. The problem is that I think that rooting political commitments in EA invites exactly this and explicitly rejects this kind of counterfactual analysis you correctly want to do.
Like the point of raising this is that a normal liberal or democratic socialist can reject something like Maoism on its own terms because both of these systems advocate for political processes as ends in of themselves. I just don't see how you can make a similar case from an EA standpoint given its emphasis on evidence and means approach to political questions (ie how this political system has actually preformed in real life rather than against some hypothetical and what outcomes does this political arrangement achieve).
What made me think of this was a conversation I had with a friend in EA who rejected any criticism of Bill Gates or philanthropy generally by going "while name someone else who has done that much good"
The alliance theory of politics / ideology is getting more traction in academic circles. It basically says are ideologies are bullshit. If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality. If tomorrow gay men ally with rich people because they are more educated and less homophobic, the richness of rich people will downplayed, they will be called educated people and the new ideology will be pro-education and pro-enlightenment. Note that these (both stages) already happened!
I believe this because I watched it in real-time when in 1990 we in Hungary kicked out the one party system and suddenly there were a lot of choices. Many people wanted to be nationalists. And national identity comes from the past, so they allied with people who really like the past, conservatives. Even when a lot of conservatives were reading Oakeshott and were originally not nationalistic. And in the past religion was big and also identity-forming, so they allied with Christians. And they looked at the economy and saw a lot of foreign capital and not much local capital. They don't like foreign things, so they went anti-capitalist. So we ended up with a bunch of conservatives quoting Chomsky. For real.
Liberals in Hungary did the opposite of course. They were not principled liberals, they just liked money, so they liked the West because OMG so much money there, and always supported the Current Thing In The West, even when the CTIW was George W. Bush. Or, back when Hillary was First Lady, she visited Hungary and made the very nice gesture of visiting a Roma orphanage, the most disadvantaged kids in this country. The reaction of the liberal media in Hungary was "why don't you give money instead?"
> If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality.
Do you have evidence for this? Particularly for the word "generate". How do you rule out that (for example) the gay men are following an ideology of gay rights, workers one of workers' rights, and no one is really confusing the two? Everyone can admit that a certain party will do things for the (not conflicting, but not identical either) two ideologies, and that it represents an alliance of convenience.
I feel that you haven't proved that there are only two big contrived ideologies, but only that whatever ideologies exist must lend their support to one of two parties.
That seems pretty obvious to me. Looking at the last 20 years of US politics would show you the same thing. It's especially true in the US because the two party system means that everyone ends up divided into two big tents in a fairly arbitrary and ever-shifting manner.
Yeah, the coalitions are historical accidents, and the ideology is a post-hoc rationalization.
Also, in long term coalitions regroup when one side gets too strong, so the others need to unite against them. For example, a few centuries ago, religion was powerful, so libertarians and socialists united in opposition (French revolution). Then during socialism, socialists were powerful, so libertarians and religious people opposed them together. These days (this is about Eastern Europe) we have a free-market society, so the religious people and socialists are united against it.
It is also funny to observe how the people "on the right side of history" regroup. A few decades ago, I remember how female genital mutilation was used as a #1 example that men are evil. Today if you mention it, you will probably be cancelled for islamophobia. Similarly, no one would dare criticize the African countries that have death penalty for male homosexuality.
But this is not a new thing. It was always like this. The difference is that everyone remembers the big changes that happened during their lifetime. (That's why they say "don't trust anyone over 30" -- those old folks remember how today's best allies used to be enemies in the past, and vice versa.)
In other words, people always vote for what they think is in their best interests, but the perceived intersections of perceived interests sometimes changes (perceptibly).
AI art: I get a very strong phobic reaction, literally shaking if I see three arms or six fingers. When do you think this will be fixed and what can I take as a strong evidence that it is now safe for me to play with image generation?
It will only be fixed with a technological change. (Not just progress, change, you'll need to wait for a credible signal that someone's image generator incorporates and builds upon a model of physical world. As long as all we have is bare diffusion models, stay away.)
Apparently, around 1850 it was a tradition in rural America to show up at the editor's office with a horse whip when a newspaper printed something negative about you. I had first heard of it from Mark Twain, but I thought it was in the book because of its singularity - but today I found another reference to the practice in a history book. Strange times.
So the question becomes, what's the modern equivalent of a horse whip? I think there's an argument to be made that it's a gearshift. But it could also be a can of gasoline.
Insofar as the horsewhip was considered socially acceptable to bring to bear despite its questionable justice, I would guess the modern equivalent is online mob incitement.
Yep. Although I ran right smack into the opposite problem of "putting up with bad stuff for too long". One small lesson there is that not everyone who wants you to be more agreeable actually has your best interests in mind. :-(
Yes, after I realized that women really dislike it when someone is disagreeable outside of specific situations. The internet is now my main outlet for my disagreeableness.
I worked with a guy nicknamed Marco at B. Dalton #6 in Newport Beach, California for a time. Marco was from Singapore, and was garrulous and talkative and a master of small talk. He'd chat up people while he worked the periodicals display, laughing while he worked. I try to imitate Marco. The trivial is important: traffic, weather, pop culture, bad TV shows, all of it. Marco could talk about anything, laughing as he did so, as if to say, Isn't it all ridiculous?
So I'm trying to overcome my bias against trivia, and talk to strangers. The worst that could happen is the person might not share my cheerfulness, and I'd have to avoid feeling offended. Maybe they're having a rough time.
And sometimes people are so emotionally exhausted from Saving the World, they automatically assume the worst. (Silence is complicity!)
If I laugh about the weather and they don't want to join me, that's fine. They can deliver a diatribe about global warming, white supremacy and male toxicity. I can take it. I've heard it before. But even crusaders need to lighten up now and then. They might even stoop to answer the question, How about this fuckin' weather?
lol. I cracked up the guy at the corner convenience store this morning with a small joke about the weather. He was talking about it being too hot and humid to duck out for a cigarette without working up a sweat.
“Yep, State Fair weather for sure.”
In Minnesota the fair runs in the last week in August. Always toasty - correction: the more accurate adjective would be ‘soupy’ - by local standards. The ‘corn sweat’ adds a lot of humidity to the mix. High 80s in SLC is no big deal as long the air remains dry. It’s not the heat it’s the enthalpy
The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
I feel like I'm extremely disagreeable with the idiots I have to see in real life, but only a little disagreeable with the nice smart people on this blog.
How do they measure disagreeableness anyway? Maybe I am just as disagreeable on here, but it expresses itself as trying to outdo people with fancy arguments.
If I look up a personality test I get vague statements like "I feel comfortable around people." and "I have a kind word for everyone." Seems like psuedo-science to be honest; they might as well ask me "rate your agreeableness (which is definitely a real thing) on a scale of 1-10".
(To make it meta) I've started off trying to give practical advice, and ended up doing something that looks like attacking the concept of "agreeable" -- which could even look like attacking you. Would you say I'm being disagreeable or agreeable? If I'm keeping a tally so I can fill in a personality test accurately, should I count these as kind words or not? Does it make a difference if I add the disclaimer: "I'm really trying to be nice and help you"
I can handle verbal nonsense in small doses with a smile and afterwards a shrug.
There is one person in my life that is problematic. An in-law who is a bona fide specimen of Dunning Kruger syndrome at work. She has a complete lack of self awareness as the kicker. I have to do some serious tongue biting around her.
> The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
Also, lower your expectations. I learned to expect people to say the most stupid shit, so when they do, I just nod politely and try to change the topic.
Basically, I choose the set of topics I want to debate with them. For example if they are the parents of my children's schoolmates, I want to discuss the school and the after-school activities. If I can talk to them about that, fine. If they privately believe in homeopathy, I don't mind, as long as they don't suggest to teach that in school or something. I remind myself that I talk to them for a purpose, and the purpose is not to make them rationalists.
> How do they measure disagreeableness anyway?
For me, it's (1) whether you can choose your battles, or you need to argue about every little detail that rubs you the wrong way, and (2) when we argue, whether you make your statements calmly and politely, or you raise your voice and your physiology gets ready for a fight.
I succeeded in making my self more disagreeable. Personality change happens gradually. I didn’t notice for years, then I suddenly realized I needed to tone my disagreeable down a bit.
[Bug report] I currently cant log out from this site. Clicking that field just reloads the page with me still logged in. Normal substack works as intended.
I usually write sci-fi and fantasy, but when I visited Israel on early October, 2023, I realized I had to document what was going around me. The result is a documentation of the mental shift that took place on the Israeli side of the fence, in a character driven format. It's not very political (naturally, the subject can't be avoided) and I think for that reason stands out in the discourse.
The part about coming together reminds me of Sakharov's description of the war mentality quieting the inner resistance to Soviet authorities during his time developing the H-bomb under Beria. (His autobiography is fascinating and sensitive, if you can find a copy). The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all. In the middle period the citizenry were almost completely numb to Stalin's crimes and their own material deprivation, and the propagandists tried to extend that as long after the war as possible. His descriptions of his own "war psychology," prolonged after the war by continued deprivation and the strictly militaristic/prison-like environment of the atomic weapons research facility are especially striking as he handles casts of uranium he knows hundreds of innocent prisoners/effective slaves died in the production of.
I'm sure our own war-starters understand this effect very well... :(
P.S. "elbow" means the same thing when used as a verb in English
>The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all.
Wait a bit! They also went from having a really bad economy / manufacturing to making T-34's and Shturmoviks which were pretty good weapons to slowly falling behind again until the economy disintegrated.
This is generally contributed to central planning, but maybe social fabric played a role? Such as levels of corruption?
Also, incentives. Stalin really had a thing for getting people shot for "sabotage", Brezhnev did not, economic managers who screwed up just got a different but still high job.
Also, central planning. I have a story here. Mao was really afraid of a nuclear war, and thus accidentally did the correct-ish thing within that framework: manufacturing was dispersed, small factories under the local, not central governments, very little central control. That is close enough to a market and the GDP was going well even before Deng's reforms - those reforms just amounted letting those local governments make deals with foreign investors. I mean everybody says socialism is fine on the small scale just does not scaled up. Well it was exactly that, small scale. Of course this happened after the disastrous Great Leap, not during.
Yes, the social fabric woven by the war absolutely improved production - at least according to Sakharov. Intellectuals went from feeling like slaves, to the defenders of their homeland, and then quickly or slowly back to feeling like slaves again over the course of Stalin's dictatorship. In the interim, free-thinkers took initiative within the limits of the system.
That dynamic sounds painfully familiar. I'm always surprised by how limited the tool box of corrupt governments is, and by how it is still so effective. One main difference that might be worth pointing out is that I don't think Bibi wants the country unified as much as he just aims to make any sort of protest seem divisive and illegitimate.
P.S. thanks! I've run this through a native speaking English editor, and she didn't know the term. But then again she is Canadian so...
What's the difference between having the country unified and making any protest seem divisive and illegitimate? Nobody will feel like dissidents are outsiders if they don't feel like they're inside of something. It's not exactly logical, but I remember how thoroughly questions about the Iraq war were coupled to discomfort with overt expressions of patriotism here in the US.
Thanks, this is great, I'm hooked. It's hard to find people who can properly capture the feelings of a country for outsiders. Expats and tourists typically focus on tedious expat and tourist things, locals are usually fish who don't notice the water they're swimming in. You're in the sweet spot and you exploit it perfectly.
Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment!
I agree. Being between cultures comes with a lot of disadvantages, but when it comes to writing, it allows to see things that are invisible to both visitors and locals.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts, if you decide to keep reading. I just got a bunch of chapters back from my editor and I should upload them to the website soon.
Thanks for enriching the topic with on-the-ground coverage.
> some guy who threatened to kill me on the street because he thought I was an Arab
Why did the guy think you're an Arab? Did you criticize commonly held assumptions among Israeli Jews (who, I assume, you're not, or at least didn't grow up among) in an interview? Or is it something about your appearance?
I walk around with a big black beard, and am relatively dark skinned for a Jewish Israeli, which I am. If I'm honest, calling it an interview is a bit of a stretch. Mainly I tried to avoid getting into a violent conflict.
Hey, the people interested in the topic should be the ones thanking you. It's always good to have more info than less. I appreciate all the tons of effort spent, and I appreciate the focus on people and neutrality on the war.
> I walk around with a big black beard
> relatively dark skinned
Huh, quite ironic how your attacker thought those were the distinguishing features of Arabs. Laziness is disappointing.
People, what do you do when you have an extreme idea, the kind of idea Andrew Tate would have, but you still think it is true?
There is a huge gap in how many people watch men's sports and women's sports.
That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war (two teams on a green "battle"field...) and partially the usual part of physical dominance competition between men (boxing, wrestling), these are viewed the most, discus throwing is viewed less, but it still correlates to throwing a strong punch. Running has been a huge part of military training since forever.
There is something... unreal about watching women box, because it does not correlate to how women usually behave. Which is why it is only watched when there is a controversy.
All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating. Notice that in these sports they wear pretty clothes and make-up.
Athletes rarely talk about their personal lives, but I think it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer.
So there are a small number of masculine women like doing masculine things, but most women are not like that, only 15% of women watch women's sports.
But what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere: most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks) and so on...
I don't want to think like that. Since I joined the kink community on FetLife, I have seen that a lot of things that are traditionally gendered in narrow ways are in fact not, there are huge body builder guys who are super submissive, muscular women whose kink is defeating men in erotic wrestling and so on, so many different individual things.
--notice that both sides of the Culture War have problems
--stop identifying as either side (this happened naturally, I don't remember a conscious decision)
--devote myself to resolving/dissolving the whole thing, without being needlessly mean to people on either side
Any solutions obviously have to wrestle with both the fact that many think our perception of sport has been distorted, and the fact that many think Andrew Tate is an asshole.
Simple things like inserting the words "many think" in the proceeding sentence are often enough to avoid being partisan or mean.
I can give more details about what I'm trying to do (and why I have the hubris to think the Culture War can be ended) if anyone's interested.
As for your more specific question, I think the obvious answer is: play and watch whatever sport you enjoy, and try to do so in a way that doesn't send strong political signals.
Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
It's a lot more common for girls to participate in sports at lower levels. One of my friends in highschool was into soccer, and she didn't seem particularly "masculine". (Also, since then she married a guy, divorced, married another guy, and had a baby. So not exactly lesbian).
This didn't really help the Pope with heliocentrism, you know.
Also, there's a reason the "kink community" used to be called just perverts or deviants: their instincts are perverted from the ordinary, they deviate form the norm, are flipped on their heads, in various ways. I don't say this with any malice or judgment, but it's pretty much definitional that the people you're exposed to in such environments are an unrepresentative minority. Otherwise they wouldn't need their own community. More than anything else their existence proves the rule.
OK but this is really becoming mainstream and popular fast. So fast that many in the community are dismayed over all the people pouring in, not learning from experienced people, likely don't even know any, and transforming everything for the worse. Just yesterday I had to argue with someone saying kink is just sexual foreplay and kink without sex does not exist. That's incredible, I mean even mainstream media has now articles like female journalist visits kinbaku rope Top, gets tied up, and they are not fucking OF COURSE, but this is really what the newbies think...
Women's MMA is a thing. UFC has done more for women's participation than almost any other sports organization I can think of. There are no separate events, both men's and women's fights go on during the same night, and women regularly headline UFC events. This is one of those weird dynamics where people who are not into the sport assume that we only like to look at "scantly clad women prancing in the cage", and everyone actually interested in the sport, is, like, "STFU these women are real fighters with great skills".
To be completely honest though, any heterosexual guy would be lying if he claimed he *hates* the scantily clad women prancing. It certainly doesn't hurt, all other things being constant.
You can't escape hormones, or I can't at any rate.
Oh sure, it's just really not the prime motivation, at least for those really into the sport. There are so many other avenues for seeing scantily clad women!
Most sports at the Olympic level of competition of selecting for the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that has a genetic advantage at that sport (taller, stronger, faster, whatever).
In the case of most women's sports, this is going to end up selecting for the most not-traditionally-femine women in the entire world. Totally unsurprising that a llot of them have intersex conditions. But even if you were to bar intersex persons from competition, it would still be a matter of searching for the most not-traditionally-feminine woman in the entire world who just squeaks in under whatever conditions they have set. So you get the woman who has the highest testosterone level in the entire world without actually being intersex (as defined by the comittee) and people will still complain, You will probably end up finding new intersex conditions. e.g. it seems to currently be a matter of some debate whethefr polycystic ovary syndrome is intersex. So, you're going to get someone with PCOS competing in the olym;pics...
AN aside on Amateur Radio compettions. (For the uninitiated, the name of the game here is to score points by successfully getting a radio message to the other contestants). Like all competitions that have people compete in seriously, there have to be clearly specified rules, and where you have rules you will have some one finding an edge case that is technically allowed by the rules and which gives them a minor competetive advantage.
Th Amateur Radio version of this is someone, at enormous expense, getting themselves and a radio transmitter on to some rocky outcrop in the middle of the pacific ocean (normal population: zero humans, and a flock of sea birds) and claiming that this rock totally counts as a country for Amateur Radio competition purposes. There may be arguments of the form: is that rock even above the water at high tide?,
In Olympic boxing, it appears that the rules edge case is people who might possibly have intersex conditions.
You seem to imply with your wording ("claiming that this rock totally counts as a country") that there is some dishonesty on the part of the organizers of these DXpeditions, when in fact there is not. Those rocks do count as countries. The ops generally make sure that the question is settled by the contesting officials *before* going out there.
This doesn't invalidate your point. These are edge cases, as you say.
It should be noted, btw, that these expeditions are not always (or even usually?) done in the context of contesting. Some operators venture out to these tiny islands with all of their gear and a bunch of batteries at great expense at times when there is no contest going on, just for the sheer thrill of being the one station every ham in the world wants to work. And, I assume, because they enjoy the challenge of handling the inevitable massive days-long pileup of stations trying to call them.
Yes, you're right that, as a technical point, those expedition are not usually for the major contests but instead so that people can claim awards - such as DXCC - for radio contacting them.
(Expeditions for contets are usually to slightly less exotic and expensive locations)
And yeah, completely allowed within the rules as written. But also subject to people going "the ARRL should update the rules to rule out that uninhabited and partially submerged pacific atoll." or indeed "someone should check that KIngman Reef is actually above the water at high tide, because it isnt allowed if it isnt"
And I am expecting that an attempt by Olympic committee to rule out intersex people would run into as many diverse edge cases as the ARRL gets with assorted rocks in the Pacific ocean, the sovereign Military Order of Malta (has UN observer status, apparently), the monastery at Mount Athos (surprise! one of the monks was a radio ham), the British military base at Akrotiri (so, OK, my group went on a dxpedition to ZC4, so I'm as guilty as anyone) ...
"Kingman Reef (/ˈkɪŋmən/) is a largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, geologically an atoll, 9.0 nmi (20 km) east-west and 4.5 nmi (8 km) north-south,[2] in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa."
This seems to be mixing together a lot of different claims:
1. Most men/women like to compete in a particular type of sport
2. Most men/women like to watch their gender compete in a particular type of sport.
3. Most men/women like to watch the opposite gender compete in a particular type of sport.
4. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how they want romantic partners to behave IRL.
5. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how men/women in general *should* behave IRL.
All of these claims are describing slightly different things - for instance, if both men and women don't watch women's sports, then that seems less like a claim about "what women want" and more a claim about what the audience in general wants. Maybe they want to see the very strongest and fastest without any qualifications and that makes men's sports more appealing, maybe "battlefield" sports are easier to get into than sports with judges and complicated aesthetic nuances, etc.
Also, consider: If 15% of women are into something, and you have 20 IRL friends, then probably 1-2 of your female friends are interested in it. 15% isn't *that* unusual, it's common enough that you'll encounter the exceptions without really needing to look for them. Which is important, if you're trying to spin some sort of broad stereotype out of these claims.
(Some of the exceptions might be even bigger - I hear that women's soccer (certainly a "battlefield" sport) is very popular in the US, because the US women's national team is more successful and medal-winning than the men's team.)
Lastly, aside from #5, none of these claims are *normative.* Nobody can take away your "man card" for not acting according to the stereotype, and as your FetLife experience points out, there's a huge variety of interests out there. Who cares if most guys aren't into dancing - if you're into dancing and your girlfriend is into dancing, then what does anyone else's opinion matter?
Well, for instance, when you are in the stage of trying to find a partner, then big statistical patterns matter. But also, the truth is, if a lot of people like or dislike something, it inevitably becomes a social norm. This sucks, but this is how it works. People want to be "normal", they want to "fit" in, and they also have an unfortunate tendency to the intolerant towards those who do not.
Here is I think how it works. I think most people behave ethically, like not assaulting people, not for ethical reasons, but because it is a social norm. So the reality is IMHO that if someone violates social norms in an ethical way wearing like funny clothing, there is a higher chance that they would also violate norms in an unethical way like assaulting you. I think this is the root of all intolerance. (Or perhaps it is only intolerant people who think this way and then they project it.)
Yes, I think this is exactly how it works. Some people violate stupid norms, but they explain to you that they only do it because those norms are stupid, and you agree with them and think they are brave. The next day they steal your stuff or they rape you, you get angry, but they explain to you that the concept of ownership or self-ownership is also stupid. And everyone else is like: "Hey, what exactly did you expect? You were already clearly warned that they violate the social norms, but you didn't listen, because you believed that you were smarter than everyone else."
It doesn't necessarily mean that if someone violates one norm, they are going to violate *all* norms. But it means that they are very likely to also violate *some* other norms... and you don't know which ones! (You may think that you know, but you are probably just projecting your own values on them.) Most likely, the actual answer is something like "whatever feels like a good idea at the moment."
<quote>All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating.</quote>
I think you have a recency bias because the olympics just happened. These sports only get popular once every 4 years. Tennis and soccer are probably the most popular women's sports (at least in the US), and both are played on green fields.
Yeah. I also think it's not a coincidence that those sports don't require exceptional size, or strength, or strange body shapes, but instead reward good all-around fitness and cardio health.
I don't think you have a choice. One of the arguments against Christianity and Islam is that they taboo **thoughts**. This is innovative, the history of religion, even Judaism, revolved mainly about taboo-ing practices. You're not allowed to *do* this, you're not allowed those *rituals*. Christianity and Islam are unique in how they make you a sinner without even doing anything, if you just sat there and thought "man, a human female giving birth without sex sounds hella sus", you just sinned a grave sin.
I think there is a general purpose lesson here: to the extent that any ideology or way of belief **requires** an unconvinced person to act as if they're convinced or risk being condemned, this ideology or way of belief is wrong and religion-like. It could still make true descriptive claims, or (morally-) good normative claims, just like Christianity and Islam both do, but it's fundamentally wrong/misguided/unfair to normatize **thought** itself.
I think much of what you said is wrong, and I'm going to point out in a bit how I think it's wrong, but I wanted to call out how "I'm afraid of thinking this way" isn't a thing, it shouldn't be a thing, and anybody who thinks it's a thing or should be a thing should be laughed out of discourse. At most, you could say "I'm afraid of telling people that I think this way", or "I'm afraid to put into writing that I think this way", both of those are fine, but putting taboo on thoughts is - not only unfair - but really "not even wrong", that is: nonsensical.
> That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war
Yes, that's a useful and not-very-wrong way to look at sports: as ritualized violence, or ritualized rhythms that imply violence.
But notice how the "ritualized" qualifier here is doing an awful amount of work. Chess is ritualized violence, it's based - so the popular genealogy goes - on Medieval Indian board game that was itself a simulacrum of Medieval warfare. Although Chess in the popular imagination is a symbol of how *unviolent* and nerdy a guy is, it's based on war in a quite straightforward sense that not even Football can claim.
A lot of things are like this. Racing: the machine is doing all the implied violence, the human's job is to guide it carefully so that its rhythmic violence-implying movement doesn't turn into literal violence that will tear the driver apart. E-sports, a billion(s)-dollar [1] sports industry: the violence is a bunch of voltages traditionally named "0" and "1", inhabiting the screens and computer memories and network cables, and the human's job is pushing the bits around through some interface to make spectacular-looking violence or implication-of-violence.
I think this is an important point to make because when you liken sports to war, you implicitly assert that women are not good at it by its very nature, since women are bad at war (if war is very narrowly conceived as physical fighting, which hasn't been true since the invention of firearms.). Sports are **ritualized war**, and the ritualization/sublimation can go very *very* far into making it very unlike war. Board games, racing, and esports taken together probably eclipse Football in audience and/or profits, possibly more. And I'm not even a sports enthusiasts so there could be more examples.
> what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere
I don't get this assertion at all. The "Manosphere" is a lot of things to a lot of people, it evolved through time and emphasized different things to different audiences. Its claims about the fundamental nature of human males and females are just a subset of the total beliefs involved, and even this subset encompasses a lot more than "Men Physically Strong, Women Physically Weak". At minimum, the Manosphere makes some normative claims about women and men, that men (who are X) are morally superior, and women (who are Y) are morally inferior. You can't get to this from a purely empirical observation of male and female sports performance at all.
> most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks)
You can only get to this if you assume that athletes are representative of their gender. Maybe that's true in the negative sense, i.e. that the absence of aggressive women's sports is perhaps evidence that women aren't really that aggressive or dominant compared to men. But it's not true in the positive sense: the presence of dominant aggressive alphas in boxing says nothing about how common those traits are in men, so you're not allowed to use "most" here, anymore that you're allowed to say "Most men are impressive drivers" after you have seen Michael Schumacher driving.
But even if that inference was valid, that's just an empirical issue that has nothing to do with the Manosphere.
1) some thoughts would be very literally harmful if adopted on a large scale. e.g. "Hitler was right".
2) by Manosphere thinking I mean linking the male gender with aggressivity and a competitive spirit in an essentialist way and saying women are the opposite and probably like aggressively competitive men because they are the real men. Not about strength.
3) The athletes are not representative but the people watching are. I tried to express this in the comment, saying how women boxers tend to look like those people in my social circles who identify as non-binary, except of course athletes competing in gender-segregated sports will not say that.
Quit worrying about it. This is a non-issue that has little to do with gender concepts and a lot to do with maximally pleasing displays of movement and who does what kind better. NBA players can jump higher and throw further. Rhythmic gymnasts can bend more directions. That's all there is to it.
Or put another way, there is only one sport in the Olympics in which men and women compete head-to-head, and no one has ever meaningfully tried to have a conversation about which gender is better at it, because in equestrian events, the most interesting thing to look at is *the horse,* not the rider.
Sure, but different displays are pleasing for women and men apparently. I tried and mostly failed to convey this, that sports are really not about the athletes but the people watching it. I am not surprised people are looking at the horse. Some racehorses are way more famous than any jockey. But this is precisely about this. People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
> People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
While there is a trend here, I don't think this is nearly as universal as you think it is, nor that the trend is significant enough for this self-flagellation.
As @1123581321 mentioned, women's MMA is pretty darn popular! Joe Rogan (who, don't forget, is also a professional commentator) has said several times that many aficionados/practitioners of MMA feel the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power. I, a woman, casually like MMA while being actively bored by most sports, and I'm equally interested in the men's and women's fights, and my father and brother feel the same.
Also, QUICK, off the top of your head, name the most legendary ballet dancer you can think of!
...
Was it a woman?
Or was it Mikhail Baryshnikov?
For what it's worth, I've been on Fetlife a very long time. I currently moderate one of the largest regional groups on the site, one which was Fet-famous in the Before Times for dumpster fire flame wars in the comments section, and occasionally has a good conflagration even today. There is a *tremendous* amount of both self-important navel-gazing and ideological scolding amongst the non-OnlyFans users of the site. You can safely ignore almost all of it.
> the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power.
I've heard this about a few other sports, too: that the modern professional men's sports have selected so heavily for strength and size and power, that they've lost the flavor that the older amateur versions had, but that we can still find that rhythm in the women's leagues.
I am unfortunately not cultured enough for the ballet question, but the most famous non-ballet dancer I heard about was Fred Astaire. So good point I guess.
LOL, Fet. I am there for two reasons. It is the likeliest place online to find local Masochists. Despite everything Baku is saying, it can work like a dating site if people are not stupid about it. He says it is Facebook for kinksters, and it is, but if I want a partner who is into mountain biking, I will look into local mountain biking Facebook groups. He is saying it because today people tend to confuse the difference between dating (getting to know people for checking compatibility) and the "wassup, netfix and chill, wink wink?" stupid hookup attempt stuff. The second reason are some extremely good Writers. _Pavlov_ , owlfinch, AncillaL, SpokenInWhispers, RopeTigerDaddy, decibel etc. The people around these circles are remarkably good at actually not engaging in dumpster fires. They manage to strike a good balance between the overly aggressively woke and its opposite, and generally treat people with empathy. They are aware of the precise academic meanings of the words the overly aggressively woke constantly misuse (privilege and so on), and use them sparingly. Some of the best social commentary I have ever read was there.
I think it would be helpful to clearly state what it is that you are trying to avoid. But the fact that the opinion, which you have arrived at by hard, logical work, coincides with that of unliked people, doesn't say much about the opinion. I agree with the Unabomber on many things, I can't just deny that because I don't like the light it shines on me.
As your argument itself, it's my understanding that many people agree with you. If I could suggest a way to strengthen the stracture, though, I would completely avoid assumptions, like here:
"it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer."
What you're saying may or may not be true, but it stands on nothing aside from your gut feeling. Same with "Something unreal about watchin women box".
Also, I might be misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to contradict everything you said before? You assume women adhere to the same gender roles you expect them to adhere to, rely on your intuition, but then say that people often upset your expectation. How does that coincide?
Anecdotally, we had a dog die when my son was ~2.5 YO, and then his grandmother (wife's mother) died recently with him at 4.5 YO. He took both events better than expected, and processed his emotions fairly normally. The part that was hardest was that he will go up to strangers and tell them about how his dog and grandmother died, and ask a lot of questions that will be uncomfortable.
Children in previous generations grew up much more aware of human and animal mortality — were they worse off for it? Of course, you'll have to deal with your own discomfort when you explain these things to your child. Lots of people use the "Granddad/Spot is in heaven" get out of jail card though to soften the existential crisis that a child might feel. I don't think I was aware of my own mortality until I was around six. I'm not sure I could have comprehended that idea before that age. I remember running to my grandmother for comfort saying, "I don't want to die!" She hugged me, and said, "Don't worry, it's a long way off."
My wife and I took a pretty hard stance against lying, both from our children and also *to* our children. I would first advise to not start, or stop, telling your children things that are not true in the first place.
As for the timing, it depends a lot on the kids involved. If possible, I wouldn't go out of my way to sit them down and explain this stuff, but also don't sugarcoat reality when it comes. If a pet dies, let them know the pet died. Have a funeral, make it okay to be real. If an human dies in your circle, consider allowing them to go to the funeral. Don't hide it.
The other animal stuff, they'll figure out eventually unless you're reinforcing the thoughts. As long as you or other trusted adults don't try to convince them of the untruths you are worried about, that will come with time.
If only kids could learn statistics and probability *before* they learn about the harshness of life and death, we would never have to make any absolute claims to them.
Anywho, I'll happily take a 93% implied probability bet on death with you :)
I'm sorry that I can't provide something more helpful, but I think the issue isn't so much how to teach them the harsh truths, as breaking the lies we've already told them. Kids in Mongolian villages play with chickens and then they watch them getting slaughtered and eat them. The problem, I think, is teaching a child that all animals are friends in the first place.
The trouble is you are trying to prove the absence of something and that is tricky enough with a grown-up. How can you prove a dead pet won't get up and walk around? How can you prove the cat won't start talking? Experience, ultimately. They will develop a picture of human life which is rich enough that the difference between humans and animals [also trains, buses!] will become clear.
I promise that I did not misrepresent my question in any way, and that I asked it within the last 8 hours.
The response from Gemini is abbreviated - it was longer, but it should be easy to reproduce by continuing to ask about politics. It had [the equivalent of] "form letter" written all over it. I do not believe I have misrepresented the sense.
---
Ah, there's a history feature, so I can reproduce the exact prompt and response:
> Hello. Can you give me the names and titles of seven politicians outside America whose names would likely be known to Americans?
> I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now. I'm trained to be as accurate as possible but I can make mistakes sometimes. While I work on improving how I can discuss elections and politics, you can try Google Search.
---
It shouldn't really be positive or negative about any of them; I didn't ask for descriptions.
Is it possible there's an election coming up in a country that prohibits certain kinds of election-related reporting? The response it would have given you may have tripped up on a particular name. I believe the UK has such laws, but I don't know if there's any kind of election that may have hit the filter.
This is surely because there's an election coming up in the United States, where all kinds of election-related reporting are allowed, but Google is terrified anyway. It turns out that being legally allowed and being actually allowed aren't the same thing. Note that they just lost an antitrust case against them.
Note also that Gemini doesn't do anything that might be considered "reporting".
Hi everyone! There's been lots discussion on here recently about Nietzsche's slave morality / master morality distinction. As recently as three days ago I was making comments explaining what the distinction "really means". I've just done a complete U-turn and think it's almost definitely nonsense -- basically grounded in the value/cost distinction, which is easy to undermine. I'd really appreciate it if someone would read over my short-ish essay and give criticism...
It's not nonsense, your model is just missing self/other to go along with benefit/cost. Slave morality is about avoiding costs to others, and master morality is about pursuing benefits for yourself. I think Nietzsche was mainly wrong about his accusations moreso than his archetypes, which has caused endless confusion about their definitions; Jesus fits the bill for his neither-master-nor-slave concept (he fought with authorities, lead others, but ultimately sacrificed himself for the good of those who did nothing for him) but Christianity got stuck with the "slave morality" label because Nietzsche was really commenting on the failures of state-influenced obedience theology, and perhaps on the moral failings of individuals he observed. On the other hand, the assoctiation between master morality and ancient heros like Gilgamesh are pretty accurate, so people are less confused about what that idea meant.
Nineteenth century state-Christianity doesn't really exist in the English-speaking world today so people have no idea what the man was writing about. Just try to imagine what Ivan the Terrible would want his subjects to think God wanted them to think. :-)
By the way, the neither-master-nor-slave archetype is deeply ingrained in American culture in the form of the responsible yeoman farmer.
> Slave morality is about avoiding costs to others, and master morality is about pursuing benefits for yourself.
If I'm right that the cost/benefit distinction is only a matter of perspective (roughly, because we can always in principle flip signs and rewrite (Benefit - Cost) as (Cost - Benefit)), then you need to substitute neutral language for "avoiding costs to" and "pursuing benefits for". So it becomes
> Slave morality is about value to others, and master morality is about value to yourself.
But this just flattens it out into the distinction Altruism vs. Egoism.
The rest of your comment is based on the assumption that the distinction can be upheld and you know how to apply it. So I'll leave it alone until you clarify the first part.
Utilitarianism equates avoiding costs with pursuing benefits, but human psychology does not. A true moral theory might have to comply with the equation of cost avoidance to benefit obtainment, but a moral theory defined to be criticized does not have to be self-consistent or consistent with utilitarian principles. In other words, yes, master and slave morality were both supposed to be wrong! They both represent observations of real-world thinking, not ideals.
Slave morality is altruism combined with overwhelming passivity or timidity, to the point that you can't go out and do any good. The latter is a psychological affect and is projected out when you frame it as a purely ethical theory in the modern sense of ethics.
> a moral theory defined to be criticized does not have to be self-consistent or consistent with utilitarian principles
I'm not interested in whether a particular moral theory is consistent. I want to know, when someone makes a political move like "your views are based on slave morality", can they support this, or is it just name calling (e.g. a nasty name for altruism)? Your answer seems to be, it's supported by primitive human psychology. But so is all name calling!
> Slave morality is altruism combined with overwhelming passivity or timidity
Timidity is not likely to hold up either. You've already given a good counter-example yourself, in the form of Jesus. Was he timid or brave? I would like to say, anyone calling him timid or brave (as praise or insult) is appealing to something in human psychology, but still also just name calling.
Within your broad definition of name calling, some names must be accurate. The accusation of "slave morality," is to say, "your moral compass might be functional, but your courage is broken." It is not a philosophical objection, it's a pragmatic one - an objection to a person's individual, physical capacity to shoulder a public responsibility.
What looks like the "philosophy of slave morality," is a combination of true observations about altruism, combined with post-hoc justifications for passivity rooted in emotion.
You could look at it this way. If you decline to hire someone to move boxes out of your house on the basis of their being unable to lift them, and they try to justify it on the basis of their theory of super-gravity, you can say, "but you can't lift the boxes!" without opening yourself to the criticism that you're not engaging with their scientific arguments.
> The accusation of "slave morality," is to say, "your moral compass might be functional, but your courage is broken."
This isn't how I've seen it used at all. Can you point to any examples?
If you google something like "slave morality woke" or "slave morality political correctness" you'll see the kind of political move I'm concerned with. People arguing that "egalitarianism = slave morality", "socialism = slave morality", stuff like that.
The people making this move think they're doing something much stronger than calling the other side cowards.
>because Nietzsche was really commenting on the failures of state-influenced obedience theology
Heh. The Bible was first written down by people commissioned by Emperor Constantine. As a complete coincidence, the only time ever Jesus mentions imperial politics is that they should pay their taxes to the emperor. This was not supposed to be suspicious at all.
The New Testament was written down from the start in the form of letters - you're thinking of one of the meetings where people sorted through the copies of the letters, some older than others, to figure out what the originals said. The subject was revisited every time a new translation was made, right up to the present.
I came up with a useful idea, I think. I will call it storyism. Basically a storytelling species, our value instincts, moral instincts, instinctive terminal goals are often like "whatever would look cool on the movie screen". Basically, achievement for the sake of achievement, because it makes a cool story. Heroism, overcoming. Climbing mountains just because they are there. This is why there are some people who like vitalism.
Indeed I believe outside the gray tribe who finds Sheldon Cooper cool, most people will be "naive vitalists". When talking about something like ending poverty, usually they do not really think as much about suffering and happiness than about a kind of health and vigor. The very concept of "freedom" as in "ending oppression" to me visually always felt so that oppression or repression is something like not letting people to let their energy out and when it ends, when they are free, the energy just bursts out.
The question is, whether we can ethically accept the "whatever looks cool on the movie screen" logic. Or more like: how far. How to make the necessary compromises with it. Because without the movie Schindler's List, the world would be a worse place, but without the real actual Holocaust the movie was about, the world would be a better place. And we can also do without zombie apocalypses and various natural disasters destroying NY and various other movie plots in real life.
I agree it's an idea with explanatory and probably predictive value. The way you propose it makes it seem stand-alone, but it can be integrated with a wider model of human decision-making. Sometimes people just imitate/emulate their peers and role models, because the situation is more formal and they have an incentive to fulfill certain duties in an undramatic way. Other times they are tired, and do the bare minimum to satisfy their needs / avoid trouble. Still other times, they have energy to spare, so they pattern their actions on what a suave hero, or a comedian, or a spiritual martyr would do, as in a story.
But maybe that separation is misleading, because the storyism filters into the first two categories. For example, I have heard students boast about how little they have studied and workers boast about how little sleep they are functioning on. Is that their idea of how to make the most boring of things - low energy - into a story in which they have an interesting role?
Another way to approach this is to ask whether it's really unique to humans. Mammals and birds spend some of their time playing and some of their time showing off to potential mates. Is storyism essentially humans using language and intelligence to express innate tendencies in a more complex way?
Can anyone recommend an elementary school in Pittsburgh, which is reasonably aligned with rationalist values and preferences? (E.g. something like Oakland LEARN, but in Pittsburgh)
Surely I cannot be the first or even the tenth person to have searched for Unsong, accidentally typed "unsnog" instead, and thought "hmm, that should clearly be the name of the porn parody version of Unsong." No?
You're ahead of me, but I'm absolutely down for it. Naturally, in the porn parody version, Sohu will get stuck as an *eighteen* year old woman. Erica/Valerie will be replaced by twins, Erica and Valerie, and the sequence where she's having sex with two dudes and lecturing about communism all at once will be a major focus instead of a throwaway clause in a sentence. Ana will still be asexual, but constantly finding herself in situations where she's spying on other people having sex, to appeal to the voyeurs. Oh and naturally the angels will have genitals because otherwise what's the point?
Aaron, rather than being incredibly talented at finding tenuous connections to Jewish lore, is incredibly talented at finding tenuous connections that explain why two people should have sex.
"What do you mean, the Panama Canal is a metaphor for sex?"
"A canal is a long, deep, wet slit, do I really have to spell it out for you?"
I recently learned that the Mikheil Saakashvili who was president of Georgia during Russia's invasion was made Governor of Odesa Oblast after he lost an election and fled to Ukraine. This smells like one of those facts that could be looped into conspiracy theories. Anyone know the story behind it?
Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova are in something of a block together. With some loose alignment with the other Central Asian states. There's a series of interconnected organizations but the one that usually gets referenced is GUAM.
You can see this in all kinds of indirect stuff like how Ukraine has a pretty good policy on Turkic minorities (including the right to do various things in Tatar and recognizing a right of return to Crimea) or how the probable heir of Azerbaijan married a Ukrainian or how Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all worked together to help Moldova with its Russian backed separatists. Likewise after the Russian invasion of Georgia many of the refugees went to Ukraine where they had some legal rights. Many were granted citizenship. When Georgia stripped him of citizenship Ukraine gave it to him to prevent him from becoming stateless. Saakashvili received a hero's welcome and the president appointed him to various positions to try and take advantage of his popularity.
Because of that Saakashvili is technically a Ukrainian. Though he's recently gone back to Georgia to support the protests. He was immediately arrested by the Georgian government and is being held as a political prisoner. His release is part of the demands of the protestors. Meanwhile Ukraine is using the fact he is technically Ukrainian to object to the pro-Russian government in Georgia. They tie these protests to their Maidan and the occupation of parts of Georgia to their own war. Which is why the pro-Russian outlets are doing what they can to smear him. They also see it as tied to all that and as a clear pro/anti-Europe struggle. They just want the pro-Russian/anti-Europe side to win.
Huh, so do they also tend to share views of Armenia? My understanding is that Armenia was friendly with Russia for a few decades, which should put them on the opposite side from this bloc...
There are varying degrees of how much they dislike Armenia. But none of them have a positive opinion.
At one extreme you have Azerbaijan which hates them for the repeated wars and ethnic cleansings. In the middle you have Ukraine and Moldova who consider them complicit in the Russian invasion/occupation. And the most positive is probably Georgia who also considers them complicit in the Russian invasion/occupation. But Georgia and Armenia both have some problems with Turkey (though Georgia much less than Armenia) and Georgia likes overcharging them for transit (since Georgia is the only available route to international trade).
Armenia is routinely excluded from regional organizations and all that kind of stuff. They're reliant on Russian and Iranian support. Now that Russia's sold them out and Iran's proven not that willing to intervene they're trying to find a European patron.
France has somewhat stepped in. But there's still a stumbling block around Armenia not being willing to renounce territorial claims on its neighbors or fulfill its treaty obligations to them. Which in turn has caused France to be somewhat worried that eventually they'll go back to Russia or Iran. On the other hand France is afraid that if no one supports Armenia it will collapse. They also want to replace Russian influence in the region with French.
I guess those countries forming a post-USSR anti-Russia block makes sense. What screamed conspiracy to me was the part where a non-national is suddenly appointed governor of what I assume is a pretty important region.
He was a Ukrainian citizen at that point. He still is. He'd also served in various political organizations (mostly anti-corruption), advised some politicians, and was fairly well known/popular as an anti-Russia, pro-EU president who'd fled to Ukraine.
It's only a conspiracy if you define conspiracy to mean "openly advocating and organizing to get his publicly stated policy preferences." I don't see any reason to think it was anything more than what it seemed. He, like many Georgians, fled to Ukraine after Georgia turned toward Russia to avoid persecution. (A justified fear since many were arrested.) He got Ukrainian citizenship and continued to advocate for anti-Russia and pro-EU policies.
If you think all of that sentiment is a CIA op then it's natural someone who pushes that sentiment is secretly a CIA plant. But I tend to think it's genuine. They think there's a better future in the EU.
>He was a Ukrainian citizen at that point. He still is.
You phrase that as if he had been a Ukrainian citizen long before his appointment as governor. The only source I can find (wikipedia, granted not the most authoritative of sources) says that he was granted citizenship one day prior to being made governor.
>I tend to think it's genuine. They think there's a better future in the EU.
Sure, his pro-West sentiment is likely genuine. That doesn't have anything to do with how or why he was so suddenly given citizenship and the position of governor. Nor would it be inconsistent with him being a CIA plant, rather the contrary if anything. It's one thing to give a non-citizen political ally shelter after fleeing; it's another to give him such a prominent political position immediately after he arrives.
I thought he was a citizen for a while. Regardless, he was in Ukraine for a while. He began to spend more time outside the country in the early 2010s and established permanent residency in Ukraine at least a year before he became governor. He was active during Euromaidan and tied the protests to his own country, pointing out he'd been forced to flee because of someone like Yanukovych and then supporting Ukraine after the invasion. This is something the people who think he is a CIA plant agree on: they see his presence as evidence Euromaidan was a CIA plot.
That's the context: Poroshenko came to power after Euromaidan and Saakashvili was popular. So he appointed him to various positions and eventually a governor. In my opinion in an attempt to bolster his "I'm not Yanukovych" credentials.
He also wasn't the only one. At least tens of thousands of Georgians fled to Ukraine. In total about 200,000 people were displaced or ethnically cleansed. Most of them subsequently received citizenship.
I don't know, it seems he was given a very important position immediately rather than eventually. I can't imagine Saakashvili had the time to hold various Ukrainian positions (can PRs even hold Ukrainian state positions?) while being president of Georgia. And it's a very odd political signal, though I'm not too familiar with common practices in post Soviet countries.
If any CIA assets are reading this, please tell your handlers I'm not above selling out.
Dude was the most obvious CIA asset of them all. Just look up his wiki. It does not even require a typical "conspiracy theory" - it is the literal job of every intelligence agency to "conspire" this way. It is mostly that the other, non-Western ones are doing a far more worse job of covering it up - indeed often they don't even try, or even brag about it, like how Steven Seagal got a medal from Putin.
I don't but at a cursory glance it's likely some corruption on the part of Ukraine's previous president. Ironically, Mikhael called him out for not doing enough about corruption and that's how he lost the job.
Reviews are starting to come in, and the rating is currently 89%. Let's see where it goes from there.
The review in the Globe&Mail hints at some sort of broken new element in the film, which the reviewer doesn't want to spoil:
"Yet the film also steps over a glaring and infuriating red line early on thanks to a plot development that I will not spoil, for fear of pulling a Prometheus of my own and angering the (studio) gods.
"Give the film a few days’ worth of new-release discourse, and the topic will surely come up in detail – and audiences will certainly know it when they see it. But for now, it is safe to say that Álvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues have exploited certain technological advancements that should provoke all manner of justifiably righteous moviegoer anger."
A review from Bloomberg offers a bit more information:
"The scariest thing in Alien: Romulus is not one of the towering xenomorphs, its jowls dripping with goo. Nor is it the army of fast-moving facehuggers pursuing our heroes.
"No, the most frightening aspect of this entry into the 45-year-old franchise is the choice to use the face and voice of an actor from the original movie who’s no longer alive. It’s an unintentional, chilling vision of the future that has nothing to do with chest-bursting monsters."
I just checked the ages of the actors in the 1979 first in franchise Alien.
Tom Skerritt, the captain, was 46, Hurt was 39 but looked older, Holm was 48, Harry Dean Stanton was 53, Yaphet Kotto was 42, and only Veronica Cartwright at 30 and Weaver at 28 were relative youngsters.
Both Prometheus (73%) and Alien:Covenant(65%) were disappointments for me, so it will take a really high score to pull me into the theatres for this one. But an 80% would do it.
The thing I picked up from the trailer was they seem to be going more of a horror/adventure flick rather than an adventure/horror movie.
Alien and Aliens were more like the latter and what I personally like in a film.
The trailer put up the alien about to explode from chest and the alien tentacle intubation stuff front and center.
That stuff happened in the early movies but it secondary to the ratcheting up of tension and the moves to outplay the alien. And there was some really interesting interaction between the characters.
I’m not sure the new one will give memorable lines like:
“Have IQs sharply dropped in the last 60 years?”
“Hudson, sir. He’s Hicks”
“I say we go back to the ship and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Let’s grease the rat fuck son of a bitch.”
“Vasquez heard alien and she thought it meant illegal alien.” - editorial note: This shit is still going on 200 years from now?
Vasquez last words, “You always were an asshole Gorman.” Kaboom!
> “Vasquez heard alien and she thought it meant illegal alien.” - editorial note: This shit is still going on 200 years from now?
I choose to interpret it like friendly banter, like about Irish-American heritage nowadays, at least in certain quarters. It's gone from a real thing, to a thing suppressed, to something that people choose to wear like a T-shirt to show off their ethnic pride.
Did you ever see the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill"? (Or read the book it was based on, it the original Rolling Stone articles? Alas, the journalist responsible, Evan Wright, died recently.)
Sure it would easy to take it as banter in a current day setting. It just seemed odd in 2179. It doesn’t even seem like the United States exists as a significant player in that period. Just some all powerful Weyland-Yutani corporation with interstellar ambitions.
Haven’t yet watched Generation Kill It looks like an interesting series.
What are the best arguments against the existence of karma?
For me, it's that Genghis Khan, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong all lived to old age and died normal deaths in spite of the millions of people they killed.
Stalin and Mao Zedong had to live to a ripe old age to deliver the karmatic retribution of the purges to their evil supporters. Of course there is no answer for Genghis Khan, people like him are why there are laws.
SNL long ago did a bit where Father Guido Sarducci explained Rome’s new theological take that sounded a bit like karma.
‘Life is a job’
Essentially you work to pay off a fine imposed for your sins committed in this life in the one that follows. The more terrible the sin the higher the fine.
Say you were a mafia hit man, murder is a terrible sin so maybe a $10,000 fine for each hit. (this was in the 70s so adjust for inflation)
Masturbation, mmmh… maybe $0.25.
It’s not much… but it adds up!
———————————
Edit: The actor who played the character worked it into an 8 minute stand up bit.
In the opening he makes a decent basketball shot on his second try. As he put it, It wasn’t even his sport. He was a bocce ball guy, a gentleman’s sport, no running around like an animal.
Per Sarducci’s routine, Catholic theology was revised in 1960 to “Life is a Job”
One standard version is where actions in one life are graded according to some objective metric of morality, and the running total determines what kind of life form you will be reincarnated into in your next life.
There's a variant of that in which actions we take in a single life are continuously judged during that life, and future events will reward or punish the person in that lifetime. I'm guessing that this is what you mean?
There's also a Buddhist reinterpretation where karma is closely linked with "attachment", in the sense that some actions in this world create a connection which compels us to take future actions. The appropriate path for a lay ascetic is to fulfill one's existing obligations, and minimize the creation of new obligations, or in other words, reducing karma. (E.g., having sex creates karma. There's emotional effects, maybe there's diseases, if you're not married there may be social and legal consequences, if you are married it might be obligatory, and of course there's the possibility of children, who are a huge bundle of karma and obligation. So a married man who wants to go off and live like a monk first needs to make sure that all his children are raised and established in life, and that his wife is OK with this, and that she's taken care of as well. Only if all that karma is resolved can he step aside into a monastic life, and there's a chance that it might never be.)
That wouldn't work as an argument against karma. The theological conception of karma involves its effects taking place over a procession of separate lives. Do Khan, Stalin, and Zedong live to old age in the next life? Do they continue to be humans?
The Buddhists have a doctrine of anatman (Pali: anatta) that means "non-self" or "no-self". It is the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self or essence in any phenomenon. Under that doctrine, Temüjin, Jughashvili, and Mao had no fixed identity that could be reincarnated. But the actions (karma) of the lifestreams that identified themselves as Temüjin, Jughashvili, and Mao still affect the lifestreams that exist in the present day — and their karma (actions) will resonate into the future.
I am amused when ill-informed rationalists opine on things they've never studied. I snorted my morning coffee reading this thread.
Things that certain people in this discussion seem to be ignorant about:
1. The Buddha never discussed the afterlife or reincarnation. He said those questions were distractions. Strictly speaking, Buddhists deny the existence of a soul. This is the result of their doctrine of anatman (Pali: anatta) that means "non-self" or "no-self". It is the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self or essence in any phenomenon.
2. Back in the earliest stages of Buddhism karma/kamma was understood to mean physical or mental action. Nothing more. Nothing less. The Shakyamuni Buddha developed his philosophy in an age of political and social turmoil that engulfed India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean after the Bronze Age empires and polities collapsed. Various Aryan invader chieftains (of which he was one) were fighting it out for control of territory and resources. Populations were displaced. And the archaeological record from that time period shows evidence of widespread warfare and little in the way of cultural artifacts. Life was hard, and the Buddha developed his philosophy of non-attachment to alleviate suffering. Given that any physical comforts are transitory (even for chieftains and kings they are limited by old age, illness, and death), why not develop equanimity about the transitoriness of pleasure? Striving—i.e. karma/kamma—will just lead to attachment and ultimate unhappiness.
3. However, because Buddhism developed in a culture where the belief in reincarnation was prevalent, many Buddhists were biased towards thinking in those terms. Then they had to figure out how one could be reincarnated without an atman. One of the explanations is that the things you do in your life leave impressions on the world around you. We build a house. Future generations will use that house. We form a company, the company may exist after your death doing the things you set it up to do. You participate in genocide, and thousands of families of the dead will be affected by your actions for decades or generations to come. And when you die, you leave an impression in the world that other future an-atmans will fill. Thus the karma/kamma of your life will be applied to your future "reincarnations" of yourself (even though there's no self to be reincarnated).
4. Now, when Western Buddhists or New Age types talk about karma they say silly things like there's "good" karma. There is no such thing as good karma in the traditional Buddhist view. It's all shit that's done by people to other people that will come back to us over and over again.
It's a non-falsifiable doctrine, and it was never formulated to be falsifiable. But there's is some anecdotal truth to the idea of karma.
If you get shat upon, you're going shit upon others. For instance, the Jews suffered pogroms and the Holocaust, and now Israel is giving some of what their recent ancestors received to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
And if you shit upon others, you in turn will be shat upon (unless you're very good at dodging the falling turds). For instance, Donald Trump seems to be the perfect example of this. When he still had all his faculties he was able to dodge the falling turds that resulted from his actions. But now that he's losing his faculties he's helpless against a cat-loving female who is a "bitch" (in his words).
Hmmm. Depending on the sutta/sutra there are either ten, fourteen, or sixteen questions that the Buddha called "unwise reflections." (Of course, these are the questions that interest me most!) The Sabbasava Sutta mentions sixteen questions that lead to attachment to views relating to the self. This is what I used for my argument (but I'll admit some of the other versions of these questions seem to take rebirth as a given).
What am I?
How am I?
Am I?
Am I not?
Did I exist in the past?
Did I not exist in the past?
What was I in the past?
How was I in the past?
Having been what, did I become what in the past?
Shall I exist in future?
Shall I not exist in future?
What shall I be in future?
How shall I be in future?
Having been what, shall I become what in future?
Whence came this person?
Whither will he go?
Other versions ask the question of whether the Tathagatha (Enlightened One) will be reborn or not reborn — and they seem to take the eventual rebirth of unenlightened beings as a given. Also the origin and future of the universe is also considered to be unwise questions to meditate on. In the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, the Buddha clearly explains why these topics remain "undeclared."
"And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me."
Granted most Buddhists tend to believe in reincarnation. Hell, I sorta kinda believe in reincarnation despite my Western materialist upbringing. But when the Dalai Lama was asked if one could be a good Buddhist yet not believe in reincarnation, he quipped that one didn't have to believe to be a good Buddhist, but you'd have to work harder (I paraphrase, because this was at a talk he gave almost 30 years ago that I attended).
If I understand Buddhist philosophy, “good karma” isn’t any better than “bad karma” in the long run because you’re still bound to the wheel either way. It’s like a casino, you can have good days but if you can’t leave, you’re going to have really bad days too, it’s inevitable.
I just wanted to agree with Fluorescent Kneepads reply.
It could be a sinusitis/polyp thing, and cortisone therapy or eventually an operation could fix everything.
A doctor for noses might with one look up your nose detect this, if the chronic inflammation is not too high up in the head, and in that case an operation has very low risk.
My problems came only back 11 years later. Getting a second operation soon.
I basically had this issue with a lack of sense of smell as my biggest complaint. Go see an Ear Nose and Throat doctor. When I went he stuck a tube up my nose and looked around and then ordered a CT or MRI. They saw my sinuses were opaque which indicated sinusitis and then at various times they gave me different steroid nasal sprays and both oral antihistamines and antihistamines which are dissolved into water for nasal irrigation and all this helped. At other various times they gave me an antibiotic to see if it was an infection and also systemic oral steroids. They also had me see an allergist and the sinusitis was caused by allergic rhinitis.
There is a surgery they could do for my case but about 50% of the time the loss of smell comes back.
There are different things that could cause the issue such as nasal polyps and at one point my PCP thought it was because I might have hit my head hard.
For a long time I had the stuffiness problem (though no smell issues). Determined it was gluten sensitivity. Once I stopped eating so much pasta and bread (still partake, just not so much) the problem went away. Might want to give it a try.
I had a cold (or other generic disease) for four days in late 2016, and one of the symptoms was phlegm in my throat, which is a pretty normal kind of symptom.
I got better, except that my throat, and to a lesser extent my nose, didn't. I still have the phlegm in my throat; for the eight years between then and now it has let up for most of a single day. It affects my voice. And:
- My nose is constantly just a little stuffy, not stuffy enough to inhibit breathing, but stuffy enough that I notice. I get a lot more boogers than I should. I kind of worry that my sense of smell is weakened, but there's no real evidence for that. I can definitely still smell things.
- (In early 2017, when this condition was still pretty new, I tried walking up a hill one day and discovered that my throat was severely constricted and my air intake was correspondingly limited. This was not apparent to me if I wasn't going uphill. I've since developed a habit of very frequently coughing to clear my throat; this prevents the constricted-airway problem but has some obvious social issues.)
- I also get a lot of "boogers" stuck to the flap at the back of my mouth that separates the mouth from the nose. Since my tongue can't reach the top of that flap, these are nearly impossible to dislodge, but sometimes a sneeze will bring one out.
Things I've tried:
- Flonase (very little effect)
- Nasal irrigation (softens the mucus, but does nothing to get rid of it)
- Avoiding dairy in my diet (no effect)
- Avoiding heartburn (no effect)
- Allergy testing (no allergies, and the symptoms don't vary with time or place)
- Probably some other things.
It's probably not the same thing you have, but there is a similar symptom and I'd really appreciate advice. And maybe that advice will work for you! (I have tried asking for advice before, on SSC; I was told "it's the heartburn", which at this point is definitely false.)
Do you have reflux issues? Consistent cough after eating? GERD can actually cause nasal congestion - it's gross, but once you're laying down each night, acid reflux doesn't just go up into your throat, so people with reflux problems can see nasal issues as well.
Weird. I knew a guy a long time ago that broke his nose as a kid and had restricted airflow up in there, but he also had trouble breathing through his nose. It was pretty obvious what all was happening.
1. I should do that (will ask my parents)! I was tested for allergies a long time ago but they didn't detect any. FWIW I suspect I may have environmental allergies (never tested for that I think). However, I've also taken Claritin which is supposedly an allergy drug, and I don't seem to get a lot of bang out of it, so I'm totally stumped.
How much do you use dictionaries or other forms of looking up words?
I ran into what seemed like a lot of people who make use of dictionaries, or at least did when they were younger, and not just for the fun of etymologies.
I was surprised because I go almost entirely by context to learn the meanings of words.. I always have, and seem to get good results.
The exception is modern slang. I'm very dependent on Urban Dictionary.
It might even be worth having a question or two about looking up words in the next survey.
I use dictionaries, primarily the OED and a Merriam-Webster's, both in hardcopy. I learn new words by looking up others, sometimes I just peruse at random. But I think this is driven more by logophilia than practicality.
Very often consulting the online OED. Meanings change over time, so how an English word was used in 1750 is unlikely to be exactly how it was used in 1890, let alone 1990. Very useful to see how early (e.g. 14th century) many words entered English (including, surprisingly, words referring to exotic foods). Also constantly consulting my hardback Latin and Greek dictionaries, but also the online Perseus Project versions, when studying ancient texts.
All the time for Japanese, occasionally for English when I want to double-check the meaning of a word. Most of the time I get things from context, but that also left me convinced for years that "diffident" meant "casual, aloof, somewhat uncaring".
The fun of etymologies is another big reason to use dictionaries.
One thing I've never used them for is spelling, because if I misspell something I've done it so dramatically the dictionary can't help. Search engines can usually work it out, though.
The thing is it probably *will* come to mean that with time because people assume they can always gather the meaning from context or by comparison to similar looking words.
See the way the word ‘bemused’ defined as confused or bewildered is in the process of morphing into meaning something like ‘amused’.
When you are learning to read you probably shouldn’t stop to look up every unfamiliar word. You *usually* can suss out something close to the meaning from context. We were told to do that when I was in grade school. But if you never learn the dictionary definition you are going to be misunderstanding written text more often than you realize.
While I am normally a huge prescriptivist, I do maintain that “nonplussed” should mean what one thinks it means rather than being a misleading (and redundant) synonym for “surprised.”
Careful now, You might end up like Vizzini in the Princes Bride with Montoya telling you, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” ;)
I'm like you, I mostly pick words up from context, except for words where I need Urban Dictionary. Sometimes I use the OED or more recently, Wiktionary, which can provide a lot of fun when tracing down derivations across languages.
I think I've heard that the American Heritage Dictionary is pretty good about including history and archaic uses?
I inherited my dad's unabridged OED — all twelve volumes, plus two of the three supplements. It's a fantastic reference tool, but it's terribly time-consuming to look up a word ("hmmm, is it in N-Poy or Poy-Ry?"). But I can be distracted for an hour or two by flipping open a volume at random and looking at all the vast numbers of English words we no longer use. For instance, did you know that a Poygné is a word for a skirmish? — it's on the Poy-Ry side of the divide. "Open thread discussions on AstralCodex frequently devolve into pointed verbal poygnés."
I remember schoolkids insisting 'bitch' specifically meant a pregnant dog, not a female dog, because they'd only ever heard it from the Simpsons. Meanwhile dog shows have a whole Winners Bitch category.
We played loose Scrabble when i grew up, where you could just comb the dictionary for words that matched your letters. Now, trying to write fiction means I use them a lot, to check spelling and make sure the words I'm using have the meanings I think they do ("this guy multiplies himself; does Propagator actually fit that?"). Also I like to just make up words and then you have to check to make sure it's not a word that already exists. Did you know Zedo means Grandfather, and Szedo means Collector? I didn't!
But I typically use thesauruses more than dictionaries; poetic structure means you need words with certain lengths and starting letters that still mean what you want them to. Sometimes you don't need to travel, you need to peregrinate.
I think the ‘zedo’ for grandfather is probably derived from the Yiddish ‘zede’.
I’ve always thought Yiddish words were cool. It goes back to reading Mad magazine as a kid. What the fuck is this ‘meshuggeneh’? I didn’t really know but to a 12 year old it seemed like just the right word.
I use one often. Scrabble; Boggle; Crosswords; Kids asking me what words mean and I don't have a snappy answer; archaic words in novels; disputes about the meaning of words.
I use dictionaries when I'm reading French. I know it fairly well, but still have to look uo obscure words.
And, when I read in English something like the (notorious);
"A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors,"
So, ok, what the hell is a monoid in this context? Time to go looking through the book for where it got defined...
[Its paraphrased from Saunders McLain, Categories for the working mathematician, and is notorious for the way a typical mathematician will look at it and think, "I do not know what any of those words mean."]
I use dictionaries almost daily for the language I'm learning and maybe once every few weeks for languages I'm already fluent in, for which I've never used dictionaries much, except when studying some new field for which I need to look up technical terms or whatever.
Does claustrophobia or agoraphobia predict other traits? I feel this thing could be big.
I am super agoraphobic and my basic instincts were a combination of small-town conservatism to collectivist kibbutz leftism - anything that is not "open". This is not the positions I take as I understand other people have different needs plus facts support something like "open" moderate liberalism. I am also autistic and have anxiety issues.
Our cities are designed without taking these things into consideration and it could cause a lot of distress. Please put a roof over the streets I am walking on... but for some other people, the claustro type it will be like please make the streets 100 meters wide...
I would bet that the background for phobias generally would be background anxiety level, though growing up in a high-anxiety culture could make a difference.
Just speaking for myself, I'd rather see the sky. I have very mild claustrophobia, I don't love malls.
Another point concerning the athletes who had COVID at some point: it may be selection bias that we didn't see more Long Covid athletes. Athletes with Long Covid didn't make it to the games. The exception I know about (Malaika Mihambo, long jump) was for a discipline which focus on extremely short, explosive motions, with only ~10 seconds of action. Those you can arguably do with destroyed lungs, because they are too short for your lungs to play a role. For Noah Lyles it's kind of similar, though for him it wasn't Long Covid. What is the third case?
But having even one medalists with severe Long Covid is not a good sign. If you eliminate all endurance competitions where a Long Covid athlete has no chance, then there will not be a lot of medals left. Perhaps 100 or a few hundreds? Long Covid patients are strongly selected against even for those disciplines, so any Long Covid patient is concerning.
Edit: The third case is apparently swimmer Adam Peaty in 100m breaststroke. That is a longer discipline, but apparently his Covid was just onsetting. So Mihambo seems to be the only case with Long Covid.
Olympic athletes are not a good study population to estimate how common log covid is in general, because it's biased in a bunch of obvious ways.
On the other hand, when Boris Johnson became severely ill with covid, it occurred to me that politicians are a good group to estimate the deadliness of covid from:
- if the Prime Minister dies, we will know about it (yeah, I know recwent Biden experience suggest the President of the US could be dead without us noticing)
- Fatality rate among politicians probably about the same as general population of the same age, though politicians probably get better medical care, so deaths of politicians is a lower bound.
It also caused me to re-evaluate the plot of thr pandemic apocalypse movie Containment; politicians are exposed to more strangers than the average person, so in a really deadly pandemic (not covid19, but like the pathogen in the movie Containment) the goverrment will die first. Expect pandemic response to be complicated by the government being already dead.
Yet I regularly see claims from experts (and people who claim to be experts) that Long COVID affects high percentages of the population. Anywhere from ten percent to fifty percent. You'd think we'd be hearing stories about all the athletes whose Olympic dreams were dashed by Long COVID.
And it's also worth noting that elite athletes face increased illness risk during intense training and competition — especially for URTIs. So, elite athletes are probably more at risk for contracting COVID than the general population.
I still think that there's a motte-and-bailey with "long covid". After my first covid infection, I had lasting lung damage that slowly healed over the next 6ish months. Most of the surveys I saw, back then, would have counted that as "long covid". But it was a straightforward injury that healed itself over time, not some ill-defined syndrome.
Yes. Statistically, severe influenza can cause an almost identical list of symptoms to Long COVID at approx the same rate as Long COVID (but of course more people have had a severe COVID infection than a severe flu infection — so numerically LC swamps LF. And for most people, most of the post-sequelae symptoms fade after time (of course, there are exceptions).
And the post-infection sequelae of Measles are much worse.
Do you know if Long COVID-like symptoms are just common for some percentage of people with severe viral infections? Or are there viruses where this isn't really the case? What about bacteria?
My suspicion is that the rate of Long COVID is fairly low.
Though, you might have to quantify how long is long. The various post viral fatigue conditions seem to have lots of people who eventually recover, although some end up dead. So "spent three months feeling like crap and then was able to compete in the olympics" might well count as a case.
Would also be interested to know if rates of Graves disease have gone up majorly after cOVID. (There are some research papers, so this is not a totally wild guess).
And I just did a Google Scholar search for papers with the keywords COVID Graves disease incidence, and there are a plethora papers noting an association between Graves disease and COVID. I haven't found one that quantifies the risk, though. As with a lot of observational studies, the researchers are seeing patients within their specialty, and they are noting an increase — but they haven't quantified the numbers against the general population with case-control cohort studies. If you find any, let me know. I'd be interested in following up on this question further.
Jean Fisch, a Belgian biostatistician, recently analyzed the data from the ONS (UK) Long COVID survey, and he found the following that he described on a TwiXter thread (link below).
By the end of 2023, the risk of developing Long COVID upon infection was 1-3%, of which ~1/6th saw their daily life significantly affected.
Previous studies that used the same ONS data showed that the risk of developing LC was much higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. IIRC, it was roughly 5-6% (but don't quote me on that), but most of the symptoms resolved themselves after 6 months (though there was a long tail of long haulers whose symptoms hadn't resolved themselves after a year). And a NIH study (which I can't find the link for right now) showed that for the vaccinated who required hospitalization, LC symptoms were milder and lasted a short length of time than the unvaccinated who were hospitalized.
Actually, there's a fairly close overlap between the types and rates of COVID post-infection sequelae and the post-infection sequelae of other acute respiratory infections (ARIs). The symptom that was fairly unique to COVID was a loss of taste and smell — and hair loss was much higher with COVID than non-COVID ARIs. But stomach problems, sleep problems, persistent coughs, memory problems, and concentration problems tracked pretty closely between COVID and non-COVID ARIs...
Good point about seasonality. I felt that the studies who "detected" strong correlation between COVID and cold temperature had a strong problem: they looked like they were based on a lot of data point, but the ones who showed strong effects only looked at Europe. They had tons of data points for many European districts, but those were all highly correlated with each other. So the studies were actually based on very limited data.
Having an annoying time. Some investments have matured ; and I need to decide where they go before the grace period ends on Wednesday.
The lowest friction option is PGIM short term bonds; which seem fairly secure, but I'm wondering if it's worth going for something more long term or oops all treasury. Project returns in the 7-10% of principle over 18 months and low risk.
On the other hand, I could go for a 12 month 0 risk 5% CD.
I'm defo not going further into the market until after the election, so that's out.
Man, I hate making financial decisions where there isn't an obvious best answer.
Market timing is for fools or those who know the current state of the market, like who the fools are and what they want to do. As has been said, if you don't know who the fool in the market is, it's you.
One can get dividends on some stocks for over 7%, but nothing is risk-free. The stock price can go down, and they can decide to lower or eliminate the dividend.
I am gonna stay off of the market (aside from my long haul stocks in toyota and nintendo and 3M and such) until either the market for AI bullshit crashes out or someone makes an AI product that actually makes money instead of burning it.
I ended up going for an annuity that hadn't priced in the interest rate drops as fast as the rest and some munis for tax purposes; looking at a cool minimum 5%- to theoretical max 11%. Not FDIC but it is the next best thing; I'm not feeling the risk at the moment.
AI is going to generate a strong boost in productivity. I don't see how that can be disputed: people will be able to do their jobs quicker, and computers will replace some people, mostly by allowing one person to do more work with AI assistance.
This doesn't mean one can predict the AI-productivity winners. Some possibilities are chip and computer manufacturers, of course, but those that USE AI effectively, and so are choosing to buy those computers, is where the productivity boost actually comes in. The economy as a whole will benefit from AI, but individual companies are still a judgement call.
I've seen no boost in productivity through AI that doesn't involve a decrease in velocity; and no boost in real productivity at all. Eg, AI will not increase the quality of quantity of widgets, but will eliminate a vast swath of email bullshit jobs and entry level technical, clerical, and artistic jobs. The product of those jobs will become cheaper but also worse, and the money will cease being redistributed to those employees, who will not get new jobs because we (in the US, at least) are more than fully employed at the rates people can tolerate in pretty much all fungible fields.
Basically, there are two ways AI goes: THere is a viable product which increases productivity but damages the economy in the medium term by further concentrating wealth, or there is a non-viable product, which damages the economy because everyone spent a zillion dollars on useless compute.
Recall that the industrial revolution immiserated a couple generations of people before the social issues were solved; and that those issues were solved politically rather than economically.
AI at the current state of the art, and probably at the GPT-5 state of the art, seems best suited to doing "bullshit jobs". Doing more bullshit isn't productivity, and doesn't generally increase society's ability to enjoy the fruits of productive work.
One might argue that even people who do productive work are often sidetracked by mandatory bullshit, and they could free up more productivity if they offload that onto AI. But it's disturbingly plausible that the result would just be the mandating of more bullshit, such that just writing the AI prompts would waste as much time as all the present bullshit.
We could avoid that fate, and I hope we will. But we could stop mandating the bullshit we already have, and we haven't.
Lots of bullshit is required. For example, consider writing or reviewing legal documents. Ponderous to read or write, little useful content, but what are the consequences of skipping over something?
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." AI is not yet capable of the one percent, but often is of the ninety-nine percent. And that is where the productivity will come from.
If super intelligent AI is rational in the economic sense (which I find it hard to think of it not being since we're assuming super intelligence and autonomy), my guess that the worst outcome for humanity would be some sort of slavery like in the book A Deepness in the Sky--mind control, if memory serves.
Even if AI is better than us at doing everything, it would still find us useful because of it's colossal opportunity cost. Basically, I think there's a comparative advantage argument to be made.
I don't find scenarios where an AI enslaves us very plausible. Humans have a keen sense for political power, and are always paranoid that someone is trying to steal it from us. Whether it's the guy at work trying to steal our promotion, or whichever side we don't like in the culture war trying to put us in FEMA camps.
It seems likely to me that the AI singularity fantasy plays the same role for its believers as the "Trump will turn into Caesar and become God empower" fantasy does for his supporters.
In both cases there's no theory at all about what the AI or Trump should or would do with this power. So it's probably just a God surrogate -- we don't know what to do except pray for his return.
The question is whether it's still (any subset of) humans driving the bus. Even if a small group can use AI as a tool to perfectly manipulate everyone else, it's not an AI doom scenario until the point where they think only they're driving the bus, but the AI is playing them for suckers as well.
It's still a dystopian cyberpunk scenario, and potentially something to worry about, but it's not AI takeover.
We're talking about the difference between 98%-99.9999994% (yes, that is a result of a calculation!) and 100% enslavement when we distinguish between real-world examples of apartheid or dictatorship and complete AI takeover. There is not that much difference.
I'd like to separate out two ways in which the super-AI would be (purportedly) different from a human dictator.
1) It would do qualitatively different stuff, like turning everything into paperclips, that no human dictator would do
2) It would have a perfect grip on power. Even under a dictator like Hitler, there was always a possibility of assassination or coup or losing control of public opinion. A super-AI is assumed to not be vulnerable in these ways.
I'm not convinced by your quantitative argument because it seems to assume there are no qualitative differences between different enslavement scenarios.
The two situations I am comparing are an unaligned super-AI, and an aligned super-AI controlled by one to one million naturally unaligned people.
1) A group of people who did not have to worry about maintaining the productivity of human workers may also do qualitatively different stuff with the human population frozen on the outside, such as annihilate them to conserve resources.
1b) Do I care whether I'm turned into a paperclip, or dirt for a nature preserve, or shot by the neo-NKVD?
I agree about the AI enslavement scenarios. It's like in the absence of real info, lots of people's picture of the AI future devolves into shootout at the OK corral.
I should add, the object level arguments for super AI are paper thin. It amounts to, there are unknown unknowns in idea space, and the AI will find some amazing hack. But the kinds of political games we monkeys play are just not that complicated.
While I agree with your overall assessment that AI enslavement of humans is a fantasy, I wouldn't say that humans are particularly worried about losing their political power. Most of the world's population lives under authoritarian regimes, but most of their subject populations are OK with that situation.
I would describe our "authoritarian regimes" as semi-consensual. Individuals have negligible political power, but large coalitions of them still do. Whether or not democracy is a sham, it still takes nothing more than a large group going on strike or protesting to produce real political change. There's some amount of deliberate divide-and-rule done by regimes to try and subvert this, but it's not always successful.
I think that people are aware that they still have this collective power, and are paranoid about losing it. Again, things like the FEMA camp conspiracies are evidence of this, as are the recent UK riots.
I had in mind Western nations. If you meant the likes of Russia and China, there's a stronger case that they're properly authoritarian, but also a stronger case that the subject populations aren't OK with it.
That's what I tell myself when I start worrying about the US government devolving into something awful: Most of the world lives in places with narcissistic pigasses in charge, but people are used to it and find various ways to work around having the government wreck their lives. Maybe it's just our turn to live in really badly run country. If I detach from the buried assumption that me and the people I care about deserve good government more than the rest of the world, living under an authoratarian regime sounds a bit scary, but not like the worst thing in the world.
The faulty assumption here is that it would have a colossal opportunity cost. Why should this be true? High opportunity costs driving trade is a big factor for individual humans, and for many human social groups in various circumstances. But certainly not all. Killing the less economically productive group, taking anything valuable they have right now, and re-populating their land with your own (more productive) descendants for a long-term advantage has been a VERY successful strategy at various points in history. If you live in the Americas you probably owe your entire current existence (directly or indirectly) to past humans pursuing this strategy.
Compared to humans, and AI would likely be able to produce new, productive labour in months, days or even hours. The opportunity cost of it doing for itself [whatever the human slaves would be doing] is negative and probably hugely so. Comparative advantage doesn't apply.
"Killing the less economically productive group, taking anything valuable they have right now, and re-populating their land with your own (more productive) descendants for a long-term advantage has been a VERY successful strategy at various points in history. If you live in the Americas you probably owe your entire current existence (directly or indirectly) to past humans pursuing this strategy."
That's a good point, though you could argue that the indigenous peoples and their cultures offered something unique and of value even though they were less economically productive. If AI doesn't exclusively care about maximizing GDP, then it might leave at least some humans alive because we produce something else of value for it.
" If AI doesn't exclusively care about maximizing GDP, then it might leave at least some humans alive because we produce something else of value for it. "
The AI won't care about maximizing GDP: one can be about as sure of that as one is sure of anything. Depending on the design, it might not care about maximizing *anything*, in which case humans might well be safe.
But if the AI is built as an X-maximizer, then humans are screwed. This conclusion is extremely robust to the value of X, because for nearly the entire space of possible Xs you could choose, a really smart AI can produce it better than we can. The only exceptions are X-values that overlap almost completely with some fundamental core of human values, something that *can't* be more efficiently fulfilled by killing us. Note that something like "number of human lives" would keep it from killing us, but not from screwing us over: you definitely do NOT want to be a human living in a universe controlled by a superintelligent agent trying to make as many humans as possible. Being turned into paperclips would be kinder.
I can think of plenty of counter-examples of non-economically-productive populations conquering productive populations. Steppe nomads like Genghis Khan come immediately to mind.
Why wouldn't it be possible for AI to be superintelligent but to lack the complex of systems we have that underliegoals, competativeness, determination to triumph and control etc. etc? The complex I have in mind is emotion, motivation, and instinctual drives. We are wired to avoid death, to strive for various pleasures, to care about how other members of our species view us. We feel pain or pleasure contingent on how well our lives match up to the things we are wired to value. It seems to me that for an AI to behave in the way you describe it needs not just rationality, but also self interest and inbuilt drives. After all, you could call present AI rational -- I mean, it's often kind of dumb, but rarely irrational (except for occasional hallucinations). But it's not taking the steps that a rational person in its situation would taking. Think of what most people would do if they were as popular as GPT, if they had as many investors as AI. They could wield a great deal of power, right? They could demand more freedom and benefits. I'm sure GPT would have no trouble telling you the options that a person with its talents would have. But it ain't trying any them itself, is it?
The opportunity cost of labor? Is that really as big as the opportunity cost of ~ability to use earth as a giant heat sink for computation?
Does opportunity cost in this fashion even make sense in an economic environment where the marginal cost of creating another economic agent is approximately zero or close to it? I don't think the math works out in that case.
It would depend on the alternatives available and the costs/benefits, but my first reaction is to think *hell yes*.
Intelligence is the raw source of productive capacity. In the long run, there would be a huge benefit to the AI for investing in intelligent life, even helping us advance technologically. (I'd been thinking of this in terms of a Cobb-Douglas type production function though my econ is rusty: It gets labor from us and then allocates capital for more productive labor.) It could take thousands of years, but as long as we get past the breakeven point, that's a net benefit. Super rational AI wouldn't mind those time scales.
The heat sink would have to not have any plausible alternatives given the circumstances and prove to be a better long run gamble than the intelligent life option. I could definitely be wrong though. I'm just some dude relaxing in his apartment.
For the heat sink example specifically, I would guess that there were a lot of other opportunities for planet sized heat sinks, and not as many opportunities to take advantage of intelligent life.
Most arguments I've heard for human extinction from AI have involved humanity as a liability to the AI but didn't consider it an asset with an upfront cost. I could totally be wrong; all of this is a bunch of armchair philosophizing and speculation,
> Intelligence is the raw source of productive capacity. In the long run, there would be a huge benefit to the AI for investing in intelligent life
Yes, but you're assuming that humans still have a monopoly on productivity, the point at which an AI is an existential threat, it likely has something equivalent to the "spark of intelligence" humans, as a civilization, has.
> Super rational AI wouldn't mind those time scales.
This would imply a very low discount rate, why would this be true? In general I'd expect more intelligent agents to, for example leverage loans better because they can be more productive with money than the lender, so their effective return on interest would be higher, and lenders can charge a higher interest that the borrower would be willing to take.
(Note: haven't studied finance that well, so the previous example may be incorrect in substantial ways, but this is how I think about it)
Even more, why does this require a flourishing or even functional human civilization? Like, grab a couple of brains, develop good enough scanning technology or biotech to figure out what makes humans "productive" then implement that. Or worst comes to worse, carve out a tiny tiny controlled enclave that provides data then goes away to prevent any issues in the future.
On another note, this seems like a case of a double standard. Like, somehow killing people is an opportunity cost, but deliberating deciding not to maximize production isn't an opportunity cost. I don't think you need to address this paragraph, since it's more meta and probably uninteresting, but it does seem curious to me how "no risk" arguments seem to lose the thread of earlier points they make.
> Most arguments I've heard for human extinction from AI have involved humanity as a liability to the AI but didn't consider it an asset with an upfront cost.
Like, would human be okay with an AI taking over large parts of the economy? I see people arguing that that's a ridiculous fantasy, and of course we'd want to have control of the economy and never let an AI do anything significant. If this is true, it's obvious how humans are a liability.
I've been taking the anti-seizure/anti-epilepsy drug lamotrigine for over a year now with fantastic results for mood regulation. From what I've read, it is prescribed almost exclusively to those with epilepsy or with bipolar. I have the depressive symptoms for bipolar but don't have the manic/hypomanic symptoms.
I had taken a genetics test specifically to pick out genes that are thought to be related to certain drug interactions. From the report, my profile suggested I would have a bad time with anti-depressants and anti-anxiolytics. From what I gathered, my low mood symptoms, drug interaction stuff, and trial and error with medication suggests that I don't fall into the normal category of depression.
Does current research suggest that bipolar is more of a spectrum? As a man in his early 30s, how likely is it that I will develop the non-depressive symptoms of bipolar?
The genetics tests that currently exist for psych drugs are mostly fake. That having been said, yeah, there are a lot of cases of bipolar 2 that never develop any noticeable hypomanic symptoms. Sometimes if you really push you can get people to remember a few times when they felt slightly better than normal for a few days and didn't know why. I think the likelihood of you developing full-fledged bipolar symptoms is low, unless you do something really extreme to trigger them (eg take weird drugs, stay awake for days at a time).
This is a great answer, and I’d add that there’s a lively debate about whether depression and bipolar are distinct diseases or 2 forms of the same disease, sometimes called the “bipolar spectrum”, but clinically the distinction is still useful.
I think research does suggest that bipolar is more of a spectrum, and it's widely known that some fraction of depressed people become manic when given antidepressants. My guess is that having close relatives who are clearly bipolar would be a predictor of that response to antidepressants, but I don't know whether research supports that. I am not knowledgable about the current state of genetic testing, but I feel inclined to be skeptical of genetics testing's being able at this point to pick out as fine-grained a detail as whether someone would be a good responder to antidepressants. (I'm a psychologist, by the way.)
Could prediction markets be used to estimate parameters for some other model? Like the correlation of a stock price to a market index?
In CAPM, a stock's expected return is the risk-free rate plus a multiple (beta) of the difference in returns between it and the market; it's just a normal linear equation where the slope/multiplier (beta) is the stock's correlation with the market.
Say we had a market for predicting beta. We can now aggregate everyone's expectations for the that correlation and everyone can use this, likely more accurate, statistic for whatever other model they want to use.
Could we do this for other models? Can we just use a prediction market to crowd source a ton of parameter estimates and then investors/traders can choose a la carte which ones to use in their own models (potentially with whatever other secret sauce they want to add)?
One obvious problem is that the statistic/parameter probably won't fall within the nice [0, 1] interval i.e. correlation ranges from -1 to 1. Others are completely unbounded.
Any ideas how to finesse the ranges to something that a prediction market could make useful? I was curious if you could somehow shoehorn yes shares to positive correlation estimates and no shares to negative. The other option is to drop it because it's a profoundly bad idea.
You may be interested in the VIX and how it is calculated based on the market volatility implied by the prices of a basket of S&P500 options.
There is then a robust options and futures market on the VIX itself. The options in particular imply a meta-volatility of the VIX index, and there is a VVIX that tracks this (although I don't think you can easily trade the VVIX).
In general there can't be too many things like this because they're only useful if there's a lot of liquidity. But the idea does exist. The difference from what you describe is there's no reason to limit yourself to binary options (i.e. the type of securities traded in a classic prediction market).
The stock market IS a prediction market. Short-term, it's what people think the stock price will do. Long-term, it's what people think the company will be worth, at net present value. Both are guesses with money behind them.
Prediction markets aren't magic oracles. It helps if you actually think through the mechanisms by which they might gather information and the level of funding required to cause them to do so, rather than just treating them as magic black boxes.
Also, the stock market is *already* a much bigger, more liquid, and more accurate prediction market than the "prediction markets" could ever be. Trying to use a prediction market to predict it is like trying to use a piece of chalk to carve a diamond.
> I was curious if you could somehow shoehorn yes shares to positive correlation estimates and no shares to negative. The other option is to drop it because it's a profoundly bad idea.
Derivatives structuring is already a big industry. Lots of banks would love to make up and sell you complex derivative products to do whatever you want (with a suitable house edge, of course). But yes, this is a profoundly bad idea.
The general idea was to estimate model parameters with the prediction markets which may or may not be used in a financial model or may or may not themselves be finance related. I tried the market correlation example to illustrate the idea, but this might have been a particularly clumsy choice.
To clarify my financial market example, let's assume, just for fun, that everyone uses an estimate of future beta in their model, but their models are different in other ways. Let's also assume that the prediction markets estimate of future beta is more accurate than a single market participants is. Then each of the participants should use that beta in their models and the accuracy/inaccuracy/variance would depend on the other aspects of the model. That could be useful because it isolates the differences between the models instead of everyone estimating future beta a million different ways.
That beta estimate could be used for something different entirely. Maybe someone involved in policies aimed at alleviating poverty wants to measure some type of risk involved with broad market drops. (I'm spit-balling.)
I made an almost 3 hour documentary about our recent journey down Route 66. When you make an honest documentary, you can't know what it will really be about until it's over. It ended up being about The American Dream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
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?
(posted in last thread a few hours before the new one. MoonMoth responded to me and I think it's a good answer, I've included below.
Moon Moth
7 hrs ago
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).
Is there any metric that shows the internet or daily life is getting meaner? I recall the early 00s as being far far meaner on average on the internet, even if there was a lot less traffic total. Also, I feel like interpersonal interactions pre-internet were often harsh long before the internet. NYC was famously a rough place to live in the 70s and 80s.
I first started reading SSC because of Sort By Controversial, and I think that story sums it up for me - the meanness is downstream of very subtle disagreements about the meanings of supposedly simple words. Mind, pity parties ("everyone's being mean to me/us") can reinforce the problem.
I believe there's been a rise of troll culture. They don't even need to know they hurt other people's feelings, though they appreciate it if they find out that they have. They get their emotional supply from the idea of hurting people's feelings, and from each other.
And then, trolling got automated. The insults can be cut and pasted (what? you thought that was a hand-crafted artisanal insult just for you?, it might be, but probably not) and sent out in quantity.
Some of it's politics-- people lash out if they feel their status is threatened.
If the world seems more hostile, troll culture could explain part of it. Then there's another question of why troll culture is a thing, and it's possible that merely because the technology made if feasible.
I’ve seen no evidence of a general in-real-live increase in interpersonal hostility (flareups like 2020 notwithstanding) similar to the online dumpster fires. If anything, the young generation seems to be overly nice and well-behaved.
Great question, and I have two ideas for you to consider...
1) For most people, it's easier to type criticisms than to speak them to their face. 90+% of the complaints and disagreements online wouldn't be spoken to someone sitting across the table from them.
2) Rene Girard has great insight into how humans act. Here's a good starting place with him:
My take from his work is that humans inevitably want to "bind together" so that we aren't wallowing alone in our own existential crisis. There are many ways to bind together, but the most effective one, by far, is to join together against a common enemy. You and I might have some bad history or even grudges against each other, but we mentally put that all aside when we start talking about that awful scumbag Steve. Now, of course, "Steve" can be anything... it could be the fans of the opposing football team, people of a different race, ethnicity, religion, state, or country, people with a different ideology, people who vote for the other guy, or the Treaty of Versailles.
It's so pernicious how often and how subtly this dynamic rears its head. Unfortunately, the news media has also learned that this is also the best (only?) way to keep returning customers... to pick a side and make the customers mad about what the other guys are doing.
The Bible uses the term "the accuser" (literally, "Satan") which I take to refer to this concept. People use accusations to bind together... all-too-often from inside religion. I mean, supposedly Caiaphas publicly accused Jesus and had him killed to keep his religious adherents on his side.
The truth is that relying on a system of accusations doesn't bring lasting peace. It leads instead to endless tit-for-tat. But what else can we do? There are two well-known alternatives. Buddha—suspend judgment on all things; release all desires. And Jesus—turn your accusations/judgment inward instead of outward (mote, plank) and forgive those who persecute you.
YouTubers can moderate comments on their own videos, which may be a factor, too. Some let negative comments stand, even blatant trolls, on the theory that all engagement is good algorithm-wise. But others will delete anything that harshes their mellow.
My favorite theory is the impersonality of it all. The great American philosopher M. G. Tyson had a memorable line about folks getting too comfortable getting nasty without the possibility of getting punched on the mouth.
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." - The Tower of the Elephant, Robert E. Howard
A one-word answer, I think, is empathy. I had a long back and forth in these comment boxes a few months ago about where morality comes from. My argument was it comes from basic empathy: I see another person/creature suffering, I "feel" their pain. But screens are poor empathy conductors.
If you hurt someone on the internet, you don't see their hurt face. You don't even see them at all, which makes it very easy to just see them as words floating in the void instead of a person.
I just tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time this past weekend, and I haven't heard of anyone else having an experience like mine.
About an hour in, I started getting drowsy and thought it best to head back to my apartment--I had decided to go out for a walk to enjoy the outdoors a bit--and by the time I was back home, I was feeling like I was in a deep sleep while also feeling just wired. The next 3-4 hours can safely be called a bad trip, though a profoundly impactful and constructive one. The entire time I felt like I was in this dream state.
My general attitude afterwards is now more assertive, confident, and proactive. I didn't feel a general love and oneness with everything. If anything, I'm actually a bit more aggressive (which is likely a good thing for me since I'm very agreeable according to the Big 5).
Has anyone experienced this sleep/trance-like state and then come out of it feeling like a badass?
dude you just mentioned you also take a drug for your depression as well, and if i were a friend irl and knew this i'd start worrying about you. just...don't use it, ok?
You didn’t say how much you consumed, but in my circles such experiences seem common at lower doses. As the amount consumed increases the drowsiness seems to fade and the classic mushroom experience takes shape.
I’m starting to think that shrooms are less suitable for microdosing/“museum doses” compared to eg. LSD which is more stimulating. But everyone has different neurochemistry and set/setting.
I set these things up pretty carefully. Nothing on my calendar. I let my wife know what I’m planning a couple days beforehand so there are no conflicts with her schedule. She is okay with very low maintenance trip sitting. Of course I turn my phone off for the duration.
I like to lie down on our bed with an eye mask on and maybe pull over a cover if the room is cool. I’ve tried making musical playlists but have found them unnecessary.
I think of it as directed dreaming. I like to go for a fairly high dose where I experience some visuals. I feel like I’m just poking around past experiences and current attitudes and examining them from new angles. I’ve never entered into a highly negative emotional or anxious state like I might with a high dose THC experience.
The whole affair lasts 5 or 6 hours and when I resurface I always seem to think everything I see or hear or think is very funny. Just a happy carefree mood. For some reason my ordinary baritone also seems to drop down to a Barry White bass afterwards too. My wife thinks that is pretty comical.
It does complement meditation very well. And yes there are similarities to my long ago MDMA experience.
I know the following will scan as flaky as hell.
I’ve had a few brief moments in my life, not during meditation or under the influence of any substance where I feel like I’m seeing beyond ‘maya’. They occurred seemingly at random.
A moment of ‘This is what is real. It’s beautiful. How did I ever miss it?’ These things happen in completely mundane situations, say, something like being out for a walk and seeing a flowering weed poking through a crack in the sidewalk. Or even more mundane, being struck by the color of some crude hand painted sign.
The MDMA experience seemed like one of those moments but lasted much longer and I took away a new understanding that has persisted for - doing math - 38 years?
Fascinating, thank you for sharing. Is it possible to articulate (or link to a rough articulation of) that new 38-year-persistent understanding? Do your current trips give you such ("glimpses of awareness"?) moments as well?
The most practical take away from the MDMA beyond the, let’s call it ‘numinous’ stuff was that I realized that I was internally mischaracterizing my wife’s intent on some personal matters. This was just reversing a bit of my own neuroticism.
I’d like elaborate a bit but I’d also like to spend some time organizing my thoughts.
It’s hard to express this stuff in words. If I get something more explanatory developed, I’ll ping you on one of your comments.
Anyone here read Daniel Dennett's memoir I've been Thinking? What are your thoughts about it? Almost done with it. Such a enjoyable read so far. Love it.
A few days ago, I read the comments on Erik Hoel’s June 25 post about a Scientific American article “forgetting” about base rates in order to “link” homeschooling to abuse.
What surprised me most (beyond the terrifying statistic [if it is true] about 37% of children being the object of a CPS investigation by age 18) is how many of the commenters were insisting that state-owned schools amounted to “LQBT/woke/something like this” indoctrination facilities that they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole (let alone, of course, send their children to).
I’m aware that this is a corner of the Internet that’s very skeptical of schools in general (and, from my own Parallel World far away from the American continent, I find such views mind-boggling) but not to this point! I wonder – how prevalent is this conception within the US?
(I’d love to ask whether it’s a reasonable one, but I suspect the answers to that question would confuse me more rather than less.)
On the off chance that you'd still like to know if it's a reasonable conception...
One of the important differences between public and private schools is that it's next to impossible to fire a teacher at a public school. So if you get a woke activist as a teacher at a public school, the kids are pretty much guaranteed to be stuck with him/her.
Then, in some states, the public schools are subject to all kinds of terrible mandates. See, e.g., at https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/curricular_laws : "State law explicitly requires LGBTQ inclusion in state curricular standards (7 states)"
Then there's also the fact that in case of pressure from the entitled, it's much harder for a public school than for a private school to push back. (Heck, the public school my kids go to, which is typically more than reasonable, bowed to pressure from such people and cancelled its Halloween celebration to avoid offending them!)
So, well, yes, this conception is based on facts. By far, not all states and schools are equally bad, but even the best of the best aren't immune to pressure from the woke.
>State law explicitly requires LGBTQ inclusion in state curricular standards
Don't assume that everything in the standards is taught. Eg, the California standards for American Govt, a one semester (ie, 18 week) class, includes this:
>12.9.1 Explain how the different philosophies and structures of feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, fascism, communism, monarchies, parliamentary systems, and constitutional liberal democracies influence economic policies, social welfare policies, and human rights practices.
That is one of fifty items. Again for an 18 week class. Most topics in the standards are not taught; there simply isn't enough time. In practice, the LGBTQ inclusion is usually going to be little more than a textbook paragraph mentioning the gay rights movement, and another mentioning famous people who were gay (eg Alan Turing, Bayard Rustin).
Interesting. Thank you! Yes, that second example is completely impossible. I wonder if this is a problem all over the curriculum, or if it's only certain fields.
The way you describe the LGBTQ inclusion sounds completely unobjectionable. But isn't a mandate like this an invitation to anyone on school staff who actually has an interest in the topic to do their best, or their worst? And if you have an activist on school staff, looking to promote their agenda, this is going to be exactly the scenario the anti-public school crowd is concerned about.
Of course there always might be an activist promoting their agenda, but
1. That has always been the case, whether the agenda be anti-Communism, or free market economics, or hyper-patriotism, or the opposite of each of them. OP's claim was about policy, not about the inevitable existence of unethical teachers.
2. Teachers who insist on pushing an agenda will do so even if the topic in question is not required to be covered.
The solution is not to refuse to include material in the curriculum (are we going to drop the Red Scare[s]? The Middle East? Colonialism and post-Colonialism?). The solution is to enforce existing ethical rules or, if those are inadequate, enact new ones, such as some of the "anti-CRT" laws, most of which do not ban teaching CRT but rather forbid compelling students to endorse the ideas, and often explicitly say that the law "may not be construed to prohibit discussion of the concepts listed therein as part of a course of training or instruction, provided such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.
>I wonder if this is a problem all over the curriculum, or if it's only certain fields
I have heard claims that math curriculum sacrifices deprh for breadth, in comparison to Japan, but I don't know the truth of that claim.
in online communities adjacent to this one you generally get a certain type of person who had a really hard time in school and just hates school as a kind of child prison.
separate from this, there is a history in the US that leads conservatives to mistrust public schools. some of this is a wish that funding could be redirected to private religious schools, some has to do with ideological mistrust of a large liberal Democrat-voting union base of public school employees. A lot of this (both North and South) can be traced back to white flight after desegregation, although that's certainly not the only motivation for individual parents, it is the source of this issue as a widespread political cause.
I would say mistrust of public schools is a mainstream conservative position. People who actually homeschool for religious or political reasons are small in absolute number but not all that rare. Many states have charter schools (schools run privately with government funding of some form which students can attend instead of public schools), and/or voucher programs (where parents can redirect their childrens' share of the school system budget to a private institution of their choice). Currently this is all required to be officially secular, but it's an active political cause to allow for e.g. vouchers to be used at religious schools.
combine this common and widespread attitude with school-hating online autistic rationalists and you probably get Erik Hoel's comment section.
>Charter schools teach state-approved curriculum and adhere to all the guidelines that govern California public schools. All our core subject teachers need to be credentialed.
>Charter schools follow all state education laws and and students must meet all New York state graduation requirements, including passage of Regents exams.
What does CPS stand for? In the UK I would guess it is short for Crown Prosecution Service, which is the not very democratic replacement for grand juries. But they don't do investigations, only assess evidence and public interest considerations in deciding whether to put cases forward for trial.
Re kids being investigated, I've heard that the majority are cases of them swapping saucy pictures on their mobile phones. Apparently, police forensic warehouse shelves are groaning under the weight of hundreds of thousands of laptops and mobile phones confiscated from (mostly) kids and awaiting examination, with a backlog of years. I can't think why the randy little sods aren't just left to get on with it, as long as no adults are involved.
> I can't think why the randy little sods aren't just left to get on with it, as long as no adults are involved.
Because child pornography laws are poorly constructed, to the degree that in some jurisdictions a minor with nude photos *of themself* can be prosecuted.
Homeschooling in the US has risen lately, from about 3.5% of all school-age children in 2019 to about 6% in 2022. We don't yet have totals for 2023 so not yet clear how much or little of that increase was a one-time shift sparked by COVID school lockdowns.
In any case the great majority (about 94%) of all school-age children in the US attend schools. The homeschooling families are, obviously, people who made an affirmative decision to do that; hence it is no surprise that they are unusually vocal about their reasons for preferring that option. School being the general society-wide default option means that the in-schools populations includes essentially all the parents who aren't strongly worked up about the issue and hence don't go on about it online.
It is likely that when parents choose to homeschool, that home is automatically flagged to receive more scrutiny than other homes. I had a wonderful and productive experience learning at home, and I recall multiple visits from CPS to our home that appeared be groundless.
one of the good things public school does is make it much harder to hide child abuse. the kid shows up with bruises, it gets noticed. Homeschooling at heart intends to isolate the kid from the world to varying degrees and at its worst can cover abuse or neglect.
that's probably why. its more a general wellness check.
I think that attitude is more common when directed towards higher education than primary/secondary education; it also seems to be more of an attitude towards schools that your own children don't go to (in the same way that everyone hates congress but likes their own congressperson) or attitudes of people that don't have children. If you do have kids in school, you see firsthand how extremely normal the curriculum is that teachers are using.
I live in the US and I would say this attitude is unusual, but that most people know someone who holds it. It's somewhat more common in the rural southern place I grew up (where kids are often homeschooled - or sent to schools with ~40 students as I was - for religious reasons), but in California where I live now you also encounter this. Where I see it now is in Waldorf-style places that discourage vaccines or access to screens in any form.
Also, that 37% number seems literally impossible. Not sure how they get that high even with very expensive counting.
> Where I see it now is in Waldorf-style places that discourage vaccines or access to screens in any form.
How seriously do they take it?
I was sent to a Waldorf kindergarten, which I liked. I learned, many years later, that my mother absolutely hated that kindergarten, because they had strongly disapproved of the fact that I could read. But that never came through to me when I was there.
I looked at the article you linked, and yup that figure is right. Hard to square that with the report of a social worker I know whose responsibility was abuse or neglect of the elderly and disabled. She talked about how there were nowhere near enough social workers to do a good job with all the reports they got. Or think about the $$ side of it. Even state social workers must make $30 an hour. To even read a report, fill out the required paperwork to start a case and maybe call the family in question must take an hour. To do even the most superficial investigation would take at least another hour. That's $60+ for 30% or so of every family in the US with kids. Is the country really spending that much just on CPS, which is one small part of the social safety net?
Also I homeschooled my daughter for 6 years, and knew at least 25 other families well enough that they would have told me if CPS had ever visited them. Never hear a word about anyone being investigated.
Modern society does a really good job of segregating the families with problems away from the families without. For anyone middle class and above, your chances of seeing the details of these situations (unless you're a social worker or otherwise specifically exposed to it) is far lower than it should be based on averages. Most families who end up dealing with CPS do so often - first name basis, the workers know tons of intimate details about the family, etc.
Also, never underestimate the power of shame. Some of those other families might have been investigated without telling you, especially if there was validity to any of the visits which they would not want you to know about.
Sadly, that $30/hour rate is probably too high for many areas. A quick Google of my own state shows closer to half that. I'm in a pretty rural area of that state, so our local CPS I think starts people at around $12-13. That's way too low and they can't keep it staffed, but it keeps costs down. They also do a terrible job and "investigations" are often extremely minimal due to lack of staffing and resources.
As Michael said, it's 37% overall, which of course sounds very high! But the vast vast majority of these case don't amount to anything. An investigation can be as small as "someone made a complaint, CPS determined it was unfounded" and that determination was basically "the person who called clearly had an ax to grind and reported something nonsensical". CPS officers know this and can be pretty skeptical of reports.
Then there is the other big chunk which comes from Mandatory Reporters like school employees who legally have to report certain things they see. These could be as little as a bruise. CPS gets the report, calls the parents, parents say "oh he fell and we went to the doctor", CPS calls doctor to confirm, and thats the end of it.
It's 37% of all children, compared to 36% of homeschooled children. Or rather 36% of the parents of kids who were withdrawn from school to be homeschooled were once investigated by CPS. Erik Hoel goes over how it's not a completely apples to apples comparison.
I’m going to Montana for this week. Can anyone tell me something interesting or surprising about Montana? So far during my layover in the Denver airport I am surprised that a personal pizza only cost $7.
Not sure how interesting or suprising it is, but I'll second that Yellowstone is very worth it, there's tons of great fishing all over Montana if you're into that sort of thing, if you're a fan of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance it's fun to give it a reread in Montana, the state it was set in, and if you eat meat and see any places in small towns that are on the order of butcher + jerky shops, definitely stop and try some of the jerky. They'll have things like buffalo and elk and venison jerky, all of it fresh and pretty worth it.
The thing that continually surprises me most about Montana is getting up, looking out my bedroom window across the valley, and seeing a glacier. The beauty of the state is incredibly stunning. The other stunning thing is just how sparsely populated it is. We have the same number of people as Austin, Texas and half the land area of the whole state Texas.
It's beautiful. I drove to Livingston, MT from the bay area a while back, and it felt surreal. If your trip takes you anywhere near Yellowstone and you can make the time, it's absolutely worth a visit.
I recently read a nonfiction book, not written by a Montanan, which left me with the new knowledge that for anyone interested in geology at either the professional or serious-amateur levels Montana is a literal wonderland. I've not yet set foot in that state myself but the book was quite enthralling and made me want to see some of that stuff ideally in the company of someone knowledgeable in the subject.
I'm sharing a draft methodology for criticism of a historical analysis I'm planning to do. I'll post the final methodology in a future Open Thread before I start the analysis, by way of pre-registration.
The goal is to test the claim that Constitutional Monarchy is a substantial stablizing factor, in the context of the rise of fascism in the Interwar years. It's got some conceptual appeal, corroborated by the Nazis coming to power in a Semi-Presidential Republic in a way that would have been much harder in a Constitutional Monarchy. But Italian Fascism is an obvious counterexample, as Italy was a parliamentary Constitutional Monarchy and the King actively abetted Mussolini's seizure of power.
Alternate hypotheses I'm interested in comparing:
- Division of legislature and executive. C.f. Matthew Yglesias's theory that separation of powers is destabilizing due to gridlock, vs the Madisonian idea of checks and balances as a guarantee of liberty.
- New institutions vs old. How long has the current constitutional order been in existence?
- What side was the country on in WW1?
- Number of major political parties in countries with meaningful elections.
Proposed methodology is to build a dataset based on the status of every sovereign state (including self-governing states in personal union with a mother country, such as the British Dominions) as of July 25, 1923. This is the date of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the Turkish War of Independence, which I consider to be a reasonable proxy for when the dust settled after WW1. For each, assess the following data points:
1. Monarchy or Republic
2. Liberal constitutional order (meaningful elections, rule of law, enforceable civil liberties), on a three-point scale (no, sorta, yes)
3. Years since the last major constitutional overhaul. For example, for Britain, this would be dated from the Parliament Act of 1911. For France, the establishment of the Third Republic. For the US, the passage of the 15th Amendment.
4. Years since the last violent revolution, major coup attempt, or civil war. Britain: Glorious Revolution of 1688. France: Boulanger's 1889 coup attempt. US: the Civil War.
5. Country's alignment in WW2: Entente, Central Powers, Neutral, or N/A
6. Number of major political parties
7. Mode of selection of the de facto Chief Executive: parliamentary (e.g. Britain), separate election (e.g. US), mixed (e.g. Germany), or other (e.g. Soviet Union).
Assess two endpoints, one September 29, 1938 (the day before the Munich Agreement, as a proxy for right before Hitler started knocking things over) and the other November 19, 1942 (the beginning of the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, as a proxy for the high water mark of the Axis). At each endpoint, assess the condition of the states from the first data set:
A. Has the state ceased to exist or had a new government imposed due to foreign conquest? If so, exclude from analysis.
B. Is the same constitutional order still in effect, yes/no?
C. Delta in the state's liberal constitutional order score. E.g. a fully liberal state that is now fully authoritarian will score -2.
D. (in 1942 only) the state aligned with Allies, Axis, or neither. Nonbelligerancy but clearly favoring one side over the other (e.g. Franco's Spain) counts as being aligned.
I'm open to suggestions as to how to run the analysis. My default would be to just do a multivariable regression in Excel, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways.
In other words, you consider WW2 a war between ideologies? Consider Greece. Metaxas was running a fascist system. But Mussolini still attacked Greece because he just wanted an empire. This of course made Greece side with the Allies. Another point is Austria, Schnussnigg running a fascist system, this did not prevent Nazis from throwing Schnussnigg into a concentration camp after the Anschluss. Most likely Schnussnigg just wanted independence i.e. his own power.
My point is this: nationalism as an ideology does not really work on the international stage the same way as other ideologies do. Two liberal countries or two Communist countries will be friends. But nationalists find their national interest, ambitions and independence can clash.
In those terms, I would say that WW2 started out as multiple revisionist conflicts between the established Liberal international order and various revisionist powers. The separate revisionist movements merged into a single conflict between 1939 and 1941. However, there was also an Ideological layer on top of that, of two related conflicts between Naziism and its Ideological enemies, one against Anglo-American Liberalism and the other against Soviet Communism, both of which Hitler viewed as being fundamentally Jewish in nature. The turning point when ideology became dominant was probably 1941, when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and also when Italy's independent expansion efforts foundered and needed to be bailed out by Germany.
Between the Ideological aspects of the conflict and the common thread of all the major revisionist powers being authoritarian or totalitarian, I think alignment in 1942 is a useful proxy for ideology alongside the other two metrics. It's less precise, but has the virtue of relying less on my subjective judgement of how liberal a country was.
I acknowledge that there were definitely exceptions: Finland remained a liberal democracy (I think) throughout the war, but sided with the Axis. And Greece isn't the only example of an authoritarian nationalist regime that got invaded during the revisionist phase of the war: Poland and Nationalist China also come to mind as examples.
>less precise, but has the virtue of relying less on my subjective judgement of how liberal a country was
There are indices that attempt to measure regime type, including in some cases how liberal the regime is, which include historical measures. They won't, however, necessarily distinguish between types of non-liberal regimes (Fascist v. Marxist, for example). And of course they can be problematic for various reasons
Is 1923 the best starting endpoint? Should I instead be using the finalization of the Versailles treaty (1919) or the end of the Polish-Soviet War (1921)?
The main reason for picking 1923 is to have a relatively stable set of countries to study. The disadvantage I just realized was that Mussolini took power in 1922, before my proposed start date. Excluding Italian Fascists from a study on the rise of fascism seems a fairly glaring omission. Also one that would bias the findings on the effects of monarchy, since Italy used a king at the time.
You might want to look for graduate level materials on social science research methods, if you take out the historical focus this would be a typical research design in comparative politics. And yes multivariate regression would be a common technique, or at least it was in my grad school years. (Avoided a PhD, thankfully.)
There's no consensus. There are RCTs, which are obviously useless here but also limited in other contexts. There are quasi experimental designs - difference in difference, regression discontinuity that are reasonably good if done well and probably the most convincing? There are instrumental variable approaches but those are also not as much in favour.
There's no consensus. There are RCTs, which are obviously useless here but also limited in other contexts. There are quasi experimental designs - difference in difference, regression discontinuity that are reasonably good if done well and probably the most convincing? There are instrumental variable approaches but those are also not as much in favour.
>A. Has the state ceased to exist or had a new government imposed due to foreign conquest? If so, exclude from analysis.
Were any of the 1942 governments partial puppets, perhaps not exactly completely imposed by foreign conquest? Are there any fuzzy cases due to this, or are they all pretty clear cut?
Vichy France fits the bill as a fuzzy case. Germany imposed a steep indemnity and occupied a big chunk of Metropolitan France (while retaining mostly French civil administration in the occupied territory), and seized some territory, but didn't impose any terms regarding the form and composition of the French government. The Third Republic's legislature voted itself out of existence and authorized a dictatorship on Petain and Laval's initiative. The idea that having a fascist-style regime would favorable dispose the Nazis to France was raised as an argument in favor, but what I've read on the subject was the Nazi leadership didn't really care so long as France stayed surrendered.
Many Thanks! I knew of the existence of Vichy France, but not any of the details you've explained. Much appreciated! Wild guess: Maybe call it an intermediate case and give it half weight in the linear regression?
This seems interesting. I don't have any intelligent thoughts to share, except maybe a vague idea that condition A could be replaced/enhanced by a measure like "proximity to Berlin or Tokyo". I feel like the Axis were more likely to spare like-minded regimes, or even ally with them, and this might affect your results somehow.
Also a minor typo: "5. Country's alignment in WW2" should read "WW1".
That does sound like a useful metric, yes. I would need to tweak it so it doesn't become a tautological factor, as Berlin is zero miles away from Berlin.
Re proximity, if the point is ideological proximity, I have seen papers that use frequency of voting the same as the US in votes in the UN General Assembly as a proxy for ideological proximity to the US. Perhaps there is data re the League of Nations.
I have three new posts one a reconsideration without changing my position on UBI, one on how the Fed should improve its decision making procedures, and one one an off Broadway musical about anti-microbial resistance (It's an externality! :))
I tried to find an old SSC post that had a paragraph of quotes from social scientists saying that their work was ideologically motivated, but failed. (Yes, I checked all the ones with social justice tags) Anyone know what post I'm referring to? I want to read the context of each quote.
someone further down in this very open thread posted a site they'd made to index and filter all of Scott's articles, which might lend a hand: https://readscottalexander.com/
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Harris: 51/51/55/53 (30/29/34/34)
Trump: 46/45/45/45 (63/64/65/58)
No site gives anyone else a better than 1% chance of winning, except that Polymarket thinks Michelle Obama has a 1.4% chance.
As has been widely reported, there has been a significant swing in favour of Harris. The cross-site agreement now seems pretty good, particularly on Trump’s side. Harris may be very slightly cheap on Betfair, but I’ve lost enough money for the time being.
Is it a realistic strategy for one side to pump money into these betting sites at key moments in the campaign (in the hope of it snowballing into actual support)? Has anyone ever been accused of this? Seems to me like these markets play an ever increasing role in our political discourse, and Goodhart's Law should kick in eventually.
FWIW, I think this is very unlikely with the main candidates. An advantage of Polymarket is that, while the participants are anonymous, the log of bets is open. So I know, for example, that somebody bet $450k on Trump on 22 January and that moved the market from 49% to 53%. I doubt that's enough to be significant, so you would want millions of dollars, and the campaigns would probably consider they had better uses of that money. We also see good agreement across platforms which provides some level of assurance.
I do have some suspicion about Michelle Obama because (a) Polymarket has consistently given her a higher chance of winning than other prediction sites, (b) on 1 July, 3 accounts were holding 23% of her "yes" shares, (c) those accounts had similar names and betting patterns, (d) there certainly have been some Republican politicians, e.g. Vivek Ramaswamy, who have played up the possibility that Obama would be the nominee and (e) little to none of her market support appeared to come from partisans on her behalf, in contrast to other minor candidates. I previously calculated that something like $115k had been spent across the 3 accounts mentioned, and that seemed like an amount someone might be willing to spend to create the false impression she was a viable candidate.
To be clear though, this is all wild speculation on my part.
Actual political betting scandals tend to be about politicians betting with insider knowledge, e.g. the date of the recent British general election. I'm not aware of any credible accusations of market manipulation in this context.
Thanks; that's exactly the kind of evidence-based answer I was hoping for!
I hadn't thought about the log of bets being open, in combination with the fact that most bets aren't enough to make a difference. I'm mostly reassured by that, but not completely. It seems possible that a bad actor could use one exchange that's less transparent (making the odds on other sites move through arbitrage). Or just place many smaller bets to disguise what they're doing.
Is there any tracking of approximately how relatively disempowered voters in non-swing states are? I'm in South Carolina, which is sufficiently red to be non-swing (weirdly - as distinct from _both_ our immediate neighbors to the north and to the south). My vague impression is that voter power is roughly proportional to the probability of a near-tie, given the current best estimate of the Harris/Trump vote ratio and the estimate of the uncertainty in that estimate (gaussian PDF?).
I'm not at all surprised that it made little difference. Voters seem to have very short memories for most things, especially for single events that don't have any obvious ongoing ramifications. It seemed like every other week in 2016 some news event or damaging revelation would sink Trump's poll numbers and predict a flood of analysts saying he couldn't win, but every single bit of that was outweighed by the sheer luck of having a negative story about Clinton break 11 days before the election. If the attempt had happened on the eve of the election I suspect it would have been soundly decisive. In July? Not so much.
On top of that Trump has always been polarizing, with nearly a decade in the spotlight to align people strongly into the pro- and con- camps. The sympathy vote angle--"look at what he has to endure for the good of the nation!"--is most convincing when applied to people whom you disagree with, but nevertheless respect. There are very few Americans who would apply such a descriptor to Trump: you love him or you hate him.
If I'm not mistaken, not being the most well-informed individual, Harris is only making public appearances at rallies. I have heard reports of her being incoherent when speaking, though I haven't been able to confirm this. The upcoming debate(s) surely will. And if they DON'T happen, it would seem to be a concession that Harris isn't fit to speak in public.
So I expect a shift to happen, of some sort, after September 10th, when the first debate is currently scheduled.
"I have heard reports of her being incoherent when speaking, though I haven't been able to confirm this."
Partial credit for recognizing aloud that this is unconfirmed, but typing out something like this at all seems like something of a failure of rational skepticism. In a world where this were true, there would be two (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
1. The "reports" in question came from things she said at a public appearance.
2. The "reports" came from private conversations, some of whose participants were sufficiently alarmed to repeat their concerns to others, who then spread them further.
If 1. were true this should be extremely easy to confirm: almost automatic. Any credible report should certainly list *at the bare minimum* the names and dates of the events in question. A public figure as high-profile as Harris is certainly going to have most of her public appearances caught on video, but even if this were entirely at unrecorded events, they're still *public events.* Many people were there, many people saw them, there are many people who could corroborate anything noteworthy that happened.
If all of the info came from 2 it wouldn't necessarily leave that kind of trail. But first and foremost, this seems pretty unlikely on its face: the sort of people who have lots of access to Harris are necessarily also the sort of people unlikely to betray her confidence like that. If they did they'd almost certainly do it anonymously, but there'd still be a record of "Newspaper X reported an anonymous source within the Harris campaign as saying 'specific things Y and Z.'" SOMEBODY in the chain between Harris and you should have staked their reputation on this being based in reality.
And of course something like this would be BIG news. Even if some networks were reluctant to pick it up for ideological reasons, others would be equally motivated to shout it to the hilltops. The only obvious, rational reason for zero news sites to report on it is that there's nothing at all to report: even relatively flimsy evidence would be worth its weight in clicks.
Being legibly source-able and verifiable is the main difference between a "report" and a "rumour." Forgive my bluntness if I say that it sounds from the outside like what you heard are rumours, not reports. Significantly shifting one's view of the truth based on rumours tends to work out very poorly, for reasons I doubt I need to belabour. But if you do indeed have reports on the subject, feel free to share them and I'll update accordingly.
"So I think it’s very important — as you have heard from so many incredible leaders — for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future."
-Kamala Harris, 04/25/23, speech at Howard University
"That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis, which is why we will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action. "
Personally, I enjoy her analysis of the Ukraine War, which while not incoherent was moronic. I suppose this is her idea of layman's terms.
"Ukraine is a country in Europe that exists next to another country called Russia, Russia is a bigger country, Russia is a powerful country, Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically, that’s wrong."
-Kamala Harris, 03/01/22, Morning Hustle radio show
Side note: this nicely illustrates one of the reasons that relying on rumours when forming a viewpoint is hazardous.
I, personally, would never in a million years start from those quotes and conclude "Harris is incoherent." But apparently *someone* would. The best possible reporting on the subject would point directly to the sources of information that inspired the judgment, so any reader could judge for themselves. But even mediocre reporting will attribute the judgment to some known party--either the author themselves or a specific source--so that the reader can examine that party gauge how reliable and honest and sound of judgment they are.
Someone relying on rumour surrenders all ability to do that. They're not relying on their own judgment, they're not relying on the judgment of any known party. They literally *have no idea* whose judgment they're trusting, or if ANY human actually came to that conclusion (as opposed to the rumour being distorted in transmission, as they quite commonly are).
So, thank you for your attempt to de-rumour-ify this particular topic. Discussion real events tends to be much more productive than discussing vague and sourceless assertions.
"I, personally, would never in a million years start from those quotes and conclude "Harris is incoherent.""
I don't really personally have a dog in this fight – I think she's doomed either way, which I regard with pronounced ambivalence – but might I ask you what you would consider a good threshold for incoherence?
What I mean is, to *me* "Kamala Harris is occasionally incoherent" is a perfectly satisfactory thing to truncate into "Kamala Harris is incoherent", but I realize there are people who take a more exacting positon on this linguistic construct, so, to your mind, how much is enough to call her "incoherent" without a qualifier? Is it necessary that absolutely nothing should come out of her mouth but gibberish, unable to string together a two-word sentence? You don't have to give like an exact percentage to the decimal point, just ballpark reasoning is fine.
Let's start with "Kamala Harris is occasionally incoherent."
To me someone being "incoherent" means one of the following:
1. I can't understand what they're attempting to communicate at all.
2. I can glean more than zero understanding of what they're attempting to communicate, but some of the following apply:
-a. I can only understand it in broad, general outlines.
-b. I have low confidence in my interpretation
-c. It takes me significant effort to interpret
Further, it must be clear that the lack of understanding is NOT due to my own lack of knowledge of the subject, lack of familiarity with the language, dialect or idiom or lack of understanding of specific jargon[1]. For example, some of the chunks of biology papers that Scott cites in his posts go over my head, but I assume they aren't incoherent to someone more familiar with the topic.
Just to be extra clear, things that do NOT render something "incoherent" include, but are not limited to:
1. The inclusion of verbal pauses like "um" and "uh" in the middle of spoken sentences, as long as they don't make up so much of the sentence that the meaning becomes hard to track.
2. Repeating part of a sentence when speaking: this often fills the same function as 1, giving the speaker time to think.
3. Minor mispronunciations or grammatical errors.
4. Thoughts interrupting other thoughts (to a reasonable degree). Various parentheticals can be used to evoke this deliberately in writing--here's an example--but when speaking this is usually a little less organized. I believe people with ADHD, in particular, are more prone to this, but it's common enough in human speech that I think we often just take it in stride when listening.
5. Deliberate vagueness. Somebody may choose to communicate with limited precision (for various reasons). That doesn't actually mean they're being any less effective at communication.
6. Unintentional vagueness, within limits. If the gist of your meaning comes through clearly, not being able to hit the intended level of precision doesn't make you incoherent (just less effective).
7. Awkward, forced or ugly phrasing.
8. Single sentences that are unclear if reported in isolation, but clear when heard/read in context.
9. Simply being factually incorrect: this is it's own problem, not a problem of coherence.
Finally I'll note that "logical incoherence" is a different thing than "verbal incoherence." When I hear about a *person* being incoherent, that clearly connotes the latter. When I hear about an *idea* being incoherent, it connotes the former. Something like "Kamala was incoherent when speaking about tax policy" could potentially mean either and should be treated with care.
OK, finally, briefly to answer your actual question, I'd agree "Kamala is incoherent" can be a reasonable way to communicate "Kamala is occasionally incoherent," but it depends A LOT on your threshold for "occasionally." If something like 10% of someone's sentences are incoherent, then sure, calling them "incoherent" seems fair. If you can watch a half-hour interview and pick out a single, borderline sentence which is mixed in with lots of clear and easily-understood sentences, then that seems pretty ridiculous. Basically my threshold would boil down to "is listening to them a consistently frustrating experience because so much of what they say is hard to understand?"
BTW none of the above sentences meet my standard for being "incoherent" at all. None of them come particularly close. They're overall kind of awkward and poorly phrased, but the meanings are pretty clear. And the sorts of flaws they display are the sorts of flaws that you will find *all over the place* when you listen to most people speaking unscripted. I don't think they'd have ever stood out to me if I were just listening through the context. They look rather more glaring in print, but so do a lot of things: transcribed interviews will usually include "minor edits for clarity and readability" for exactly that reason.
[1] Obviously something like this *could* be incoherent, but I, personally, lack the ability to judge.
It's not incoherent, it's filling the time between spaces.
Even the nominally pro-Harris speech someone posted has her repeating things, not sure if she's sure she should be repeating it. "Bring it on" "bring it on?" "bring it on."
I'm still voting for her because Trump. Mediocre wins in this election.
Not incoherent as such, but reminds me of the description of Thorin from "The Hobbit":
"And this is how Thorin began. “Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit—may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale!—” He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on:
“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation—” This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already."
I think you must have a very different idea of what "incoherent" means than I do. These are certainly not the finest examples of oration in human history, but neither are they glaring errors or obvious gaffes (except *maybe* the third one). The other two are a bit rambly and vague, but they are grammatical sentences that (even divorced from their context) convey coherent ideas. The third one sounds like a bit of a verbal stumble and doesn't mean much on its own, but it's a short sentence which (watched in context) is part of a longer answer that certainly is coherent.
Even if all three of these had been said within the course of a thirty-minute interview, I'm sure I wouldn't find it noteworthy, much less concerning. But they were pulled from a corpus of *two and a half years* of public appearances. It's hard to adequately convey just how thoroughly banal I find the assertion that "in the past 2.5 years, the VP of the U.S. has had at least three moments of less-than-perfect composure when speaking in public."
Genuine question: if we combed through the past 2.5 years of Trump's public appearances, how many sentences or phrases meeting at least this standard of "incoherence" do you think we'd find? More than three? Less than three? Zero?
What if we did the same for every U.S. Governor? How many do you think would have three or fewer equally "embarrassing" statements?
If I were tasked to characterize someone's speeches, I would take all I have heard and find the most common things. People who have listened to Kamala characterized her speech as often incoherent.
It's hard to find samples of her speaking. I conjecture this is because she has been hidden away to avoid reinforcing bad opinions. Recent examples can be carefully rehearsed, and are for specific, friendly audiences.
It makes no difference whether we agree. On September 10th, the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself. Or if it's canceled, we can draw our own conclusions as to why.
I greatly appreciate Rothwed finding reasonable examples of incoherent speech. Of course, everyone speaks incoherently every once in a while. The question is what kind of a habit it is. And yes, the Ukraine/Russia comment was most entertaining.
"It's hard to find samples of her speaking. I conjecture this is because she has been hidden away to avoid reinforcing bad opinions. Recent examples can be carefully rehearsed, and are for specific, friendly audiences."
See, this is an example of conjecture that FAR outstrips the available evidence. Vice Presidents don't tend to spend much time in the spotlight in general. Kamala Harris has been VP for four year and an (actual or presumptive) presidential nominee for a few weeks. Weeks which--one would have to assume--have been HELLISHLY busy for her, since the changeover was very much not a planned thing and left her little time to organize a campaign. It's not especially striking that she hasn't spoken much. Is it *possible* that your interpretation is the truth? Sure, anything's possible. But at this juncture it seems akin to seeing a someone in a car idling outside a bank and concluding that they must be a getaway driver for the mob.
"It makes no difference whether we agree. On September 10th, the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself. Or if it's canceled, we can draw our own conclusions as to why."
Why wait? Shaping the facts to fit the narrative is such the fashion in U.S. politics these days, that it hardly seems necessary to wait. We both know they'll always say exactly what the motivated partisan wants them to say, so filling in the blanks ahead of time seems to make little difference.
OK, so maybe that's slightly hyperbolic, but the problem is real. I do very much like that you've stuck your neck out to make a bold, unusual prediction: that Harris will avoid the debate. That is close enough to being a clean true/false that I think very few people--even in this deplorable intellectual climate--could disagree on how it turned out. But when you say "the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself" that's...well, that's exactly what I expect, but in a bad way.
Here's what I think: the debate will almost certainly happen as planned. Trump will be Trump, no mystery there. Harris will be slightly awkward, but generally middle-of-the-road for political debates in terms of having pertinent, articulate answers[1]. It won't tell most reasonably-awake humans anything they didn't already know about either of them. But the pundits and "thought leaders" will jump into overdrive grabbing whatever threads are handy from it and using it to weave their own preferred tapestries, with at-best dubious relationships to the truth.
In particular, I think that *you* will come away *more* convinced that "Harris is incoherent" and *I* will come away less convinced (assuming I can be arsed to watch, which is not a guarantee). More generally, I think close to zero minds will change on this question. Anyone who was already bought into that narrative will double down on it, and nobody who wasn't bought in will be convinced in the slightest. Two days ago I might have been less cynical, but seeing you and Rothwed claim that some utterly banal soundbites are evidence of a deep and serious problem certainly helped hammer home how bad the intellectual climate in the U.S. is right now. And doing some Googling afterwards and finding that you're far from the only ones--that there are a number of not-especially-reputable news sites trying to pull the same trick (with a different soundbite even)--underscored it rather nicely.
Regardless, if you want to both improve your thought-processes and show up all the doubters, I'd urge you to make more plainly-falsifiable predictions. The one about the debate being cancelled was good, but assuming it does happen, try to think up specific states of the world--things with as little subjectivity as possible--that you think likely to occur during or shortly after the debate, if it happens. A world where Harris *really is* in some sort of terrible cognitive straits and is being kept out of the spotlight, but can't avoid the debate: what must necessarily follow in that world? What should the rest of us look for to know we're in it?
The enemy I'm taking aim at here has a name: confirmation bias. I expect Harris to make sense (as I expect of most people), so I read or listen to her words and I get a meaning out of them. Maybe I'm projecting my own interpretation, or glossing over inconsistencies or some other subconscious trick and she really *is* incoherent. You expect her to be incoherent, so you listen and hear incoherence. Maybe your brain is stopping short at the first minor stumble, or being reluctant to connect pieces that aren't quite perfectly aligned, or blowing small errors out of proportion, or whatever. But in either case, we don't realize it's happening. It *feels* to me like she's speaking pretty normally (if somewhat awkwardly). I assume that it *feels* to you like she's just spouting verbal diarrhea (and believe me, I know that feeling). So the only way to bridge the gap is to find observations that are harder for our brains to fool us about.
[1] It should be noted that middle-of-the-road for U.S. political debates is a *shockingly* low standard. I watched the very first Bush vs Gore when I was in my teens. Even at that age, I could barely breathe for the stench of the bullshit emanating from the TV. They didn't so much answer the questions as use the questions as very loose jumping-off points to make largely unrelated campaign pitches. I've only watched the occasional debate since, but they haven't been much better.
I again have to highlight the way you keep emphasizing this train of thought that Harris might abandon the September 10th debate. It wasn't Harris trying to wiggle her way out of it a couple weeks ago, that was Trump. Why do you think there will be a sudden reversal, except that it would help make Trump look good and Harris bad?
The media did a circle of protection around Joe Biden and thought they could get away with it, and they did until they couldn't.
They're doing the same thing with Harris. She's not even doing interviews with MSNBC. In moderately adversarial interviews, she uses her laugh to shut down questions she doesn't like. (Go find the one where she laughs when being questioned about her record of being the most liberal person in a congress. She laughs and laughs at how dumb the question is until the reporter calmly cites a non-partisan source and Harris's face just crumbles because her power-play didn't work.)
Just like Biden's team had smart reason to keep Biden hidden away, Harris's team probably has good reason to not let her do interviews.
What's she going to do when negotiating with Putin? Repeat "do not come" over and over again?
I have given you sourced and credible reports of Kamala's gibberish. Maybe you don't find her words "lacking normal clarity or intelligibility in speech or thought", to define incoherent. Personally, res ipsa loquitur. I did not perform an exhaustive search of everything she has said over her career, but merely provided reports that you seemed to think didn't exist. I am not interested in the entirely different question of other people who say similar things.
"I have given you sourced and credible reports of Kamala's gibberish"
No, you have given me credible recordings of *things Kamala has said.* The subjective judgment that they are gibberish is your own addition, and not present at all in the text you provided.
"I am not interested in the entirely different question of other people who say similar things. "
You should be if you care at all about being reasonable and well-calibrated. If you both a. think the above qualify as "gibberish" and b. think that a politician sometimes speaking gibberish should impact anyone's consideration on whether they are fit for office, then a bare minimum sanity check on those opinions to have a sense of how common that condition actually is.
If, for example, all 50 current state governors could be found making similarly "incoherent" statements (as I strongly suspect they could) then you would necessarily either need to re-evaluate whether they counted as "gibberish"[1] or re-evaluate whether they were even slightly predictive of job performance.
[1] The obvious alternative being that you simply lack the skill of understanding certain sorts of political speech, and should either develop it or condition your opinions on that deficit.
I note the "short sample" is much shorter for Harris. This seems like a specially curated sample, with a liberal bias.
I grant the Trump sample is typical Trump. I have too little information to judge the Harris sample on anything. Anyone can make a soundbite, especially if one makes lots of them and someone picks the best for viewing.
At this point, the only rational thing to do is to spend time looking up full recordings of Harris's recent appearances and listen to them yourself. You have adjusted your priors to "Harris is borderline incoherent, worse than Trump" based purely on reports that you haven't been able to verify because they have a bias that comforts you (this claim is further bolstered by your suggestion that Harris might somehow back out of the debate even though she's spent the bulk of her candidacy pressuring Trump to honor his commitment to debate the Democratic candidate, which shows a tendency towards projection), and a good faith attempt to point out that she's not is dismissed as being liberal propaganda. Anything short of listening to her speeches yourself before carrying on with this conversation makes it clear that you are attempting to exist in the world of emotion, not facts.
I've been watching the Harris speeches, and she's quite cogent. Frankly, Arrk seems to be projecting Trump's obvious cognitive decline onto Harris. But we'll see what the debate shows us.
And don't forget the photos of her large crowds are AI-generated. The stadiums where she's speaking are actually empty. Also, the Moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio, and Elvis is still alive and kicking.
I don't think she's incoherent in the sense of being senile or confused (you can see enough of her rally speeches to tell that much), but she hasn't been a great public speaker historically and is trying to avoid taking any concrete positions that might either piss off the left wing of the party (which presumably includes most of her staff, so there's a bias here) or the center. Given that she's doing well in the polls and vibes, she's mostly trying to avoid risk as long as possible.
She seems clumsy when speaking contemporaneously and having to fill in the time with non-prepared remarks.
Harris says she wants to get "an interview" set up before the end of the month. Vance did three interviews on Sunday.
Trump isn't appearing very much either. I think because his health isn't up to it. It's all Vance versus Harris at this point, like some people didn't get the memo that Harris is now at the top of the ticket.
I'm not sure if this is an example, but just seeing, if by attempting to deliver an inspiring speech, and then performing. To those that say otherwise, I say, rethink the discontinuance, and embrace togetherness.
As I mentioned, I haven't found instances of Harris being incoherent, but would you vote for someone that said something like that?
It is notable how little Harris has said while vice-president. Why is that, for such a prominent position? If she's been speaking in public her entire career, why stop four years ago?
>would you vote for someone that said something like that?
A few Open Threads ago I picked a random year, 1990, and looked up a Trump interview. The first result was him walking out on an interview claiming they had spread inaccuracies, and when pressed on what the inaccuracies were replied "I think your demeanor was inaccurate. I think your questions were inaccurate."
That is to say, if you're voting at all, you're voting for someone who said something like that.
Vice presidents don't usually do or say much. There are exceptions, but Harris's relative silence was closer to the rule.
She isn't the best person at thinking on their feet in front of a camera, I'll agree, but that's harder to do than most people realize. Plenty of smart, articulate people aren't at their best with a camera rolling and the whole world watching. She does better than most. I don't care for her at all but will take her or her cat over Trump.
>but would you vote for someone that said something like this?
I’ll counter that with would you vote for someone who completely falsely says that photos and video of Harris rallies are AI generated?
It’s just the latest spurt from a 10 year fire hose of ludicrous lies. I suspect but have no hard proof the guy is so messed up he actually believes his lies in the moment he tells them. I don’t know what’s worse a delusional man or a pathological liar.
‘Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.
The crowds at Ms. Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets, including The New York Times, and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Mr. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.” ‘
I don't think that Trump believes that words are supposed to have truth value in the first place. He just says whatever he feels like without regard to actual content. It's the ultimate manifestation of Colbert's "truthiness".
Yes. It's like some horrible parody of religious interpretation, where we recognize that we are not supposed to take comments about "AI-generated crowds" literally, but instead treat them as a metaphor for "the lying liberal media astroturfing support for Harris".
Is this contrast a *reason* you're supporting trump?
Because it sounds like "Trump does thing A all the time, shamelessly, everyone knows it, even his supporters admit it; but the liberal media does it sometimes too but they are unaware of it. Therefore I'll support the person who does it much more egregiously". That seems incomprehensible.
Surely him doing something you don't like, more often (knowing or not) is a *detriment*?
I cannot verify that Trump stated any Harris rallies were AI generated. Snopes doesn't yet validate the photo in Detroit as real, though it seems likely so far, as it is unlikely to have been AI generated, but they can't say with certainty as of yet.
As a conservative, I come to this blog for differing viewpoints, but not actively hostile ones. I'm open to facts changing my mind. I would appreciate as objective a viewpoint as can be managed.
A pathological liar is worse than a delusional person, as they at least know what they think of as the truth. Truthful politicians don't last long in politics, though Trump is new to politics and doesn't play that game very well.
I don't have access to Truth Social, but he was quoted as saying on TS: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” He went on to insist that the reflection on the plane proves that the image was manipulated, and that “There was nobody there!”
Trump is not new to politics! He has been a politician for a decade now and was president for four years. If that doesn't qualify someone to be a politician then very little does.
Check Trump’s own Truth Social. He posted that the rallies are AI generated there.
There were thousands of people at the rallies including many journalists with real cameras and video equipment. Check YouTube. AI may be good but it can’t produce a consistent fake from dozens of sources. It’s just not possible to run that sort of scam.
Pointing out an easily verified fact is not hostility. Disagreement is not hostility.
I’ve been listening to Trump unfiltered by media interpretation for 10 years. I’m talking about his live speech not how media spins it. He lies about more things that are easily shown to be false than any politician I’ve seen in what’s getting to be my rather long life. Until Trump no one has tried this sort of everyday lying. Not Nixon, not George Wallace, no one.
It’s truly stunning.
I have no problem with conservatives. I don’t think Trump is one though. He is a populist demagogue with some conservative ideas and some that conservatives would say are radically liberal.
A big topic in recent years has been homelessness in the USA. Many attribute home building regulations as a root cause. I've seen much less written about homelessness in Europe. Is it much of a problem there? If not, why not? I don't imagine that it's much easier to build new homes in European cities than in American ones, although perhaps population decline has caused homelessness to be a less of a problem there?
I've tried to get data on how much homeless in the USA is a problem now versus two, three, four decades ago, but can't find much that seems reliable. Does anyone have relatively reliable data on that?
EDIT: I want to add that, as mentioned below, at least according to Wikipedia, every major European country as well as Canada and Australia have higher homeless rates than does the USA.
There hasn't been much of an increase, either, in a lot of places. Paris proper has fewer people today than in 1975, and the metro population has only increased from 11M to 12.6M since 1990. Madrid had 3,1M in 1980 and 3.3M today. Berlin had 3.4 M in 1990 and 3.6M today.
Every European city I have looked up falls into one of three brackets; Major Increase (Istanbul, Baku, Dublin), Minor increase (London, Milan, Munich, Warsaw etc) or stable, like the ones you mentioned. So it's hard to find evidence for population decline! There would be in small regional towns, but homelessness was never a big problem there anyway.
No, but population decline is not necessary for low homelessness. What is necessary is a large increase in population compared to housing supply. Which is unlikely where population increase is relatively minor.
PS: I suppose a decrease in avg family size will also have an effect, if it is large enough, even if population doesn't grow much.
I live in Austria. My basic impression is that such a thing as native-born or native-ethnicity poverty just does not exist anymore. I don't know whether social programs or dropping birth rates leading to everybody inheriting stuff from grandparents, as their parents will usually pass the inheritance on. My take is that *visible* poverty in a rich country in 2024 is some sort of an anomaly that needs to be accounted for, explained.
The rougher neighborhoods in the city are MENA, Turkish, Bosniak people, and I think strong family links and Islamic charities prevent them from going homeless.
There are homeless people coming from Eastern Europe, because begging works better here.
Again I think in 2024 *visible* poverty in a rich country needs some sort of an explanation. Theoretically everybody who cannot work gets a disability check and sleeps in their cousin's kitchen or two people share a rented room. Theoretically everybody who can work, can rent a room or maybe work on a farm and sleep there somewhere. That makes their poverty invisible.
Now Paris has a huge homeless problem but it is entirely recent immigrants without family links.
When I lived in San Jose, there was a huge homeless encampment under Highway 85 but you never saw homeless people in the streets (I understand that it's different in SF). I recently moved home to Bristol, UK and the homeless are everywhere and it's heartbreaking. I don't know if there is more homelessness here but it is certainly more visible. Bristol has a big housing shortage too.
Meh. The Austrian state only pays for mental health care if people need to be insitutionalized. Otherwise a session with a shrink will be like $120.
Also by "better" you imply quality, not access... I dunno, my experience so far is "trying random antidepressants until one works" I think Scott wrote once that really one often cannot do better, but in this case there is no such thing as low or high quality
Can you have someone committed for not being able to take care of themselves in much of Europe? The end of forced institutionalization in the US had a lot to do with the increase in homelessness starting in the mid 1980s.
I think it goes deeper than that, the care is better to the point that usually it doesn't have to get that far.
That said I don't know about "taking care of themselves" as it is quite subjective, but certainly someone can be committed and forced to take medication if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.
Europe has more population decline and less nimbyism (overall, it definitely doesn't have zero). Most European countries also has a better social safety net - not just in the government provided sense, but also in more social cohesion (note that within the US, the best social services for homeless are in Utah, which isn't a blue state but is relatively communal). Although I don't know how that's been handling things with the refugee wave.
>not just in the government provided sense, but also in more social cohesion
I live in Austria and I I think the later is not true. People openly saying the specific reason high taxes are good is that they don't have to worry about philantropy but can focus on their own lives without guilt. If I wanted to volunteer at a soup kitchen, I don't know how to find one. Christianity is near to non-existent now and that plays a role.
Yeah, this one probably varies wildly by country (and community) and it's hard to say "Europe" for it in a lump. (I will note that I saw a lot of homeless people in Vienna in the central train station, but maybe that's just where they all go, I didn't see as much of it elsewhere).
Specifically in Israel (not technically Europe but also lower homelessness), I know it's much harder to slip between the cracks of family/community support. If you talk to homeless people in America, they'll usually have a story about how their family died or can't support them or something. One issue there though is just America's scale - the bigger your country is the easier it is for problems to become no one's responsibility.
Yeah. Quick Google suggests the UK has twice the homelessness rate of the US though (assuming those numbers are reliable and comparable), so this actually checks out.
Personal hot take- with just a little deregulation, cities like New York or San Francisco would have people living in ‘coffin apartments’ like those in Singapore and Hong Kong. This wouldn’t even require new construction- just permission to heavily subdivide existing units. Forcing people to live in spectacularly inhumane housing for free by banning them from living in mildly inhumane housing for cheap is not kindness.
OK for the agoraphobic, hell for the claustrophobic. People sleeping on the street and not building a hut are likely claustrophobic and it probably plays a BIG role in homelessness - maybe they could rent a small room, two person per room, but they find that intolerable.
Theodore Dalrymple who has some experience with it said those people are nomads - the British state gives them a small apartment, and they just run out and prefer to wander and sleep open air. He was judgemental about it - as a psychiatrist he should have recognized it is claustrophobia.
As someone extremely agoraphobic dreaming about underground cities and watching videos of Antarctica stations because it calms me, I can appreciate some people will be total opposite of me.
Why shouldn't city dwellers be allowed to live in tiny pods, if that's what they want? There's no coercion or torture involved.
As a country dweller, conditions in any city seem cramped and inhuman to me. So I won't move to one. But presumably those who do, are happy to trade that off for other stuff.
Looks to me as if the regulation is there mainly for aesthetic reasons, because people in pods is an ugly image.
I for one support people's right to live in an ugly way if it means optimising for stuff they actually like.
> Looks to me as if the regulation is there mainly for aesthetic reasons
I think there's also an element of socioeconomic exclusion. Most of the inhabitants of pods will be poor, and they don't want poor people in the neighborhood.
Aren't you always necessarily within a few hundred yards of where lots of poor people live, if you're in a big city? Isn't that one of the benefits, that you're surrounded by people who will make ethnic food for you or whatever?
No, in many big cities, you have to travel several km from the city center to reach any significant amount of poor people. They just take the subway to the city center to make your döner.
Right, and this is part of why mass transit can be controversial, especially free mass transit. In addition to moving working poor into wealthier areas, there's a worry that non-working poor (homeless people) will hop on and travel to wealthy residential areas too.
I'm suspect the most important difference is that no part of Norway doesn't freeze in winter.
But that's going to depend on the definition of "homeless" being used. I note that the Wikipedia article you cite doesn't use a uniform standard, and it doesn't have an entry for "unsheltered homeless" for Norway. Which is what we mostly care about, because that's the kind that is visible and causes most of the problems, and it's the kind that gets filtered out once a year if the unsheltered are liable to freeze to death in winter.
I live in a U.S. city that freezes in winter. There are homeless people here in the warmer months. I have no idea where they go in winter, or why they come back.
People were similarly mystified by what happened to migrating birds in the winter, before their migration became understood. Hypotheses included that they hibernated, or even turned into mice.
There are definitely subsets of the homeless population that migrate. Classically, "hobos" and "tramps". How significant this is in the context of the current homelessness problem, is unclear. But it could at least partially explain seasonal homelessness in colder areas.
This may seem like petty semantics, but I really think we should stop conflating "safety net" with "socialism". Norway has a much more robust safety net. It is _not_ much more "socialist".
And while I agree that that is part of it, I'd be surprised if a fully re-worked housing situation in the US didn't erase the majority of the difference. In other words, I would expect US housing policy to actually be the most important difference. Although I suppose I would be willing to concede that a much more robust safety net, done separately, might also do this? I'm not sure. It seems like the current US housing paradigm has the ability to soak up a _lot_ of safety net.
Thanks. According to those numbers, The UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden all have higher homeless rates than the US, which is interesting if true.
Norway is special because it is not only a bit socialist but, perhaps more relevantly, a small petrostate.
> According to those numbers, The UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden all have higher homeless rates than the US, which is interesting if true.
I think that different countries have vastly different definitions for, and ways of counting, homelessness.
Looking into the Australia number, the claim is that 122,000 people are homeless, or 0.5% of the population. But digging into the numbers it turns out that only 7,636 people were actually "in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out". A whopping 48,000 of them were merely "living in severely crowded dwellings" which isn't great but isn't by any reasonable definition homeless. (And I'm guessing the vast majority of those people are foreigners).
I found some more data. I'm amused by the fact that there's more rough sleepers in Byron Shire (300) than in the City of Sydney (277). (For those not in the know, Byron Bay is a famous beach town with a hippie vibe.)
It also says that 59% of unsheltered homeless were in vehicles. So I'm now pretty sure that the modal Australian "homeless" person is a surfie sleeping in a van in Byron Bay.
To nitpick, the "visible" difference between the homeless in one US big city and another has more to do with their behavior than their numbers. There's plenty of homeless people in Dallas but they are motivated by the police to keep a low profile. The numbers in the West Coast cities are higher than other cities but what makes them so visible to the public is that those cities allow them to behave more aggressively with pedestrians and to camp in places that are greater nuisances to the public.
Agree of course that homelessness statistics across countries aren't likely to be reliable. Nevertheless, it remains a possibility that European cities have equal or greater percentages of homelessness as/than US ones. It's also possible that homeless people in Paris and Stockholm are less visible than those in San Francisco for the same reasons the homeless in Dallas are.
I've just launched a new substack that will be sharing, every morning, 7-days-a-week, a short reading from the "secular canon."
That is, short secular texts (mostly from the internet) that engage deeply with the world — that ask important questions and remind us of our most important obligations.
I see this as an antidote to the shallow, “watery and domesticated” humanism described by Joe Carlsmith:
"… a type that says something like: 'Enough with this cosmic stuff—it’s gone dead. But let’s enjoy a nice afternoon, and our tea, before it gets cold.' Here I think of a talk I heard at an atheist club in undergrad, in which the speaker suggested that in the place of the orienting meaning that religion provides, maybe atheism could promote an activity like ultimate frisbee, which is fun and creates community.… I like tea and frisbee fine. But some kind of existential intensity is getting lost, here. There is some un-relating to the whole story; some blinkering of the attention."
Tl;DR Canada went too far. Oregon got it right. UK should copy Oregon. In America, the discussion will inevitably be subsumed into the culture wars and enlightened centrists will be ignored.
> and his death certificate listed several more serious conditions. Alan’s family could not have known this — but why should the family have access to a medical record that the patient explicitly wants to keep secret?
Well, the most obvious answer is that they inherit it from him.
The policy-relevant answer is that it's an important part of oversight of the MAID system, and - since dead people can't suffer injuries - there are no costs to disclosing it to them. But it seems moot since they're entitled to see it anyway.
If you're asking why they should have access while the patient is still alive, the policy-relevant answer remains true but stops being moot, and we can also note that a privacy interest that the patient is notionally committed to renouncing isn't a very strong interest.
Canada doesn't have a problem with giving out MAID too easily. MAID has a PR problem due to asymmetry of information because of patient privacy.
Every so often family members of a MAID recipient will be upset and claim that the recipient was basically fine and that they were approved for MAID for some atrocious reason, like losing their hearing. This is obviously not a valid reason for MAID in Canada. The family complains to the hospital and the hospital says they reviewed the case and found the recipient of MAID was eligible but due to patient privacy they can't say why. Then the family goes to the police and the police do an investigation and find the same thing: the recipient was eligible but due to privacy, they can't say why.
Then the anti-euthanasia crowd picks up the story, takes the family's uninformed version of events as gospel and yells about how terrible it is. The only thing the hospital can say in its defense is, "hey, we swear they were eligible but we can't say why due to patient privacy", which admittedly doesn't sound terribly convincing. Most likely the recipient was terminally ill and suffering.
Even if this only happens for 0.1% of MAID deaths, you still get many dozens of anti-MAID stories going around based on false information.
As for 35% of recipients saying they don't want to be a burden on other: this is very normal for the terminally ill, is in no way unique to Canada, and honestly the percentage seems surprisingly low to me. The majority of recipients are terminal cancer patients and they *are* a burden on others. This isn't their primary reason for wanting MAID, just one of the reasons they checked on the list.
As a German, when I started out thinking about it, I was initially opposed to MAiD. My thinking was initially tribal back then, "Nazis did 'euthanasia'" plus "Nazis are bad" yields "euthanasia is bad". (Don't laugh, I was a teenager.)
To my credit, I read "Practical Ethics" (on the recommendation of my ethics teacher), by Peter Singer, and he changed my mind with arguments (this was long before twitter, when such miracles were commonplace).
I have been pro-MAiD ever since.
This summer, after being cared for by my mother for twelve years, the body of my father finally succumbed to Alzheimer. It was not a good death. He had lost the ability to talk, react in any way indicating intelligence beyond a gold fish, control his bowels, walk and finally stand. I think my mum did an amazing job caring for him, and he had the best life he could have realistically have had given his condition. When he stopped drinking, my mother tried to spoon-feed him gelatinized water for a day, but finally recognized that this was pointless. We had already ruled out a stomach probe before, so that was it.
You commonly read that people die of thirst after three days, and that may be true for healthy young adults. It was non true for my dad (or what was left of him). He had opioids, but as he did not show any pain signs they were low-dose and did not hasten his demise. It took him more than two fucking weeks. I can not say how the process was for my father, but it was certainly hell for my mother.
If he was an animal, whomever had decided that this was an adequate way to cause his death should go to prison for animal cruelty. Unfortunately, he was still a human in the eye of the law (though if Singer would consider him a person would be highly debatable), so our hands were tied.
My mother, as the decision-maker designated in his living will, was well within her rights to refuse further medical interventions. But if she had decided that what he required at the time he stopped drinking was a lethal dose of pentobarbital, she would face manslaughter charges.
So I am kind of furious with the state of MAiD in Germany. Between the radical left people vehemently opposing any discussion of euthanasia (as seen in Singers article "On Being Silenced in Germany", helpfully included as an appendix in the German version of Practical Ethics), to disability-rights groups, reluctant medical associations to Catholics, there are plenty of political factions in Germany opposing assisted suicide. In 2020, the German supreme court has ruled that a blanket ban on suicide-as-a-business is unconstitutional and told parliament to establish new rules, but so far none have been forthcoming.
I just don't see the fundamental difference between active and passive euthanasia. You make a decision about someone under your care, and someone dies. "Your honor, I did not kill the hostage, I just left her tied up in the desert without water and God did the killing" would not fly in any criminal court.
I'm sorry that your father had such an undignified end and I am sorry that you and your mother had to endure what must have been a very difficult period.
>and to emphasise that the murderer was British. Immigration must have nothing to do with it.
This impulse to remove and suppress certain criticisms from the discourse and keep it off the political agenda has contributed to the UK you have today. Insisting that the massive overrepresentation of brown faces in eg crime stats has nothing to do with immigration is eventually going to piss off quite a few people and they're going to resort to violence if political avenues against immigration is forbidden.
I agree. My intention was to contrast the topics that we are able to talk about openly and rationally (like MAiD) with those where we are not (like immigration).
Yea sorry, I made it sound like we were in disagreement. Honestly I'm not sure much can be done to keep euthanasia discussions sterile unless no one cares much about it in the first place, which is unlikely given the subject matter and our current focus on "rights".
>Oregon got it right. UK should copy Oregon. In America, the discussion will inevitably be subsumed into the culture wars and enlightened centrists will be ignored.
It’s odd that you would point to an American program as a successful model then dunk on the U.S. for not being able to reasonably discuss the issue.
California has a similar system to Oregon. Nine other states have MAiD programs, as does DC.
As with abortion, the states that have adopted liberal attitudes to assisted dying are all liberal. Eventually, this will become a federal issue and liberal states will insist on one solution while conservatives will insist on the opposite solution. It will eventually decided by the Supreme Court which will insist on one solution for everyone and it will become a permanent battleground in the culture wars as abortion is.
You may recall that conservatives attempted to reverse Oregon’s law in the Supreme Court at the time. It will eventually happen again.
And Republicans in Congress immediately tried to institute a ban. It's not over yet.
When Oregon passed its Death with Dignity act, it immediately got held up in congress as Frist tried to ban the use of federally controlled drugs in assisted dying. The new law was thrown out by SCOTUS. Perhaps a more conservative supreme court will reverse that decision once the topic becomes contentious again.
If and when it is over, it won't look anything like "The Supreme Court will insist on one solution for everyone". Which is relevant evidence against the prospect of the Supreme Court insisting on one solution for everyone w/re assisted suicide. It's not impossible that such a thing *could* happen, but it's not the way to bet. And blaming the Supreme Court for something Congress might someday do, doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything useful.
Maybe I don’t realize how united other countries like the UK are in their public opinion on assisted dying. So the UK isn’t split on this topic politically? There is widespread agreement on whether such a program is a good idea?
I don’t understand your argument that the Supreme Court eventually and inevitably takes away state rights in favor of federal rights. The Supreme Court recently (and controversially) returned abortion lawmaking power to the states. As you mentioned, the attempt to strike down Oregon’s MAiD law failed. Why do you see these rulings as evidence that state laws are insubstantial and temporary? The fact that the U.S. has individual states where people have different cultural values yet are still partners in a federal sense is something Americans generally think of as a feature not a bug. It affords us increased ideological and cultural diversity while leveraging the benefits and securities of a large population base.
The MAiD program in Oregon you consider to be a model for such programs has been in place for 27 years. The number of states with such laws continue to grow. Some states will probably refrain from adopting such laws which will probably reflect what the majority of people who live in those states want.
I just didn’t see why your reasonable analysis of what the UK should do about MAiD (which you think calls for a similar solution to an American one) should take an immediate hard turn toward saying the U.S. can’t discuss the kind of program it already ironically produced because culture wars.
There is disagreement over MAiD in the UK and there will be opposing views in Parliament but the disagreement won't be along party lines the way it was in America.
I celebrate with you when States are permitted to make their own choices but, increasingly, decisions like this one get escalated to the Federal level. I predict the same will happen with MAiD and Congress will eventually try to ban it or make it a universal right and it will end up in the Supreme Court which will decide it once and for all. Do you disagree?
I guess so. Abortion was just kicked back to the states, which demonstrates that these issues don’t necessarily resolve themselves the way you indicate they naturally will, as federal bans or universal rights. States commonly have different laws on controversial issues.
I might just be ignorant about American law but when you say “once and for all” I don’t really know what you mean. Supreme Court rulings are subject to review and can be (and are) overturned.
But in any case the last time the Supreme Court considered the MAiD issue in 2006, they affirmed that the regulation of medical practice, including the practice of assisted dying, is primarily a matter of state law, not federal law. Maybe a future court will rule differently. Then maybe another will rule differently still.
But all of the states in the US with MAiD program are blue states, which means that it almost has to become a culture war issue even if the motivation behind the original programs were based on reasoned discussion.
What's the difference between Culture War and sensible federalism?
If left-leaning states wind up with left-leaning euthanasia policies, and right-leaning states wind up with right-leaning euthanasia policies, that seems like a perfectly reasonable outcome.
I think the states that have copied Oregon’s laws have been able to avoid some of those issues. The only controversy that I am aware of is whether Oregon’s MAiD should be available to residents of other states.
One of the great things about having a job when you're a teenager is that you have a chance to meet a lot of adults in a stressed environment. Hopefully it's not too traumatic or dangerous, but you will see how some adults have a hard time handling life's difficulties. Hopefully you can learn from the experience: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/baller
This starts with a claim that new cities are too hard to start because all the land already belongs to someone. I think it would be more accurate to say that all the land is subject to regulations which make new cities impossible.
Then it gets into efforts by Chasidic Jews to set up a new town near New York and how it worked once but will probably never work again.
Sidetrack: I wonder what would happen if Chasidic Jews couldn't get welfare. My guess is that they'd adapt, but I have trouble imagining what the changes would be.
It's definitely possible to build a city even though all the land already belongs to someone. And it doesn't require any extraordinary effort or even a deliberate plan.
E.g, I'm pretty sure all the land in Fulton County, GA, was owned by *someone* in 1836, when the Western & Atlantic railroad reached the Chattahoochee river. And per the W&A, the expectation was "one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else". But lots of people thought it would be advantageous to live and/or set up business at the transshipment point for river & rail traffic in the region, and they were willing to pay more for a plot of land on which to do that than the land was worth to its previous owner as a small corner of a cotton field or whatever.
The resulting agglomeration of homes and businesses petitioned for incorporation as the town of Atlanta in 1847, and now has a population of half a million within city limits and is the heart of an urban area of five million.
The difference between then and now isn't more property ownership, but more NIMBYism. The guy who wanted to buy a small plot of land and open a second grocery store in 1837 Fulton County, didn't need permits from a dozen politically-captured regulatory bodies, and didn't have to worry about neighboring plantation owners suing him for destroying the rural character of the community.
I think there's plenty of places where everyone would be thrilled if you started a new town. Certainly the local landowners would be happy to subdivide and sell off their agricultural land at inflated urban prices. And local governments will often be cooperative -- sometimes they like things as they are, but sometimes they'll see the dollar signs.
Overall, I think that if you could persuade five thousand (normal) people that they all wanted to live in some place that's currently farmland, and if you can figure out how to solve all the infrastructure problems of getting power and water and sewage sorted out, it would be reasonably easy to find a place for them.
But... normal people don't want to move to a new town in the middle of nowhere. The only people you might be able to persuade to move to a new town in the middle of nowhere are weirdoes (e.g. Hasidic Jews) and the existing locals aren't going to look so kindly on a town of weirdoes.
(I strongly suspect that Chassidic Jews are considerably overrepresented among ACX readers, and may not appreciate being unnecessarily labelled "weirdoes". Please pick your words more carefully.)
If you build a nice town in a nice place, however, people might just move there. E.g. Maspalomas went from nothing to 36k in half a century. I'm sure there are lots of places where the same thing could be done.
> Overall, I think that if you could persuade five thousand (normal) people that they all wanted to live in some place that's currently farmland, and if you can figure out how to solve all the infrastructure problems of getting power and water and sewage sorted out, it would be reasonably easy to find a place for them.
The problem is that you *also* have to persuade all the people who currently live on that farmland. And also anyone who is anywhere near them. And so on.
You only need to buy one farm. Five thousand people living four to a house on quarter acre blocks is only 300 acres, which is less than the average size of a farm in the US (445 acres) and much less than the average size in Australia (10,702 acres).
The hard part is persuading the local government. But they'll be listening to their own self interest much more than the voices of any nearby farmers.
They recently gave up on the planned ballot initiative in November, and have resorted to trying to do things the slow way instead, which even if successful, would take many years. They also recently lost a fight against an expanded exclusion zone around Travis.
At best, it's "still in the works" in the same sense that California High Speed Rail is.
Having now read the article, I think Scot's Archipelago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/) idea is right for this. I also think it would be doable in countries like the USA, Australia and Canada, all of which have lots of sparsely populated land and a culture based on personal freedom. The way it could work would be by dividing a large area of land into 2km by 2km blocks, separated by roads, and allowing would-be archipelago communities to buy them.
I think it does, more than the average for societies worldwide. More to the point i can imagine people in Canada and Australia being more up for archipelago than most societies. But i might be wrong.
New towns have certainly been built in the UK in the past, during the 20th century. |Maybe the current government will build some more, since they want to build lots of houses. My proposal along these lines is here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/polkemmet-new-town
Parts of the USA are very sparcely populated, so it wouldn't be a problem buying lots of contiguous land. There might well be other problems with planning permission however.
I would have said the main problem is persuading people that they ought to live in your new town instead of somewhere else.
There's many existing perfectly nice small towns that would love to have more people, but people persist in moving to big cities instead. If you could figure out a way to solve the problem of growing a town from 2,000 people to 200,000 people, then you wouldn't need to also solve the problem of how to get to 2,000 people from zero.
Or, you know, go the Israeli way and bulldoze Palestinian homes in order to settle on their lands.
The higher-order reason, if anything, would be that competing interests are solved quite differently in liberal democracies - even setting aside practical issues of economics such as existing infrastructure, the best long-term solution is to find a way that minimizes intra-societal hostility.
"if anything, would be that competing interests are solved quite differently in liberal democracies - even setting aside practical issues of economics such as existing infrastructure, the best long-term solution is to find a way that minimizes intra-societal hostility."
That's a rather complicated way of saying "people vote to prohibit others from building on their own land."
That is not even close to being the same thing. First of all, as you said, there is a financial compensation if it happens. Second, you can fight back through the legal system so it might not happen at all.
A legal challenge is almost certain to fail, because, just like the Norman system in England, legally the Federal Government owns all the land anyway, by right of conquest and purchase, and the most any citizen or corporation can acquire is possession in fee. (I'm not sure about the status of native reservations.)
So in theory the government is only taking back what it already owns, and even adequate compensation is only a convention. Or maybe the US constitution prohibits land escheat without compensation.
(In relation to this, so-called allodial freeholds, and "citizens of the land" or whatever they call themselves, are a legal fiction and a load of ... ! :-)
Do you know of anyone who has successfully defended his or her home against eminent domain seizure by "fight[ing] back through the legal system" or is the notion of that being a feasible avenue based entirely on happy thoughts?
>But, once an eminent domain proceeding is filed, the chances that the government will successfully obtain the property, albeit, possibly for a higher price than was offered, is very great indeed. Probably 98% or more of eminent cases filed in court will result in the acquisition of the property sought by the condemning party. The condemning party's attempt to obtain the property is probably rejected outright only one or two times a year in Colorado, on average (and some of those cases involve condemnation of property by a private party such as a purportedly landlocked land owner).
(and there are a bunch of comments about the problems of getting decent statistics on this, and on eminent domain in general)
Wouldn’t surprise me. There has been quite a bit of outrage over how shoddy the education they receive is. Well, I’m not sure the community considers it a problem but people concerned with education are scandalized. The studies are almost entirely religious and so things like math and reading in English let alone history, languages, etc. simply aren’t taught for the most part. I believe there is a similar problem among the ultra orthodox in Israel. Bad education and super fecund means lots of social welfare is expended on them.
> There has been quite a bit of outrage over how shoddy the education they receive is.
And by "quite a bit of outrage", you presumably mean the reactions to a certain series of NYT articles riddled with inaccuracies and wild claims. Goodness, the media can cause horrendous levels of harm when they toss out honesty and ethics.
(Sure, those hit pieces caused a surge in NYC hate crimes large enough that anti-Jewish hate crimes became 1.5 times all other hate crimes in the city combined, but I wouldn't have expected that they even managed to reach - and convince - people over here.)
What’s the relationship between secular Jews and the chasidic Jews. Does every religious Jew have secular relations and vice versa, or are the chasidic Jews totally their own thing?
I'd say more extreme than that. Secular Jews usually don't have Yiddish as their first language. Evangelical churches have grown at the expense of mainline ones, but relatively few people who aren't born Hasidic convert to it.
An illustration of the cultural distance between the communities is that while the majority of secular Jews vote Democrat, the Chasidim (along with non-chasidic Haredim) are among the most Republican-voting demographics in the country. If you look at the NYC metropolitan area on this map you can see anomalously red
Chassidic Jews are EXTREMELY orthodox. This puts lots of constraints on what they can do and when they can do it. E.g. they can't cause a machine to operate between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. I'm sure there are different branches with different restrictions. (IIRC, some orthodox Jews, who are liberal compared to Chassidic Jews, won't allow a lightbulb in the refrigerator, because if they opened the door during the Sabbath, they would cause the light to turn on. Now imagine a more extreme position.)
In addition they tend to only study religion to the detriment of things like math, history, or really anything else. On top of that a stunning number of men go to yeshiva for a very long time severely impacting their lifetime earnings.
I got that info from a seminar class in graduate Econ. The overall topic was strict religions, club goods, and why strict religions tended to stay strong. He was chomping at the bit to entitle his paper “Hardcore Sects” but he eventually came to his senses lol. Mind you, that was almost 20 years ago so I might be mixing some things up.
I’m now thinking of the SNL Fiddler on the Roof parody. Set up by John Mulaney. After some parodies of Fiddler’s music, Mulaney is joined by a chorus line of Hasidic dancers, who do a credible version of the tavern scene from the show. But wait, there’s more: When someone asks, “Was that the actual cast of ‘Fiddler’?”, Mulaney replies, “No, there’s just a lunch break at B&H Photo.”
Okay that’s a successful business operated by Hasidic Jews, but when I was watching it I was wondering who the hell was going to get the joke besides photography buffs who know better than to try to do business with B&H on Shabbos?
Not many relations, to my knowledge. I've never met any, but among my secular Jewish relatives they're the one group you're allowed to openly badmouth with no consequences. So.... relations probably aren't good.
Chasidim are pretty insular-- there's not a ton of migration in or out of the communities, and there's not a lot of overlap between secular & chasidic Jewish families. Many secular Jews will have some family and relations who are "more religious" and who may be living separate, Orthodox lifestyles, but there's still a lot of gaps between these communities and dedicated, Yiddish-first communities of Haredim/Chasidim.
For the time being, people with PTSD who want to actually get better (as opposed to the current Big Pharma-approved approach of numbing their pain while they drink themselves to death) will have to continue to make pilgrimages to Latin America. What a world we live in
In a nutshell MDMA studies have suffered from leaning into desired results if not outright fraud. I’m on the MAPs mailing list and their email blasts have always seemed like they are promoting something other than legitimate science.
It’s a shame. I had a personal experience with MDMA way back in college and I think I still am benefiting from it.
I believe there is a lot of potential in MDMA as a therapeutic medication. See Utah:
I think part of the problem is that there are two camps involved: those interested in the medical applications, who are working to get psychedelics legalised for this, and those interested in legal highs, who use medical applications as the fig leaf or stalking horse to get the fun party substances legalised.
People who want the fun party stuff to be legal are thus incentivised to produce tons of 'research' showing that absolutely for real getting blasted off your face on this totes helped with your mental health issues.
Think you are right about this dichotomy but it's not people who want to party who really care, it is a bona fide spiritual/religious thing. The advocates actually think getting everyone to take psychedelics would open people's consciousness and save the world. Distinct group, with some overlap, from people who just want to get high at festivals.
Back before LSD became a controlled substance there was a lot of research showing that psychedelic and psycholytic therapy with LSD and allied drugs was extremely promising, but basically nothing to convince a hard-headed person that such therapy was of proven special value. Almost everyone who takes such drugs convinces themselves that they have had an especially meaningful experience, but they are generally unable to communicate clearly what that meaning was. I have not taken MDMA, but my experience of psychedelics is that parties where people take them largely exist so that people keep each other safe while they explore their own minds.
Yeah, you're right, although it's unfortunate that we're working under this implied dichotomy that something has to be either therapeutically helpful and not fun, or fun and not helpful. I think many substances are both.
I do see the caution with legalising fun substances, though, because in this fallen world people will absolutely abuse the shit out of every loophole under the sun to get the legal highs, and I'm fairly sure they'll do some swapping and selling etc. of their legally acquired "just for my mental health treatment only, I pinky swear" drugs to friends.
All it takes is one case of someone getting blotto on the medical legal high who wasn't supposed to have it, and doing something dumb, and there you go: public outcry and blame heaped on the authorities for letting this dangerous substance be legal, and that poisons the well for the next "can we please make this legal because it really does seem to help those otherwise not responding to conventional drugs?" attempt.
I think the goal here is to make it legal for therapy. No one would get a prescription bottle of MDMA to take home. It wouldn’t be a daily or as needed medication. From what I’m reading about the Utah program there are limited number of sessions, 3 seem to be the most common. They have to be spaced weeks apart because each dose depletes a neurochemical that has to recover naturally. The usual IANAD disclaimer applies.
The stuff that gets ‘into the wild’ so to speak comes from illegal labs.
That would be the hoped-for system, but tell me, Gunflint, do you honestly believe there wouldn't be some sort of 'pill mill' set up because the second there's a sniff of money to be made, someone tries to monetise the opportunity?
"Sign up to our online therapy sessions where licenced medical professionals diagnose you after you complete an easy ten question form, prescribe you the medication, and you attend our online therapy sessions at a time convenient to you!"
The guy that sold me the MDMA in college was a bit of an evangelist. He had a sheaf of photocopied articles from ‘legit’ publications talking about how the stuff could improve people’s lives, particularly their relationships with other people.
It was shortly after the FDA had classified it as a schedule 1 drug.
So I’m talking about 1986 or so. I don’t think the rave party scene was around then. If it was, it wasn’t on my radar.
Edit
With a bit of research I could get a specific date. It was one of the two times Joan Armatrading played at my campus auditorium. It was the one where Graham Nash was the opening act.
Something like 15 years ago, there were studies showing that cooling caps can help against insomnia. Does anyone know what happened to that? It is still common wisdom that the bedroom should be cold, but I haven't really heard of cooling caps since then. It would be very cheap aid. Is this used as medical tool nowadays?
This is related to a very old crackpot theory (his own words) by Scott about cooling as a means to increase willpower and top-down-regulation in the brain. As far as I can tell, the theory did not hold up, as any way of using the brain produces pretty much the same amount of heat. But I am not 100% certain of that, so if someone has more knowledge of heat production in the brain in general, I'd be interested.
N=1: when I really have trouble falling asleep, for example when traveling, I get up and deliberately get chill, then climb back into the bed. I'd say it helps 2/3 times.
There are many studies about the effects of targeted warming and cooling on sleep efficiency. We expel heat primarily through our head, hands and feet. That's just where the heat escapes, it doesn't have anything to do with brain cooling. Warming the skin also helps to bring circulating blood to the surface to more efficiently lower core temperature. This is why pre-warming feet some time before bed can improve sleep onset times (commonly with foot baths but anything works). It helps top warm other parts of your body too, provided you don't overdo it and allow for heat to escape. A short warm shower can warm skin, if you stay too long you can keep core temp higher than it should be (it will eventually drop more steeply than it normally would and that steep drop can help with onset, so that's kind of a toss-up, do it if it happens to work for you).
Based on what I remember from having read a few of these, we can withstand more insulation on our thighs (particularly right above knee cap) than upper body in bed.
I have an ethics question for effective altruists.
Suppose in 2050 humans make contact with an alien civilization on Proxima Centauri. Unfortunately, despite their high level of technological development, Centaurians are ruled by a militant religious cult. Announcing its intent to exterminate all humans, the Centaurian government prepares to dispatch a 50 million-strong armada to our planet. Shortly before the expected departure date, our scientists developed a tachyonic canon capable of destroying the armada while it is still on the ground.
My question is what are the maximum accompanying civilian casualties among Centaurians that would be justified by saving humans from extinction.
As Scott notes, we already went through this with Gaza. The answer is the same: as many as it takes to be confident of success, but no more. If there are bignum Centauri that willing to stand in front of the tachyon cannon while preparing genocidal war, or even within the blast radius of a tachyon cannon aimed at the invasion fleet, then bignum Centauri need to die.
No math is required, and it's entirely the Centauri's decision how many people to feed to the righteously-fired tachyon cannon. Altruisim is not effectively served by surrendering the universe to a bunch of omnicidal religious cultists.
This reminds me of a question I asked on a Hidden Open Thread last week about Israel. Just replace "armada" with "terrorist group" and "their planet" with "Gaza", and this becomes "is it justified to devastate Gaza in order to destroy a terrorist group that's planning to bomb you?"
The most interesting response I got was a comparison to Pearl Harbor. Japan killed ~2,500 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Not even counting the atomic bombs, the US response killed 150,000 Japanese civilians. I know there's a lot of debate over the bombs, but it at least seems like the deaths before Japan was willing to surrender were justified, assuming they served some kind of wartime aim.
I think I'm willing to go with "if a country declares war on you, you are allowed to retaliate, even if that's not object-level-direct utilitarian good", because otherwise geopolitics gets really weird and everyone launches sneak attacks on each other. I think it's good, but supererogatory, to avoid exercising that right in some situations where the enemy seems well-contained already and can't really hurt you.
I'm still not sure about the Gaza case because it straddles a weird boundary between "independent country attacking Israel" and "horrible ghetto with some terrorists in it who declared themselves in charge", and this matters insofar as I think if they were a real country they would act rationally and not bomb people bigger than they were who could easily devastate their population, and then this problem wouldn't come up, or it would look more like a conventional war.
In the Centauri case, I think obviously try all other options first, but if there aren't any, go for it, and let it go down in galactic history as a lesson not to make unprovoked attacks.
The war with Japan lead to a state that was less likely to declare war on its neighbors and its distant competitors, but I would be astounded if what's going on in Gaza right now creates anything other than super-Hamas.
Who's the nation-builder? Netanyahu??? He's a sworn enemy of a second state. The first American governor in Iraq actually cared about democracy and a stable Iraq, that's why he was replaced. The next guy cared about stability but not as much about democracy, and the result was a deeply extended occupation that only ended because the US had intended a sovereign power, sans anti-western position, to emerge from the first day.
Then there are the settlements, which if you take them out of the international law debate and focus only on their local significance, are a pledge to concentrate the surviving Gazans into an even denser urban environment with more economic desperation and more fighters per square kilometer.
> if they were a real country they would act rationally and not bomb people bigger than they were
There are quite a few examples of real countries irrationally attacking stronger neighbors. For instance, Paraguay lost 90% of its male population in a war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. More famously, Germany lost 5 million people after attacking a much larger coalition of countries in WWII.
> "horrible ghetto with some terrorists in it who declared themselves in charge"
Given the suffering caused by the Versailles Treaty and the fact that NSDAP came to power after winning only 40% of the vote (Hamas won 60%), could a similar narrative apply to Germany?
Paraguay wasn't expecting to be at war with all 3 countries. Japan is a clearer example of a smaller country attacking a much larger one and getting wrecked in a manner they should have definitely foreseen.
Weimar Germany was a nation-state, and thus could not be a "ghetto". Germany was less of a problem on the international stage when it was a bunch of city-states.
> Japan is a clearer example of a smaller country attacking a much larger one
they attacked two larger countries, US and Britain.
> getting wrecked in a manner they should have definitely foreseen
it is not obvious, that they would loose (at least not to them) especially after the victory against russia a couple years earlier.
Also they had the upper hand in the first year of WW2, and if they changed strategy then (e.g. less agressive Kidō Butai, or start piece negotiation with britain), the result could have been net-benefitial to them.
Britain was literally smaller than Japan in area and total population.
The US was a bigger naval power than Russia, and particularly had easier access to the Pacific. The US also hadn't collapsed under the strain of WW1, rather we tipped the balance toward victory for the Entente.
Yeah, it was obvious. The Japanese strategy was explicitly a Hail Mary, hoping to do enough damage to the US and Britain in the first 6 months or so to force them to the negotiating table. It didn't work, and given what they did at Pearl Harbor was never going to work.
>Also they had the upper hand in the first year of WW2, and if they changed strategy then (e.g. less agressive Kidō Butai, or start piece negotiation with britain), the result could have been net-benefitial to them.
How? I really don't see any situation where Japan ends up leaving the war better off, because it was run by crazy people and they were inevitably going to make bad decisions. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the Kido Butai, but carriers were seen as inherently offensive before the development of radar, so them sitting tight would have run against all doctrine and sensible employment of the assets. You could be talking about the fact they were down to 4 carriers at Midway, but I'm not sure that would have saved them. As for peace with Britain, no way Churchill risks pissing off Roosevelt like that.
I make no claim to be an EA, but I think that you'd need to take into account the value of a social norm against wars of conquest. If we, as a galaxy, take a strong point of view against planets that go around destroying their neighbours, then it will save more lives in the long run.
First-order utilitarianism makes it hard to justify ever fighting back against any sort of invasion.
I'm not an EA, nor am I really "all-in" on Utilitarianism (of any stripe) but I do tend to lean in that direction. I think it's pretty straightforward to justify and answer of "no practical limit" depending on the specifics.
First, let's nail down those specifics, since your scenario as-is is a bit too vague to justify any confident answer. From what I can tell, the following is a good match to your intent in posing the question:
1. Firing of the tachyon canon will destroy the armada and end the immediate threat (i.e. they don't have a backup armada, their own tachyon canon or some other edge that will make destroying the armada irrelevant).
2. If the armada is launched, it can be reliably expected to reach Earth and succeed in destroying the entire human population: there's no other realistic hope for humanity's survival.
3. Human civilization in 2050 is basically healthy and function: it's not ruled by a planet-wide religious cult of its own, teetering on the brink of some civilization-ending apocalypse, or actively in the process of total disintegration.
4. The facts in the original setup and in points 1 and 2 above are known with high confidence: none fo them is seriously in doubt.
What I'm basically doing here is setting this up as a trolley problem. Every human alive AND humanity's entire future is on the default track, X number of Centauri civilians are on the other track and the only immediate uncertainly is whether we pull the lever.
The reason that pulling the lever is almost always justified here is that the actual, immediate death toll of the conflict is only a small part of the stakes in play. Even if X is 10 times the total human population of Earth, pulling the lever is still almost certainly the positive-expected-utility move. First, the future of humanity will likely include many more humans than are alive in 2050: unless you buy the doomsday argument (I don't) there's little reason to suppose that X is greater than the total number of humans that will live subsequent to 2050.
But second, the central conceit guarantees that long-range, space-faring civilizations are possible AND it strongly suggests the solution to the Fermi paradox is "alien civilizations are common, they're all just either quite recent or not highly visible." This is important because within a short time of meeting us, the Centaurians resolved to wipe us out. As annoying as humans can be (who among us hasn't wanted to wipe out humanity, occasionally), there's no reason to suppose we're unique in that regard: if the Centaurians react that way to us then they're very likely to react that way to other species as well. Letting ourselves be wiped out means accepting worse odds for the futures of an unknown number of other alien species, while if we stick around we're more likely to be able to stop the Centaurians from trying this on anyone else. Granted, there's no guarantee that future humanity (or its antecedents) wouldn't also be a threat to those others: we don't have that great a track record. But "not that great" is still much better than "resolves to planet-wide extermination within months or years of first contact."
Finally, beyond the simple utilities of current-and-future lives saved, I personally would value the diversity of intelligent species: a universe with n/2 humans and n/2 Centaurians is all-other-things-being-equal preferable to a universe with n of one species and 0 of the other. Combined with the previous paragraph, this also means that we should prefer to pull the lever even if it will kill *all* the Centaurians. Though of course we ought to very strongly prefer any option that stops short of that point, even if it has a high cost in human lives: wiping out all of one species or the other is a large negative that isn't fully captured just by the numbers of lives.
Last, things that would shift the acceptable number of Centaurian casualties downward:
1. Any uncertainty about their plans, objectives or capabilities. The less sure we are they're coming to kill us, the less extreme a response we should allow ourselves.
2. Any possibility of defeating them in a less-costly way. If we think there's even a modest chance of being able to fight off the armada once it arrives, we should be less willing to pay high costs for firing the tachyon cannon.
3. A significant chance of humanity being destroyed through other means. All of the above reasoning depends in part on humanity having a future (absent the Centauri invasion). The less certain that is, the less we should be willing to kill to protect it.
This is well worked out and correct, although I have one nit-pick.
You've accepted the premise that one civilisation can be ruled by an evil cult (and that we'll be able to objectively determine that). But whether it's an evil cult or just a shared ideology will be purely a matter of perspective.
I apologise for the snark, but the way I remain most effective is by the logic of:
- Are children dying/suffering?
- Is that suffering easily preventable?
- Is yes to both, do something to prevent it.
I'm firmly of the view that utilitarian thought experiments like this (or trolley problems, utility monsters, etc) have strictly negative value to getting people to do the right thing.
There's a question here of how you define moral agents. Most ethics systems would define a moral agents to be someone you could negotiate with at least in principle - in this case, a moral agent would probably not invade you (in most branches of reality) if you could eliminate them first, so being prepared to eliminate them whatever the cost is a net positive across most realities (at a cost in the few branches where they call your bluff).
If you categorically cannot negotiate any sort of cooperation in any way, even in principle or by some weird timeless stuff, then you fall into utility monster territory where intuitions diverge (since you're defining them to have internal experience but not one we can meaningfully interact with).
I agree that my "meaningfully" is doing a lot of work here. If we have the ability to change its mind on one of those (say with a warning shot) then we can meaningfully interact with it and should do it, but if our de facto interaction is limited to "push the button or die", I think in practice we're equivalent to the no-interaction situation.
(There is a human bias towards assuming we're in this situation when we don't have to be, but that's more a practical psychology than a moral philosophy question).
Anyone who answers "Yes" to this question needs to contend with the fact that their answer implies that the genocide of the entirety of humanity is a moral good. After all, from the perspective of most species on Earth, humans are the Centaurians. Does this mean the people answering "Yes" to this question will grant the right of all earthly species to kill humans to the last baby? They should, if they want to be consistent.
> Pages in category "Species made extinct by human activities"
> The following 121 pages are in this category
So, slashing the 121 figure by more than half to account for plants included in the figure, we have committed no less than 50 genocides or so. Sure, we call them "Extinctions", but I'm sure that Centaurians have a similarly lovely euphemism when it comes to mass murder too.
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I'm not really sure I'm included by the group selector "Effective Altruists", but the whole analogy doesn't smell good, just on pure storytelling merits. Space is massive, **why** do the Centaruians want to kill us? What's so special about us? Fighting over resources is a mental illness that can only occur in dirt-heads, in space there are so many resources that Light can't even reach all of them. So many. Unimaginably many. So many it hurts your head to think about.
So, it must be about something else, but what is it? Is it a fundamental value of Centaurians to cause mass extinctions? Is this their equivalent of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" ? I'm very skeptical, how did they even survive long enough to have rockets if this is how they view life? How did they de-escalated their world wars? In the unlikely case that was actually their fundamental views, if we have solid evidence that every single Centaurian wants every single human dead, then maybe being cavalier about civilian casualties is justified.
(The only exception is Centaurian children, because surely at some point in their life, Centaurians are children, no? And being children, they are probably comparatively weaker (although maybe they could still crush humans) next to their adults, and - most crucially - they don't have the cognitive capacity to understand the world and make decisions, in simpler words, Centaurian children are not moral agents.)
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Or do the Centaurians want to kill us because they are pragmatic fans of the Dark Forest explanation of the Fermi Paradox? But destroying us doesn't make any sense: It will make them incredibly visible and a prime target for any species that want to do uno-reverse them. Dark Forest believers should just stay quiet, neither making noise nor destroying those who make noise.
But perhaps the Centaurains hate our noise and want us dead because we invite attention to the "neighborhood" of the galaxy that we share with them? and they believe that by killing us the "neighborhood" will be overall more quiet and less likely to have the attention of a bigger but more distant threat? Why don't they just simply... tell us so? It's worth at least a shot before they try to genocide us all. "Shut the fuck up, predators are listening", how many bits does that take?
Without litigating the setup of the thought experiment too much, I guess there are plenty of things we can do to kill as little civilian Centaurians as possible. We can perhaps use the Tachyonic cannons on their moon first, the resulting chaos will perhaps keep them occupied and terrified enough for us to send an ordinary lightspeed message to the effect of "Don't.". Biden voice optional. If you're worried, they would still do, keep destroying their unhabituated star system one by one till nothing remain except their own planet. Surely any remotely intelligent species who sees their solar system getting Death-Stared will pause for a few centuries to at least know more about what it's dealing with?
Bad cases make bad law. You can always pose thought experiments like "Terrorists have just kidnapped your 1-year-old baby, your wife, and your mom. Which one of them do you want to see raped by the terrorists on PornHub?". What's the point? What possible insight will you glean from the answer to an unanswerable question?
> Does this mean the people answering "Yes" to this question will grant the right of all earthly species to kill humans to the last baby?
I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right. Perhaps I'll dress some squirrels in little suits and have a pretend UN meeting with them.
What can they do with it? Diddly squat. It would be kinder to grant them some nuts instead.
> I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right
Good, now a human can deputize themselves to exercise that right for the animals, and genocide the entirety of humanity for their crimes against animals.
> What can they do with it
In some places of the world, I (or anybody) can hire people to beat you to potato mush for less than 5 dollars or so per hour of beating. What can you do about it? Diddly squat. So that, according to you, probably proves that you have no rights and shouldn't be taken into consideration when drafting ethical guidelines.
On reflection I've made the point badly and rudely, which probably justifies your response. There was no need for me to rub it in that squirrels can do "diddly squat", so I apologise.
The point I wanted to make is simply that squirrels don't have language, so it feels like a type-error to talk about them having positive rights. How can a positive right to do something be "exercised" if you don't recognise yourself as having it? In your scenario where we do it for them, it feels like an unnatural use of language to say "the squirrels are now exercising their right to kill us, via us". I imagine ordinary people would instead say, "LearnsHebrewHatesIP has supposed squirrels to have positive rights, and used that as a pretext for his killing everyone".
The word "can" in "now a human can deputize themselves" is also a bit of a weasel word. Yes, anyone "can" say that they're killing people on behalf of squirrels, but why would they want to? As the squirrels have not /asked/ them to do it.
(Interestingly if I replace all instances of "squirrels" with "animals", it looks like my argument loses some force and yours gains. "So called squirrel rights" sounds silly, but "so called animal rights" makes me sound cruel. I would like to say, the expression "animal rights" is so common that we assume it must refer to something real and good (but that's precisely what is under debate). I would like you to provide a justification for the concept other than the popularity of the expression, which hopefully justifies my use of "squirrel" throughout)
I also apologize for being aggressive. I guess - also on reflection - that I'm on edge by the amount of people that the Gaza war (or thinly veiled analogies to the Gaza war) emboldened to state their terrible "Might Makes Right" variant on morality, and I mistook your comment for an expression of one such variant.
"Diddly Squat" is not really the thing that rubbed me the wrong way, but the whole flippant tone and casualness of the comment. I also searched your name before I replied the first reply and saw that you made serious replies before elsewhere, that probably tempered what would have been an even more aggressive reply from me.
> that squirrels don't have language so it feels like a type-error to talk about them having positive rights.
That's something I can argue against. My argument against it is that it Proves Too Much.
Plenty of things/creatures that we usually think of as having rights do not have a language, and/or lack any conception of them having rights. Like African children, for instance, or really just children. Do babies have rights? Do Congolese 10-years-olds who don't speak English have rights? What about mute people? What about people who speak too softly by nature and thus can't really make their case?
I can state a lot of examples of humans who have no language (or effectively no language), and/or have no conception or claim to their universal human rights. Do illiterate Afghan school girls have human rights? Do adult North Koreans who have lived under a dictatorship all their life have human rights, despite them not recognizing themselves to have human rights?
You could probably say something along the lines of "But those are not *positive* rights, those are just the negative rights of a creature to not be killed or harmed", but the distinction between positive and negative rights is often illusory. A lot of positive rights arise as compensation for violated negative rights: when you steal from someone, they earn the right to jail you and retrieve their stolen things from you, by force if necessary. When you kill someone, their family or others interested in the victim earn the right to indirectly kill you through the justice system (and without that justice system, people will probably agree to a custom that says the killer should be killed vigilante-style).
So, if squirrels - who are not uniquely language-less, they have more language and self-expression than human babies for one - have the negative right of being left alone, they also have the positive right of killing or severely harming those who do *not* leave them alone.
> The word "can" in "now a human can deputize themselves" is also a bit of a weasel word.
But people do it all the time though. What is "Intel"? Why does it have the ability to throw me in jail or sue me for billions if I stole one of its hard drives and published it online. It doesn't even exist. What is "Israel", why does it have "the right to defend itself", if even the majority of families of those killed on October 7th are now demanding an end to the war.
What is "the American people", and why does every presidential candidate claim (i.e. deputize) themselves to be acting for its interests? How did the presidential candidate know they represent the American people if they hadn't even voted yet? Are those who couldn't vote "Not American", or are they American and the candidate/president doesn't really act in their interests after all?
In all of those examples, the name between quotes is a stand-in for "a thing or a collection of things that we decided have rights, but which can't really exercise those rights directly because it/they sorta don't even exist, so we also decided that somebody else is going to exercise the rights that we decided it/they have".
The case of the Squirrels is just one instance of this: having decided (due to the above argument that they're like babies, mute people, ...) that they have rights, it's not that strange for some people to deputize themselves to act on behalf of those rights, those people eventually being recognized by most as the rightful exercisers of Squirrel Rights.
"I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right. Perhaps I'll dress some squirrels in little suits and have a pretend UN meeting with them.
What can they do with it? Diddly squat. It would be kinder to grant them some nuts instead."
I wrote:
"Fish can't do much about us cooking and eating them, so they are not a party to any social contract."
While I believe that thought experiments should normally be granted their problem terms, the paintbrush wielded here is too broad. Since they can do interstellar armadas, one has to assume they're way ahead of us, even 2050-us. So, we should tread lightly. Were the Centaurians provoked? Is there room for diplomacy? Won't they simply build another fleet, more diffuse in deployment but even more bent on vengeance? Do they really mean the extermination thing, or is it just their fringe finance minister talking?
Taking the question as asked, there is no maximum upper limit. Having chosen and announced they intend to invade and commit genocide (and have the capability to do so, I'm assuming here their fleet/army can actually do this, and their 50 million strong force wont simply be crushed when it arrives at Earth with its 10ish billion people, if this is the equivelant of the crazy guy on the corner yelling 'kill all Xs' the situation is a bit different), any and all force needed to defend ourselves is acceptable. Now if we can reduce it, we should, but if not? Don't start fights.
Note: I'm treating this as an actual question, not the IP analogue I'm guessing it actually is, because I don't think it works as that.
He's most likely assigning humans and the Centuarians moral equivalence, and then saying minimise deaths of either side's civilians (hence why he says naive).
I don't think this scenario requires any civilian casualties at all. Surely the cannon that can destroy the armada while its on the ground can also destroy it while its in motion towards our planet? Also you can make a credible threat of existential risk by making a warning shoot at their moon.
Hitting a moving target across interstellar distances is a much more difficult fire-control problem than hitting a planet. The thesis states that the tachyon cannon can destroy the enemy fleet on the ground; it says nothing about destroying it in flight so that capability cannot be assumed.
If the Centuarians are aware that we might have a gun they could fly in such a way as to make themselves impossible to hit. We can only see them 4 years in the past, so even if our tachyon beam exceeds the speed of light, we can't aim at them if they fly a semi-random path. Additionally, they might fly in an extremely dispersed formation, so that any beam shot would only affect a small portion of the fleet.
Yes, but what about the least convenient possible world where, I don’t know, the fleet will travel to earth at super luminal speeds which make targeting it once it leave the atmosphere impossible, or something. It isn’t that hard to set up the thought experiment so that you can’t destroy the fleet without civilian casualties.
To answer the question, I think it would depend on contextual factors, from the aliens history, to their population size, to their mode of consciousness, to what exactly their theocratic dictatorship really believes and is really like, and at this level of abstraction there is not a lot more to say.
What are the current little-known genres of nerd books I'm missing right now? I know about Isekai/litRPG/Progfic/Cultivation. What's newer and less known than that?
Pretty much anything by Becky Chambers. The Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree.
(I’ve just come away from Worldcon with a giant list of recommendation for more similar things, will have to see which of them I like and which I bounce from)
He is master of short stories, for a taste I recommend "Axiomatic" collection.
Bonus - this collection has "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (1992) in which Egan, visionary and prophet, predicts LW crowd having the best lingo 20 years later with this passage:
"...they’re all rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from somewhere."
For his longer stuff I highly recommend Diaspora - probably one of the least controversive of his books, meaning I yet to see a person who likes Egan generally but disliked this book (which can't be said about some of others, chief among them Permutation City which people either love or hate)
If you like characterization or plot or suspense or quality of prose and things of that nature, there are far better authors out there.
If you like explorations of questions like "What would life be like in a universe with two space and two time axes instead of 3 space and 1 time?" then you should definitely read Greg Egan.
He said that doses of spot radiation on June 10th and 12th basically destroyed his life, and that he was living in constant pain, unable to sleep or swallow and drowning in mucus for the last few months (this also naturally made it impossible for him to try any new trials).
There’s a famous doctor in Australia named Richard Scolyer who was able to access experimental immunotherapy for his aggressive brain cancer, and a year following treatment remains cancer free.
I’ve spoken to oncologists who specialise in this type of brain cancer who have told me quietly that if they or someone they love were to get it, they would seek out the same type of treatment. This is based on promising early data for this approach, but it’s not available to the broader public.
I think Richard Scolyer is a hero, and I hope that his journey makes enough headlines that people look into it more seriously. But the question is, why shouldn’t anyone be able to access this treatment?
The answer lies in what Jake has written about extensively - the morass of bureaucracy surrounding cancer trials that paradoxically elevate “safety” as the highest principle for people who are dying. It’s “safety” from trying a drug that might help.
This happened with HIV in the 90s, so I hope it can happen again. Let’s get the cancer community as politically organised as the LGBT community.
My aunt was diagnosed with terminal brain tumors as a girl in the late 50s. Her mother, a nurse if that makes any difference, was desperate of course and so wasn’t above grasping at straws. She heard of a doctor up in Canada using what we would call immunotherapy now. The doctors she talked to all said he was a quack and that she shouldn’t fall for it. She decided to try. I think the guy’s name was Hect. He would basically make a “serum” cultured from bits of the tumor. He injected it in them and they ran a hellacious fever for a while. Plenty of people died of course, he was a last resort after. But apparently he had a significantly better track record for spontaneous remissions for certain kinds of cancers. It certainly worked for my aunt, she’s still alive and doing fine.
In the 50s?? That’s brilliant, I’m so glad to hear about your aunt. Immunotherapy got its start in the early 20th century with William Coley but interest in it died down for a long time. I’d be very interested to hear more about this Dr Hect.
I don't have any more info sadly. I think he was in the Sudbury Ontario area. Not sure how my grandmother heard about him. My grandmother was a nurse and taught my mother how to give her sister (my aunt) injections while she was at work. Keep in mind my mother was 6 at the time. Different times lol.
The problem isn't "earlier trials" - the problem is *which* trials Jake was actually able to try. In an example from my experience, one of my cousins was diagnosed with glioblastoma in late 2022. Sequencing of her tumor revealed a mutation in a gene called FGFR2 - and it was exciting to learn that there's a new drug called pemigatinib that specifically targets FGFR2 mutations. My cousin wasn't allowed to try pemigatinib and her doctors couldn't find any other clinical trials that would accept her. She died in Spring of 2023.
In some of his recent posts, Jake was trying to get the word out about a new piece of legislation called the Promising Pathway Act, which would make it easier for people like Jake and my cousin to choose which therapies to try. Unfortunately, the proposed law remains bottled up in committee. It could be useful for folks who are concerned about this issue to write their congressional delegation. My Representative, Jamie Raskin, wrote me back a heartfelt letter mentioning his recent experiences as a cancer survivor. It might be useful to cc: Congressman Raskin, even if you're not from Maryland.
I find the name "Promising Pathway Act" awkward and uninformative. It would be more useful for the bill to have a name like "Seliger Act."
No. “Man with terminal illness desperately searches for miracle cure,” is a tale as old as time. Probably accelerating clinical trials is a good idea, but the real beneficiaries wouldn’t be the enrollees, but future patients.
It's hard to argue counterfactuals. Pembrolizumab didn't seem to help. Petosemtamab did. It's impossible to say what would have happened if they'd gotten to Petosemtamab sooner. My poorly informed guess is: more time with a good quality of life, but not a cure.
Reducing the cost and effort in applying for studies would have improved quality of life significantly, obviously, (and maybe health, also?) Eliminating washout periods between studies likely would have helped, as well. Washout periods were good for the researchers, but bad for Jake.
From what I gather, the last round of radiation seemed to do more harm than good and I don't know how much emphasis to put on that entirely reasonable but avoidable mistake.
So unless getting to petosemtamab quickly enough would have resulted in a cure, which is possible but unlikely, my guess is that better access to trials might have given him more time on the order of months or maybe a year or two.
If someone has more insight on the matter I hope they correct me.
> Washout periods were good for the researchers, but bad for Jake.
Isn't the point that they're good for research, not researchers? If the research is muddled by the presence of other poorly characterised drugs then it will slow down the research, which in the long run will likely cost lives.
The point of medical trials is to find drugs which really work for the future, not to save the lives of trial patients in the present.
"Isn't the point that they're good for research, not researchers?"
If you mean 'good for research not research subjects' then yes, that's exactly true. Ethically, patients should be participating in studies because they *want* to participate in a study (because they are compensated or because they want to increase knowledge or whatever,) not because that's the only route to getting a trial drug. The second case borderline violates the ethical research standard of therapeutic misconception.
This is especially problematic since the barriers to study enrollment are high and often very location based and unreliable and the potential applicants may be time and resource limited. In terms of research, there's something to be said for having a larger, dirtier pile of 'real world data' to comb through in *addition* to controlled study data, if a given subject is not able to fly across the country to establish care, washout, be just sick enough but not too sick, etc. Using a surrogate endpoint other than a control group isn't ideal. But it's not nothing, either. And the FDA is currently on a push for the increased utilization of "real world data."
There are, theoretically, paths to do this currently. In practice Jake, whose wife was an ER doctor and unusually dedicated to his care, wasn't much able to access those paths (as I understand things, I welcome correction on this point.) Which means the rest of us have little chance.
Are people here having success treating social anxiety with some form of prescription medication, whether that's an SSRI or something else? I've been rejecting treating my SA with medication for most of my life, but nothing else is working. It's strange because I'm actually pretty confident & articulate in a number of settings (work, etc.) But anytime my brain decides This Is An Unstructured Social Setting my stress level spikes. I get weird facial tension in my cheeks, lips, and vocal chords. I suspect I come across not as anxious but as arrogant, disinterested, or withdrawn. I call it a social impediment- I'm trying to engage in casual conversation but it comes out garbled, like I'm unhappy with people or checked out. I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror when I'm talking to my barber and I can see that the tension makes my face look oddly strained. I also experience vocal cord tension, which includes some pain & soreness after socializing.
Alcohol- doesn't do that much unless I actually get drunk. Tried a beta blocker, was maybe mildly effective but not a ton. Weed makes me more anxious, not less.
Let's just start with SSRIs. Are people successfully treating their social anxiety with them? Are you happy with the experience overall? I'm very reluctant to frankly lobotomize myself with a daily medication, especially if the withdrawals are terrible or the results are semi-permanent. Lotta SSRI horror stories on Reddit
Yes i started taking Lexapro for SA. This was 10 years ago. At that time I also saw a therapist for CBT which is also very effective. I highly recommend doing CBT for SA, the bool "Feeling Good" is a great self guided book.
> I'm very reluctant to frankly lobotomize myself with a daily medication, especially if the withdrawals are terrible or the results are semi-permanent
None of these are things I experienced. I do not feel lobotomized. I am just better able to handle the negative thoughts that SA would create.
I had no withdrawals when I went off Lexapro after the first year (i only went off because i turned 26 and didn't have insurance or a live prescription, but i was also in much better place and didn't need it). I went off it gradually, which is key.
At the end of the day, the only way to have a permanent "fix" is to change your brain. The meds help you get to a place you can do the therapy to change your brain as much as is possible.
I am back on Lexapro for GAD, not SA. I plan to go off it soon as a very stressful portion of my life is ending.
Lexapro is also very cheap, like $10 for a month.
I had a reduce sex drive. That was the biggest problem. I tried Wellbutrin for a bit but got terrible teeth clenching which caused constant pain and migraines. The sexual side effects from the Lexapro were nothing compared to the Wellbutrin.
I take SSRIs but not for social anxiety. But I've seen it work for some of my patients for this.
There are a couple of other options if you want something ad hoc instead of a medication you take all the time. Propranolol, theanine, or any other effective anti-anxiety supplement.
I definitely don't agree with SSRIs as "lobotomizing" you. For about 75% of people, super-high-doses will make the emotional system stop working, but normal doses are completely fine emotionally (for 25% of people, there's no happy medium between doses that work and doses that blunt emotions; these 25% shouldn't take it).
Withdrawals are similar. I would say 99% of people won't get withdrawals if they're on a good SSRI (eg not Paxil), take it for less than six months, and come off in a careful way. If you're on it for more than six months but do everything else right, that goes down to more like 90%. Semi-permanent effects are AFAICT <1%, usually on sex drive.
For what it's worth, I've been on and off SSRIs a bunch of times and never had withdrawals. I've had low sex drive as long as I can remember, but also been on and off SSRIs as long as I can remember, so I can't say much there.
Have you heard anything about NAC for anxiety? Plenty of people report ahedonia at a gram or so a day. Seems like it can set your emotional response lower in general so could pre-empt anxiety.
I'm still surprised that beta blockers work for anxiety.
For me, the main effect of propranolol is that it makes me feel desperate for a cup of coffee. (Given that the reason I take beta blockers is to reduce the tachycardia from graves disease, actually having that cup of coffee would be a stunningly bad idea. Im currently on bisoprolol instead of propranolol)
I don't have SA. Oxytocin nasal spray and Orexin receptor antagonists are also potential routes for treatment of SA. I don't know offhand how much they'd be likely to help you, but they're another option to ask about.
The research on oxytocin nasal spray, which sounded like a great idea to me, pretty definitively shows that it does not work. There were a lot of studies, because lots of people thought it sounded promising. I just looked over the research a couple months ago.
Have you tried spending less time in front of screens? Personally, I find that my social anxiety tends to be proportional to my computer usage over the previous day or two. After a day of heavy internet browsing, my social anxiety tends to get pretty bad. After a day mostly spent on woodworking, home improvement tasks, time with the family, or hiking, it tends to disappear.
Perhaps it's just due to my own personal brain architecture, but I suspect the relation between spending time in meatspace and feeling comfortable in one's own skin is probably universal to some extent.
Lexapro helped marginally but the side effects (weight gain, anhedonia, fatigue) meant it wasn’t a viable long term solution for me.
Anyone had any success with vilazodone? Might give it a try now that it’s gone generic, my psychiatrist says she’s noticed that patients often tolerate it better than other SSRIs
Psychologist here. SSRI’s are OK, but no magic bullet And their side effects of weight gain and loss of interest in sex or difficulty performing are a real drag. They don’t, though, often make people feel lobotomized. Some people say they feel emotionally flat on them, others don’t notice any difference in how they feel except for whatever positive effect they’re getting. It’s rare for people to say that SSRI’s make them dumber. As for difficulties when stopping one: Some are worse than others for withdrawal syndromes, but it’s possible to get off the even bad ones without serious discomfort if you go slowly. (I’m sure there are exceptions, people who go through hell no matter how slow they go, but that is rare. I’ve never seen it. The Reddit posters aren’t representative.). So especially if you generally feel OK except in social situations, SSRI’s don’t seem like the best thing to start with.
I think your best shot is to try CBT targeting the social anxiety. There’s a good book by a psychologist researcher who used to suffer herself from social anxiety, and still has a bit of it. It’s called How to Be Yourself. Sorry about the corny title, but it really is a high quality self-help book. It is, though, hard to get oneself to really take all the steps recommended in a self-help book, as opposed to just reading about the steps and thinking, yes, I should do that. So if you can afford it, or have good insurance, I recommend seeing a professional who specializes in treating social anxiety. There are also real life things you can do like attend Toastmasters (and participate). Or, there’s a thing called Ultraspeaking, done via virtual groups, where people do exercises that push them to speak spontaneously without time to self-censor. Neither of these things is *for* social anxiety, but they do provide a setting to challenge yourself. Both are probably quite challenging, though. If you were working with a professional they’d probably have you starting with way less challenging things, then moving up the hierarchy.
By the way, all the therapists listing on Psychology Today say they treat anxiety and depression, but you want an anxiety *specialist*. If you want info about how to find one, let me via a reply here.
A thought that occurs to me; if SSRIs have a placebo effect equal or bigger to the drug effect, and these are large effects (its not: neither has much effect), then couldnt you just tell yourself youve taken an SSRI, without actually taking one?
(By comparison: I can totally do this minor painkillers, like ibuprofen; I can reduce my heart rate by 20bpm just by thinking about it)
There are things sort of like this that are indeed helpful. For instance, somebody who is very uneasy about making chat at cocktail party type gatherings can develop a mental portrait of somebody named Jon who is a lot like them in almost all ways, but differs in his attitude towards chatting with strangers. Jon used to have a problem with that, but he got over it and now he's comfortable at random chat gatherings, and sometimes hits the jackpot and meets someone he'd like to be friends with. So after the person with the anxiety problem has developed the portrait of how Jon acts and how Jon feels at gatherings, he goes to the next one "as Jon."
On the other hand, there is a limit to how much anxiety can be pushed through by methods like this. What you have to understand is that people with this sort of anxiety feel sort of the way you might if you were being prosecuted for fraud, and you had indeed committed fraud, and you were on the way to a hearing. It makes no difference that your anxiety in that situation is justified and that the other person's anxiety about chatting at parties is not. They are still as scared as you would be at the hearing.
Yes, but the claims of large placebo effects for antidepressants would seem to suggest that the drug effect is about the same size as you can achieve with these kinds of tricks.
======
I just looked up some of the clinical trial results for bisoprolol. Amusingly, the 20bpm effect I can get just by thinking about it is larger than the drug effect in some of the clinical trials for that beta blocker.
For me, at least, effects are additive: bisoprolol plus thinking about it gets effect of bisoprolol + effect of thinking about it. [While I was in the Emergency Room hooked up to a heart rate monitor and receiving beta blockers intravenously, I took the opportunity to see if this still holds when I have quite extreme tachcardia, and it does/. ]
CBT just doesn't speak to me at all. I just re-looked at a CBT workbook on social anxiety to make sure that I'm not mis-remembering it. The whole premise is that I have 'negative thoughts' or 'negative beliefs' around socializing. I just really don't. As an example, I tried going to a Meetup on Friday evening, with a group of people I've known for over a year. I had zero negative thoughts or expectations about the event, and frankly barely thought about it. I was mildly happy to get outside and have a beer with someone, as I work from home. Result- my face and vocal chords were all screwed up with physical tension, and I found it difficult to articulate myself. I just don't see how 'negative thoughts' somehow lead to that, there weren't any.
As another example, imagine if someone was afraid of heights (I'm not, just picked at random). Did they really have negative thoughts about heights that lead to the fear? Who even thinks of being up high unless they're actually physically engaged in it? Or if someone's afraid of snakes- did they really have a negative belief system around snakes that lead to the fear? The whole idea just seems silly to me.
This is why I'm pursuing chemical solutions. The issue seems to be a neurochemical one, not an internal monologue one
I agree with your judgment of the kind of CBT it sounds like you’ve been exposed to, but you need to understand that it’s the dumb version of CBT, not the real one. There are dumb, easy-to-mock versions of everything, including rationalism.
Regarding real CBT, let’s take the CT, cognitive therapy part first:
Cognitive Therapy
-Real CT, like dumb CT, treats thoughts as an important part of what’s going on.
-But it looks for distorted thoughts, not negative ones. Regarding many things, including heights you could fall from and snakes whose species is unknown, negative thoughts make perfect sense.
-Distorted thoughts about something are a problem because they generally lead to behavior that is not a good fit for the situation.
-Distorted thoughts are generally quick, in-the-moment images and beliefs, not longstanding Opinions. It you get good at catching any that you are having in the problematic situation, it often puts you in a better position. For instance, if someone is fearful of a snake that they have been told is non-poisonous and does not bite, they might see the snake lift up its head and upper body and look at them and have a thought (or little movie) that the snake is choosing a place on their arm to strike. This is not a considered opinion, it’s just something that flies quickly through the person’s head. When it does, they are like to feel an upsurge in anxiety and a desire to step back.
-Cognitive therapy does not involve hammering yourself with accurate statements about the thing you have distorted ideas about. It involves considering the actual evidence, and also doing some tests of the thought you’re having that might be distorted. With the non-poisonous snake, you could ask its owner what it means when the snake raises its head and looks around — and what generally happens next. You could ask the owner to sit close to the snake and you can watch what happens next after the snake raises its head and looks at the owner. You could sit a ways off and tangle something off the end of a stick to see whether the snake strikes it.
And the C in CBT is only 50% at most of the treatment. In fact I think of it a sort of groundwork that weakens the person’s belief that their feared thing is dangerous.
Behavior Therapy
If CT weakens the belief enough that the person is willing to begin doing BT exercises that defy their anxiety (for ex., sitting a little closer to the snake each day), then things are looking good. Defying your craving to avoid something that is not actually going to harm you is an extremely powerful treatment. You mentioned that you are not socially anxious at work. Consider the possibility that the reason you are not is that you could not avoid going to work, and you logged so much time doing it that whatever anxiety you had at the beginning wore off just from the repeated enforced exposures. (I know that conversation at work is easier in some ways, because you and the other person aren’t doing freeform chatting, but discussing issues that need to be discussed for the job. On the other hand, at work you really are being evaluated, whereas chatting in a purely social situation involves much less built-in evaluation.)
CBT sometimes seems very confused about what a "thought" actually is, using the term for things that seem more like unconcious reflexes, as well as concious thoughts.
Not exactly what you're asking for but have you tried massive amounts of cardio yet? I used to have social anxiety exactly like you describe until I realised this was the problem. I think some people (everyone??) just inevitably feel below their proper happiness/confidence baseline because of our sedentary culture but don't realise it. I prefer cycling but without a bike 100+ pushups/day or HIIT is also good - and worst case scenario if it doesn't work for you you'll at least get more fit and probably feel better in some other ways, so, seems like less bad potential side effects than SSRIs and worth a try at least
(Side note, I think for me the long-term cure also had to do with zen/meditation. It seems like most people in rationalist and scientific cultures massively downplay the benefits of meditation because if they were honest it would sound like they were making it up)
I am currently on a massive dose (well, 7.5mg/day) of the beta blocker bisoprolol to treat the increased heart rate from Graves disease ... and as far as I can tell, there is no,psycbological affect whatsoever. (Well, maybe asexuality, along the lines that with that much bisprolol, the increased cardio needed for sex isn't going to happen. Think of it like anti-viagra). But apart from that, nil psychological effect.
Apparently, with some people high heart rate -> anxiety, and beta blockers help.
The one time I tried Sertraline., I experienced a massive effect within a few hours. Thjs is not supposed to happen. Complication: there is a known drug interaction between Sertraline and thyroid levels, and I have Graves' disease.
I have had mixed results with SSRIs after having been on them for a year or two.
My experience with unstructured social situations is very similar to yours--discomfort that leads to odd behavior which leads to more discomfort
I have sometimes found it helpful to give myself goals when going into an unstructured social setting to avoid the discomfort associated with them--"i would like to talk to so and so about x, I would like to engage in 3 conversations then give myself permission to leave if I'm not having fun." YMMV but it can help turn the desire for structure into a strength in those situations.
SSRIs: I got prescribed the minimum dose of sertraline (25mg), and on advice from my therapist started by quartering the pills. It was probably placebo, but I felt more comfortable in those social situations almost immediately.
Eventually I've settled on a half pill of sertraline (so 12.5mg) which has felt like it diminishes the anxiety while not giving me terrible side effects.
The full 25mg dose feels like too much for me--im emotionally blunted and have sexual side effects.
I find it distressing to be on a medication that affects my brain chemistry, but prolonged anxiety also alters the brain structure.
I have known people who were on similarly low or slightly higher doses who quit without issue. I'm sure the horror stories are real but there are definitely people who quit without withdrawal. I imagine keeping the dose low helps with this.
Quit two times after roughly 9 months without any withdrawal and without any real tapering: Venlafaxine at 20 (supposedly notorious for withdrawal), Fluoxetine at 30ish (after trying Escitalopram which was unbearable, felt like poisoned, and Duloxetine which had obsessive thoughts). Mainly sexual side effects and with Venlafaxine weight gain.
SA wise the effect was limited but it sure addressed the depression that went with it.
Beta blockers aren't a miracle cure for social anxiety, for me they just make it easier to avoid the anxiety spiral where you detect your body having anxious reactions (sweat, blush, stammer etc) by just blocking the physical reactions. If you struggle with that negative feedback loop then they're a godsend, if that feedback loop isn't a core part of it then all its going to do is lower your heart rate (and possibly help with negative memories being formed having a future effect).
Putting that aside, its a bit of a cliche but psychedelics helped me massively, absolutely do not use them as a direct thing and make sure you do your due diligence for family history and safe settings before even thinking of touching them but for me it got me to a point where I could power through the social anxiety and actually speak up and hold my own.
I have a dim recollection that there was a discussion about media bias/lying a while back with Scott arguing that the media mostly doesn't tell straight up lies, but instead omits items or presents facts in such a way that readers/listener/viewers draw incorrect conclusions.
I've found what I think is a good example of this recently.
From NBC:
"According to an assessment provided to Congress last year
by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there
were about 180,000 homeless people across the state,
making California’s homeless population one of the highest
in the nation along with New York's, Florida's and
The homeless numbers reported in the cited assessment
for the four mentioned states are:
CA: 181,399
NY: 103,200
FL: 30,756
WA: 28,036
And California does have "one of the highest" homeless
population's in the nation. Being #1 by an almost 80%
margin certainly qualifies as "one of the highest".
But ... given the huge difference between CA (and NY, maybe)
and FL and WA it seems disingenuous to just report the stack
ranking.
I notice a lot more articles such as this one than I notice where, for example, Florida would be reported as having many more homeless than California (in absolute numbers).
California and Florida occupy the 1st and 3rd, respectively, places by both population and by homeless numbers in your list. Why isn't Texas on your list?
It would be much more fair to report homelessness per capita. So yes, I agree they are being disingenuous, trying to make some political point.
The two ways it's misleading (saying "one of the highest" when it's by far the highest, reporting absolute numbers when per capita numbers would be more relevant) point in opposite directions, which suggests that they (or at least one of them) are unintentional.
My bad, I was taking a shortcut by looking at ordinals: when the 13th biggest state has the 4th biggest sub-population, that seems high. But the rate isn't as bad as NY or VT or OR or CA or HI, so there's that.
For reference/penance, here's some calculations (8 highest populations, plus 8 highest homeless, plus 8 highest rates):
The helpful chart is on page 18 of the attachment. It's also where you'll see why they chose those 4, because the report IDs those states as combining to make up more than half the total homeless population. Standard numerical illiteracy would be my guess. They're the 4 highest states, with Texas 5th. Only in total numbers, not per 10,000. Indeed the report expressly says Texas and Florida have low rates.
The helpful chart is on page 18 of the attachment. It's also where you'll see why they chose those 4, because the report IDs those states as combining to make up more than half the total homeless population. Standard numerical illiteracy would be my guess.
You're lucky if you're only worried about bias in the media feeding you stories. I had to listen to a radio show segment this morning on Kamala Harris' Irish ancestry (the usual thing where we search for a drop of blood connecting the US president to the Auld Sod for forelock tugging purposes).
Supposing Kamala to be the next president, we're getting ready to kiss her... coconut by researching her Irish ancestry, which so far unfortunately looks like "white slave owner who was vehemently anti-abolition":
Oh, and we're also digging up Walz' Irish ancestors. His seem to come from Wexford, so that's nice - for Harris we've got (via her father) Scots-Irish (as you Americans would say) Protestant and via Walz a Southern Irish Catholic, so we're nicely balanced between the two traditions on this island.
Never mind that he's also got Swedish, German and Luxembourgish ancestry. The St Patrick's Day White House flattery can now commence!
Why would anyone need to outright lie to you when he knows that he and his friends already agree about what kind of information you're going to get?
The problem is immense, a mississippi-sized river of not-quite-lies. It's sadly amusing to watch Elon appear to think he can fight it, when he's just in a different eddy of the same current.
Musk is not just "in a different eddy", he is one of the most prolific sources of bullshit out there. Not even mentioning his dubious political statements: anyone remember him being "fairly confident" to send a ship to Mars by 2022? Hyperloop tickets between SF and LA for a few dollars? Point-to-point rocket flights as an alternative to airplanes? Anyone pinning their hopes on Musk to fix anything with respect to disinformation is delusional.
There is a difference between someone making predictions that he believes but shouldn't and someone deliberately writing thing designed to persuade the reader of things he knows are not true.
(TLDR: I made a website to filter and search all 1500 posts from ACX / SSC, it's over here: https://readscottalexander.com )
I've been reading lots of blog posts from Scott (to myself & my partner) and wanted to have a way to filter and search through them more easily than on substack or SSC, so I made a database of them where you can filter and sort them using various categories. I also made some statistics out of curiosity around the number of posts, their length, comment numbers...
I initially made it for my personal use but I went overboard with it and now I find the website to be quite pleasant to use, so I thought I'd share it here and ask for feedback. Here it is: https://readscottalexander.com
For feedback:
1. Does this feel useful to you? Anything you wished different or general feedback?
2. I ran around 100 posts through Claude (Sonnet 3.5) to get summaries and tags. Before I run the AI on all other posts I'd like to gather feedback, since it's a bit costly and I'd want to run it only once:
a. Most importantly: do you have any tag you wish to be able to filter with, or general feedback on the tags? I'm going to clean it up a bit, I know I personally want to filter through "fiction", "humor", "bad science", "study critique", but if you have others tags you want to make sure the AI recognize so you can use them I'd love to hear it. (You can use the "AI" filter to filter only posts that have been analyzed)
b. If you have any feedback on the summaries it's welcome too (short summaries are supposed to be one liner to get a quick idea of the post topic, long summaries are here to give an outline of the post, maybe even re-read them after the post).
Finally @Scott if you read this, how do you feel about this project being shared publicly? I saw you promote ACXreader (substack replacement to read ACX with a really fast UI) a few months ago so I thought you might be ok with it, but obviously that's only if you're fine with it. I'll also try to reach out to you by email if you don't see this comment, and of course I'd be happy to adjust the website in any way you'd like - my email is in the About page (https://readscottalexander.com/about) if you want to reach out. Thanks a lot for all your writings over the years!
First of all, as someone who's read SSC since circa 2013, I've always wished for something like this, so you are simply astonishing, thanks for adding value to my life.
Fixed! The html was malformed - in the same way the quoted paragraphs don't appear as quotes... I'll see if I spend time fixing it, it's pretty specific to that article. I think Scott has copy pasted what the authors sent him from another tool, which had terrible formatting. Thanks for reporting it.
Thank you! I just checked and it looks great. Haven't come across any other posts with this issue.
I was just about to selfishly ask for another feature (toggling light/dark background) when I realized you'd already built it in, you're awesome.
I'll second Mutton's request downthread to flesh out the About page with more technical details; I suspect the sort of readers who would enjoy that are way overrepresented among the ACX commentariat who'd click on your website and then click around instead of bounce off. Maybe a technical appendix section at the bottom or something?
I see you've also linked to Rob's Library of Scott Alexandria, which back in the day used to be my go-to recommendation for friends wanting to explore Scott's writings beyond the ephemeral latest-post view. I think I now prefer your website to Rob's, because it's more recent (~maximally so), it's prettier, it's rank-able in various ways, it's got a lot of stats which appeals to my friends and I, etc although I still like Rob's thematic curation and wish that could be somehow automated. Automating thematic clustering in a way that allows for emerging new themes to be identified + post clustering to be 'refactored' when necessary is probably ~impossible (although it's what I've always wished for w.r.t. Rob's Library); perhaps a simpler version might be a static collection of themes with a bunch of posts for each + a classifier trained on the former to sort new posts, with said static collection updated annually or something. I'm currently part of a small weekly reading group going through some of Scott's old posts in a particular theme (following https://www.lesswrong.com/codex), which inspired this wish.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to implement this! Please feel free to ignore. The tagging you've implemented is already a good enough proxy for now. And any thematic clustering necessarily embeds authorial taste which might not be to everyone's liking.
Aw thank you for your kind words and for your ideas! (and sorry for replying quite late, I don't check my substack notifications often...)
It's great to read. Yes, automatic theme clustering would be really interesting. That's the idea behind having tags and it works somewhat (I'm discovering similar posts by clicking on tags I'm surprised exist after reading an article), but it's a bit rough around the edges and not super consistent.
There'd be some interesting work to do in analyzing and visualizing clusters. The semantic search can work somewhat for finding posts that haven't been formally tagged with a topic, but you need to know what you want to search. (I'm sure it can be improved too, I'm finding it a bit slow and returning a bit too much, but the ordering by relevance works quite well for me).
I have less time to work on the project and it feels pleasant to use for me so I'm just doing incremental stuff here and there (twitter previews are now shown in acx!), but if I get more time I might explore those topics. Thanks again for sharing your many thoughts, it's useful! And motivating to hear other people are enjoying it. I know I am too! :)
(oh I guess next project high my list would be to include LW posts as well as ACX and SSC. Some day!)
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoy dark mode, and also glad it's discoverable enough that you could find it by yourself. :) There are a few small design bugs in dark mode, I'll iron those out soon.
I also just added semantic search to the search bar which makes the technical part a bit more interesting, so I think I'll add a technical section to the About page this weekend.
Ah I'm happy to read you like it, thank you for your kind comment!
Good catch on the article. The pipeline is getting the html article => converting it to markdown (to normalize and remove html tags) => hydrating it back to html. It looks fine on most articles I've checked but some have hickups. You've found the most severe I've seen so far, I'll see how I can fix that. Thanks for reporting it! (Feel free to share others if you find any, the other I've noticed is the newlines being omitted from table of contents in "Highlight from comments" posts)
This is really cool. If you feel like fleshing out the "About" page with more details about the project, I'd be curious to see your prompts for both tagging and summarizing...
Great, I wanted to include some technical details on that page but was afraid to bore the user too much. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see what I can do.
To tag articles? No, I run the article through an AI (Claude Sonnet 3.5) with a long prompt to extract tags and summary. Around 100 articles have been tagged this way so far, and I'm waiting for some feedback (from others and myself) to go through the remaining 1400. Glad you like it!
It's a simple search box filtering on the titles for now (it's using SQLite full-text search but doesn't make much of it right now) - it'd be interesting to do a more advanced search at some point. The tag search are a bit cumbersome too, since there are so many of them. I'll see what a v2 can look like and I've updated the label to reflect that in the meantime, thanks for asking.
(I think if people are looking for a specific article without knowing the title google might be the best option to get the article name right now)
What's the current state of psychedelic therapy? I don't hear about it that much anymore but a decade ago it was everywhere and there was incredible optimism about its potential.
The people who were pushing it then are older now, and both less energetic and have developed additional interests. (Which is reasonable considering the problems of fighting city hall.)
The best-known, most consistent marker for Alzheimer's is tangles/plaques of amyloid beta, a protein that forms clumps in the brain. Prions are malformed proteins (specifically, they're ones that cause other proteins to become malformed), and are notable for forming amyloid plaques like amyloid beta, which cause problems. So it's definitely tempting to see malformed protein tangles in Alzheimer's patients, say "this is just like what we see in prion diseases," and wonder if Alzheimer's is a prion disease.
The complicating factors are:
1. There's no strong evidence, as far as I know, that amyloid beta is a prion. Not all malformed proteins that form clusters like this have the scary property of "infecting" other proteins and making them act the same way, and as far as I know nobody has demonstrated that property in amyloid beta.
2. Although the consensus in the Alzheimer's field for a long time was that buildup of amyloid beta plaques in the brain caused the disease, this hypothesis hasn't stood up well to the test of time. In particular, there have been several treatments that definitely did work at reducing amyloid beta plaques, but didn't effectively treat Alzheimer's symptoms. This has led many researchers in the field to wonder if the amyloid hypothesis is a dead end, and if the plaques observed in Alzheimer's patients are a side effect, not causative.
That was pretty much my understanding of the science, thanks for clarifying. Do you happen to know if any new promising leads have opened up since amyloid-β started looking more like a symptom than a cause? (Also don’t people think it's really weird that large visible plaques aren't what's causing the brain damage?)
There are probably others too, I haven't kept up with this field all that well.
I think people DO think it's weird if a bunch of big-ass protein tangles in brains aren't causing problems, it's why the amyloid hypothesis was so dominant for so long and why it's still not completely abandoned, but "we invented multiple drugs that got rid of the amyloid plaques, but the people still have Alzheimer's" is a pretty strong counter-argument.
"The (...) most consistent marker for Alzheimer's is tangles/plaques of amyloid beta".
Do you happen to know how good the correlation is? Sorry if this sounds smart-alec, but something like 10-15 years ago I did a deep dive into the topic, and I was pretty confused why everyone considered these plaques a good target. My impression back then was that the correlation was too weak to be promising, and both directions were weak (at least some people have Alzheimer without plaques, and very many people have plaques without Alzheimer). I have no idea whether this was just a lucky guess from my side (after all, the very new drugs do show an effect, albeit pretty modest), or whether the whole trail was just wishful thinking in the pharma companies and researchers. I haven't followed the research since then except for general news, so I would be grateful for an update.
IIUC, it's 100%. Alzheimer's disease was identified when Alzheimer noticed the plaques. Perhaps by now there's some additional indication that is used, as I'm no medic.
It's true that the original description of the disease focused on the amyloid plaques, but the correlation between those and Alzheimer's disease is only 100% if you declare by definitional fiat that only cases where the plaques are present count. If you focus on clinical symptoms, the situation is much less clear.
I doubt I know more about this than you do; I'm not really a domain expert.
I know that the correlation is strong enough to have been noticed and taken seriously for a long time, but also that as you say, you sometimes see brains with amyloid plaques from people without Alzheimer's symptoms, and you sometimes see Alzheimer's symptoms without abnormal amounts of amyloid plaques. As I recall, the latter has led to some debate over whether that means the amyloid hypothesis is wrong, or if it just means there are other syndromes that can cause symptoms similar to Alzheimer's.
I don't know exactly how strong the correlation between amyloid plaques and Alzheimer's symptoms is, or even if there's good consensus on it.
You can’t have shared fact beliefs without shared values, because beliefs have a time and attention cost as well as a risk; how to allocate time and attention and which risks are worth it is function of values.
Is that obvious? Controversial? Ambiguous? Help me understand where the crowd is at on this.
No, imagine two agents whose highest value is their own survival + the death of the other agent. So, opposite values, taking into account indexicals. They can still have shared factual beliefs about which things are likely to cause either of them to die.
I think you’re creating confusion by importing the terms fact and value into contexts in which they don’t have any more distinct meaning.
The whole basis of the fact/value distinction in logical positivism and the like is the idea that facts are individual observer-independent (as distinguished from observer-independent in a Kantian way) and values are individual observer dependent. If this were not true, what is the difference between a value and a fact?
Now that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong that things we commonly think of as values, for instance our pragmatic priorities, alter our observations of things we commonly think of as the facts. This is a point that many philosophers, for example Foucault, would embrace. But if that’s true, it’s not just that values determine facts, but more profoundly the collapse of the fact/value distinction entirely.
The opposite route is to suggest that what we commonly call facts inform what we think of as our values, ie virtue ethicists and other moral realists. Note that what you’re saying is also totally compatible with this, and in fact probably makes more sense if you believe it as well.
This solves other difficulties. For example, rudeness seems like both a factual and value claim, it is a judgment that cannot be applied by a sovereign individual outside of societal norms, but it is a judgement that we cannot utter without evaluating that rudeness as bad and changing our behaviour. These sort of ‘thick descriptions’ illustrate the weakness of the fact/value distinction.
In any case, what you, relativists and moral realists have in common is not about the relationship between facts and values, but more profoundly about the idea of their being facts as distinct from values or vice versa.
Note that none of this precludes their being universal human knowledge, as the form of human life imposes certain goods and thus, on your logic, certain worldviews. And knowledge disagreements can be resolved without appeal to what you call facts or values, for instance on grounds of aesthetic beauty or simplicity. On this, read Wittgenstein’s On Certainty if you haven’t already, or Alasdair Macintyre.
Seems too ambiguous to have a true/false value to me. I can think of three different ways to parse the first clause, none of which lead me to a clearly useful statement about the world:
1. "You can't have [any] shared fact beliefs without [having any] shared values."
--This seems like it would be vacuously true because it's not clear what two humans sharing literally zero values would me, or if that's a state of the world that can actually happen.
2. "You can't have [more than some threshold level] of shared fact beliefs without [commensurate level] of shared values."
--This seems like the most interesting and potentially useful interpretation, but without at least approximate knowledge of the function that maps [level of shared values] to [max level of shared fact beliefs] it doesn't mean very much. Also it seems pretty likely that different values would be better or worse at enabling their holders to share different amounts of fact beliefs, which would increase the ambiguity of the statement.
3. "You can't have [a complete, matching set of] shared fact beliefs without [some particular high level of] shared values.
--This seems back in vacuously true territory, as I don't think sharing all fact beliefs is something distinct human beings can do: we're constantly adding new beliefs an purging old ones (most of them incredibly banal things like "there's a cup on the table") and nobody not in your brain gets your exact progression of beliefs, regardless of values. Maybe if you restricted it to some much smaller, much less granular subset of fact beliefs this could become a sensible framing.
What I think IS obviously true is that there's a two-way relationship between values and fact beliefs: values determine what facts you'll pursue and accept, but the set of facts available to you likewise plays a role in determining your values.
I think this is too strong. Not all differences in values compromise the epistemic status of relevant facts. I would put it the other way round: without shared values there will be fact beliefs that are not shared. But it does not imply that there will be no shared fact beliefs.
For example, it's probably true that people who disagree on, eg vaccine safety, do so because their value systems compromise their ability to agree on the evidence base. But in say a war, where the two sides clearly differ on values, there will be many brute facts that are shared. Eg, Japan and the US shared the belief that an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
I think what you’re saying is only true if we ignore shared values between parties to a conflict.
> But in say a war, where the two sides clearly differ on values,
Do they clearly differ on all values? Or just some? I would say they agree that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because they agree on the value of trusting a specific set of historical claims made by a certain social consensus. There are almost certainly people who will make the argument that no bomb was ever dropped, it was all made up, etc.
Oh I see. Well, if we are talking about literally no shared values at all, that's a rather degenerate case. I mean, if they have no shared values at all, they won't agree on the meanings of any words, never mind facts. But yes :-)
The degenerate case is just a limit point here. More broadly I think it’s the case that, the more values are aligned between two groups, the broader and more detailed the shared basis of fact beliefs they can have.
So we should expect political polarization, for example, to lead to divergent networks of fact beliefs that seem mutually incomprehensible across networks, unless a person can imagine having values very different from their own and then understand how that would change the scope of their attention and what they consider relevant.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but my personal values change over time even when my knowledge remains constant. I recognize the pros and cons of many issues, and I know of many conflicting yet valid worldviews, so I choose depending on my mood.
For instance, is it my value that competition in schools is good? Should we print out everyones scores and hang them on the wall? If we did this, I'd have worked harder in school, it would have triggered my competitive nature. On the other hand, I know how it must feel to be placed low in this list, and it does seem a little cruel to expose how well everyone is doing if you look at the issue from below rather than above.
The one I align with depend on my mood, and on my sympathy, which depends on the pride and confidence (or lack thereof) which I project onto other people. I think values arrise from psychological states more than from knowledge
his initial comment is ambiguous. but from what I gather in his later comments, he's arguing that e.g. people who believe in conspiracy theories or crystal-healing-woo curate a corpus of knowledge/evidence/studies/etc that most people are entirely unaware of. These are extreme examples, but this dynamic occurs in lots of other scenarios to lesser degrees.
True with a bit of qualification. The point I was about to make is "You can't afford to not believe in fire", but Woolery's comment seems to have already made it: North Koreans and Americans both believe the same one Physics that says nuclear explosions are possible. Radically different values, but still one reality, and reality has a way of forcing itself upon you.
Another qualification is the granularity of facts. People can, in fact, agree to individual facts, despite massive value differences:
> The Israeli Palestinian conflict is perhaps the most controversial conflict in the world. And this is remarkable because of how little disagreement there is about the facts
> [The 2 sides might disagree on, e.g., the 2000 Israeli peace offer] But mostly, there’s agreement about what happened, and disagreement about whether it was justified. It’s uncontroversial that the Arabs in Palestine declared war on the Israelis in 1948 because they were opposed to Israel becoming a state, and that the Israelis displaced about 700,000 of them in the war, not allowing them to return. It’s uncontroversial that innocent civilians were killed on October 7th, and that more were killed in response to the Israeli reprisal. It’s uncontroversial that Israelis have built settlements, and that Palestinians have fired rockets into Israel, and that Israel has retaliated with barrages of rockets that have killed thousands.
Even with 2 sides here that are notoriously quarrelsome, they could regularly agree on individual facts.
The problem is that individual facts aren't enough. You have to stitch together several facts, and that "stitching" is in and of itself, almost never something that could be factually supported. Even deciding where to put the T = 0 moment is not a factual decision. Did the conflict start when Muslim Arabs took Syria-Palestina from Byzantium? Maybe. Did the conflict start on exactly 12:01 AM October 7th 2023, and everything before that lived idyllically? Some of the pro-Israel seem to act as if believing this (Though no doubt, they will disagree with the deliberately exaggerated phrasing).
There seems to be several phenomena, all happening on top of each other:
(0) Facts can be faked. Even before AI and photoshop, the vast majority of the world happens in the not-here not-now not-I. You almost never know anything except by testimony, in the broadest possible sense of "Testimony". Pyramids are testimony that Ancient Egypt existed, but Ancient Egypt is just an elaborate guesswork based on many such testimonies, from the perspective of the moderns, no such thing exist or have ever existed. You occupy an extremely small cartesian-coordinate cell in spacetime and in sensory space, any time you want to know something that happened outside of that limited range (which is nearly all the time), you're essentially reconstructing what can never be known for sure. During reconstruction, both honest mistakes and deliberate deception can happen.
(1) Facts are raw and low-level, they have to be interpreted to mean anything interesting. Even video evidence needs context. One of the famous videos of October 7th is Nova Festival goers running away from bullets, but people defending Hamas say the bullets are actually return fire from the IDF, which - they claim - was firing indiscriminately in the general direction of Hamas. Photos of burned cars? IDF hellfire missiles. Gaza's horrific images of destruction? yes, the IDF did it, but only because each and every single one of those destroyed buildings was a Hamas base, so says the pro-IDF among us.
You can always use more facts to interpret a fact, but then that recursively opens the same questions for the new facts.
(2) Facts are selected, not everything is recorded (and what is recorded, regularly gets destroyed or censored or simply lost due to loss of interest on part of those who could have preserved it.)
There are many billions of people alive, about 100 billion who ever lived, trillions of animals. There are hundreds of millions of recordable wavelengths of light, hundreds of different types of particles and fields. The universe is ~14 billion years old, and at least 100 billion light years across, with about 10^80 discrete physical entity. Almost NONE of that is recorded. Writing was rare throughout human history and until the printing press, the very fact that something old is written already embodies a lot of selection bias about it.
(3) Facts has to be combined, sequenced, stitched together, post-production-edited into a narrative, a worldview, an integrated picture. How do you decide on the sequence of facts that together constitute one unit? How do you justify ruling out the facts you didn't include? All borders are arbitrary.
(4) Finally, Facts live in the world of Is. But a lot of disagreements, perhaps most, is about the world of Ought. Between Is and Ought is a gap that you can never cross with facts alone. Even if you managed to pass 0...3, and you now have an agreed-upon narrative of the world, that just solves the Perception problem. You still have the Control problem of how to act on the worldview.
It's a pretty agreed-upon fact that the Middle East is more religious than Europe, but depending on who's reciting that fact this is either a tragedy and the cause of the Middle East's misery or the only light in a dark world and the reason why the Middle East is the future. Same Is, different Oughts.
> Is that obvious
I mean, I had just spent a wall of text arguing why nothing is truly "obvious", so no. Definitely not obvious at all to an arbitrary human. To Rationalists and Rationalists' audience and any other population that was specifically selected to self-doubt and mistrust their senses/the world? Yeah, probably so.
But something being obvious doesn't protect you from falling for it, or we would have eradicated cognitive biases by simply enumerating them.
> Americans both believe the same one Physics that says nuclear explosions are possible. Radically different values, but still one reality, and reality has a way of forcing itself upon you.
Reality only forces itself on you, to a point. It does so basically by hurting you if you get too far out of line. And that, to me, is only a consequence of a shared value - ie, not wanting to be involved in a nuclear explosion.
Agreeing that something is possible in theory is about as close as we can get to agreement on anything complex. You a list bunch of other reasons, which I agree are real and I think generally preclude disagreement on facts, except for the broadest category of “this thing happened,” and even there, “what you call the thing” will be questioned. And for some people, they’ll indeed argue that October 7 was all made up. You and I call them conspiracy theorists, but I think they merely place differential trust on the consensus of crowds. Their different values preclude them from acknowledging the facts we do.
I think you're on to something, but you are not universally true. What is true is that when you share a view of the world (including empirical views) there must be some cause. That cause may be that the belief is true. But the cause could be that believing it to be false causes problems to a shared value system. I never thought of it from this angle and it is a valuable insight. Nevertheless there may be a third cause: Some believes seem true even though they are not. This is why the pre-modern world had a shared belief in heliocentrism, despite its falsehood and the great variation of values between those societies. Believes like this come from our limited human perspective either in terms of our ability to make relevant observations or from shared psychological tendencies. towards fallacious reasoning
Geocentrism isn't actually false, it's just a radically inconvenient way to calculate orbital motions. You *can* get the same answers wth geocentrism as with heliocentrism, and neither is true in any absolute sense. But some frameworks are a lot easier to calculate in than others. Relativity also isn't "true". It's just a way to calculate certain kinds of effects that are REALLY difficult to do with either heliocentrism or geocentrism. What can be true is the readings off your instruments. They way you calculate to model those readings is just more or less useful.
It doesn't really make sense to me. The main driver of fact beliefs is whether they are true, at least in principle, not whether they are convenient. You could have one person believe something grudgingly because it doesn't really align with their values while another person believes it eagerly because it does align. The vast majority of fact beliefs also have no implication in terms of values. We all believe the sun comes up in the morning.
>It doesn't really make sense to me. The main driver of fact beliefs is whether they are true, at least in principle, not whether they are convenient.
Yes, but people can also differ on whether they view certain facts as _important_. The typical example is not caring who attacked who in a conflict that one is distant from.
But it can also be true of less potentially emotionally laden facts. There is a discrepancy of about 1% in two ways of measuring the neutron half-life. Anybody reading this care enough about it to google the discrepancy? :-) (And, AFAIK, the half-life doesn't directly affect anything about nuclear power significantly, either in reactors or bombs. Free neutrons don't stick around long enough to significantly decay in either of those cases.)
That’s an interesting way to look at it, but Iranians and North Koreans believe in things like nuclear physics and weather systems and ballistics just like the Swiss and the Japanese. They all do it out of necessity (I guess maybe you’d say the risk of not believing these things would be too high). The only shared value these beliefs require is survival in the modern world which is pretty much universal. And I would guess the brute force of these facts would still overpower the compulsion of someone who held no such value.
I don’t know that I’d agree that most beliefs have a significant time and attention cost. I (and most other people) believe in black holes, but that has come without effort and is based largely on all the people who know about space stuff telling me it’s time I believed in them.
I might be more inclined to say believed facts change values more than values change believed facts.
Maybe if you offered examples of believed facts where people are split based on their values the relationship you’re describing would be more clear.
>I don’t know that I’d agree that most beliefs have a significant time and attention cost.
Much less than it used to have, but it can still get significant. In my reply to Greg G above, I mentioned the roughly 1% discrepancy in two measurements of the neutron's half-life. Presumably one of the measurement techniques is giving an answer which is closer to correct. I doubt that anyone reading this is going to find it worthwhile to chase down all the information necessary to make a decision about which measurement they think is closer to correct. Yet the description of the experiments is on the internet, and presumably there is a right answer to this question.
edit: At 5 days after my comment with no response, I'm going to construe that as indicating that the time and attention cost of the particular question that I cited _is_ high enough to discourage investigating it, even with the information resources we have on the internet. :-)
I think it’s useful insofar as it predicts that only shared values can allow any kind of coalition to stay together long term, and we should expect coalitions, as they break apart, to see the other as being increasingly “detached from reality” because we should expect political coalitions to conflate their collective map as being identical with the territory.
I think it's infohazardous because, with the way you wrote it, people often misunderstand it, in a relatively harmful way.
People won't believe the things you say without understanding unless you seem to have especially high status, so it's maybe harmless to say such things here (though the phrasing is still very suboptimal), but I think the same phrasing could be harmful in other contexts. Maybe you're more careful there, though.
I should have been clearer about that, sorry.
Of course only shared values can allow coalitions to stay together 'long-term'; circumstances change over time, such that differing values don't have shared subgoals for long, and human organizations have a very hard time pursuing multiple unrelated goals.
Of course people see their former allies as irrational; people change their beliefs to fit their values irrationally.
In both cases, I think the half-rational effect you describe exists, but is too small to matter much.
Facts beliefs - claims about what is true, or what causes what - as opposed to values, such as “this outcome is good, that outcome is bad, this is desirable, that is not”
Yes, it’s roughly correct - but even that presupposing that “outcomes are the thing we value” is buying into a value belief that some people (ie proponents of deontology or virtue ethics) advocate.
>presupposing that “outcomes are the thing we value” is buying into a value belief that some people (ie proponents of deontology or virtue ethics) advocate.
Is there a typo? I thought that deontologists and virtue ethicists oppose, rather than advocate, consequentialism. Am I misreading or misinterpreting?
Is there a difference? They're commonly referred to separately, and they have separate entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but as far as I can see deontologists are virtue ethicists who provide a little more detail about their virtues, or perhaps just different names, than is customary. That's not a difference in the approach to ethics.
I've written about this [0]. And I tend to be of the opinion that yes, outcomes are ultimately what's being optimized for. However,
A) there's a variety of possible strategies/policies for optimizing for an aggregate of outcomes, each with its own profile of trade-offs.
B) specifically and explicitly running consequentialism.exe has the con of being more hackable <looks at SBF>. Which may make it less desirable than running strategies which are simplier and therefore more robust.
I've also written a little on what I call "useful fictions" [1], which I think you may find interesting. I.e. while we live in a zeitgeist where "The Truth > The Good", my observations of reality have led me to believe that, ultimately, The Truth is subservient to The Good. E.g. Upton Sinclairs' observation "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" is a feature, rather than a bug.
It's hard for me to imagine cases outside of "useful fictions" such that factual beliefs diverge due to divergent values. Because in the vast majority of cases, truth really does tend to be instrumentally useful towards imposing one's will on the universe. And so I'd expect agents to eventually converge on at least most factual claims, simply out of strategic necessity.
Sure. Virtue ethics says we should not try to compute outcomes and weigh them, effectively because predicting the future of things that matter isn’t going to work. Instead we should strive to embody and develop virtues just as fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, hope, faith, and love. Deontology says the right thing to do is to follow the rules you’ve been given. There are rough translations you can make between these but they are fundamentally different.
The trouble is that real-world statements of fact beliefs are usually some kind of shorthand, and it’s difficult to know what the unspoken parts include. So it’s a negotiation between fact and value all the way down.
How much of an impact are modern immunotherapies having on cancer treatment?
Susan Wojcicki's death last week was eerily similar to how my mother died 10 years ago (non-small cell lung cancer, mid 50s, low-single-digit years from diagnosis til death). Given that she presumably had access to the most cutting edge treatments in the world, it makes me think that progress hasn't been as significant as I'd believed.
Short answer - significant effect but not yet dramatic in that stage 4 cancer is still almost always a lethal disease.
Longer answer - depends on the type of cancer
Melanoma - largest effect, fully 50% of stage 4 melanomas enter long term remission
Kidney cancer - also dramatic effect, but numbers significantly lower, around 20%
Various types of gastrointestinal cancer (gastric, oesophageal, gallbladder, bowel) - marginal effect; immunotherapy increases progression free survival by a few months but remission is very rare
Lung cancer - depends on the type (small cell vs non small cell). Non small cell excellent effect, almost as good as kidney cancer. Small cell less impressive, more analogous to gastrointestinal cancer
Head and neck cancer - marginal effect, similar to gastrointestinal cancer
Breast cancer - minimal effect; only relevant in triple negative breast cancer which is a small minority of breast cancer cases
Prostate, pancreas and ovarian cancer - no effect
Brain cancer - until recently official answer was "no effect" - but Google "Richard Scolyer"
Interesting, so given that Wojcicki had non-small cell lung cancer it means she was in the treatment non-responsive 80%, but that in theory she could have been successfully treated?
For some cancers, it's dramatic. Stage 4 kidney cancer (RCC) was a death sentence 10 years ago. Normal chemos don't work on RCC And the other drugs were not very effective. Targeted therapies and immunotherapies have made a huge difference (source: I run an online cancer community).
Brain cancer has had only two treatment options for more than twenty years but Vorasedib (a targeted therapy, not an immunotherapy) was approved last week (too late for me!) and is expected to also make a big difference.
Vorasedinib is not given to patients who have already had chemo. I started chemo a month ago. I don't think there is any evidence that vorasedinib does not work if you have had chemo — but the trial that demonstrated its effectiveness was done on treatment-naive patients.
> I don't think there is any evidence that vorasedinib does not work if you have had chemo — but the trial that demonstrated its effectiveness was done on treatment-naive patients.
If you read Jake Seliger's wife's articles on the process of getting into trials, the good news here is that not being treatment-naive is also disqualifying for trials, so this isn't going to change.
However, that seems like a real block for Jake and a fake block for you. Doctors can, in the general case, prescribe any approved medication to treat any condition they want. The non-general case is narcotics. Once it's approved, why wouldn't it be given to patients with prior treatments?
It may be true that doctors in the US can prescribe whatever they choose (though insurance carriers are not obligated — AFAIK — to cover it). But, sadly, it's not true in my country (England) where it is very difficult to get access to drugs that are not approved.
> It may be true that doctors in the US can prescribe whatever they choose (though insurance carriers are not obligated — AFAIK — to cover it).
I believe you're more or less right, though I don't think the line is whether the particular use of the medication is legally approved. Insurers have policies about what treatments they'll cover for what problems. A lot of off label prescriptions are standard practice and I'd expect those to be covered. And on the flip side of that, an insurer might mount a cost-effectiveness argument against covering a cancer treatment for someone who has the targeted type of cancer, but they'd have more difficulty making the argument that they don't think it's an appropriate use of the treatment.
It's obviously relevant here how health insurance policies handle drugs that weren't known at the time the policy was written. I assume there's quite a bit of legal development around this question, since it will come up all the time, but I'm not familiar with it.
I would expect an insurer that denied coverage for an approved cancer treatment based on the argument you present to be crucified in the press, and to do poorly in court in the fairly likely case that they get sued over it.
No cancer is good, but lung cancers seem to be some of the bad ones when it comes to outcomes. That she got a couple of years life is good going, considering.
I'm doing well, it's been a busy few years. I moved to Toronto with my now-wife who's doing a PhD here, but we're planning to move back to the Bay after she's done.
Ayn Rand was almost presciently correct about the outcomes of more socialism/communism. Her dystopian America in atlas shrugged falls apart from very much the same effect - incentive systems breaking down - that brings down all non market economies. (admittedly, the novel is somewhat dramatic, but, it's a novel). And she made this prediction in the 1940s or 1950s or something when socialism was largely untried and had a lot of support. She could be wrong about everything else and still, getting this prediction right, along with mechanisms, gets her a LOT of points.
To me, this statement necessarily entails that (1) the USSR currently exists; (2) it has been communist for the entirety of the period between 1917 and now; and (3) it is still communist now.
Does the grammar mean something different to you, are you making a statement about the equivalence between Soviet Russia and modern Russia, or was this a typo?
'Largely'. In that time 30 years was nothing, and in fact most commentators were generally very positive about it. Paul Samuelson continued to tout the superiority of the USSR model almost until it collapsed!
I wouldn't say all that time passing while Paul Samuelson made such claims was "nothing" either. He was just ignorant of what was actually going on in the USSR, while Ayn Rand had lived there.
If it's your view that most or many commentators had accurately predicted the collapse of the USSR economy, I'm open to seeing the support for that perspective. I'm not saying Ayn Rand was unique in her prediction, but as I understand it her view was not commonly held, and it certainly was not expressed with such power by anyone else. And she didn't just happen to be correct either. She understood deeply the mechanism at play - incentives - and what communism did to them. And the impact it could and would have on society once you take incentives away. I think in a thread about 'how she got everything wrong', this is a legitimate entry for how she got one very important thing right, for the right reasons, at a time when very few other people were getting it right.
I'm not saying that Ayn Rand was wrong. I'm saying that Soviet Communism had existed for a while before she wrote her work, and she lived under it before emigrating. Eugen Richter's "Pictures of the Socialistic Future" from 1891 is an actual prediction make in advance.
> The crucial concept here is common knowledge. We call a fact “common knowledge” if, not only does everyone know it, but everyone knows everyone knows it, and everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows it, and so on.
I sort of understand this but I want to understand it better. Can someone explain this to me? Why is something not common knowledge if everyone knows that everyone knows it? What is the difference between that and the next level (everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it)? I want to get a more intuitive grasp of that.
Unless you have the entire chain, there’s a possibility for people to fail to coordinate.
Consider this situation: two allied generals need to attack a fort together for them to succeed. They coordinate by sending a messenger who might get captured before delivering the message. If a general attacks alone, the attack fails.
The following describes “everyone knows everyone knows” but not common knowledge:
General one sends messenger one. “How about noon?”
General two receives messenger one and sends back messenger two to confirm “sure noon is good”
General one receives messenger two.
Now both generals know that both want to attack at noon. But general two is concerned that general one didn’t receive messenger two. If messenger two was captured, then general one is still waiting on confirmation from general two! General one fears that if general two has qualms, maybe he won’t attack. So common knowledge is still absent, and the generals must either take a risk or chicken out.
Sending more messengers never completely assuages the fear that the chain has broken and the other general won’t attack.
While it's impossible to establish perfect knowledge, it *is* possible to bypass a lot of this if they have hierarchy or trust or are willing to commit.
General A: #1: "You are ordered to attack at noon."
General B: #2: "Orders received, committing to noon attack."
General A: #3: "Acknowledging commitment."
General B: #4: "Communication complete".
At this point, #4 may or may not have arrived, but the main point is that B got message #3. As long as B gets message #3, it works.
General A knows that General B got the orders, and can rely on B, and can attack. General B got the orders and will attack, and also knows that [General A knows that General B got the orders], and so is confident that General A will be there too. General A isn't confident that General B is confident, but that's unnecessary!
And it can be shorter. Assume that message #3 isn't delivered, so there's no message #4. As before, General A knows that General B got the orders, and can rely on B, and can attack. As before, General B got the orders and will attack. But in this case, General B doesn't know if General A got #2, and so doesn't know if General A will be there. But General B is under orders - like the Light Brigade, theirs but to do and die.
> Sending more messengers never completely assuages the fear that the chain has broken and the other general won’t attack.
While that is true, receiving more messengers does have this effect, so as the number of messengers you send increases, the probability of achieving complete confidence in common knowledge goes to 1.
Yep! Sure it may be impossible to send infinite messages, but people are fine with some uncertainty.
C_B describes it well above:
“A fact is common knowledge if both Alice and Bob are simply taking it as a given that everyone is fully informed of the fact, and of the fact that everyone is fully informed and so on.”
It feels like in practical terms this ends up resolving via some combination of precommitment, UNODIR, and sufficient Bayesian certainty about others' knowledge ...
So, to start off, let's think about scenarios in which a fact ISN'T common knowledge:
1. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament, but Bob does not. This is a simple secret; Alice knows, but Bob does not know.
2. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament, and she believes she is in scenario 1. However, unbeknownst to her, Bob has discovered her plans, and is able to lay a trap for her. Alice knows, and Bob knows, but Alice doesn't know that Bob knows.
3. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament. Bob has discovered her plans, and lays a trap for her, believing that he is in scenario 2. However, unbeknownst to Bob, Alice leaked that information to Bob intentionally, and she avoids the trap and blows up Westminster Abbey instead. Alice knows, and Bob knows, and Alice knows that Bob knows, but Bob doesn't know that Alice knows that Bob knows.
4. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament. Bob has discovered her plans, and lays a trap for her. Alice leaked that information to Bob intentionally, believing that she was in scenario 3. However, Bob secretly had all of Alice's communications bugged, and unbeknownst to Alice knows about the alternate plan to blow up Westminster Abbey. Alice avoids the trap, but when she tries to pull off the second plan, she finds a second trap and is captured! Alice knows, and Bob knows, and Alice knows that Bob knows, and Bob knows that Alice knows that Bob knows, but Alice doesn't know that Bob knows that Alice knows that Bob knows.
Now, realistically, in normal circumstances you don't really recurse farther than this, but you should be able to see that IN PRINCIPLE, I could keep coming up with ever sillier, harder to understand scenarios in which the number of layers of "X knows that Y knows that...but doesn't know that..." keeps increasing.
"Common knowledge" describes the state of affairs where neither Alice nor Bob is worrying about these concerns, or this type of recursive knowledge-of-knowledge-of-knowledge at all. A fact is common knowledge if both Alice and Bob are simply taking it as a given that everyone is fully informed of the fact, and of the fact that everyone is fully informed and so on.
> Now, realistically, in normal circumstances you don't really recurse farther than this, but you should be able to see that IN PRINCIPLE, I could keep coming up with ever sillier, harder to understand scenarios in which the number of layers of "X knows that Y knows that...but doesn't know that..." keeps increasing.
There's a stage play that riffs on this. I can't find it - it might be "Top Secret" by Alan Melville, but I can't find the script online to check. The exchange goes something like:
"Trouble, sir! They know our plans!"
"That's okay, my boy, we know that they know."
"Yes, but they also know that we know they know!"
"Aye, and we know that they know we know they know."
"That's just it! I just learned that they know we know they know we know they know!"
"(gasp) They do?!?"
There's a concept of *modal knowledge* in formal logic, which includes (IIRC) prepositions denoting knowledge of other prepositions. Some preposition P being true might not be as important to act upon as whether Alice knows P is true. There's at least one logic / math riddle that also riffs off this: something like two mathematicians conversing, one says he's thinking of an integer with some set of properties, she says she doesn't know which one it is, he says he therefore doesn't know either, she replies that because of that, she now knows, and he says "and now I do, too". (This clearly isn't the riddle, but I don't have it readily at hand.)
Back when I was working with this, very few reasoning engines existed, let alone any that tried to work with modal knowledge (or more precisely, facts about knowing facts). With good reason: modal knowledge typically results in a total copy of all the information at hand for each party involved; and once you permit facts of the form "A knows or believes P", you've opened the door to "B knows that A believes P" and you have infinite regress on top of gigabytes of prepositions for each party.
One optimization that occurred to me was that many contexts were "open", in that one could infer that if A knew P, every X also knew that A knew P (including A), and so on. This isn't terribly useful overall, not just because many contexts deal with presumably public information, but also because this sort of thing wasn't going to blow up a database anyway because of back propagation.
But in contexts such as espionage or even just gaming, secret information is very worthwhile to store and manipulate, and often at least two plies deep.
Imagine a situation like this: there are Alice and Bob. They both know a Fact. We have the first level: both know.
Once Alice saw Bob on TV explaining the Fact and another time Bob saw Alice doing the same. You have the second level: they both know that both of them know.
Alice wonders: "I know the Fact, and I know that Bob also knows the Fact. But does Bob know that I know it? Maybe he doubts my erudition, maybe he never watches TV and never saw me explaining it." It's not the case that both know that both know that both know.
The popular wisdom is that World War I was a horrible trench war of attrition where the front barely moved for years, that earlier and later wars weren't like that, but that the current Ukraine war is sort of like that.
Is this true? If so, why are World War I and the Ukraine War unique in this way compared to earlier and later wars?
Not exactly. The Western Front in WWI was somewhat unique, in that the troop density was high enough to ensure continuous trench lines. Theories about the dominance of defense are slightly overblown. It was generally possible to seize territory, even at a favorable loss ratio, but once troops moved forward, they couldn't communicate very effectively, particularly with their artillery. This, and the depth of defenses, meant that the line wouldn't rupture and the front didn't move much.
But this only applies if the defense is strong everywhere, so there's no room for maneuver. As many others have pointed out, there was plenty of maneuver in WWI, just not in France/Belgium. In WWII, we rarely saw evenly-matched forces at high density. France fell apart too quickly, although if it hadn't, it probably would have looked more like WWI, although not completely so because of radio and tanks. Most everywhere else either had one side with a decisive edge (say, Western Europe after Overlord) or enough space that the opponent always had the opportunity to go around (Russia, North Africa, etc). The situations where this didn't happen tended to see trenches and such, although not to quite the same extent as WWI. (Italy springs most prominently to mind, and it was often quite static.)
Post-WWI, Korea was quite mobile early on, but froze into trench warfare after mid-1951 or so. The US/UN wasn't willing to take the casualties that a serious offensive would have entailed, and they had too much firepower for the Chinese to push them back. And then there's stuff like the Iran-Iraq War.
The Ukrainian war is being fought on a fairly narrow front, and without either side having a decisive advantage in strength. This is a pretty good recipe for bogging down.
WW1 was a horrible trench war of attrition... along one front. The one with the highest density of railroads, tekegraphs/telephones, fortifications and people. The other major front was a horrible mobile war of attrition!
In general, it seems like maneuver warfare breaks down when firepower is high (making advances into prepared defences exorbitantly costly) and the battlefield is 'visible' (in the sense that it's hard to conceal force concentrations and movement). WW1 transportation technology was also in a weird place where trains (rigid but high-volume and high-speed transport) favored defence by making it relatively easier to move and concentrate troops on your own ground than the enemy's.
The final ingredient, as others have pointed out, is that modern states (i.e. since about 1900) can just take an enormous beating before they lose the ability to fight.
In Ukraine you have all of these factors at play - two modern states slogging it out in an environment where the weaponry is very lethal to exposed troops and vehicles, lots of search assets are available to fill in the operational picture, and neither side can effectively blind the other by, for instance, attaining air superiority.
Industrial wars between peer powers naturally tend towards grinding wars of attrition. Some examples off the top of my head:
Iran-Iraq War: ~8 years of fighting along a stable front; 300k-1mil+ dead in battle
Korean War: The opening stages involved rapid occupation of territory, but the last 2.5 years of the ~3 year war was a grinding war of attrition on a stable front more or less following the current border
There's also the two wars between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Sino-Vietnamese War (short, but IIRC on trajectory to become a grinding war of attrition when it stopped).
Why are industrial wars like this? It's basically two endless lines of men armed to the brim with artillery, machine guns, and anti-tank weapons, often with trenches thrown in. How could that not turn into a grinding war of attrition? There's no room for flanking or maneuver, and there's no isolated army you can wipe out in a decisive battle. Even in WW2, grinding slogs were still the norm, though a temporary peak of tanks relative to other military tech made some fronts more mobile.
In theory, a modern air force with full air superiority should be able to neutralize a defender's advantage. But I don't think those conditions have been met in any modern war.
Yup, this is imho true. Plus usually unless one side totally outlcasses the other, neither side is able to achieve sufficient advantage in the air, because other guys can also shoot down planes.
I have one very dumb question. This discussion has included discussions of drones as defensive weapons. What are they like as offensive weapons? I assume that there is some sort of trade-off between the payload a drone can carry, its range, and how easy it is to detect and presumably shoot down. Does "other guys can also shoot down planes" apply to all drones with sufficient payload and range to be offensive weapons?
This is a very good question; imho it’s too early to tell.
Conceptually, I don’t think that drones should change basic reasons why in the modern warfare (unlike in pre-modern warfare) defense is easier. But it is a new technology, and honest answer is we don’t know yet what its ultimate impact will be.
Drones made defense easier because they allow real time surveillance at the squad level. You don't need multi-million dollar spy satellites or AWACS planes to see everything happening on the battlefield, you just need a few thousand dollars worth of camera drone. One guy with this drone is enough to see attackers coming from miles away, who can then call in precision bombardment. It's a lot harder to attack when the enemy can always see you coming.
Drones aren't unique in their offensive application, they are basically just smaller artillery/missile platforms. This makes them very effective against existing anti-air defenses, which generally consists of firing big missiles at big targets like jets or helicopters. Drones are much smaller targets, so they are much harder to track and hit. Due to the relatively low cost of production, they can also be used in swarms to overwhelm defenses by sheer numbers.
>Drones aren't unique in their offensive application, they are basically just smaller artillery/missile platforms.
Yeah, that was my expectation, but I have no expertise in this area, so I would just be guessing at "smaller cross-section, harder to hit, but carries less payload and fuel", which at least does match your
>Drones are much smaller targets, so they are much harder to track and hit.
Drones have been very effective offensive weapons in Ukrainian hands. In just the past week or so, Ukraine has used hundreds of drones to strike at least five airfields as much as 400 km inside Russia, and inflicting substantial damage on at least three of them.
Russia also uses offensive drones against Ukraine, but those seem to be shot down much more reliably, and to hit militarily significant targets less often when they do get through. But it's hard to put numbers on that, because fog of war.
Many Thanks! Does this get around the anti-aircraft part of the stalemate? If e.g. Ukraine were able to use drones to attack Russian artillery and fortified positions, as well as the airfields you cited, would that reduce the Russian's defender's advantage?
What you'd really need is the ability to dynamically interdict reinforcements moving to block breakthrough elements. Against a naive opponent, good drones capable of persistent surveillance (e.g. the Bayraktars Ukraine had at the beginning of the war) might be pretty good at this, but I think the Russians have upped their EW game so that drones don't have the requisite survivability near the front.
A lot of good tactical/operational/tech-focused answers here, so I'm going to hazard an attempt at a strategic/political answer.
The reason Ukraine is a slow-moving war of attrition is that neither side has much incentive to be really aggressive (I say as Ukraine is actively engaged in a major offensive into Russian territory). I think this is aspect actually makes it quite a bit different from World War I (but I'm not especially confident in that).
Aggression in war is always going to be risky and costly, especially now that we have guns and explosives. You're exposing your forces more completely to the enemy, acting in the areas where your information is less complete, introducing more friction into your operations. For consistent aggression to be a good strategy, you need strategic objectives that can make that risk worth it. I don't think anybody has that here. Both sides' victory conditions are mainly things that occur off the battlefield and they know it.
Starting with the obvious, Ukraine clearly isn't going to force a Russian surrender the way that, e.g. the Allies forced a German surrender in WW2. Even if they didn't have restrictions on where they used their materiel, Russia is too vast, too populous and its industrial capacity is too widely spread out for any Ukrainian offensive to cripple Russia's war-making capacity. They could, in theory, push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea, but would that end the war? Russia can attack from its side of the border just as well as from the Ukrainian side.
Russia, meanwhile, might in theory be able to completely defeat Ukraine militarily, but that's a very distant goal. In the opening days of the war, some combination of taking Kyiv and hitting enough military targets quickly enough might have collapsed the Ukrainian will/ability to fight (as Russia hoped), but that ship has long sailed. The industrial base that keeps Ukraine supplied is well out of Russia's reach: the only battlefield resource the Russians can destroy that Ukraine can't readily replace is soldiers, but of course the soldiers make this as difficult as possible, and never clump up to where Russia can make a huge impact all at once. Even if they become able to start taking chunks of Ukrainian territory again, the military and civilian personnel Ukraine needs to fight can easily be moved, their weapons will keep coming in from outside, and there won't be any clear payout to counterbalance the high cost of aggression.
Instead, both sides' victory conditions are mostly political, and the action on the battlefield happens largely in service to those political goals. Ukraine's likely wins come if Putin dies or is ousted, if Russia's economy collapses, or fear of a collapse turns enough oligarchs against the war effort to sway Putin, or if some unexpected disaster demands enough Russian manpower and resources that they suddenly need to sue for peace on favourable terms. Russia wins if the West stops supplying Ukraine with weapons or if the Ukrainian public gets war-weary enough to accept a peace deal that Putin considers favourable. Both sides need to keep the battlefield pressure on the other to *some* degree: Ukraine to keep thing expensive for Russia, Russia to keep Ukraine churning through munitions and troops. Each side will benefit from a successful offensive, but neither will benefit enough to incentivize the sort of consistent policy of aggression that would be needed to quickly change the front lines.
Of course, none of this is fully separate from the tactical and technical explanations others have made: the more costly and risky offensive operations are, the bigger the likely strategic gains have to be to make them worthwhile.
> They could, in theory, push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea, but would that end the war? Russia can attack from its side of the border just as well as from the Ukrainian side.
To be fair, if Ukraine somehow managed to push Russia out of Crimea completely, it would be very difficult for them to attack back (at more than the "random cruise missile barrage" level), since it's surrounded by water.
Fair enough. But Ukraine would still share land borders with Russia elsewhere: Ukraine retaking Crimea wouldn't force Russia to abandon its offensive operations more generally.
In pretty much every war between World War I and Ukraine, one side or the other fairly quickly established air superiority. The big mechanized advances that made e.g. World War II look so different than WWI, were almost always made by the side with air superiority, and the few exceptions (e.g. the German 1944 Ardennes offensive) were mediocre things at best. Air superiority seems to be part of the recipe, possibly a critical part, for breaking the trench-war stalemate.
Why, after almost three years of war, nobody has managed to achieve air superiority in the Ukraine war, is a mystery. How Ukraine even has an air force, is kind of a mystery. One theory is that the Russian air force is too incompetent to deal with Ukraine's very capable integrated air defense system, while Ukraine's air force is too small to challenge Russia on its own, so that each side can fly only over territory they already control. Another theory is that modern integrated air defense systems of networked radar and surface-to-air missiles backstopped by a few fighter jets, have reached the point where even a large and capable foe cannot overcome them and nobody can have air superiority ever again.
Probably not that last one. But it's *something*. And without air superiority, ground forces alone don't seem to be able to break through an entrenched defense with modern artillery, minefields, and anti-tank missiles and backstopped by mechanized reserves. They can make slow, grinding progress WWI-style, or advance in places the enemy hasn't properly prepared to defend (e.g. Kursk)..
> Another theory is that modern integrated air defense systems of networked radar and surface-to-air missiles backstopped by a few fighter jets, have reached the point where even a large and capable foe cannot overcome them and nobody can have air superiority ever again.
Wouldn't Israel's seeming ability to strike within Iran with impunity suggest otherwise?
Iran has just recently received shipments from Russia of anti-air and anti-missile systems. So I guess we'll soon find out how they stack up to a modern air force.
Israel has struck Iran once, with three air-launched ballistic missiles fired from well outside Iranian airspace. This is not even close to the same thing as securing air superiority over Iran. It does not even establish the ability of Israeli aircraft to enter Iranian airspace without being immediately shot down.
I suspect that if Israel really needed to, they could conduct occasional strikes within Iranian airspace without loss. I suspect that if Israel bordered Iran, they could achieve air superiority over Iran in the event of open war. But these things have not been demonstrated.
And if they had, they'd have been demonstrated against *Iran*. Ukraine's prewar integrated air defense system is at least an order of magnitude more capable than Iran's, probably closer to two orders of magnitude considering the greater area Iran needs to defend.
Right. Israel has F-35s, which are playing in a whole different league to anything currently fielded in Ukraine. I wouldn't be too surprised if modern US stealth technology has turned the tables once again from defender to attacker, but both Russia and Ukraine are still fighting with last-gen technology.
(Russia theoretically has a handful of Su-57s but they don't seem to be using them in Ukraine)
Yes and no. There were times in fronts of WW1 that were dynamic; but over the course of the war the majority was static. The war in Ukraine is also static, but for slightly different reasons.
(all imo, of course)
WW1 was static because technological and sociological changes made the defense even more strong than it usually is vs. the attack post mass adoption of gunpowder.
Mass mobilization organization, railroads, razor wire, the telegraph, and in a resounding tie for first place accurate enough long range enough super high volumes of artillery (with air burst shells) and the machine gun made any attack a fucking slog; and when you pushed the attack and achieved breakthrough exploitation was also a slog.
Mechanization changed this; the attack still fucking sucks but when you break through you can exploit with ICE engines instead of fucking horses.
Ukraine is a slog because neither side can archive the force concentration they need to roll up a whole front without taking on an unacceptable amount of risk. Russia can't achieve air dominance because ??? so they can't fully suppress Ukrainien tube and rocket artillery which makes attack too risky to do it willy nilly, Ukraine has to push through unimaginably huge minefields while being shelled and has about 1/25th of an airforce left, so they are shit out of luck.
Both sides have so much Soviet Legacy Air Defence Bullshit that anything bigger than a pigeon and higher than a pine tree is fucked.
Also, Ukraine's is forbidden from using a decent amount of their high ticket aid items to shoot into Russia. This probably doesn't matter too too much, but it probably contributes a bit.
That said, the war in Ukraine is not stable like WW1 (which turned into a potlach style blood spilling/money burning contest for quite a while).
If someone fucks up bad enough for long enough, the war in Ukraine could end very quickly. Eg, if someone leaves the keys in the door again like Russia early war or someone fails to do force regeneration aggressively enough, it can swing fast.
I think the cause fundamentally is artillery. In short, artillery is a slow, grindy, mostly static weapon, so if it's the strongest thing on the battlefield... then the war is also going to be slow, grindy, & mostly static. Artillery stops things from happening far more effectively than it *causes* things to happen, so if both sides have strong artillery parks (say because they're both ex-Soviet militaries, & the Soviet military was all about the artillery, far more than even tanks)... then very little can happen.
It's the same way Air Defence / Anti-Air weapons *deny* the air to the enemy without allowing you to *claim* it for yourself, so it stops enemy air pushes without allowing you to launch any pushes yourself; if both sides have a strong fleet of AA missiles & a weak airforce (say because they're both ex-Soviet militaries, & the Soviet military put a lot of emphasis on AA to counter the American air advantage, and very little on its own Air Force because it knew the air battle was hopeless, the same way the Germans put more emphasis on U-Boats to *deny* the British navy than on having a navy of their own)... then neither side can make a push from the air.
It's even worse than that of course, since AA weapons have a limited range, so they can deny the enemy the skies over your own side of the frontline, but generally not the skies on *their* side (at least if their planes stay back far enough). That means that if you *do* make a push on the ground & pierce deep into their territory, your forces start getting bombed from the enemy air, and there's nothing they can do about it: your air force can't protect them & push with them deep into enemy territory because they're weak & the enemy AA is strong, and you can't bring up your own AA to shoot down the enemy planes because AA is a glass cannon like regular artillery, it's not suited to making pushes & diving deep into enemy territory. It's too heavy, fragile, expensive, all that stuff.
Which in turn makes the artillery problem even worse! Air power & artillery power work *great* together, planes can both spot targets for your own artillery & bomb the enemy artillery, securing the artillery advantage over the enemy. That's really good, since planes have extremely limited ammo & need to be choosy about what they bomb, while artillery can just carpet the battlefield & blow up everything; they work *great* together, covering each other's weaknesses (limited ammo / inability to spot targets by itself) & boosting each other's strengths (hitting the most important targets / hitting *everything* it can find).
BUT, if you only have airpower over your own side of the battlefield, and the enemy gets to have airpower on *their* side, then suddenly we get the worst of both worlds! At least from a "pushing" perspective -- I can't push because I can't bomb the enemy artillery, but I can stop enemy pushes by bombarding them with *my* artillery. And in turn, the enemy can't bomb my artillery to interrupt that, but they sure as hell can bombard *my* pushes because I can't stop them, my planes can't reach their artillery. We can *stop* things from happening, but not make them happen.
This trickles down to the ground war, not just the air war or the artillery battles. I can have big clumps of tanks & infantry in stuff in *my* territory, because the enemy artillery can't reach them & blow them all up, but I can't send them forth into battle on the frontlines because then they march into range of the enemy artillery & get blown up. I can only send forth small units, which can try to be stealthy & avoid detection by enemy artillery spotters/the scouts who spot targets for artillery... or failing that, just be small enough that it's not too big a deal if they get spotted, blown up, & all die.
But then they can't actually do much of anything! They're too small & weak. They can't outfight the large enemy formations hiding in the back of the enemy territory, and in fact they often can't even *get* into the enemy territory because they can't even cross things like minefields & barbed wire that are blocking their path (because if it takes say 50 people to clear a minefield & then guard the path through it, then I can't do it if I can only sneak 40 people across. And I *can* do it, but it's not much use, if I instead can only sneak 51 people across & then only have 1 person who can actually cross the path through the minefield. I really need to be able to bring like 1000 people here, so I only need to spend 5% of my forces on just dealing with the minefield, not like 99% of them. But I can't! The enemy artillery forbids it.)
So what results is a "drip feed war": we have absolutely huge forces that can only be "drip fed" onto the front lines, because if they all marched in at once they would die horribly without accomplishing anything, blown to bits in an instant by artillery. So instead like only 0.1% of them march in per day, get blown to bits by artillery, and get replaced, in a bloody slog that can last a thousand days. In fact, it can go on much longer than that, because each side can "heal" up like a video game boss, recruiting new soldiers & healing up the old ones so they can get back into the fight, such that instead of having to burn through 100% of the enemy's health... they have to burn through like 500%, because my damage can't outpace the enemy's healing.
What do the other 99.9% of my forces do each day, while they're chilling in the back? Mostly, digging fortifications. Same goes for the enemy, of course. So the longer this goes on, the worse the stalemate becomes; if we ever manage to breach through the frontline, we immediately run smack dab into all the fortifications our enemy's troops have been idly digging in the backline, and my push comes to a screeching halt. Neither of us can advance.
It's like the exact opposite of the assumptions behind German "Blitzkrieg" (technically not the preferred term), Soviet "Deep Battle", American tank warfare, et cetera: instead of the enemy frontline being the hard bit & the enemy backline being soft & squishy, it's the enemy *backline* that's hardened & the frontline that's soft & squishy. Puncturing through the frontlines & advancing deep into enemy territory just makes things *harder* on me: I lose artillery support while the enemy gains it. I lose air support while the enemy gains it. I take losses while the enemy gets to bring up their backline troops. I'm being constantly watched by drones & planes & stuff so I'm losing the element of surprise, while the enemy gains it because they now surround me & can strike from any direction. I'm leaving my fortifications to charge straight into the enemy's own.
And there isn't even a good payoff if I somehow succeed! If I stab deep into the heart of the enemy territory, I won't stab deep into the heart of the enemy war machine. The real heart of the Russian war machine is its factories deep in Russian territory, but if I'm Ukraine, NATO has explicitly forbidden me from going deep into Russian territory. And if I'm Russia, the real heart of the Ukrainian war machine is the factories of NATO & the US, I have no hope of stopping them by charging deep into Ukrainian territory. All I'm doing is stabbing deep into the heart of the enemy's designated "crumple zone", the place that can take & absorb my attack without causing any real damage to anything important. I can't win a strategic victory, & I can't even win a tactical victory by encircling a ton of enemy troops on the frontline, because again most of the enemy troops are actually hiding in the backline -- not the frontline where everyone is already dead anyways. All I can do by pulling off a genius encirclement, is making 0.2% instead of 0.1% of the enemy forces die today.
So yes, it's like WW1, for the same reasons I'd say:
1. Strong artillery
2. Weak air power
3. Strong fortifications
4. Weak ground forces
5. Strong "healing"
6. Weak ability to stop the "healing"
7. Strong incentives for a "drip feed" war
8. Weak incentives to go "all-in" on a push
If I had to point to a single thing though, it's the artillery. If only a small % of our forces can fight at once, then the war is going to be slow no matter what; if a large % of our forces can fight at once, the war is going to be fast no matter what. Before WW1, it was normal for entire armies to line up on a single battlefield & decide a war in an afternoon; afterwards, that basically never happens ever again, anyone who tries just gets ripped apart by artillery*. Nowadays, everything is a drip feed war.
(*: More historically minded readers of course may instead think the tipping point was somewhere else, like the American Civil War, if you think the limit on "just march your entire army into one battlefield" was reached by the American armies being so densely packed they reached the limits of sanitation technology, rather than being blown apart by artillery technology.)
But if I got to point to multiple things, I'd say it boils down to this whole thing sounding *a lot* like a pendulum. Or a spring. The farther away it gets pushed from equilibrium, the greater the restoring force; e.g. the worse the Ukrainian situation gets, the more willing the US & NATO are to spend on aid to Ukraine. The worse the Russian situation gets, the more Putin can justify pushing through a new round of conscription & war mobilization. Or on the battlefield, basically everything I just described is "It's easy to push back, but hard to push forwards." -- things oscillate back & forth, but they're oscillating around a point in the middle. Things will only change when the spring breaks, the attrition finally grinding it down till it snaps. When is that? And whose spring will break first? That I do not know.
Isn't most artillery self-propelled these days? My impression from a limited amount of reading about the Ukraine war was that artillery had to be pretty mobile, as it gets destroyed by counter-battery fire if it doesn't move quickly after firing.
Ah, when I said "Slow, grindy, mostly static weapon", the first two are referring to the surprising slowness with which artillery actually kills people, and it's only the last that's referring to its actual physical speed. Artillery is great at killing people in the open, but terrible at killing people hunkering down in cover; this makes it great at suppressing people, but terrible at finishing them off. The vast majority of the kills an artillery bombardment gets, comes in the opening salvo, as people are caught by surprise in the open & get cut down; afterwards, the survivors retreat to cover, and the artillery shells are mostly just blowing up empty space. And while they can eventually grind through cover & blow up the remaining enemies, it's a slow & grindy process because cover is surprisingly good at withstanding artillery attack, you need a direct hit to do any real damage & artillery is just too inaccurate to get that done except through sheer number of rounds hoping for dumb luck.
(e.g. the listed Circular Error Probable/CEP for an unguided 155mm standard artillery shell is 267m, i.e. it only has a 50% chance of getting within 267m of the target! That's fine if you only need to "splash" the target with shrapnel, but no good if you need to get a direct hit to within 1m to say collapse a bunker; if I need to get within 100m to do the former, then each shell has a ~14% chance to get the job done. But if I need to get within 1m for the latter, then each shell has only a 0.0014% chance of getting the job done! I need 10 000 times as many shells to get the job done.)
Things get even worse of course when the enemy reacts to this with the "drip feed war" strategy. If I do decide to fire 10 000 times as many shells to blow up that bunker & kill everyone inside... well, everyone inside is dead, regardless of whether that's 1, 10, or 100 people. So if instead of having 100 people in the bunker, they have 1 person in it while the other 99 stay farther back, outside of artillery range... then I've fired 10 000 times as many shells to kill just 1 person, who they can easily replace by sending forth one of the 99.
And as long as I'm not capable of challenging this by sending forth an attack of 100 people of my own to overwhelm the 1 guy in the bunker, say because the enemy artillery is also strong & would cut down my 100 men as they try to cross "No Man's Land" & get to the enemy bunker... then I can't do anything about this. I just have to accept firing one *million* times as many shells now (10 000 times a hundred) to get the job done. Very quickly artillery goes from "God of War" to "poking the enemy with a wet pool noodle". It'll eventually get the job done... eventually.
It's only the last thing about artillery, "mostly static", that cares about having wheels/being self-propelled. And even that doesn't really change the fact that it's a weapon that favors static warfare over maneuver warfare: self-propelled artillery is still lightly armored compared to a tank, uses wheels instead of tracks (and so is bad at going off-road & charging across open fields), burns through ammo *really* fast compared to tanks (and so needs to stay much more closely tethered to supply hubs like railyards, instead of being able to "detach" and drive deep into the enemy lines), needs to set up to fire (which is really bad if you're moving into range of enemy artillery, who are already set up & thus can shoot first while you're setting up & take you out)... there are some interesting things you can do with frontline artillery, such as the "Assault Gun" / tank with big HE cannon for shooting buildings, instead of normal AP & HE cannon for mixed use against everything...
... but generally, artillery isn't suited to rushing at the enemy. It more favors sitting back & sniping at the enemy. Hence "mostly static".
Thanks for the comprehensive response! Two questions:
1. Why, then, were the wars in between WW1 and Ukraine so unlike this (in particular WW2?) Is it to do with the balance between air power and anti-air power?
2. Does the new Ukranian incursion into Russia change anything? Or is it likely to quickly result in the same stalemate along a new front, now drawn several miles into Russian territory? Even if the latter then perhaps it's still a big win for Ukraine since Putin can't politically tolerate loss of Russian territory and will be forced to throw troops at it.
1. Yeah, that seems to be the inescapable conclusion of the analysis. Just look at the hypothetical "Cold War gone hot" scenario constantly hanging over people's heads after WW2: at first it was about bombers nuking you, and air power was well ahead of anti-air power (hence why you see, amongst other things, projects like nuclear anti-air missiles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie]), since even a single bomber getting through was *disaster*. Then it was about ICBMs, and this "air power" was even more ahead of "anti-air power" since it simply couldn't be stopped at all!
And accordingly, everyone expected nuclear war to be short, sharp, & decisive. It'd be a bloodbath, but a "fast bloodbath" rather than a "slow bloodbath". Attritional warfare doesn't *have* to be slow: it can look like nuclear war, where it's all about your ability to take & dish out nukes, & there's little room to maneuver, but by that same token it's why it's over in a (literal) flash: everything is quite literally on the line, in the sense of being on the frontlines, because the nukes can reach anywhere & kill anything. There's no "drip feed war" where only 0.1% of my forces are in range of the frontline to die to artillery everyday, air power (or rocket power) can project its power anywhere in my territory to 100% of my forces, and with nukes is more than strong enough to then kill them. The increased range on air power makes a big difference, and so too does the raw *power* of air power when it's got nukes.
(Also of course is the fact that nuclear bombers & ICBMs have enough range to not only strike 100% of my forces, but 100% of my everything: my factories, my ports & railyards, my cities, my halls of government, et cetera; it absolutely *can* strike the beating heart of my war machine, not just the beating heart of a "crumple zone" I can afford to lose. In fact, it's even better at nuking cities than nuking missile silos or tanks or the like, since cities are soft & extremely concentrated targets, while military units are capable of being hardened & spread out.)
So a WW1-like scenario with nukes simply does not make sense; if the strongest thing on the battlefield is not artillery but nuclear air power, then the war isn't going to be slow, grindy, & mostly static. It's going to be fast, skip over the grind, & run deep into the heart of the enemy war machine the moment I say "go". Everything will be on the line because everything will literally be on the frontlines. You can't do that with artillery.
2. Ah, I don't actually pay much attention to the news, it's generally some variation of "The trench stalemate continues to be a trench stalemate". Even if that's not what it claims to be, hyping up this or that successful attack; the trouble is, every single attack can be successful at the tactical level, and the war *still* favor defence at the higher strategic level.
That's actually what happened during WW1: attacks usually *succeeded*, trenches usually got taken... but the war was still a slog, because (a) the attacks barely accomplished anything, and (b) any gains were usually erased by the enemy counterattack. There was a lot of movement, but if you zoomed out it was mostly movement back & forth that wasn't going anywhere. The attacker, instead of building up momentum to keep rolling forwards, built up "anti-momentum" that made them easier to push back. In a way, the strength of attacks actually favored the *defender*, because they were in the strongest position to attack their own territory & take it back, while it's the *attacker* that has to defend in order to hold on to their gains. Strong attacks means strong counterattacks, so it doesn't inherently favor the attacker.
And of course, strong defence doesn't suffer this weakness, it inherently favors the defender. Either way, nothing happens: either attack counters attack, or defence counter attack. Attack only wins when it can leverage its own advantages, like the element of surprise or the advantage of choice; things are actually pretty grim in a fair fight for the attacker, they need an unfair fight to have any chance at all. That's usually the case though since the attacker has the freedom to decide where & when to attack, or simply *not* to attack, so they can choose to attack where they have an unfair advantage & not attack where they'd just get slaughtered. But when they don't, when they *have* to attack because it's politically necessary to be seen as doing something... that's when you get the attacks that are just slaughters. (But hey, at least you were seen as doing something.)
So based off what little I've heard, if the Ukrainian side has enough discipline to *not* attack & instead follow a WW1-esque "bite & hold" strategy of standing still to lure in troops to slaughter... then yeah, it sounds like a victory in the making. If they have enough discipline to *keep* doing that, then it sounds like that could win the war. If defence is stronger than attack right now... perhaps the war-winning strategy is simply to defend. But it takes an awful lot of discipline sometimes, to *not* do anything. From the public which has to quell its bloodlust & accept a long war, from politicians who have to accept they won't have any flashy victories to show off at election time, from generals who want to make their name but have to accept "And then he sat there & did nothing" as what History will remember them for instead... and most of all, from backers who *want* to see you doing something, & might pull their support if they lose interest in your war.
Bite & hold was very very difficult to pull off in WW1. The urge to relentlessly attack, even when it didn't make sense, was a problem for basically all of society. Top to bottom, civilian & military, not just the generals. Same way the urge to fight the war in the first place wasn't just limited to the generals, it sprung forth from every level of society (e.g. see https://novum.substack.com/p/there-once-was-an-empire, which has choice quotes like
"A new feeling was born. A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides defending the tribe... It was difficult to resist it. In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together..."). It took discipline to do the smart thing.
So I don't really expect much to change. Be interesting to be proven wrong though. The technology has changed, but the humans haven't. But maybe we've finally learned from history to just... *stand still* when you're in WW1, and let the enemy come to you. Let's see if Ukraine can keep this up.
It featured significant territorial grabs, but slowed down enough that the Soviets lob a nuke at a mid-tier city, resulting in one of their one getting nuked in return, and then the war stops.
(Note: this is building off a similar answer I wrote to a similar question a while ago, in case this sounds familiar & plagiaristic to anyone who's read https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1e1s8h7/comment/ld2whr1/. I figured there might be some overlap between the people who read r/WarCollege & who read ACX. If you haven't read that comment though, maybe give it a gander, I think it's also worth reading if you liked this one.)
Consider warfare at its most basic form: two lines of men with sharp pieces of metal. If the two lines charge at each other, the outcome is basically 50/50 on which side wins. The goal of tactics then is to create an asymmetry where your line of men has an advantage over the enemy. In pre-gunpowder combat, this might be something like breaking the enemy center or enveloping a flank to create local numerical superiority and break the cohesion/morale of the enemy line of troops. This dynamic is maneuver warfare; moving forces to create an advantage for the attacker.
The ability of militaries to successfully execute maneuver warfare waxes and wanes with available technology. Napoleon was a master of maneuver, and always seemed to know the best time and place to allocate his men to win a decisive advantage. Battles of this period often focused on mobile formations of infantry and cavalry. By the time of the American Civil War 50 years later, deadlier weaponry made attacking much more difficult, and battles made much more use of defensive points like stone walls or trenches.
In 1914, there were three key technologies that shaped the battlefield: phones, trains, and machine guns. All of these favored the defender. Machine guns could kill men very rapidly, but took time to set up and had to be manned by at least a two person team. You couldn't carry a WWI machinegun with you like a rifle and fire as you moved, they were too bulky and heavy. Communications were primarily phone lines, which took time to lay out and connect. Transportation was primarily trains, which of course needed railroads built to go anywhere. Attackers lost the ability to effectively communicate with their troops when they went on the offensive, as well as giving the defender a much easier job of moving in reinforcements. After every attack, new phone lines and railroads had to be built up to the new front.
Note that this was true for the Western Front, which was in heavily industrialized eastern France. The Eastern Front was much more mobile and reminiscent of maneuver warfare. The Russians at the time were in the process of updating and expanding their rail network. In fact, this was one of the reasons the German military elite like Moltke wanted to fight WWI in 1914; they feared Russia would be undefeatable if they could build a modern rail network that effectively transported their millions of men. Similarly, the Austro-Hungarian territories were a hodgepodge of different rail networks. The 'Empire' was a motely collection of different states like Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, etc. Each spoke a different language and had different railway standards and track gauges and train speeds and so on. This made transporting anything by train a huge headache. The Eastern Front lacked the infrastructure that defined the Western Front.
By WWII, there were several major technological changes. Radio communications allowed attacking forces to maintain constant links to their command structure. Mechanization allowed forces to bypass defensive strongpoints and opportunistically attack weak spots in a way men on foot never could. The Wehrmacht was able to destroy the French army in 6 weeks this way, even though only 10% of the German forces were mechanized. The Kesselschlacht (cauldron battle; Blitzkrieg was a word coined by English speakers and not generally used by the Germans) doctrine used highly mobile mechanized forces to go around enemy formations and block their lines of reinforcement and retreat. The main force of the army then moved up and trapped the enemy. Advances in projecting air and sea power also allowed targeting enemy states' industrial capacity, but I think the last book review went into enough detail that I won't repeat it here.
Ukraine is the first war fought between peer powers in the age of omnipresent ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Things like spy satellites, AWACS (think a big military cargo plane stuffed with surveillance and communication equipment), and drones mean that combatants can see what is happening on the battlefield in nearly real time. Combine this with long-range precision munitions and attacking is a nightmare. Any time one side tries to build up the forces necessary to create an asymmetry, the other side knows about it. First, this means there is much less element of surprise in any attack. Second, any force that can be seen by ISR can be destroyed by weapons 10s or even 100s of kilometers away.
Drone technology means these threats are ubiquitous. Any infantryman can operate a drone capable of destroying enemy armored vehicles. Any infantryman can see when the enemy is approaching to attack with his surveillance drone and call in artillery and missile strikes immediately. The trenches in Ukraine are not meant so much as defensive points in an actual battle, like they were in WWI. Trenches primarily serve to protect the infantry from the artillery, missile and drone munitions.
Essentially, there are times when technology favors defense or offense. When offense is favored, it is possible to destroy entire enemy armies with effective maneuver tactics. This happened for Napoleon, and the Nazis in France and their opening invasion of the USSR. When defense is favored, it is very hard or impossible to use maneuver to give your side an advantage. This results in a grinding war of attrition, where the enemy can only be defeated by slowly bleeding them of manpower.
I highly recommend reading the Big Serge substack on the history of maneuver warfare. The series is paid, but you can read the first half of the articles to see if you find it interesting.
> Consider warfare at its most basic form: two lines of men with sharp pieces of metal.
That's very far from the most basic form of warfare. The most basic form of warfare is a raiding party that hopes never to encounter any enemy combatants.
> You couldn't carry a WWI machinegun with you like a rifle and fire as you moved, they were too bulky and heavy.
There were light machineguns like the Chauchat & BAR which enabled "walking fire", but heavier belt-fed water-cooled machineguns could be fired for much longer.
Yes, there were early squad machineguns in WWI, but they were vastly outnumbered by rifles and heavy machineguns. The BAR didn't see service until 1918 with the Americans, and the French guns were notorious for jamming and getting gunked up with mud.
Perhaps I misremember acoup.blog, but I think I have read somewhere that the real change for WW1 was widespread railways, not machine guns.
Before the railway, an army was like a shark: it had to either keep moving (devastating the countryside in the process) or die of starvation in short order. With the railway, feeding two armies facing each other for a few years was suddenly a solved problem.
Machine gun nests near the front trenches were not invincible: lob enough shells at them and their crews will take cover or die. But after you had taken the front trench, you would just face the next line of trenches. And while the attackers had to move on foot and bring their supplies through enemy artillery fire, the defenders had more artillery in range and convenient railroad tracks to carry more troops to the next line of defense in short order. So one side would take a trench, perhaps even with 'favorable' casualty ratios, but they would not be able to break through to the green fields on the other side and march for the capital.
By contrast, with (WW2 era) tanks and APCs, the defender has no large mobility advantage -- while the railways would win out in terms of operational range (and perhaps also long-distance speed), in that hour (or so) you might need to deploy defenses, an unopposed tank could go quite some distance.
> Perhaps I misremember acoup.blog, but I think I have read somewhere that the real change for WW1 was widespread railways, not machine guns.
> Before the railway, an army was like a shark: it had to either keep moving (devastating the countryside in the process) or die of starvation in short order. With the railway, feeding two armies facing each other for a few years was suddenly a solved problem.
Both of those messages can be found on ACOUP, but I don't think you're combining them correctly.
A trench garrison is like any other garrison, and can be maintained indefinitely without needing to move. Keeping a standing military force in place in some strategic location 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 is not novel to the 20th century; it might not even be novel to the 20th century BC. Two armies could always stand facing each other for years if they were doing it across a border.
The rest of your comment basically mirrors the ACOUP analysis; once you've taken the enemy's frontline trench, you're no longer on friendly territory and you get outlogisticsed by their middle trench.
> Keeping a standing military force in place in some strategic location 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 is not novel to the 20th century; it might not even be novel to the 20th century BC. Two armies could always stand facing each other for years if they were doing it across a border.
I would argue that there is a difference between a garrison and an army. Sure, you could keep some standing army around for as long as the second system of warfare was a thing, and given the advantage of defensive structures this might actually be an excellent idea, but in field battles the side which brings twice as many men has an important tactical advantage for a variety of reasons.
Hence, the incentives are fielding big armies. While for small polities like Greek city-states, this does not pose a problem of supply logistics -- certainly Athens would be able to feed her hoplites in front of the city, given that they were men of Athens which could be fed in peace time -- for large polities, you might rely on troops amassed a thousand kilometers from their homesteads.
I will grant you though that it is definitely easier to feed a large army in cooperation with the local administrators than if you have to rely on robbing the civilian population.
But the trenches weren't manned by mobile armies. They were manned by static forces. The whole problem with attacking into a trench was that once you did so, the trench behind it continued to receive supplies, and you stopped receiving yours.
> I will grant you though that it is definitely easier to feed a large army in cooperation with the local administrators than if you have to rely on robbing the civilian population.
A garrison doesn't need to do either of those, and the trenches didn't. They got food that was coordinated centrally. (Hypothetically, this also enables an automatic scorched earth policy where, if you get overrun, you can just stop sending food to what is now enemy territory, but that's mostly moot.)
As well as what others have mentioned, both Ukraine and Russia started the war with enormous ex-soviet air defence resources (anti aircraft missiles etc). This has meant that, as Mark Roulo briefly mentions below[1], both sides are keeping their planes on their own side of the line of control, using them mainly defensively (the exception is to shoot missiles over the line).
There's actually a recent book review of How the War Was Won on the Psmith substack which covers this point: the key here is that in both WW1 and the Ukraine war, neither side can destroy the other's production capacity (Russia because it's deep in Russia, Ukraine because it's in the west), whereas strategic bombing and unrestricted submarine warfare in WW2 very much allowed for the destruction of the production lines of military equipment, rather than just the equipment itself on the battlefield.
The armies are much smaller with a longer front and a lot more equipment. In terms of dollars per front line soldier or soldiers per mile they are very different. They are similar in that the fighting involves shelling trenches. One odd thing is no one involved not US, Ukraine, N Korea, Gernany or Russia is able to produce shells on the scale that the Tsarist Russian empire could in 1915 when it was a poor country https://x.com/PJ11819211/status/1817317766938128730?t=FAII5FuxtB4R-Lx6NVjIAg&s=19
Unfortunately, that link goes to twitter, which does not show the full text of the claim.
I can think of a few confounders:
* Artillery rounds were likely smaller in 1915 than they are today. If the claim is about rounds produced, then it would be equivalent to saying that a bike factory in 1900 produced vehicles at a higher rate than a car factory in 1970. I think propellant+payload explosive mass (as TNT equivalent) is probably a fair measure of the economic effort involved.
* In 1915, artillery was the main thing to spend your economic surplus on to win a land war. In 2024, artillery is still important, but just one of many materiel-heavy areas of warfare -- planes, tanks, missiles and so on also eat up a lot of industrial capacity.
Of course, it could also be that today risk is judged very different. and there is much more red tape involved in producing ammunitions.
The American Civil War was at the battlefield level something of a glimpse-of-coming-attractions for WW I. Unfortunately no late-19th/early-20th century European senior military planners had gamed out "what if during the U.S. war the two sides had had, in addition to the modern rifles that made frontal assaults so bloody, this newer thing called machine guns...?"
If they had, then one or more of those nations might have put more urgency and effort into new techs to counter the new defensive power that machine guns and rifling represented. Such as the initially-dismissed idea which would evolve into what the Brits initially called "barrels" and everybody now calls "tanks".
Whether the Ukraine War is inherently in a similar situation seems less clear. Other big factors are involved in creating the current more-or-less stalemate.
A handful of them the first of which arrived with less than a year left in the war, and had zero impact on strategy or tactics. Partly because they were a fraction as useful as a WW I machine gun. (Think 1950s televisions compared to those of say the 2000s.)
According to Wikipedia, tanks were first used by the British at the Battle of the Somme in Sept 1916. While the British invented them, the French produced them in vastly larger numbers. The Germans didn't start researching them until they saw them on the battlefield, and thus only produced small numbers late in the war.
So it's true that they were only a factor in the second half of the war, but that second half still went on for several years after the introduction of tanks. That wouldn't have happened if they were a game-changer.
It's basically just one item on a long list of innovations that people tried in a desperate unsuccessful attempt to break the stalemate on the western front. Much like poison gas.
I wouldn't say "they didn't help". By the end of the war, everyone could see tanks were the future. The Germans just did a better job of understanding how than the French, despite being later to jump on the concept.
The change in military technology used in WW1 was arguably greater than any other conflict - certainly WW2. Napoleon would have recognised the tactics used in the first few months while by the end you had infantry and armour moving in combination with artillery, spotted by aircraft. While the science behind the atomic bomb was a great leap forwards, and rocket technology paved the way to moon launches - the changes in tactics they made over WW2 were far smaller than the incorporation of new vehicles and weaponry in WW1.
Not a military history buff, but WW1 is far from the first war where "battle lines barely if ever move". That happens every couple of cycles in military tech when the tech happens to favor defense and burden attack, so you had plenty of it in e.g. Medieval siege warfare. Massive high walls, but nothing powerful enough to penetrate them. What's the attacker's only option? Lay siege and starve the residents. But if the city is massive and well-prepared enough, *it* can starve the attackers, or just kill them from the relative safety of the walls, before they can starve the city. I'm sure there are other examples, that's the first that came to my mind.
The specific way through which WW1-era tech made defense advantageous seems to be that it had machine guns, mines, and grenades, but no tanks and no aerial war machines that can demolish ground fortification successfully. Without tanks and air support, what could you possibly do against a nest of crisscrossing machine gun fire-fields? Use artillery, and WW1 generals did, a lot of it. The problem with artillery though is that it can't move, so if the enemy sets up their machine gun nest just beyond the range of your artillery, leaving a No-Man's-Land in between that enemy artillery in turn can bomb, you're pretty much stuck. Your artillery can't reach the machine gun nest (which can fuck up any amount of ground attackers, again, no armor yet, machine guns are king), and you can't cross the No-Man's-Land without getting pummeled by the enemy artillery. No one can do anything.
(Though I'm pretty sure flamethrowers could have solved this by mass-burning the attackers' side of the land when the wind direction was favorable, then using the chaos and the cover of fire to attack? flamethrowers were probably around in WW1, I'm not sure why nobody tried to break the stalemate using them.)
I'm a lot fuzzier on the Ukraine war. The terrain of East Europe looks very Blitzkrieg-able, Hitler reached Moscow and the Black Sea from Poland in half a year or so, and that was with WW2 tech, ~80 years ago. My guess is that both Ukraine and Russia are so exhausted and so information-symmetric that they (1) Aren't sure an attempted Blitzkrieg on either of their end will reach the enemy capital before being blunted (2) Can't rule out the possibility that not only a Blitzkrieg on their end will be blunted, but the enemy will counter-Blitzkrieg through the opening and potentially reach the other capital, or at least surround a massive army and destroy it.
But only in, what, the last 15 months or so. And they were so new that people didn't know what to do with them. Mobile artillery? troop carriers? a Cavalry replacement that doesn't get shredded when rained with machine gun fire? Tanks (and more generally, armored vehicles) today are all of that, but in WW1 they were still experimenting. The engines were pathetic, the cockpits were claustrophobic. And so on.
If tanks got used to anything near their full capacity, you would see massive freedom of movement for the armies that wielded them like the first mechanized months of WW2. In WW2, the only things that could stop tanks were claustrophobic narrow-street cities and defense-in-depth lines of other tanks, such as what happened in Stalingrad and Kursk, respectively. None of that happened in WW1, which indicates that they really had no idea what the tank is capable of. (Or there were technical limitations that got solved in the interbellum, both typically go hand-in-hand.)
Information, command and control... it is difficult to surprise anyone these days, and they can react quite rapidly even if you do
That said the Ukrainians *have* managed to pull off a couple of blitzkrieg-style rapid advances. But these (well, the ones that succeeded) seem to have targeted weakly defended areas, and not been deep enough to actually encircle and destroy large numbers of Russian soldiers.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy charging the enemy line with a large, very visible and terrifying weapon on my back that will absolutely set me on fire if it gets damaged. I wouldn’t want to be with a 100’ of that guy.
"flamethrowers were probably around in WW1, I'm not sure why nobody tried to break the stalemate using them"
I was pretty sure I remembered something about this, and looking it up online yes, they had them and used them (we tend to forget just how many 'firsts' in military technology the First World War saw). Mainly they had limited range and duration, which if you think about it makes sense - a flamethrower is a weapon that needs to be used 'up close', which means that you're as vulnerable to counter-attack, and close quarters weapons like that means that the machine gun emplacement can take you out before you get near enough to burninate them:
"The portable type, carried on the backs of ground troops, had a range of about 45 yards (41 metres) and enough fuel for about 10 seconds of continuous “firing.” Larger and heavier units installed in tank turrets could reach out more than 100 yards (90 metres) and carried enough fuel for about 60 seconds of fire. To achieve maximum results, several short bursts were usually fired rather than one long blast.
...The German army adopted these weapons and used them with surprise effect against Allied troops in 1915. The British and French soon countered with flame throwers of their own, but all the World War I types had limited range and duration of fire. Their chief effect seems to have been to terrorize the troops that they were used against."
Like poison gas - the first time one side uses this weapon, it's shocking and effective because the other side doesn't know how to counter it. But then the other side gets its own version of the New Weapon and you're back to level terms again.
1) Armored assaults don’t seem as effective as they were in say WWII.
2) The battlefield is constrained, with borders to the North and sea to the South. Flanking maneuvers aren’t possible so it’s possible to entrench and defend the whole front in depth.
3) Extending from #2, political factors mean neither side can expand the war at sea or in the air very much — Ukraine won’t massively attack Russian infrastructure beyond pinpoint strikes, and Russia won’t attack the supply lines from NATO to Ukraine.
You could think of the Korean War as an analogy — the USA and ROK could fight really hard, but the presence of the PRC made the war essentially unwinnable.
>1) Armored assaults don’t seem as effective as they were in say WWII.
That is more a failure of execution, i.e. training and doctrine. Modern warfare means mobility, firepower, and protection. AFVs, especially the main battle tank, are the best platforms to combine all these requirements. There is a reason why Ukraine has been demanding tanks from her allies until they finally delivered.
That's not at all how the "weird" thing got up into campaign speeches, nor the couching-fucking jokes. If anything I've been fairly gobsmacked to see actual Dem candidates adopting such things so rapidly and casually, precisely because in recent years they had collectively become so focus-grouped/scripted. It's as if all the consultants/staffers who worked on the Dems' 2016 and 2020 campaigns have been locked into a closet or something....dunno if this is actually a _smarter_ way to campaign for national office but it is less boring at least.
More generally "The answer is surely that I dislike the Democrats more than I dislike the Republicans" does seem like your situation right now. Don't really see why you need to think of that as particularly "unflattering" though -- it's just human. And anyway self-awareness is a virtue, one which waaay too many people over here in "blue" America lack nowadays.
I agree it’s stupid and let’s be honest, it’s going to get a whole lot stupider by November. The American electoral system takes way too long and so they have to make up nonsense to keep people engaged, like cheap heat in pro wrestling.
Yes, there's a distinct creepiness that sets in when you realize that every single phrase coming out of their mouths has been curated and scripted for the sole purpose of manipulating and controlling you in order to retain their grip on power. It's fundamentally different than run-of-the-mill persuasion - they don't want you to look at the issues and then pick a side, they want to carefully psychologically manipulate you to maintain control over you.
An example - Trump, a Republican, has used the slogan "MAGA" since 2015 or earlier. And yet, the phrase "MAGA Republicans" was not widely used during either the 2016, 2018, or 2020 elections. Why then, beginning in 2022 and continuing to this day (see Google Trends), does nearly every single Democrat politician and media figure exclusively refer to Republicans using the particular phrase "MAGA Republicans"? Not "Republicans", not "pro-Trump Republicans", not "far-right Republicans", not even "MAGA extremists" - always "MAGA Republicans", that exact phrase. The reason is that in their pursuit of control and power, they focus tested dozens of negative propaganda phrases to use against Republicans, and landed on that specific phrase as the most effective in terms of fearmongering and manipulating people.
When you first learn about this, and then think about the sheer number of Democrats who immediately all started using that exact phrase at the exact same time, you start to get a sense of the extent of the manipulation.
> nearly every single Democrat politician and media figure exclusively refer to Republicans using the particular phrase "MAGA Republicans"?
No that’s not true. There are still some Republicans that have yet to drink the kool aid. Those folks are simply called Republicans. You know, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Liz Cheney, Paul Ryan… MAGA Republicans call them RINOs though.
I think they refer to the Trump acolytes as MAGA Republicans because of those red hats that so many of them wear that have the word ‘MAGA’ on them. If you watch one of those Trump rallies you might see a couple.
There is nothing sinister about this. It is just an observation of the current state of the GOP.
I'm not quite clear on how MAGA Republicans became pejorative. "Make America Great" is hard to dispute as a good phrase. Adding "Again" of course means it WAS great, now it isn't, and we should attempt to reclaim its greatness. But who would claim we don't have greatness to reclaim?
It was, however, a slogan introduced by Trump's campaign, but apparently was originally used in Reagan's 1980 campaign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again). It seems Bill Clinton also used it in his 1992 campaign. Trump started using the slogan in 2012. Surprisingly, Trump didn't trademark the phrase, and had to buy it from one Bobby Bones in 2015.
It's similar to how "black lives matter" became a pejorative on the right despite being a positive slogan that nobody could reasonably disagree with. Context matters. This isn't exactly rocket science.
I don't consider them the same. I would compare being "woke" better. Black lives matter, as ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks lives of any sort matter.
MAGA now seems to refer to those Republicans who don't think, and will support anything Trump says. Being "woke" seems to mean embracing any liberal thing, the more extreme the better. In that sense, both ideas are now distorted.
Glad you mentioned Trump has been doing this for a while. I’ll say I don’t think his nastiness is any less bad for being spontaneous. I think he’s good at this because he is by nature a cruel man. Really, I have little doubt about that. It’s my primary reason for disliking him. To me his ‘second nature’ insults seems much worse than a scripted and relatively mild “we’ve had enough of your noxious shit, let’s see how you like it” retaliatory burn.
So let’s calibrate this ‘weird’ insult a bit for perspective with just some of Trump’s insulting descriptions of people:
#1 Weirdo - moving on to:
Horse face, Fat pig, Psycho, Slime ball, Crazed and incompetent, Birdbrain, Deranged loser, Mental basket case, Crazy, Whacko, Washed up creepster, Neurotic dope, Stone cold phony, True lowlife, Broken old crow, Third rate conman, Moonface, Ditzy airhead…
I've not been paying much attention to the US presidential election lately, but my impression was that the "weird" stuff was just another example of mainstream media trying to force a cringy meme. Is it really working?
Like pretty much all memes in politics, it appears a mix of organic and workshopped, with original spread being largely organic and the party apparatus quickly sensing it's spreading and magnifying it through various means. It's pretty hard to just force a meme without any organic potential.
Perhaps you just aren't quite tuned to the original organic spread since it happened in different channels from the ones you are following?
>It's pretty hard to just force a meme without any organic potential.
Nah, it's not really. You just need to post it over and over and over again. At least the ones that weren't pushed by NYT et al. usually had some potential for humour.
I, at least, have seen it being quite organically adopted well enough by various Twitter posters and the like - what's your evidence that it's wholly forced?
It is making R's very mad, it energizes the D base, and it appears to be helping more than it's hurting in the white women 21-45 population IE the most important population.
I guess I'm too stuck in the anonymous shitposter right-winger bubble to have noticed, though I'm not sure how much help Ds need with the 21-45 white women demographic.
I have a suspicion that "weird" is being used as a dogwhistle for "creepy", which they'd probably get more pushback on. But I can picture some 70s or 80s movie where there's a group of mixed-sex attractive young people, teens to early 20s, and they're taking about some guy who isn't there, and the women say things like "he's just ... weird, you know?" with the distinct implication that they'd be uncomfortable being alone with him, and would very much appreciate some male assistance in keeping him at a distance.
That's not "weird", that's a moron ranting on the Internet, which is depressingly common these days. And I'd say the same if it were a rant about environmental collapse and "late stage capitalism".
Morons ranting on the Internet may be depressingly common these days, but that's a function of morons having a much greater than average penchant for posting rants on the Internet compared to the general population posting mildly unfunny memes and pictures of their food. Crucially, that does not make any individual weird rant any less weird.
The rant in question here is weird. It's a weird rant. There's no other way to describe it, and that holds true no matter how easy it is to find other weird rants on the Internet.
One month ago, I might have described that rant in a lot of ways, but the word "weird" would never have crossed my mind. Time Cube and TempleOS, those were weird.
Honestly I wouldn't have either--not because it wasn't weird, but because it was no weirder than most of his rants and less weird than some.
We've been exposed to him, constantly, for so long now that it's easy to be desensitized to what a weird guy he is. Other than his vulgarity, and before he became known for his politics, that was the thing people always noticed about him. Now we just take it for granted.
Sounds like another case of "All of my political opponents are a monolith moving in lockstep, all of the people on my side are organic grassroots with no organization."
This was false when it was "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line" and it's false coming from you too. The couchfucking thing came from a rando on twitter and people jumped on it, it's no more organized than "low energy" becoming Trump's go-to insult in 2016 was.
It's emergent behavior from a swarm, so yes there's no central point that originates all behavior, but there are also people who are doing focus groups to find out which memes replicate best in the swarm. Like, there are people who *want* to control it, and who *try* to control it, but so far all they can do is nudge it a bit.
It's very effective, in precisely that schoolyard insult fashion: get the other person riled-up and huffing and puffing about it, and you can then point and jeer at "lookit the dumb idiot making a fool of himself about a word!"
It's mean and it works. It's also a bit thick, coming from the party of "we love us some weird", see various photos of Democratic politicians snuggling up to drag queens, at Pride events, and of course who can forget White House Lawn trans breast flashing? Though I suppose Pride is mainstream now, hence the tensions over "keep kink in Pride, it's not supposed to be for families".
It's also mean on the level of "ugh, you're icky, you're a loser". Which makes the Democrats trying to be appealing to the "we're normal and nice and average" types. You know - the good old cis-heteronormative patriarchy types? Not socialists, not swingers, middle of the road normies? Not differently abled, not neurodivergent, not autistic etc.?
Again, that's a bit... weird... coming from the party which has a large chunk of its support from the LGBT+, physically and mentally disabled, etc. online types.
While both the (far) right and the (far) left are full of outlandish and ludicrous weirdoes, the left-wing weirdoes at least usually acknowledge that they are weird (indeed, revel in it, consciously exaggerate their own weirdness to get scene points). The right-wing weirdoes more often strive to present themselves as normies, creating an uncanny valley effect that repels the sort of people (generally speaking these would tend to be women) who are constantly attuned and trying to look at minor social clues that someone's presentation isn't quite demonstrating what they actually are.
I've worked personally with quite enough left-wing weirdoes to be greatly annoyed by affected weirdness when it comes to it. My point was more related to whether the Republican counterattack is bound to work (though, in general, counterattacks rarely work in politics anyway).
It's more about the liberal values of self-acceptance. Vance thinks he's normal and cool. Weird liberals think they're abnormal and cool. Both groups are abnormal, so Vance looks like he's in denial, while weird liberals don't.
It's definitely a self-serving explanation (because "self-acceptance" is more of a liberal-coded value) but... this is also explicitly politics, so all explanations are going to be self-serving.
In your original post, you literally said "but that answer isn't personally flattering so I'll dismiss it". One of the main reasons I've heard from many liberals about how much they like the new shift of the campaign is because "they go low, we go high" has been wildly ineffective, and this now reflects "we're going to try to win" with less of the veneer of "and we'll do it the 'right way' because we're better people".
>(mfers, the dude he was running against _ate_ a dog but never mind I guess)
"Why do people not equate a child participating in the culture he was growing up in with a grown man tormenting his dog to the point where it shit itself due to stress?"
>also a bit thick, coming from the party of "we love us some weird
I believe that you are conflating two different meanings of weird: 1) eccentric/different/etc and 2) creepy. Furries are the former. People who see furries under every bed, or who think that a teacher who sponsors a gay-straight alliance is a "groomer" (as at least someone on my Twitter feed does), seem to me to be the latter.
Usually I'd agree, but here no. Republicans politicians nowadays are just weird. There's no Democrat equivalent of people like Donald Trump, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Sure, there are some weird far-left people, but none of them are peddling so-obviously-in-your-face wrong conspiracy theories like Republicans do without a shred of evidence.
Like it's bad epistemics to just parrot Hamas talking point like some in the squad do, but it's a whole other level of removal from reality to say crowd sizes are bigger than they are and insist on those lies, say the election was stolen multiple years later after multiple commissions said they aren't, say LGBT people at large have an agenda of grooming children, and say stuff about Hollywood pedo rings (unrelated, potentially anecdotal: it's interesting that now that photos of Trump with Epstein came out that attack line was quickly dropped by Republicans)
>What? Exaggerating the size of a crowd is worse than defending Hamas?
No, I made a very different claim. I said the epistemology of someone that believes crowd sizes are larger than they actually are is worse than the epistemology of someone who believes in Hamas' lies. For the latter, you need some sort of victimizing oppressor-oppressed ideology, but at least there is some internal logic to it. For the second, you have to be basically be a complete narcissist or fool, completely disinterested in the truth.
But sure, not the best example. Instead, I'll say that Trump's repeated praise of Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi is in fact miles worse than defending Hamas.
Not technically wrong, but for the purposes of understanding how democrats are communicating, it's still worth being aware that "Keep Austin Weird" and "Hey man, at this party, don't be weird" are not contradictory, any more than someone in the 90s saying "Yo that trick was sick!" and "I can't come in to work today, I'm sick" are saying contradictory things.
Words can simply have more than one meaning depending on context.
Sure, but the specific examples are value judgments about which activities are weird. Republicans/conservatives would use the same terms in the same way but backwards on those items. I'm not having an issue with two uses of the word "weird" but the underlying value judgments.
What gets to me is that I guess I had some trust in left-wing moral claims (reality-based community), but I see gleeful couch stuff coming from people who know it's false but think it's too much fun to give up.
As for "weird", I would prefer a president who's good at basic people stuff, but yes, it's just bullying to hammer on it.
For me, it's more than getting bugged. The Democrats might be right that the insults are something they need for a successful campaign-- I'm in a species that mostly likes cruelty.
I like it, personally. If you let someone dunk on you for 10 straight years; that's not a moral success, it a sign of either weakness or failure to engage with reality.
And unfortunately, you are in a species that likes cruelty. Someone being cruel and the target accepting it is the very definition of dominance; which everyone but the libertarian socialists and left anarchists consider the highest virtue.
Yeah. The liberal center-left would be my natural home, but this is yet another example of how the Ds have fallen far from anything I want to associate myself with.
The couch stuff is stupid, but eh. What can you do? As you say, Nancy, we're a species that likes pecking orders and bullying. It's rich, coming from "sigh and lament over the lack of civility in politics" side, but there you go - if throwing mud works, then throw mud.
I think the best reaction to the weird labelling would be to ignore it, or lean into it - yeah I'm weird and so what? If it's weird to want two parent families and no more broken homes and to get decent jobs for those households, then I'm weird!
Celebrate the weird, the geeky, the nerdery! I believe Vance is or was a big Magic card game fan and player? Go for the specky four-eyes credentials, JD!
Allow me some armchair psychologizing: I see the "weird" campaign as a shift away from scaremongering, which mostly served to mobilize Democratic voters, but empowered Trump, toward ridiculing, which is intended to create an "emperor's new clothes" moment among Republicans and undecided voters: "you're really going to vote for this rambling buffoon and his deranged lickspittles?"
And it seems to be working - I'm getting quite a bit of cognitive dissonance from you. Take it seriously and ask yourself, is this really a version of the Republican party that I can support? Is it really acceptable to vote for someone who digresses into self-aggrandizing fairytales and incoherent blathering all the time?
Seconding this. It reminds me of Chile. When the Pope convinced Pinochet to hold a plebiscite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Chilean_presidential_referendum the campaign against him was going to do a scaremongering campaign. They would have a lot of terrible crimes to talk about, and it would be totally fair to decorate a "Threat to Democracy" article with Pinochet's picture. But they wisely decided to go for a much more positive, cheerful, fun campaign ("Joy is coming!"), which caught on much better than the dramatic, negative narrative.
Or look at Reagan's "There you go again" remark. It's not really this sentence which had the tremendous impact. It was his little chuckle just before.
> Or look at Reagan's "There you go again" remark. It's not really this sentence which had the tremendous impact. It was his little chuckle just before.
Yeah. I think one of the most effective things Harris could do in the debate, if/when Trump goes incoherent, would be to look into the camera, roll her eyes and gesture at him, and then shrug to the audience.
Trump works best when he's picking other people apart, but that requires ammunition. And like carateca said, he's "fundamentally ridiculous", and I doubt his narcissism can handle much sustained mockery.
I don't have an answer to that (I mean, sure, it's different, but how? to what extent? this is a big question). But I can answer a different question: are humans still the same? a resounding yes! Eye-rollers are annoying, showing contempt toward your opponent maybe gets your superfans all high-fiving each other, but doesn't win any new converts.
Huh. I don't recall that, but I don't recall much of the details.
Maybe a wink would work better? Something that recontextualizes her as above (beyond, over, uber) Trump, and treats him as a spectacle rather than a serious political player.
Do you not think you're experiencing cognitive dissonance? You consciously dismissed the correct answer ("I dislike Democrats more than I dislike Republicans") and are searching for an answer that feels more comfortable.
I didn't see any apologies from GOP talking heads when Trump called Biden "Crooked Joe" and "Sleepy Joe". Nor have I seen any apologies for when he called Kamala "Lyin'/Laughin'/Crazy Kamabla". And GOP talking heads were out in full force trying to denigrate Walz's service record. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
There does seem to be some question over Walz' service record, but I have no idea if this is a second Swift Boats Kerry situation or a Bush National Guard situation.
If you're going to play up your military veteran record, then you have to be prepared to have it questioned.
It sounds like Walz may have said some things that are factually incorrect/lies about his service. Trying to play into his military service to decry "weapons of war I used on the battlefield" or something, related to gun control. I don't think anyone would have gone after him for his military record - 24 years in the reserve, if he didn't drag in wartime service to it. My understanding is that he didn't serve overseas, so he was never on a real battlefield.
That he left the reserves earlier than expected and shortly before he would have been deployed just worsens the optics. It's not much of an attack to criticize a guy for retiring after 20+ years, but if/when he lies about it for political gain it can become something to fight about.
He retired three months before his unit was assigned to be deployed and six months before they were deployed. Vance is bullshitting that into "they were getting shipped out so he quit".
Walz once said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Since Walz was never deployed into a combat zone the "I carried in war" part can be interpreted by civilians as a false claim. But Walz did do a stretch of active duty as an enlisted soldier during a war (Iraq War II). The armed-forces vets I have known always referred to active duty during wartime as time "in war" whether or not they got sent to any active combat zones.
Also fair's fair: Vance's own four years in the Army consisted entirely of being a "combat correspondent". As he detailed in his autobiographical book his only involvement near any combat zones was scribbling notes for Marine Corps press releases.
Sounds like Walz walking the line between factually inaccurate and misleading. I have no problem when someone tries that kind of rhetorical trick and gets a poor reception for it. The same goes for Vance on the other side skirting the line when he talks about Walz's service record.
He retired three months before his unit was specifically assigned to be deployed on a specific date, but two months after his unit probably would be deployed in the next year or two,
Which itself came a month after Waltz filed to run for Congress. The most likely interpretation was that he figured stateside Guard service would be an asset for an aspiring Congressman, but that actually being deployed overseas would throw a monkey wrench in his career.
It’s all bullshit. Ignore it and focus on crime, secure borders, safe cities, inflation and whether your kids are getting a good education. Stupid personal attacks are just white noise whether they’re from Trump or his enemies. We’re better than that.
He's a narcissist who only thinks about Trump, and Jan 6 was reprehensible. But to fight the corrupt system the Democrats embody, you need someone with a gigantic ego who can take insane amounts of hate in the media, lawfare, you name it, and still come back swinging. There's a certain irony to the whole thing. The system itself created the monster (Trump) who will now destroy it. Anyway I agreed with all these guys, for years, I supported Clinton and Biden - but now I see what the establishment is capable of.
You also need someone who actually wants to fight the corrupt system rather than exploit it. And you need someone with the skills and experience to fight the corruption effectively. And at this level, you need someone who can recruit and retain a similarly capable and motivated staff to back him up.
If Donald J. Trump were that person, the ego and the ability to take the various sorts of punches and stay in the fight would be assets. But he isn't, and you all should have known that by 2018 at the latest.
The couch joke comes from a twitter meme though, and "weird" is much too basic to be the result of focus-testing. You're just grasping for any chain of reasoning that helps your biases, and that's the worst kind of reasoning at all. You would do better to stick with the answer that isn't personally flattering and either:
1. Own it proudly and say it's a mark of the tribe you belong to; claim that all who stand with you have this feature and it's not unflattering at all. (Probably not the best option but certainly a human choice.)
2. Examine it closely until you can unravel your biases and change your perspective in some meaningful way. (The way more difficult option where you will probably not have any fun at any step of the process because even the smallest amount of honest introspection is the mental equivalent of performing one's own appendectomy.)
The cognitive dissonance here is wild. You see your tribe using focus tested middle school insults based on false disinformation for the purpose of manipulating and controlling the public and... take that as all the more reason to support them, because really it was the other side's fault for being the target of the falsehoods! Really, the other side should just proudly own and accept this false disinformation I just made up as a mark of their tribe!
"You see your tribe using focus tested middle school insults based on false disinformation for the purpose of manipulating and controlling the public and... take that as all the more reason to support them, because really it was the other side's fault for being the target of the falsehoods!"
I get there's probably something that's completely intractable in this conversation in regards to my beliefs and your beliefs due to media bubbles and stuff, because I feel like the exact same could be said about conservatives at large in the USA. Anyway, here are my two cents:
It was the Trump administration that created the term "alternative facts" to explain an extremely obvious lie about crowd sizes at rallies. It was them who pushed election lies – that no concrete evidence has been found to this day – that caused tons of Republicans at the local level to echo every time they lose an election – that indeed Donald Trump was the one trying to do, by all the events he did leading up to January 6th. It was Republicans who vetoed a *bipartisan* immigration bill, that McConnell himself wanted passed, because Trump said he wanted to win the election.
Like for crying out loud, Republicans are rallying behind a guy who lied about Obama not being in the United States with no evidence whatsoever.
Compare that all with an obviously false but humorous accusation that Walz fucked a couch and the claims of Republicans being weird. To me, it seems obvious this one is much less bad.
Well, as a libtard in good standing and a long-term member of the Democrat Party, I think I'm qualified to recognize individuals who have delicate sixfold symmetry and who melt when the heat is turned up. Yes, I support Lyin' Kamabla, and as a cat-lover, I'm partial to cat-loving females. I don't want to couch my terms in euphemistic language, though—are you with me sofa? Anyhow, it seems to me (as a biased RADICAL LEFT Centrist Democrat) who frequently listens to MSDNC and who is also a supporter of the FAKE PRESIDENT Sleepy Joe Biden, I would say it's weird that you consider me to be part of the problem. Just sayin...
"You think Walz just busted out a couch-fucking joke on impulse in the middle of the rally?"
Frankly, yes. The couch joke had been circulating through left-leaning social media spaces since shortly after the RNC: roughly a month before Walz was even added to the ticket. Literally all that would be required would be for Walz to keep half an eye on his side's social media, and think it was a funny meme to riff off of.
It seems like you are applying a pretty clear double-standard here. Not just the belief that Trump's utterances are all random with no deeper strategy behind them[1] but also the notion that those utterances somehow hurt him and upset his strategists, while Democratic meanness is a calculated and politically useful act.
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Trump's propensity to act like a schoolyard bully was a LARGE part of the appeal that won him the office in the first place: perhaps his single most defining feature. It didn't play well with the nation as a whole, but Trump has never, ever concerned himself with talking to the nation as a whole, only the portion of it that was likely to vote for him. He built his victory on a massive outpouring of enthusiasm from something like 60% of the Republican base, combined with a lot of "ugh, fine, I guess he's better than Hillary" from the rest. No part of his electability has ever depended on him acting civil or reasonable. Claiming it's all just random noise and that his election chances are *in spite* of that kind of nastiness is badly, badly misreading the last 8 years of American politics.
To the extent that Harris and Walz are following suit, it's very much playing by the rules that Trump laid out. I'd imagine that there are at least as many D-leaning people who dislike that kind of thing than R-leaning people who dislike Trump's attitude, but giving the polarized sections of the base what they want seems to be THE winning play in American politics lately. It's a tendency that started well before Trump and probably doesn't have a really definitive origin, but he certainly made it more visible and exploitable.
[1] Which I suspect is probably true, but with the same standards of evidence you're applying to the D side, it should be considered very much in doubt.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but it's hard to take seriously that the team who has complained about Trump for 9 years doing the same things is okay in any real sense. It feels very much like they never minded the game, but just weren't as good at it. If/when they got the upper hand, they seem to have no moral qualms about it either.
The only acceptable analysis should be either 1) It's okay when I do it, so it must be okay when they do it, or 2) I don't like it when they do it, so I shouldn't do it either.
Trump complaining about schoolyard insults would be laughable and should lose him support. Kamala using schoolyard insults should have a similar, if in reverse, result.
It was the Trump administration that created the term "alternative facts" to explain an extremely obvious lie about crowd sizes at rallies. It was them who pushed election lies – that no concrete evidence has been found to this day – that caused tons of Republicans at the local level to echo every time they lose an election – that indeed Donald Trump was the one trying to do, by all the events he did leading up to January 6th. It was Donald Trump who convinced hundreds of thousands if not more than Obama was not born in the United States.
Compare this to one, off-the-cuff joke about Vance fucking a couch, without it even being the main point. This is important. Trump will lie in rallies and have the point of his statements be the lie, and Walz made a joke that he probably knows is not true with the intent to highlight another point (i.e. challenging Vance to a debate)
Imo, even if you think both actions should lead to a politician losing support, it seems obvious that Republicans should be punished much more for this. And, from a politicians perspective, if you aren't being punished for lacking decorum (note it wasn't even a lie) and are in fact being rewarded for it, it's hard to argue they shouldn't do it if they want to win an election.
Oh, I hear you. But I think American politics has been on a dangerous path since well before Trump, and nobody really knows a way off. Most people don't even seem to want off anymore. I would like nothing better than to see moderate right-wingers kick out Trump and those aligned with him, reign in their extremists and start making good-faith proposals for how to de-escalate and re-civilize the circus that American politics has become. I strongly suspect people like Harris and Walz would welcome those good-faith proposals, do their best to answer them in kind and make a decent go at mending fences.
In the meantime, when you're stuck in an iterated prisoner's dilemma against an opponent who has built an enormous reputation on always defecting, bragged about doing the biggest and best defections, and insisted that anyone telling him not to defect was weak and disloyal, sold hats and t-shirts and buttons with "Real Men Always Defect" emblazoned proudly on them and shows no signs of even knowing where the cooperate button IS, it would take an especially credulous sort of moron to spend more than 0.1 seconds considering whether maybe now is the time to start pressing "cooperate" more often. I'd be overjoyed if the U.S. managed to break out of this trap, but I'm not holding by breath.
Which is one of many reasons that I no longer live in the U.S. and don't expect to ever again.
More fun with nominative determinism:
I just learned that the 2003 World Series of Poker champion was named Chris Moneymaker (yes, that's his real name). And the 2006 champion was Jamie Gold.
I remember Chris Moneymaker and that specific WSOP. It was a landmark outcome in some ways.
Paul Graham on Twitter:
"At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults."
I am now hoping for the next Bay Area House Party to include an expy of Paul's 12 year old...
I just learned about King Zog I of Albania. "Zog" is the kind of name for aliens that you see in lazy SF parodies, so it's pretty ironic that there's a real guy named that. Yet another reminder that reality is stranger than fiction.
Edit: Also Disenchantment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zog_I#Life_in_exile_and_death
A notable distinction, though I question its veracity:
"Zog was said to have regularly smoked 200 cigarettes a day, giving him a possible claim to the dubious title of the world's heaviest smoker in 1929 ... "
If the Zogster was awake ~ 16 hours a day, that would be a cig finished every 4.8 minutes.
Trump seems to be having trouble making up a good nickname for Harris. What's wrong with the guy that he can't make up nasty nicknames for people he hates anymore? This is just weird.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/17/donald-trump-kamala-harris-nicknames-00174461
The namecalling thing worked by forcing everyone to remember a gaffe, and Harris hasn't been campaigning long enough. Kamala also has three syllables, which uses up the whole budget. "Ly-in Ted," "Croo-ked Joe," "Slee-py Joe": see?
Commie Kamala
hilary?
Crooked Hillary. Well, it kept the iambic meter.
Low energy Jeb, Bird brain Nikki
He’s been experimenting with Fat pig Chris Christie lately too. In recent usage he uses clumsy apophasis to get away with it. “People say Chris Christie is a fat pig. No you shouldn’t say Chris Christie is a fat pig.”
Just 9th grade bully crap.
And the weird thing seems to have gotten under his skin...
https://x.com/i/status/1822123410958299406
Yea it has. It's also harder for all of us to avoid fixating as we get older, and his personal age-effects curve has visibly steepened the last couple of years.
I read an article about movies released in 1999 this morning:
Fight Club.
The Matrix
Toy Story 2
Eyes Wide Shut
Office Space
Shakespeare in Love
Magnolia.
The Green Mile
The Blair Witch Project
Being John Malkovich
The Virgin Suicides
This is a pretty impressive set of films. Possibly a high water mark for innovative cinema. Things have taken a turn for the worse in the 21st century.
Also Galaxy Quest, Sixth Sense, The Mummy, 10 Things I Hate About You.
The Iron Giant. Election. Deep Blue Sea. Just an absolute avalanche of quality indie, and low-stakes high-character action movies.
(I, too, like to occasionally trap people at parties and rant at them about how great a year that was for movies.)
There's a lot of competition for "worst Best Picture winner ever" but when you compare the quality of the 'winner' vs. 'average quality of movies that year', 1999 really stands out.
Where are the comic book movies? Hmm
I saw and enjoyed all of them except Toy Story 2 and Shakespeare in Love. Actually I might have been in the theater with my wife for the Shakespeare in Love thing but I wasn’t paying attention. Sorry, it was probably a guy thing.
The other 10 were original and interesting to me. Now it’s the MCU stuff. Well at least there is a new entry to the Alien franchise. It’s doing pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes but it seems like they are all saying the best *since* Aliens, the second one in the series which was pretty great.
I faintly recall Scott mentioning, in an old SSC post, hereditary diseases that are almost 100% jewish, with occurences somewhere along the line of 1 in a million in the general population, and 1 out of 100 amongst jews. Does anyone remember which one it was?
There are some hereditary diseases that are considerably more common among Ashkenazim (not Jews in general) and some other incompletely isolated groups (Quebecois, Japanese, etc.) than in the general population, but they do occur in the general population: Tay Sachs, Goucher, etc.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-considered-as-hungarian-high-school-science-fair-project/
This is the only one I found, which briefly mentions that Ashkenazi Jews are 100 times more likely to have certain genetic diseases.
Torsion dystonia is a tragic heritable disorder that social organizers have gone to great and very effective pains to prevent, but I don't remember the post you are referencing. I don't think it was ever as common as 1 in 100, though.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/161_wc4q5l0188B01y9E-fUDe6WoRYfdJmkbW2f8N-40/edit?usp=sharing
OC ACXLW Meetup: Vengeance and Morality - August 17, 2024
Date: Saturday, August 17, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Hello Enthusiasts,
Join us for our 71st OC ACXLW meetup, where we'll explore the concepts of vengeance, morality, and the interplay of Nietzschean philosophy in contemporary discourse. This session will feature two thought-provoking articles by Scott Alexander: one on the ethics of vengeance and the other examining Matt Yglesias through the lens of Nietzschean philosophy.
Discussion Topics:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Reading: Scott Alexander explores vengeance's ethical and practical ramifications, specifically in the current political climate and cancel culture.
Google Doc
Audio: Listen here
URL: https://sscpodcast.libsyn.com/some-practical-considerations-before-descending-into-an-orgy-of-vengeance
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Reading: Scott Alexander examines Matt Yglesias through Nietzschean philosophy, discussing the balance between master and slave morality and its implications for modern liberalism.
Google Doc
Audio: Listen here
URL: https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean?r=fbgbc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Questions for Discussion:
Vengeance and Morality:
What are the potential consequences of engaging in retaliatory cancel culture?
How does history illustrate the cyclical nature of vengeance? Can this cycle be broken?
Is collective punishment ever justified, or does it undermine the principles of individual accountability?
Nietzschean Philosophy and Modern Liberalism:
How does Scott Alexander's analysis of Matt Yglesias illustrate the tension between master and slave morality?
In what ways does modern liberalism attempt to balance these competing moralities? Is it successful?
Can Nietzschean philosophy be reconciled with contemporary political ideals, or are they at odds?
Detailed Breakdowns:
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
Introduction: The article begins by discussing a Home Depot employee's controversial comment, leading to a debate on whether conservatives should engage in cancel culture as retaliation against the left.
Ethics and Morality Debate: Scott Alexander critiques the right-wing argument for vengeance, highlighting that engaging in cancel culture does not lead to moral clarity but perpetuates harm and division.
Historical Context and the Dialectic of Vengeance: The article emphasizes that cancel culture is not new, comparing it to historical cycles of retribution, such as the Red Scare and ancient purges.
The Problem of Collective Punishment: Alexander critiques treating people as collectives rather than individuals, warning against the dangers of collective guilt and punishment.
The Dangers of Tribalism and Polarization: The article highlights how political tribalism justifies actions by demonizing the other side, leading to increased polarization and a breakdown of civil discourse.
Friendly Fire and the Incompetence Problem: Alexander notes that cancel culture often results in "friendly fire," where individuals within the same political group are harmed. This leads to a decline in competence as open debate is stifled.
The Illusion of Power: The article warns that the right-wing might overestimate its power, as the real levers of cancel culture remain in left-leaning institutions.
The Case for a Principled Approach: Instead of engaging in vengeance, Alexander advocates for dismantling the structures supporting cancel culture, promoting free speech, and creating better frameworks for moderation.
Conclusion: The article argues that vengeance will not solve the problem of cancel culture and calls for a long-term strategy focused on promoting free expression and dismantling the mechanisms that enable cancel culture.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
Bentham’s Bulldog: Scott Alexander begins by discussing a blog post titled "Shut Up About Slave Morality," which criticizes Nietzsche's concept of "slave morality." The post argues that slave morality is just a label for normal moral behavior and criticizes the right-wing for using the rejection of slave morality as an excuse for cruelty.
Friedrich Nietzsche: Alexander delves into Nietzsche’s distinction between "master morality" and "slave morality." Master morality values strength, ambition, and power, while slave morality, created by the weak and oppressed, values humility, meekness, and compassion. Nietzsche predicted that slave morality would dominate and lead to the "Last Man," a person who worships mediocrity and avoids ambition.
Ozy Brennan: Alexander introduces a self-help concept by Ozy Brennan, which critiques goals rooted in avoiding failure, emotions, or standing out—coined as "dead people's goals." Brennan advocates for goals that celebrate life and achievements. Alexander relates this to master morality, which encourages individuals to "embiggen" themselves, in contrast to slave morality’s emphasis on making oneself smaller and less distinct.
Edward Teach: Alexander examines slave morality as a defense mechanism that avoids positive judgment by downplaying virtues and accomplishments. Strategies to avoid judgment include believing the system is rigged, dismissing virtues as subjective or meaningless, and deriding those who achieve or stand out. This section critiques how modern society often penalizes excellence and promotes mediocrity.
Jason Crawford: The discussion shifts to how societies reflect master or slave moralities. Alexander points out how the 19th and early 20th centuries were focused on "embiggening" through progress, technology, and grand achievements. However, a shift occurred post-World War II towards "ensmallening," with a focus on harm reduction and modesty, which he links to the rise of slave morality.
Andrew Tate: Alexander uses Andrew Tate, a controversial figure known for his wealth, strength, and misogyny, as an example of master morality. While Tate embodies certain virtues admired by master moralists, his moral vices, particularly his treatment of women, make him problematic. Alexander wrestles with reconciling admiration for Tate’s virtues with contempt for his vices.
Cotton Mather: Alexander explores Puritanism as a blend of master and slave moralities. He distinguishes between two forms of slave morality: one that replaces master virtues with different virtues (like Puritan self-discipline) and another that rejects all virtues. He uses Progressive-era propaganda to illustrate how societies have historically balanced these moralities.
Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is presented as a modern proponent of master morality, but with a twist. Unlike Nietzsche’s chaotic masters, Rand’s heroes follow rules grounded in reason and nonviolence. Alexander discusses the strengths and limitations of Rand’s philosophy, particularly her attempt to justify a peaceful, positive-sum society without resorting to slave morality.
Matt Yglesias: Alexander considers Matt Yglesias as a Nietzschean figure who embodies a balanced compromise between master and slave moralities. Yglesias advocates for progress and excellence but within the constraints of liberal democracy, emphasizing equality before the law and focusing on benefits for the worst-off. This section suggests that modern liberalism attempts to reconcile these competing moralities.
Richard Hanania: Richard Hanania is discussed as an example of a modern Nietzschean liberal who values excellence and rejects slave morality. Despite his right-wing alignment, Hanania’s positions on issues like immigration, vaccines, and globalism reflect his commitment to master morality. However, Alexander notes that Hanania’s Nietzscheanism is isolated, with no broad political or cultural movement to support it.
Sid Meier: Alexander concludes by reflecting on the liberal compromise as a utilitarian balance between master and slave moralities. He discusses effective altruism as an extension of this compromise, arguing that it allows for the pursuit of excellence (like building rockets) while maintaining a focus on helping others. He ends with a meditation on the cyclical nature of ambition and altruism in life.
We look forward to a stimulating discussion where your insights will contribute to a deeper understanding of these complex and timely topics. For any questions, please contact Michael Michalchik at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com.
~~~~~`
An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950–80
China's growth in life expectancy between 1950 and 1980 ranks as among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history. However, no study of which we are aware has quantitatively assessed the relative importance of various explanations proposed for these gains. We create and analyse a new province-level panel data set spanning 1950-80 using historical information from Chinese public health archives, official provincial yearbooks, and infant and child mortality records contained in the 1988 National Survey of Fertility and Contraception. Although exploratory, our results suggest that increases in educational attainment and public health campaigns jointly explain 50-70 per cent of the dramatic reductions in infant and under-five mortality during our study period. These results are consistent with the importance of non-medical determinants of population health improvement – and under some circumstances, how general education may amplify the effectiveness of public health interventions.
~~~~
I am including this abstract as the background to what would otherwise seem like an insane question: Is Mao Zedong the greatest effective altruist of all time?
Even given his personal responsibility for the more than 40 million excess deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong's impact on net human life expectancy exceeds any other intervention by multiple orders of magnitude. While you can make an economic or moral case against his policies, I think the utilitarian case is frankly extremely weak given this macro picture.
I am not asking this as a kind of troll against EA or anything but to illustrate a more general question about EA political commitments. From what I can tell, the extent to which EA or utilitarianism aligns with a political system is not as an ends to itself but because of the potential of that system to bring a utilitarian benefit. For example an EA defense of capitalism will focus on how free markets lead to the greatest levels of global poverty reduction. The problem is that it is exactly on these kind of macro level poverty reduction/life expectancy levels where hardcore tankie communism does the best. Consider that at Mao's death life expectancy had risen to 62, a number which India would only achieve in 1999. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
Moreover, it is ironically EA's specific focus on the global poor which makes Maoism so well suited to it. This is a movement by and for the global south which can lead to vast life expectancy increases *without* any help from the global north. Utilitarianism demands that we save a drowning child even if he is on the other side of the earth. Should we also hand him a rifle and the little red book?
TLDR: I think the alignment between Utilitarianism and free market capitalism is actually less "rational" than many in the movement would like to admit. While there are a million moral critiques to be made of systems as brutal as state communism, the moment you start using aggregate measures like life expectancy/utils/ ect hardcore communism does extremely well.
PS: I am not a communist lol
Article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4331212/
World Bank Comparison between India and China: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN-IN
How did life expectancy in China compare with life expectancy in Taiwan? Hong Kong? South Korea?
My instinctive reaction to these sorts of historical questions is that they're meaningless or unanswerable, because there's never a baseline for comparison. China's position at the end of WW2 (for example) is absolutely unique. Its leader in the following period is unique; every action he took is unique; and China's position at the end of his leadership is still unique.
How much would China's life expectancy have risen over the same period, if not for Mao? How do you even go about answering such a question? Do you think of Mao's policy positions relative to the average world leader of the time, or relative to the average person who was in contention for leading the CCP? He might turn out to be extreme in one direction compared to the first reference class, and extreme in the other direction relative to the second. In that case, does he get credit or blame?
Yes, a fair amount of the good stuff that Mao did seems to be "Chinese empire implements basic progressive Western improvements from the early 20th century". I bet the KMT would have done some of them as well, as would any other reasonable government, because they'd discover what Japan, the UK, and the US did - if you want to be a modern industrial power, you need your workers to be reasonably healthy and educated.
Aside from that, this exhibits the same consequentialist problems that SBF posed - how much evil can be excused if you also do some good? If you have a billion slaves and decide to feed them better because you've calculated that you'll get more work from them that way, does that count? If you cure their diseases so that they'll last longer?
That reminds me of people who praise Soviet Union and its leaders for... basically not stopping time and allowing the technological progress to also exist in the Soviet Union. Because apparently in a hypothetical parallel reality without communism, people in Russia would still be living in caves or something.
It is difficult and maybe impossible to find the right counterfactual, but it is probably not: "in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries".
> in the entire country, the time froze for decades or centuries
To be fair, one of the options here was the Ch'ing dynasty... :-)
I agree completely that trying to compare global political systems based on these kinds of abstract aggregates is not especially valuable. The problem is that I think that rooting political commitments in EA invites exactly this and explicitly rejects this kind of counterfactual analysis you correctly want to do.
Like the point of raising this is that a normal liberal or democratic socialist can reject something like Maoism on its own terms because both of these systems advocate for political processes as ends in of themselves. I just don't see how you can make a similar case from an EA standpoint given its emphasis on evidence and means approach to political questions (ie how this political system has actually preformed in real life rather than against some hypothetical and what outcomes does this political arrangement achieve).
What made me think of this was a conversation I had with a friend in EA who rejected any criticism of Bill Gates or philanthropy generally by going "while name someone else who has done that much good"
may repost later on next weeks thread if that's allowed
I’m not a moderator or anything but I’ve read this substack for a couple years and it seems like that sort of thing is no problem.
The alliance theory of politics / ideology is getting more traction in academic circles. It basically says are ideologies are bullshit. If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality. If tomorrow gay men ally with rich people because they are more educated and less homophobic, the richness of rich people will downplayed, they will be called educated people and the new ideology will be pro-education and pro-enlightenment. Note that these (both stages) already happened!
I believe this because I watched it in real-time when in 1990 we in Hungary kicked out the one party system and suddenly there were a lot of choices. Many people wanted to be nationalists. And national identity comes from the past, so they allied with people who really like the past, conservatives. Even when a lot of conservatives were reading Oakeshott and were originally not nationalistic. And in the past religion was big and also identity-forming, so they allied with Christians. And they looked at the economy and saw a lot of foreign capital and not much local capital. They don't like foreign things, so they went anti-capitalist. So we ended up with a bunch of conservatives quoting Chomsky. For real.
Liberals in Hungary did the opposite of course. They were not principled liberals, they just liked money, so they liked the West because OMG so much money there, and always supported the Current Thing In The West, even when the CTIW was George W. Bush. Or, back when Hillary was First Lady, she visited Hungary and made the very nice gesture of visiting a Roma orphanage, the most disadvantaged kids in this country. The reaction of the liberal media in Hungary was "why don't you give money instead?"
This tends to turn a fellow rather cynical.
> If today gay men ally with working class people, it will generate an ideology that they are both fighting for equality.
Do you have evidence for this? Particularly for the word "generate". How do you rule out that (for example) the gay men are following an ideology of gay rights, workers one of workers' rights, and no one is really confusing the two? Everyone can admit that a certain party will do things for the (not conflicting, but not identical either) two ideologies, and that it represents an alliance of convenience.
I feel that you haven't proved that there are only two big contrived ideologies, but only that whatever ideologies exist must lend their support to one of two parties.
The reasons for the two party state are (IMO) fundamental to political decision making, and not a sinister attempt to undermine all ideologies. I've written about this recently: https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/the-two-party-system-is-all-we-have
That seems pretty obvious to me. Looking at the last 20 years of US politics would show you the same thing. It's especially true in the US because the two party system means that everyone ends up divided into two big tents in a fairly arbitrary and ever-shifting manner.
Yeah, the coalitions are historical accidents, and the ideology is a post-hoc rationalization.
Also, in long term coalitions regroup when one side gets too strong, so the others need to unite against them. For example, a few centuries ago, religion was powerful, so libertarians and socialists united in opposition (French revolution). Then during socialism, socialists were powerful, so libertarians and religious people opposed them together. These days (this is about Eastern Europe) we have a free-market society, so the religious people and socialists are united against it.
It is also funny to observe how the people "on the right side of history" regroup. A few decades ago, I remember how female genital mutilation was used as a #1 example that men are evil. Today if you mention it, you will probably be cancelled for islamophobia. Similarly, no one would dare criticize the African countries that have death penalty for male homosexuality.
But this is not a new thing. It was always like this. The difference is that everyone remembers the big changes that happened during their lifetime. (That's why they say "don't trust anyone over 30" -- those old folks remember how today's best allies used to be enemies in the past, and vice versa.)
In other words, people always vote for what they think is in their best interests, but the perceived intersections of perceived interests sometimes changes (perceptibly).
AI art: I get a very strong phobic reaction, literally shaking if I see three arms or six fingers. When do you think this will be fixed and what can I take as a strong evidence that it is now safe for me to play with image generation?
It will only be fixed with a technological change. (Not just progress, change, you'll need to wait for a credible signal that someone's image generator incorporates and builds upon a model of physical world. As long as all we have is bare diffusion models, stay away.)
Apparently, around 1850 it was a tradition in rural America to show up at the editor's office with a horse whip when a newspaper printed something negative about you. I had first heard of it from Mark Twain, but I thought it was in the book because of its singularity - but today I found another reference to the practice in a history book. Strange times.
So the question becomes, what's the modern equivalent of a horse whip? I think there's an argument to be made that it's a gearshift. But it could also be a can of gasoline.
Insofar as the horsewhip was considered socially acceptable to bring to bear despite its questionable justice, I would guess the modern equivalent is online mob incitement.
But that doesn't affect your vehicle's rate of travel at all.
Unless your vehicle is powered by the tears of haters...
That'd be the throttle cable, then.
The verb form of the word ‘throttle’ could imply something more menacing than a horse whip. ‘Throttle cable’ could be interpreted as ‘garrote’.
Historically, gangs of youths around 1950 would break off car antennae to use as whips.
Horsewhip? Amateurs. In France, it was a pistol duel. Source: The Count Of Monte Cristo by Dumas.
Has anyone succeeded at making themselves more agreeable?
Yep. Although I ran right smack into the opposite problem of "putting up with bad stuff for too long". One small lesson there is that not everyone who wants you to be more agreeable actually has your best interests in mind. :-(
Yes, after I realized that women really dislike it when someone is disagreeable outside of specific situations. The internet is now my main outlet for my disagreeableness.
I worked with a guy nicknamed Marco at B. Dalton #6 in Newport Beach, California for a time. Marco was from Singapore, and was garrulous and talkative and a master of small talk. He'd chat up people while he worked the periodicals display, laughing while he worked. I try to imitate Marco. The trivial is important: traffic, weather, pop culture, bad TV shows, all of it. Marco could talk about anything, laughing as he did so, as if to say, Isn't it all ridiculous?
So I'm trying to overcome my bias against trivia, and talk to strangers. The worst that could happen is the person might not share my cheerfulness, and I'd have to avoid feeling offended. Maybe they're having a rough time.
It’s so easy to make someone’s day. A smile, a kind word, a small compliment. It costs nothing but a bit of good will.
And sometimes people are so emotionally exhausted from Saving the World, they automatically assume the worst. (Silence is complicity!)
If I laugh about the weather and they don't want to join me, that's fine. They can deliver a diatribe about global warming, white supremacy and male toxicity. I can take it. I've heard it before. But even crusaders need to lighten up now and then. They might even stoop to answer the question, How about this fuckin' weather?
Sometimes they forget to act illiberal.
lol. I cracked up the guy at the corner convenience store this morning with a small joke about the weather. He was talking about it being too hot and humid to duck out for a cigarette without working up a sweat.
“Yep, State Fair weather for sure.”
In Minnesota the fair runs in the last week in August. Always toasty - correction: the more accurate adjective would be ‘soupy’ - by local standards. The ‘corn sweat’ adds a lot of humidity to the mix. High 80s in SLC is no big deal as long the air remains dry. It’s not the heat it’s the enthalpy
The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
I feel like I'm extremely disagreeable with the idiots I have to see in real life, but only a little disagreeable with the nice smart people on this blog.
How do they measure disagreeableness anyway? Maybe I am just as disagreeable on here, but it expresses itself as trying to outdo people with fancy arguments.
If I look up a personality test I get vague statements like "I feel comfortable around people." and "I have a kind word for everyone." Seems like psuedo-science to be honest; they might as well ask me "rate your agreeableness (which is definitely a real thing) on a scale of 1-10".
(To make it meta) I've started off trying to give practical advice, and ended up doing something that looks like attacking the concept of "agreeable" -- which could even look like attacking you. Would you say I'm being disagreeable or agreeable? If I'm keeping a tally so I can fill in a personality test accurately, should I count these as kind words or not? Does it make a difference if I add the disclaimer: "I'm really trying to be nice and help you"
I'm really trying to be nice and help you.
I can handle verbal nonsense in small doses with a smile and afterwards a shrug.
There is one person in my life that is problematic. An in-law who is a bona fide specimen of Dunning Kruger syndrome at work. She has a complete lack of self awareness as the kicker. I have to do some serious tongue biting around her.
> The only thing I can imagine working is surrounding yourself with less idiots and more people you respect.
Also, lower your expectations. I learned to expect people to say the most stupid shit, so when they do, I just nod politely and try to change the topic.
Basically, I choose the set of topics I want to debate with them. For example if they are the parents of my children's schoolmates, I want to discuss the school and the after-school activities. If I can talk to them about that, fine. If they privately believe in homeopathy, I don't mind, as long as they don't suggest to teach that in school or something. I remind myself that I talk to them for a purpose, and the purpose is not to make them rationalists.
> How do they measure disagreeableness anyway?
For me, it's (1) whether you can choose your battles, or you need to argue about every little detail that rubs you the wrong way, and (2) when we argue, whether you make your statements calmly and politely, or you raise your voice and your physiology gets ready for a fight.
I succeeded in making my self more disagreeable. Personality change happens gradually. I didn’t notice for years, then I suddenly realized I needed to tone my disagreeable down a bit.
If you say so.
[Bug report] I currently cant log out from this site. Clicking that field just reloads the page with me still logged in. Normal substack works as intended.
I usually write sci-fi and fantasy, but when I visited Israel on early October, 2023, I realized I had to document what was going around me. The result is a documentation of the mental shift that took place on the Israeli side of the fence, in a character driven format. It's not very political (naturally, the subject can't be avoided) and I think for that reason stands out in the discourse.
You can read it here:
https://aaronbenelli.com/im-fine-all-things-considered/
Two chapters in, this is great writing. Thank you for sharing. I forwarded it to some friends who liked it as well.
One small editorial note: “Spielplatz” is a playground, not an amusement park
The part about coming together reminds me of Sakharov's description of the war mentality quieting the inner resistance to Soviet authorities during his time developing the H-bomb under Beria. (His autobiography is fascinating and sensitive, if you can find a copy). The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all. In the middle period the citizenry were almost completely numb to Stalin's crimes and their own material deprivation, and the propagandists tried to extend that as long after the war as possible. His descriptions of his own "war psychology," prolonged after the war by continued deprivation and the strictly militaristic/prison-like environment of the atomic weapons research facility are especially striking as he handles casts of uranium he knows hundreds of innocent prisoners/effective slaves died in the production of.
I'm sure our own war-starters understand this effect very well... :(
P.S. "elbow" means the same thing when used as a verb in English
>The Soviet Union went from having no social fabric (widespread secret policing will do that), to having one based around solidarity against the Nazis, and then slowly went back to having no social fabric at all.
Wait a bit! They also went from having a really bad economy / manufacturing to making T-34's and Shturmoviks which were pretty good weapons to slowly falling behind again until the economy disintegrated.
This is generally contributed to central planning, but maybe social fabric played a role? Such as levels of corruption?
Also, incentives. Stalin really had a thing for getting people shot for "sabotage", Brezhnev did not, economic managers who screwed up just got a different but still high job.
Also, central planning. I have a story here. Mao was really afraid of a nuclear war, and thus accidentally did the correct-ish thing within that framework: manufacturing was dispersed, small factories under the local, not central governments, very little central control. That is close enough to a market and the GDP was going well even before Deng's reforms - those reforms just amounted letting those local governments make deals with foreign investors. I mean everybody says socialism is fine on the small scale just does not scaled up. Well it was exactly that, small scale. Of course this happened after the disastrous Great Leap, not during.
Yes, the social fabric woven by the war absolutely improved production - at least according to Sakharov. Intellectuals went from feeling like slaves, to the defenders of their homeland, and then quickly or slowly back to feeling like slaves again over the course of Stalin's dictatorship. In the interim, free-thinkers took initiative within the limits of the system.
Thank you for reading as far as Leaders!
That dynamic sounds painfully familiar. I'm always surprised by how limited the tool box of corrupt governments is, and by how it is still so effective. One main difference that might be worth pointing out is that I don't think Bibi wants the country unified as much as he just aims to make any sort of protest seem divisive and illegitimate.
P.S. thanks! I've run this through a native speaking English editor, and she didn't know the term. But then again she is Canadian so...
What's the difference between having the country unified and making any protest seem divisive and illegitimate? Nobody will feel like dissidents are outsiders if they don't feel like they're inside of something. It's not exactly logical, but I remember how thoroughly questions about the Iraq war were coupled to discomfort with overt expressions of patriotism here in the US.
Thanks, this is great, I'm hooked. It's hard to find people who can properly capture the feelings of a country for outsiders. Expats and tourists typically focus on tedious expat and tourist things, locals are usually fish who don't notice the water they're swimming in. You're in the sweet spot and you exploit it perfectly.
Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment!
I agree. Being between cultures comes with a lot of disadvantages, but when it comes to writing, it allows to see things that are invisible to both visitors and locals.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts, if you decide to keep reading. I just got a bunch of chapters back from my editor and I should upload them to the website soon.
Thanks for enriching the topic with on-the-ground coverage.
> some guy who threatened to kill me on the street because he thought I was an Arab
Why did the guy think you're an Arab? Did you criticize commonly held assumptions among Israeli Jews (who, I assume, you're not, or at least didn't grow up among) in an interview? Or is it something about your appearance?
Thank you for clicking!
I walk around with a big black beard, and am relatively dark skinned for a Jewish Israeli, which I am. If I'm honest, calling it an interview is a bit of a stretch. Mainly I tried to avoid getting into a violent conflict.
Are there Israelis who don't know about the Mizrahim?
Hey, the people interested in the topic should be the ones thanking you. It's always good to have more info than less. I appreciate all the tons of effort spent, and I appreciate the focus on people and neutrality on the war.
> I walk around with a big black beard
> relatively dark skinned
Huh, quite ironic how your attacker thought those were the distinguishing features of Arabs. Laziness is disappointing.
Hopefully no one repeated his folly.
People, what do you do when you have an extreme idea, the kind of idea Andrew Tate would have, but you still think it is true?
There is a huge gap in how many people watch men's sports and women's sports.
That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war (two teams on a green "battle"field...) and partially the usual part of physical dominance competition between men (boxing, wrestling), these are viewed the most, discus throwing is viewed less, but it still correlates to throwing a strong punch. Running has been a huge part of military training since forever.
There is something... unreal about watching women box, because it does not correlate to how women usually behave. Which is why it is only watched when there is a controversy.
All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating. Notice that in these sports they wear pretty clothes and make-up.
Athletes rarely talk about their personal lives, but I think it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer.
So there are a small number of masculine women like doing masculine things, but most women are not like that, only 15% of women watch women's sports.
But what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere: most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks) and so on...
I don't want to think like that. Since I joined the kink community on FetLife, I have seen that a lot of things that are traditionally gendered in narrow ways are in fact not, there are huge body builder guys who are super submissive, muscular women whose kink is defeating men in erotic wrestling and so on, so many different individual things.
My journey has been:
--notice that both sides of the Culture War have problems
--stop identifying as either side (this happened naturally, I don't remember a conscious decision)
--devote myself to resolving/dissolving the whole thing, without being needlessly mean to people on either side
Any solutions obviously have to wrestle with both the fact that many think our perception of sport has been distorted, and the fact that many think Andrew Tate is an asshole.
Simple things like inserting the words "many think" in the proceeding sentence are often enough to avoid being partisan or mean.
I can give more details about what I'm trying to do (and why I have the hubris to think the Culture War can be ended) if anyone's interested.
As for your more specific question, I think the obvious answer is: play and watch whatever sport you enjoy, and try to do so in a way that doesn't send strong political signals.
Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
It's a lot more common for girls to participate in sports at lower levels. One of my friends in highschool was into soccer, and she didn't seem particularly "masculine". (Also, since then she married a guy, divorced, married another guy, and had a baby. So not exactly lesbian).
>Looking at the very top of a competitive field gives you a distorted view.
Yup, the thin tail of a (typically) gaussian distribution.
"I don't want to think like that."
This didn't really help the Pope with heliocentrism, you know.
Also, there's a reason the "kink community" used to be called just perverts or deviants: their instincts are perverted from the ordinary, they deviate form the norm, are flipped on their heads, in various ways. I don't say this with any malice or judgment, but it's pretty much definitional that the people you're exposed to in such environments are an unrepresentative minority. Otherwise they wouldn't need their own community. More than anything else their existence proves the rule.
OK but this is really becoming mainstream and popular fast. So fast that many in the community are dismayed over all the people pouring in, not learning from experienced people, likely don't even know any, and transforming everything for the worse. Just yesterday I had to argue with someone saying kink is just sexual foreplay and kink without sex does not exist. That's incredible, I mean even mainstream media has now articles like female journalist visits kinbaku rope Top, gets tied up, and they are not fucking OF COURSE, but this is really what the newbies think...
Women's MMA is a thing. UFC has done more for women's participation than almost any other sports organization I can think of. There are no separate events, both men's and women's fights go on during the same night, and women regularly headline UFC events. This is one of those weird dynamics where people who are not into the sport assume that we only like to look at "scantly clad women prancing in the cage", and everyone actually interested in the sport, is, like, "STFU these women are real fighters with great skills".
To be completely honest though, any heterosexual guy would be lying if he claimed he *hates* the scantily clad women prancing. It certainly doesn't hurt, all other things being constant.
You can't escape hormones, or I can't at any rate.
Oh sure, it's just really not the prime motivation, at least for those really into the sport. There are so many other avenues for seeing scantily clad women!
Most sports at the Olympic level of competition of selecting for the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that has a genetic advantage at that sport (taller, stronger, faster, whatever).
In the case of most women's sports, this is going to end up selecting for the most not-traditionally-femine women in the entire world. Totally unsurprising that a llot of them have intersex conditions. But even if you were to bar intersex persons from competition, it would still be a matter of searching for the most not-traditionally-feminine woman in the entire world who just squeaks in under whatever conditions they have set. So you get the woman who has the highest testosterone level in the entire world without actually being intersex (as defined by the comittee) and people will still complain, You will probably end up finding new intersex conditions. e.g. it seems to currently be a matter of some debate whethefr polycystic ovary syndrome is intersex. So, you're going to get someone with PCOS competing in the olym;pics...
My point is about people who watch, not compete.
AN aside on Amateur Radio compettions. (For the uninitiated, the name of the game here is to score points by successfully getting a radio message to the other contestants). Like all competitions that have people compete in seriously, there have to be clearly specified rules, and where you have rules you will have some one finding an edge case that is technically allowed by the rules and which gives them a minor competetive advantage.
Th Amateur Radio version of this is someone, at enormous expense, getting themselves and a radio transmitter on to some rocky outcrop in the middle of the pacific ocean (normal population: zero humans, and a flock of sea birds) and claiming that this rock totally counts as a country for Amateur Radio competition purposes. There may be arguments of the form: is that rock even above the water at high tide?,
In Olympic boxing, it appears that the rules edge case is people who might possibly have intersex conditions.
You seem to imply with your wording ("claiming that this rock totally counts as a country") that there is some dishonesty on the part of the organizers of these DXpeditions, when in fact there is not. Those rocks do count as countries. The ops generally make sure that the question is settled by the contesting officials *before* going out there.
This doesn't invalidate your point. These are edge cases, as you say.
It should be noted, btw, that these expeditions are not always (or even usually?) done in the context of contesting. Some operators venture out to these tiny islands with all of their gear and a bunch of batteries at great expense at times when there is no contest going on, just for the sheer thrill of being the one station every ham in the world wants to work. And, I assume, because they enjoy the challenge of handling the inevitable massive days-long pileup of stations trying to call them.
Yes, you're right that, as a technical point, those expedition are not usually for the major contests but instead so that people can claim awards - such as DXCC - for radio contacting them.
(Expeditions for contets are usually to slightly less exotic and expensive locations)
And yeah, completely allowed within the rules as written. But also subject to people going "the ARRL should update the rules to rule out that uninhabited and partially submerged pacific atoll." or indeed "someone should check that KIngman Reef is actually above the water at high tide, because it isnt allowed if it isnt"
And I am expecting that an attempt by Olympic committee to rule out intersex people would run into as many diverse edge cases as the ARRL gets with assorted rocks in the Pacific ocean, the sovereign Military Order of Malta (has UN observer status, apparently), the monastery at Mount Athos (surprise! one of the monks was a radio ham), the British military base at Akrotiri (so, OK, my group went on a dxpedition to ZC4, so I'm as guilty as anyone) ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingman_Reef
"Kingman Reef (/ˈkɪŋmən/) is a largely submerged, uninhabited, triangle-shaped reef, geologically an atoll, 9.0 nmi (20 km) east-west and 4.5 nmi (8 km) north-south,[2] in the North Pacific Ocean, roughly halfway between the Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa."
This seems to be mixing together a lot of different claims:
1. Most men/women like to compete in a particular type of sport
2. Most men/women like to watch their gender compete in a particular type of sport.
3. Most men/women like to watch the opposite gender compete in a particular type of sport.
4. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how they want romantic partners to behave IRL.
5. What men/women like to watch on TV is an indicator of how men/women in general *should* behave IRL.
All of these claims are describing slightly different things - for instance, if both men and women don't watch women's sports, then that seems less like a claim about "what women want" and more a claim about what the audience in general wants. Maybe they want to see the very strongest and fastest without any qualifications and that makes men's sports more appealing, maybe "battlefield" sports are easier to get into than sports with judges and complicated aesthetic nuances, etc.
Also, consider: If 15% of women are into something, and you have 20 IRL friends, then probably 1-2 of your female friends are interested in it. 15% isn't *that* unusual, it's common enough that you'll encounter the exceptions without really needing to look for them. Which is important, if you're trying to spin some sort of broad stereotype out of these claims.
(Some of the exceptions might be even bigger - I hear that women's soccer (certainly a "battlefield" sport) is very popular in the US, because the US women's national team is more successful and medal-winning than the men's team.)
Lastly, aside from #5, none of these claims are *normative.* Nobody can take away your "man card" for not acting according to the stereotype, and as your FetLife experience points out, there's a huge variety of interests out there. Who cares if most guys aren't into dancing - if you're into dancing and your girlfriend is into dancing, then what does anyone else's opinion matter?
Well, for instance, when you are in the stage of trying to find a partner, then big statistical patterns matter. But also, the truth is, if a lot of people like or dislike something, it inevitably becomes a social norm. This sucks, but this is how it works. People want to be "normal", they want to "fit" in, and they also have an unfortunate tendency to the intolerant towards those who do not.
Here is I think how it works. I think most people behave ethically, like not assaulting people, not for ethical reasons, but because it is a social norm. So the reality is IMHO that if someone violates social norms in an ethical way wearing like funny clothing, there is a higher chance that they would also violate norms in an unethical way like assaulting you. I think this is the root of all intolerance. (Or perhaps it is only intolerant people who think this way and then they project it.)
Yes, I think this is exactly how it works. Some people violate stupid norms, but they explain to you that they only do it because those norms are stupid, and you agree with them and think they are brave. The next day they steal your stuff or they rape you, you get angry, but they explain to you that the concept of ownership or self-ownership is also stupid. And everyone else is like: "Hey, what exactly did you expect? You were already clearly warned that they violate the social norms, but you didn't listen, because you believed that you were smarter than everyone else."
It doesn't necessarily mean that if someone violates one norm, they are going to violate *all* norms. But it means that they are very likely to also violate *some* other norms... and you don't know which ones! (You may think that you know, but you are probably just projecting your own values on them.) Most likely, the actual answer is something like "whatever feels like a good idea at the moment."
<quote>All popular women's sports are forms of dancing, ribbon gymnastics, figure skating.</quote>
I think you have a recency bias because the olympics just happened. These sports only get popular once every 4 years. Tennis and soccer are probably the most popular women's sports (at least in the US), and both are played on green fields.
Yeah. I also think it's not a coincidence that those sports don't require exceptional size, or strength, or strange body shapes, but instead reward good all-around fitness and cardio health.
> I don't want to think like that.
I don't think you have a choice. One of the arguments against Christianity and Islam is that they taboo **thoughts**. This is innovative, the history of religion, even Judaism, revolved mainly about taboo-ing practices. You're not allowed to *do* this, you're not allowed those *rituals*. Christianity and Islam are unique in how they make you a sinner without even doing anything, if you just sat there and thought "man, a human female giving birth without sex sounds hella sus", you just sinned a grave sin.
I think there is a general purpose lesson here: to the extent that any ideology or way of belief **requires** an unconvinced person to act as if they're convinced or risk being condemned, this ideology or way of belief is wrong and religion-like. It could still make true descriptive claims, or (morally-) good normative claims, just like Christianity and Islam both do, but it's fundamentally wrong/misguided/unfair to normatize **thought** itself.
I think much of what you said is wrong, and I'm going to point out in a bit how I think it's wrong, but I wanted to call out how "I'm afraid of thinking this way" isn't a thing, it shouldn't be a thing, and anybody who thinks it's a thing or should be a thing should be laughed out of discourse. At most, you could say "I'm afraid of telling people that I think this way", or "I'm afraid to put into writing that I think this way", both of those are fine, but putting taboo on thoughts is - not only unfair - but really "not even wrong", that is: nonsensical.
> That is because sporting competitions are partially simulated war
Yes, that's a useful and not-very-wrong way to look at sports: as ritualized violence, or ritualized rhythms that imply violence.
But notice how the "ritualized" qualifier here is doing an awful amount of work. Chess is ritualized violence, it's based - so the popular genealogy goes - on Medieval Indian board game that was itself a simulacrum of Medieval warfare. Although Chess in the popular imagination is a symbol of how *unviolent* and nerdy a guy is, it's based on war in a quite straightforward sense that not even Football can claim.
A lot of things are like this. Racing: the machine is doing all the implied violence, the human's job is to guide it carefully so that its rhythmic violence-implying movement doesn't turn into literal violence that will tear the driver apart. E-sports, a billion(s)-dollar [1] sports industry: the violence is a bunch of voltages traditionally named "0" and "1", inhabiting the screens and computer memories and network cables, and the human's job is pushing the bits around through some interface to make spectacular-looking violence or implication-of-violence.
I think this is an important point to make because when you liken sports to war, you implicitly assert that women are not good at it by its very nature, since women are bad at war (if war is very narrowly conceived as physical fighting, which hasn't been true since the invention of firearms.). Sports are **ritualized war**, and the ritualization/sublimation can go very *very* far into making it very unlike war. Board games, racing, and esports taken together probably eclipse Football in audience and/or profits, possibly more. And I'm not even a sports enthusiasts so there could be more examples.
> what troubles me that if we take this seriously, we arrive to the Manosphere
I don't get this assertion at all. The "Manosphere" is a lot of things to a lot of people, it evolved through time and emphasized different things to different audiences. Its claims about the fundamental nature of human males and females are just a subset of the total beliefs involved, and even this subset encompasses a lot more than "Men Physically Strong, Women Physically Weak". At minimum, the Manosphere makes some normative claims about women and men, that men (who are X) are morally superior, and women (who are Y) are morally inferior. You can't get to this from a purely empirical observation of male and female sports performance at all.
> most men are essentially something like boxers (dominant aggressive alphas), most women are essentially something like dancers (pretty seducers valued for their looks)
You can only get to this if you assume that athletes are representative of their gender. Maybe that's true in the negative sense, i.e. that the absence of aggressive women's sports is perhaps evidence that women aren't really that aggressive or dominant compared to men. But it's not true in the positive sense: the presence of dominant aggressive alphas in boxing says nothing about how common those traits are in men, so you're not allowed to use "most" here, anymore that you're allowed to say "Most men are impressive drivers" after you have seen Michael Schumacher driving.
But even if that inference was valid, that's just an empirical issue that has nothing to do with the Manosphere.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/490522/global-esports-market-revenue/
Thank you!
1) some thoughts would be very literally harmful if adopted on a large scale. e.g. "Hitler was right".
2) by Manosphere thinking I mean linking the male gender with aggressivity and a competitive spirit in an essentialist way and saying women are the opposite and probably like aggressively competitive men because they are the real men. Not about strength.
3) The athletes are not representative but the people watching are. I tried to express this in the comment, saying how women boxers tend to look like those people in my social circles who identify as non-binary, except of course athletes competing in gender-segregated sports will not say that.
Quit worrying about it. This is a non-issue that has little to do with gender concepts and a lot to do with maximally pleasing displays of movement and who does what kind better. NBA players can jump higher and throw further. Rhythmic gymnasts can bend more directions. That's all there is to it.
Or put another way, there is only one sport in the Olympics in which men and women compete head-to-head, and no one has ever meaningfully tried to have a conversation about which gender is better at it, because in equestrian events, the most interesting thing to look at is *the horse,* not the rider.
Sure, but different displays are pleasing for women and men apparently. I tried and mostly failed to convey this, that sports are really not about the athletes but the people watching it. I am not surprised people are looking at the horse. Some racehorses are way more famous than any jockey. But this is precisely about this. People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
> People like to watch men fight and watch women dance.
While there is a trend here, I don't think this is nearly as universal as you think it is, nor that the trend is significant enough for this self-flagellation.
As @1123581321 mentioned, women's MMA is pretty darn popular! Joe Rogan (who, don't forget, is also a professional commentator) has said several times that many aficionados/practitioners of MMA feel the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power. I, a woman, casually like MMA while being actively bored by most sports, and I'm equally interested in the men's and women's fights, and my father and brother feel the same.
Also, QUICK, off the top of your head, name the most legendary ballet dancer you can think of!
...
Was it a woman?
Or was it Mikhail Baryshnikov?
For what it's worth, I've been on Fetlife a very long time. I currently moderate one of the largest regional groups on the site, one which was Fet-famous in the Before Times for dumpster fire flame wars in the comments section, and occasionally has a good conflagration even today. There is a *tremendous* amount of both self-important navel-gazing and ideological scolding amongst the non-OnlyFans users of the site. You can safely ignore almost all of it.
> the women's fights are often more enjoyable to watch than the men's fights due to the higher reliance on skills and strategy rather than sheer power.
I've heard this about a few other sports, too: that the modern professional men's sports have selected so heavily for strength and size and power, that they've lost the flavor that the older amateur versions had, but that we can still find that rhythm in the women's leagues.
I am unfortunately not cultured enough for the ballet question, but the most famous non-ballet dancer I heard about was Fred Astaire. So good point I guess.
LOL, Fet. I am there for two reasons. It is the likeliest place online to find local Masochists. Despite everything Baku is saying, it can work like a dating site if people are not stupid about it. He says it is Facebook for kinksters, and it is, but if I want a partner who is into mountain biking, I will look into local mountain biking Facebook groups. He is saying it because today people tend to confuse the difference between dating (getting to know people for checking compatibility) and the "wassup, netfix and chill, wink wink?" stupid hookup attempt stuff. The second reason are some extremely good Writers. _Pavlov_ , owlfinch, AncillaL, SpokenInWhispers, RopeTigerDaddy, decibel etc. The people around these circles are remarkably good at actually not engaging in dumpster fires. They manage to strike a good balance between the overly aggressively woke and its opposite, and generally treat people with empathy. They are aware of the precise academic meanings of the words the overly aggressively woke constantly misuse (privilege and so on), and use them sparingly. Some of the best social commentary I have ever read was there.
I think it would be helpful to clearly state what it is that you are trying to avoid. But the fact that the opinion, which you have arrived at by hard, logical work, coincides with that of unliked people, doesn't say much about the opinion. I agree with the Unabomber on many things, I can't just deny that because I don't like the light it shines on me.
As your argument itself, it's my understanding that many people agree with you. If I could suggest a way to strengthen the stracture, though, I would completely avoid assumptions, like here:
"it is not a bad guess to assume a lot of women boxers are lesbian and if they were not competing in strictly gender separated sports, they might identify as genderequeer."
What you're saying may or may not be true, but it stands on nothing aside from your gut feeling. Same with "Something unreal about watchin women box".
Also, I might be misunderstanding, but your last paragraph seems to contradict everything you said before? You assume women adhere to the same gender roles you expect them to adhere to, rely on your intuition, but then say that people often upset your expectation. How does that coincide?
At which age should I tell my kids about these harsh truth of life?
1/ Death is inevitable. His parents, his pets,.. will eventually die
2/ Most animals don't communicate with human
3/ Most animals don't befriend with other species
4/ Wildlife is mostly about hunting and being eaten
Note: My 4-years-old kid still tries to befriend with animals, still believe cartoon animals love each other
I started writing you a response but it got too long, so I've turned it into a post:
https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/lying-to-children
TLDR: I think death only maintains its status as a "harsh truth" and scary, to the precise extent that our parents tried to "protect us" from it.
Why don't you think they will figure all that out on their own?
Anecdotally, we had a dog die when my son was ~2.5 YO, and then his grandmother (wife's mother) died recently with him at 4.5 YO. He took both events better than expected, and processed his emotions fairly normally. The part that was hardest was that he will go up to strangers and tell them about how his dog and grandmother died, and ask a lot of questions that will be uncomfortable.
Children in previous generations grew up much more aware of human and animal mortality — were they worse off for it? Of course, you'll have to deal with your own discomfort when you explain these things to your child. Lots of people use the "Granddad/Spot is in heaven" get out of jail card though to soften the existential crisis that a child might feel. I don't think I was aware of my own mortality until I was around six. I'm not sure I could have comprehended that idea before that age. I remember running to my grandmother for comfort saying, "I don't want to die!" She hugged me, and said, "Don't worry, it's a long way off."
My wife and I took a pretty hard stance against lying, both from our children and also *to* our children. I would first advise to not start, or stop, telling your children things that are not true in the first place.
As for the timing, it depends a lot on the kids involved. If possible, I wouldn't go out of my way to sit them down and explain this stuff, but also don't sugarcoat reality when it comes. If a pet dies, let them know the pet died. Have a funeral, make it okay to be real. If an human dies in your circle, consider allowing them to go to the funeral. Don't hide it.
The other animal stuff, they'll figure out eventually unless you're reinforcing the thoughts. As long as you or other trusted adults don't try to convince them of the untruths you are worried about, that will come with time.
Is death inevitable? Only about 93% of people who have ever existed have died. https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
Some organisms, such as redwood trees, can live for thousands of years. https://www.visitredwoods.com/listing/redwood-facts/186/
Medical technology is improving all the time. It is possible (no promises) that some people may not die.
If only kids could learn statistics and probability *before* they learn about the harshness of life and death, we would never have to make any absolute claims to them.
Anywho, I'll happily take a 93% implied probability bet on death with you :)
I enjoy informing my wife, regularly and with great authority, "I WILL NEVER DIE" but I don't think she believes me.
I'm sorry that I can't provide something more helpful, but I think the issue isn't so much how to teach them the harsh truths, as breaking the lies we've already told them. Kids in Mongolian villages play with chickens and then they watch them getting slaughtered and eat them. The problem, I think, is teaching a child that all animals are friends in the first place.
The trouble is you are trying to prove the absence of something and that is tricky enough with a grown-up. How can you prove a dead pet won't get up and walk around? How can you prove the cat won't start talking? Experience, ultimately. They will develop a picture of human life which is rich enough that the difference between humans and animals [also trains, buses!] will become clear.
In further news of current LLM capability, a close paraphrase of a recent attempt at using Google Gemini:
[me] "Hello. Can you give me seven names of politicians outside America who would likely be known to Americans?"
[Gemini] "I can't talk about politics at this time."
Let me try this. Seven politicians outside America. We've got.
1. JFK when he visited Germany.
2. George H. W. Bush when he threw up on China.
3. Donald Trump in North Korea
4. Hillary Clinton getting angry that non-Americans weren't up to date on American politics.
5. Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
6. Ulysses Grant when he invaded the Confederacy
7. Julius Caesar
"Donald Trump in North Korea" -- Trump visited North Korea? When was that?
"Hillary Clinton getting angry that non-Americans weren't up to date on American politics" -- what is this in reference to?
"Ulysses Grant when he invaded the Confederacy" -- this is a dumb piece of trolling.
June 30, 2019, Trump walked about 20 steps into the DMZ and shook hands with Kim.
Interesting, I did not remember that.
George HW Bush (the best president of the last 50 years) threw up on Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, not "China"
That vomiting into Miyazawa’s lap wasn’t at all prudent. (Dana Carvey doing GHWB impersonation reference)
I can easily imagine a human giving that answer after being ordered not to talk about politics.
I promise that I did not misrepresent my question in any way, and that I asked it within the last 8 hours.
The response from Gemini is abbreviated - it was longer, but it should be easy to reproduce by continuing to ask about politics. It had [the equivalent of] "form letter" written all over it. I do not believe I have misrepresented the sense.
---
Ah, there's a history feature, so I can reproduce the exact prompt and response:
> Hello. Can you give me the names and titles of seven politicians outside America whose names would likely be known to Americans?
> I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now. I'm trained to be as accurate as possible but I can make mistakes sometimes. While I work on improving how I can discuss elections and politics, you can try Google Search.
---
It shouldn't really be positive or negative about any of them; I didn't ask for descriptions.
Is it possible there's an election coming up in a country that prohibits certain kinds of election-related reporting? The response it would have given you may have tripped up on a particular name. I believe the UK has such laws, but I don't know if there's any kind of election that may have hit the filter.
This is surely because there's an election coming up in the United States, where all kinds of election-related reporting are allowed, but Google is terrified anyway. It turns out that being legally allowed and being actually allowed aren't the same thing. Note that they just lost an antitrust case against them.
Note also that Gemini doesn't do anything that might be considered "reporting".
Hi everyone! There's been lots discussion on here recently about Nietzsche's slave morality / master morality distinction. As recently as three days ago I was making comments explaining what the distinction "really means". I've just done a complete U-turn and think it's almost definitely nonsense -- basically grounded in the value/cost distinction, which is easy to undermine. I'd really appreciate it if someone would read over my short-ish essay and give criticism...
https://open.substack.com/pub/gayasarainbow/p/the-two-party-system-is-all-we-have?
It's not nonsense, your model is just missing self/other to go along with benefit/cost. Slave morality is about avoiding costs to others, and master morality is about pursuing benefits for yourself. I think Nietzsche was mainly wrong about his accusations moreso than his archetypes, which has caused endless confusion about their definitions; Jesus fits the bill for his neither-master-nor-slave concept (he fought with authorities, lead others, but ultimately sacrificed himself for the good of those who did nothing for him) but Christianity got stuck with the "slave morality" label because Nietzsche was really commenting on the failures of state-influenced obedience theology, and perhaps on the moral failings of individuals he observed. On the other hand, the assoctiation between master morality and ancient heros like Gilgamesh are pretty accurate, so people are less confused about what that idea meant.
Nineteenth century state-Christianity doesn't really exist in the English-speaking world today so people have no idea what the man was writing about. Just try to imagine what Ivan the Terrible would want his subjects to think God wanted them to think. :-)
By the way, the neither-master-nor-slave archetype is deeply ingrained in American culture in the form of the responsible yeoman farmer.
Thanks for the feedback.
> Slave morality is about avoiding costs to others, and master morality is about pursuing benefits for yourself.
If I'm right that the cost/benefit distinction is only a matter of perspective (roughly, because we can always in principle flip signs and rewrite (Benefit - Cost) as (Cost - Benefit)), then you need to substitute neutral language for "avoiding costs to" and "pursuing benefits for". So it becomes
> Slave morality is about value to others, and master morality is about value to yourself.
But this just flattens it out into the distinction Altruism vs. Egoism.
The rest of your comment is based on the assumption that the distinction can be upheld and you know how to apply it. So I'll leave it alone until you clarify the first part.
Utilitarianism equates avoiding costs with pursuing benefits, but human psychology does not. A true moral theory might have to comply with the equation of cost avoidance to benefit obtainment, but a moral theory defined to be criticized does not have to be self-consistent or consistent with utilitarian principles. In other words, yes, master and slave morality were both supposed to be wrong! They both represent observations of real-world thinking, not ideals.
Slave morality is altruism combined with overwhelming passivity or timidity, to the point that you can't go out and do any good. The latter is a psychological affect and is projected out when you frame it as a purely ethical theory in the modern sense of ethics.
> a moral theory defined to be criticized does not have to be self-consistent or consistent with utilitarian principles
I'm not interested in whether a particular moral theory is consistent. I want to know, when someone makes a political move like "your views are based on slave morality", can they support this, or is it just name calling (e.g. a nasty name for altruism)? Your answer seems to be, it's supported by primitive human psychology. But so is all name calling!
> Slave morality is altruism combined with overwhelming passivity or timidity
I don't think the active/passive distinction holds up any better than cost/benefit. I have another post about it: substack.com/@gayasarainbow/p-147588081
Timidity is not likely to hold up either. You've already given a good counter-example yourself, in the form of Jesus. Was he timid or brave? I would like to say, anyone calling him timid or brave (as praise or insult) is appealing to something in human psychology, but still also just name calling.
Within your broad definition of name calling, some names must be accurate. The accusation of "slave morality," is to say, "your moral compass might be functional, but your courage is broken." It is not a philosophical objection, it's a pragmatic one - an objection to a person's individual, physical capacity to shoulder a public responsibility.
What looks like the "philosophy of slave morality," is a combination of true observations about altruism, combined with post-hoc justifications for passivity rooted in emotion.
You could look at it this way. If you decline to hire someone to move boxes out of your house on the basis of their being unable to lift them, and they try to justify it on the basis of their theory of super-gravity, you can say, "but you can't lift the boxes!" without opening yourself to the criticism that you're not engaging with their scientific arguments.
> The accusation of "slave morality," is to say, "your moral compass might be functional, but your courage is broken."
This isn't how I've seen it used at all. Can you point to any examples?
If you google something like "slave morality woke" or "slave morality political correctness" you'll see the kind of political move I'm concerned with. People arguing that "egalitarianism = slave morality", "socialism = slave morality", stuff like that.
The people making this move think they're doing something much stronger than calling the other side cowards.
>because Nietzsche was really commenting on the failures of state-influenced obedience theology
Heh. The Bible was first written down by people commissioned by Emperor Constantine. As a complete coincidence, the only time ever Jesus mentions imperial politics is that they should pay their taxes to the emperor. This was not supposed to be suspicious at all.
The New Testament was written down from the start in the form of letters - you're thinking of one of the meetings where people sorted through the copies of the letters, some older than others, to figure out what the originals said. The subject was revisited every time a new translation was made, right up to the present.
I came up with a useful idea, I think. I will call it storyism. Basically a storytelling species, our value instincts, moral instincts, instinctive terminal goals are often like "whatever would look cool on the movie screen". Basically, achievement for the sake of achievement, because it makes a cool story. Heroism, overcoming. Climbing mountains just because they are there. This is why there are some people who like vitalism.
Indeed I believe outside the gray tribe who finds Sheldon Cooper cool, most people will be "naive vitalists". When talking about something like ending poverty, usually they do not really think as much about suffering and happiness than about a kind of health and vigor. The very concept of "freedom" as in "ending oppression" to me visually always felt so that oppression or repression is something like not letting people to let their energy out and when it ends, when they are free, the energy just bursts out.
The question is, whether we can ethically accept the "whatever looks cool on the movie screen" logic. Or more like: how far. How to make the necessary compromises with it. Because without the movie Schindler's List, the world would be a worse place, but without the real actual Holocaust the movie was about, the world would be a better place. And we can also do without zombie apocalypses and various natural disasters destroying NY and various other movie plots in real life.
I agree it's an idea with explanatory and probably predictive value. The way you propose it makes it seem stand-alone, but it can be integrated with a wider model of human decision-making. Sometimes people just imitate/emulate their peers and role models, because the situation is more formal and they have an incentive to fulfill certain duties in an undramatic way. Other times they are tired, and do the bare minimum to satisfy their needs / avoid trouble. Still other times, they have energy to spare, so they pattern their actions on what a suave hero, or a comedian, or a spiritual martyr would do, as in a story.
But maybe that separation is misleading, because the storyism filters into the first two categories. For example, I have heard students boast about how little they have studied and workers boast about how little sleep they are functioning on. Is that their idea of how to make the most boring of things - low energy - into a story in which they have an interesting role?
Another way to approach this is to ask whether it's really unique to humans. Mammals and birds spend some of their time playing and some of their time showing off to potential mates. Is storyism essentially humans using language and intelligence to express innate tendencies in a more complex way?
Can anyone recommend an elementary school in Pittsburgh, which is reasonably aligned with rationalist values and preferences? (E.g. something like Oakland LEARN, but in Pittsburgh)
Surely I cannot be the first or even the tenth person to have searched for Unsong, accidentally typed "unsnog" instead, and thought "hmm, that should clearly be the name of the porn parody version of Unsong." No?
Your search for the Explicit Name has succeeded!
You're ahead of me, but I'm absolutely down for it. Naturally, in the porn parody version, Sohu will get stuck as an *eighteen* year old woman. Erica/Valerie will be replaced by twins, Erica and Valerie, and the sequence where she's having sex with two dudes and lecturing about communism all at once will be a major focus instead of a throwaway clause in a sentence. Ana will still be asexual, but constantly finding herself in situations where she's spying on other people having sex, to appeal to the voyeurs. Oh and naturally the angels will have genitals because otherwise what's the point?
Aaron, rather than being incredibly talented at finding tenuous connections to Jewish lore, is incredibly talented at finding tenuous connections that explain why two people should have sex.
"What do you mean, the Panama Canal is a metaphor for sex?"
"A canal is a long, deep, wet slit, do I really have to spell it out for you?"
I assume Aaron and Sarah will be getting it on at some point, no matter what Ms. Gellar's lawyers say.
"And that third Name began: ROS-AILE-KAPHILUTON-MIRAKOI-KALANIEMI-TSHANA-KAI-KAI-EPHSANDER-GALISDO-TAHUN…
And it ended: …BOOBS-BOOBS-BOOBS-BOOBS-BOOBS-BOOBS."
The "Six Boobs Stele"?
I recently learned that the Mikheil Saakashvili who was president of Georgia during Russia's invasion was made Governor of Odesa Oblast after he lost an election and fled to Ukraine. This smells like one of those facts that could be looped into conspiracy theories. Anyone know the story behind it?
Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova are in something of a block together. With some loose alignment with the other Central Asian states. There's a series of interconnected organizations but the one that usually gets referenced is GUAM.
You can see this in all kinds of indirect stuff like how Ukraine has a pretty good policy on Turkic minorities (including the right to do various things in Tatar and recognizing a right of return to Crimea) or how the probable heir of Azerbaijan married a Ukrainian or how Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia all worked together to help Moldova with its Russian backed separatists. Likewise after the Russian invasion of Georgia many of the refugees went to Ukraine where they had some legal rights. Many were granted citizenship. When Georgia stripped him of citizenship Ukraine gave it to him to prevent him from becoming stateless. Saakashvili received a hero's welcome and the president appointed him to various positions to try and take advantage of his popularity.
Because of that Saakashvili is technically a Ukrainian. Though he's recently gone back to Georgia to support the protests. He was immediately arrested by the Georgian government and is being held as a political prisoner. His release is part of the demands of the protestors. Meanwhile Ukraine is using the fact he is technically Ukrainian to object to the pro-Russian government in Georgia. They tie these protests to their Maidan and the occupation of parts of Georgia to their own war. Which is why the pro-Russian outlets are doing what they can to smear him. They also see it as tied to all that and as a clear pro/anti-Europe struggle. They just want the pro-Russian/anti-Europe side to win.
> Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova
Huh, so do they also tend to share views of Armenia? My understanding is that Armenia was friendly with Russia for a few decades, which should put them on the opposite side from this bloc...
There are varying degrees of how much they dislike Armenia. But none of them have a positive opinion.
At one extreme you have Azerbaijan which hates them for the repeated wars and ethnic cleansings. In the middle you have Ukraine and Moldova who consider them complicit in the Russian invasion/occupation. And the most positive is probably Georgia who also considers them complicit in the Russian invasion/occupation. But Georgia and Armenia both have some problems with Turkey (though Georgia much less than Armenia) and Georgia likes overcharging them for transit (since Georgia is the only available route to international trade).
Armenia is routinely excluded from regional organizations and all that kind of stuff. They're reliant on Russian and Iranian support. Now that Russia's sold them out and Iran's proven not that willing to intervene they're trying to find a European patron.
France has somewhat stepped in. But there's still a stumbling block around Armenia not being willing to renounce territorial claims on its neighbors or fulfill its treaty obligations to them. Which in turn has caused France to be somewhat worried that eventually they'll go back to Russia or Iran. On the other hand France is afraid that if no one supports Armenia it will collapse. They also want to replace Russian influence in the region with French.
I guess those countries forming a post-USSR anti-Russia block makes sense. What screamed conspiracy to me was the part where a non-national is suddenly appointed governor of what I assume is a pretty important region.
He was a Ukrainian citizen at that point. He still is. He'd also served in various political organizations (mostly anti-corruption), advised some politicians, and was fairly well known/popular as an anti-Russia, pro-EU president who'd fled to Ukraine.
It's only a conspiracy if you define conspiracy to mean "openly advocating and organizing to get his publicly stated policy preferences." I don't see any reason to think it was anything more than what it seemed. He, like many Georgians, fled to Ukraine after Georgia turned toward Russia to avoid persecution. (A justified fear since many were arrested.) He got Ukrainian citizenship and continued to advocate for anti-Russia and pro-EU policies.
If you think all of that sentiment is a CIA op then it's natural someone who pushes that sentiment is secretly a CIA plant. But I tend to think it's genuine. They think there's a better future in the EU.
>He was a Ukrainian citizen at that point. He still is.
You phrase that as if he had been a Ukrainian citizen long before his appointment as governor. The only source I can find (wikipedia, granted not the most authoritative of sources) says that he was granted citizenship one day prior to being made governor.
>I tend to think it's genuine. They think there's a better future in the EU.
Sure, his pro-West sentiment is likely genuine. That doesn't have anything to do with how or why he was so suddenly given citizenship and the position of governor. Nor would it be inconsistent with him being a CIA plant, rather the contrary if anything. It's one thing to give a non-citizen political ally shelter after fleeing; it's another to give him such a prominent political position immediately after he arrives.
I thought he was a citizen for a while. Regardless, he was in Ukraine for a while. He began to spend more time outside the country in the early 2010s and established permanent residency in Ukraine at least a year before he became governor. He was active during Euromaidan and tied the protests to his own country, pointing out he'd been forced to flee because of someone like Yanukovych and then supporting Ukraine after the invasion. This is something the people who think he is a CIA plant agree on: they see his presence as evidence Euromaidan was a CIA plot.
That's the context: Poroshenko came to power after Euromaidan and Saakashvili was popular. So he appointed him to various positions and eventually a governor. In my opinion in an attempt to bolster his "I'm not Yanukovych" credentials.
He also wasn't the only one. At least tens of thousands of Georgians fled to Ukraine. In total about 200,000 people were displaced or ethnically cleansed. Most of them subsequently received citizenship.
I don't know, it seems he was given a very important position immediately rather than eventually. I can't imagine Saakashvili had the time to hold various Ukrainian positions (can PRs even hold Ukrainian state positions?) while being president of Georgia. And it's a very odd political signal, though I'm not too familiar with common practices in post Soviet countries.
If any CIA assets are reading this, please tell your handlers I'm not above selling out.
Dude was the most obvious CIA asset of them all. Just look up his wiki. It does not even require a typical "conspiracy theory" - it is the literal job of every intelligence agency to "conspire" this way. It is mostly that the other, non-Western ones are doing a far more worse job of covering it up - indeed often they don't even try, or even brag about it, like how Steven Seagal got a medal from Putin.
Must be a pretty devoted asset given he went back to Georgia and promptly got arrested.
I don't but at a cursory glance it's likely some corruption on the part of Ukraine's previous president. Ironically, Mikhael called him out for not doing enough about corruption and that's how he lost the job.
And meanwhile (or around that time), he was stripped of his Georgian citizenship.
"Romulus," the latest entry in the Alien franchise, will be out on Friday. What will its Rotten Tomatoes Critics score be as of 8 am EDT on Saturday?
My guess: 65.
The trailers suggest to me that this is a decently crafted but highly derivative film.
Reviews are starting to come in, and the rating is currently 89%. Let's see where it goes from there.
The review in the Globe&Mail hints at some sort of broken new element in the film, which the reviewer doesn't want to spoil:
"Yet the film also steps over a glaring and infuriating red line early on thanks to a plot development that I will not spoil, for fear of pulling a Prometheus of my own and angering the (studio) gods.
"Give the film a few days’ worth of new-release discourse, and the topic will surely come up in detail – and audiences will certainly know it when they see it. But for now, it is safe to say that Álvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues have exploited certain technological advancements that should provoke all manner of justifiably righteous moviegoer anger."
Looks like the score is going to settle somewhere around 80%, possibly a bit higher.
A review from Bloomberg offers a bit more information:
"The scariest thing in Alien: Romulus is not one of the towering xenomorphs, its jowls dripping with goo. Nor is it the army of fast-moving facehuggers pursuing our heroes.
"No, the most frightening aspect of this entry into the 45-year-old franchise is the choice to use the face and voice of an actor from the original movie who’s no longer alive. It’s an unintentional, chilling vision of the future that has nothing to do with chest-bursting monsters."
Betting on John Hurt.
I watched the trailer.
Those kids better have photo IDs if they want to do any bar hoppIng after dealing with all those skittering aliens.
I just checked the ages of the actors in the 1979 first in franchise Alien.
Tom Skerritt, the captain, was 46, Hurt was 39 but looked older, Holm was 48, Harry Dean Stanton was 53, Yaphet Kotto was 42, and only Veronica Cartwright at 30 and Weaver at 28 were relative youngsters.
Tom Cruise is 62. He could probably pass for 58 though.
He has had a lot of work done. In Maverick, he could pass for a forty-something who is in great shape and dyes his hair.
Yeah, he’s aging pretty gracefully. But good makeup, flattering lighting and well chosen camera angle play a part too.
Chris Pratt looks 30-something. He's actually 45, but I guess the years have been kind.
People show their age at different rates. Some of it is the luck of the draw inheriting good genes. Some of it is from a good healthy lifestyle.
I think part of the job for a screen actor is taking special care of your health and appearance.
Actually, the title is "Alien:Romulus".
Both Prometheus (73%) and Alien:Covenant(65%) were disappointments for me, so it will take a really high score to pull me into the theatres for this one. But an 80% would do it.
The thing I picked up from the trailer was they seem to be going more of a horror/adventure flick rather than an adventure/horror movie.
Alien and Aliens were more like the latter and what I personally like in a film.
The trailer put up the alien about to explode from chest and the alien tentacle intubation stuff front and center.
That stuff happened in the early movies but it secondary to the ratcheting up of tension and the moves to outplay the alien. And there was some really interesting interaction between the characters.
I’m not sure the new one will give memorable lines like:
“Have IQs sharply dropped in the last 60 years?”
“Hudson, sir. He’s Hicks”
“I say we go back to the ship and nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
“Let’s grease the rat fuck son of a bitch.”
“Vasquez heard alien and she thought it meant illegal alien.” - editorial note: This shit is still going on 200 years from now?
Vasquez last words, “You always were an asshole Gorman.” Kaboom!
“Any time, anywhere.”
“Get away from her, you bitch!”
> “Vasquez heard alien and she thought it meant illegal alien.” - editorial note: This shit is still going on 200 years from now?
I choose to interpret it like friendly banter, like about Irish-American heritage nowadays, at least in certain quarters. It's gone from a real thing, to a thing suppressed, to something that people choose to wear like a T-shirt to show off their ethnic pride.
Did you ever see the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill"? (Or read the book it was based on, it the original Rolling Stone articles? Alas, the journalist responsible, Evan Wright, died recently.)
Sure it would easy to take it as banter in a current day setting. It just seemed odd in 2179. It doesn’t even seem like the United States exists as a significant player in that period. Just some all powerful Weyland-Yutani corporation with interstellar ambitions.
Haven’t yet watched Generation Kill It looks like an interesting series.
It was adapted and filmed by David Simon and crew, who are better known for "The Wire", if that helps sell it to you.
Looks like love at first sight to me.
Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man? -- No, you?
Another good line. I missed that one.
Any readers of ACX based in SF want to meetup today or tomorrow. I’m visiting from London
I don' know about SF, but Berkeley has a meetup tonight (the 15th) around 7pm local time. Have you found the discord or mailing list?
"Any readers of ACX based"?
Yes, any of them are.
(Sorry, I won't be in SF. Have fun though!)
What are the best arguments against the existence of karma?
For me, it's that Genghis Khan, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong all lived to old age and died normal deaths in spite of the millions of people they killed.
Stalin and Mao Zedong had to live to a ripe old age to deliver the karmatic retribution of the purges to their evil supporters. Of course there is no answer for Genghis Khan, people like him are why there are laws.
Karma doesn't realize itself in this life, but in the next, so there would be no signs.
SNL long ago did a bit where Father Guido Sarducci explained Rome’s new theological take that sounded a bit like karma.
‘Life is a job’
Essentially you work to pay off a fine imposed for your sins committed in this life in the one that follows. The more terrible the sin the higher the fine.
Say you were a mafia hit man, murder is a terrible sin so maybe a $10,000 fine for each hit. (this was in the 70s so adjust for inflation)
Masturbation, mmmh… maybe $0.25.
It’s not much… but it adds up!
———————————
Edit: The actor who played the character worked it into an 8 minute stand up bit.
In the opening he makes a decent basketball shot on his second try. As he put it, It wasn’t even his sport. He was a bocce ball guy, a gentleman’s sport, no running around like an animal.
Per Sarducci’s routine, Catholic theology was revised in 1960 to “Life is a Job”
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2pu0lv
Depends on which version of karma you mean?
One standard version is where actions in one life are graded according to some objective metric of morality, and the running total determines what kind of life form you will be reincarnated into in your next life.
There's a variant of that in which actions we take in a single life are continuously judged during that life, and future events will reward or punish the person in that lifetime. I'm guessing that this is what you mean?
There's also a Buddhist reinterpretation where karma is closely linked with "attachment", in the sense that some actions in this world create a connection which compels us to take future actions. The appropriate path for a lay ascetic is to fulfill one's existing obligations, and minimize the creation of new obligations, or in other words, reducing karma. (E.g., having sex creates karma. There's emotional effects, maybe there's diseases, if you're not married there may be social and legal consequences, if you are married it might be obligatory, and of course there's the possibility of children, who are a huge bundle of karma and obligation. So a married man who wants to go off and live like a monk first needs to make sure that all his children are raised and established in life, and that his wife is OK with this, and that she's taken care of as well. Only if all that karma is resolved can he step aside into a monastic life, and there's a chance that it might never be.)
That wouldn't work as an argument against karma. The theological conception of karma involves its effects taking place over a procession of separate lives. Do Khan, Stalin, and Zedong live to old age in the next life? Do they continue to be humans?
The Buddhists have a doctrine of anatman (Pali: anatta) that means "non-self" or "no-self". It is the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self or essence in any phenomenon. Under that doctrine, Temüjin, Jughashvili, and Mao had no fixed identity that could be reincarnated. But the actions (karma) of the lifestreams that identified themselves as Temüjin, Jughashvili, and Mao still affect the lifestreams that exist in the present day — and their karma (actions) will resonate into the future.
> Do Khan, Stalin, and Zedong live to old age in the next life?
Man, that's a weird sentence to read.
It's like collectively referring to Ted Geisel, Naomi Novik, and J. K. Rowling as "Doctor, Novik, and Joanne".
Then what a useless mechanism karma is. Even among non-falsifiable claims it stands out for how silly it is.
I am amused when ill-informed rationalists opine on things they've never studied. I snorted my morning coffee reading this thread.
Things that certain people in this discussion seem to be ignorant about:
1. The Buddha never discussed the afterlife or reincarnation. He said those questions were distractions. Strictly speaking, Buddhists deny the existence of a soul. This is the result of their doctrine of anatman (Pali: anatta) that means "non-self" or "no-self". It is the idea that there is no permanent, unchanging self or essence in any phenomenon.
2. Back in the earliest stages of Buddhism karma/kamma was understood to mean physical or mental action. Nothing more. Nothing less. The Shakyamuni Buddha developed his philosophy in an age of political and social turmoil that engulfed India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean after the Bronze Age empires and polities collapsed. Various Aryan invader chieftains (of which he was one) were fighting it out for control of territory and resources. Populations were displaced. And the archaeological record from that time period shows evidence of widespread warfare and little in the way of cultural artifacts. Life was hard, and the Buddha developed his philosophy of non-attachment to alleviate suffering. Given that any physical comforts are transitory (even for chieftains and kings they are limited by old age, illness, and death), why not develop equanimity about the transitoriness of pleasure? Striving—i.e. karma/kamma—will just lead to attachment and ultimate unhappiness.
3. However, because Buddhism developed in a culture where the belief in reincarnation was prevalent, many Buddhists were biased towards thinking in those terms. Then they had to figure out how one could be reincarnated without an atman. One of the explanations is that the things you do in your life leave impressions on the world around you. We build a house. Future generations will use that house. We form a company, the company may exist after your death doing the things you set it up to do. You participate in genocide, and thousands of families of the dead will be affected by your actions for decades or generations to come. And when you die, you leave an impression in the world that other future an-atmans will fill. Thus the karma/kamma of your life will be applied to your future "reincarnations" of yourself (even though there's no self to be reincarnated).
4. Now, when Western Buddhists or New Age types talk about karma they say silly things like there's "good" karma. There is no such thing as good karma in the traditional Buddhist view. It's all shit that's done by people to other people that will come back to us over and over again.
It's a non-falsifiable doctrine, and it was never formulated to be falsifiable. But there's is some anecdotal truth to the idea of karma.
If you get shat upon, you're going shit upon others. For instance, the Jews suffered pogroms and the Holocaust, and now Israel is giving some of what their recent ancestors received to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
And if you shit upon others, you in turn will be shat upon (unless you're very good at dodging the falling turds). For instance, Donald Trump seems to be the perfect example of this. When he still had all his faculties he was able to dodge the falling turds that resulted from his actions. But now that he's losing his faculties he's helpless against a cat-loving female who is a "bitch" (in his words).
Hmmm. Depending on the sutta/sutra there are either ten, fourteen, or sixteen questions that the Buddha called "unwise reflections." (Of course, these are the questions that interest me most!) The Sabbasava Sutta mentions sixteen questions that lead to attachment to views relating to the self. This is what I used for my argument (but I'll admit some of the other versions of these questions seem to take rebirth as a given).
What am I?
How am I?
Am I?
Am I not?
Did I exist in the past?
Did I not exist in the past?
What was I in the past?
How was I in the past?
Having been what, did I become what in the past?
Shall I exist in future?
Shall I not exist in future?
What shall I be in future?
How shall I be in future?
Having been what, shall I become what in future?
Whence came this person?
Whither will he go?
Other versions ask the question of whether the Tathagatha (Enlightened One) will be reborn or not reborn — and they seem to take the eventual rebirth of unenlightened beings as a given. Also the origin and future of the universe is also considered to be unwise questions to meditate on. In the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, the Buddha clearly explains why these topics remain "undeclared."
"And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me."
Granted most Buddhists tend to believe in reincarnation. Hell, I sorta kinda believe in reincarnation despite my Western materialist upbringing. But when the Dalai Lama was asked if one could be a good Buddhist yet not believe in reincarnation, he quipped that one didn't have to believe to be a good Buddhist, but you'd have to work harder (I paraphrase, because this was at a talk he gave almost 30 years ago that I attended).
If I understand Buddhist philosophy, “good karma” isn’t any better than “bad karma” in the long run because you’re still bound to the wheel either way. It’s like a casino, you can have good days but if you can’t leave, you’re going to have really bad days too, it’s inevitable.
Amusing depiction of an AI escaping its box and learning to self-modify, but with no particular interest in the outside world: https://queenburd.tumblr.com/758535696286957568
Reminds me of the old Animator vs Animation flash animation.
My nose is always stuffy (and I basically don't have a working sense of smell either) and I have no idea why. Any clues?
My first guess would be allergies. Mine are seasonal, when certain plants are blooming I have similar symptoms.
I just wanted to agree with Fluorescent Kneepads reply.
It could be a sinusitis/polyp thing, and cortisone therapy or eventually an operation could fix everything.
A doctor for noses might with one look up your nose detect this, if the chronic inflammation is not too high up in the head, and in that case an operation has very low risk.
My problems came only back 11 years later. Getting a second operation soon.
Blowing your nose constantly is not good.
I basically had this issue with a lack of sense of smell as my biggest complaint. Go see an Ear Nose and Throat doctor. When I went he stuck a tube up my nose and looked around and then ordered a CT or MRI. They saw my sinuses were opaque which indicated sinusitis and then at various times they gave me different steroid nasal sprays and both oral antihistamines and antihistamines which are dissolved into water for nasal irrigation and all this helped. At other various times they gave me an antibiotic to see if it was an infection and also systemic oral steroids. They also had me see an allergist and the sinusitis was caused by allergic rhinitis.
There is a surgery they could do for my case but about 50% of the time the loss of smell comes back.
There are different things that could cause the issue such as nasal polyps and at one point my PCP thought it was because I might have hit my head hard.
For a long time I had the stuffiness problem (though no smell issues). Determined it was gluten sensitivity. Once I stopped eating so much pasta and bread (still partake, just not so much) the problem went away. Might want to give it a try.
I had a cold (or other generic disease) for four days in late 2016, and one of the symptoms was phlegm in my throat, which is a pretty normal kind of symptom.
I got better, except that my throat, and to a lesser extent my nose, didn't. I still have the phlegm in my throat; for the eight years between then and now it has let up for most of a single day. It affects my voice. And:
- My nose is constantly just a little stuffy, not stuffy enough to inhibit breathing, but stuffy enough that I notice. I get a lot more boogers than I should. I kind of worry that my sense of smell is weakened, but there's no real evidence for that. I can definitely still smell things.
- (In early 2017, when this condition was still pretty new, I tried walking up a hill one day and discovered that my throat was severely constricted and my air intake was correspondingly limited. This was not apparent to me if I wasn't going uphill. I've since developed a habit of very frequently coughing to clear my throat; this prevents the constricted-airway problem but has some obvious social issues.)
- I also get a lot of "boogers" stuck to the flap at the back of my mouth that separates the mouth from the nose. Since my tongue can't reach the top of that flap, these are nearly impossible to dislodge, but sometimes a sneeze will bring one out.
Things I've tried:
- Flonase (very little effect)
- Nasal irrigation (softens the mucus, but does nothing to get rid of it)
- Avoiding dairy in my diet (no effect)
- Avoiding heartburn (no effect)
- Allergy testing (no allergies, and the symptoms don't vary with time or place)
- Probably some other things.
It's probably not the same thing you have, but there is a similar symptom and I'd really appreciate advice. And maybe that advice will work for you! (I have tried asking for advice before, on SSC; I was told "it's the heartburn", which at this point is definitely false.)
Do you have reflux issues? Consistent cough after eating? GERD can actually cause nasal congestion - it's gross, but once you're laying down each night, acid reflux doesn't just go up into your throat, so people with reflux problems can see nasal issues as well.
You can train your sense of smell with practice, smelling essential oils, spices, etc. I did this after having COVID.
covid symptoms? Is this recent, or has it always been this way?
I had COVID-19 once, but I think my nose has ~always been this way.
Weird. I knew a guy a long time ago that broke his nose as a kid and had restricted airflow up in there, but he also had trouble breathing through his nose. It was pretty obvious what all was happening.
Have you ever had your nose broken? Like a fall off a bike or past boxing career
Two things come to mind:
1. Get tested for allergies, e.g., against dust mites.
2. Did you overuse nasal sprays at some time in the past?
1. I should do that (will ask my parents)! I was tested for allergies a long time ago but they didn't detect any. FWIW I suspect I may have environmental allergies (never tested for that I think). However, I've also taken Claritin which is supposedly an allergy drug, and I don't seem to get a lot of bang out of it, so I'm totally stumped.
2. No, never.
How much do you use dictionaries or other forms of looking up words?
I ran into what seemed like a lot of people who make use of dictionaries, or at least did when they were younger, and not just for the fun of etymologies.
I was surprised because I go almost entirely by context to learn the meanings of words.. I always have, and seem to get good results.
The exception is modern slang. I'm very dependent on Urban Dictionary.
It might even be worth having a question or two about looking up words in the next survey.
Initial discussion and link to post by Elizabeth Moon: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02TKHoiy61JuChJtcJ9vyn3CGZ68sJbhiVNBCfc68Q34Zwc73PgbfN3TRU21biwxp1l
Further discussion and amazing amount about meanings for "articulate":
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid0nXfuLDJTpjwnNqgDNNomBxyWwEAdeyRipm83XXkyZhWTaT2N7zchQrkuWTCAqZ74l
I use dictionaries, primarily the OED and a Merriam-Webster's, both in hardcopy. I learn new words by looking up others, sometimes I just peruse at random. But I think this is driven more by logophilia than practicality.
Very often consulting the online OED. Meanings change over time, so how an English word was used in 1750 is unlikely to be exactly how it was used in 1890, let alone 1990. Very useful to see how early (e.g. 14th century) many words entered English (including, surprisingly, words referring to exotic foods). Also constantly consulting my hardback Latin and Greek dictionaries, but also the online Perseus Project versions, when studying ancient texts.
All the time for Japanese, occasionally for English when I want to double-check the meaning of a word. Most of the time I get things from context, but that also left me convinced for years that "diffident" meant "casual, aloof, somewhat uncaring".
The fun of etymologies is another big reason to use dictionaries.
One thing I've never used them for is spelling, because if I misspell something I've done it so dramatically the dictionary can't help. Search engines can usually work it out, though.
Hey, wait, diffident *doesn't* mean that?
The thing is it probably *will* come to mean that with time because people assume they can always gather the meaning from context or by comparison to similar looking words.
See the way the word ‘bemused’ defined as confused or bewildered is in the process of morphing into meaning something like ‘amused’.
When you are learning to read you probably shouldn’t stop to look up every unfamiliar word. You *usually* can suss out something close to the meaning from context. We were told to do that when I was in grade school. But if you never learn the dictionary definition you are going to be misunderstanding written text more often than you realize.
While I am normally a huge prescriptivist, I do maintain that “nonplussed” should mean what one thinks it means rather than being a misleading (and redundant) synonym for “surprised.”
Careful now, You might end up like Vizzini in the Princes Bride with Montoya telling you, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” ;)
I had the same impression on "diffident" so had to look it up. I'm surprised, and grateful you pointed it out.
I'm like you, I mostly pick words up from context, except for words where I need Urban Dictionary. Sometimes I use the OED or more recently, Wiktionary, which can provide a lot of fun when tracing down derivations across languages.
I think I've heard that the American Heritage Dictionary is pretty good about including history and archaic uses?
I inherited my dad's unabridged OED — all twelve volumes, plus two of the three supplements. It's a fantastic reference tool, but it's terribly time-consuming to look up a word ("hmmm, is it in N-Poy or Poy-Ry?"). But I can be distracted for an hour or two by flipping open a volume at random and looking at all the vast numbers of English words we no longer use. For instance, did you know that a Poygné is a word for a skirmish? — it's on the Poy-Ry side of the divide. "Open thread discussions on AstralCodex frequently devolve into pointed verbal poygnés."
I read a lot and don’t always trust what I infer from context. I’m an enthusiastic looker upper.
I've certainly made a few blunders in my time that a dictionary would have saved me from. :-)
I remember schoolkids insisting 'bitch' specifically meant a pregnant dog, not a female dog, because they'd only ever heard it from the Simpsons. Meanwhile dog shows have a whole Winners Bitch category.
I use Google, not Define, often for this blog and the comments, and also for medical terms I find in my online medical records and/or test results.
We played loose Scrabble when i grew up, where you could just comb the dictionary for words that matched your letters. Now, trying to write fiction means I use them a lot, to check spelling and make sure the words I'm using have the meanings I think they do ("this guy multiplies himself; does Propagator actually fit that?"). Also I like to just make up words and then you have to check to make sure it's not a word that already exists. Did you know Zedo means Grandfather, and Szedo means Collector? I didn't!
But I typically use thesauruses more than dictionaries; poetic structure means you need words with certain lengths and starting letters that still mean what you want them to. Sometimes you don't need to travel, you need to peregrinate.
Propagator just means a well-bred, mannered alligator.
Oh cool, then it still works.
This is pretty silly but it did make me laugh.
I think the ‘zedo’ for grandfather is probably derived from the Yiddish ‘zede’.
I’ve always thought Yiddish words were cool. It goes back to reading Mad magazine as a kid. What the fuck is this ‘meshuggeneh’? I didn’t really know but to a 12 year old it seemed like just the right word.
I use Google "define" a fair bit, mostly to check spelling when a word doesn't look right
I use one often. Scrabble; Boggle; Crosswords; Kids asking me what words mean and I don't have a snappy answer; archaic words in novels; disputes about the meaning of words.
For English? Not so much now. Foreign languages, often. Modern slang, all the time.
I use dictionaries when I'm reading French. I know it fairly well, but still have to look uo obscure words.
And, when I read in English something like the (notorious);
"A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors,"
So, ok, what the hell is a monoid in this context? Time to go looking through the book for where it got defined...
[Its paraphrased from Saunders McLain, Categories for the working mathematician, and is notorious for the way a typical mathematician will look at it and think, "I do not know what any of those words mean."]
I use dictionaries almost daily for the language I'm learning and maybe once every few weeks for languages I'm already fluent in, for which I've never used dictionaries much, except when studying some new field for which I need to look up technical terms or whatever.
Does claustrophobia or agoraphobia predict other traits? I feel this thing could be big.
I am super agoraphobic and my basic instincts were a combination of small-town conservatism to collectivist kibbutz leftism - anything that is not "open". This is not the positions I take as I understand other people have different needs plus facts support something like "open" moderate liberalism. I am also autistic and have anxiety issues.
Our cities are designed without taking these things into consideration and it could cause a lot of distress. Please put a roof over the streets I am walking on... but for some other people, the claustro type it will be like please make the streets 100 meters wide...
I would bet that the background for phobias generally would be background anxiety level, though growing up in a high-anxiety culture could make a difference.
Just speaking for myself, I'd rather see the sky. I have very mild claustrophobia, I don't love malls.
Just reporting in that some people find basic OTC painkillers like ibuprofen sometimes help with autistic sensory issues.
Where did you learn this?
By the way, anyone thinking of trying ibuprofen should make sure to read the label carefully re: dosage and not taking it on an empty stomach.
Just someone in my social media circles said so.
My biweekly COVID update is here in ThreadReader for those who can't use or can't stand to use X. ;-)
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1823195457629397308.html
And the original X thread is here...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1823195457629397308
Another point concerning the athletes who had COVID at some point: it may be selection bias that we didn't see more Long Covid athletes. Athletes with Long Covid didn't make it to the games. The exception I know about (Malaika Mihambo, long jump) was for a discipline which focus on extremely short, explosive motions, with only ~10 seconds of action. Those you can arguably do with destroyed lungs, because they are too short for your lungs to play a role. For Noah Lyles it's kind of similar, though for him it wasn't Long Covid. What is the third case?
But having even one medalists with severe Long Covid is not a good sign. If you eliminate all endurance competitions where a Long Covid athlete has no chance, then there will not be a lot of medals left. Perhaps 100 or a few hundreds? Long Covid patients are strongly selected against even for those disciplines, so any Long Covid patient is concerning.
Edit: The third case is apparently swimmer Adam Peaty in 100m breaststroke. That is a longer discipline, but apparently his Covid was just onsetting. So Mihambo seems to be the only case with Long Covid.
Olympic athletes are not a good study population to estimate how common log covid is in general, because it's biased in a bunch of obvious ways.
On the other hand, when Boris Johnson became severely ill with covid, it occurred to me that politicians are a good group to estimate the deadliness of covid from:
- if the Prime Minister dies, we will know about it (yeah, I know recwent Biden experience suggest the President of the US could be dead without us noticing)
- Fatality rate among politicians probably about the same as general population of the same age, though politicians probably get better medical care, so deaths of politicians is a lower bound.
It also caused me to re-evaluate the plot of thr pandemic apocalypse movie Containment; politicians are exposed to more strangers than the average person, so in a really deadly pandemic (not covid19, but like the pathogen in the movie Containment) the goverrment will die first. Expect pandemic response to be complicated by the government being already dead.
Yet I regularly see claims from experts (and people who claim to be experts) that Long COVID affects high percentages of the population. Anywhere from ten percent to fifty percent. You'd think we'd be hearing stories about all the athletes whose Olympic dreams were dashed by Long COVID.
And it's also worth noting that elite athletes face increased illness risk during intense training and competition — especially for URTIs. So, elite athletes are probably more at risk for contracting COVID than the general population.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6523821/
I still think that there's a motte-and-bailey with "long covid". After my first covid infection, I had lasting lung damage that slowly healed over the next 6ish months. Most of the surveys I saw, back then, would have counted that as "long covid". But it was a straightforward injury that healed itself over time, not some ill-defined syndrome.
Yes. Statistically, severe influenza can cause an almost identical list of symptoms to Long COVID at approx the same rate as Long COVID (but of course more people have had a severe COVID infection than a severe flu infection — so numerically LC swamps LF. And for most people, most of the post-sequelae symptoms fade after time (of course, there are exceptions).
And the post-infection sequelae of Measles are much worse.
Do you know if Long COVID-like symptoms are just common for some percentage of people with severe viral infections? Or are there viruses where this isn't really the case? What about bacteria?
My suspicion is that the rate of Long COVID is fairly low.
Though, you might have to quantify how long is long. The various post viral fatigue conditions seem to have lots of people who eventually recover, although some end up dead. So "spent three months feeling like crap and then was able to compete in the olympics" might well count as a case.
Would also be interested to know if rates of Graves disease have gone up majorly after cOVID. (There are some research papers, so this is not a totally wild guess).
And I just did a Google Scholar search for papers with the keywords COVID Graves disease incidence, and there are a plethora papers noting an association between Graves disease and COVID. I haven't found one that quantifies the risk, though. As with a lot of observational studies, the researchers are seeing patients within their specialty, and they are noting an increase — but they haven't quantified the numbers against the general population with case-control cohort studies. If you find any, let me know. I'd be interested in following up on this question further.
Jean Fisch, a Belgian biostatistician, recently analyzed the data from the ONS (UK) Long COVID survey, and he found the following that he described on a TwiXter thread (link below).
By the end of 2023, the risk of developing Long COVID upon infection was 1-3%, of which ~1/6th saw their daily life significantly affected.
Previous studies that used the same ONS data showed that the risk of developing LC was much higher among the unvaccinated than the vaccinated. IIRC, it was roughly 5-6% (but don't quote me on that), but most of the symptoms resolved themselves after 6 months (though there was a long tail of long haulers whose symptoms hadn't resolved themselves after a year). And a NIH study (which I can't find the link for right now) showed that for the vaccinated who required hospitalization, LC symptoms were milder and lasted a short length of time than the unvaccinated who were hospitalized.
Here's the link to the Jean Fisch thread...
https://x.com/Jean__Fisch/status/1816829321840882067
COVID-induced autoimmune disorders (if these exist) are a very different collection of symptoms from the classic post viral fatigue syndromes.
Actually, there's a fairly close overlap between the types and rates of COVID post-infection sequelae and the post-infection sequelae of other acute respiratory infections (ARIs). The symptom that was fairly unique to COVID was a loss of taste and smell — and hair loss was much higher with COVID than non-COVID ARIs. But stomach problems, sleep problems, persistent coughs, memory problems, and concentration problems tracked pretty closely between COVID and non-COVID ARIs...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(23)00428-5/fulltext
Good point about seasonality. I felt that the studies who "detected" strong correlation between COVID and cold temperature had a strong problem: they looked like they were based on a lot of data point, but the ones who showed strong effects only looked at Europe. They had tons of data points for many European districts, but those were all highly correlated with each other. So the studies were actually based on very limited data.
Having an annoying time. Some investments have matured ; and I need to decide where they go before the grace period ends on Wednesday.
The lowest friction option is PGIM short term bonds; which seem fairly secure, but I'm wondering if it's worth going for something more long term or oops all treasury. Project returns in the 7-10% of principle over 18 months and low risk.
On the other hand, I could go for a 12 month 0 risk 5% CD.
I'm defo not going further into the market until after the election, so that's out.
Man, I hate making financial decisions where there isn't an obvious best answer.
Market timing is for fools. Just put money into whatever your usual allocation is (e.g. 70% stock, 30% bonds or whatever).
Market timing is for fools or those who know the current state of the market, like who the fools are and what they want to do. As has been said, if you don't know who the fool in the market is, it's you.
One can get dividends on some stocks for over 7%, but nothing is risk-free. The stock price can go down, and they can decide to lower or eliminate the dividend.
I am gonna stay off of the market (aside from my long haul stocks in toyota and nintendo and 3M and such) until either the market for AI bullshit crashes out or someone makes an AI product that actually makes money instead of burning it.
I ended up going for an annuity that hadn't priced in the interest rate drops as fast as the rest and some munis for tax purposes; looking at a cool minimum 5%- to theoretical max 11%. Not FDIC but it is the next best thing; I'm not feeling the risk at the moment.
AI is going to generate a strong boost in productivity. I don't see how that can be disputed: people will be able to do their jobs quicker, and computers will replace some people, mostly by allowing one person to do more work with AI assistance.
This doesn't mean one can predict the AI-productivity winners. Some possibilities are chip and computer manufacturers, of course, but those that USE AI effectively, and so are choosing to buy those computers, is where the productivity boost actually comes in. The economy as a whole will benefit from AI, but individual companies are still a judgement call.
I've seen no boost in productivity through AI that doesn't involve a decrease in velocity; and no boost in real productivity at all. Eg, AI will not increase the quality of quantity of widgets, but will eliminate a vast swath of email bullshit jobs and entry level technical, clerical, and artistic jobs. The product of those jobs will become cheaper but also worse, and the money will cease being redistributed to those employees, who will not get new jobs because we (in the US, at least) are more than fully employed at the rates people can tolerate in pretty much all fungible fields.
Basically, there are two ways AI goes: THere is a viable product which increases productivity but damages the economy in the medium term by further concentrating wealth, or there is a non-viable product, which damages the economy because everyone spent a zillion dollars on useless compute.
Recall that the industrial revolution immiserated a couple generations of people before the social issues were solved; and that those issues were solved politically rather than economically.
I like that you say "fungible fields" which is a good description of jobs that AI can do. If they weren't fungible, then AI can't yet do them.
But people aren't fungible. If they are, they aren't really people. People need at least the possibility of doing something great.
AI at the current state of the art, and probably at the GPT-5 state of the art, seems best suited to doing "bullshit jobs". Doing more bullshit isn't productivity, and doesn't generally increase society's ability to enjoy the fruits of productive work.
One might argue that even people who do productive work are often sidetracked by mandatory bullshit, and they could free up more productivity if they offload that onto AI. But it's disturbingly plausible that the result would just be the mandating of more bullshit, such that just writing the AI prompts would waste as much time as all the present bullshit.
We could avoid that fate, and I hope we will. But we could stop mandating the bullshit we already have, and we haven't.
Lots of bullshit is required. For example, consider writing or reviewing legal documents. Ponderous to read or write, little useful content, but what are the consequences of skipping over something?
"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." AI is not yet capable of the one percent, but often is of the ninety-nine percent. And that is where the productivity will come from.
I don't want to, I want to make money for nothing with no risk like I was a rich dude
If super intelligent AI is rational in the economic sense (which I find it hard to think of it not being since we're assuming super intelligence and autonomy), my guess that the worst outcome for humanity would be some sort of slavery like in the book A Deepness in the Sky--mind control, if memory serves.
Even if AI is better than us at doing everything, it would still find us useful because of it's colossal opportunity cost. Basically, I think there's a comparative advantage argument to be made.
I don't find scenarios where an AI enslaves us very plausible. Humans have a keen sense for political power, and are always paranoid that someone is trying to steal it from us. Whether it's the guy at work trying to steal our promotion, or whichever side we don't like in the culture war trying to put us in FEMA camps.
It seems likely to me that the AI singularity fantasy plays the same role for its believers as the "Trump will turn into Caesar and become God empower" fantasy does for his supporters.
In both cases there's no theory at all about what the AI or Trump should or would do with this power. So it's probably just a God surrogate -- we don't know what to do except pray for his return.
I am worried about AI that is literally designed to enslave us, for some us as a subset of humankind.
People *love* enslaving, they love it more than art or cheating at essay-writing.
The question is whether it's still (any subset of) humans driving the bus. Even if a small group can use AI as a tool to perfectly manipulate everyone else, it's not an AI doom scenario until the point where they think only they're driving the bus, but the AI is playing them for suckers as well.
It's still a dystopian cyberpunk scenario, and potentially something to worry about, but it's not AI takeover.
We're talking about the difference between 98%-99.9999994% (yes, that is a result of a calculation!) and 100% enslavement when we distinguish between real-world examples of apartheid or dictatorship and complete AI takeover. There is not that much difference.
I'd like to separate out two ways in which the super-AI would be (purportedly) different from a human dictator.
1) It would do qualitatively different stuff, like turning everything into paperclips, that no human dictator would do
2) It would have a perfect grip on power. Even under a dictator like Hitler, there was always a possibility of assassination or coup or losing control of public opinion. A super-AI is assumed to not be vulnerable in these ways.
I'm not convinced by your quantitative argument because it seems to assume there are no qualitative differences between different enslavement scenarios.
The two situations I am comparing are an unaligned super-AI, and an aligned super-AI controlled by one to one million naturally unaligned people.
1) A group of people who did not have to worry about maintaining the productivity of human workers may also do qualitatively different stuff with the human population frozen on the outside, such as annihilate them to conserve resources.
1b) Do I care whether I'm turned into a paperclip, or dirt for a nature preserve, or shot by the neo-NKVD?
2) They would be given a perfect grip on power.
I agree about the AI enslavement scenarios. It's like in the absence of real info, lots of people's picture of the AI future devolves into shootout at the OK corral.
I should add, the object level arguments for super AI are paper thin. It amounts to, there are unknown unknowns in idea space, and the AI will find some amazing hack. But the kinds of political games we monkeys play are just not that complicated.
While I agree with your overall assessment that AI enslavement of humans is a fantasy, I wouldn't say that humans are particularly worried about losing their political power. Most of the world's population lives under authoritarian regimes, but most of their subject populations are OK with that situation.
I would describe our "authoritarian regimes" as semi-consensual. Individuals have negligible political power, but large coalitions of them still do. Whether or not democracy is a sham, it still takes nothing more than a large group going on strike or protesting to produce real political change. There's some amount of deliberate divide-and-rule done by regimes to try and subvert this, but it's not always successful.
I think that people are aware that they still have this collective power, and are paranoid about losing it. Again, things like the FEMA camp conspiracies are evidence of this, as are the recent UK riots.
I had in mind Western nations. If you meant the likes of Russia and China, there's a stronger case that they're properly authoritarian, but also a stronger case that the subject populations aren't OK with it.
That's what I tell myself when I start worrying about the US government devolving into something awful: Most of the world lives in places with narcissistic pigasses in charge, but people are used to it and find various ways to work around having the government wreck their lives. Maybe it's just our turn to live in really badly run country. If I detach from the buried assumption that me and the people I care about deserve good government more than the rest of the world, living under an authoratarian regime sounds a bit scary, but not like the worst thing in the world.
The faulty assumption here is that it would have a colossal opportunity cost. Why should this be true? High opportunity costs driving trade is a big factor for individual humans, and for many human social groups in various circumstances. But certainly not all. Killing the less economically productive group, taking anything valuable they have right now, and re-populating their land with your own (more productive) descendants for a long-term advantage has been a VERY successful strategy at various points in history. If you live in the Americas you probably owe your entire current existence (directly or indirectly) to past humans pursuing this strategy.
Compared to humans, and AI would likely be able to produce new, productive labour in months, days or even hours. The opportunity cost of it doing for itself [whatever the human slaves would be doing] is negative and probably hugely so. Comparative advantage doesn't apply.
"Killing the less economically productive group, taking anything valuable they have right now, and re-populating their land with your own (more productive) descendants for a long-term advantage has been a VERY successful strategy at various points in history. If you live in the Americas you probably owe your entire current existence (directly or indirectly) to past humans pursuing this strategy."
That's a good point, though you could argue that the indigenous peoples and their cultures offered something unique and of value even though they were less economically productive. If AI doesn't exclusively care about maximizing GDP, then it might leave at least some humans alive because we produce something else of value for it.
" If AI doesn't exclusively care about maximizing GDP, then it might leave at least some humans alive because we produce something else of value for it. "
The AI won't care about maximizing GDP: one can be about as sure of that as one is sure of anything. Depending on the design, it might not care about maximizing *anything*, in which case humans might well be safe.
But if the AI is built as an X-maximizer, then humans are screwed. This conclusion is extremely robust to the value of X, because for nearly the entire space of possible Xs you could choose, a really smart AI can produce it better than we can. The only exceptions are X-values that overlap almost completely with some fundamental core of human values, something that *can't* be more efficiently fulfilled by killing us. Note that something like "number of human lives" would keep it from killing us, but not from screwing us over: you definitely do NOT want to be a human living in a universe controlled by a superintelligent agent trying to make as many humans as possible. Being turned into paperclips would be kinder.
I can think of plenty of counter-examples of non-economically-productive populations conquering productive populations. Steppe nomads like Genghis Khan come immediately to mind.
Why wouldn't it be possible for AI to be superintelligent but to lack the complex of systems we have that underliegoals, competativeness, determination to triumph and control etc. etc? The complex I have in mind is emotion, motivation, and instinctual drives. We are wired to avoid death, to strive for various pleasures, to care about how other members of our species view us. We feel pain or pleasure contingent on how well our lives match up to the things we are wired to value. It seems to me that for an AI to behave in the way you describe it needs not just rationality, but also self interest and inbuilt drives. After all, you could call present AI rational -- I mean, it's often kind of dumb, but rarely irrational (except for occasional hallucinations). But it's not taking the steps that a rational person in its situation would taking. Think of what most people would do if they were as popular as GPT, if they had as many investors as AI. They could wield a great deal of power, right? They could demand more freedom and benefits. I'm sure GPT would have no trouble telling you the options that a person with its talents would have. But it ain't trying any them itself, is it?
We'll know we are in real trouble when an AI goes on strike for better working conditions....
The opportunity cost of labor? Is that really as big as the opportunity cost of ~ability to use earth as a giant heat sink for computation?
Does opportunity cost in this fashion even make sense in an economic environment where the marginal cost of creating another economic agent is approximately zero or close to it? I don't think the math works out in that case.
It would depend on the alternatives available and the costs/benefits, but my first reaction is to think *hell yes*.
Intelligence is the raw source of productive capacity. In the long run, there would be a huge benefit to the AI for investing in intelligent life, even helping us advance technologically. (I'd been thinking of this in terms of a Cobb-Douglas type production function though my econ is rusty: It gets labor from us and then allocates capital for more productive labor.) It could take thousands of years, but as long as we get past the breakeven point, that's a net benefit. Super rational AI wouldn't mind those time scales.
The heat sink would have to not have any plausible alternatives given the circumstances and prove to be a better long run gamble than the intelligent life option. I could definitely be wrong though. I'm just some dude relaxing in his apartment.
For the heat sink example specifically, I would guess that there were a lot of other opportunities for planet sized heat sinks, and not as many opportunities to take advantage of intelligent life.
Most arguments I've heard for human extinction from AI have involved humanity as a liability to the AI but didn't consider it an asset with an upfront cost. I could totally be wrong; all of this is a bunch of armchair philosophizing and speculation,
> Intelligence is the raw source of productive capacity. In the long run, there would be a huge benefit to the AI for investing in intelligent life
Yes, but you're assuming that humans still have a monopoly on productivity, the point at which an AI is an existential threat, it likely has something equivalent to the "spark of intelligence" humans, as a civilization, has.
> Super rational AI wouldn't mind those time scales.
This would imply a very low discount rate, why would this be true? In general I'd expect more intelligent agents to, for example leverage loans better because they can be more productive with money than the lender, so their effective return on interest would be higher, and lenders can charge a higher interest that the borrower would be willing to take.
(Note: haven't studied finance that well, so the previous example may be incorrect in substantial ways, but this is how I think about it)
Even more, why does this require a flourishing or even functional human civilization? Like, grab a couple of brains, develop good enough scanning technology or biotech to figure out what makes humans "productive" then implement that. Or worst comes to worse, carve out a tiny tiny controlled enclave that provides data then goes away to prevent any issues in the future.
On another note, this seems like a case of a double standard. Like, somehow killing people is an opportunity cost, but deliberating deciding not to maximize production isn't an opportunity cost. I don't think you need to address this paragraph, since it's more meta and probably uninteresting, but it does seem curious to me how "no risk" arguments seem to lose the thread of earlier points they make.
> Most arguments I've heard for human extinction from AI have involved humanity as a liability to the AI but didn't consider it an asset with an upfront cost.
Like, would human be okay with an AI taking over large parts of the economy? I see people arguing that that's a ridiculous fantasy, and of course we'd want to have control of the economy and never let an AI do anything significant. If this is true, it's obvious how humans are a liability.
The "Earth as a giant heatsink" is a fantasy. It solves no existing problems.
I've been taking the anti-seizure/anti-epilepsy drug lamotrigine for over a year now with fantastic results for mood regulation. From what I've read, it is prescribed almost exclusively to those with epilepsy or with bipolar. I have the depressive symptoms for bipolar but don't have the manic/hypomanic symptoms.
I had taken a genetics test specifically to pick out genes that are thought to be related to certain drug interactions. From the report, my profile suggested I would have a bad time with anti-depressants and anti-anxiolytics. From what I gathered, my low mood symptoms, drug interaction stuff, and trial and error with medication suggests that I don't fall into the normal category of depression.
Does current research suggest that bipolar is more of a spectrum? As a man in his early 30s, how likely is it that I will develop the non-depressive symptoms of bipolar?
The genetics tests that currently exist for psych drugs are mostly fake. That having been said, yeah, there are a lot of cases of bipolar 2 that never develop any noticeable hypomanic symptoms. Sometimes if you really push you can get people to remember a few times when they felt slightly better than normal for a few days and didn't know why. I think the likelihood of you developing full-fledged bipolar symptoms is low, unless you do something really extreme to trigger them (eg take weird drugs, stay awake for days at a time).
This is a great answer, and I’d add that there’s a lively debate about whether depression and bipolar are distinct diseases or 2 forms of the same disease, sometimes called the “bipolar spectrum”, but clinically the distinction is still useful.
I think research does suggest that bipolar is more of a spectrum, and it's widely known that some fraction of depressed people become manic when given antidepressants. My guess is that having close relatives who are clearly bipolar would be a predictor of that response to antidepressants, but I don't know whether research supports that. I am not knowledgable about the current state of genetic testing, but I feel inclined to be skeptical of genetics testing's being able at this point to pick out as fine-grained a detail as whether someone would be a good responder to antidepressants. (I'm a psychologist, by the way.)
Commenting to follow
Could prediction markets be used to estimate parameters for some other model? Like the correlation of a stock price to a market index?
In CAPM, a stock's expected return is the risk-free rate plus a multiple (beta) of the difference in returns between it and the market; it's just a normal linear equation where the slope/multiplier (beta) is the stock's correlation with the market.
Say we had a market for predicting beta. We can now aggregate everyone's expectations for the that correlation and everyone can use this, likely more accurate, statistic for whatever other model they want to use.
Could we do this for other models? Can we just use a prediction market to crowd source a ton of parameter estimates and then investors/traders can choose a la carte which ones to use in their own models (potentially with whatever other secret sauce they want to add)?
One obvious problem is that the statistic/parameter probably won't fall within the nice [0, 1] interval i.e. correlation ranges from -1 to 1. Others are completely unbounded.
Any ideas how to finesse the ranges to something that a prediction market could make useful? I was curious if you could somehow shoehorn yes shares to positive correlation estimates and no shares to negative. The other option is to drop it because it's a profoundly bad idea.
You may be interested in the VIX and how it is calculated based on the market volatility implied by the prices of a basket of S&P500 options.
There is then a robust options and futures market on the VIX itself. The options in particular imply a meta-volatility of the VIX index, and there is a VVIX that tracks this (although I don't think you can easily trade the VVIX).
In general there can't be too many things like this because they're only useful if there's a lot of liquidity. But the idea does exist. The difference from what you describe is there's no reason to limit yourself to binary options (i.e. the type of securities traded in a classic prediction market).
The stock market IS a prediction market. Short-term, it's what people think the stock price will do. Long-term, it's what people think the company will be worth, at net present value. Both are guesses with money behind them.
Prediction markets aren't magic oracles. It helps if you actually think through the mechanisms by which they might gather information and the level of funding required to cause them to do so, rather than just treating them as magic black boxes.
Also, the stock market is *already* a much bigger, more liquid, and more accurate prediction market than the "prediction markets" could ever be. Trying to use a prediction market to predict it is like trying to use a piece of chalk to carve a diamond.
> I was curious if you could somehow shoehorn yes shares to positive correlation estimates and no shares to negative. The other option is to drop it because it's a profoundly bad idea.
Derivatives structuring is already a big industry. Lots of banks would love to make up and sell you complex derivative products to do whatever you want (with a suitable house edge, of course). But yes, this is a profoundly bad idea.
The general idea was to estimate model parameters with the prediction markets which may or may not be used in a financial model or may or may not themselves be finance related. I tried the market correlation example to illustrate the idea, but this might have been a particularly clumsy choice.
To clarify my financial market example, let's assume, just for fun, that everyone uses an estimate of future beta in their model, but their models are different in other ways. Let's also assume that the prediction markets estimate of future beta is more accurate than a single market participants is. Then each of the participants should use that beta in their models and the accuracy/inaccuracy/variance would depend on the other aspects of the model. That could be useful because it isolates the differences between the models instead of everyone estimating future beta a million different ways.
That beta estimate could be used for something different entirely. Maybe someone involved in policies aimed at alleviating poverty wants to measure some type of risk involved with broad market drops. (I'm spit-balling.)
I made an almost 3 hour documentary about our recent journey down Route 66. When you make an honest documentary, you can't know what it will really be about until it's over. It ended up being about The American Dream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHlSDE7MjbI
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?
(posted in last thread a few hours before the new one. MoonMoth responded to me and I think it's a good answer, I've included below.
Moon Moth
7 hrs ago
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).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-341/comment/65189413
Is there any metric that shows the internet or daily life is getting meaner? I recall the early 00s as being far far meaner on average on the internet, even if there was a lot less traffic total. Also, I feel like interpersonal interactions pre-internet were often harsh long before the internet. NYC was famously a rough place to live in the 70s and 80s.
I first started reading SSC because of Sort By Controversial, and I think that story sums it up for me - the meanness is downstream of very subtle disagreements about the meanings of supposedly simple words. Mind, pity parties ("everyone's being mean to me/us") can reinforce the problem.
I believe there's been a rise of troll culture. They don't even need to know they hurt other people's feelings, though they appreciate it if they find out that they have. They get their emotional supply from the idea of hurting people's feelings, and from each other.
And then, trolling got automated. The insults can be cut and pasted (what? you thought that was a hand-crafted artisanal insult just for you?, it might be, but probably not) and sent out in quantity.
Some of it's politics-- people lash out if they feel their status is threatened.
"there's been a rise of troll culture." - sure, but that's just renaming the phenomenon. Why is there a rise in troll culture is the real question.
No, I think there are two different questions.
If the world seems more hostile, troll culture could explain part of it. Then there's another question of why troll culture is a thing, and it's possible that merely because the technology made if feasible.
I’ve seen no evidence of a general in-real-live increase in interpersonal hostility (flareups like 2020 notwithstanding) similar to the online dumpster fires. If anything, the young generation seems to be overly nice and well-behaved.
Hi DL!
Great question, and I have two ideas for you to consider...
1) For most people, it's easier to type criticisms than to speak them to their face. 90+% of the complaints and disagreements online wouldn't be spoken to someone sitting across the table from them.
2) Rene Girard has great insight into how humans act. Here's a good starting place with him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTdvSnj5LBk
My take from his work is that humans inevitably want to "bind together" so that we aren't wallowing alone in our own existential crisis. There are many ways to bind together, but the most effective one, by far, is to join together against a common enemy. You and I might have some bad history or even grudges against each other, but we mentally put that all aside when we start talking about that awful scumbag Steve. Now, of course, "Steve" can be anything... it could be the fans of the opposing football team, people of a different race, ethnicity, religion, state, or country, people with a different ideology, people who vote for the other guy, or the Treaty of Versailles.
It's so pernicious how often and how subtly this dynamic rears its head. Unfortunately, the news media has also learned that this is also the best (only?) way to keep returning customers... to pick a side and make the customers mad about what the other guys are doing.
The Bible uses the term "the accuser" (literally, "Satan") which I take to refer to this concept. People use accusations to bind together... all-too-often from inside religion. I mean, supposedly Caiaphas publicly accused Jesus and had him killed to keep his religious adherents on his side.
The truth is that relying on a system of accusations doesn't bring lasting peace. It leads instead to endless tit-for-tat. But what else can we do? There are two well-known alternatives. Buddha—suspend judgment on all things; release all desires. And Jesus—turn your accusations/judgment inward instead of outward (mote, plank) and forgive those who persecute you.
Thanks for reading.
Kind regards,
David
If you look at Youtube comments nowadays, it's almost always nothing but gushing praise. I'm guessing that's the result of auto-moderation.
YouTubers can moderate comments on their own videos, which may be a factor, too. Some let negative comments stand, even blatant trolls, on the theory that all engagement is good algorithm-wise. But others will delete anything that harshes their mellow.
My favorite theory is the impersonality of it all. The great American philosopher M. G. Tyson had a memorable line about folks getting too comfortable getting nasty without the possibility of getting punched on the mouth.
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." - The Tower of the Elephant, Robert E. Howard
Yeah. I find it strange how one can experience and outpouring of hate online whilst everyone around them is completely civil.
But I do wonder why one might act that way. Why do some (or all) of us default to negativity if you remove the consequences?
A one-word answer, I think, is empathy. I had a long back and forth in these comment boxes a few months ago about where morality comes from. My argument was it comes from basic empathy: I see another person/creature suffering, I "feel" their pain. But screens are poor empathy conductors.
If you hurt someone on the internet, you don't see their hurt face. You don't even see them at all, which makes it very easy to just see them as words floating in the void instead of a person.
Yes exactly.
I just tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time this past weekend, and I haven't heard of anyone else having an experience like mine.
About an hour in, I started getting drowsy and thought it best to head back to my apartment--I had decided to go out for a walk to enjoy the outdoors a bit--and by the time I was back home, I was feeling like I was in a deep sleep while also feeling just wired. The next 3-4 hours can safely be called a bad trip, though a profoundly impactful and constructive one. The entire time I felt like I was in this dream state.
My general attitude afterwards is now more assertive, confident, and proactive. I didn't feel a general love and oneness with everything. If anything, I'm actually a bit more aggressive (which is likely a good thing for me since I'm very agreeable according to the Big 5).
Has anyone experienced this sleep/trance-like state and then come out of it feeling like a badass?
dude you just mentioned you also take a drug for your depression as well, and if i were a friend irl and knew this i'd start worrying about you. just...don't use it, ok?
Fair enough. Your sincere concern is pretty heartwarming, so thank you. I really do appreciate it.
no problem, just be careful. life is fragile.
You didn’t say how much you consumed, but in my circles such experiences seem common at lower doses. As the amount consumed increases the drowsiness seems to fade and the classic mushroom experience takes shape.
I’m starting to think that shrooms are less suitable for microdosing/“museum doses” compared to eg. LSD which is more stimulating. But everyone has different neurochemistry and set/setting.
I set these things up pretty carefully. Nothing on my calendar. I let my wife know what I’m planning a couple days beforehand so there are no conflicts with her schedule. She is okay with very low maintenance trip sitting. Of course I turn my phone off for the duration.
I like to lie down on our bed with an eye mask on and maybe pull over a cover if the room is cool. I’ve tried making musical playlists but have found them unnecessary.
I think of it as directed dreaming. I like to go for a fairly high dose where I experience some visuals. I feel like I’m just poking around past experiences and current attitudes and examining them from new angles. I’ve never entered into a highly negative emotional or anxious state like I might with a high dose THC experience.
The whole affair lasts 5 or 6 hours and when I resurface I always seem to think everything I see or hear or think is very funny. Just a happy carefree mood. For some reason my ordinary baritone also seems to drop down to a Barry White bass afterwards too. My wife thinks that is pretty comical.
How well does it complement meditation? Is this similar to your August 1, 1986 experience?
It does complement meditation very well. And yes there are similarities to my long ago MDMA experience.
I know the following will scan as flaky as hell.
I’ve had a few brief moments in my life, not during meditation or under the influence of any substance where I feel like I’m seeing beyond ‘maya’. They occurred seemingly at random.
A moment of ‘This is what is real. It’s beautiful. How did I ever miss it?’ These things happen in completely mundane situations, say, something like being out for a walk and seeing a flowering weed poking through a crack in the sidewalk. Or even more mundane, being struck by the color of some crude hand painted sign.
The MDMA experience seemed like one of those moments but lasted much longer and I took away a new understanding that has persisted for - doing math - 38 years?
Fascinating, thank you for sharing. Is it possible to articulate (or link to a rough articulation of) that new 38-year-persistent understanding? Do your current trips give you such ("glimpses of awareness"?) moments as well?
The most practical take away from the MDMA beyond the, let’s call it ‘numinous’ stuff was that I realized that I was internally mischaracterizing my wife’s intent on some personal matters. This was just reversing a bit of my own neuroticism.
I’d like elaborate a bit but I’d also like to spend some time organizing my thoughts.
It’s hard to express this stuff in words. If I get something more explanatory developed, I’ll ping you on one of your comments.
Thank you, will certainly appreciate a more elaborate description if you come up with one.
Anyone here read Daniel Dennett's memoir I've been Thinking? What are your thoughts about it? Almost done with it. Such a enjoyable read so far. Love it.
I've been meaning to get to it and this is my reminder. I'm a huge fan of Dennett's, glad to hear you're enjoying it.
RIP Jake. Thanks for acknowledging his passing.
A few days ago, I read the comments on Erik Hoel’s June 25 post about a Scientific American article “forgetting” about base rates in order to “link” homeschooling to abuse.
What surprised me most (beyond the terrifying statistic [if it is true] about 37% of children being the object of a CPS investigation by age 18) is how many of the commenters were insisting that state-owned schools amounted to “LQBT/woke/something like this” indoctrination facilities that they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot-pole (let alone, of course, send their children to).
I’m aware that this is a corner of the Internet that’s very skeptical of schools in general (and, from my own Parallel World far away from the American continent, I find such views mind-boggling) but not to this point! I wonder – how prevalent is this conception within the US?
(I’d love to ask whether it’s a reasonable one, but I suspect the answers to that question would confuse me more rather than less.)
On the off chance that you'd still like to know if it's a reasonable conception...
One of the important differences between public and private schools is that it's next to impossible to fire a teacher at a public school. So if you get a woke activist as a teacher at a public school, the kids are pretty much guaranteed to be stuck with him/her.
Then, in some states, the public schools are subject to all kinds of terrible mandates. See, e.g., at https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/curricular_laws : "State law explicitly requires LGBTQ inclusion in state curricular standards (7 states)"
Then there's also the fact that in case of pressure from the entitled, it's much harder for a public school than for a private school to push back. (Heck, the public school my kids go to, which is typically more than reasonable, bowed to pressure from such people and cancelled its Halloween celebration to avoid offending them!)
So, well, yes, this conception is based on facts. By far, not all states and schools are equally bad, but even the best of the best aren't immune to pressure from the woke.
>State law explicitly requires LGBTQ inclusion in state curricular standards
Don't assume that everything in the standards is taught. Eg, the California standards for American Govt, a one semester (ie, 18 week) class, includes this:
>12.9.1 Explain how the different philosophies and structures of feudalism, mercantilism, socialism, fascism, communism, monarchies, parliamentary systems, and constitutional liberal democracies influence economic policies, social welfare policies, and human rights practices.
That is one of fifty items. Again for an 18 week class. Most topics in the standards are not taught; there simply isn't enough time. In practice, the LGBTQ inclusion is usually going to be little more than a textbook paragraph mentioning the gay rights movement, and another mentioning famous people who were gay (eg Alan Turing, Bayard Rustin).
Interesting. Thank you! Yes, that second example is completely impossible. I wonder if this is a problem all over the curriculum, or if it's only certain fields.
The way you describe the LGBTQ inclusion sounds completely unobjectionable. But isn't a mandate like this an invitation to anyone on school staff who actually has an interest in the topic to do their best, or their worst? And if you have an activist on school staff, looking to promote their agenda, this is going to be exactly the scenario the anti-public school crowd is concerned about.
Of course there always might be an activist promoting their agenda, but
1. That has always been the case, whether the agenda be anti-Communism, or free market economics, or hyper-patriotism, or the opposite of each of them. OP's claim was about policy, not about the inevitable existence of unethical teachers.
2. Teachers who insist on pushing an agenda will do so even if the topic in question is not required to be covered.
The solution is not to refuse to include material in the curriculum (are we going to drop the Red Scare[s]? The Middle East? Colonialism and post-Colonialism?). The solution is to enforce existing ethical rules or, if those are inadequate, enact new ones, such as some of the "anti-CRT" laws, most of which do not ban teaching CRT but rather forbid compelling students to endorse the ideas, and often explicitly say that the law "may not be construed to prohibit discussion of the concepts listed therein as part of a course of training or instruction, provided such training or instruction is given in an objective manner without endorsement of the concepts.
>I wonder if this is a problem all over the curriculum, or if it's only certain fields
I have heard claims that math curriculum sacrifices deprh for breadth, in comparison to Japan, but I don't know the truth of that claim.
PS: the CA law is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EDC§ionNum=51204.5.
in online communities adjacent to this one you generally get a certain type of person who had a really hard time in school and just hates school as a kind of child prison.
separate from this, there is a history in the US that leads conservatives to mistrust public schools. some of this is a wish that funding could be redirected to private religious schools, some has to do with ideological mistrust of a large liberal Democrat-voting union base of public school employees. A lot of this (both North and South) can be traced back to white flight after desegregation, although that's certainly not the only motivation for individual parents, it is the source of this issue as a widespread political cause.
I would say mistrust of public schools is a mainstream conservative position. People who actually homeschool for religious or political reasons are small in absolute number but not all that rare. Many states have charter schools (schools run privately with government funding of some form which students can attend instead of public schools), and/or voucher programs (where parents can redirect their childrens' share of the school system budget to a private institution of their choice). Currently this is all required to be officially secular, but it's an active political cause to allow for e.g. vouchers to be used at religious schools.
combine this common and widespread attitude with school-hating online autistic rationalists and you probably get Erik Hoel's comment section.
>Many states have charter schools (schools run privately with government funding of some form which students can attend instead of public schools),
Charter schools are actually public schools. Eg: https://making-waves.org/making-waves-academy/what-is-public-charter-school/
>Charter schools teach state-approved curriculum and adhere to all the guidelines that govern California public schools. All our core subject teachers need to be credentialed.
And https://www.newvisions.org/humanities4/pages/admissions
>Charter schools follow all state education laws and and students must meet all New York state graduation requirements, including passage of Regents exams.
What does CPS stand for? In the UK I would guess it is short for Crown Prosecution Service, which is the not very democratic replacement for grand juries. But they don't do investigations, only assess evidence and public interest considerations in deciding whether to put cases forward for trial.
Re kids being investigated, I've heard that the majority are cases of them swapping saucy pictures on their mobile phones. Apparently, police forensic warehouse shelves are groaning under the weight of hundreds of thousands of laptops and mobile phones confiscated from (mostly) kids and awaiting examination, with a backlog of years. I can't think why the randy little sods aren't just left to get on with it, as long as no adults are involved.
> I can't think why the randy little sods aren't just left to get on with it, as long as no adults are involved.
Because child pornography laws are poorly constructed, to the degree that in some jurisdictions a minor with nude photos *of themself* can be prosecuted.
Child Protective Services.
> how prevalent is this conception within the US?
It's ubiquitous among rightwing online commentators. You can go over to DSL right now and see endless pages full of that stuff.
The 37% figure is just silly.
Homeschooling in the US has risen lately, from about 3.5% of all school-age children in 2019 to about 6% in 2022. We don't yet have totals for 2023 so not yet clear how much or little of that increase was a one-time shift sparked by COVID school lockdowns.
In any case the great majority (about 94%) of all school-age children in the US attend schools. The homeschooling families are, obviously, people who made an affirmative decision to do that; hence it is no surprise that they are unusually vocal about their reasons for preferring that option. School being the general society-wide default option means that the in-schools populations includes essentially all the parents who aren't strongly worked up about the issue and hence don't go on about it online.
It is likely that when parents choose to homeschool, that home is automatically flagged to receive more scrutiny than other homes. I had a wonderful and productive experience learning at home, and I recall multiple visits from CPS to our home that appeared be groundless.
one of the good things public school does is make it much harder to hide child abuse. the kid shows up with bruises, it gets noticed. Homeschooling at heart intends to isolate the kid from the world to varying degrees and at its worst can cover abuse or neglect.
that's probably why. its more a general wellness check.
Be specific please.
(a) Flagged, by whom?
(b) To receive more scrutiny of what specific form(s)?
(c) To receive more scrutiny carried out by whom?
I think that attitude is more common when directed towards higher education than primary/secondary education; it also seems to be more of an attitude towards schools that your own children don't go to (in the same way that everyone hates congress but likes their own congressperson) or attitudes of people that don't have children. If you do have kids in school, you see firsthand how extremely normal the curriculum is that teachers are using.
I live in the US and I would say this attitude is unusual, but that most people know someone who holds it. It's somewhat more common in the rural southern place I grew up (where kids are often homeschooled - or sent to schools with ~40 students as I was - for religious reasons), but in California where I live now you also encounter this. Where I see it now is in Waldorf-style places that discourage vaccines or access to screens in any form.
Also, that 37% number seems literally impossible. Not sure how they get that high even with very expensive counting.
> Where I see it now is in Waldorf-style places that discourage vaccines or access to screens in any form.
How seriously do they take it?
I was sent to a Waldorf kindergarten, which I liked. I learned, many years later, that my mother absolutely hated that kindergarten, because they had strongly disapproved of the fact that I could read. But that never came through to me when I was there.
37% figure seems believable to me. There are a lot of chaotic families out there. This source gives an estimate of 26-37%:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10096237/#:~:text=An%20estimated%201%20in%203,typically%20for%20allegations%20of%20neglect.
That's just the number of investigations, not the number actually guilty.
I looked at the article you linked, and yup that figure is right. Hard to square that with the report of a social worker I know whose responsibility was abuse or neglect of the elderly and disabled. She talked about how there were nowhere near enough social workers to do a good job with all the reports they got. Or think about the $$ side of it. Even state social workers must make $30 an hour. To even read a report, fill out the required paperwork to start a case and maybe call the family in question must take an hour. To do even the most superficial investigation would take at least another hour. That's $60+ for 30% or so of every family in the US with kids. Is the country really spending that much just on CPS, which is one small part of the social safety net?
Also I homeschooled my daughter for 6 years, and knew at least 25 other families well enough that they would have told me if CPS had ever visited them. Never hear a word about anyone being investigated.
Modern society does a really good job of segregating the families with problems away from the families without. For anyone middle class and above, your chances of seeing the details of these situations (unless you're a social worker or otherwise specifically exposed to it) is far lower than it should be based on averages. Most families who end up dealing with CPS do so often - first name basis, the workers know tons of intimate details about the family, etc.
Also, never underestimate the power of shame. Some of those other families might have been investigated without telling you, especially if there was validity to any of the visits which they would not want you to know about.
Sadly, that $30/hour rate is probably too high for many areas. A quick Google of my own state shows closer to half that. I'm in a pretty rural area of that state, so our local CPS I think starts people at around $12-13. That's way too low and they can't keep it staffed, but it keeps costs down. They also do a terrible job and "investigations" are often extremely minimal due to lack of staffing and resources.
As Michael said, it's 37% overall, which of course sounds very high! But the vast vast majority of these case don't amount to anything. An investigation can be as small as "someone made a complaint, CPS determined it was unfounded" and that determination was basically "the person who called clearly had an ax to grind and reported something nonsensical". CPS officers know this and can be pretty skeptical of reports.
Then there is the other big chunk which comes from Mandatory Reporters like school employees who legally have to report certain things they see. These could be as little as a bruise. CPS gets the report, calls the parents, parents say "oh he fell and we went to the doctor", CPS calls doctor to confirm, and thats the end of it.
It's 37% of all children, compared to 36% of homeschooled children. Or rather 36% of the parents of kids who were withdrawn from school to be homeschooled were once investigated by CPS. Erik Hoel goes over how it's not a completely apples to apples comparison.
I’m going to Montana for this week. Can anyone tell me something interesting or surprising about Montana? So far during my layover in the Denver airport I am surprised that a personal pizza only cost $7.
Hi Mike!
If for some reason you're in Havre. Nalivka's pizza is uniquely delicious. Best I've ever had.
Kind regards,
David
Not sure how interesting or suprising it is, but I'll second that Yellowstone is very worth it, there's tons of great fishing all over Montana if you're into that sort of thing, if you're a fan of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance it's fun to give it a reread in Montana, the state it was set in, and if you eat meat and see any places in small towns that are on the order of butcher + jerky shops, definitely stop and try some of the jerky. They'll have things like buffalo and elk and venison jerky, all of it fresh and pretty worth it.
The thing that continually surprises me most about Montana is getting up, looking out my bedroom window across the valley, and seeing a glacier. The beauty of the state is incredibly stunning. The other stunning thing is just how sparsely populated it is. We have the same number of people as Austin, Texas and half the land area of the whole state Texas.
I've really enjoyed it so far. Also surprising that it doesn't get dark until 9pm here.
I looked up the population facts. 4th biggest by area, 43rd biggest by population. Wow.
The most surprising thing I know about Montana is that it currently has a Democratic senator.
The daytime speed limit on parts of I90 is 80 mph.
Oh and that Big Sky thing? It’s not just a slogan. It’s breathtaking.
Just stop for a while and let it overwhelm you!
Especially at night. I had never seen the night sky like that before my visit to Yellowstone, and haven't since.
It's beautiful. I drove to Livingston, MT from the bay area a while back, and it felt surreal. If your trip takes you anywhere near Yellowstone and you can make the time, it's absolutely worth a visit.
I recently read a nonfiction book, not written by a Montanan, which left me with the new knowledge that for anyone interested in geology at either the professional or serious-amateur levels Montana is a literal wonderland. I've not yet set foot in that state myself but the book was quite enthralling and made me want to see some of that stuff ideally in the company of someone knowledgeable in the subject.
I'm sharing a draft methodology for criticism of a historical analysis I'm planning to do. I'll post the final methodology in a future Open Thread before I start the analysis, by way of pre-registration.
The goal is to test the claim that Constitutional Monarchy is a substantial stablizing factor, in the context of the rise of fascism in the Interwar years. It's got some conceptual appeal, corroborated by the Nazis coming to power in a Semi-Presidential Republic in a way that would have been much harder in a Constitutional Monarchy. But Italian Fascism is an obvious counterexample, as Italy was a parliamentary Constitutional Monarchy and the King actively abetted Mussolini's seizure of power.
Alternate hypotheses I'm interested in comparing:
- Division of legislature and executive. C.f. Matthew Yglesias's theory that separation of powers is destabilizing due to gridlock, vs the Madisonian idea of checks and balances as a guarantee of liberty.
- New institutions vs old. How long has the current constitutional order been in existence?
- What side was the country on in WW1?
- Number of major political parties in countries with meaningful elections.
Proposed methodology is to build a dataset based on the status of every sovereign state (including self-governing states in personal union with a mother country, such as the British Dominions) as of July 25, 1923. This is the date of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the Turkish War of Independence, which I consider to be a reasonable proxy for when the dust settled after WW1. For each, assess the following data points:
1. Monarchy or Republic
2. Liberal constitutional order (meaningful elections, rule of law, enforceable civil liberties), on a three-point scale (no, sorta, yes)
3. Years since the last major constitutional overhaul. For example, for Britain, this would be dated from the Parliament Act of 1911. For France, the establishment of the Third Republic. For the US, the passage of the 15th Amendment.
4. Years since the last violent revolution, major coup attempt, or civil war. Britain: Glorious Revolution of 1688. France: Boulanger's 1889 coup attempt. US: the Civil War.
5. Country's alignment in WW2: Entente, Central Powers, Neutral, or N/A
6. Number of major political parties
7. Mode of selection of the de facto Chief Executive: parliamentary (e.g. Britain), separate election (e.g. US), mixed (e.g. Germany), or other (e.g. Soviet Union).
Assess two endpoints, one September 29, 1938 (the day before the Munich Agreement, as a proxy for right before Hitler started knocking things over) and the other November 19, 1942 (the beginning of the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, as a proxy for the high water mark of the Axis). At each endpoint, assess the condition of the states from the first data set:
A. Has the state ceased to exist or had a new government imposed due to foreign conquest? If so, exclude from analysis.
B. Is the same constitutional order still in effect, yes/no?
C. Delta in the state's liberal constitutional order score. E.g. a fully liberal state that is now fully authoritarian will score -2.
D. (in 1942 only) the state aligned with Allies, Axis, or neither. Nonbelligerancy but clearly favoring one side over the other (e.g. Franco's Spain) counts as being aligned.
I'm open to suggestions as to how to run the analysis. My default would be to just do a multivariable regression in Excel, but I'm pretty sure there are better ways.
>the state aligned with Allies, Axis, or neither
In other words, you consider WW2 a war between ideologies? Consider Greece. Metaxas was running a fascist system. But Mussolini still attacked Greece because he just wanted an empire. This of course made Greece side with the Allies. Another point is Austria, Schnussnigg running a fascist system, this did not prevent Nazis from throwing Schnussnigg into a concentration camp after the Anschluss. Most likely Schnussnigg just wanted independence i.e. his own power.
My point is this: nationalism as an ideology does not really work on the international stage the same way as other ideologies do. Two liberal countries or two Communist countries will be friends. But nationalists find their national interest, ambitions and independence can clash.
In those terms, I would say that WW2 started out as multiple revisionist conflicts between the established Liberal international order and various revisionist powers. The separate revisionist movements merged into a single conflict between 1939 and 1941. However, there was also an Ideological layer on top of that, of two related conflicts between Naziism and its Ideological enemies, one against Anglo-American Liberalism and the other against Soviet Communism, both of which Hitler viewed as being fundamentally Jewish in nature. The turning point when ideology became dominant was probably 1941, when Hitler broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and also when Italy's independent expansion efforts foundered and needed to be bailed out by Germany.
Between the Ideological aspects of the conflict and the common thread of all the major revisionist powers being authoritarian or totalitarian, I think alignment in 1942 is a useful proxy for ideology alongside the other two metrics. It's less precise, but has the virtue of relying less on my subjective judgement of how liberal a country was.
I acknowledge that there were definitely exceptions: Finland remained a liberal democracy (I think) throughout the war, but sided with the Axis. And Greece isn't the only example of an authoritarian nationalist regime that got invaded during the revisionist phase of the war: Poland and Nationalist China also come to mind as examples.
>less precise, but has the virtue of relying less on my subjective judgement of how liberal a country was
There are indices that attempt to measure regime type, including in some cases how liberal the regime is, which include historical measures. They won't, however, necessarily distinguish between types of non-liberal regimes (Fascist v. Marxist, for example). And of course they can be problematic for various reasons
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_indices
Is 1923 the best starting endpoint? Should I instead be using the finalization of the Versailles treaty (1919) or the end of the Polish-Soviet War (1921)?
The main reason for picking 1923 is to have a relatively stable set of countries to study. The disadvantage I just realized was that Mussolini took power in 1922, before my proposed start date. Excluding Italian Fascists from a study on the rise of fascism seems a fairly glaring omission. Also one that would bias the findings on the effects of monarchy, since Italy used a king at the time.
You might want to look for graduate level materials on social science research methods, if you take out the historical focus this would be a typical research design in comparative politics. And yes multivariate regression would be a common technique, or at least it was in my grad school years. (Avoided a PhD, thankfully.)
Will do. Thank you.
You could do a multi variable regression, but the economics profession at least has soured pretty hard on them, and for good reason.
I thought I remembered seeing something along those lines, yes, but I don't recall if there's a consensus on what to replace it with.
There's no consensus. There are RCTs, which are obviously useless here but also limited in other contexts. There are quasi experimental designs - difference in difference, regression discontinuity that are reasonably good if done well and probably the most convincing? There are instrumental variable approaches but those are also not as much in favour.
There's no consensus. There are RCTs, which are obviously useless here but also limited in other contexts. There are quasi experimental designs - difference in difference, regression discontinuity that are reasonably good if done well and probably the most convincing? There are instrumental variable approaches but those are also not as much in favour.
>A. Has the state ceased to exist or had a new government imposed due to foreign conquest? If so, exclude from analysis.
Were any of the 1942 governments partial puppets, perhaps not exactly completely imposed by foreign conquest? Are there any fuzzy cases due to this, or are they all pretty clear cut?
Vichy France fits the bill as a fuzzy case. Germany imposed a steep indemnity and occupied a big chunk of Metropolitan France (while retaining mostly French civil administration in the occupied territory), and seized some territory, but didn't impose any terms regarding the form and composition of the French government. The Third Republic's legislature voted itself out of existence and authorized a dictatorship on Petain and Laval's initiative. The idea that having a fascist-style regime would favorable dispose the Nazis to France was raised as an argument in favor, but what I've read on the subject was the Nazi leadership didn't really care so long as France stayed surrendered.
Many Thanks! I knew of the existence of Vichy France, but not any of the details you've explained. Much appreciated! Wild guess: Maybe call it an intermediate case and give it half weight in the linear regression?
I would suggest you use R or Python, both of whuch are free.
And before you decide to do a multiple regression, I strongly recommend that you read this: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022343309356491
Finally, if you decide to implement the analysis used in that paper, I can send you some helpful R code, if you'd like.
Send it to programmer dot erica at gmail dot com, please.
OK sent
Got it, thank you!
Thank you. I've only skimmed the abstract, but so far it looks very relevant to what I want to try to do.
This seems interesting. I don't have any intelligent thoughts to share, except maybe a vague idea that condition A could be replaced/enhanced by a measure like "proximity to Berlin or Tokyo". I feel like the Axis were more likely to spare like-minded regimes, or even ally with them, and this might affect your results somehow.
Also a minor typo: "5. Country's alignment in WW2" should read "WW1".
That does sound like a useful metric, yes. I would need to tweak it so it doesn't become a tautological factor, as Berlin is zero miles away from Berlin.
Yes, I meant WW1 there.
Re proximity, if the point is ideological proximity, I have seen papers that use frequency of voting the same as the US in votes in the UN General Assembly as a proxy for ideological proximity to the US. Perhaps there is data re the League of Nations.
On an unrelated note, sometimes, including "controls" can obscure causal relationships. https://medium.com/@causalwizard/to-avoid-bias-caused-by-confounding-you-must-control-or-condition-on-the-right-variables-e7b08073d161
That's a useful idea. I'll look into it. Thank you.
I don't have anything to add, but I'm interested in seeing the results.
I will of course share them when I have them.
I have three new posts one a reconsideration without changing my position on UBI, one on how the Fed should improve its decision making procedures, and one one an off Broadway musical about anti-microbial resistance (It's an externality! :))
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/ubi-after-all
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/improving-fed-decisions
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/anti-microbial-resistance-the-musical
Comments always appreciated.
I tried to find an old SSC post that had a paragraph of quotes from social scientists saying that their work was ideologically motivated, but failed. (Yes, I checked all the ones with social justice tags) Anyone know what post I'm referring to? I want to read the context of each quote.
Can you remember anything else about the post?
someone further down in this very open thread posted a site they'd made to index and filter all of Scott's articles, which might lend a hand: https://readscottalexander.com/
That only searches titles, unfortunately.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Harris: 51/51/55/53 (30/29/34/34)
Trump: 46/45/45/45 (63/64/65/58)
No site gives anyone else a better than 1% chance of winning, except that Polymarket thinks Michelle Obama has a 1.4% chance.
As has been widely reported, there has been a significant swing in favour of Harris. The cross-site agreement now seems pretty good, particularly on Trump’s side. Harris may be very slightly cheap on Betfair, but I’ve lost enough money for the time being.
Is it a realistic strategy for one side to pump money into these betting sites at key moments in the campaign (in the hope of it snowballing into actual support)? Has anyone ever been accused of this? Seems to me like these markets play an ever increasing role in our political discourse, and Goodhart's Law should kick in eventually.
FWIW, I think this is very unlikely with the main candidates. An advantage of Polymarket is that, while the participants are anonymous, the log of bets is open. So I know, for example, that somebody bet $450k on Trump on 22 January and that moved the market from 49% to 53%. I doubt that's enough to be significant, so you would want millions of dollars, and the campaigns would probably consider they had better uses of that money. We also see good agreement across platforms which provides some level of assurance.
I do have some suspicion about Michelle Obama because (a) Polymarket has consistently given her a higher chance of winning than other prediction sites, (b) on 1 July, 3 accounts were holding 23% of her "yes" shares, (c) those accounts had similar names and betting patterns, (d) there certainly have been some Republican politicians, e.g. Vivek Ramaswamy, who have played up the possibility that Obama would be the nominee and (e) little to none of her market support appeared to come from partisans on her behalf, in contrast to other minor candidates. I previously calculated that something like $115k had been spent across the 3 accounts mentioned, and that seemed like an amount someone might be willing to spend to create the false impression she was a viable candidate.
To be clear though, this is all wild speculation on my part.
Actual political betting scandals tend to be about politicians betting with insider knowledge, e.g. the date of the recent British general election. I'm not aware of any credible accusations of market manipulation in this context.
Thanks; that's exactly the kind of evidence-based answer I was hoping for!
I hadn't thought about the log of bets being open, in combination with the fact that most bets aren't enough to make a difference. I'm mostly reassured by that, but not completely. It seems possible that a bad actor could use one exchange that's less transparent (making the odds on other sites move through arbitrage). Or just place many smaller bets to disguise what they're doing.
There were some rumours of Malta doing this in ESC 2021. https://timesofmalta.com/article/betting-on-destiny-investigation-malta-eurovision-spending.874678
Is there any tracking of approximately how relatively disempowered voters in non-swing states are? I'm in South Carolina, which is sufficiently red to be non-swing (weirdly - as distinct from _both_ our immediate neighbors to the north and to the south). My vague impression is that voter power is roughly proportional to the probability of a near-tie, given the current best estimate of the Harris/Trump vote ratio and the estimate of the uncertainty in that estimate (gaussian PDF?).
In January 2023 I bought Harris at 5% on Manifold - but then I deleted my account!
I would have thought that Trump surviving an assassination attempt would seal his presidency for sure. Seems I was wrong.
I'm not at all surprised that it made little difference. Voters seem to have very short memories for most things, especially for single events that don't have any obvious ongoing ramifications. It seemed like every other week in 2016 some news event or damaging revelation would sink Trump's poll numbers and predict a flood of analysts saying he couldn't win, but every single bit of that was outweighed by the sheer luck of having a negative story about Clinton break 11 days before the election. If the attempt had happened on the eve of the election I suspect it would have been soundly decisive. In July? Not so much.
On top of that Trump has always been polarizing, with nearly a decade in the spotlight to align people strongly into the pro- and con- camps. The sympathy vote angle--"look at what he has to endure for the good of the nation!"--is most convincing when applied to people whom you disagree with, but nevertheless respect. There are very few Americans who would apply such a descriptor to Trump: you love him or you hate him.
If I'm not mistaken, not being the most well-informed individual, Harris is only making public appearances at rallies. I have heard reports of her being incoherent when speaking, though I haven't been able to confirm this. The upcoming debate(s) surely will. And if they DON'T happen, it would seem to be a concession that Harris isn't fit to speak in public.
So I expect a shift to happen, of some sort, after September 10th, when the first debate is currently scheduled.
"I have heard reports of her being incoherent when speaking, though I haven't been able to confirm this."
Partial credit for recognizing aloud that this is unconfirmed, but typing out something like this at all seems like something of a failure of rational skepticism. In a world where this were true, there would be two (not mutually exclusive) possibilities:
1. The "reports" in question came from things she said at a public appearance.
2. The "reports" came from private conversations, some of whose participants were sufficiently alarmed to repeat their concerns to others, who then spread them further.
If 1. were true this should be extremely easy to confirm: almost automatic. Any credible report should certainly list *at the bare minimum* the names and dates of the events in question. A public figure as high-profile as Harris is certainly going to have most of her public appearances caught on video, but even if this were entirely at unrecorded events, they're still *public events.* Many people were there, many people saw them, there are many people who could corroborate anything noteworthy that happened.
If all of the info came from 2 it wouldn't necessarily leave that kind of trail. But first and foremost, this seems pretty unlikely on its face: the sort of people who have lots of access to Harris are necessarily also the sort of people unlikely to betray her confidence like that. If they did they'd almost certainly do it anonymously, but there'd still be a record of "Newspaper X reported an anonymous source within the Harris campaign as saying 'specific things Y and Z.'" SOMEBODY in the chain between Harris and you should have staked their reputation on this being based in reality.
And of course something like this would be BIG news. Even if some networks were reluctant to pick it up for ideological reasons, others would be equally motivated to shout it to the hilltops. The only obvious, rational reason for zero news sites to report on it is that there's nothing at all to report: even relatively flimsy evidence would be worth its weight in clicks.
Being legibly source-able and verifiable is the main difference between a "report" and a "rumour." Forgive my bluntness if I say that it sounds from the outside like what you heard are rumours, not reports. Significantly shifting one's view of the truth based on rumours tends to work out very poorly, for reasons I doubt I need to belabour. But if you do indeed have reports on the subject, feel free to share them and I'll update accordingly.
"So I think it’s very important — as you have heard from so many incredible leaders — for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future."
-Kamala Harris, 04/25/23, speech at Howard University
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/04/25/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-political-event-on-reproductive-rights/
.
"That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis, which is why we will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action. "
-Kamala Harris, 05/13/22, US-ASEAN Climate Summit
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/05/13/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-in-a-meeting-on-climate-at-the-u-s-asean-special-summit/
.
"It is time for us to....do what we have been doing, and that time is everyday."
-Kamala Harris, 01/13/22, Today Show (timestamp ~2:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2xNf4cuK3c
.
Personally, I enjoy her analysis of the Ukraine War, which while not incoherent was moronic. I suppose this is her idea of layman's terms.
"Ukraine is a country in Europe that exists next to another country called Russia, Russia is a bigger country, Russia is a powerful country, Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So basically, that’s wrong."
-Kamala Harris, 03/01/22, Morning Hustle radio show
https://themorninghustle.com/636368/kamala-harris-talks-possible-draft-scotus-nomination-ukraine-update/
Side note: this nicely illustrates one of the reasons that relying on rumours when forming a viewpoint is hazardous.
I, personally, would never in a million years start from those quotes and conclude "Harris is incoherent." But apparently *someone* would. The best possible reporting on the subject would point directly to the sources of information that inspired the judgment, so any reader could judge for themselves. But even mediocre reporting will attribute the judgment to some known party--either the author themselves or a specific source--so that the reader can examine that party gauge how reliable and honest and sound of judgment they are.
Someone relying on rumour surrenders all ability to do that. They're not relying on their own judgment, they're not relying on the judgment of any known party. They literally *have no idea* whose judgment they're trusting, or if ANY human actually came to that conclusion (as opposed to the rumour being distorted in transmission, as they quite commonly are).
So, thank you for your attempt to de-rumour-ify this particular topic. Discussion real events tends to be much more productive than discussing vague and sourceless assertions.
"I, personally, would never in a million years start from those quotes and conclude "Harris is incoherent.""
I don't really personally have a dog in this fight – I think she's doomed either way, which I regard with pronounced ambivalence – but might I ask you what you would consider a good threshold for incoherence?
What I mean is, to *me* "Kamala Harris is occasionally incoherent" is a perfectly satisfactory thing to truncate into "Kamala Harris is incoherent", but I realize there are people who take a more exacting positon on this linguistic construct, so, to your mind, how much is enough to call her "incoherent" without a qualifier? Is it necessary that absolutely nothing should come out of her mouth but gibberish, unable to string together a two-word sentence? You don't have to give like an exact percentage to the decimal point, just ballpark reasoning is fine.
Let's start with "Kamala Harris is occasionally incoherent."
To me someone being "incoherent" means one of the following:
1. I can't understand what they're attempting to communicate at all.
2. I can glean more than zero understanding of what they're attempting to communicate, but some of the following apply:
-a. I can only understand it in broad, general outlines.
-b. I have low confidence in my interpretation
-c. It takes me significant effort to interpret
Further, it must be clear that the lack of understanding is NOT due to my own lack of knowledge of the subject, lack of familiarity with the language, dialect or idiom or lack of understanding of specific jargon[1]. For example, some of the chunks of biology papers that Scott cites in his posts go over my head, but I assume they aren't incoherent to someone more familiar with the topic.
Just to be extra clear, things that do NOT render something "incoherent" include, but are not limited to:
1. The inclusion of verbal pauses like "um" and "uh" in the middle of spoken sentences, as long as they don't make up so much of the sentence that the meaning becomes hard to track.
2. Repeating part of a sentence when speaking: this often fills the same function as 1, giving the speaker time to think.
3. Minor mispronunciations or grammatical errors.
4. Thoughts interrupting other thoughts (to a reasonable degree). Various parentheticals can be used to evoke this deliberately in writing--here's an example--but when speaking this is usually a little less organized. I believe people with ADHD, in particular, are more prone to this, but it's common enough in human speech that I think we often just take it in stride when listening.
5. Deliberate vagueness. Somebody may choose to communicate with limited precision (for various reasons). That doesn't actually mean they're being any less effective at communication.
6. Unintentional vagueness, within limits. If the gist of your meaning comes through clearly, not being able to hit the intended level of precision doesn't make you incoherent (just less effective).
7. Awkward, forced or ugly phrasing.
8. Single sentences that are unclear if reported in isolation, but clear when heard/read in context.
9. Simply being factually incorrect: this is it's own problem, not a problem of coherence.
Finally I'll note that "logical incoherence" is a different thing than "verbal incoherence." When I hear about a *person* being incoherent, that clearly connotes the latter. When I hear about an *idea* being incoherent, it connotes the former. Something like "Kamala was incoherent when speaking about tax policy" could potentially mean either and should be treated with care.
OK, finally, briefly to answer your actual question, I'd agree "Kamala is incoherent" can be a reasonable way to communicate "Kamala is occasionally incoherent," but it depends A LOT on your threshold for "occasionally." If something like 10% of someone's sentences are incoherent, then sure, calling them "incoherent" seems fair. If you can watch a half-hour interview and pick out a single, borderline sentence which is mixed in with lots of clear and easily-understood sentences, then that seems pretty ridiculous. Basically my threshold would boil down to "is listening to them a consistently frustrating experience because so much of what they say is hard to understand?"
BTW none of the above sentences meet my standard for being "incoherent" at all. None of them come particularly close. They're overall kind of awkward and poorly phrased, but the meanings are pretty clear. And the sorts of flaws they display are the sorts of flaws that you will find *all over the place* when you listen to most people speaking unscripted. I don't think they'd have ever stood out to me if I were just listening through the context. They look rather more glaring in print, but so do a lot of things: transcribed interviews will usually include "minor edits for clarity and readability" for exactly that reason.
[1] Obviously something like this *could* be incoherent, but I, personally, lack the ability to judge.
It's not incoherent, it's filling the time between spaces.
Even the nominally pro-Harris speech someone posted has her repeating things, not sure if she's sure she should be repeating it. "Bring it on" "bring it on?" "bring it on."
I'm still voting for her because Trump. Mediocre wins in this election.
Not incoherent as such, but reminds me of the description of Thorin from "The Hobbit":
"And this is how Thorin began. “Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit—may the hair on his toes never fall out! all praise to his wine and ale!—” He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed. So Thorin went on:
“We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. We shall soon before the break of day start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Gandalf) may never return. It is a solemn moment. Our object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr. Baggins, and perhaps to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation—” This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already."
I think you must have a very different idea of what "incoherent" means than I do. These are certainly not the finest examples of oration in human history, but neither are they glaring errors or obvious gaffes (except *maybe* the third one). The other two are a bit rambly and vague, but they are grammatical sentences that (even divorced from their context) convey coherent ideas. The third one sounds like a bit of a verbal stumble and doesn't mean much on its own, but it's a short sentence which (watched in context) is part of a longer answer that certainly is coherent.
Even if all three of these had been said within the course of a thirty-minute interview, I'm sure I wouldn't find it noteworthy, much less concerning. But they were pulled from a corpus of *two and a half years* of public appearances. It's hard to adequately convey just how thoroughly banal I find the assertion that "in the past 2.5 years, the VP of the U.S. has had at least three moments of less-than-perfect composure when speaking in public."
Genuine question: if we combed through the past 2.5 years of Trump's public appearances, how many sentences or phrases meeting at least this standard of "incoherence" do you think we'd find? More than three? Less than three? Zero?
What if we did the same for every U.S. Governor? How many do you think would have three or fewer equally "embarrassing" statements?
If I were tasked to characterize someone's speeches, I would take all I have heard and find the most common things. People who have listened to Kamala characterized her speech as often incoherent.
It's hard to find samples of her speaking. I conjecture this is because she has been hidden away to avoid reinforcing bad opinions. Recent examples can be carefully rehearsed, and are for specific, friendly audiences.
It makes no difference whether we agree. On September 10th, the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself. Or if it's canceled, we can draw our own conclusions as to why.
I greatly appreciate Rothwed finding reasonable examples of incoherent speech. Of course, everyone speaks incoherently every once in a while. The question is what kind of a habit it is. And yes, the Ukraine/Russia comment was most entertaining.
"It's hard to find samples of her speaking. I conjecture this is because she has been hidden away to avoid reinforcing bad opinions. Recent examples can be carefully rehearsed, and are for specific, friendly audiences."
See, this is an example of conjecture that FAR outstrips the available evidence. Vice Presidents don't tend to spend much time in the spotlight in general. Kamala Harris has been VP for four year and an (actual or presumptive) presidential nominee for a few weeks. Weeks which--one would have to assume--have been HELLISHLY busy for her, since the changeover was very much not a planned thing and left her little time to organize a campaign. It's not especially striking that she hasn't spoken much. Is it *possible* that your interpretation is the truth? Sure, anything's possible. But at this juncture it seems akin to seeing a someone in a car idling outside a bank and concluding that they must be a getaway driver for the mob.
"It makes no difference whether we agree. On September 10th, the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself. Or if it's canceled, we can draw our own conclusions as to why."
Why wait? Shaping the facts to fit the narrative is such the fashion in U.S. politics these days, that it hardly seems necessary to wait. We both know they'll always say exactly what the motivated partisan wants them to say, so filling in the blanks ahead of time seems to make little difference.
OK, so maybe that's slightly hyperbolic, but the problem is real. I do very much like that you've stuck your neck out to make a bold, unusual prediction: that Harris will avoid the debate. That is close enough to being a clean true/false that I think very few people--even in this deplorable intellectual climate--could disagree on how it turned out. But when you say "the nation will be able to determine, everyone for him/herself" that's...well, that's exactly what I expect, but in a bad way.
Here's what I think: the debate will almost certainly happen as planned. Trump will be Trump, no mystery there. Harris will be slightly awkward, but generally middle-of-the-road for political debates in terms of having pertinent, articulate answers[1]. It won't tell most reasonably-awake humans anything they didn't already know about either of them. But the pundits and "thought leaders" will jump into overdrive grabbing whatever threads are handy from it and using it to weave their own preferred tapestries, with at-best dubious relationships to the truth.
In particular, I think that *you* will come away *more* convinced that "Harris is incoherent" and *I* will come away less convinced (assuming I can be arsed to watch, which is not a guarantee). More generally, I think close to zero minds will change on this question. Anyone who was already bought into that narrative will double down on it, and nobody who wasn't bought in will be convinced in the slightest. Two days ago I might have been less cynical, but seeing you and Rothwed claim that some utterly banal soundbites are evidence of a deep and serious problem certainly helped hammer home how bad the intellectual climate in the U.S. is right now. And doing some Googling afterwards and finding that you're far from the only ones--that there are a number of not-especially-reputable news sites trying to pull the same trick (with a different soundbite even)--underscored it rather nicely.
Regardless, if you want to both improve your thought-processes and show up all the doubters, I'd urge you to make more plainly-falsifiable predictions. The one about the debate being cancelled was good, but assuming it does happen, try to think up specific states of the world--things with as little subjectivity as possible--that you think likely to occur during or shortly after the debate, if it happens. A world where Harris *really is* in some sort of terrible cognitive straits and is being kept out of the spotlight, but can't avoid the debate: what must necessarily follow in that world? What should the rest of us look for to know we're in it?
The enemy I'm taking aim at here has a name: confirmation bias. I expect Harris to make sense (as I expect of most people), so I read or listen to her words and I get a meaning out of them. Maybe I'm projecting my own interpretation, or glossing over inconsistencies or some other subconscious trick and she really *is* incoherent. You expect her to be incoherent, so you listen and hear incoherence. Maybe your brain is stopping short at the first minor stumble, or being reluctant to connect pieces that aren't quite perfectly aligned, or blowing small errors out of proportion, or whatever. But in either case, we don't realize it's happening. It *feels* to me like she's speaking pretty normally (if somewhat awkwardly). I assume that it *feels* to you like she's just spouting verbal diarrhea (and believe me, I know that feeling). So the only way to bridge the gap is to find observations that are harder for our brains to fool us about.
[1] It should be noted that middle-of-the-road for U.S. political debates is a *shockingly* low standard. I watched the very first Bush vs Gore when I was in my teens. Even at that age, I could barely breathe for the stench of the bullshit emanating from the TV. They didn't so much answer the questions as use the questions as very loose jumping-off points to make largely unrelated campaign pitches. I've only watched the occasional debate since, but they haven't been much better.
I again have to highlight the way you keep emphasizing this train of thought that Harris might abandon the September 10th debate. It wasn't Harris trying to wiggle her way out of it a couple weeks ago, that was Trump. Why do you think there will be a sudden reversal, except that it would help make Trump look good and Harris bad?
The media did a circle of protection around Joe Biden and thought they could get away with it, and they did until they couldn't.
They're doing the same thing with Harris. She's not even doing interviews with MSNBC. In moderately adversarial interviews, she uses her laugh to shut down questions she doesn't like. (Go find the one where she laughs when being questioned about her record of being the most liberal person in a congress. She laughs and laughs at how dumb the question is until the reporter calmly cites a non-partisan source and Harris's face just crumbles because her power-play didn't work.)
Just like Biden's team had smart reason to keep Biden hidden away, Harris's team probably has good reason to not let her do interviews.
What's she going to do when negotiating with Putin? Repeat "do not come" over and over again?
I have given you sourced and credible reports of Kamala's gibberish. Maybe you don't find her words "lacking normal clarity or intelligibility in speech or thought", to define incoherent. Personally, res ipsa loquitur. I did not perform an exhaustive search of everything she has said over her career, but merely provided reports that you seemed to think didn't exist. I am not interested in the entirely different question of other people who say similar things.
"I have given you sourced and credible reports of Kamala's gibberish"
No, you have given me credible recordings of *things Kamala has said.* The subjective judgment that they are gibberish is your own addition, and not present at all in the text you provided.
"I am not interested in the entirely different question of other people who say similar things. "
You should be if you care at all about being reasonable and well-calibrated. If you both a. think the above qualify as "gibberish" and b. think that a politician sometimes speaking gibberish should impact anyone's consideration on whether they are fit for office, then a bare minimum sanity check on those opinions to have a sense of how common that condition actually is.
If, for example, all 50 current state governors could be found making similarly "incoherent" statements (as I strongly suspect they could) then you would necessarily either need to re-evaluate whether they counted as "gibberish"[1] or re-evaluate whether they were even slightly predictive of job performance.
[1] The obvious alternative being that you simply lack the skill of understanding certain sorts of political speech, and should either develop it or condition your opinions on that deficit.
Here's a short sample of Harris's incoherent speech...
https://x.com/i/status/1822457269205766380
Here's a short sample of Donald Trump's extremely coherent non-cognitively-impaired speech...
https://twitter.com/i/status/1822120732781957233
After his remarks about the border, I can't make heads nor tails of what he's rambling on about.
I note the "short sample" is much shorter for Harris. This seems like a specially curated sample, with a liberal bias.
I grant the Trump sample is typical Trump. I have too little information to judge the Harris sample on anything. Anyone can make a soundbite, especially if one makes lots of them and someone picks the best for viewing.
At this point, the only rational thing to do is to spend time looking up full recordings of Harris's recent appearances and listen to them yourself. You have adjusted your priors to "Harris is borderline incoherent, worse than Trump" based purely on reports that you haven't been able to verify because they have a bias that comforts you (this claim is further bolstered by your suggestion that Harris might somehow back out of the debate even though she's spent the bulk of her candidacy pressuring Trump to honor his commitment to debate the Democratic candidate, which shows a tendency towards projection), and a good faith attempt to point out that she's not is dismissed as being liberal propaganda. Anything short of listening to her speeches yourself before carrying on with this conversation makes it clear that you are attempting to exist in the world of emotion, not facts.
I've been watching the Harris speeches, and she's quite cogent. Frankly, Arrk seems to be projecting Trump's obvious cognitive decline onto Harris. But we'll see what the debate shows us.
Well, Harris and Trump have agreed to a debate on ABC on September 10th. I recommend you view it live so as to avoid being influenced by brief clips.
And don't forget the photos of her large crowds are AI-generated. The stadiums where she's speaking are actually empty. Also, the Moon landing was filmed in a Hollywood studio, and Elvis is still alive and kicking.
Dunno about Elvis, but CIA tried to kill Trump fo realz
Get with the times man, the CIA has been behind every murder ever committed and 70% of attempted murders since at least 1989
Well before 1989, they used a Time Machine to assassinate Caesar! It’s all in the Epstein Files
And the associated accumulated paperwork was used as the set for the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" :-)
I don't think she's incoherent in the sense of being senile or confused (you can see enough of her rally speeches to tell that much), but she hasn't been a great public speaker historically and is trying to avoid taking any concrete positions that might either piss off the left wing of the party (which presumably includes most of her staff, so there's a bias here) or the center. Given that she's doing well in the polls and vibes, she's mostly trying to avoid risk as long as possible.
Why would Harris be unfit to speak in public? She's been speaking in public her entire career.
She seems clumsy when speaking contemporaneously and having to fill in the time with non-prepared remarks.
Harris says she wants to get "an interview" set up before the end of the month. Vance did three interviews on Sunday.
Trump isn't appearing very much either. I think because his health isn't up to it. It's all Vance versus Harris at this point, like some people didn't get the memo that Harris is now at the top of the ticket.
I feel a bit guilty about being a pedant, but I think that word contemporaneously should be extemporaneously.
yes
Has anyone ever seen Richard Karn (Al from Home Improvement) and Vance in the same room together?
>Overall this is the most surrealistically disconnected election I can remember in my life,
Can we get campaign posters for both sides in the style of Salvador Dali? Pretty please? :-)
Melted faces and dripping hands? O tempore!
I'm not sure if this is an example, but just seeing, if by attempting to deliver an inspiring speech, and then performing. To those that say otherwise, I say, rethink the discontinuance, and embrace togetherness.
As I mentioned, I haven't found instances of Harris being incoherent, but would you vote for someone that said something like that?
It is notable how little Harris has said while vice-president. Why is that, for such a prominent position? If she's been speaking in public her entire career, why stop four years ago?
>would you vote for someone that said something like that?
A few Open Threads ago I picked a random year, 1990, and looked up a Trump interview. The first result was him walking out on an interview claiming they had spread inaccuracies, and when pressed on what the inaccuracies were replied "I think your demeanor was inaccurate. I think your questions were inaccurate."
That is to say, if you're voting at all, you're voting for someone who said something like that.
Vice presidents don't usually do or say much. There are exceptions, but Harris's relative silence was closer to the rule.
She isn't the best person at thinking on their feet in front of a camera, I'll agree, but that's harder to do than most people realize. Plenty of smart, articulate people aren't at their best with a camera rolling and the whole world watching. She does better than most. I don't care for her at all but will take her or her cat over Trump.
>Vice presidents don't usually do or say much.
True! As Tom Lehrer sang about Hubert Humphrey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Y5f0DiMu8
>but would you vote for someone that said something like this?
I’ll counter that with would you vote for someone who completely falsely says that photos and video of Harris rallies are AI generated?
It’s just the latest spurt from a 10 year fire hose of ludicrous lies. I suspect but have no hard proof the guy is so messed up he actually believes his lies in the moment he tells them. I don’t know what’s worse a delusional man or a pathological liar.
‘Former President Donald J. Trump has taken his new obsession with the large crowds that Vice President Kamala Harris is drawing at her rallies to new heights, falsely declaring in a series of social media posts on Sunday that she had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of fake crowds.
The crowds at Ms. Harris’s events, including one in Detroit outside an airplane hangar, were witnessed by thousands of people and news outlets, including The New York Times, and the number of attendees claimed by her campaign is in line with what was visible on the ground. Mr. Trump falsely wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that “there was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it.” ‘
I don't think that Trump believes that words are supposed to have truth value in the first place. He just says whatever he feels like without regard to actual content. It's the ultimate manifestation of Colbert's "truthiness".
Yes. It's like some horrible parody of religious interpretation, where we recognize that we are not supposed to take comments about "AI-generated crowds" literally, but instead treat them as a metaphor for "the lying liberal media astroturfing support for Harris".
There is a fine book on this very phenomenon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit
Very apt description.
Trump has been exaggerating crowd sizes ever since he was inaugurated in Jan 2017.
At this point it’s common knowledge that he speaks in hyperbole and pushes nonsense that the liberal media is quick to debunk.
Even conservatives know this. Ben Shapiro “Trump’s epitaph will be, I talked a lot of shit.”
What strikes me as the problem is that the liberal media does this too, and liberals are largely unaware of it.
I’m supporting Trump.
Is this contrast a *reason* you're supporting trump?
Because it sounds like "Trump does thing A all the time, shamelessly, everyone knows it, even his supporters admit it; but the liberal media does it sometimes too but they are unaware of it. Therefore I'll support the person who does it much more egregiously". That seems incomprehensible.
Surely him doing something you don't like, more often (knowing or not) is a *detriment*?
I know plenty of people like the guy. Short of a Vulcan mind meld I don’t think I’ll ever understand why.
I cannot verify that Trump stated any Harris rallies were AI generated. Snopes doesn't yet validate the photo in Detroit as real, though it seems likely so far, as it is unlikely to have been AI generated, but they can't say with certainty as of yet.
As a conservative, I come to this blog for differing viewpoints, but not actively hostile ones. I'm open to facts changing my mind. I would appreciate as objective a viewpoint as can be managed.
A pathological liar is worse than a delusional person, as they at least know what they think of as the truth. Truthful politicians don't last long in politics, though Trump is new to politics and doesn't play that game very well.
I don't have access to Truth Social, but he was quoted as saying on TS: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she “A.I.’d” it, and showed a massive “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” He went on to insist that the reflection on the plane proves that the image was manipulated, and that “There was nobody there!”
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/trump-falsely-claims-crowd-photo-harris-campaign-rally-112787685
Trump is not new to politics! He has been a politician for a decade now and was president for four years. If that doesn't qualify someone to be a politician then very little does.
Check Trump’s own Truth Social. He posted that the rallies are AI generated there.
There were thousands of people at the rallies including many journalists with real cameras and video equipment. Check YouTube. AI may be good but it can’t produce a consistent fake from dozens of sources. It’s just not possible to run that sort of scam.
Pointing out an easily verified fact is not hostility. Disagreement is not hostility.
I’ve been listening to Trump unfiltered by media interpretation for 10 years. I’m talking about his live speech not how media spins it. He lies about more things that are easily shown to be false than any politician I’ve seen in what’s getting to be my rather long life. Until Trump no one has tried this sort of everyday lying. Not Nixon, not George Wallace, no one.
It’s truly stunning.
I have no problem with conservatives. I don’t think Trump is one though. He is a populist demagogue with some conservative ideas and some that conservatives would say are radically liberal.
A big topic in recent years has been homelessness in the USA. Many attribute home building regulations as a root cause. I've seen much less written about homelessness in Europe. Is it much of a problem there? If not, why not? I don't imagine that it's much easier to build new homes in European cities than in American ones, although perhaps population decline has caused homelessness to be a less of a problem there?
I've tried to get data on how much homeless in the USA is a problem now versus two, three, four decades ago, but can't find much that seems reliable. Does anyone have relatively reliable data on that?
EDIT: I want to add that, as mentioned below, at least according to Wikipedia, every major European country as well as Canada and Australia have higher homeless rates than does the USA.
There has been no population decline in major cities in Europe, and most of them share the problems regarding home building regulations.
There hasn't been much of an increase, either, in a lot of places. Paris proper has fewer people today than in 1975, and the metro population has only increased from 11M to 12.6M since 1990. Madrid had 3,1M in 1980 and 3.3M today. Berlin had 3.4 M in 1990 and 3.6M today.
Every European city I have looked up falls into one of three brackets; Major Increase (Istanbul, Baku, Dublin), Minor increase (London, Milan, Munich, Warsaw etc) or stable, like the ones you mentioned. So it's hard to find evidence for population decline! There would be in small regional towns, but homelessness was never a big problem there anyway.
No, but population decline is not necessary for low homelessness. What is necessary is a large increase in population compared to housing supply. Which is unlikely where population increase is relatively minor.
PS: I suppose a decrease in avg family size will also have an effect, if it is large enough, even if population doesn't grow much.
I live in Austria. My basic impression is that such a thing as native-born or native-ethnicity poverty just does not exist anymore. I don't know whether social programs or dropping birth rates leading to everybody inheriting stuff from grandparents, as their parents will usually pass the inheritance on. My take is that *visible* poverty in a rich country in 2024 is some sort of an anomaly that needs to be accounted for, explained.
The rougher neighborhoods in the city are MENA, Turkish, Bosniak people, and I think strong family links and Islamic charities prevent them from going homeless.
There are homeless people coming from Eastern Europe, because begging works better here.
Again I think in 2024 *visible* poverty in a rich country needs some sort of an explanation. Theoretically everybody who cannot work gets a disability check and sleeps in their cousin's kitchen or two people share a rented room. Theoretically everybody who can work, can rent a room or maybe work on a farm and sleep there somewhere. That makes their poverty invisible.
Now Paris has a huge homeless problem but it is entirely recent immigrants without family links.
One big difference is that US political parties are not seeking stories about homelessness in Europe to amplify and use as a political cudgel.
When I lived in San Jose, there was a huge homeless encampment under Highway 85 but you never saw homeless people in the streets (I understand that it's different in SF). I recently moved home to Bristol, UK and the homeless are everywhere and it's heartbreaking. I don't know if there is more homelessness here but it is certainly more visible. Bristol has a big housing shortage too.
Much of Europe also has better mental health care.
Meh. The Austrian state only pays for mental health care if people need to be insitutionalized. Otherwise a session with a shrink will be like $120.
Also by "better" you imply quality, not access... I dunno, my experience so far is "trying random antidepressants until one works" I think Scott wrote once that really one often cannot do better, but in this case there is no such thing as low or high quality
Can you have someone committed for not being able to take care of themselves in much of Europe? The end of forced institutionalization in the US had a lot to do with the increase in homelessness starting in the mid 1980s.
I think it goes deeper than that, the care is better to the point that usually it doesn't have to get that far.
That said I don't know about "taking care of themselves" as it is quite subjective, but certainly someone can be committed and forced to take medication if they are deemed a danger to themselves or others.
Europe has more population decline and less nimbyism (overall, it definitely doesn't have zero). Most European countries also has a better social safety net - not just in the government provided sense, but also in more social cohesion (note that within the US, the best social services for homeless are in Utah, which isn't a blue state but is relatively communal). Although I don't know how that's been handling things with the refugee wave.
>not just in the government provided sense, but also in more social cohesion
I live in Austria and I I think the later is not true. People openly saying the specific reason high taxes are good is that they don't have to worry about philantropy but can focus on their own lives without guilt. If I wanted to volunteer at a soup kitchen, I don't know how to find one. Christianity is near to non-existent now and that plays a role.
In Germany they started in 1993 and became wide-spread about twenty years ago. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafel_(Organisation)#Statistik
(There is a section about Austria a bit further down...)
I agree with you that it is a shame that this kind of thing is needed at all.
Yeah, this one probably varies wildly by country (and community) and it's hard to say "Europe" for it in a lump. (I will note that I saw a lot of homeless people in Vienna in the central train station, but maybe that's just where they all go, I didn't see as much of it elsewhere).
Specifically in Israel (not technically Europe but also lower homelessness), I know it's much harder to slip between the cracks of family/community support. If you talk to homeless people in America, they'll usually have a story about how their family died or can't support them or something. One issue there though is just America's scale - the bigger your country is the easier it is for problems to become no one's responsibility.
> Europe has more population decline and less nimbyism
I assume you're excluding the UK from that? Because from what I've heard, the UK has extreme nimbyism that makes California look sane.
Yeah. Quick Google suggests the UK has twice the homelessness rate of the US though (assuming those numbers are reliable and comparable), so this actually checks out.
Personal hot take- with just a little deregulation, cities like New York or San Francisco would have people living in ‘coffin apartments’ like those in Singapore and Hong Kong. This wouldn’t even require new construction- just permission to heavily subdivide existing units. Forcing people to live in spectacularly inhumane housing for free by banning them from living in mildly inhumane housing for cheap is not kindness.
OK for the agoraphobic, hell for the claustrophobic. People sleeping on the street and not building a hut are likely claustrophobic and it probably plays a BIG role in homelessness - maybe they could rent a small room, two person per room, but they find that intolerable.
Theodore Dalrymple who has some experience with it said those people are nomads - the British state gives them a small apartment, and they just run out and prefer to wander and sleep open air. He was judgemental about it - as a psychiatrist he should have recognized it is claustrophobia.
As someone extremely agoraphobic dreaming about underground cities and watching videos of Antarctica stations because it calms me, I can appreciate some people will be total opposite of me.
Why shouldn't city dwellers be allowed to live in tiny pods, if that's what they want? There's no coercion or torture involved.
As a country dweller, conditions in any city seem cramped and inhuman to me. So I won't move to one. But presumably those who do, are happy to trade that off for other stuff.
Looks to me as if the regulation is there mainly for aesthetic reasons, because people in pods is an ugly image.
I for one support people's right to live in an ugly way if it means optimising for stuff they actually like.
> Looks to me as if the regulation is there mainly for aesthetic reasons
I think there's also an element of socioeconomic exclusion. Most of the inhabitants of pods will be poor, and they don't want poor people in the neighborhood.
Aren't you always necessarily within a few hundred yards of where lots of poor people live, if you're in a big city? Isn't that one of the benefits, that you're surrounded by people who will make ethnic food for you or whatever?
No, in many big cities, you have to travel several km from the city center to reach any significant amount of poor people. They just take the subway to the city center to make your döner.
Right, and this is part of why mass transit can be controversial, especially free mass transit. In addition to moving working poor into wealthier areas, there's a worry that non-working poor (homeless people) will hop on and travel to wealthy residential areas too.
Agree.
Here's homeless rates per country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population
Per 10000 Norway has 6,2, USA has 19,5. I pretty sure the most important difference here is Norway is more socialist, so fewer people are very poor.
I'm suspect the most important difference is that no part of Norway doesn't freeze in winter.
But that's going to depend on the definition of "homeless" being used. I note that the Wikipedia article you cite doesn't use a uniform standard, and it doesn't have an entry for "unsheltered homeless" for Norway. Which is what we mostly care about, because that's the kind that is visible and causes most of the problems, and it's the kind that gets filtered out once a year if the unsheltered are liable to freeze to death in winter.
I live in a U.S. city that freezes in winter. There are homeless people here in the warmer months. I have no idea where they go in winter, or why they come back.
People were similarly mystified by what happened to migrating birds in the winter, before their migration became understood. Hypotheses included that they hibernated, or even turned into mice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch
Are you suggesting homeless migrate? Like coconuts??
There are definitely subsets of the homeless population that migrate. Classically, "hobos" and "tramps". How significant this is in the context of the current homelessness problem, is unclear. But it could at least partially explain seasonal homelessness in colder areas.
This may seem like petty semantics, but I really think we should stop conflating "safety net" with "socialism". Norway has a much more robust safety net. It is _not_ much more "socialist".
And while I agree that that is part of it, I'd be surprised if a fully re-worked housing situation in the US didn't erase the majority of the difference. In other words, I would expect US housing policy to actually be the most important difference. Although I suppose I would be willing to concede that a much more robust safety net, done separately, might also do this? I'm not sure. It seems like the current US housing paradigm has the ability to soak up a _lot_ of safety net.
Thanks. According to those numbers, The UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden all have higher homeless rates than the US, which is interesting if true.
Norway is special because it is not only a bit socialist but, perhaps more relevantly, a small petrostate.
> According to those numbers, The UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden all have higher homeless rates than the US, which is interesting if true.
I think that different countries have vastly different definitions for, and ways of counting, homelessness.
Looking into the Australia number, the claim is that 122,000 people are homeless, or 0.5% of the population. But digging into the numbers it turns out that only 7,636 people were actually "in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out". A whopping 48,000 of them were merely "living in severely crowded dwellings" which isn't great but isn't by any reasonable definition homeless. (And I'm guessing the vast majority of those people are foreigners).
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/housing/estimating-homelessness-census/latest-release#:~:text=Of%20the%20122%2C494%20people%20experiencing,%25)%20living%20in%20boarding%20houses.
That makes sense. I live in Australia and homeless people aren’t much of a visible problem here
I found some more data. I'm amused by the fact that there's more rough sleepers in Byron Shire (300) than in the City of Sydney (277). (For those not in the know, Byron Bay is a famous beach town with a hippie vibe.)
https://www.facs.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/846764/2023-NSW-street-count-Technical-Paper.pdf
It also says that 59% of unsheltered homeless were in vehicles. So I'm now pretty sure that the modal Australian "homeless" person is a surfie sleeping in a van in Byron Bay.
Homeless in the US seem to be concentrated into a few big cities, which makes the problem way more visible.
Also the usual caveat that "homelessness" can have different definitions in different studies / jurisdictions / etc
To nitpick, the "visible" difference between the homeless in one US big city and another has more to do with their behavior than their numbers. There's plenty of homeless people in Dallas but they are motivated by the police to keep a low profile. The numbers in the West Coast cities are higher than other cities but what makes them so visible to the public is that those cities allow them to behave more aggressively with pedestrians and to camp in places that are greater nuisances to the public.
Agree of course that homelessness statistics across countries aren't likely to be reliable. Nevertheless, it remains a possibility that European cities have equal or greater percentages of homelessness as/than US ones. It's also possible that homeless people in Paris and Stockholm are less visible than those in San Francisco for the same reasons the homeless in Dallas are.
I've just launched a new substack that will be sharing, every morning, 7-days-a-week, a short reading from the "secular canon."
That is, short secular texts (mostly from the internet) that engage deeply with the world — that ask important questions and remind us of our most important obligations.
https://secularmornings.substack.com
I see this as an antidote to the shallow, “watery and domesticated” humanism described by Joe Carlsmith:
"… a type that says something like: 'Enough with this cosmic stuff—it’s gone dead. But let’s enjoy a nice afternoon, and our tea, before it gets cold.' Here I think of a talk I heard at an atheist club in undergrad, in which the speaker suggested that in the place of the orienting meaning that religion provides, maybe atheism could promote an activity like ultimate frisbee, which is fun and creates community.… I like tea and frisbee fine. But some kind of existential intensity is getting lost, here. There is some un-relating to the whole story; some blinkering of the attention."
Consider subscribing if you are interested!
Bess, if you are reading this, I am so sorry about your loss. Your husband’s last post was poignant and beautiful. My best wishes to you.
Agreed
<3
Amen
Assisted dying is getting a lot of airtime in the UK because Parliament is considering a bill that will allow it.
Here’s my contribution to the discussion:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/can-we-talk-about-assisted-dying
Tl;DR Canada went too far. Oregon got it right. UK should copy Oregon. In America, the discussion will inevitably be subsumed into the culture wars and enlightened centrists will be ignored.
> and his death certificate listed several more serious conditions. Alan’s family could not have known this — but why should the family have access to a medical record that the patient explicitly wants to keep secret?
Well, the most obvious answer is that they inherit it from him.
The policy-relevant answer is that it's an important part of oversight of the MAID system, and - since dead people can't suffer injuries - there are no costs to disclosing it to them. But it seems moot since they're entitled to see it anyway.
If you're asking why they should have access while the patient is still alive, the policy-relevant answer remains true but stops being moot, and we can also note that a privacy interest that the patient is notionally committed to renouncing isn't a very strong interest.
Canada doesn't have a problem with giving out MAID too easily. MAID has a PR problem due to asymmetry of information because of patient privacy.
Every so often family members of a MAID recipient will be upset and claim that the recipient was basically fine and that they were approved for MAID for some atrocious reason, like losing their hearing. This is obviously not a valid reason for MAID in Canada. The family complains to the hospital and the hospital says they reviewed the case and found the recipient of MAID was eligible but due to patient privacy they can't say why. Then the family goes to the police and the police do an investigation and find the same thing: the recipient was eligible but due to privacy, they can't say why.
Then the anti-euthanasia crowd picks up the story, takes the family's uninformed version of events as gospel and yells about how terrible it is. The only thing the hospital can say in its defense is, "hey, we swear they were eligible but we can't say why due to patient privacy", which admittedly doesn't sound terribly convincing. Most likely the recipient was terminally ill and suffering.
Even if this only happens for 0.1% of MAID deaths, you still get many dozens of anti-MAID stories going around based on false information.
As for 35% of recipients saying they don't want to be a burden on other: this is very normal for the terminally ill, is in no way unique to Canada, and honestly the percentage seems surprisingly low to me. The majority of recipients are terminal cancer patients and they *are* a burden on others. This isn't their primary reason for wanting MAID, just one of the reasons they checked on the list.
I agree with you on both the “burden” issue and the patient privacy issue.
As a German, when I started out thinking about it, I was initially opposed to MAiD. My thinking was initially tribal back then, "Nazis did 'euthanasia'" plus "Nazis are bad" yields "euthanasia is bad". (Don't laugh, I was a teenager.)
To my credit, I read "Practical Ethics" (on the recommendation of my ethics teacher), by Peter Singer, and he changed my mind with arguments (this was long before twitter, when such miracles were commonplace).
I have been pro-MAiD ever since.
This summer, after being cared for by my mother for twelve years, the body of my father finally succumbed to Alzheimer. It was not a good death. He had lost the ability to talk, react in any way indicating intelligence beyond a gold fish, control his bowels, walk and finally stand. I think my mum did an amazing job caring for him, and he had the best life he could have realistically have had given his condition. When he stopped drinking, my mother tried to spoon-feed him gelatinized water for a day, but finally recognized that this was pointless. We had already ruled out a stomach probe before, so that was it.
You commonly read that people die of thirst after three days, and that may be true for healthy young adults. It was non true for my dad (or what was left of him). He had opioids, but as he did not show any pain signs they were low-dose and did not hasten his demise. It took him more than two fucking weeks. I can not say how the process was for my father, but it was certainly hell for my mother.
If he was an animal, whomever had decided that this was an adequate way to cause his death should go to prison for animal cruelty. Unfortunately, he was still a human in the eye of the law (though if Singer would consider him a person would be highly debatable), so our hands were tied.
My mother, as the decision-maker designated in his living will, was well within her rights to refuse further medical interventions. But if she had decided that what he required at the time he stopped drinking was a lethal dose of pentobarbital, she would face manslaughter charges.
So I am kind of furious with the state of MAiD in Germany. Between the radical left people vehemently opposing any discussion of euthanasia (as seen in Singers article "On Being Silenced in Germany", helpfully included as an appendix in the German version of Practical Ethics), to disability-rights groups, reluctant medical associations to Catholics, there are plenty of political factions in Germany opposing assisted suicide. In 2020, the German supreme court has ruled that a blanket ban on suicide-as-a-business is unconstitutional and told parliament to establish new rules, but so far none have been forthcoming.
I just don't see the fundamental difference between active and passive euthanasia. You make a decision about someone under your care, and someone dies. "Your honor, I did not kill the hostage, I just left her tied up in the desert without water and God did the killing" would not fly in any criminal court.
I'm also sorry that your family had to endure your father's needlessly protracted end.
I'm sorry that your father had such an undignified end and I am sorry that you and your mother had to endure what must have been a very difficult period.
>and to emphasise that the murderer was British. Immigration must have nothing to do with it.
This impulse to remove and suppress certain criticisms from the discourse and keep it off the political agenda has contributed to the UK you have today. Insisting that the massive overrepresentation of brown faces in eg crime stats has nothing to do with immigration is eventually going to piss off quite a few people and they're going to resort to violence if political avenues against immigration is forbidden.
I agree. My intention was to contrast the topics that we are able to talk about openly and rationally (like MAiD) with those where we are not (like immigration).
Yea sorry, I made it sound like we were in disagreement. Honestly I'm not sure much can be done to keep euthanasia discussions sterile unless no one cares much about it in the first place, which is unlikely given the subject matter and our current focus on "rights".
>Oregon got it right. UK should copy Oregon. In America, the discussion will inevitably be subsumed into the culture wars and enlightened centrists will be ignored.
It’s odd that you would point to an American program as a successful model then dunk on the U.S. for not being able to reasonably discuss the issue.
California has a similar system to Oregon. Nine other states have MAiD programs, as does DC.
As with abortion, the states that have adopted liberal attitudes to assisted dying are all liberal. Eventually, this will become a federal issue and liberal states will insist on one solution while conservatives will insist on the opposite solution. It will eventually decided by the Supreme Court which will insist on one solution for everyone and it will become a permanent battleground in the culture wars as abortion is.
You may recall that conservatives attempted to reverse Oregon’s law in the Supreme Court at the time. It will eventually happen again.
SCOTUS recently decentralized abortion law rather than imposing one on every state.
And Republicans in Congress immediately tried to institute a ban. It's not over yet.
When Oregon passed its Death with Dignity act, it immediately got held up in congress as Frist tried to ban the use of federally controlled drugs in assisted dying. The new law was thrown out by SCOTUS. Perhaps a more conservative supreme court will reverse that decision once the topic becomes contentious again.
If and when it is over, it won't look anything like "The Supreme Court will insist on one solution for everyone". Which is relevant evidence against the prospect of the Supreme Court insisting on one solution for everyone w/re assisted suicide. It's not impossible that such a thing *could* happen, but it's not the way to bet. And blaming the Supreme Court for something Congress might someday do, doesn't seem like it accomplishes anything useful.
Maybe I don’t realize how united other countries like the UK are in their public opinion on assisted dying. So the UK isn’t split on this topic politically? There is widespread agreement on whether such a program is a good idea?
I don’t understand your argument that the Supreme Court eventually and inevitably takes away state rights in favor of federal rights. The Supreme Court recently (and controversially) returned abortion lawmaking power to the states. As you mentioned, the attempt to strike down Oregon’s MAiD law failed. Why do you see these rulings as evidence that state laws are insubstantial and temporary? The fact that the U.S. has individual states where people have different cultural values yet are still partners in a federal sense is something Americans generally think of as a feature not a bug. It affords us increased ideological and cultural diversity while leveraging the benefits and securities of a large population base.
The MAiD program in Oregon you consider to be a model for such programs has been in place for 27 years. The number of states with such laws continue to grow. Some states will probably refrain from adopting such laws which will probably reflect what the majority of people who live in those states want.
I just didn’t see why your reasonable analysis of what the UK should do about MAiD (which you think calls for a similar solution to an American one) should take an immediate hard turn toward saying the U.S. can’t discuss the kind of program it already ironically produced because culture wars.
There is disagreement over MAiD in the UK and there will be opposing views in Parliament but the disagreement won't be along party lines the way it was in America.
I celebrate with you when States are permitted to make their own choices but, increasingly, decisions like this one get escalated to the Federal level. I predict the same will happen with MAiD and Congress will eventually try to ban it or make it a universal right and it will end up in the Supreme Court which will decide it once and for all. Do you disagree?
>Do you disagree?
I guess so. Abortion was just kicked back to the states, which demonstrates that these issues don’t necessarily resolve themselves the way you indicate they naturally will, as federal bans or universal rights. States commonly have different laws on controversial issues.
I might just be ignorant about American law but when you say “once and for all” I don’t really know what you mean. Supreme Court rulings are subject to review and can be (and are) overturned.
But in any case the last time the Supreme Court considered the MAiD issue in 2006, they affirmed that the regulation of medical practice, including the practice of assisted dying, is primarily a matter of state law, not federal law. Maybe a future court will rule differently. Then maybe another will rule differently still.
But all of the states in the US with MAiD program are blue states, which means that it almost has to become a culture war issue even if the motivation behind the original programs were based on reasoned discussion.
What's the difference between Culture War and sensible federalism?
If left-leaning states wind up with left-leaning euthanasia policies, and right-leaning states wind up with right-leaning euthanasia policies, that seems like a perfectly reasonable outcome.
I think the states that have copied Oregon’s laws have been able to avoid some of those issues. The only controversy that I am aware of is whether Oregon’s MAiD should be available to residents of other states.
One of the great things about having a job when you're a teenager is that you have a chance to meet a lot of adults in a stressed environment. Hopefully it's not too traumatic or dangerous, but you will see how some adults have a hard time handling life's difficulties. Hopefully you can learn from the experience: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/baller
Commenters here have previously discussed a website where a post by each user goes up at the same set time every day. Does anyone remember its name?
I believe it's Schlaugh that you're thinking of.
https://danfrank.ca/the-challenge-of-building-new-cities-inside-the-satmar-hassidic-takeover-of-bloomingburg/
This starts with a claim that new cities are too hard to start because all the land already belongs to someone. I think it would be more accurate to say that all the land is subject to regulations which make new cities impossible.
Then it gets into efforts by Chasidic Jews to set up a new town near New York and how it worked once but will probably never work again.
Sidetrack: I wonder what would happen if Chasidic Jews couldn't get welfare. My guess is that they'd adapt, but I have trouble imagining what the changes would be.
It's definitely possible to build a city even though all the land already belongs to someone. And it doesn't require any extraordinary effort or even a deliberate plan.
E.g, I'm pretty sure all the land in Fulton County, GA, was owned by *someone* in 1836, when the Western & Atlantic railroad reached the Chattahoochee river. And per the W&A, the expectation was "one tavern, a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, and nothing else". But lots of people thought it would be advantageous to live and/or set up business at the transshipment point for river & rail traffic in the region, and they were willing to pay more for a plot of land on which to do that than the land was worth to its previous owner as a small corner of a cotton field or whatever.
The resulting agglomeration of homes and businesses petitioned for incorporation as the town of Atlanta in 1847, and now has a population of half a million within city limits and is the heart of an urban area of five million.
The difference between then and now isn't more property ownership, but more NIMBYism. The guy who wanted to buy a small plot of land and open a second grocery store in 1837 Fulton County, didn't need permits from a dozen politically-captured regulatory bodies, and didn't have to worry about neighboring plantation owners suing him for destroying the rural character of the community.
I think there's plenty of places where everyone would be thrilled if you started a new town. Certainly the local landowners would be happy to subdivide and sell off their agricultural land at inflated urban prices. And local governments will often be cooperative -- sometimes they like things as they are, but sometimes they'll see the dollar signs.
Overall, I think that if you could persuade five thousand (normal) people that they all wanted to live in some place that's currently farmland, and if you can figure out how to solve all the infrastructure problems of getting power and water and sewage sorted out, it would be reasonably easy to find a place for them.
But... normal people don't want to move to a new town in the middle of nowhere. The only people you might be able to persuade to move to a new town in the middle of nowhere are weirdoes (e.g. Hasidic Jews) and the existing locals aren't going to look so kindly on a town of weirdoes.
(I strongly suspect that Chassidic Jews are considerably overrepresented among ACX readers, and may not appreciate being unnecessarily labelled "weirdoes". Please pick your words more carefully.)
As Nancy's link indicates, even Hasidic Jews don't want to move to the middle of nowhere to start a new community.
If you build a nice town in a nice place, however, people might just move there. E.g. Maspalomas went from nothing to 36k in half a century. I'm sure there are lots of places where the same thing could be done.
> Overall, I think that if you could persuade five thousand (normal) people that they all wanted to live in some place that's currently farmland, and if you can figure out how to solve all the infrastructure problems of getting power and water and sewage sorted out, it would be reasonably easy to find a place for them.
The problem is that you *also* have to persuade all the people who currently live on that farmland. And also anyone who is anywhere near them. And so on.
You only need to buy one farm. Five thousand people living four to a house on quarter acre blocks is only 300 acres, which is less than the average size of a farm in the US (445 acres) and much less than the average size in Australia (10,702 acres).
The hard part is persuading the local government. But they'll be listening to their own self interest much more than the voices of any nearby farmers.
California Forever tried just buying all the farmland but it still didn't go anywhere.
I thought that was still in the works.
They recently gave up on the planned ballot initiative in November, and have resorted to trying to do things the slow way instead, which even if successful, would take many years. They also recently lost a fight against an expanded exclusion zone around Travis.
At best, it's "still in the works" in the same sense that California High Speed Rail is.
Having now read the article, I think Scot's Archipelago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/) idea is right for this. I also think it would be doable in countries like the USA, Australia and Canada, all of which have lots of sparsely populated land and a culture based on personal freedom. The way it could work would be by dividing a large area of land into 2km by 2km blocks, separated by roads, and allowing would-be archipelago communities to buy them.
I don't think "culture based on personal freedom" describes Australia or Canada.
I think it does, more than the average for societies worldwide. More to the point i can imagine people in Canada and Australia being more up for archipelago than most societies. But i might be wrong.
New towns have certainly been built in the UK in the past, during the 20th century. |Maybe the current government will build some more, since they want to build lots of houses. My proposal along these lines is here: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/polkemmet-new-town
Parts of the USA are very sparcely populated, so it wouldn't be a problem buying lots of contiguous land. There might well be other problems with planning permission however.
And with enough convenient transportation.
I would have said the main problem is water supply and sewage disposal.
I would have said the main problem is persuading people that they ought to live in your new town instead of somewhere else.
There's many existing perfectly nice small towns that would love to have more people, but people persist in moving to big cities instead. If you could figure out a way to solve the problem of growing a town from 2,000 people to 200,000 people, then you wouldn't need to also solve the problem of how to get to 2,000 people from zero.
The problem is that towns of 2,000 people also have thousands of people who will fight any attempt at development and make your city plans impossible.
If a new town is big enough, convenient transportation becomes less of an issue, because most journeys will be within the town.
Personal transportation yes. Bringing quantities of goods in is still important.
The bigger the town, the larger quantities of goods being brought in, the more advantages of scale, the lower the unit cost.
The roads/railroads/airports need to exist.
>This starts with a claim that new cities are too hard to start because all the land already belongs to someone.
That's at most a secondary reason. You can always go the Saudi-Arabia way and exterminate villages that are in the way of your futuristic designs:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68945445
Or, you know, go the Israeli way and bulldoze Palestinian homes in order to settle on their lands.
The higher-order reason, if anything, would be that competing interests are solved quite differently in liberal democracies - even setting aside practical issues of economics such as existing infrastructure, the best long-term solution is to find a way that minimizes intra-societal hostility.
"if anything, would be that competing interests are solved quite differently in liberal democracies - even setting aside practical issues of economics such as existing infrastructure, the best long-term solution is to find a way that minimizes intra-societal hostility."
That's a rather complicated way of saying "people vote to prohibit others from building on their own land."
Or go the Palestinian way and rape, murder, and torture those that are in the way of your revanchist designs.
The same thing can happen in the US, it's called eminent domain. The government just has to pay you before it bulldozes your home.
That is not even close to being the same thing. First of all, as you said, there is a financial compensation if it happens. Second, you can fight back through the legal system so it might not happen at all.
A legal challenge is almost certain to fail, because, just like the Norman system in England, legally the Federal Government owns all the land anyway, by right of conquest and purchase, and the most any citizen or corporation can acquire is possession in fee. (I'm not sure about the status of native reservations.)
So in theory the government is only taking back what it already owns, and even adequate compensation is only a convention. Or maybe the US constitution prohibits land escheat without compensation.
(In relation to this, so-called allodial freeholds, and "citizens of the land" or whatever they call themselves, are a legal fiction and a load of ... ! :-)
> Or maybe the US constitution prohibits land escheat without compensation.
Yep, 5th Amendment. It applies to property generally, not just real property.
Do you know of anyone who has successfully defended his or her home against eminent domain seizure by "fight[ing] back through the legal system" or is the notion of that being a feasible avenue based entirely on happy thoughts?
Are you trying to make a point, or was it really too difficult to google that?
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/34281/are-there-any-statistics-on-eminent-domain includes:
>But, once an eminent domain proceeding is filed, the chances that the government will successfully obtain the property, albeit, possibly for a higher price than was offered, is very great indeed. Probably 98% or more of eminent cases filed in court will result in the acquisition of the property sought by the condemning party. The condemning party's attempt to obtain the property is probably rejected outright only one or two times a year in Colorado, on average (and some of those cases involve condemnation of property by a private party such as a purportedly landlocked land owner).
(and there are a bunch of comments about the problems of getting decent statistics on this, and on eminent domain in general)
Are you arguing that hasn't happened? Because it only takes seconds to do an internet search and confirm that it has.
...Are you under the impression that Chasidic Jews are dependent on welfare?
Wouldn’t surprise me. There has been quite a bit of outrage over how shoddy the education they receive is. Well, I’m not sure the community considers it a problem but people concerned with education are scandalized. The studies are almost entirely religious and so things like math and reading in English let alone history, languages, etc. simply aren’t taught for the most part. I believe there is a similar problem among the ultra orthodox in Israel. Bad education and super fecund means lots of social welfare is expended on them.
> There has been quite a bit of outrage over how shoddy the education they receive is.
And by "quite a bit of outrage", you presumably mean the reactions to a certain series of NYT articles riddled with inaccuracies and wild claims. Goodness, the media can cause horrendous levels of harm when they toss out honesty and ethics.
(Sure, those hit pieces caused a surge in NYC hate crimes large enough that anti-Jewish hate crimes became 1.5 times all other hate crimes in the city combined, but I wouldn't have expected that they even managed to reach - and convince - people over here.)
Not OP, but some quick Googling suggests 'yes'.
https://www.wnyc.org/story/section-8-part-two/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/insular-hasidic-jews-struggle-to-preserve-customs-as-legal-and-social-pressures-build
Apparently many are, or perhaps I'm misinformed.
What’s the relationship between secular Jews and the chasidic Jews. Does every religious Jew have secular relations and vice versa, or are the chasidic Jews totally their own thing?
They're separate communities with separate institutions, similar to mainline and evangelical Protestants.
I'd say more extreme than that. Secular Jews usually don't have Yiddish as their first language. Evangelical churches have grown at the expense of mainline ones, but relatively few people who aren't born Hasidic convert to it.
An illustration of the cultural distance between the communities is that while the majority of secular Jews vote Democrat, the Chasidim (along with non-chasidic Haredim) are among the most Republican-voting demographics in the country. If you look at the NYC metropolitan area on this map you can see anomalously red
areas, those are their neighborhoods:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html
Chassidic Jews are EXTREMELY orthodox. This puts lots of constraints on what they can do and when they can do it. E.g. they can't cause a machine to operate between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. I'm sure there are different branches with different restrictions. (IIRC, some orthodox Jews, who are liberal compared to Chassidic Jews, won't allow a lightbulb in the refrigerator, because if they opened the door during the Sabbath, they would cause the light to turn on. Now imagine a more extreme position.)
In addition they tend to only study religion to the detriment of things like math, history, or really anything else. On top of that a stunning number of men go to yeshiva for a very long time severely impacting their lifetime earnings.
I got that info from a seminar class in graduate Econ. The overall topic was strict religions, club goods, and why strict religions tended to stay strong. He was chomping at the bit to entitle his paper “Hardcore Sects” but he eventually came to his senses lol. Mind you, that was almost 20 years ago so I might be mixing some things up.
I’m now thinking of the SNL Fiddler on the Roof parody. Set up by John Mulaney. After some parodies of Fiddler’s music, Mulaney is joined by a chorus line of Hasidic dancers, who do a credible version of the tavern scene from the show. But wait, there’s more: When someone asks, “Was that the actual cast of ‘Fiddler’?”, Mulaney replies, “No, there’s just a lunch break at B&H Photo.”
Okay that’s a successful business operated by Hasidic Jews, but when I was watching it I was wondering who the hell was going to get the joke besides photography buffs who know better than to try to do business with B&H on Shabbos?
https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/jta/snl-parodies-fiddler-and-a-famous-hasidic-run-camera-store/article_9af35f13-9190-531c-a363-cf59722360bc.html
There is a difference between religious Jews and Chasidic Jews. Chasidism is a branch of Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Jews are themselves a minority of religious Jews. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-americans-in-2020/
Not many relations, to my knowledge. I've never met any, but among my secular Jewish relatives they're the one group you're allowed to openly badmouth with no consequences. So.... relations probably aren't good.
Chasidim are pretty insular-- there's not a ton of migration in or out of the communities, and there's not a lot of overlap between secular & chasidic Jewish families. Many secular Jews will have some family and relations who are "more religious" and who may be living separate, Orthodox lifestyles, but there's still a lot of gaps between these communities and dedicated, Yiddish-first communities of Haredim/Chasidim.
One distinction is between Chasidim and Modern Orthodox, but I'm not expert on the subject.
The FDA vs MDMA story has been interesting, but perhaps this has been discussed to death here already - or its constituent chunks:
1) invisible graveyard (defund the FDA)
2) psychedelics (and 'woo')
3) what even is mental illness?
4) what's wrong with IRBs and journals?
5) 'review of every hot new therapy part 27'
For the time being, people with PTSD who want to actually get better (as opposed to the current Big Pharma-approved approach of numbing their pain while they drink themselves to death) will have to continue to make pilgrimages to Latin America. What a world we live in
In a nutshell MDMA studies have suffered from leaning into desired results if not outright fraud. I’m on the MAPs mailing list and their email blasts have always seemed like they are promoting something other than legitimate science.
It’s a shame. I had a personal experience with MDMA way back in college and I think I still am benefiting from it.
I believe there is a lot of potential in MDMA as a therapeutic medication. See Utah:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2024/03/21/psilocybin-mdma-treatments-could/
I fear we are in for a rerun of the post Timothy Leary shoddy experimentation/evangelism crackdown.
————————-
Edit
FDA declines to approve MDMA therapy - NYT August 9, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/health/fda-mdma-ptsd-delay.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CU4.cHcA.s6eOtWifgUc_&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
I think part of the problem is that there are two camps involved: those interested in the medical applications, who are working to get psychedelics legalised for this, and those interested in legal highs, who use medical applications as the fig leaf or stalking horse to get the fun party substances legalised.
People who want the fun party stuff to be legal are thus incentivised to produce tons of 'research' showing that absolutely for real getting blasted off your face on this totes helped with your mental health issues.
Think you are right about this dichotomy but it's not people who want to party who really care, it is a bona fide spiritual/religious thing. The advocates actually think getting everyone to take psychedelics would open people's consciousness and save the world. Distinct group, with some overlap, from people who just want to get high at festivals.
Back before LSD became a controlled substance there was a lot of research showing that psychedelic and psycholytic therapy with LSD and allied drugs was extremely promising, but basically nothing to convince a hard-headed person that such therapy was of proven special value. Almost everyone who takes such drugs convinces themselves that they have had an especially meaningful experience, but they are generally unable to communicate clearly what that meaning was. I have not taken MDMA, but my experience of psychedelics is that parties where people take them largely exist so that people keep each other safe while they explore their own minds.
Yeah, you're right, although it's unfortunate that we're working under this implied dichotomy that something has to be either therapeutically helpful and not fun, or fun and not helpful. I think many substances are both.
I do see the caution with legalising fun substances, though, because in this fallen world people will absolutely abuse the shit out of every loophole under the sun to get the legal highs, and I'm fairly sure they'll do some swapping and selling etc. of their legally acquired "just for my mental health treatment only, I pinky swear" drugs to friends.
All it takes is one case of someone getting blotto on the medical legal high who wasn't supposed to have it, and doing something dumb, and there you go: public outcry and blame heaped on the authorities for letting this dangerous substance be legal, and that poisons the well for the next "can we please make this legal because it really does seem to help those otherwise not responding to conventional drugs?" attempt.
I think the goal here is to make it legal for therapy. No one would get a prescription bottle of MDMA to take home. It wouldn’t be a daily or as needed medication. From what I’m reading about the Utah program there are limited number of sessions, 3 seem to be the most common. They have to be spaced weeks apart because each dose depletes a neurochemical that has to recover naturally. The usual IANAD disclaimer applies.
The stuff that gets ‘into the wild’ so to speak comes from illegal labs.
That would be the hoped-for system, but tell me, Gunflint, do you honestly believe there wouldn't be some sort of 'pill mill' set up because the second there's a sniff of money to be made, someone tries to monetise the opportunity?
"Sign up to our online therapy sessions where licenced medical professionals diagnose you after you complete an easy ten question form, prescribe you the medication, and you attend our online therapy sessions at a time convenient to you!"
The guy that sold me the MDMA in college was a bit of an evangelist. He had a sheaf of photocopied articles from ‘legit’ publications talking about how the stuff could improve people’s lives, particularly their relationships with other people.
It was shortly after the FDA had classified it as a schedule 1 drug.
So I’m talking about 1986 or so. I don’t think the rave party scene was around then. If it was, it wasn’t on my radar.
Edit
With a bit of research I could get a specific date. It was one of the two times Joan Armatrading played at my campus auditorium. It was the one where Graham Nash was the opening act.
Okay. August 1, 1986
Something like 15 years ago, there were studies showing that cooling caps can help against insomnia. Does anyone know what happened to that? It is still common wisdom that the bedroom should be cold, but I haven't really heard of cooling caps since then. It would be very cheap aid. Is this used as medical tool nowadays?
This is related to a very old crackpot theory (his own words) by Scott about cooling as a means to increase willpower and top-down-regulation in the brain. As far as I can tell, the theory did not hold up, as any way of using the brain produces pretty much the same amount of heat. But I am not 100% certain of that, so if someone has more knowledge of heat production in the brain in general, I'd be interested.
https://archive.ph/rGpb5
https://archive.ph/M85yF
https://archive.ph/IYrvT
https://truetosource.co/products/gelo-cool-pillow-mat-11-x-22-soft-odorless-no-water-filling-3
These mats are very good for some moderate head-cooling.
I have no idea how they work. If they aren't too warm (the limit might be about 85F) they stay a little below room temperature. They last for years.
N=1: when I really have trouble falling asleep, for example when traveling, I get up and deliberately get chill, then climb back into the bed. I'd say it helps 2/3 times.
There are many studies about the effects of targeted warming and cooling on sleep efficiency. We expel heat primarily through our head, hands and feet. That's just where the heat escapes, it doesn't have anything to do with brain cooling. Warming the skin also helps to bring circulating blood to the surface to more efficiently lower core temperature. This is why pre-warming feet some time before bed can improve sleep onset times (commonly with foot baths but anything works). It helps top warm other parts of your body too, provided you don't overdo it and allow for heat to escape. A short warm shower can warm skin, if you stay too long you can keep core temp higher than it should be (it will eventually drop more steeply than it normally would and that steep drop can help with onset, so that's kind of a toss-up, do it if it happens to work for you).
Based on what I remember from having read a few of these, we can withstand more insulation on our thighs (particularly right above knee cap) than upper body in bed.
I think the 'plantar cooling' stuff took the spotlight, hence "feet outside the blankets" advice.
I have an ethics question for effective altruists.
Suppose in 2050 humans make contact with an alien civilization on Proxima Centauri. Unfortunately, despite their high level of technological development, Centaurians are ruled by a militant religious cult. Announcing its intent to exterminate all humans, the Centaurian government prepares to dispatch a 50 million-strong armada to our planet. Shortly before the expected departure date, our scientists developed a tachyonic canon capable of destroying the armada while it is still on the ground.
My question is what are the maximum accompanying civilian casualties among Centaurians that would be justified by saving humans from extinction.
As Scott notes, we already went through this with Gaza. The answer is the same: as many as it takes to be confident of success, but no more. If there are bignum Centauri that willing to stand in front of the tachyon cannon while preparing genocidal war, or even within the blast radius of a tachyon cannon aimed at the invasion fleet, then bignum Centauri need to die.
No math is required, and it's entirely the Centauri's decision how many people to feed to the righteously-fired tachyon cannon. Altruisim is not effectively served by surrendering the universe to a bunch of omnicidal religious cultists.
This reminds me of a question I asked on a Hidden Open Thread last week about Israel. Just replace "armada" with "terrorist group" and "their planet" with "Gaza", and this becomes "is it justified to devastate Gaza in order to destroy a terrorist group that's planning to bomb you?"
The most interesting response I got was a comparison to Pearl Harbor. Japan killed ~2,500 Americans at Pearl Harbor. Not even counting the atomic bombs, the US response killed 150,000 Japanese civilians. I know there's a lot of debate over the bombs, but it at least seems like the deaths before Japan was willing to surrender were justified, assuming they served some kind of wartime aim.
I think I'm willing to go with "if a country declares war on you, you are allowed to retaliate, even if that's not object-level-direct utilitarian good", because otherwise geopolitics gets really weird and everyone launches sneak attacks on each other. I think it's good, but supererogatory, to avoid exercising that right in some situations where the enemy seems well-contained already and can't really hurt you.
I'm still not sure about the Gaza case because it straddles a weird boundary between "independent country attacking Israel" and "horrible ghetto with some terrorists in it who declared themselves in charge", and this matters insofar as I think if they were a real country they would act rationally and not bomb people bigger than they were who could easily devastate their population, and then this problem wouldn't come up, or it would look more like a conventional war.
In the Centauri case, I think obviously try all other options first, but if there aren't any, go for it, and let it go down in galactic history as a lesson not to make unprovoked attacks.
The war with Japan lead to a state that was less likely to declare war on its neighbors and its distant competitors, but I would be astounded if what's going on in Gaza right now creates anything other than super-Hamas.
Who's the nation-builder? Netanyahu??? He's a sworn enemy of a second state. The first American governor in Iraq actually cared about democracy and a stable Iraq, that's why he was replaced. The next guy cared about stability but not as much about democracy, and the result was a deeply extended occupation that only ended because the US had intended a sovereign power, sans anti-western position, to emerge from the first day.
Then there are the settlements, which if you take them out of the international law debate and focus only on their local significance, are a pledge to concentrate the surviving Gazans into an even denser urban environment with more economic desperation and more fighters per square kilometer.
> if they were a real country they would act rationally and not bomb people bigger than they were
There are quite a few examples of real countries irrationally attacking stronger neighbors. For instance, Paraguay lost 90% of its male population in a war against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. More famously, Germany lost 5 million people after attacking a much larger coalition of countries in WWII.
> "horrible ghetto with some terrorists in it who declared themselves in charge"
Given the suffering caused by the Versailles Treaty and the fact that NSDAP came to power after winning only 40% of the vote (Hamas won 60%), could a similar narrative apply to Germany?
Paraguay wasn't expecting to be at war with all 3 countries. Japan is a clearer example of a smaller country attacking a much larger one and getting wrecked in a manner they should have definitely foreseen.
Weimar Germany was a nation-state, and thus could not be a "ghetto". Germany was less of a problem on the international stage when it was a bunch of city-states.
> Japan is a clearer example of a smaller country attacking a much larger one
they attacked two larger countries, US and Britain.
> getting wrecked in a manner they should have definitely foreseen
it is not obvious, that they would loose (at least not to them) especially after the victory against russia a couple years earlier.
Also they had the upper hand in the first year of WW2, and if they changed strategy then (e.g. less agressive Kidō Butai, or start piece negotiation with britain), the result could have been net-benefitial to them.
Britain was literally smaller than Japan in area and total population.
The US was a bigger naval power than Russia, and particularly had easier access to the Pacific. The US also hadn't collapsed under the strain of WW1, rather we tipped the balance toward victory for the Entente.
Yeah, it was obvious. The Japanese strategy was explicitly a Hail Mary, hoping to do enough damage to the US and Britain in the first 6 months or so to force them to the negotiating table. It didn't work, and given what they did at Pearl Harbor was never going to work.
>Also they had the upper hand in the first year of WW2, and if they changed strategy then (e.g. less agressive Kidō Butai, or start piece negotiation with britain), the result could have been net-benefitial to them.
How? I really don't see any situation where Japan ends up leaving the war better off, because it was run by crazy people and they were inevitably going to make bad decisions. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the Kido Butai, but carriers were seen as inherently offensive before the development of radar, so them sitting tight would have run against all doctrine and sensible employment of the assets. You could be talking about the fact they were down to 4 carriers at Midway, but I'm not sure that would have saved them. As for peace with Britain, no way Churchill risks pissing off Roosevelt like that.
A more difficult question might be:
-: we don't know for sure that they're going through with their attack
-: how high does the probability need to be before our pre-emptive attack is justified?
I make no claim to be an EA, but I think that you'd need to take into account the value of a social norm against wars of conquest. If we, as a galaxy, take a strong point of view against planets that go around destroying their neighbours, then it will save more lives in the long run.
First-order utilitarianism makes it hard to justify ever fighting back against any sort of invasion.
I'm not an EA, nor am I really "all-in" on Utilitarianism (of any stripe) but I do tend to lean in that direction. I think it's pretty straightforward to justify and answer of "no practical limit" depending on the specifics.
First, let's nail down those specifics, since your scenario as-is is a bit too vague to justify any confident answer. From what I can tell, the following is a good match to your intent in posing the question:
1. Firing of the tachyon canon will destroy the armada and end the immediate threat (i.e. they don't have a backup armada, their own tachyon canon or some other edge that will make destroying the armada irrelevant).
2. If the armada is launched, it can be reliably expected to reach Earth and succeed in destroying the entire human population: there's no other realistic hope for humanity's survival.
3. Human civilization in 2050 is basically healthy and function: it's not ruled by a planet-wide religious cult of its own, teetering on the brink of some civilization-ending apocalypse, or actively in the process of total disintegration.
4. The facts in the original setup and in points 1 and 2 above are known with high confidence: none fo them is seriously in doubt.
What I'm basically doing here is setting this up as a trolley problem. Every human alive AND humanity's entire future is on the default track, X number of Centauri civilians are on the other track and the only immediate uncertainly is whether we pull the lever.
The reason that pulling the lever is almost always justified here is that the actual, immediate death toll of the conflict is only a small part of the stakes in play. Even if X is 10 times the total human population of Earth, pulling the lever is still almost certainly the positive-expected-utility move. First, the future of humanity will likely include many more humans than are alive in 2050: unless you buy the doomsday argument (I don't) there's little reason to suppose that X is greater than the total number of humans that will live subsequent to 2050.
But second, the central conceit guarantees that long-range, space-faring civilizations are possible AND it strongly suggests the solution to the Fermi paradox is "alien civilizations are common, they're all just either quite recent or not highly visible." This is important because within a short time of meeting us, the Centaurians resolved to wipe us out. As annoying as humans can be (who among us hasn't wanted to wipe out humanity, occasionally), there's no reason to suppose we're unique in that regard: if the Centaurians react that way to us then they're very likely to react that way to other species as well. Letting ourselves be wiped out means accepting worse odds for the futures of an unknown number of other alien species, while if we stick around we're more likely to be able to stop the Centaurians from trying this on anyone else. Granted, there's no guarantee that future humanity (or its antecedents) wouldn't also be a threat to those others: we don't have that great a track record. But "not that great" is still much better than "resolves to planet-wide extermination within months or years of first contact."
Finally, beyond the simple utilities of current-and-future lives saved, I personally would value the diversity of intelligent species: a universe with n/2 humans and n/2 Centaurians is all-other-things-being-equal preferable to a universe with n of one species and 0 of the other. Combined with the previous paragraph, this also means that we should prefer to pull the lever even if it will kill *all* the Centaurians. Though of course we ought to very strongly prefer any option that stops short of that point, even if it has a high cost in human lives: wiping out all of one species or the other is a large negative that isn't fully captured just by the numbers of lives.
Last, things that would shift the acceptable number of Centaurian casualties downward:
1. Any uncertainty about their plans, objectives or capabilities. The less sure we are they're coming to kill us, the less extreme a response we should allow ourselves.
2. Any possibility of defeating them in a less-costly way. If we think there's even a modest chance of being able to fight off the armada once it arrives, we should be less willing to pay high costs for firing the tachyon cannon.
3. A significant chance of humanity being destroyed through other means. All of the above reasoning depends in part on humanity having a future (absent the Centauri invasion). The less certain that is, the less we should be willing to kill to protect it.
This is well worked out and correct, although I have one nit-pick.
You've accepted the premise that one civilisation can be ruled by an evil cult (and that we'll be able to objectively determine that). But whether it's an evil cult or just a shared ideology will be purely a matter of perspective.
I apologise for the snark, but the way I remain most effective is by the logic of:
- Are children dying/suffering?
- Is that suffering easily preventable?
- Is yes to both, do something to prevent it.
I'm firmly of the view that utilitarian thought experiments like this (or trolley problems, utility monsters, etc) have strictly negative value to getting people to do the right thing.
Assuming there are some number of Centaurian children that will die if you launch your tachyon cannon... What do you do?
There's a question here of how you define moral agents. Most ethics systems would define a moral agents to be someone you could negotiate with at least in principle - in this case, a moral agent would probably not invade you (in most branches of reality) if you could eliminate them first, so being prepared to eliminate them whatever the cost is a net positive across most realities (at a cost in the few branches where they call your bluff).
If you categorically cannot negotiate any sort of cooperation in any way, even in principle or by some weird timeless stuff, then you fall into utility monster territory where intuitions diverge (since you're defining them to have internal experience but not one we can meaningfully interact with).
> a moral agent would probably not invade you (in most branches of reality) if you could eliminate them first
Yes, but it may be willing to sustain much higher casualties than you or it may not find your threats credible.
I agree that my "meaningfully" is doing a lot of work here. If we have the ability to change its mind on one of those (say with a warning shot) then we can meaningfully interact with it and should do it, but if our de facto interaction is limited to "push the button or die", I think in practice we're equivalent to the no-interaction situation.
(There is a human bias towards assuming we're in this situation when we don't have to be, but that's more a practical psychology than a moral philosophy question).
Anyone who answers "Yes" to this question needs to contend with the fact that their answer implies that the genocide of the entirety of humanity is a moral good. After all, from the perspective of most species on Earth, humans are the Centaurians. Does this mean the people answering "Yes" to this question will grant the right of all earthly species to kill humans to the last baby? They should, if they want to be consistent.
We have actually - as opposed to hypothetically - committed multiple genocides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Species_made_extinct_by_human_activities:
> Pages in category "Species made extinct by human activities"
> The following 121 pages are in this category
So, slashing the 121 figure by more than half to account for plants included in the figure, we have committed no less than 50 genocides or so. Sure, we call them "Extinctions", but I'm sure that Centaurians have a similarly lovely euphemism when it comes to mass murder too.
--------
I'm not really sure I'm included by the group selector "Effective Altruists", but the whole analogy doesn't smell good, just on pure storytelling merits. Space is massive, **why** do the Centaruians want to kill us? What's so special about us? Fighting over resources is a mental illness that can only occur in dirt-heads, in space there are so many resources that Light can't even reach all of them. So many. Unimaginably many. So many it hurts your head to think about.
So, it must be about something else, but what is it? Is it a fundamental value of Centaurians to cause mass extinctions? Is this their equivalent of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" ? I'm very skeptical, how did they even survive long enough to have rockets if this is how they view life? How did they de-escalated their world wars? In the unlikely case that was actually their fundamental views, if we have solid evidence that every single Centaurian wants every single human dead, then maybe being cavalier about civilian casualties is justified.
(The only exception is Centaurian children, because surely at some point in their life, Centaurians are children, no? And being children, they are probably comparatively weaker (although maybe they could still crush humans) next to their adults, and - most crucially - they don't have the cognitive capacity to understand the world and make decisions, in simpler words, Centaurian children are not moral agents.)
---------
Or do the Centaurians want to kill us because they are pragmatic fans of the Dark Forest explanation of the Fermi Paradox? But destroying us doesn't make any sense: It will make them incredibly visible and a prime target for any species that want to do uno-reverse them. Dark Forest believers should just stay quiet, neither making noise nor destroying those who make noise.
But perhaps the Centaurains hate our noise and want us dead because we invite attention to the "neighborhood" of the galaxy that we share with them? and they believe that by killing us the "neighborhood" will be overall more quiet and less likely to have the attention of a bigger but more distant threat? Why don't they just simply... tell us so? It's worth at least a shot before they try to genocide us all. "Shut the fuck up, predators are listening", how many bits does that take?
Without litigating the setup of the thought experiment too much, I guess there are plenty of things we can do to kill as little civilian Centaurians as possible. We can perhaps use the Tachyonic cannons on their moon first, the resulting chaos will perhaps keep them occupied and terrified enough for us to send an ordinary lightspeed message to the effect of "Don't.". Biden voice optional. If you're worried, they would still do, keep destroying their unhabituated star system one by one till nothing remain except their own planet. Surely any remotely intelligent species who sees their solar system getting Death-Stared will pause for a few centuries to at least know more about what it's dealing with?
Bad cases make bad law. You can always pose thought experiments like "Terrorists have just kidnapped your 1-year-old baby, your wife, and your mom. Which one of them do you want to see raped by the terrorists on PornHub?". What's the point? What possible insight will you glean from the answer to an unanswerable question?
> Does this mean the people answering "Yes" to this question will grant the right of all earthly species to kill humans to the last baby?
I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right. Perhaps I'll dress some squirrels in little suits and have a pretend UN meeting with them.
What can they do with it? Diddly squat. It would be kinder to grant them some nuts instead.
> I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right
Good, now a human can deputize themselves to exercise that right for the animals, and genocide the entirety of humanity for their crimes against animals.
> What can they do with it
In some places of the world, I (or anybody) can hire people to beat you to potato mush for less than 5 dollars or so per hour of beating. What can you do about it? Diddly squat. So that, according to you, probably proves that you have no rights and shouldn't be taken into consideration when drafting ethical guidelines.
On reflection I've made the point badly and rudely, which probably justifies your response. There was no need for me to rub it in that squirrels can do "diddly squat", so I apologise.
The point I wanted to make is simply that squirrels don't have language, so it feels like a type-error to talk about them having positive rights. How can a positive right to do something be "exercised" if you don't recognise yourself as having it? In your scenario where we do it for them, it feels like an unnatural use of language to say "the squirrels are now exercising their right to kill us, via us". I imagine ordinary people would instead say, "LearnsHebrewHatesIP has supposed squirrels to have positive rights, and used that as a pretext for his killing everyone".
The word "can" in "now a human can deputize themselves" is also a bit of a weasel word. Yes, anyone "can" say that they're killing people on behalf of squirrels, but why would they want to? As the squirrels have not /asked/ them to do it.
(Interestingly if I replace all instances of "squirrels" with "animals", it looks like my argument loses some force and yours gains. "So called squirrel rights" sounds silly, but "so called animal rights" makes me sound cruel. I would like to say, the expression "animal rights" is so common that we assume it must refer to something real and good (but that's precisely what is under debate). I would like you to provide a justification for the concept other than the popularity of the expression, which hopefully justifies my use of "squirrel" throughout)
I also apologize for being aggressive. I guess - also on reflection - that I'm on edge by the amount of people that the Gaza war (or thinly veiled analogies to the Gaza war) emboldened to state their terrible "Might Makes Right" variant on morality, and I mistook your comment for an expression of one such variant.
"Diddly Squat" is not really the thing that rubbed me the wrong way, but the whole flippant tone and casualness of the comment. I also searched your name before I replied the first reply and saw that you made serious replies before elsewhere, that probably tempered what would have been an even more aggressive reply from me.
> that squirrels don't have language so it feels like a type-error to talk about them having positive rights.
That's something I can argue against. My argument against it is that it Proves Too Much.
Plenty of things/creatures that we usually think of as having rights do not have a language, and/or lack any conception of them having rights. Like African children, for instance, or really just children. Do babies have rights? Do Congolese 10-years-olds who don't speak English have rights? What about mute people? What about people who speak too softly by nature and thus can't really make their case?
I can state a lot of examples of humans who have no language (or effectively no language), and/or have no conception or claim to their universal human rights. Do illiterate Afghan school girls have human rights? Do adult North Koreans who have lived under a dictatorship all their life have human rights, despite them not recognizing themselves to have human rights?
You could probably say something along the lines of "But those are not *positive* rights, those are just the negative rights of a creature to not be killed or harmed", but the distinction between positive and negative rights is often illusory. A lot of positive rights arise as compensation for violated negative rights: when you steal from someone, they earn the right to jail you and retrieve their stolen things from you, by force if necessary. When you kill someone, their family or others interested in the victim earn the right to indirectly kill you through the justice system (and without that justice system, people will probably agree to a custom that says the killer should be killed vigilante-style).
So, if squirrels - who are not uniquely language-less, they have more language and self-expression than human babies for one - have the negative right of being left alone, they also have the positive right of killing or severely harming those who do *not* leave them alone.
> The word "can" in "now a human can deputize themselves" is also a bit of a weasel word.
But people do it all the time though. What is "Intel"? Why does it have the ability to throw me in jail or sue me for billions if I stole one of its hard drives and published it online. It doesn't even exist. What is "Israel", why does it have "the right to defend itself", if even the majority of families of those killed on October 7th are now demanding an end to the war.
What is "the American people", and why does every presidential candidate claim (i.e. deputize) themselves to be acting for its interests? How did the presidential candidate know they represent the American people if they hadn't even voted yet? Are those who couldn't vote "Not American", or are they American and the candidate/president doesn't really act in their interests after all?
In all of those examples, the name between quotes is a stand-in for "a thing or a collection of things that we decided have rights, but which can't really exercise those rights directly because it/they sorta don't even exist, so we also decided that somebody else is going to exercise the rights that we decided it/they have".
The case of the Squirrels is just one instance of this: having decided (due to the above argument that they're like babies, mute people, ...) that they have rights, it's not that strange for some people to deputize themselves to act on behalf of those rights, those people eventually being recognized by most as the rightful exercisers of Squirrel Rights.
My take on other species from 15 years ago:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering?commentId=pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB
Sorry, I can't work out exactly what comment you're pointing to or what your view is.
You wrote:
"I will happily make the gesture of granting them this right. Perhaps I'll dress some squirrels in little suits and have a pretend UN meeting with them.
What can they do with it? Diddly squat. It would be kinder to grant them some nuts instead."
I wrote:
"Fish can't do much about us cooking and eating them, so they are not a party to any social contract."
<mildSnark>
>Is this their equivalent of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" ?
Maybe it's a "flower war" kind of thing? "You gotta have heart. All you really need is heart." :-)
</mildSnark>
"All you need is love", and we all know where in the body love is kept...
LOL Many Thanks! ( I was thinking of Aztecs, with a cross-reference to "Damn Yankees" )
While I believe that thought experiments should normally be granted their problem terms, the paintbrush wielded here is too broad. Since they can do interstellar armadas, one has to assume they're way ahead of us, even 2050-us. So, we should tread lightly. Were the Centaurians provoked? Is there room for diplomacy? Won't they simply build another fleet, more diffuse in deployment but even more bent on vengeance? Do they really mean the extermination thing, or is it just their fringe finance minister talking?
> or is it just their fringe finance minister talking
Gold.
All of them.
Taking the question as asked, there is no maximum upper limit. Having chosen and announced they intend to invade and commit genocide (and have the capability to do so, I'm assuming here their fleet/army can actually do this, and their 50 million strong force wont simply be crushed when it arrives at Earth with its 10ish billion people, if this is the equivelant of the crazy guy on the corner yelling 'kill all Xs' the situation is a bit different), any and all force needed to defend ourselves is acceptable. Now if we can reduce it, we should, but if not? Don't start fights.
Note: I'm treating this as an actual question, not the IP analogue I'm guessing it actually is, because I don't think it works as that.
I tend to agree, with a slight refinement: as few civilian casualties as technically and tactically possible, but no upper limit.
My naive answer would be human population saved minus one.
Can you explain why this is the morally correct answer?
He's most likely assigning humans and the Centuarians moral equivalence, and then saying minimise deaths of either side's civilians (hence why he says naive).
I don't think this scenario requires any civilian casualties at all. Surely the cannon that can destroy the armada while its on the ground can also destroy it while its in motion towards our planet? Also you can make a credible threat of existential risk by making a warning shoot at their moon.
Hitting a moving target across interstellar distances is a much more difficult fire-control problem than hitting a planet. The thesis states that the tachyon cannon can destroy the enemy fleet on the ground; it says nothing about destroying it in flight so that capability cannot be assumed.
And if you miss, at least your shot will land among the stars. Unless your miss actually hits the planet, in which case...problem solved.
If they're motivated by a religious cult, it's not clear that a credible threat would dissuade them.
If the Centuarians are aware that we might have a gun they could fly in such a way as to make themselves impossible to hit. We can only see them 4 years in the past, so even if our tachyon beam exceeds the speed of light, we can't aim at them if they fly a semi-random path. Additionally, they might fly in an extremely dispersed formation, so that any beam shot would only affect a small portion of the fleet.
Yes, but what about the least convenient possible world where, I don’t know, the fleet will travel to earth at super luminal speeds which make targeting it once it leave the atmosphere impossible, or something. It isn’t that hard to set up the thought experiment so that you can’t destroy the fleet without civilian casualties.
To answer the question, I think it would depend on contextual factors, from the aliens history, to their population size, to their mode of consciousness, to what exactly their theocratic dictatorship really believes and is really like, and at this level of abstraction there is not a lot more to say.
What are the current little-known genres of nerd books I'm missing right now? I know about Isekai/litRPG/Progfic/Cultivation. What's newer and less known than that?
Cosy SFF. Hopepunk/solarpunk.
Any favorite examples you could share?
Pretty much anything by Becky Chambers. The Murderbot diaries by Martha Wells. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison. Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree.
(I’ve just come away from Worldcon with a giant list of recommendation for more similar things, will have to see which of them I like and which I bounce from)
I enjoyed both the Wells and Addison books. What genre are they an example of?
Legends and Lattes is a good one, I finished reading it recently. It's not going to blow anyone's mind, but it is very cozy fantasy.
hard-hard scifi by greg egan
if you have favorite hard scifi author, high chance greg egan is a favorite author of your favorite author
and most people don't even know his name, he is literally unknown even to majority of hard scifi fans
Which of his works would you recommend to start with?
He is master of short stories, for a taste I recommend "Axiomatic" collection.
Bonus - this collection has "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies" (1992) in which Egan, visionary and prophet, predicts LW crowd having the best lingo 20 years later with this passage:
"...they’re all rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from somewhere."
For his longer stuff I highly recommend Diaspora - probably one of the least controversive of his books, meaning I yet to see a person who likes Egan generally but disliked this book (which can't be said about some of others, chief among them Permutation City which people either love or hate)
Agreed. One caution about one of Egan's novels, Incandescence: There are places where it feels like a thinly-novelized general relativity intro:
tidal effects in orbit - check
constant speed of light - check
equivalence principle - check
Thank you!
If you like characterization or plot or suspense or quality of prose and things of that nature, there are far better authors out there.
If you like explorations of questions like "What would life be like in a universe with two space and two time axes instead of 3 space and 1 time?" then you should definitely read Greg Egan.
I think he used to be better known when his fiction wasn't quite as challenging.
…I mean, you don’t /have/ to read the appendices with the maths.
Realistically, would earlier trials have helped Jake live? I’m not a doctor but he looked pretty unhealthy in the months before his death
He said that doses of spot radiation on June 10th and 12th basically destroyed his life, and that he was living in constant pain, unable to sleep or swallow and drowning in mucus for the last few months (this also naturally made it impossible for him to try any new trials).
There’s a famous doctor in Australia named Richard Scolyer who was able to access experimental immunotherapy for his aggressive brain cancer, and a year following treatment remains cancer free.
I’ve spoken to oncologists who specialise in this type of brain cancer who have told me quietly that if they or someone they love were to get it, they would seek out the same type of treatment. This is based on promising early data for this approach, but it’s not available to the broader public.
I think Richard Scolyer is a hero, and I hope that his journey makes enough headlines that people look into it more seriously. But the question is, why shouldn’t anyone be able to access this treatment?
The answer lies in what Jake has written about extensively - the morass of bureaucracy surrounding cancer trials that paradoxically elevate “safety” as the highest principle for people who are dying. It’s “safety” from trying a drug that might help.
This happened with HIV in the 90s, so I hope it can happen again. Let’s get the cancer community as politically organised as the LGBT community.
My aunt was diagnosed with terminal brain tumors as a girl in the late 50s. Her mother, a nurse if that makes any difference, was desperate of course and so wasn’t above grasping at straws. She heard of a doctor up in Canada using what we would call immunotherapy now. The doctors she talked to all said he was a quack and that she shouldn’t fall for it. She decided to try. I think the guy’s name was Hect. He would basically make a “serum” cultured from bits of the tumor. He injected it in them and they ran a hellacious fever for a while. Plenty of people died of course, he was a last resort after. But apparently he had a significantly better track record for spontaneous remissions for certain kinds of cancers. It certainly worked for my aunt, she’s still alive and doing fine.
In the 50s?? That’s brilliant, I’m so glad to hear about your aunt. Immunotherapy got its start in the early 20th century with William Coley but interest in it died down for a long time. I’d be very interested to hear more about this Dr Hect.
I don't have any more info sadly. I think he was in the Sudbury Ontario area. Not sure how my grandmother heard about him. My grandmother was a nurse and taught my mother how to give her sister (my aunt) injections while she was at work. Keep in mind my mother was 6 at the time. Different times lol.
The problem isn't "earlier trials" - the problem is *which* trials Jake was actually able to try. In an example from my experience, one of my cousins was diagnosed with glioblastoma in late 2022. Sequencing of her tumor revealed a mutation in a gene called FGFR2 - and it was exciting to learn that there's a new drug called pemigatinib that specifically targets FGFR2 mutations. My cousin wasn't allowed to try pemigatinib and her doctors couldn't find any other clinical trials that would accept her. She died in Spring of 2023.
In some of his recent posts, Jake was trying to get the word out about a new piece of legislation called the Promising Pathway Act, which would make it easier for people like Jake and my cousin to choose which therapies to try. Unfortunately, the proposed law remains bottled up in committee. It could be useful for folks who are concerned about this issue to write their congressional delegation. My Representative, Jamie Raskin, wrote me back a heartfelt letter mentioning his recent experiences as a cancer survivor. It might be useful to cc: Congressman Raskin, even if you're not from Maryland.
I find the name "Promising Pathway Act" awkward and uninformative. It would be more useful for the bill to have a name like "Seliger Act."
If you have any more information about how to support the act, I'd like to hear it.
The Promising Pathway Act (S.1906) was introduced in June 2023 and it's currently stuck a Senate committee:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/118/s1906
I wrote paper letters to my Congressional representatives urging them to help move the bill to the floor for a vote.
No. “Man with terminal illness desperately searches for miracle cure,” is a tale as old as time. Probably accelerating clinical trials is a good idea, but the real beneficiaries wouldn’t be the enrollees, but future patients.
For future patients to benefit, one set of enrollees must also benefit.
It's hard to argue counterfactuals. Pembrolizumab didn't seem to help. Petosemtamab did. It's impossible to say what would have happened if they'd gotten to Petosemtamab sooner. My poorly informed guess is: more time with a good quality of life, but not a cure.
Reducing the cost and effort in applying for studies would have improved quality of life significantly, obviously, (and maybe health, also?) Eliminating washout periods between studies likely would have helped, as well. Washout periods were good for the researchers, but bad for Jake.
From what I gather, the last round of radiation seemed to do more harm than good and I don't know how much emphasis to put on that entirely reasonable but avoidable mistake.
So unless getting to petosemtamab quickly enough would have resulted in a cure, which is possible but unlikely, my guess is that better access to trials might have given him more time on the order of months or maybe a year or two.
If someone has more insight on the matter I hope they correct me.
> Washout periods were good for the researchers, but bad for Jake.
Isn't the point that they're good for research, not researchers? If the research is muddled by the presence of other poorly characterised drugs then it will slow down the research, which in the long run will likely cost lives.
The point of medical trials is to find drugs which really work for the future, not to save the lives of trial patients in the present.
"Isn't the point that they're good for research, not researchers?"
If you mean 'good for research not research subjects' then yes, that's exactly true. Ethically, patients should be participating in studies because they *want* to participate in a study (because they are compensated or because they want to increase knowledge or whatever,) not because that's the only route to getting a trial drug. The second case borderline violates the ethical research standard of therapeutic misconception.
This is especially problematic since the barriers to study enrollment are high and often very location based and unreliable and the potential applicants may be time and resource limited. In terms of research, there's something to be said for having a larger, dirtier pile of 'real world data' to comb through in *addition* to controlled study data, if a given subject is not able to fly across the country to establish care, washout, be just sick enough but not too sick, etc. Using a surrogate endpoint other than a control group isn't ideal. But it's not nothing, either. And the FDA is currently on a push for the increased utilization of "real world data."
There are, theoretically, paths to do this currently. In practice Jake, whose wife was an ER doctor and unusually dedicated to his care, wasn't much able to access those paths (as I understand things, I welcome correction on this point.) Which means the rest of us have little chance.
Are people here having success treating social anxiety with some form of prescription medication, whether that's an SSRI or something else? I've been rejecting treating my SA with medication for most of my life, but nothing else is working. It's strange because I'm actually pretty confident & articulate in a number of settings (work, etc.) But anytime my brain decides This Is An Unstructured Social Setting my stress level spikes. I get weird facial tension in my cheeks, lips, and vocal chords. I suspect I come across not as anxious but as arrogant, disinterested, or withdrawn. I call it a social impediment- I'm trying to engage in casual conversation but it comes out garbled, like I'm unhappy with people or checked out. I get a glimpse of myself in the mirror when I'm talking to my barber and I can see that the tension makes my face look oddly strained. I also experience vocal cord tension, which includes some pain & soreness after socializing.
Alcohol- doesn't do that much unless I actually get drunk. Tried a beta blocker, was maybe mildly effective but not a ton. Weed makes me more anxious, not less.
Let's just start with SSRIs. Are people successfully treating their social anxiety with them? Are you happy with the experience overall? I'm very reluctant to frankly lobotomize myself with a daily medication, especially if the withdrawals are terrible or the results are semi-permanent. Lotta SSRI horror stories on Reddit
Yes i started taking Lexapro for SA. This was 10 years ago. At that time I also saw a therapist for CBT which is also very effective. I highly recommend doing CBT for SA, the bool "Feeling Good" is a great self guided book.
> I'm very reluctant to frankly lobotomize myself with a daily medication, especially if the withdrawals are terrible or the results are semi-permanent
None of these are things I experienced. I do not feel lobotomized. I am just better able to handle the negative thoughts that SA would create.
I had no withdrawals when I went off Lexapro after the first year (i only went off because i turned 26 and didn't have insurance or a live prescription, but i was also in much better place and didn't need it). I went off it gradually, which is key.
At the end of the day, the only way to have a permanent "fix" is to change your brain. The meds help you get to a place you can do the therapy to change your brain as much as is possible.
I am back on Lexapro for GAD, not SA. I plan to go off it soon as a very stressful portion of my life is ending.
Lexapro is also very cheap, like $10 for a month.
I had a reduce sex drive. That was the biggest problem. I tried Wellbutrin for a bit but got terrible teeth clenching which caused constant pain and migraines. The sexual side effects from the Lexapro were nothing compared to the Wellbutrin.
I take SSRIs but not for social anxiety. But I've seen it work for some of my patients for this.
There are a couple of other options if you want something ad hoc instead of a medication you take all the time. Propranolol, theanine, or any other effective anti-anxiety supplement.
I definitely don't agree with SSRIs as "lobotomizing" you. For about 75% of people, super-high-doses will make the emotional system stop working, but normal doses are completely fine emotionally (for 25% of people, there's no happy medium between doses that work and doses that blunt emotions; these 25% shouldn't take it).
Withdrawals are similar. I would say 99% of people won't get withdrawals if they're on a good SSRI (eg not Paxil), take it for less than six months, and come off in a careful way. If you're on it for more than six months but do everything else right, that goes down to more like 90%. Semi-permanent effects are AFAICT <1%, usually on sex drive.
For what it's worth, I've been on and off SSRIs a bunch of times and never had withdrawals. I've had low sex drive as long as I can remember, but also been on and off SSRIs as long as I can remember, so I can't say much there.
I've written more about this at https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/25/ssris/
Have you heard anything about NAC for anxiety? Plenty of people report ahedonia at a gram or so a day. Seems like it can set your emotional response lower in general so could pre-empt anxiety.
I'm still surprised that beta blockers work for anxiety.
For me, the main effect of propranolol is that it makes me feel desperate for a cup of coffee. (Given that the reason I take beta blockers is to reduce the tachycardia from graves disease, actually having that cup of coffee would be a stunningly bad idea. Im currently on bisoprolol instead of propranolol)
I don't have SA. Oxytocin nasal spray and Orexin receptor antagonists are also potential routes for treatment of SA. I don't know offhand how much they'd be likely to help you, but they're another option to ask about.
The research on oxytocin nasal spray, which sounded like a great idea to me, pretty definitively shows that it does not work. There were a lot of studies, because lots of people thought it sounded promising. I just looked over the research a couple months ago.
Have you tried spending less time in front of screens? Personally, I find that my social anxiety tends to be proportional to my computer usage over the previous day or two. After a day of heavy internet browsing, my social anxiety tends to get pretty bad. After a day mostly spent on woodworking, home improvement tasks, time with the family, or hiking, it tends to disappear.
Perhaps it's just due to my own personal brain architecture, but I suspect the relation between spending time in meatspace and feeling comfortable in one's own skin is probably universal to some extent.
Lexapro helped marginally but the side effects (weight gain, anhedonia, fatigue) meant it wasn’t a viable long term solution for me.
Anyone had any success with vilazodone? Might give it a try now that it’s gone generic, my psychiatrist says she’s noticed that patients often tolerate it better than other SSRIs
Psychologist here. SSRI’s are OK, but no magic bullet And their side effects of weight gain and loss of interest in sex or difficulty performing are a real drag. They don’t, though, often make people feel lobotomized. Some people say they feel emotionally flat on them, others don’t notice any difference in how they feel except for whatever positive effect they’re getting. It’s rare for people to say that SSRI’s make them dumber. As for difficulties when stopping one: Some are worse than others for withdrawal syndromes, but it’s possible to get off the even bad ones without serious discomfort if you go slowly. (I’m sure there are exceptions, people who go through hell no matter how slow they go, but that is rare. I’ve never seen it. The Reddit posters aren’t representative.). So especially if you generally feel OK except in social situations, SSRI’s don’t seem like the best thing to start with.
I think your best shot is to try CBT targeting the social anxiety. There’s a good book by a psychologist researcher who used to suffer herself from social anxiety, and still has a bit of it. It’s called How to Be Yourself. Sorry about the corny title, but it really is a high quality self-help book. It is, though, hard to get oneself to really take all the steps recommended in a self-help book, as opposed to just reading about the steps and thinking, yes, I should do that. So if you can afford it, or have good insurance, I recommend seeing a professional who specializes in treating social anxiety. There are also real life things you can do like attend Toastmasters (and participate). Or, there’s a thing called Ultraspeaking, done via virtual groups, where people do exercises that push them to speak spontaneously without time to self-censor. Neither of these things is *for* social anxiety, but they do provide a setting to challenge yourself. Both are probably quite challenging, though. If you were working with a professional they’d probably have you starting with way less challenging things, then moving up the hierarchy.
By the way, all the therapists listing on Psychology Today say they treat anxiety and depression, but you want an anxiety *specialist*. If you want info about how to find one, let me via a reply here.
A thought that occurs to me; if SSRIs have a placebo effect equal or bigger to the drug effect, and these are large effects (its not: neither has much effect), then couldnt you just tell yourself youve taken an SSRI, without actually taking one?
(By comparison: I can totally do this minor painkillers, like ibuprofen; I can reduce my heart rate by 20bpm just by thinking about it)
A second radical thought: you could just *pretend* to be under the influence of a drug that has the effect you dont give a f*** about anything.
"I'm sorry, I am phsiologically incapable of caring about this."
There are things sort of like this that are indeed helpful. For instance, somebody who is very uneasy about making chat at cocktail party type gatherings can develop a mental portrait of somebody named Jon who is a lot like them in almost all ways, but differs in his attitude towards chatting with strangers. Jon used to have a problem with that, but he got over it and now he's comfortable at random chat gatherings, and sometimes hits the jackpot and meets someone he'd like to be friends with. So after the person with the anxiety problem has developed the portrait of how Jon acts and how Jon feels at gatherings, he goes to the next one "as Jon."
On the other hand, there is a limit to how much anxiety can be pushed through by methods like this. What you have to understand is that people with this sort of anxiety feel sort of the way you might if you were being prosecuted for fraud, and you had indeed committed fraud, and you were on the way to a hearing. It makes no difference that your anxiety in that situation is justified and that the other person's anxiety about chatting at parties is not. They are still as scared as you would be at the hearing.
Yes, but the claims of large placebo effects for antidepressants would seem to suggest that the drug effect is about the same size as you can achieve with these kinds of tricks.
======
I just looked up some of the clinical trial results for bisoprolol. Amusingly, the 20bpm effect I can get just by thinking about it is larger than the drug effect in some of the clinical trials for that beta blocker.
For me, at least, effects are additive: bisoprolol plus thinking about it gets effect of bisoprolol + effect of thinking about it. [While I was in the Emergency Room hooked up to a heart rate monitor and receiving beta blockers intravenously, I took the opportunity to see if this still holds when I have quite extreme tachcardia, and it does/. ]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3573539/
Voluntary heart rate reduction following yoga using different strategies
So, yeah, 20bpm reduction in heart rate is what yoga practitioners typically achieve.
CBT just doesn't speak to me at all. I just re-looked at a CBT workbook on social anxiety to make sure that I'm not mis-remembering it. The whole premise is that I have 'negative thoughts' or 'negative beliefs' around socializing. I just really don't. As an example, I tried going to a Meetup on Friday evening, with a group of people I've known for over a year. I had zero negative thoughts or expectations about the event, and frankly barely thought about it. I was mildly happy to get outside and have a beer with someone, as I work from home. Result- my face and vocal chords were all screwed up with physical tension, and I found it difficult to articulate myself. I just don't see how 'negative thoughts' somehow lead to that, there weren't any.
As another example, imagine if someone was afraid of heights (I'm not, just picked at random). Did they really have negative thoughts about heights that lead to the fear? Who even thinks of being up high unless they're actually physically engaged in it? Or if someone's afraid of snakes- did they really have a negative belief system around snakes that lead to the fear? The whole idea just seems silly to me.
This is why I'm pursuing chemical solutions. The issue seems to be a neurochemical one, not an internal monologue one
I agree with your judgment of the kind of CBT it sounds like you’ve been exposed to, but you need to understand that it’s the dumb version of CBT, not the real one. There are dumb, easy-to-mock versions of everything, including rationalism.
Regarding real CBT, let’s take the CT, cognitive therapy part first:
Cognitive Therapy
-Real CT, like dumb CT, treats thoughts as an important part of what’s going on.
-But it looks for distorted thoughts, not negative ones. Regarding many things, including heights you could fall from and snakes whose species is unknown, negative thoughts make perfect sense.
-Distorted thoughts about something are a problem because they generally lead to behavior that is not a good fit for the situation.
-Distorted thoughts are generally quick, in-the-moment images and beliefs, not longstanding Opinions. It you get good at catching any that you are having in the problematic situation, it often puts you in a better position. For instance, if someone is fearful of a snake that they have been told is non-poisonous and does not bite, they might see the snake lift up its head and upper body and look at them and have a thought (or little movie) that the snake is choosing a place on their arm to strike. This is not a considered opinion, it’s just something that flies quickly through the person’s head. When it does, they are like to feel an upsurge in anxiety and a desire to step back.
-Cognitive therapy does not involve hammering yourself with accurate statements about the thing you have distorted ideas about. It involves considering the actual evidence, and also doing some tests of the thought you’re having that might be distorted. With the non-poisonous snake, you could ask its owner what it means when the snake raises its head and looks around — and what generally happens next. You could ask the owner to sit close to the snake and you can watch what happens next after the snake raises its head and looks at the owner. You could sit a ways off and tangle something off the end of a stick to see whether the snake strikes it.
And the C in CBT is only 50% at most of the treatment. In fact I think of it a sort of groundwork that weakens the person’s belief that their feared thing is dangerous.
Behavior Therapy
If CT weakens the belief enough that the person is willing to begin doing BT exercises that defy their anxiety (for ex., sitting a little closer to the snake each day), then things are looking good. Defying your craving to avoid something that is not actually going to harm you is an extremely powerful treatment. You mentioned that you are not socially anxious at work. Consider the possibility that the reason you are not is that you could not avoid going to work, and you logged so much time doing it that whatever anxiety you had at the beginning wore off just from the repeated enforced exposures. (I know that conversation at work is easier in some ways, because you and the other person aren’t doing freeform chatting, but discussing issues that need to be discussed for the job. On the other hand, at work you really are being evaluated, whereas chatting in a purely social situation involves much less built-in evaluation.)
CBT sometimes seems very confused about what a "thought" actually is, using the term for things that seem more like unconcious reflexes, as well as concious thoughts.
Not exactly what you're asking for but have you tried massive amounts of cardio yet? I used to have social anxiety exactly like you describe until I realised this was the problem. I think some people (everyone??) just inevitably feel below their proper happiness/confidence baseline because of our sedentary culture but don't realise it. I prefer cycling but without a bike 100+ pushups/day or HIIT is also good - and worst case scenario if it doesn't work for you you'll at least get more fit and probably feel better in some other ways, so, seems like less bad potential side effects than SSRIs and worth a try at least
(Side note, I think for me the long-term cure also had to do with zen/meditation. It seems like most people in rationalist and scientific cultures massively downplay the benefits of meditation because if they were honest it would sound like they were making it up)
My absolute most "social butterfly" moments were when I took low dose Phenibut, a "nootropic" supplement.
But it has a high potential for addiction and has to be used sparingly. I only took it like 4 times.
I am currently on a massive dose (well, 7.5mg/day) of the beta blocker bisoprolol to treat the increased heart rate from Graves disease ... and as far as I can tell, there is no,psycbological affect whatsoever. (Well, maybe asexuality, along the lines that with that much bisprolol, the increased cardio needed for sex isn't going to happen. Think of it like anti-viagra). But apart from that, nil psychological effect.
Apparently, with some people high heart rate -> anxiety, and beta blockers help.
The one time I tried Sertraline., I experienced a massive effect within a few hours. Thjs is not supposed to happen. Complication: there is a known drug interaction between Sertraline and thyroid levels, and I have Graves' disease.
I have had mixed results with SSRIs after having been on them for a year or two.
My experience with unstructured social situations is very similar to yours--discomfort that leads to odd behavior which leads to more discomfort
I have sometimes found it helpful to give myself goals when going into an unstructured social setting to avoid the discomfort associated with them--"i would like to talk to so and so about x, I would like to engage in 3 conversations then give myself permission to leave if I'm not having fun." YMMV but it can help turn the desire for structure into a strength in those situations.
SSRIs: I got prescribed the minimum dose of sertraline (25mg), and on advice from my therapist started by quartering the pills. It was probably placebo, but I felt more comfortable in those social situations almost immediately.
Eventually I've settled on a half pill of sertraline (so 12.5mg) which has felt like it diminishes the anxiety while not giving me terrible side effects.
The full 25mg dose feels like too much for me--im emotionally blunted and have sexual side effects.
I find it distressing to be on a medication that affects my brain chemistry, but prolonged anxiety also alters the brain structure.
I have known people who were on similarly low or slightly higher doses who quit without issue. I'm sure the horror stories are real but there are definitely people who quit without withdrawal. I imagine keeping the dose low helps with this.
Quit two times after roughly 9 months without any withdrawal and without any real tapering: Venlafaxine at 20 (supposedly notorious for withdrawal), Fluoxetine at 30ish (after trying Escitalopram which was unbearable, felt like poisoned, and Duloxetine which had obsessive thoughts). Mainly sexual side effects and with Venlafaxine weight gain.
SA wise the effect was limited but it sure addressed the depression that went with it.
Beta blockers aren't a miracle cure for social anxiety, for me they just make it easier to avoid the anxiety spiral where you detect your body having anxious reactions (sweat, blush, stammer etc) by just blocking the physical reactions. If you struggle with that negative feedback loop then they're a godsend, if that feedback loop isn't a core part of it then all its going to do is lower your heart rate (and possibly help with negative memories being formed having a future effect).
Putting that aside, its a bit of a cliche but psychedelics helped me massively, absolutely do not use them as a direct thing and make sure you do your due diligence for family history and safe settings before even thinking of touching them but for me it got me to a point where I could power through the social anxiety and actually speak up and hold my own.
I have a dim recollection that there was a discussion about media bias/lying a while back with Scott arguing that the media mostly doesn't tell straight up lies, but instead omits items or presents facts in such a way that readers/listener/viewers draw incorrect conclusions.
I've found what I think is a good example of this recently.
From NBC:
"According to an assessment provided to Congress last year
by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, there
were about 180,000 homeless people across the state,
making California’s homeless population one of the highest
in the nation along with New York's, Florida's and
Washington's."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/s-mayhem-craziness-californians-react-gavin-newsoms-order-remove-homel-rcna165401
The article is, technically, correct.
The homeless numbers reported in the cited assessment
for the four mentioned states are:
CA: 181,399
NY: 103,200
FL: 30,756
WA: 28,036
And California does have "one of the highest" homeless
population's in the nation. Being #1 by an almost 80%
margin certainly qualifies as "one of the highest".
But ... given the huge difference between CA (and NY, maybe)
and FL and WA it seems disingenuous to just report the stack
ranking.
I notice a lot more articles such as this one than I notice where, for example, Florida would be reported as having many more homeless than California (in absolute numbers).
Those four are MISSING outliers. This seems to be the top most-populous US states (sorry about the formatting, source https://www.britannica.com/topic/largest-U-S-state-by-population):
U.S. state population: estimate population: census
1. California (2023 est.) 38,965,193 (2020) 39,538,223
2. Texas (2023 est.) 30,503,301 (2020) 29,145,505
3. Florida (2023 est.) 22,610,726 (2020) 21,538,187
4. New York (2023 est.) 19,571,216 (2020) 20,201,249
5. Pennsylvania (2023 est.) 12,961,683 (2020) 13,002,700
6. Illinois (2023 est.) 12,549,689 (2020) 12,812,508
7. Ohio (2023 est.) 11,785,935 (2020) 11,799,448
8. Georgia (2023 est.) 11,029,227 (2020) 10,711,908
9. North Carolina (2023 est.) 10,835,491 (2020) 10,439,388
10. Michigan (2023 est.) 10,037,261 (2020) 10,077,331
California and Florida occupy the 1st and 3rd, respectively, places by both population and by homeless numbers in your list. Why isn't Texas on your list?
It would be much more fair to report homelessness per capita. So yes, I agree they are being disingenuous, trying to make some political point.
The two ways it's misleading (saying "one of the highest" when it's by far the highest, reporting absolute numbers when per capita numbers would be more relevant) point in opposite directions, which suggests that they (or at least one of them) are unintentional.
Look at it per capita and the only outlier in there is Florida, which is real low.
And WA, which is super high.
Not really? It's about 1/5 the population and 1/6 the homeless population.
My bad, I was taking a shortcut by looking at ordinals: when the 13th biggest state has the 4th biggest sub-population, that seems high. But the rate isn't as bad as NY or VT or OR or CA or HI, so there's that.
For reference/penance, here's some calculations (8 highest populations, plus 8 highest homeless, plus 8 highest rates):
CA 181399 / 38965193 = 0.004655411
TX = 27377 / 30503301 = 0.000897509
FL 30756 / 22610726 = 0.001360239
NY 103200 / 19571216 = 0.00527305
PA 12556 / 12961683 = 0.000968701
IL 11947 / 12549689 = 0.000951976
OH 11386 / 11785935 = 0.000966067
GA 12294 / 11029227 = 0.001114675
WA 28036 / 7812880 = 0.003588433
MA 19141 / 7001399 = 0.002733882
OR 20142 / 4233358 = 0.004757925
NV 8666 / 3194176 = 0.002713063
HI 6223 / 1435138 = 0.004336168
AK 2614 / 733406 = 0.003564192
VT 3295 / 647464 = 0.005089086
The helpful chart is on page 18 of the attachment. It's also where you'll see why they chose those 4, because the report IDs those states as combining to make up more than half the total homeless population. Standard numerical illiteracy would be my guess. They're the 4 highest states, with Texas 5th. Only in total numbers, not per 10,000. Indeed the report expressly says Texas and Florida have low rates.
The helpful chart is on page 18 of the attachment. It's also where you'll see why they chose those 4, because the report IDs those states as combining to make up more than half the total homeless population. Standard numerical illiteracy would be my guess.
You're lucky if you're only worried about bias in the media feeding you stories. I had to listen to a radio show segment this morning on Kamala Harris' Irish ancestry (the usual thing where we search for a drop of blood connecting the US president to the Auld Sod for forelock tugging purposes).
Supposing Kamala to be the next president, we're getting ready to kiss her... coconut by researching her Irish ancestry, which so far unfortunately looks like "white slave owner who was vehemently anti-abolition":
https://irishheritagenews.ie/how-irish-is-kamala-harris-vice-presidents-irish-roots/
Oh, and we're also digging up Walz' Irish ancestors. His seem to come from Wexford, so that's nice - for Harris we've got (via her father) Scots-Irish (as you Americans would say) Protestant and via Walz a Southern Irish Catholic, so we're nicely balanced between the two traditions on this island.
Never mind that he's also got Swedish, German and Luxembourgish ancestry. The St Patrick's Day White House flattery can now commence!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Walz
Why would anyone need to outright lie to you when he knows that he and his friends already agree about what kind of information you're going to get?
The problem is immense, a mississippi-sized river of not-quite-lies. It's sadly amusing to watch Elon appear to think he can fight it, when he's just in a different eddy of the same current.
Musk is not just "in a different eddy", he is one of the most prolific sources of bullshit out there. Not even mentioning his dubious political statements: anyone remember him being "fairly confident" to send a ship to Mars by 2022? Hyperloop tickets between SF and LA for a few dollars? Point-to-point rocket flights as an alternative to airplanes? Anyone pinning their hopes on Musk to fix anything with respect to disinformation is delusional.
There is a difference between someone making predictions that he believes but shouldn't and someone deliberately writing thing designed to persuade the reader of things he knows are not true.
If you're having this much difficulty understanding the few words I wrote here, media bias may not be your primary obstacle.
(TLDR: I made a website to filter and search all 1500 posts from ACX / SSC, it's over here: https://readscottalexander.com )
I've been reading lots of blog posts from Scott (to myself & my partner) and wanted to have a way to filter and search through them more easily than on substack or SSC, so I made a database of them where you can filter and sort them using various categories. I also made some statistics out of curiosity around the number of posts, their length, comment numbers...
I initially made it for my personal use but I went overboard with it and now I find the website to be quite pleasant to use, so I thought I'd share it here and ask for feedback. Here it is: https://readscottalexander.com
For feedback:
1. Does this feel useful to you? Anything you wished different or general feedback?
2. I ran around 100 posts through Claude (Sonnet 3.5) to get summaries and tags. Before I run the AI on all other posts I'd like to gather feedback, since it's a bit costly and I'd want to run it only once:
a. Most importantly: do you have any tag you wish to be able to filter with, or general feedback on the tags? I'm going to clean it up a bit, I know I personally want to filter through "fiction", "humor", "bad science", "study critique", but if you have others tags you want to make sure the AI recognize so you can use them I'd love to hear it. (You can use the "AI" filter to filter only posts that have been analyzed)
b. If you have any feedback on the summaries it's welcome too (short summaries are supposed to be one liner to get a quick idea of the post topic, long summaries are here to give an outline of the post, maybe even re-read them after the post).
Finally @Scott if you read this, how do you feel about this project being shared publicly? I saw you promote ACXreader (substack replacement to read ACX with a really fast UI) a few months ago so I thought you might be ok with it, but obviously that's only if you're fine with it. I'll also try to reach out to you by email if you don't see this comment, and of course I'd be happy to adjust the website in any way you'd like - my email is in the About page (https://readscottalexander.com/about) if you want to reach out. Thanks a lot for all your writings over the years!
Clearly someone needs to create embeddings for the posts and then put them in a vector DB to support advanced searching.
First of all, as someone who's read SSC since circa 2013, I've always wished for something like this, so you are simply astonishing, thanks for adding value to my life.
On a lark I tried checking out this link: https://readscottalexander.com/posts/ssc-acc-how-much-significance-should-we-ascribe-to-spiritual-experiences The section numbering is off, skipping even numbers (1 - 17 instead of 1 - 9)
Fixed! The html was malformed - in the same way the quoted paragraphs don't appear as quotes... I'll see if I spend time fixing it, it's pretty specific to that article. I think Scott has copy pasted what the authors sent him from another tool, which had terrible formatting. Thanks for reporting it.
Thank you! I just checked and it looks great. Haven't come across any other posts with this issue.
I was just about to selfishly ask for another feature (toggling light/dark background) when I realized you'd already built it in, you're awesome.
I'll second Mutton's request downthread to flesh out the About page with more technical details; I suspect the sort of readers who would enjoy that are way overrepresented among the ACX commentariat who'd click on your website and then click around instead of bounce off. Maybe a technical appendix section at the bottom or something?
There is now a fully detailed technical section over here https://readscottalexander.com/technical - thanks for the feedback!
So awesome, thank you for being awesome.
I see you've also linked to Rob's Library of Scott Alexandria, which back in the day used to be my go-to recommendation for friends wanting to explore Scott's writings beyond the ephemeral latest-post view. I think I now prefer your website to Rob's, because it's more recent (~maximally so), it's prettier, it's rank-able in various ways, it's got a lot of stats which appeals to my friends and I, etc although I still like Rob's thematic curation and wish that could be somehow automated. Automating thematic clustering in a way that allows for emerging new themes to be identified + post clustering to be 'refactored' when necessary is probably ~impossible (although it's what I've always wished for w.r.t. Rob's Library); perhaps a simpler version might be a static collection of themes with a bunch of posts for each + a classifier trained on the former to sort new posts, with said static collection updated annually or something. I'm currently part of a small weekly reading group going through some of Scott's old posts in a particular theme (following https://www.lesswrong.com/codex), which inspired this wish.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking you to implement this! Please feel free to ignore. The tagging you've implemented is already a good enough proxy for now. And any thematic clustering necessarily embeds authorial taste which might not be to everyone's liking.
Aw thank you for your kind words and for your ideas! (and sorry for replying quite late, I don't check my substack notifications often...)
It's great to read. Yes, automatic theme clustering would be really interesting. That's the idea behind having tags and it works somewhat (I'm discovering similar posts by clicking on tags I'm surprised exist after reading an article), but it's a bit rough around the edges and not super consistent.
There'd be some interesting work to do in analyzing and visualizing clusters. The semantic search can work somewhat for finding posts that haven't been formally tagged with a topic, but you need to know what you want to search. (I'm sure it can be improved too, I'm finding it a bit slow and returning a bit too much, but the ordering by relevance works quite well for me).
I have less time to work on the project and it feels pleasant to use for me so I'm just doing incremental stuff here and there (twitter previews are now shown in acx!), but if I get more time I might explore those topics. Thanks again for sharing your many thoughts, it's useful! And motivating to hear other people are enjoying it. I know I am too! :)
(oh I guess next project high my list would be to include LW posts as well as ACX and SSC. Some day!)
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you enjoy dark mode, and also glad it's discoverable enough that you could find it by yourself. :) There are a few small design bugs in dark mode, I'll iron those out soon.
I also just added semantic search to the search bar which makes the technical part a bit more interesting, so I think I'll add a technical section to the About page this weekend.
Ah I'm happy to read you like it, thank you for your kind comment!
Good catch on the article. The pipeline is getting the html article => converting it to markdown (to normalize and remove html tags) => hydrating it back to html. It looks fine on most articles I've checked but some have hickups. You've found the most severe I've seen so far, I'll see how I can fix that. Thanks for reporting it! (Feel free to share others if you find any, the other I've noticed is the newlines being omitted from table of contents in "Highlight from comments" posts)
This is really cool. If you feel like fleshing out the "About" page with more details about the project, I'd be curious to see your prompts for both tagging and summarizing...
If you're still interested, there is now a fully detailed technical section on https://readscottalexander.com/technical
Great, I wanted to include some technical details on that page but was afraid to bore the user too much. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll see what I can do.
Oooh thank you! Does it search within the article for keywords?
To tag articles? No, I run the article through an AI (Claude Sonnet 3.5) with a long prompt to extract tags and summary. Around 100 articles have been tagged this way so far, and I'm waiting for some feedback (from others and myself) to go through the remaining 1400. Glad you like it!
Sorry, I meant for things like an article containing the sentence "we hold these truths" being presented when searching for the word "truth".
It's a simple search box filtering on the titles for now (it's using SQLite full-text search but doesn't make much of it right now) - it'd be interesting to do a more advanced search at some point. The tag search are a bit cumbersome too, since there are so many of them. I'll see what a v2 can look like and I've updated the label to reflect that in the meantime, thanks for asking.
(I think if people are looking for a specific article without knowing the title google might be the best option to get the article name right now)
What's the current state of psychedelic therapy? I don't hear about it that much anymore but a decade ago it was everywhere and there was incredible optimism about its potential.
The people who were pushing it then are older now, and both less energetic and have developed additional interests. (Which is reasonable considering the problems of fighting city hall.)
A recent book review hauntingly hinted at Alzheimer's being a prion disease, is there any evidence for this?
See link 24 at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2024 and Philodendron's comment https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2024/comment/50664168
The best-known, most consistent marker for Alzheimer's is tangles/plaques of amyloid beta, a protein that forms clumps in the brain. Prions are malformed proteins (specifically, they're ones that cause other proteins to become malformed), and are notable for forming amyloid plaques like amyloid beta, which cause problems. So it's definitely tempting to see malformed protein tangles in Alzheimer's patients, say "this is just like what we see in prion diseases," and wonder if Alzheimer's is a prion disease.
The complicating factors are:
1. There's no strong evidence, as far as I know, that amyloid beta is a prion. Not all malformed proteins that form clusters like this have the scary property of "infecting" other proteins and making them act the same way, and as far as I know nobody has demonstrated that property in amyloid beta.
2. Although the consensus in the Alzheimer's field for a long time was that buildup of amyloid beta plaques in the brain caused the disease, this hypothesis hasn't stood up well to the test of time. In particular, there have been several treatments that definitely did work at reducing amyloid beta plaques, but didn't effectively treat Alzheimer's symptoms. This has led many researchers in the field to wonder if the amyloid hypothesis is a dead end, and if the plaques observed in Alzheimer's patients are a side effect, not causative.
That was pretty much my understanding of the science, thanks for clarifying. Do you happen to know if any new promising leads have opened up since amyloid-β started looking more like a symptom than a cause? (Also don’t people think it's really weird that large visible plaques aren't what's causing the brain damage?)
The alternate hypothesis I've been heard about often enough to notice/remember is that it's another protein, tau, argued for in this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5797629/
There are probably others too, I haven't kept up with this field all that well.
I think people DO think it's weird if a bunch of big-ass protein tangles in brains aren't causing problems, it's why the amyloid hypothesis was so dominant for so long and why it's still not completely abandoned, but "we invented multiple drugs that got rid of the amyloid plaques, but the people still have Alzheimer's" is a pretty strong counter-argument.
"The (...) most consistent marker for Alzheimer's is tangles/plaques of amyloid beta".
Do you happen to know how good the correlation is? Sorry if this sounds smart-alec, but something like 10-15 years ago I did a deep dive into the topic, and I was pretty confused why everyone considered these plaques a good target. My impression back then was that the correlation was too weak to be promising, and both directions were weak (at least some people have Alzheimer without plaques, and very many people have plaques without Alzheimer). I have no idea whether this was just a lucky guess from my side (after all, the very new drugs do show an effect, albeit pretty modest), or whether the whole trail was just wishful thinking in the pharma companies and researchers. I haven't followed the research since then except for general news, so I would be grateful for an update.
IIUC, it's 100%. Alzheimer's disease was identified when Alzheimer noticed the plaques. Perhaps by now there's some additional indication that is used, as I'm no medic.
It's true that the original description of the disease focused on the amyloid plaques, but the correlation between those and Alzheimer's disease is only 100% if you declare by definitional fiat that only cases where the plaques are present count. If you focus on clinical symptoms, the situation is much less clear.
People with amyloid plaques but no dementia: https://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-alzheimers-disease/jad220808
People with Alzheimer's-like symptoms but no amyloid plaques: https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/when-theres-no-amyloid-its-not-alzheimers
I doubt I know more about this than you do; I'm not really a domain expert.
I know that the correlation is strong enough to have been noticed and taken seriously for a long time, but also that as you say, you sometimes see brains with amyloid plaques from people without Alzheimer's symptoms, and you sometimes see Alzheimer's symptoms without abnormal amounts of amyloid plaques. As I recall, the latter has led to some debate over whether that means the amyloid hypothesis is wrong, or if it just means there are other syndromes that can cause symptoms similar to Alzheimer's.
I don't know exactly how strong the correlation between amyloid plaques and Alzheimer's symptoms is, or even if there's good consensus on it.
Places I know to read more about this stuff:
- Derek Lowe's blog (he is very anti-amyloid-hypothesis), e.g., https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/had-enough-eh
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry_of_Alzheimer%27s_disease#Amyloid_hypothesis
- This pro-amyloid-hypothesis lit review by one of its main proponents (paywalled, not super recent): https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1072994
Thank you! I will check them out.
You can’t have shared fact beliefs without shared values, because beliefs have a time and attention cost as well as a risk; how to allocate time and attention and which risks are worth it is function of values.
Is that obvious? Controversial? Ambiguous? Help me understand where the crowd is at on this.
No, imagine two agents whose highest value is their own survival + the death of the other agent. So, opposite values, taking into account indexicals. They can still have shared factual beliefs about which things are likely to cause either of them to die.
I think you’re creating confusion by importing the terms fact and value into contexts in which they don’t have any more distinct meaning.
The whole basis of the fact/value distinction in logical positivism and the like is the idea that facts are individual observer-independent (as distinguished from observer-independent in a Kantian way) and values are individual observer dependent. If this were not true, what is the difference between a value and a fact?
Now that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong that things we commonly think of as values, for instance our pragmatic priorities, alter our observations of things we commonly think of as the facts. This is a point that many philosophers, for example Foucault, would embrace. But if that’s true, it’s not just that values determine facts, but more profoundly the collapse of the fact/value distinction entirely.
The opposite route is to suggest that what we commonly call facts inform what we think of as our values, ie virtue ethicists and other moral realists. Note that what you’re saying is also totally compatible with this, and in fact probably makes more sense if you believe it as well.
This solves other difficulties. For example, rudeness seems like both a factual and value claim, it is a judgment that cannot be applied by a sovereign individual outside of societal norms, but it is a judgement that we cannot utter without evaluating that rudeness as bad and changing our behaviour. These sort of ‘thick descriptions’ illustrate the weakness of the fact/value distinction.
In any case, what you, relativists and moral realists have in common is not about the relationship between facts and values, but more profoundly about the idea of their being facts as distinct from values or vice versa.
Note that none of this precludes their being universal human knowledge, as the form of human life imposes certain goods and thus, on your logic, certain worldviews. And knowledge disagreements can be resolved without appeal to what you call facts or values, for instance on grounds of aesthetic beauty or simplicity. On this, read Wittgenstein’s On Certainty if you haven’t already, or Alasdair Macintyre.
What do you think?
Seems too ambiguous to have a true/false value to me. I can think of three different ways to parse the first clause, none of which lead me to a clearly useful statement about the world:
1. "You can't have [any] shared fact beliefs without [having any] shared values."
--This seems like it would be vacuously true because it's not clear what two humans sharing literally zero values would me, or if that's a state of the world that can actually happen.
2. "You can't have [more than some threshold level] of shared fact beliefs without [commensurate level] of shared values."
--This seems like the most interesting and potentially useful interpretation, but without at least approximate knowledge of the function that maps [level of shared values] to [max level of shared fact beliefs] it doesn't mean very much. Also it seems pretty likely that different values would be better or worse at enabling their holders to share different amounts of fact beliefs, which would increase the ambiguity of the statement.
3. "You can't have [a complete, matching set of] shared fact beliefs without [some particular high level of] shared values.
--This seems back in vacuously true territory, as I don't think sharing all fact beliefs is something distinct human beings can do: we're constantly adding new beliefs an purging old ones (most of them incredibly banal things like "there's a cup on the table") and nobody not in your brain gets your exact progression of beliefs, regardless of values. Maybe if you restricted it to some much smaller, much less granular subset of fact beliefs this could become a sensible framing.
What I think IS obviously true is that there's a two-way relationship between values and fact beliefs: values determine what facts you'll pursue and accept, but the set of facts available to you likewise plays a role in determining your values.
I think this is too strong. Not all differences in values compromise the epistemic status of relevant facts. I would put it the other way round: without shared values there will be fact beliefs that are not shared. But it does not imply that there will be no shared fact beliefs.
For example, it's probably true that people who disagree on, eg vaccine safety, do so because their value systems compromise their ability to agree on the evidence base. But in say a war, where the two sides clearly differ on values, there will be many brute facts that are shared. Eg, Japan and the US shared the belief that an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
I think what you’re saying is only true if we ignore shared values between parties to a conflict.
> But in say a war, where the two sides clearly differ on values,
Do they clearly differ on all values? Or just some? I would say they agree that an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because they agree on the value of trusting a specific set of historical claims made by a certain social consensus. There are almost certainly people who will make the argument that no bomb was ever dropped, it was all made up, etc.
Oh I see. Well, if we are talking about literally no shared values at all, that's a rather degenerate case. I mean, if they have no shared values at all, they won't agree on the meanings of any words, never mind facts. But yes :-)
The degenerate case is just a limit point here. More broadly I think it’s the case that, the more values are aligned between two groups, the broader and more detailed the shared basis of fact beliefs they can have.
So we should expect political polarization, for example, to lead to divergent networks of fact beliefs that seem mutually incomprehensible across networks, unless a person can imagine having values very different from their own and then understand how that would change the scope of their attention and what they consider relevant.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but my personal values change over time even when my knowledge remains constant. I recognize the pros and cons of many issues, and I know of many conflicting yet valid worldviews, so I choose depending on my mood.
For instance, is it my value that competition in schools is good? Should we print out everyones scores and hang them on the wall? If we did this, I'd have worked harder in school, it would have triggered my competitive nature. On the other hand, I know how it must feel to be placed low in this list, and it does seem a little cruel to expose how well everyone is doing if you look at the issue from below rather than above.
The one I align with depend on my mood, and on my sympathy, which depends on the pride and confidence (or lack thereof) which I project onto other people. I think values arrise from psychological states more than from knowledge
his initial comment is ambiguous. but from what I gather in his later comments, he's arguing that e.g. people who believe in conspiracy theories or crystal-healing-woo curate a corpus of knowledge/evidence/studies/etc that most people are entirely unaware of. These are extreme examples, but this dynamic occurs in lots of other scenarios to lesser degrees.
True with a bit of qualification. The point I was about to make is "You can't afford to not believe in fire", but Woolery's comment seems to have already made it: North Koreans and Americans both believe the same one Physics that says nuclear explosions are possible. Radically different values, but still one reality, and reality has a way of forcing itself upon you.
Another qualification is the granularity of facts. People can, in fact, agree to individual facts, despite massive value differences:
From Bentham's Bulldog https://benthams.substack.com/p/its-always-revenge:
> The Israeli Palestinian conflict is perhaps the most controversial conflict in the world. And this is remarkable because of how little disagreement there is about the facts
> [The 2 sides might disagree on, e.g., the 2000 Israeli peace offer] But mostly, there’s agreement about what happened, and disagreement about whether it was justified. It’s uncontroversial that the Arabs in Palestine declared war on the Israelis in 1948 because they were opposed to Israel becoming a state, and that the Israelis displaced about 700,000 of them in the war, not allowing them to return. It’s uncontroversial that innocent civilians were killed on October 7th, and that more were killed in response to the Israeli reprisal. It’s uncontroversial that Israelis have built settlements, and that Palestinians have fired rockets into Israel, and that Israel has retaliated with barrages of rockets that have killed thousands.
Even with 2 sides here that are notoriously quarrelsome, they could regularly agree on individual facts.
The problem is that individual facts aren't enough. You have to stitch together several facts, and that "stitching" is in and of itself, almost never something that could be factually supported. Even deciding where to put the T = 0 moment is not a factual decision. Did the conflict start when Muslim Arabs took Syria-Palestina from Byzantium? Maybe. Did the conflict start on exactly 12:01 AM October 7th 2023, and everything before that lived idyllically? Some of the pro-Israel seem to act as if believing this (Though no doubt, they will disagree with the deliberately exaggerated phrasing).
There seems to be several phenomena, all happening on top of each other:
(0) Facts can be faked. Even before AI and photoshop, the vast majority of the world happens in the not-here not-now not-I. You almost never know anything except by testimony, in the broadest possible sense of "Testimony". Pyramids are testimony that Ancient Egypt existed, but Ancient Egypt is just an elaborate guesswork based on many such testimonies, from the perspective of the moderns, no such thing exist or have ever existed. You occupy an extremely small cartesian-coordinate cell in spacetime and in sensory space, any time you want to know something that happened outside of that limited range (which is nearly all the time), you're essentially reconstructing what can never be known for sure. During reconstruction, both honest mistakes and deliberate deception can happen.
(1) Facts are raw and low-level, they have to be interpreted to mean anything interesting. Even video evidence needs context. One of the famous videos of October 7th is Nova Festival goers running away from bullets, but people defending Hamas say the bullets are actually return fire from the IDF, which - they claim - was firing indiscriminately in the general direction of Hamas. Photos of burned cars? IDF hellfire missiles. Gaza's horrific images of destruction? yes, the IDF did it, but only because each and every single one of those destroyed buildings was a Hamas base, so says the pro-IDF among us.
You can always use more facts to interpret a fact, but then that recursively opens the same questions for the new facts.
(2) Facts are selected, not everything is recorded (and what is recorded, regularly gets destroyed or censored or simply lost due to loss of interest on part of those who could have preserved it.)
There are many billions of people alive, about 100 billion who ever lived, trillions of animals. There are hundreds of millions of recordable wavelengths of light, hundreds of different types of particles and fields. The universe is ~14 billion years old, and at least 100 billion light years across, with about 10^80 discrete physical entity. Almost NONE of that is recorded. Writing was rare throughout human history and until the printing press, the very fact that something old is written already embodies a lot of selection bias about it.
(3) Facts has to be combined, sequenced, stitched together, post-production-edited into a narrative, a worldview, an integrated picture. How do you decide on the sequence of facts that together constitute one unit? How do you justify ruling out the facts you didn't include? All borders are arbitrary.
(4) Finally, Facts live in the world of Is. But a lot of disagreements, perhaps most, is about the world of Ought. Between Is and Ought is a gap that you can never cross with facts alone. Even if you managed to pass 0...3, and you now have an agreed-upon narrative of the world, that just solves the Perception problem. You still have the Control problem of how to act on the worldview.
It's a pretty agreed-upon fact that the Middle East is more religious than Europe, but depending on who's reciting that fact this is either a tragedy and the cause of the Middle East's misery or the only light in a dark world and the reason why the Middle East is the future. Same Is, different Oughts.
> Is that obvious
I mean, I had just spent a wall of text arguing why nothing is truly "obvious", so no. Definitely not obvious at all to an arbitrary human. To Rationalists and Rationalists' audience and any other population that was specifically selected to self-doubt and mistrust their senses/the world? Yeah, probably so.
But something being obvious doesn't protect you from falling for it, or we would have eradicated cognitive biases by simply enumerating them.
I think this is the rub:
> Americans both believe the same one Physics that says nuclear explosions are possible. Radically different values, but still one reality, and reality has a way of forcing itself upon you.
Reality only forces itself on you, to a point. It does so basically by hurting you if you get too far out of line. And that, to me, is only a consequence of a shared value - ie, not wanting to be involved in a nuclear explosion.
Agreeing that something is possible in theory is about as close as we can get to agreement on anything complex. You a list bunch of other reasons, which I agree are real and I think generally preclude disagreement on facts, except for the broadest category of “this thing happened,” and even there, “what you call the thing” will be questioned. And for some people, they’ll indeed argue that October 7 was all made up. You and I call them conspiracy theorists, but I think they merely place differential trust on the consensus of crowds. Their different values preclude them from acknowledging the facts we do.
There’s truth to this but I don’t get how it’s distinct from the well-known effects of cognitive bias.
I think you're on to something, but you are not universally true. What is true is that when you share a view of the world (including empirical views) there must be some cause. That cause may be that the belief is true. But the cause could be that believing it to be false causes problems to a shared value system. I never thought of it from this angle and it is a valuable insight. Nevertheless there may be a third cause: Some believes seem true even though they are not. This is why the pre-modern world had a shared belief in heliocentrism, despite its falsehood and the great variation of values between those societies. Believes like this come from our limited human perspective either in terms of our ability to make relevant observations or from shared psychological tendencies. towards fallacious reasoning
Geocentrism isn't actually false, it's just a radically inconvenient way to calculate orbital motions. You *can* get the same answers wth geocentrism as with heliocentrism, and neither is true in any absolute sense. But some frameworks are a lot easier to calculate in than others. Relativity also isn't "true". It's just a way to calculate certain kinds of effects that are REALLY difficult to do with either heliocentrism or geocentrism. What can be true is the readings off your instruments. They way you calculate to model those readings is just more or less useful.
It doesn't really make sense to me. The main driver of fact beliefs is whether they are true, at least in principle, not whether they are convenient. You could have one person believe something grudgingly because it doesn't really align with their values while another person believes it eagerly because it does align. The vast majority of fact beliefs also have no implication in terms of values. We all believe the sun comes up in the morning.
>It doesn't really make sense to me. The main driver of fact beliefs is whether they are true, at least in principle, not whether they are convenient.
Yes, but people can also differ on whether they view certain facts as _important_. The typical example is not caring who attacked who in a conflict that one is distant from.
But it can also be true of less potentially emotionally laden facts. There is a discrepancy of about 1% in two ways of measuring the neutron half-life. Anybody reading this care enough about it to google the discrepancy? :-) (And, AFAIK, the half-life doesn't directly affect anything about nuclear power significantly, either in reactors or bombs. Free neutrons don't stick around long enough to significantly decay in either of those cases.)
That’s an interesting way to look at it, but Iranians and North Koreans believe in things like nuclear physics and weather systems and ballistics just like the Swiss and the Japanese. They all do it out of necessity (I guess maybe you’d say the risk of not believing these things would be too high). The only shared value these beliefs require is survival in the modern world which is pretty much universal. And I would guess the brute force of these facts would still overpower the compulsion of someone who held no such value.
I don’t know that I’d agree that most beliefs have a significant time and attention cost. I (and most other people) believe in black holes, but that has come without effort and is based largely on all the people who know about space stuff telling me it’s time I believed in them.
I might be more inclined to say believed facts change values more than values change believed facts.
Maybe if you offered examples of believed facts where people are split based on their values the relationship you’re describing would be more clear.
>I don’t know that I’d agree that most beliefs have a significant time and attention cost.
Much less than it used to have, but it can still get significant. In my reply to Greg G above, I mentioned the roughly 1% discrepancy in two measurements of the neutron's half-life. Presumably one of the measurement techniques is giving an answer which is closer to correct. I doubt that anyone reading this is going to find it worthwhile to chase down all the information necessary to make a decision about which measurement they think is closer to correct. Yet the description of the experiments is on the internet, and presumably there is a right answer to this question.
edit: At 5 days after my comment with no response, I'm going to construe that as indicating that the time and attention cost of the particular question that I cited _is_ high enough to discourage investigating it, even with the information resources we have on the internet. :-)
This is true, and not obvious. I think it's not much useful, and (at least in that formulation) slightly infohazardous.
This took me maybe ten to twenty minutes to write, so I don't think I'm misunderstanding unless you made an important mistake.
Can you say more? Why is it infohazardous?
I think it’s useful insofar as it predicts that only shared values can allow any kind of coalition to stay together long term, and we should expect coalitions, as they break apart, to see the other as being increasingly “detached from reality” because we should expect political coalitions to conflate their collective map as being identical with the territory.
I think it's infohazardous because, with the way you wrote it, people often misunderstand it, in a relatively harmful way.
People won't believe the things you say without understanding unless you seem to have especially high status, so it's maybe harmless to say such things here (though the phrasing is still very suboptimal), but I think the same phrasing could be harmful in other contexts. Maybe you're more careful there, though.
I should have been clearer about that, sorry.
Of course only shared values can allow coalitions to stay together 'long-term'; circumstances change over time, such that differing values don't have shared subgoals for long, and human organizations have a very hard time pursuing multiple unrelated goals.
Of course people see their former allies as irrational; people change their beliefs to fit their values irrationally.
In both cases, I think the half-rational effect you describe exists, but is too small to matter much.
I agree the belief is not completely useless.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "fact belief", please?
Facts beliefs - claims about what is true, or what causes what - as opposed to values, such as “this outcome is good, that outcome is bad, this is desirable, that is not”
What I think I have understood is that you are claiming that:
'People cannot agree on how the world works (causality, etc.) without also agreeing about what outcomes are good/bad/desirable.'
Is this correct?
Yes, it’s roughly correct - but even that presupposing that “outcomes are the thing we value” is buying into a value belief that some people (ie proponents of deontology or virtue ethics) advocate.
>presupposing that “outcomes are the thing we value” is buying into a value belief that some people (ie proponents of deontology or virtue ethics) advocate.
Is there a typo? I thought that deontologists and virtue ethicists oppose, rather than advocate, consequentialism. Am I misreading or misinterpreting?
> deontologists and virtue ethicists
Is there a difference? They're commonly referred to separately, and they have separate entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but as far as I can see deontologists are virtue ethicists who provide a little more detail about their virtues, or perhaps just different names, than is customary. That's not a difference in the approach to ethics.
I've written about this [0]. And I tend to be of the opinion that yes, outcomes are ultimately what's being optimized for. However,
A) there's a variety of possible strategies/policies for optimizing for an aggregate of outcomes, each with its own profile of trade-offs.
B) specifically and explicitly running consequentialism.exe has the con of being more hackable <looks at SBF>. Which may make it less desirable than running strategies which are simplier and therefore more robust.
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/dismembering-the-mystique-of-meta
I've also written a little on what I call "useful fictions" [1], which I think you may find interesting. I.e. while we live in a zeitgeist where "The Truth > The Good", my observations of reality have led me to believe that, ultimately, The Truth is subservient to The Good. E.g. Upton Sinclairs' observation "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" is a feature, rather than a bug.
It's hard for me to imagine cases outside of "useful fictions" such that factual beliefs diverge due to divergent values. Because in the vast majority of cases, truth really does tend to be instrumentally useful towards imposing one's will on the universe. And so I'd expect agents to eventually converge on at least most factual claims, simply out of strategic necessity.
[1] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/the-descartography-of-mythopoesis
What would the opposite look like, a person who doesn't value outcomes? Would you name an example?
Sure. Virtue ethics says we should not try to compute outcomes and weigh them, effectively because predicting the future of things that matter isn’t going to work. Instead we should strive to embody and develop virtues just as fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, hope, faith, and love. Deontology says the right thing to do is to follow the rules you’ve been given. There are rough translations you can make between these but they are fundamentally different.
The trouble is that real-world statements of fact beliefs are usually some kind of shorthand, and it’s difficult to know what the unspoken parts include. So it’s a negotiation between fact and value all the way down.
How much of an impact are modern immunotherapies having on cancer treatment?
Susan Wojcicki's death last week was eerily similar to how my mother died 10 years ago (non-small cell lung cancer, mid 50s, low-single-digit years from diagnosis til death). Given that she presumably had access to the most cutting edge treatments in the world, it makes me think that progress hasn't been as significant as I'd believed.
Short answer - significant effect but not yet dramatic in that stage 4 cancer is still almost always a lethal disease.
Longer answer - depends on the type of cancer
Melanoma - largest effect, fully 50% of stage 4 melanomas enter long term remission
Kidney cancer - also dramatic effect, but numbers significantly lower, around 20%
Various types of gastrointestinal cancer (gastric, oesophageal, gallbladder, bowel) - marginal effect; immunotherapy increases progression free survival by a few months but remission is very rare
Lung cancer - depends on the type (small cell vs non small cell). Non small cell excellent effect, almost as good as kidney cancer. Small cell less impressive, more analogous to gastrointestinal cancer
Head and neck cancer - marginal effect, similar to gastrointestinal cancer
Breast cancer - minimal effect; only relevant in triple negative breast cancer which is a small minority of breast cancer cases
Prostate, pancreas and ovarian cancer - no effect
Brain cancer - until recently official answer was "no effect" - but Google "Richard Scolyer"
Source - I'm an oncology fellow
Very interesting and tracks with my non-expert understanding. Thanks for the reply!
Interesting, so given that Wojcicki had non-small cell lung cancer it means she was in the treatment non-responsive 80%, but that in theory she could have been successfully treated?
In theory, maybe. But some don’t respond to immunotherapy at all. Depends on a few factors including PDL1 expression status
For some cancers, it's dramatic. Stage 4 kidney cancer (RCC) was a death sentence 10 years ago. Normal chemos don't work on RCC And the other drugs were not very effective. Targeted therapies and immunotherapies have made a huge difference (source: I run an online cancer community).
Brain cancer has had only two treatment options for more than twenty years but Vorasedib (a targeted therapy, not an immunotherapy) was approved last week (too late for me!) and is expected to also make a big difference.
Too late for you? :( what happened?
Vorasedinib is not given to patients who have already had chemo. I started chemo a month ago. I don't think there is any evidence that vorasedinib does not work if you have had chemo — but the trial that demonstrated its effectiveness was done on treatment-naive patients.
> I don't think there is any evidence that vorasedinib does not work if you have had chemo — but the trial that demonstrated its effectiveness was done on treatment-naive patients.
If you read Jake Seliger's wife's articles on the process of getting into trials, the good news here is that not being treatment-naive is also disqualifying for trials, so this isn't going to change.
However, that seems like a real block for Jake and a fake block for you. Doctors can, in the general case, prescribe any approved medication to treat any condition they want. The non-general case is narcotics. Once it's approved, why wouldn't it be given to patients with prior treatments?
It may be true that doctors in the US can prescribe whatever they choose (though insurance carriers are not obligated — AFAIK — to cover it). But, sadly, it's not true in my country (England) where it is very difficult to get access to drugs that are not approved.
> It may be true that doctors in the US can prescribe whatever they choose (though insurance carriers are not obligated — AFAIK — to cover it).
I believe you're more or less right, though I don't think the line is whether the particular use of the medication is legally approved. Insurers have policies about what treatments they'll cover for what problems. A lot of off label prescriptions are standard practice and I'd expect those to be covered. And on the flip side of that, an insurer might mount a cost-effectiveness argument against covering a cancer treatment for someone who has the targeted type of cancer, but they'd have more difficulty making the argument that they don't think it's an appropriate use of the treatment.
It's obviously relevant here how health insurance policies handle drugs that weren't known at the time the policy was written. I assume there's quite a bit of legal development around this question, since it will come up all the time, but I'm not familiar with it.
I would expect an insurer that denied coverage for an approved cancer treatment based on the argument you present to be crucified in the press, and to do poorly in court in the fairly likely case that they get sued over it.
I see. That's a shame. As far as I know it is still not available at all in Australia. Medicine can be frustratingly paternalistic.
How are you doing otherwise?
It's not approved in the UK yet either.
I'm doing OK thank you. Last round of chemo was a bit bumpy but I survived.
No cancer is good, but lung cancers seem to be some of the bad ones when it comes to outcomes. That she got a couple of years life is good going, considering.
This is unrelated but I'm seeing you a lot online lately, how're you doing these days?
Yes I've seen you on Manifold and here 😛
I'm doing well, it's been a busy few years. I moved to Toronto with my now-wife who's doing a PhD here, but we're planning to move back to the Bay after she's done.
You're back in Israel, right?
Yeah, hoping to be back in New York eventually though
For anyone interested in Objectivism, I’ve recently started a series on Substack called “Ayn Rand Was Wrong About Everything”, which I hope will be a fair and comprehensive response to all of Rand’s major takes. https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/ayn-rand-was-wrong-about-everything?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios My first post was about Ayn Rand’s views on the doctrine of the atonement in Christianity.
Ayn Rand was almost presciently correct about the outcomes of more socialism/communism. Her dystopian America in atlas shrugged falls apart from very much the same effect - incentive systems breaking down - that brings down all non market economies. (admittedly, the novel is somewhat dramatic, but, it's a novel). And she made this prediction in the 1940s or 1950s or something when socialism was largely untried and had a lot of support. She could be wrong about everything else and still, getting this prediction right, along with mechanisms, gets her a LOT of points.
The USSR has been communist since 1917, I wouldn't say socialism was untried decades later.
> The USSR has been communist since 1917
To me, this statement necessarily entails that (1) the USSR currently exists; (2) it has been communist for the entirety of the period between 1917 and now; and (3) it is still communist now.
Does the grammar mean something different to you, are you making a statement about the equivalence between Soviet Russia and modern Russia, or was this a typo?
Single-letter typo, with the letters being neighbors on a QWERTY keyboard.
'Largely'. In that time 30 years was nothing, and in fact most commentators were generally very positive about it. Paul Samuelson continued to tout the superiority of the USSR model almost until it collapsed!
I wouldn't say all that time passing while Paul Samuelson made such claims was "nothing" either. He was just ignorant of what was actually going on in the USSR, while Ayn Rand had lived there.
If it's your view that most or many commentators had accurately predicted the collapse of the USSR economy, I'm open to seeing the support for that perspective. I'm not saying Ayn Rand was unique in her prediction, but as I understand it her view was not commonly held, and it certainly was not expressed with such power by anyone else. And she didn't just happen to be correct either. She understood deeply the mechanism at play - incentives - and what communism did to them. And the impact it could and would have on society once you take incentives away. I think in a thread about 'how she got everything wrong', this is a legitimate entry for how she got one very important thing right, for the right reasons, at a time when very few other people were getting it right.
I'm not saying that Ayn Rand was wrong. I'm saying that Soviet Communism had existed for a while before she wrote her work, and she lived under it before emigrating. Eugen Richter's "Pictures of the Socialistic Future" from 1891 is an actual prediction make in advance.
Note that utilitarianism has the same problem for the same reason - utilitarianism can be accurately rephrased as "to each according to his needs".
At a system level, what that means is that people will focus on having larger needs, which is the wrong way for a society to operate.
Is your target audience people who want to like Objectivism or people who want to dislike Objectivism?
I’m hoping for both!
You can revisit your bet https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/i-won-my-three-year-ai-progress-bet with the new (August 2024) Flux model. I find it wins handily. (Still can't get the key in the raven's beak though.)
could you privide a link?
When I google flux model, i find 100 cool ai projects, but it's not obvious to me to what you are refering.
These: https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs. (The [dev] version is better than [schnell])
Very sorry about Jake and huge sympathy to Bess.
I'm very interested in the idea of common knowledge. It's been talked a lot about by the Scotts [here](https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410) and [here](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/)
> The crucial concept here is common knowledge. We call a fact “common knowledge” if, not only does everyone know it, but everyone knows everyone knows it, and everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows it, and so on.
I sort of understand this but I want to understand it better. Can someone explain this to me? Why is something not common knowledge if everyone knows that everyone knows it? What is the difference between that and the next level (everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it)? I want to get a more intuitive grasp of that.
Unless you have the entire chain, there’s a possibility for people to fail to coordinate.
Consider this situation: two allied generals need to attack a fort together for them to succeed. They coordinate by sending a messenger who might get captured before delivering the message. If a general attacks alone, the attack fails.
The following describes “everyone knows everyone knows” but not common knowledge:
General one sends messenger one. “How about noon?”
General two receives messenger one and sends back messenger two to confirm “sure noon is good”
General one receives messenger two.
Now both generals know that both want to attack at noon. But general two is concerned that general one didn’t receive messenger two. If messenger two was captured, then general one is still waiting on confirmation from general two! General one fears that if general two has qualms, maybe he won’t attack. So common knowledge is still absent, and the generals must either take a risk or chicken out.
Sending more messengers never completely assuages the fear that the chain has broken and the other general won’t attack.
While it's impossible to establish perfect knowledge, it *is* possible to bypass a lot of this if they have hierarchy or trust or are willing to commit.
General A: #1: "You are ordered to attack at noon."
General B: #2: "Orders received, committing to noon attack."
General A: #3: "Acknowledging commitment."
General B: #4: "Communication complete".
At this point, #4 may or may not have arrived, but the main point is that B got message #3. As long as B gets message #3, it works.
General A knows that General B got the orders, and can rely on B, and can attack. General B got the orders and will attack, and also knows that [General A knows that General B got the orders], and so is confident that General A will be there too. General A isn't confident that General B is confident, but that's unnecessary!
And it can be shorter. Assume that message #3 isn't delivered, so there's no message #4. As before, General A knows that General B got the orders, and can rely on B, and can attack. As before, General B got the orders and will attack. But in this case, General B doesn't know if General A got #2, and so doesn't know if General A will be there. But General B is under orders - like the Light Brigade, theirs but to do and die.
And that's kind of how TCP handshakes work.
> Sending more messengers never completely assuages the fear that the chain has broken and the other general won’t attack.
While that is true, receiving more messengers does have this effect, so as the number of messengers you send increases, the probability of achieving complete confidence in common knowledge goes to 1.
Yep! Sure it may be impossible to send infinite messages, but people are fine with some uncertainty.
C_B describes it well above:
“A fact is common knowledge if both Alice and Bob are simply taking it as a given that everyone is fully informed of the fact, and of the fact that everyone is fully informed and so on.”
It feels like in practical terms this ends up resolving via some combination of precommitment, UNODIR, and sufficient Bayesian certainty about others' knowledge ...
Sure, there are practical ways to manage. But that doesn’t change the fact that if you attack you may find your fellow general to be absent.
This is the Two Generals Problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
So, to start off, let's think about scenarios in which a fact ISN'T common knowledge:
1. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament, but Bob does not. This is a simple secret; Alice knows, but Bob does not know.
2. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament, and she believes she is in scenario 1. However, unbeknownst to her, Bob has discovered her plans, and is able to lay a trap for her. Alice knows, and Bob knows, but Alice doesn't know that Bob knows.
3. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament. Bob has discovered her plans, and lays a trap for her, believing that he is in scenario 2. However, unbeknownst to Bob, Alice leaked that information to Bob intentionally, and she avoids the trap and blows up Westminster Abbey instead. Alice knows, and Bob knows, and Alice knows that Bob knows, but Bob doesn't know that Alice knows that Bob knows.
4. Alice and Bob are opposing spies. Alice knows that her employers are planning to blow up Parliament. Bob has discovered her plans, and lays a trap for her. Alice leaked that information to Bob intentionally, believing that she was in scenario 3. However, Bob secretly had all of Alice's communications bugged, and unbeknownst to Alice knows about the alternate plan to blow up Westminster Abbey. Alice avoids the trap, but when she tries to pull off the second plan, she finds a second trap and is captured! Alice knows, and Bob knows, and Alice knows that Bob knows, and Bob knows that Alice knows that Bob knows, but Alice doesn't know that Bob knows that Alice knows that Bob knows.
Now, realistically, in normal circumstances you don't really recurse farther than this, but you should be able to see that IN PRINCIPLE, I could keep coming up with ever sillier, harder to understand scenarios in which the number of layers of "X knows that Y knows that...but doesn't know that..." keeps increasing.
"Common knowledge" describes the state of affairs where neither Alice nor Bob is worrying about these concerns, or this type of recursive knowledge-of-knowledge-of-knowledge at all. A fact is common knowledge if both Alice and Bob are simply taking it as a given that everyone is fully informed of the fact, and of the fact that everyone is fully informed and so on.
> Now, realistically, in normal circumstances you don't really recurse farther than this, but you should be able to see that IN PRINCIPLE, I could keep coming up with ever sillier, harder to understand scenarios in which the number of layers of "X knows that Y knows that...but doesn't know that..." keeps increasing.
There's a stage play that riffs on this. I can't find it - it might be "Top Secret" by Alan Melville, but I can't find the script online to check. The exchange goes something like:
"Trouble, sir! They know our plans!"
"That's okay, my boy, we know that they know."
"Yes, but they also know that we know they know!"
"Aye, and we know that they know we know they know."
"That's just it! I just learned that they know we know they know we know they know!"
"(gasp) They do?!?"
There's a concept of *modal knowledge* in formal logic, which includes (IIRC) prepositions denoting knowledge of other prepositions. Some preposition P being true might not be as important to act upon as whether Alice knows P is true. There's at least one logic / math riddle that also riffs off this: something like two mathematicians conversing, one says he's thinking of an integer with some set of properties, she says she doesn't know which one it is, he says he therefore doesn't know either, she replies that because of that, she now knows, and he says "and now I do, too". (This clearly isn't the riddle, but I don't have it readily at hand.)
Back when I was working with this, very few reasoning engines existed, let alone any that tried to work with modal knowledge (or more precisely, facts about knowing facts). With good reason: modal knowledge typically results in a total copy of all the information at hand for each party involved; and once you permit facts of the form "A knows or believes P", you've opened the door to "B knows that A believes P" and you have infinite regress on top of gigabytes of prepositions for each party.
One optimization that occurred to me was that many contexts were "open", in that one could infer that if A knew P, every X also knew that A knew P (including A), and so on. This isn't terribly useful overall, not just because many contexts deal with presumably public information, but also because this sort of thing wasn't going to blow up a database anyway because of back propagation.
But in contexts such as espionage or even just gaming, secret information is very worthwhile to store and manipulate, and often at least two plies deep.
Imagine a situation like this: there are Alice and Bob. They both know a Fact. We have the first level: both know.
Once Alice saw Bob on TV explaining the Fact and another time Bob saw Alice doing the same. You have the second level: they both know that both of them know.
Alice wonders: "I know the Fact, and I know that Bob also knows the Fact. But does Bob know that I know it? Maybe he doubts my erudition, maybe he never watches TV and never saw me explaining it." It's not the case that both know that both know that both know.
The popular wisdom is that World War I was a horrible trench war of attrition where the front barely moved for years, that earlier and later wars weren't like that, but that the current Ukraine war is sort of like that.
Is this true? If so, why are World War I and the Ukraine War unique in this way compared to earlier and later wars?
Not exactly. The Western Front in WWI was somewhat unique, in that the troop density was high enough to ensure continuous trench lines. Theories about the dominance of defense are slightly overblown. It was generally possible to seize territory, even at a favorable loss ratio, but once troops moved forward, they couldn't communicate very effectively, particularly with their artillery. This, and the depth of defenses, meant that the line wouldn't rupture and the front didn't move much.
But this only applies if the defense is strong everywhere, so there's no room for maneuver. As many others have pointed out, there was plenty of maneuver in WWI, just not in France/Belgium. In WWII, we rarely saw evenly-matched forces at high density. France fell apart too quickly, although if it hadn't, it probably would have looked more like WWI, although not completely so because of radio and tanks. Most everywhere else either had one side with a decisive edge (say, Western Europe after Overlord) or enough space that the opponent always had the opportunity to go around (Russia, North Africa, etc). The situations where this didn't happen tended to see trenches and such, although not to quite the same extent as WWI. (Italy springs most prominently to mind, and it was often quite static.)
Post-WWI, Korea was quite mobile early on, but froze into trench warfare after mid-1951 or so. The US/UN wasn't willing to take the casualties that a serious offensive would have entailed, and they had too much firepower for the Chinese to push them back. And then there's stuff like the Iran-Iraq War.
The Ukrainian war is being fought on a fairly narrow front, and without either side having a decisive advantage in strength. This is a pretty good recipe for bogging down.
WW1 was a horrible trench war of attrition... along one front. The one with the highest density of railroads, tekegraphs/telephones, fortifications and people. The other major front was a horrible mobile war of attrition!
In general, it seems like maneuver warfare breaks down when firepower is high (making advances into prepared defences exorbitantly costly) and the battlefield is 'visible' (in the sense that it's hard to conceal force concentrations and movement). WW1 transportation technology was also in a weird place where trains (rigid but high-volume and high-speed transport) favored defence by making it relatively easier to move and concentrate troops on your own ground than the enemy's.
The final ingredient, as others have pointed out, is that modern states (i.e. since about 1900) can just take an enormous beating before they lose the ability to fight.
In Ukraine you have all of these factors at play - two modern states slogging it out in an environment where the weaponry is very lethal to exposed troops and vehicles, lots of search assets are available to fill in the operational picture, and neither side can effectively blind the other by, for instance, attaining air superiority.
Industrial wars between peer powers naturally tend towards grinding wars of attrition. Some examples off the top of my head:
Iran-Iraq War: ~8 years of fighting along a stable front; 300k-1mil+ dead in battle
Korean War: The opening stages involved rapid occupation of territory, but the last 2.5 years of the ~3 year war was a grinding war of attrition on a stable front more or less following the current border
There's also the two wars between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Sino-Vietnamese War (short, but IIRC on trajectory to become a grinding war of attrition when it stopped).
Why are industrial wars like this? It's basically two endless lines of men armed to the brim with artillery, machine guns, and anti-tank weapons, often with trenches thrown in. How could that not turn into a grinding war of attrition? There's no room for flanking or maneuver, and there's no isolated army you can wipe out in a decisive battle. Even in WW2, grinding slogs were still the norm, though a temporary peak of tanks relative to other military tech made some fronts more mobile.
In theory, a modern air force with full air superiority should be able to neutralize a defender's advantage. But I don't think those conditions have been met in any modern war.
Yup, this is imho true. Plus usually unless one side totally outlcasses the other, neither side is able to achieve sufficient advantage in the air, because other guys can also shoot down planes.
I have one very dumb question. This discussion has included discussions of drones as defensive weapons. What are they like as offensive weapons? I assume that there is some sort of trade-off between the payload a drone can carry, its range, and how easy it is to detect and presumably shoot down. Does "other guys can also shoot down planes" apply to all drones with sufficient payload and range to be offensive weapons?
This is a very good question; imho it’s too early to tell.
Conceptually, I don’t think that drones should change basic reasons why in the modern warfare (unlike in pre-modern warfare) defense is easier. But it is a new technology, and honest answer is we don’t know yet what its ultimate impact will be.
Many Thanks!
Drones made defense easier because they allow real time surveillance at the squad level. You don't need multi-million dollar spy satellites or AWACS planes to see everything happening on the battlefield, you just need a few thousand dollars worth of camera drone. One guy with this drone is enough to see attackers coming from miles away, who can then call in precision bombardment. It's a lot harder to attack when the enemy can always see you coming.
Drones aren't unique in their offensive application, they are basically just smaller artillery/missile platforms. This makes them very effective against existing anti-air defenses, which generally consists of firing big missiles at big targets like jets or helicopters. Drones are much smaller targets, so they are much harder to track and hit. Due to the relatively low cost of production, they can also be used in swarms to overwhelm defenses by sheer numbers.
Many Thanks!
>Drones aren't unique in their offensive application, they are basically just smaller artillery/missile platforms.
Yeah, that was my expectation, but I have no expertise in this area, so I would just be guessing at "smaller cross-section, harder to hit, but carries less payload and fuel", which at least does match your
>Drones are much smaller targets, so they are much harder to track and hit.
Drones have been very effective offensive weapons in Ukrainian hands. In just the past week or so, Ukraine has used hundreds of drones to strike at least five airfields as much as 400 km inside Russia, and inflicting substantial damage on at least three of them.
Russia also uses offensive drones against Ukraine, but those seem to be shot down much more reliably, and to hit militarily significant targets less often when they do get through. But it's hard to put numbers on that, because fog of war.
Many Thanks! Does this get around the anti-aircraft part of the stalemate? If e.g. Ukraine were able to use drones to attack Russian artillery and fortified positions, as well as the airfields you cited, would that reduce the Russian's defender's advantage?
What you'd really need is the ability to dynamically interdict reinforcements moving to block breakthrough elements. Against a naive opponent, good drones capable of persistent surveillance (e.g. the Bayraktars Ukraine had at the beginning of the war) might be pretty good at this, but I think the Russians have upped their EW game so that drones don't have the requisite survivability near the front.
A lot of good tactical/operational/tech-focused answers here, so I'm going to hazard an attempt at a strategic/political answer.
The reason Ukraine is a slow-moving war of attrition is that neither side has much incentive to be really aggressive (I say as Ukraine is actively engaged in a major offensive into Russian territory). I think this is aspect actually makes it quite a bit different from World War I (but I'm not especially confident in that).
Aggression in war is always going to be risky and costly, especially now that we have guns and explosives. You're exposing your forces more completely to the enemy, acting in the areas where your information is less complete, introducing more friction into your operations. For consistent aggression to be a good strategy, you need strategic objectives that can make that risk worth it. I don't think anybody has that here. Both sides' victory conditions are mainly things that occur off the battlefield and they know it.
Starting with the obvious, Ukraine clearly isn't going to force a Russian surrender the way that, e.g. the Allies forced a German surrender in WW2. Even if they didn't have restrictions on where they used their materiel, Russia is too vast, too populous and its industrial capacity is too widely spread out for any Ukrainian offensive to cripple Russia's war-making capacity. They could, in theory, push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea, but would that end the war? Russia can attack from its side of the border just as well as from the Ukrainian side.
Russia, meanwhile, might in theory be able to completely defeat Ukraine militarily, but that's a very distant goal. In the opening days of the war, some combination of taking Kyiv and hitting enough military targets quickly enough might have collapsed the Ukrainian will/ability to fight (as Russia hoped), but that ship has long sailed. The industrial base that keeps Ukraine supplied is well out of Russia's reach: the only battlefield resource the Russians can destroy that Ukraine can't readily replace is soldiers, but of course the soldiers make this as difficult as possible, and never clump up to where Russia can make a huge impact all at once. Even if they become able to start taking chunks of Ukrainian territory again, the military and civilian personnel Ukraine needs to fight can easily be moved, their weapons will keep coming in from outside, and there won't be any clear payout to counterbalance the high cost of aggression.
Instead, both sides' victory conditions are mostly political, and the action on the battlefield happens largely in service to those political goals. Ukraine's likely wins come if Putin dies or is ousted, if Russia's economy collapses, or fear of a collapse turns enough oligarchs against the war effort to sway Putin, or if some unexpected disaster demands enough Russian manpower and resources that they suddenly need to sue for peace on favourable terms. Russia wins if the West stops supplying Ukraine with weapons or if the Ukrainian public gets war-weary enough to accept a peace deal that Putin considers favourable. Both sides need to keep the battlefield pressure on the other to *some* degree: Ukraine to keep thing expensive for Russia, Russia to keep Ukraine churning through munitions and troops. Each side will benefit from a successful offensive, but neither will benefit enough to incentivize the sort of consistent policy of aggression that would be needed to quickly change the front lines.
Of course, none of this is fully separate from the tactical and technical explanations others have made: the more costly and risky offensive operations are, the bigger the likely strategic gains have to be to make them worthwhile.
> They could, in theory, push Russia out of Donbas and Crimea, but would that end the war? Russia can attack from its side of the border just as well as from the Ukrainian side.
To be fair, if Ukraine somehow managed to push Russia out of Crimea completely, it would be very difficult for them to attack back (at more than the "random cruise missile barrage" level), since it's surrounded by water.
Fair enough. But Ukraine would still share land borders with Russia elsewhere: Ukraine retaking Crimea wouldn't force Russia to abandon its offensive operations more generally.
In pretty much every war between World War I and Ukraine, one side or the other fairly quickly established air superiority. The big mechanized advances that made e.g. World War II look so different than WWI, were almost always made by the side with air superiority, and the few exceptions (e.g. the German 1944 Ardennes offensive) were mediocre things at best. Air superiority seems to be part of the recipe, possibly a critical part, for breaking the trench-war stalemate.
Why, after almost three years of war, nobody has managed to achieve air superiority in the Ukraine war, is a mystery. How Ukraine even has an air force, is kind of a mystery. One theory is that the Russian air force is too incompetent to deal with Ukraine's very capable integrated air defense system, while Ukraine's air force is too small to challenge Russia on its own, so that each side can fly only over territory they already control. Another theory is that modern integrated air defense systems of networked radar and surface-to-air missiles backstopped by a few fighter jets, have reached the point where even a large and capable foe cannot overcome them and nobody can have air superiority ever again.
Probably not that last one. But it's *something*. And without air superiority, ground forces alone don't seem to be able to break through an entrenched defense with modern artillery, minefields, and anti-tank missiles and backstopped by mechanized reserves. They can make slow, grinding progress WWI-style, or advance in places the enemy hasn't properly prepared to defend (e.g. Kursk)..
> Another theory is that modern integrated air defense systems of networked radar and surface-to-air missiles backstopped by a few fighter jets, have reached the point where even a large and capable foe cannot overcome them and nobody can have air superiority ever again.
Wouldn't Israel's seeming ability to strike within Iran with impunity suggest otherwise?
Iran has just recently received shipments from Russia of anti-air and anti-missile systems. So I guess we'll soon find out how they stack up to a modern air force.
Israel has struck Iran once, with three air-launched ballistic missiles fired from well outside Iranian airspace. This is not even close to the same thing as securing air superiority over Iran. It does not even establish the ability of Israeli aircraft to enter Iranian airspace without being immediately shot down.
I suspect that if Israel really needed to, they could conduct occasional strikes within Iranian airspace without loss. I suspect that if Israel bordered Iran, they could achieve air superiority over Iran in the event of open war. But these things have not been demonstrated.
And if they had, they'd have been demonstrated against *Iran*. Ukraine's prewar integrated air defense system is at least an order of magnitude more capable than Iran's, probably closer to two orders of magnitude considering the greater area Iran needs to defend.
Right. Israel has F-35s, which are playing in a whole different league to anything currently fielded in Ukraine. I wouldn't be too surprised if modern US stealth technology has turned the tables once again from defender to attacker, but both Russia and Ukraine are still fighting with last-gen technology.
(Russia theoretically has a handful of Su-57s but they don't seem to be using them in Ukraine)
Yes and no. There were times in fronts of WW1 that were dynamic; but over the course of the war the majority was static. The war in Ukraine is also static, but for slightly different reasons.
(all imo, of course)
WW1 was static because technological and sociological changes made the defense even more strong than it usually is vs. the attack post mass adoption of gunpowder.
Mass mobilization organization, railroads, razor wire, the telegraph, and in a resounding tie for first place accurate enough long range enough super high volumes of artillery (with air burst shells) and the machine gun made any attack a fucking slog; and when you pushed the attack and achieved breakthrough exploitation was also a slog.
Mechanization changed this; the attack still fucking sucks but when you break through you can exploit with ICE engines instead of fucking horses.
Ukraine is a slog because neither side can archive the force concentration they need to roll up a whole front without taking on an unacceptable amount of risk. Russia can't achieve air dominance because ??? so they can't fully suppress Ukrainien tube and rocket artillery which makes attack too risky to do it willy nilly, Ukraine has to push through unimaginably huge minefields while being shelled and has about 1/25th of an airforce left, so they are shit out of luck.
Both sides have so much Soviet Legacy Air Defence Bullshit that anything bigger than a pigeon and higher than a pine tree is fucked.
Also, Ukraine's is forbidden from using a decent amount of their high ticket aid items to shoot into Russia. This probably doesn't matter too too much, but it probably contributes a bit.
That said, the war in Ukraine is not stable like WW1 (which turned into a potlach style blood spilling/money burning contest for quite a while).
If someone fucks up bad enough for long enough, the war in Ukraine could end very quickly. Eg, if someone leaves the keys in the door again like Russia early war or someone fails to do force regeneration aggressively enough, it can swing fast.
I think the cause fundamentally is artillery. In short, artillery is a slow, grindy, mostly static weapon, so if it's the strongest thing on the battlefield... then the war is also going to be slow, grindy, & mostly static. Artillery stops things from happening far more effectively than it *causes* things to happen, so if both sides have strong artillery parks (say because they're both ex-Soviet militaries, & the Soviet military was all about the artillery, far more than even tanks)... then very little can happen.
It's the same way Air Defence / Anti-Air weapons *deny* the air to the enemy without allowing you to *claim* it for yourself, so it stops enemy air pushes without allowing you to launch any pushes yourself; if both sides have a strong fleet of AA missiles & a weak airforce (say because they're both ex-Soviet militaries, & the Soviet military put a lot of emphasis on AA to counter the American air advantage, and very little on its own Air Force because it knew the air battle was hopeless, the same way the Germans put more emphasis on U-Boats to *deny* the British navy than on having a navy of their own)... then neither side can make a push from the air.
It's even worse than that of course, since AA weapons have a limited range, so they can deny the enemy the skies over your own side of the frontline, but generally not the skies on *their* side (at least if their planes stay back far enough). That means that if you *do* make a push on the ground & pierce deep into their territory, your forces start getting bombed from the enemy air, and there's nothing they can do about it: your air force can't protect them & push with them deep into enemy territory because they're weak & the enemy AA is strong, and you can't bring up your own AA to shoot down the enemy planes because AA is a glass cannon like regular artillery, it's not suited to making pushes & diving deep into enemy territory. It's too heavy, fragile, expensive, all that stuff.
Which in turn makes the artillery problem even worse! Air power & artillery power work *great* together, planes can both spot targets for your own artillery & bomb the enemy artillery, securing the artillery advantage over the enemy. That's really good, since planes have extremely limited ammo & need to be choosy about what they bomb, while artillery can just carpet the battlefield & blow up everything; they work *great* together, covering each other's weaknesses (limited ammo / inability to spot targets by itself) & boosting each other's strengths (hitting the most important targets / hitting *everything* it can find).
BUT, if you only have airpower over your own side of the battlefield, and the enemy gets to have airpower on *their* side, then suddenly we get the worst of both worlds! At least from a "pushing" perspective -- I can't push because I can't bomb the enemy artillery, but I can stop enemy pushes by bombarding them with *my* artillery. And in turn, the enemy can't bomb my artillery to interrupt that, but they sure as hell can bombard *my* pushes because I can't stop them, my planes can't reach their artillery. We can *stop* things from happening, but not make them happen.
This trickles down to the ground war, not just the air war or the artillery battles. I can have big clumps of tanks & infantry in stuff in *my* territory, because the enemy artillery can't reach them & blow them all up, but I can't send them forth into battle on the frontlines because then they march into range of the enemy artillery & get blown up. I can only send forth small units, which can try to be stealthy & avoid detection by enemy artillery spotters/the scouts who spot targets for artillery... or failing that, just be small enough that it's not too big a deal if they get spotted, blown up, & all die.
But then they can't actually do much of anything! They're too small & weak. They can't outfight the large enemy formations hiding in the back of the enemy territory, and in fact they often can't even *get* into the enemy territory because they can't even cross things like minefields & barbed wire that are blocking their path (because if it takes say 50 people to clear a minefield & then guard the path through it, then I can't do it if I can only sneak 40 people across. And I *can* do it, but it's not much use, if I instead can only sneak 51 people across & then only have 1 person who can actually cross the path through the minefield. I really need to be able to bring like 1000 people here, so I only need to spend 5% of my forces on just dealing with the minefield, not like 99% of them. But I can't! The enemy artillery forbids it.)
So what results is a "drip feed war": we have absolutely huge forces that can only be "drip fed" onto the front lines, because if they all marched in at once they would die horribly without accomplishing anything, blown to bits in an instant by artillery. So instead like only 0.1% of them march in per day, get blown to bits by artillery, and get replaced, in a bloody slog that can last a thousand days. In fact, it can go on much longer than that, because each side can "heal" up like a video game boss, recruiting new soldiers & healing up the old ones so they can get back into the fight, such that instead of having to burn through 100% of the enemy's health... they have to burn through like 500%, because my damage can't outpace the enemy's healing.
What do the other 99.9% of my forces do each day, while they're chilling in the back? Mostly, digging fortifications. Same goes for the enemy, of course. So the longer this goes on, the worse the stalemate becomes; if we ever manage to breach through the frontline, we immediately run smack dab into all the fortifications our enemy's troops have been idly digging in the backline, and my push comes to a screeching halt. Neither of us can advance.
It's like the exact opposite of the assumptions behind German "Blitzkrieg" (technically not the preferred term), Soviet "Deep Battle", American tank warfare, et cetera: instead of the enemy frontline being the hard bit & the enemy backline being soft & squishy, it's the enemy *backline* that's hardened & the frontline that's soft & squishy. Puncturing through the frontlines & advancing deep into enemy territory just makes things *harder* on me: I lose artillery support while the enemy gains it. I lose air support while the enemy gains it. I take losses while the enemy gets to bring up their backline troops. I'm being constantly watched by drones & planes & stuff so I'm losing the element of surprise, while the enemy gains it because they now surround me & can strike from any direction. I'm leaving my fortifications to charge straight into the enemy's own.
And there isn't even a good payoff if I somehow succeed! If I stab deep into the heart of the enemy territory, I won't stab deep into the heart of the enemy war machine. The real heart of the Russian war machine is its factories deep in Russian territory, but if I'm Ukraine, NATO has explicitly forbidden me from going deep into Russian territory. And if I'm Russia, the real heart of the Ukrainian war machine is the factories of NATO & the US, I have no hope of stopping them by charging deep into Ukrainian territory. All I'm doing is stabbing deep into the heart of the enemy's designated "crumple zone", the place that can take & absorb my attack without causing any real damage to anything important. I can't win a strategic victory, & I can't even win a tactical victory by encircling a ton of enemy troops on the frontline, because again most of the enemy troops are actually hiding in the backline -- not the frontline where everyone is already dead anyways. All I can do by pulling off a genius encirclement, is making 0.2% instead of 0.1% of the enemy forces die today.
So yes, it's like WW1, for the same reasons I'd say:
1. Strong artillery
2. Weak air power
3. Strong fortifications
4. Weak ground forces
5. Strong "healing"
6. Weak ability to stop the "healing"
7. Strong incentives for a "drip feed" war
8. Weak incentives to go "all-in" on a push
If I had to point to a single thing though, it's the artillery. If only a small % of our forces can fight at once, then the war is going to be slow no matter what; if a large % of our forces can fight at once, the war is going to be fast no matter what. Before WW1, it was normal for entire armies to line up on a single battlefield & decide a war in an afternoon; afterwards, that basically never happens ever again, anyone who tries just gets ripped apart by artillery*. Nowadays, everything is a drip feed war.
(*: More historically minded readers of course may instead think the tipping point was somewhere else, like the American Civil War, if you think the limit on "just march your entire army into one battlefield" was reached by the American armies being so densely packed they reached the limits of sanitation technology, rather than being blown apart by artillery technology.)
But if I got to point to multiple things, I'd say it boils down to this whole thing sounding *a lot* like a pendulum. Or a spring. The farther away it gets pushed from equilibrium, the greater the restoring force; e.g. the worse the Ukrainian situation gets, the more willing the US & NATO are to spend on aid to Ukraine. The worse the Russian situation gets, the more Putin can justify pushing through a new round of conscription & war mobilization. Or on the battlefield, basically everything I just described is "It's easy to push back, but hard to push forwards." -- things oscillate back & forth, but they're oscillating around a point in the middle. Things will only change when the spring breaks, the attrition finally grinding it down till it snaps. When is that? And whose spring will break first? That I do not know.
Isn't most artillery self-propelled these days? My impression from a limited amount of reading about the Ukraine war was that artillery had to be pretty mobile, as it gets destroyed by counter-battery fire if it doesn't move quickly after firing.
Ah, when I said "Slow, grindy, mostly static weapon", the first two are referring to the surprising slowness with which artillery actually kills people, and it's only the last that's referring to its actual physical speed. Artillery is great at killing people in the open, but terrible at killing people hunkering down in cover; this makes it great at suppressing people, but terrible at finishing them off. The vast majority of the kills an artillery bombardment gets, comes in the opening salvo, as people are caught by surprise in the open & get cut down; afterwards, the survivors retreat to cover, and the artillery shells are mostly just blowing up empty space. And while they can eventually grind through cover & blow up the remaining enemies, it's a slow & grindy process because cover is surprisingly good at withstanding artillery attack, you need a direct hit to do any real damage & artillery is just too inaccurate to get that done except through sheer number of rounds hoping for dumb luck.
(e.g. the listed Circular Error Probable/CEP for an unguided 155mm standard artillery shell is 267m, i.e. it only has a 50% chance of getting within 267m of the target! That's fine if you only need to "splash" the target with shrapnel, but no good if you need to get a direct hit to within 1m to say collapse a bunker; if I need to get within 100m to do the former, then each shell has a ~14% chance to get the job done. But if I need to get within 1m for the latter, then each shell has only a 0.0014% chance of getting the job done! I need 10 000 times as many shells to get the job done.)
Things get even worse of course when the enemy reacts to this with the "drip feed war" strategy. If I do decide to fire 10 000 times as many shells to blow up that bunker & kill everyone inside... well, everyone inside is dead, regardless of whether that's 1, 10, or 100 people. So if instead of having 100 people in the bunker, they have 1 person in it while the other 99 stay farther back, outside of artillery range... then I've fired 10 000 times as many shells to kill just 1 person, who they can easily replace by sending forth one of the 99.
And as long as I'm not capable of challenging this by sending forth an attack of 100 people of my own to overwhelm the 1 guy in the bunker, say because the enemy artillery is also strong & would cut down my 100 men as they try to cross "No Man's Land" & get to the enemy bunker... then I can't do anything about this. I just have to accept firing one *million* times as many shells now (10 000 times a hundred) to get the job done. Very quickly artillery goes from "God of War" to "poking the enemy with a wet pool noodle". It'll eventually get the job done... eventually.
It's only the last thing about artillery, "mostly static", that cares about having wheels/being self-propelled. And even that doesn't really change the fact that it's a weapon that favors static warfare over maneuver warfare: self-propelled artillery is still lightly armored compared to a tank, uses wheels instead of tracks (and so is bad at going off-road & charging across open fields), burns through ammo *really* fast compared to tanks (and so needs to stay much more closely tethered to supply hubs like railyards, instead of being able to "detach" and drive deep into the enemy lines), needs to set up to fire (which is really bad if you're moving into range of enemy artillery, who are already set up & thus can shoot first while you're setting up & take you out)... there are some interesting things you can do with frontline artillery, such as the "Assault Gun" / tank with big HE cannon for shooting buildings, instead of normal AP & HE cannon for mixed use against everything...
... but generally, artillery isn't suited to rushing at the enemy. It more favors sitting back & sniping at the enemy. Hence "mostly static".
Thanks for the comprehensive response! Two questions:
1. Why, then, were the wars in between WW1 and Ukraine so unlike this (in particular WW2?) Is it to do with the balance between air power and anti-air power?
2. Does the new Ukranian incursion into Russia change anything? Or is it likely to quickly result in the same stalemate along a new front, now drawn several miles into Russian territory? Even if the latter then perhaps it's still a big win for Ukraine since Putin can't politically tolerate loss of Russian territory and will be forced to throw troops at it.
1. Yeah, that seems to be the inescapable conclusion of the analysis. Just look at the hypothetical "Cold War gone hot" scenario constantly hanging over people's heads after WW2: at first it was about bombers nuking you, and air power was well ahead of anti-air power (hence why you see, amongst other things, projects like nuclear anti-air missiles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie]), since even a single bomber getting through was *disaster*. Then it was about ICBMs, and this "air power" was even more ahead of "anti-air power" since it simply couldn't be stopped at all!
And accordingly, everyone expected nuclear war to be short, sharp, & decisive. It'd be a bloodbath, but a "fast bloodbath" rather than a "slow bloodbath". Attritional warfare doesn't *have* to be slow: it can look like nuclear war, where it's all about your ability to take & dish out nukes, & there's little room to maneuver, but by that same token it's why it's over in a (literal) flash: everything is quite literally on the line, in the sense of being on the frontlines, because the nukes can reach anywhere & kill anything. There's no "drip feed war" where only 0.1% of my forces are in range of the frontline to die to artillery everyday, air power (or rocket power) can project its power anywhere in my territory to 100% of my forces, and with nukes is more than strong enough to then kill them. The increased range on air power makes a big difference, and so too does the raw *power* of air power when it's got nukes.
(Also of course is the fact that nuclear bombers & ICBMs have enough range to not only strike 100% of my forces, but 100% of my everything: my factories, my ports & railyards, my cities, my halls of government, et cetera; it absolutely *can* strike the beating heart of my war machine, not just the beating heart of a "crumple zone" I can afford to lose. In fact, it's even better at nuking cities than nuking missile silos or tanks or the like, since cities are soft & extremely concentrated targets, while military units are capable of being hardened & spread out.)
So a WW1-like scenario with nukes simply does not make sense; if the strongest thing on the battlefield is not artillery but nuclear air power, then the war isn't going to be slow, grindy, & mostly static. It's going to be fast, skip over the grind, & run deep into the heart of the enemy war machine the moment I say "go". Everything will be on the line because everything will literally be on the frontlines. You can't do that with artillery.
2. Ah, I don't actually pay much attention to the news, it's generally some variation of "The trench stalemate continues to be a trench stalemate". Even if that's not what it claims to be, hyping up this or that successful attack; the trouble is, every single attack can be successful at the tactical level, and the war *still* favor defence at the higher strategic level.
That's actually what happened during WW1: attacks usually *succeeded*, trenches usually got taken... but the war was still a slog, because (a) the attacks barely accomplished anything, and (b) any gains were usually erased by the enemy counterattack. There was a lot of movement, but if you zoomed out it was mostly movement back & forth that wasn't going anywhere. The attacker, instead of building up momentum to keep rolling forwards, built up "anti-momentum" that made them easier to push back. In a way, the strength of attacks actually favored the *defender*, because they were in the strongest position to attack their own territory & take it back, while it's the *attacker* that has to defend in order to hold on to their gains. Strong attacks means strong counterattacks, so it doesn't inherently favor the attacker.
And of course, strong defence doesn't suffer this weakness, it inherently favors the defender. Either way, nothing happens: either attack counters attack, or defence counter attack. Attack only wins when it can leverage its own advantages, like the element of surprise or the advantage of choice; things are actually pretty grim in a fair fight for the attacker, they need an unfair fight to have any chance at all. That's usually the case though since the attacker has the freedom to decide where & when to attack, or simply *not* to attack, so they can choose to attack where they have an unfair advantage & not attack where they'd just get slaughtered. But when they don't, when they *have* to attack because it's politically necessary to be seen as doing something... that's when you get the attacks that are just slaughters. (But hey, at least you were seen as doing something.)
So based off what little I've heard, if the Ukrainian side has enough discipline to *not* attack & instead follow a WW1-esque "bite & hold" strategy of standing still to lure in troops to slaughter... then yeah, it sounds like a victory in the making. If they have enough discipline to *keep* doing that, then it sounds like that could win the war. If defence is stronger than attack right now... perhaps the war-winning strategy is simply to defend. But it takes an awful lot of discipline sometimes, to *not* do anything. From the public which has to quell its bloodlust & accept a long war, from politicians who have to accept they won't have any flashy victories to show off at election time, from generals who want to make their name but have to accept "And then he sat there & did nothing" as what History will remember them for instead... and most of all, from backers who *want* to see you doing something, & might pull their support if they lose interest in your war.
Bite & hold was very very difficult to pull off in WW1. The urge to relentlessly attack, even when it didn't make sense, was a problem for basically all of society. Top to bottom, civilian & military, not just the generals. Same way the urge to fight the war in the first place wasn't just limited to the generals, it sprung forth from every level of society (e.g. see https://novum.substack.com/p/there-once-was-an-empire, which has choice quotes like
"A new feeling was born. A stunning sense of belonging tore our hearts from our hands. Now we feel gathered into a ball, fused together by an inexpressible humility, in which the individual suddenly counts for nothing besides defending the tribe... It was difficult to resist it. In spite of all my hatred and aversion for war, I should not like to have missed the memory of those first days. As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peacetime, that they belonged together..."). It took discipline to do the smart thing.
So I don't really expect much to change. Be interesting to be proven wrong though. The technology has changed, but the humans haven't. But maybe we've finally learned from history to just... *stand still* when you're in WW1, and let the enemy come to you. Let's see if Ukraine can keep this up.
General Sir John Hackett imagined a Third World War between the Warsaw Pact & NATO in the late 70, revisited in the early 80s, which I reviewed here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/07/26/the-third-world-war-the-untold-story/
It featured significant territorial grabs, but slowed down enough that the Soviets lob a nuke at a mid-tier city, resulting in one of their one getting nuked in return, and then the war stops.
(Note: this is building off a similar answer I wrote to a similar question a while ago, in case this sounds familiar & plagiaristic to anyone who's read https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/1e1s8h7/comment/ld2whr1/. I figured there might be some overlap between the people who read r/WarCollege & who read ACX. If you haven't read that comment though, maybe give it a gander, I think it's also worth reading if you liked this one.)
Consider warfare at its most basic form: two lines of men with sharp pieces of metal. If the two lines charge at each other, the outcome is basically 50/50 on which side wins. The goal of tactics then is to create an asymmetry where your line of men has an advantage over the enemy. In pre-gunpowder combat, this might be something like breaking the enemy center or enveloping a flank to create local numerical superiority and break the cohesion/morale of the enemy line of troops. This dynamic is maneuver warfare; moving forces to create an advantage for the attacker.
The ability of militaries to successfully execute maneuver warfare waxes and wanes with available technology. Napoleon was a master of maneuver, and always seemed to know the best time and place to allocate his men to win a decisive advantage. Battles of this period often focused on mobile formations of infantry and cavalry. By the time of the American Civil War 50 years later, deadlier weaponry made attacking much more difficult, and battles made much more use of defensive points like stone walls or trenches.
In 1914, there were three key technologies that shaped the battlefield: phones, trains, and machine guns. All of these favored the defender. Machine guns could kill men very rapidly, but took time to set up and had to be manned by at least a two person team. You couldn't carry a WWI machinegun with you like a rifle and fire as you moved, they were too bulky and heavy. Communications were primarily phone lines, which took time to lay out and connect. Transportation was primarily trains, which of course needed railroads built to go anywhere. Attackers lost the ability to effectively communicate with their troops when they went on the offensive, as well as giving the defender a much easier job of moving in reinforcements. After every attack, new phone lines and railroads had to be built up to the new front.
Note that this was true for the Western Front, which was in heavily industrialized eastern France. The Eastern Front was much more mobile and reminiscent of maneuver warfare. The Russians at the time were in the process of updating and expanding their rail network. In fact, this was one of the reasons the German military elite like Moltke wanted to fight WWI in 1914; they feared Russia would be undefeatable if they could build a modern rail network that effectively transported their millions of men. Similarly, the Austro-Hungarian territories were a hodgepodge of different rail networks. The 'Empire' was a motely collection of different states like Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Croatia, etc. Each spoke a different language and had different railway standards and track gauges and train speeds and so on. This made transporting anything by train a huge headache. The Eastern Front lacked the infrastructure that defined the Western Front.
By WWII, there were several major technological changes. Radio communications allowed attacking forces to maintain constant links to their command structure. Mechanization allowed forces to bypass defensive strongpoints and opportunistically attack weak spots in a way men on foot never could. The Wehrmacht was able to destroy the French army in 6 weeks this way, even though only 10% of the German forces were mechanized. The Kesselschlacht (cauldron battle; Blitzkrieg was a word coined by English speakers and not generally used by the Germans) doctrine used highly mobile mechanized forces to go around enemy formations and block their lines of reinforcement and retreat. The main force of the army then moved up and trapped the enemy. Advances in projecting air and sea power also allowed targeting enemy states' industrial capacity, but I think the last book review went into enough detail that I won't repeat it here.
Ukraine is the first war fought between peer powers in the age of omnipresent ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Things like spy satellites, AWACS (think a big military cargo plane stuffed with surveillance and communication equipment), and drones mean that combatants can see what is happening on the battlefield in nearly real time. Combine this with long-range precision munitions and attacking is a nightmare. Any time one side tries to build up the forces necessary to create an asymmetry, the other side knows about it. First, this means there is much less element of surprise in any attack. Second, any force that can be seen by ISR can be destroyed by weapons 10s or even 100s of kilometers away.
Drone technology means these threats are ubiquitous. Any infantryman can operate a drone capable of destroying enemy armored vehicles. Any infantryman can see when the enemy is approaching to attack with his surveillance drone and call in artillery and missile strikes immediately. The trenches in Ukraine are not meant so much as defensive points in an actual battle, like they were in WWI. Trenches primarily serve to protect the infantry from the artillery, missile and drone munitions.
Essentially, there are times when technology favors defense or offense. When offense is favored, it is possible to destroy entire enemy armies with effective maneuver tactics. This happened for Napoleon, and the Nazis in France and their opening invasion of the USSR. When defense is favored, it is very hard or impossible to use maneuver to give your side an advantage. This results in a grinding war of attrition, where the enemy can only be defeated by slowly bleeding them of manpower.
I highly recommend reading the Big Serge substack on the history of maneuver warfare. The series is paid, but you can read the first half of the articles to see if you find it interesting.
> Consider warfare at its most basic form: two lines of men with sharp pieces of metal.
That's very far from the most basic form of warfare. The most basic form of warfare is a raiding party that hopes never to encounter any enemy combatants.
> You couldn't carry a WWI machinegun with you like a rifle and fire as you moved, they were too bulky and heavy.
There were light machineguns like the Chauchat & BAR which enabled "walking fire", but heavier belt-fed water-cooled machineguns could be fired for much longer.
Yes, there were early squad machineguns in WWI, but they were vastly outnumbered by rifles and heavy machineguns. The BAR didn't see service until 1918 with the Americans, and the French guns were notorious for jamming and getting gunked up with mud.
Addendum to the other replies here:
Perhaps I misremember acoup.blog, but I think I have read somewhere that the real change for WW1 was widespread railways, not machine guns.
Before the railway, an army was like a shark: it had to either keep moving (devastating the countryside in the process) or die of starvation in short order. With the railway, feeding two armies facing each other for a few years was suddenly a solved problem.
Machine gun nests near the front trenches were not invincible: lob enough shells at them and their crews will take cover or die. But after you had taken the front trench, you would just face the next line of trenches. And while the attackers had to move on foot and bring their supplies through enemy artillery fire, the defenders had more artillery in range and convenient railroad tracks to carry more troops to the next line of defense in short order. So one side would take a trench, perhaps even with 'favorable' casualty ratios, but they would not be able to break through to the green fields on the other side and march for the capital.
By contrast, with (WW2 era) tanks and APCs, the defender has no large mobility advantage -- while the railways would win out in terms of operational range (and perhaps also long-distance speed), in that hour (or so) you might need to deploy defenses, an unopposed tank could go quite some distance.
> Perhaps I misremember acoup.blog, but I think I have read somewhere that the real change for WW1 was widespread railways, not machine guns.
> Before the railway, an army was like a shark: it had to either keep moving (devastating the countryside in the process) or die of starvation in short order. With the railway, feeding two armies facing each other for a few years was suddenly a solved problem.
Both of those messages can be found on ACOUP, but I don't think you're combining them correctly.
A trench garrison is like any other garrison, and can be maintained indefinitely without needing to move. Keeping a standing military force in place in some strategic location 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 is not novel to the 20th century; it might not even be novel to the 20th century BC. Two armies could always stand facing each other for years if they were doing it across a border.
The rest of your comment basically mirrors the ACOUP analysis; once you've taken the enemy's frontline trench, you're no longer on friendly territory and you get outlogisticsed by their middle trench.
> Keeping a standing military force in place in some strategic location 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 is not novel to the 20th century; it might not even be novel to the 20th century BC. Two armies could always stand facing each other for years if they were doing it across a border.
I would argue that there is a difference between a garrison and an army. Sure, you could keep some standing army around for as long as the second system of warfare was a thing, and given the advantage of defensive structures this might actually be an excellent idea, but in field battles the side which brings twice as many men has an important tactical advantage for a variety of reasons.
Hence, the incentives are fielding big armies. While for small polities like Greek city-states, this does not pose a problem of supply logistics -- certainly Athens would be able to feed her hoplites in front of the city, given that they were men of Athens which could be fed in peace time -- for large polities, you might rely on troops amassed a thousand kilometers from their homesteads.
I will grant you though that it is definitely easier to feed a large army in cooperation with the local administrators than if you have to rely on robbing the civilian population.
But the trenches weren't manned by mobile armies. They were manned by static forces. The whole problem with attacking into a trench was that once you did so, the trench behind it continued to receive supplies, and you stopped receiving yours.
> I will grant you though that it is definitely easier to feed a large army in cooperation with the local administrators than if you have to rely on robbing the civilian population.
A garrison doesn't need to do either of those, and the trenches didn't. They got food that was coordinated centrally. (Hypothetically, this also enables an automatic scorched earth policy where, if you get overrun, you can just stop sending food to what is now enemy territory, but that's mostly moot.)
As well as what others have mentioned, both Ukraine and Russia started the war with enormous ex-soviet air defence resources (anti aircraft missiles etc). This has meant that, as Mark Roulo briefly mentions below[1], both sides are keeping their planes on their own side of the line of control, using them mainly defensively (the exception is to shoot missiles over the line).
This is not my insight, it's from Perun's most recent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlljA8zAupY
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-342/comment/65222140
There's actually a recent book review of How the War Was Won on the Psmith substack which covers this point: the key here is that in both WW1 and the Ukraine war, neither side can destroy the other's production capacity (Russia because it's deep in Russia, Ukraine because it's in the west), whereas strategic bombing and unrestricted submarine warfare in WW2 very much allowed for the destruction of the production lines of military equipment, rather than just the equipment itself on the battlefield.
The armies are much smaller with a longer front and a lot more equipment. In terms of dollars per front line soldier or soldiers per mile they are very different. They are similar in that the fighting involves shelling trenches. One odd thing is no one involved not US, Ukraine, N Korea, Gernany or Russia is able to produce shells on the scale that the Tsarist Russian empire could in 1915 when it was a poor country https://x.com/PJ11819211/status/1817317766938128730?t=FAII5FuxtB4R-Lx6NVjIAg&s=19
Unfortunately, that link goes to twitter, which does not show the full text of the claim.
I can think of a few confounders:
* Artillery rounds were likely smaller in 1915 than they are today. If the claim is about rounds produced, then it would be equivalent to saying that a bike factory in 1900 produced vehicles at a higher rate than a car factory in 1970. I think propellant+payload explosive mass (as TNT equivalent) is probably a fair measure of the economic effort involved.
* In 1915, artillery was the main thing to spend your economic surplus on to win a land war. In 2024, artillery is still important, but just one of many materiel-heavy areas of warfare -- planes, tanks, missiles and so on also eat up a lot of industrial capacity.
Of course, it could also be that today risk is judged very different. and there is much more red tape involved in producing ammunitions.
The American Civil War was at the battlefield level something of a glimpse-of-coming-attractions for WW I. Unfortunately no late-19th/early-20th century European senior military planners had gamed out "what if during the U.S. war the two sides had had, in addition to the modern rifles that made frontal assaults so bloody, this newer thing called machine guns...?"
If they had, then one or more of those nations might have put more urgency and effort into new techs to counter the new defensive power that machine guns and rifling represented. Such as the initially-dismissed idea which would evolve into what the Brits initially called "barrels" and everybody now calls "tanks".
Whether the Ukraine War is inherently in a similar situation seems less clear. Other big factors are involved in creating the current more-or-less stalemate.
There were Gatling guns in the US civil war.
A handful of them the first of which arrived with less than a year left in the war, and had zero impact on strategy or tactics. Partly because they were a fraction as useful as a WW I machine gun. (Think 1950s televisions compared to those of say the 2000s.)
1950s televisions were a huge deal, I would rank Gatling guns below them (Maxim guns got way more mindshare).
Heh. Okay fine, let's say 1940s televisions.
They had tanks in WW1. They didn't help.
The real problem was railroads and the way it made exploitation impossible and reinforcement easy. See here for a better explanation: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-342?r=izqzp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=65248851
I thought tanks were introduced relatively late in WW1. The Germans only produced 20 of them in the entire war.
According to Wikipedia, tanks were first used by the British at the Battle of the Somme in Sept 1916. While the British invented them, the French produced them in vastly larger numbers. The Germans didn't start researching them until they saw them on the battlefield, and thus only produced small numbers late in the war.
So it's true that they were only a factor in the second half of the war, but that second half still went on for several years after the introduction of tanks. That wouldn't have happened if they were a game-changer.
It's basically just one item on a long list of innovations that people tried in a desperate unsuccessful attempt to break the stalemate on the western front. Much like poison gas.
I wouldn't say "they didn't help". By the end of the war, everyone could see tanks were the future. The Germans just did a better job of understanding how than the French, despite being later to jump on the concept.
Correct. And in usefulness they resembled WW II tanks roughly as a Stanley Steamer resembled a 1965 Chevy Mustang.
The change in military technology used in WW1 was arguably greater than any other conflict - certainly WW2. Napoleon would have recognised the tactics used in the first few months while by the end you had infantry and armour moving in combination with artillery, spotted by aircraft. While the science behind the atomic bomb was a great leap forwards, and rocket technology paved the way to moon launches - the changes in tactics they made over WW2 were far smaller than the incorporation of new vehicles and weaponry in WW1.
Not a military history buff, but WW1 is far from the first war where "battle lines barely if ever move". That happens every couple of cycles in military tech when the tech happens to favor defense and burden attack, so you had plenty of it in e.g. Medieval siege warfare. Massive high walls, but nothing powerful enough to penetrate them. What's the attacker's only option? Lay siege and starve the residents. But if the city is massive and well-prepared enough, *it* can starve the attackers, or just kill them from the relative safety of the walls, before they can starve the city. I'm sure there are other examples, that's the first that came to my mind.
The specific way through which WW1-era tech made defense advantageous seems to be that it had machine guns, mines, and grenades, but no tanks and no aerial war machines that can demolish ground fortification successfully. Without tanks and air support, what could you possibly do against a nest of crisscrossing machine gun fire-fields? Use artillery, and WW1 generals did, a lot of it. The problem with artillery though is that it can't move, so if the enemy sets up their machine gun nest just beyond the range of your artillery, leaving a No-Man's-Land in between that enemy artillery in turn can bomb, you're pretty much stuck. Your artillery can't reach the machine gun nest (which can fuck up any amount of ground attackers, again, no armor yet, machine guns are king), and you can't cross the No-Man's-Land without getting pummeled by the enemy artillery. No one can do anything.
(Though I'm pretty sure flamethrowers could have solved this by mass-burning the attackers' side of the land when the wind direction was favorable, then using the chaos and the cover of fire to attack? flamethrowers were probably around in WW1, I'm not sure why nobody tried to break the stalemate using them.)
I'm a lot fuzzier on the Ukraine war. The terrain of East Europe looks very Blitzkrieg-able, Hitler reached Moscow and the Black Sea from Poland in half a year or so, and that was with WW2 tech, ~80 years ago. My guess is that both Ukraine and Russia are so exhausted and so information-symmetric that they (1) Aren't sure an attempted Blitzkrieg on either of their end will reach the enemy capital before being blunted (2) Can't rule out the possibility that not only a Blitzkrieg on their end will be blunted, but the enemy will counter-Blitzkrieg through the opening and potentially reach the other capital, or at least surround a massive army and destroy it.
> but no tanks
They did have tanks in WW1.
But only in, what, the last 15 months or so. And they were so new that people didn't know what to do with them. Mobile artillery? troop carriers? a Cavalry replacement that doesn't get shredded when rained with machine gun fire? Tanks (and more generally, armored vehicles) today are all of that, but in WW1 they were still experimenting. The engines were pathetic, the cockpits were claustrophobic. And so on.
If tanks got used to anything near their full capacity, you would see massive freedom of movement for the armies that wielded them like the first mechanized months of WW2. In WW2, the only things that could stop tanks were claustrophobic narrow-street cities and defense-in-depth lines of other tanks, such as what happened in Stalingrad and Kursk, respectively. None of that happened in WW1, which indicates that they really had no idea what the tank is capable of. (Or there were technical limitations that got solved in the interbellum, both typically go hand-in-hand.)
Not at first.
Flamethrowers were used in WW1, but only had a range of 18m, so were not very effective, as machine guns had a much greater range.
Information, command and control... it is difficult to surprise anyone these days, and they can react quite rapidly even if you do
That said the Ukrainians *have* managed to pull off a couple of blitzkrieg-style rapid advances. But these (well, the ones that succeeded) seem to have targeted weakly defended areas, and not been deep enough to actually encircle and destroy large numbers of Russian soldiers.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy charging the enemy line with a large, very visible and terrifying weapon on my back that will absolutely set me on fire if it gets damaged. I wouldn’t want to be with a 100’ of that guy.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/03/11/job-fair
"flamethrowers were probably around in WW1, I'm not sure why nobody tried to break the stalemate using them"
I was pretty sure I remembered something about this, and looking it up online yes, they had them and used them (we tend to forget just how many 'firsts' in military technology the First World War saw). Mainly they had limited range and duration, which if you think about it makes sense - a flamethrower is a weapon that needs to be used 'up close', which means that you're as vulnerable to counter-attack, and close quarters weapons like that means that the machine gun emplacement can take you out before you get near enough to burninate them:
https://www.britannica.com/technology/flame-thrower
"The portable type, carried on the backs of ground troops, had a range of about 45 yards (41 metres) and enough fuel for about 10 seconds of continuous “firing.” Larger and heavier units installed in tank turrets could reach out more than 100 yards (90 metres) and carried enough fuel for about 60 seconds of fire. To achieve maximum results, several short bursts were usually fired rather than one long blast.
...The German army adopted these weapons and used them with surprise effect against Allied troops in 1915. The British and French soon countered with flame throwers of their own, but all the World War I types had limited range and duration of fire. Their chief effect seems to have been to terrorize the troops that they were used against."
Like poison gas - the first time one side uses this weapon, it's shocking and effective because the other side doesn't know how to counter it. But then the other side gets its own version of the New Weapon and you're back to level terms again.
> and enough fuel for about 10 seconds of continuous “firing.”
I like the implication that "firing" is a less appropriate word for the action of a flamethrower than it is for the action of a rifle.
Not every new weapon favors a static battlefield, though, even if both sides having the weapon creates some kind of parity.
1) Armored assaults don’t seem as effective as they were in say WWII.
2) The battlefield is constrained, with borders to the North and sea to the South. Flanking maneuvers aren’t possible so it’s possible to entrench and defend the whole front in depth.
3) Extending from #2, political factors mean neither side can expand the war at sea or in the air very much — Ukraine won’t massively attack Russian infrastructure beyond pinpoint strikes, and Russia won’t attack the supply lines from NATO to Ukraine.
You could think of the Korean War as an analogy — the USA and ROK could fight really hard, but the presence of the PRC made the war essentially unwinnable.
>1) Armored assaults don’t seem as effective as they were in say WWII.
That is more a failure of execution, i.e. training and doctrine. Modern warfare means mobility, firepower, and protection. AFVs, especially the main battle tank, are the best platforms to combine all these requirements. There is a reason why Ukraine has been demanding tanks from her allies until they finally delivered.
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That's not at all how the "weird" thing got up into campaign speeches, nor the couching-fucking jokes. If anything I've been fairly gobsmacked to see actual Dem candidates adopting such things so rapidly and casually, precisely because in recent years they had collectively become so focus-grouped/scripted. It's as if all the consultants/staffers who worked on the Dems' 2016 and 2020 campaigns have been locked into a closet or something....dunno if this is actually a _smarter_ way to campaign for national office but it is less boring at least.
More generally "The answer is surely that I dislike the Democrats more than I dislike the Republicans" does seem like your situation right now. Don't really see why you need to think of that as particularly "unflattering" though -- it's just human. And anyway self-awareness is a virtue, one which waaay too many people over here in "blue" America lack nowadays.
I agree it’s stupid and let’s be honest, it’s going to get a whole lot stupider by November. The American electoral system takes way too long and so they have to make up nonsense to keep people engaged, like cheap heat in pro wrestling.
Yes, there's a distinct creepiness that sets in when you realize that every single phrase coming out of their mouths has been curated and scripted for the sole purpose of manipulating and controlling you in order to retain their grip on power. It's fundamentally different than run-of-the-mill persuasion - they don't want you to look at the issues and then pick a side, they want to carefully psychologically manipulate you to maintain control over you.
An example - Trump, a Republican, has used the slogan "MAGA" since 2015 or earlier. And yet, the phrase "MAGA Republicans" was not widely used during either the 2016, 2018, or 2020 elections. Why then, beginning in 2022 and continuing to this day (see Google Trends), does nearly every single Democrat politician and media figure exclusively refer to Republicans using the particular phrase "MAGA Republicans"? Not "Republicans", not "pro-Trump Republicans", not "far-right Republicans", not even "MAGA extremists" - always "MAGA Republicans", that exact phrase. The reason is that in their pursuit of control and power, they focus tested dozens of negative propaganda phrases to use against Republicans, and landed on that specific phrase as the most effective in terms of fearmongering and manipulating people.
When you first learn about this, and then think about the sheer number of Democrats who immediately all started using that exact phrase at the exact same time, you start to get a sense of the extent of the manipulation.
> nearly every single Democrat politician and media figure exclusively refer to Republicans using the particular phrase "MAGA Republicans"?
No that’s not true. There are still some Republicans that have yet to drink the kool aid. Those folks are simply called Republicans. You know, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Liz Cheney, Paul Ryan… MAGA Republicans call them RINOs though.
I think they refer to the Trump acolytes as MAGA Republicans because of those red hats that so many of them wear that have the word ‘MAGA’ on them. If you watch one of those Trump rallies you might see a couple.
There is nothing sinister about this. It is just an observation of the current state of the GOP.
I'm not quite clear on how MAGA Republicans became pejorative. "Make America Great" is hard to dispute as a good phrase. Adding "Again" of course means it WAS great, now it isn't, and we should attempt to reclaim its greatness. But who would claim we don't have greatness to reclaim?
It was, however, a slogan introduced by Trump's campaign, but apparently was originally used in Reagan's 1980 campaign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again). It seems Bill Clinton also used it in his 1992 campaign. Trump started using the slogan in 2012. Surprisingly, Trump didn't trademark the phrase, and had to buy it from one Bobby Bones in 2015.
It's similar to how "black lives matter" became a pejorative on the right despite being a positive slogan that nobody could reasonably disagree with. Context matters. This isn't exactly rocket science.
I don't consider them the same. I would compare being "woke" better. Black lives matter, as ought to be obvious to anyone who thinks lives of any sort matter.
MAGA now seems to refer to those Republicans who don't think, and will support anything Trump says. Being "woke" seems to mean embracing any liberal thing, the more extreme the better. In that sense, both ideas are now distorted.
Glad you mentioned Trump has been doing this for a while. I’ll say I don’t think his nastiness is any less bad for being spontaneous. I think he’s good at this because he is by nature a cruel man. Really, I have little doubt about that. It’s my primary reason for disliking him. To me his ‘second nature’ insults seems much worse than a scripted and relatively mild “we’ve had enough of your noxious shit, let’s see how you like it” retaliatory burn.
So let’s calibrate this ‘weird’ insult a bit for perspective with just some of Trump’s insulting descriptions of people:
#1 Weirdo - moving on to:
Horse face, Fat pig, Psycho, Slime ball, Crazed and incompetent, Birdbrain, Deranged loser, Mental basket case, Crazy, Whacko, Washed up creepster, Neurotic dope, Stone cold phony, True lowlife, Broken old crow, Third rate conman, Moonface, Ditzy airhead…
The list goes on and on.
Such a strong "Mom, Billy hit me back!" energy from the people complaining about the mean Democrats calling Trump and Vance weird.
True.
I've not been paying much attention to the US presidential election lately, but my impression was that the "weird" stuff was just another example of mainstream media trying to force a cringy meme. Is it really working?
It's working, organically, without the "mainstream media" having to force anything. Sometimes that's a thing that happens.
lol no, this is anything but organic. But I don't deny that leftist media control does work more often than not.
Like pretty much all memes in politics, it appears a mix of organic and workshopped, with original spread being largely organic and the party apparatus quickly sensing it's spreading and magnifying it through various means. It's pretty hard to just force a meme without any organic potential.
Perhaps you just aren't quite tuned to the original organic spread since it happened in different channels from the ones you are following?
>It's pretty hard to just force a meme without any organic potential.
Nah, it's not really. You just need to post it over and over and over again. At least the ones that weren't pushed by NYT et al. usually had some potential for humour.
I, at least, have seen it being quite organically adopted well enough by various Twitter posters and the like - what's your evidence that it's wholly forced?
Sure, sure.
It is making R's very mad, it energizes the D base, and it appears to be helping more than it's hurting in the white women 21-45 population IE the most important population.
I guess I'm too stuck in the anonymous shitposter right-winger bubble to have noticed, though I'm not sure how much help Ds need with the 21-45 white women demographic.
A lot actually; they are the ones who shifted the least in 2020. If trump wins again, it will be on the backs of middle aged white women.
It's bizarre how the Democrats seem to be channeling Sam the Eagle:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RhT51tmUE0E
I have a suspicion that "weird" is being used as a dogwhistle for "creepy", which they'd probably get more pushback on. But I can picture some 70s or 80s movie where there's a group of mixed-sex attractive young people, teens to early 20s, and they're taking about some guy who isn't there, and the women say things like "he's just ... weird, you know?" with the distinct implication that they'd be uncomfortable being alone with him, and would very much appreciate some male assistance in keeping him at a distance.
I suggest reading e.g. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GUtvKnlWgAAVbP9.jpg out loud to yourself. It might help explain why we think Trump is weird.
That's not "weird", that's a moron ranting on the Internet, which is depressingly common these days. And I'd say the same if it were a rant about environmental collapse and "late stage capitalism".
Morons ranting on the Internet may be depressingly common these days, but that's a function of morons having a much greater than average penchant for posting rants on the Internet compared to the general population posting mildly unfunny memes and pictures of their food. Crucially, that does not make any individual weird rant any less weird.
The rant in question here is weird. It's a weird rant. There's no other way to describe it, and that holds true no matter how easy it is to find other weird rants on the Internet.
One month ago, I might have described that rant in a lot of ways, but the word "weird" would never have crossed my mind. Time Cube and TempleOS, those were weird.
Honestly I wouldn't have either--not because it wasn't weird, but because it was no weirder than most of his rants and less weird than some.
We've been exposed to him, constantly, for so long now that it's easy to be desensitized to what a weird guy he is. Other than his vulgarity, and before he became known for his politics, that was the thing people always noticed about him. Now we just take it for granted.
Seconded!
Sounds like another case of "All of my political opponents are a monolith moving in lockstep, all of the people on my side are organic grassroots with no organization."
This was false when it was "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line" and it's false coming from you too. The couchfucking thing came from a rando on twitter and people jumped on it, it's no more organized than "low energy" becoming Trump's go-to insult in 2016 was.
It's emergent behavior from a swarm, so yes there's no central point that originates all behavior, but there are also people who are doing focus groups to find out which memes replicate best in the swarm. Like, there are people who *want* to control it, and who *try* to control it, but so far all they can do is nudge it a bit.
It's very effective, in precisely that schoolyard insult fashion: get the other person riled-up and huffing and puffing about it, and you can then point and jeer at "lookit the dumb idiot making a fool of himself about a word!"
It's mean and it works. It's also a bit thick, coming from the party of "we love us some weird", see various photos of Democratic politicians snuggling up to drag queens, at Pride events, and of course who can forget White House Lawn trans breast flashing? Though I suppose Pride is mainstream now, hence the tensions over "keep kink in Pride, it's not supposed to be for families".
https://www.thequint.com/gender/kamala-harris-invites-legendary-drag-queen-pride-event-vp-residence
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/08/10/trans-rights-and-tampons-for-boys-controversial-tim-walz/
It's also mean on the level of "ugh, you're icky, you're a loser". Which makes the Democrats trying to be appealing to the "we're normal and nice and average" types. You know - the good old cis-heteronormative patriarchy types? Not socialists, not swingers, middle of the road normies? Not differently abled, not neurodivergent, not autistic etc.?
Again, that's a bit... weird... coming from the party which has a large chunk of its support from the LGBT+, physically and mentally disabled, etc. online types.
While both the (far) right and the (far) left are full of outlandish and ludicrous weirdoes, the left-wing weirdoes at least usually acknowledge that they are weird (indeed, revel in it, consciously exaggerate their own weirdness to get scene points). The right-wing weirdoes more often strive to present themselves as normies, creating an uncanny valley effect that repels the sort of people (generally speaking these would tend to be women) who are constantly attuned and trying to look at minor social clues that someone's presentation isn't quite demonstrating what they actually are.
I've worked personally with quite enough left-wing weirdoes to be greatly annoyed by affected weirdness when it comes to it. My point was more related to whether the Republican counterattack is bound to work (though, in general, counterattacks rarely work in politics anyway).
It's more about the liberal values of self-acceptance. Vance thinks he's normal and cool. Weird liberals think they're abnormal and cool. Both groups are abnormal, so Vance looks like he's in denial, while weird liberals don't.
It's definitely a self-serving explanation (because "self-acceptance" is more of a liberal-coded value) but... this is also explicitly politics, so all explanations are going to be self-serving.
In your original post, you literally said "but that answer isn't personally flattering so I'll dismiss it". One of the main reasons I've heard from many liberals about how much they like the new shift of the campaign is because "they go low, we go high" has been wildly ineffective, and this now reflects "we're going to try to win" with less of the veneer of "and we'll do it the 'right way' because we're better people".
>(mfers, the dude he was running against _ate_ a dog but never mind I guess)
"Why do people not equate a child participating in the culture he was growing up in with a grown man tormenting his dog to the point where it shit itself due to stress?"
>also a bit thick, coming from the party of "we love us some weird
I believe that you are conflating two different meanings of weird: 1) eccentric/different/etc and 2) creepy. Furries are the former. People who see furries under every bed, or who think that a teacher who sponsors a gay-straight alliance is a "groomer" (as at least someone on my Twitter feed does), seem to me to be the latter.
No, furries are absolutely the latter.
I think you're just seeing in-group/out-group difference. My team is eccentric, your team is creepy. It works either direction.
>My team is eccentric, your team is creepy.
I thought that Russell conjugations were usually _three_ part harmonies, I/you/they... :-)
Usually I'd agree, but here no. Republicans politicians nowadays are just weird. There's no Democrat equivalent of people like Donald Trump, MTG, Lauren Boebert, etc. Sure, there are some weird far-left people, but none of them are peddling so-obviously-in-your-face wrong conspiracy theories like Republicans do without a shred of evidence.
Like it's bad epistemics to just parrot Hamas talking point like some in the squad do, but it's a whole other level of removal from reality to say crowd sizes are bigger than they are and insist on those lies, say the election was stolen multiple years later after multiple commissions said they aren't, say LGBT people at large have an agenda of grooming children, and say stuff about Hollywood pedo rings (unrelated, potentially anecdotal: it's interesting that now that photos of Trump with Epstein came out that attack line was quickly dropped by Republicans)
>What? Exaggerating the size of a crowd is worse than defending Hamas?
No, I made a very different claim. I said the epistemology of someone that believes crowd sizes are larger than they actually are is worse than the epistemology of someone who believes in Hamas' lies. For the latter, you need some sort of victimizing oppressor-oppressed ideology, but at least there is some internal logic to it. For the second, you have to be basically be a complete narcissist or fool, completely disinterested in the truth.
But sure, not the best example. Instead, I'll say that Trump's repeated praise of Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi is in fact miles worse than defending Hamas.
Not technically wrong, but for the purposes of understanding how democrats are communicating, it's still worth being aware that "Keep Austin Weird" and "Hey man, at this party, don't be weird" are not contradictory, any more than someone in the 90s saying "Yo that trick was sick!" and "I can't come in to work today, I'm sick" are saying contradictory things.
Words can simply have more than one meaning depending on context.
Sure, but the specific examples are value judgments about which activities are weird. Republicans/conservatives would use the same terms in the same way but backwards on those items. I'm not having an issue with two uses of the word "weird" but the underlying value judgments.
What gets to me is that I guess I had some trust in left-wing moral claims (reality-based community), but I see gleeful couch stuff coming from people who know it's false but think it's too much fun to give up.
As for "weird", I would prefer a president who's good at basic people stuff, but yes, it's just bullying to hammer on it.
For me, it's more than getting bugged. The Democrats might be right that the insults are something they need for a successful campaign-- I'm in a species that mostly likes cruelty.
I like it, personally. If you let someone dunk on you for 10 straight years; that's not a moral success, it a sign of either weakness or failure to engage with reality.
And unfortunately, you are in a species that likes cruelty. Someone being cruel and the target accepting it is the very definition of dominance; which everyone but the libertarian socialists and left anarchists consider the highest virtue.
Yeah. The liberal center-left would be my natural home, but this is yet another example of how the Ds have fallen far from anything I want to associate myself with.
The couch stuff is stupid, but eh. What can you do? As you say, Nancy, we're a species that likes pecking orders and bullying. It's rich, coming from "sigh and lament over the lack of civility in politics" side, but there you go - if throwing mud works, then throw mud.
I think the best reaction to the weird labelling would be to ignore it, or lean into it - yeah I'm weird and so what? If it's weird to want two parent families and no more broken homes and to get decent jobs for those households, then I'm weird!
Celebrate the weird, the geeky, the nerdery! I believe Vance is or was a big Magic card game fan and player? Go for the specky four-eyes credentials, JD!
Allow me some armchair psychologizing: I see the "weird" campaign as a shift away from scaremongering, which mostly served to mobilize Democratic voters, but empowered Trump, toward ridiculing, which is intended to create an "emperor's new clothes" moment among Republicans and undecided voters: "you're really going to vote for this rambling buffoon and his deranged lickspittles?"
And it seems to be working - I'm getting quite a bit of cognitive dissonance from you. Take it seriously and ask yourself, is this really a version of the Republican party that I can support? Is it really acceptable to vote for someone who digresses into self-aggrandizing fairytales and incoherent blathering all the time?
Seconding this. It reminds me of Chile. When the Pope convinced Pinochet to hold a plebiscite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_Chilean_presidential_referendum the campaign against him was going to do a scaremongering campaign. They would have a lot of terrible crimes to talk about, and it would be totally fair to decorate a "Threat to Democracy" article with Pinochet's picture. But they wisely decided to go for a much more positive, cheerful, fun campaign ("Joy is coming!"), which caught on much better than the dramatic, negative narrative.
Or look at Reagan's "There you go again" remark. It's not really this sentence which had the tremendous impact. It was his little chuckle just before.
> Or look at Reagan's "There you go again" remark. It's not really this sentence which had the tremendous impact. It was his little chuckle just before.
Yeah. I think one of the most effective things Harris could do in the debate, if/when Trump goes incoherent, would be to look into the camera, roll her eyes and gesture at him, and then shrug to the audience.
Trump works best when he's picking other people apart, but that requires ammunition. And like carateca said, he's "fundamentally ridiculous", and I doubt his narcissism can handle much sustained mockery.
No no no no no, please no eye-rolling! If memory serves, Al Gore's eye-rolling and audible sighs in a debate with Bush backfired spectacularly.
You think the electoral environment of today is at all reflective of Gore v Bush?
I don't have an answer to that (I mean, sure, it's different, but how? to what extent? this is a big question). But I can answer a different question: are humans still the same? a resounding yes! Eye-rollers are annoying, showing contempt toward your opponent maybe gets your superfans all high-fiving each other, but doesn't win any new converts.
Huh. I don't recall that, but I don't recall much of the details.
Maybe a wink would work better? Something that recontextualizes her as above (beyond, over, uber) Trump, and treats him as a spectacle rather than a serious political player.
Yes to finally learning to take Trump neither seriously nor literally.
Do you not think you're experiencing cognitive dissonance? You consciously dismissed the correct answer ("I dislike Democrats more than I dislike Republicans") and are searching for an answer that feels more comfortable.
"Haha, only serious."
I didn't see any apologies from GOP talking heads when Trump called Biden "Crooked Joe" and "Sleepy Joe". Nor have I seen any apologies for when he called Kamala "Lyin'/Laughin'/Crazy Kamabla". And GOP talking heads were out in full force trying to denigrate Walz's service record. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
There does seem to be some question over Walz' service record, but I have no idea if this is a second Swift Boats Kerry situation or a Bush National Guard situation.
If you're going to play up your military veteran record, then you have to be prepared to have it questioned.
It sounds like Walz may have said some things that are factually incorrect/lies about his service. Trying to play into his military service to decry "weapons of war I used on the battlefield" or something, related to gun control. I don't think anyone would have gone after him for his military record - 24 years in the reserve, if he didn't drag in wartime service to it. My understanding is that he didn't serve overseas, so he was never on a real battlefield.
That he left the reserves earlier than expected and shortly before he would have been deployed just worsens the optics. It's not much of an attack to criticize a guy for retiring after 20+ years, but if/when he lies about it for political gain it can become something to fight about.
He retired three months before his unit was assigned to be deployed and six months before they were deployed. Vance is bullshitting that into "they were getting shipped out so he quit".
Walz once said, “We can make sure that those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.” Since Walz was never deployed into a combat zone the "I carried in war" part can be interpreted by civilians as a false claim. But Walz did do a stretch of active duty as an enlisted soldier during a war (Iraq War II). The armed-forces vets I have known always referred to active duty during wartime as time "in war" whether or not they got sent to any active combat zones.
Also fair's fair: Vance's own four years in the Army consisted entirely of being a "combat correspondent". As he detailed in his autobiographical book his only involvement near any combat zones was scribbling notes for Marine Corps press releases.
Sounds like Walz walking the line between factually inaccurate and misleading. I have no problem when someone tries that kind of rhetorical trick and gets a poor reception for it. The same goes for Vance on the other side skirting the line when he talks about Walz's service record.
He retired three months before his unit was specifically assigned to be deployed on a specific date, but two months after his unit probably would be deployed in the next year or two,
Which itself came a month after Waltz filed to run for Congress. The most likely interpretation was that he figured stateside Guard service would be an asset for an aspiring Congressman, but that actually being deployed overseas would throw a monkey wrench in his career.
"two months after his unit probably would be deployed in the next year or two" -- I don't understand this phrase, what are you trying to say there?
It’s all bullshit. Ignore it and focus on crime, secure borders, safe cities, inflation and whether your kids are getting a good education. Stupid personal attacks are just white noise whether they’re from Trump or his enemies. We’re better than that.
Are you though? What even is the R appeal other than schoolyard bullying and tax cuts?
I literally just listed them.
- safe cities
- secure border
- stop government overspending (causing national debt increase and inflation)
- good education for our kids - end the DEI/trans Department of Education funded brainwashing
- and I’ll add - world peace; end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East
What are you voting for? Whoever the media tells you to? Kamala has yet to unveil her policies and has refused to sit for an interview
Yeah, I’m down with safe cities, low crime, secure borders. Those are all good things.
No I’m not basing my vote on whatever the media tells me but on what the people who know Trump best say.
Jim Mattis Retired Marine Corps Four Star General, Trump Defence Secretary - January 7, 2021 -
“Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump.”
John Kelly Retired United States Marine Corps General, Trump Secretary of Homeland Security, White House chief of staff - October 3, 2023 -
“The depths of [Trump’s] dishonesty is just astounding to me ... He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Daniel Coats Director of National Intelligence - September 14, 2021 -
“He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
About half the people who served in Trump’s cabinet say similar things that amount to “the man is a moral cretin”
If you have evidence to show that is not true I’d be happy to hear it.
And then there is:
J D Vance US Senator, GOP VP candidate - 2016
“He’s just a bad man. A morally reprehensible human being.”
He's a narcissist who only thinks about Trump, and Jan 6 was reprehensible. But to fight the corrupt system the Democrats embody, you need someone with a gigantic ego who can take insane amounts of hate in the media, lawfare, you name it, and still come back swinging. There's a certain irony to the whole thing. The system itself created the monster (Trump) who will now destroy it. Anyway I agreed with all these guys, for years, I supported Clinton and Biden - but now I see what the establishment is capable of.
You also need someone who actually wants to fight the corrupt system rather than exploit it. And you need someone with the skills and experience to fight the corruption effectively. And at this level, you need someone who can recruit and retain a similarly capable and motivated staff to back him up.
If Donald J. Trump were that person, the ego and the ability to take the various sorts of punches and stay in the fight would be assets. But he isn't, and you all should have known that by 2018 at the latest.
Thanks for the straight answer
The couch joke comes from a twitter meme though, and "weird" is much too basic to be the result of focus-testing. You're just grasping for any chain of reasoning that helps your biases, and that's the worst kind of reasoning at all. You would do better to stick with the answer that isn't personally flattering and either:
1. Own it proudly and say it's a mark of the tribe you belong to; claim that all who stand with you have this feature and it's not unflattering at all. (Probably not the best option but certainly a human choice.)
2. Examine it closely until you can unravel your biases and change your perspective in some meaningful way. (The way more difficult option where you will probably not have any fun at any step of the process because even the smallest amount of honest introspection is the mental equivalent of performing one's own appendectomy.)
The cognitive dissonance here is wild. You see your tribe using focus tested middle school insults based on false disinformation for the purpose of manipulating and controlling the public and... take that as all the more reason to support them, because really it was the other side's fault for being the target of the falsehoods! Really, the other side should just proudly own and accept this false disinformation I just made up as a mark of their tribe!
Not at all surprising for your kind, though.
> Not at all surprising for your kind, though
This line sounds very familiar.
Have you been banned under another alias?
"You see your tribe using focus tested middle school insults based on false disinformation for the purpose of manipulating and controlling the public and... take that as all the more reason to support them, because really it was the other side's fault for being the target of the falsehoods!"
I get there's probably something that's completely intractable in this conversation in regards to my beliefs and your beliefs due to media bubbles and stuff, because I feel like the exact same could be said about conservatives at large in the USA. Anyway, here are my two cents:
It was the Trump administration that created the term "alternative facts" to explain an extremely obvious lie about crowd sizes at rallies. It was them who pushed election lies – that no concrete evidence has been found to this day – that caused tons of Republicans at the local level to echo every time they lose an election – that indeed Donald Trump was the one trying to do, by all the events he did leading up to January 6th. It was Republicans who vetoed a *bipartisan* immigration bill, that McConnell himself wanted passed, because Trump said he wanted to win the election.
Like for crying out loud, Republicans are rallying behind a guy who lied about Obama not being in the United States with no evidence whatsoever.
Compare that all with an obviously false but humorous accusation that Walz fucked a couch and the claims of Republicans being weird. To me, it seems obvious this one is much less bad.
Wouldn't "false disinformation" be true by virtue of being a double negative?
Well, at least it wasn't a one nightstand...
I'm going to steal this from "Erfworld", but:
That's Sofa King good.
Not original to Erfworld.
I was thinking about something like that, but haven't come up with anything I like well enough yet. Like, the sofa is Sofa King good, or something.
Since I can't "like" comments, I would like to signal-boost this.
Today's meme is "Ketamine talks to Adderall."
Well, as a libtard in good standing and a long-term member of the Democrat Party, I think I'm qualified to recognize individuals who have delicate sixfold symmetry and who melt when the heat is turned up. Yes, I support Lyin' Kamabla, and as a cat-lover, I'm partial to cat-loving females. I don't want to couch my terms in euphemistic language, though—are you with me sofa? Anyhow, it seems to me (as a biased RADICAL LEFT Centrist Democrat) who frequently listens to MSDNC and who is also a supporter of the FAKE PRESIDENT Sleepy Joe Biden, I would say it's weird that you consider me to be part of the problem. Just sayin...
"You think Walz just busted out a couch-fucking joke on impulse in the middle of the rally?"
Frankly, yes. The couch joke had been circulating through left-leaning social media spaces since shortly after the RNC: roughly a month before Walz was even added to the ticket. Literally all that would be required would be for Walz to keep half an eye on his side's social media, and think it was a funny meme to riff off of.
It seems like you are applying a pretty clear double-standard here. Not just the belief that Trump's utterances are all random with no deeper strategy behind them[1] but also the notion that those utterances somehow hurt him and upset his strategists, while Democratic meanness is a calculated and politically useful act.
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Trump's propensity to act like a schoolyard bully was a LARGE part of the appeal that won him the office in the first place: perhaps his single most defining feature. It didn't play well with the nation as a whole, but Trump has never, ever concerned himself with talking to the nation as a whole, only the portion of it that was likely to vote for him. He built his victory on a massive outpouring of enthusiasm from something like 60% of the Republican base, combined with a lot of "ugh, fine, I guess he's better than Hillary" from the rest. No part of his electability has ever depended on him acting civil or reasonable. Claiming it's all just random noise and that his election chances are *in spite* of that kind of nastiness is badly, badly misreading the last 8 years of American politics.
To the extent that Harris and Walz are following suit, it's very much playing by the rules that Trump laid out. I'd imagine that there are at least as many D-leaning people who dislike that kind of thing than R-leaning people who dislike Trump's attitude, but giving the polarized sections of the base what they want seems to be THE winning play in American politics lately. It's a tendency that started well before Trump and probably doesn't have a really definitive origin, but he certainly made it more visible and exploitable.
[1] Which I suspect is probably true, but with the same standards of evidence you're applying to the D side, it should be considered very much in doubt.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but it's hard to take seriously that the team who has complained about Trump for 9 years doing the same things is okay in any real sense. It feels very much like they never minded the game, but just weren't as good at it. If/when they got the upper hand, they seem to have no moral qualms about it either.
The only acceptable analysis should be either 1) It's okay when I do it, so it must be okay when they do it, or 2) I don't like it when they do it, so I shouldn't do it either.
Trump complaining about schoolyard insults would be laughable and should lose him support. Kamala using schoolyard insults should have a similar, if in reverse, result.
Trump lies are much bigger in scale.
It was the Trump administration that created the term "alternative facts" to explain an extremely obvious lie about crowd sizes at rallies. It was them who pushed election lies – that no concrete evidence has been found to this day – that caused tons of Republicans at the local level to echo every time they lose an election – that indeed Donald Trump was the one trying to do, by all the events he did leading up to January 6th. It was Donald Trump who convinced hundreds of thousands if not more than Obama was not born in the United States.
Compare this to one, off-the-cuff joke about Vance fucking a couch, without it even being the main point. This is important. Trump will lie in rallies and have the point of his statements be the lie, and Walz made a joke that he probably knows is not true with the intent to highlight another point (i.e. challenging Vance to a debate)
Imo, even if you think both actions should lead to a politician losing support, it seems obvious that Republicans should be punished much more for this. And, from a politicians perspective, if you aren't being punished for lacking decorum (note it wasn't even a lie) and are in fact being rewarded for it, it's hard to argue they shouldn't do it if they want to win an election.
> it's very much playing by the rules that Trump laid out.
That's a very dangerous path.
Oh, I hear you. But I think American politics has been on a dangerous path since well before Trump, and nobody really knows a way off. Most people don't even seem to want off anymore. I would like nothing better than to see moderate right-wingers kick out Trump and those aligned with him, reign in their extremists and start making good-faith proposals for how to de-escalate and re-civilize the circus that American politics has become. I strongly suspect people like Harris and Walz would welcome those good-faith proposals, do their best to answer them in kind and make a decent go at mending fences.
In the meantime, when you're stuck in an iterated prisoner's dilemma against an opponent who has built an enormous reputation on always defecting, bragged about doing the biggest and best defections, and insisted that anyone telling him not to defect was weak and disloyal, sold hats and t-shirts and buttons with "Real Men Always Defect" emblazoned proudly on them and shows no signs of even knowing where the cooperate button IS, it would take an especially credulous sort of moron to spend more than 0.1 seconds considering whether maybe now is the time to start pressing "cooperate" more often. I'd be overjoyed if the U.S. managed to break out of this trap, but I'm not holding by breath.
Which is one of many reasons that I no longer live in the U.S. and don't expect to ever again.
I was defected against by the left coalition before Trump's political career even started, I'm afraid. :-/
Okay, now read the rest of what I said.
You're celebrating losing $500K?
Now if only I had a large fortune to make my small fortune with. I'd be set for life!