Just came across this article (https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril), which is a pretty wild interesting story. But I also found it very ironic, because right after talking about how Luckey was smeared by inaccurate media articles, the article itself proceeds to smear Facebook the same way!
As i may have mentioned before, I am currently struggling with Grave's disease (overactive thyroid0.
The cardiology department has just had the bright idea they could prescribe spironolactone for thw water retention (edema) I get as a symptom of the thyroid condition. Which will probably work, yes.
And, I am thinking to myself... spironolactone? I just happen to know what *else* that is prescribed for, having been following the news about restrictions on prescribing puberty blockers. It's a testosterone blocker, also often prescribed for MtF transsexuals. Fine. Fine. I shall play dumb and pretend that I do not know this.
I started some of his books and liked them but haven't finished anything yet. I mostly liked his analysis of the psychology of the modern man, I didn't get a lot of insights on AI.
I'm not saying that the Unabomber wasn't a smart guy, but I am going to say that someone who couldn't even manage to keep himself from blowing up buildings and airplanes probably isn't who we should turn to when it comes to keeping AI from doing likewise.
I also question the wisdom of linking to one of the premiere resources for literary piracy, personally.
I thought this might have been a clip from an SNL skit — sort of a reprise of their classic Bass-O-Matic skit — but, no, it's a real company with a real product! And how much development time was required to make its lips sync with its voice?
What would be the optimal immigration policy for the USA? I don't believe it is either Open Borders or Zero Immigrants. My best guess is we need to allow way, way more immigrants with college degrees and maybe the same or fewer without degrees? In either category, what would be a method for determining what the optimum number per year would be?
The critical question is whether we maintain a welfare state for the immigrants. If we do, then we don't want poor immigrants, since they cost us more than they pay us. That leads to the popular policy of letting in only high end immigrants.
But the immigrants who we, and they, can gain most from are at the other end of the scale, poor people happy to do unskilled work at a wage high for them, low for us, and work their way up from there, the equivalent of my ancestors who came in from eastern Europe to work in sweatshops in New York a century and more ago. They are better off coming in without the protections of a welfare state than being kept out — but that option is barred by current ideology.
Don't you need to consider the labour capital ration as well? Expanding the labour supply will probably push down per capita gdp and wages for a fixed amount of capital.
Also, if the source of higher incomes in developed countries is non-rivalous, like institutions or governance, surely it makes more sense to extend them to low-income countries rather than concentrating everyone in places that are already high income.
Does it depend at all on the particular state? My guess is that unskilled immigrants to Texas, which has a relatively small welfare state, are a net positive to the economy whereas low skilled immigrants to California are a net negative, but I don't know what the data says.
I'll perversely say, more unskilled laborers and fewer skilled or degreed immigrants. Also, dismantle the H1-B visa system which is really a soft form of indentured servitude.
Something like Australian / NZ point system would be a good start. Less “family re-unification”, more “we have shortage of this labor type, come in”. Our immigration system is such a hopeless mess, any streamlining and simplification would be welcome at this point.
The optimal immigration policy is a Schengen Area within the core American Empire (US, Anglosphere, EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel) and a MrBeast style gameshow at the southern border open to any IQ > 115, where contestants have to pass through several rounds of challenges testing intelligence, fitness, creativity, patience, sociability, and adherence to American Empire cultural norms.
It sounds like you are looking for workers who will add value: I don't know if your strategy for achieving that is right or not, but more importantly I don't know if it's the right aim - or more to the point the aim most people would agree on.
There's a review of the book "Then I Am Myself the World" by Christof Koch in the latest Science News. Koch is into ITT (integrated information theory), which postulates you can measure a system's consciousness by measuring the amount of integrated information within it. Koch did this with the generative AI ChatGPT, and the money quote is -
"(it) has an itsy bitsy bit of consciousness" but experiences the world something much less than a worm with only 300 neurons.
So maybe we're safe from AI doom for a little while.
Can you say a bit about what Koch means by integrated information? What's an example? Is what is integrated things about self and things about world? (So, for instance, GPT4 will tell you it's an LLM, and whether LLM's like itself can or can't do a certain task. That seems to me like some knowledge about self integrated with knowledge about the world. )
I didn't read Koch's book. Integrated information theory (IIT, got the acronym wrong the first time) is something I tried to learn about by reading Erik Hoel's book "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science", but it was over my head and, altho he helped develop the theory, he winds up trashing it. If only someone more expert than me could write up a review of either of these books for next years contest.
I wasn't asked and have no idea what he means with the fluffy phrase "integrated information" but I think his overall idea is panpsychism plus the assumption that an atom has a different - and vastly poorer experience - than a fox because an atom can do viewer and less complex actions than a fox. That's my interpretation of him saying that what matters is how much "irreducible causal power" a thing has.
My example is, a fox can do actions that its individual atoms can't. Not its atoms hunt rats, the fox does.
And I think, for sure: hunting a rat feels much different than to only swing arround a few nanometer. I know, I've done both.
I don't get it. Clearly, my group is right, and the other group is wrong. So why don't all utilitarians join my group and declare a war on the other group? Is it because they are stupid, or because they are hypocrites? What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
I am also baffled. Me and my in-group are clearly utility monsters, so why aren't utilitarians fulfilling our every whim at the expense of the out-group?
For the benefit of folks who haven’t watched The Big Lebowski a half a dozen time that’s a reference to The Dude describing his time in the music business. As a roadie for Metallica, along with his opinion of the group. Mettalica loved the joke BTW.
I didn’t get that when I played it. I’ll delete the link.
Edit; I’m finding YouTube clips for a lot of Big Lebowski scenes. Not that one though.
Further Edit: I did find it dubbed into French, Japanese and a language I can only guess at with non ASII character set letters with diacritics and other ornamentations I don’t know the names of.
I've heard time and again that in Chasidic culture, men don't work. And I've said it.
At least for Williamsberg Chasidim, it just isn't true, and I'm wondering to what extent it's true elsewhere.
The video is an overview of the lively business culture of Williamsberg, with a lot of work being done by men. What they generally don't have is college degrees, but you can do a lot without a degree. There are many business supplying specialized cultural products (kosher food, wigs for women, etc.), non-religious products and services (plumbing, extermination), and selling outside the community. Computers are more of factor than they used to be, and so is entertainment.
Note that my link is about Chasidic culture where men work, but there's a possibility (if I can trust what I keep hearing about Israel) where Chasidic men (at least in some groups) don't work.
What's up with that is that the universe is out to get you. You think you have a nice handy generalization, and wham! the universe hits you with an exception. This is especially true for biology and for humans.
An interesting idea of "the bezzle", the window of time after a fraud has been committed when the action appears positive-sum, since the fraudster benefited, and the mark hasn't realized anything is amiss.
It helps explain why people get mad at whistleblowers, because everyone is happier *before* the whistle is blown, even if in reality some of the parties were worse off.
Whistleblowers probably aren't very popular even before they blow the whistle. In order to be willing to do it, you probably need to have a bond with the company and your coworkers that's defective, i.e. falls short of what's needed by the other parties. The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player. Still, we need them. If every crew rebelled against their Capt. Bligh there would be no Navy. But if there were many Capt. Blighs there also would be no Navy.
Every place I've worked there has been a huge glob of stuff that everybody knows is bad, but everybody thinks of it as stuff you can't acknowledge, much less challenge. The first place I ever worked was a small diner in the south. I was a waitress. The owner came in most days to check on things and punch and smack the busboys (all black, by the way) for not moving as fast as the thought they should. I remember him tasting the day's special and saying "Jesus, they must be hungry today!"
Whistleblowers are people who see something wrong in an organization and want to fix it. If they're not getting along with the rest of the organization, whistleblowing is one of the primary ways we hear about them. If they *are* getting along with the rest of the organization, then they're probably just working with their management (upwards or down; some of these people are themselves managers), getting the change that way, and we people outside the organization never hear of them.
Therefore, by the time we hear of someone in the news as a whistleblower, it's virtually certain they didn't get along with their team.
There's a catch here, though. Some people don't get along with their team because their team is corrupt and doing illegal things and then they go to the press. Others don't get along with their team because their team is trying to do its job and it's the individual who's corrupted by delusions of speaking truth to power and goes to the press. The press doesn't have a very large incentive to tell one from the other, but it often has a large incentive to report pot stirring and underdog stories, so both types of people are reported as whistleblowers, and it falls to us readers to figure out whether the person reported as a whistleblower actually *is* one, assuming we ourselves have any incentive to do so.
What makes you think I'm saying people who blow the whistle are immoral? I'm saying they're bad team players. They do not bond deeply with coworkers or the organization itself, are less loyal to it and its workers, less willing to forgive the organization its various lies and injustices, more skeptical of its view of how it should be seen. That's not equivalent to their being immoral. As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school. I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
> I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
> As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school.
Actions are what matter
> If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
Why? Im no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
<Why? I'm no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
ACX reasons: Because this is not Reddit, and if you engage in Reddit style rudeness, especially in response to someone who has not been rude to you, a lot of people are going to think you're a jackass and not take your posts seriously.
My reasons: I am not exactly distressed by your various negative takes on me, but I am irritated, and am likely in the future to skip over comments by you because, ugh, it's that monky guy who adds extra y's or something to monky. I have the impression that you read my posts on this thread not trying to get what I was saying, but scanning for bits that will give you a chance to exclaim about ways I am lame and dumb and wrong. Specifically: (1) A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct. But you just went with your first impression, rather than re-reading, or asking me whether I was saying that being a team player is more important than being honest. So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
(2) So then I clarify what I meant, and you let me off the hook for being a bad player who hogs the ball, but you still ended with an insult: I am calling myself a bad player because I am pussy-whipped by the HT lady. Again, rather than assuming I have been intimidated by a mean cunt into thinking I am Bad when actually I am a Good Guy, you could have asked me why I was calling myself a bad team player even though I believe I treat my coworkers fairly and pull my weight. But nope, you went for pussy whip.
> A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct.
I quoted a statement because I was responding to a statement
> So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
>> Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
>> The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
I granted/clarified it wasn't a cope about your actions.
> I pulled my weight....
I believe you confused by my lazy sentence structure on this comment, to rephrase it verbosely
1. the definition of a bad team player is related to taking undue credit
2. given your claims you dont sound like you do that
3. qed you are there not a bad team player
I was also hoping to imply that that a "bad team player" commits local anti social behavior, a whistle blower commits high-cost, pro-socail behavior at a higher level of abstraction and its extremely unlikely for an ethical person to actually be less ethical at less abstract, lower cost, situations
> a mean cunt
From my point of view this is the first direct(i.e. about people here) insult in this thread
I pulled my weight, and did the hospital equivalent of passing the ball. But here are they ways I was not a team player: If I had a patient to refer, I sent them to whoever I thought was best, not to the person who had recently done me a favor, or the person I knew needed to pick up some more patients. I did not make an effort to pretend to like and respect various people on staff that I thought were dishonest, greedy and self-serving. I made a few friends on staff, but did not feel a bond with the rest of staff — skipped their baby showers, holiday parties, retirement parties, etc. Did not schmooze with them. Did not respect the head of the unit where I worked, and sometimes warned people to beware of his tendency to do various unscrupulous and unfair things. Had some major objections to certain hospital policies, and spoke about them bluntly whenever it was relevant. Overall, I just did not exude the “I’m OK you’re OK” feeling that organizations want and need from staff. I was respected, and was not disliked, but I definitely did not pull my weight when it came to working to create an atmosphere of “we’re all fine folks here.”
> but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
Is hr Human Relations? I don't think I ever spoke with one, or even knew who the hospital HR staff were. What on earth do you think one convinced me of? And what makes you expect that it's easy to convince me of things? You sure didn't get very far with convincing me I'm immoral.
At the risk of receiving a whizzing stream of exclamatory question marks, I wonder if Monkyyy could explain his Simiiforme reasoning for his belief that honesty is necessarily a prosocial behavior? Honesty is usually perceived by those on the receiving-end of it as an antisocial behavior.
Id draw the line closer to kant's axe murder then most. Everything depends on truth surviving lies, charitys that work rather then are money laundering schemes. If theres to much causal lying in society, something like giving to charity could easily break down and your giving money to a gold plated throne of the middle ages church. The proper use of violence depends on finding the right guy, etc etc etc etc
One of my friends lost a job because he wouldn't pad his expense account. He didn't report that everyone else was padding their expense accounts, but they were afraid he would.
Lorien made a question earlier asking why utilitarians more in favor of gender roles. A good discussion came from that. I have a similar comment, but different enough that I want to post about it separate from the discussion thread that Lorien started.
My question is... why aren't utilitarians more active in opposing what's called wokeness? At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy, particularly the woke themselves. This philosophy/ideology is known for deriding toxicity, but is itself highly toxic. It focuses the mind almost exclusively on negative externalities, and it actively encourages very uncharitable interpretations of the words/actions of others through the promotion of ideas like micro-aggressions.
The art/entertainment that arises from it is widely considered inferior to what came before, as we can see with various viewer satisfaction metrics and falling ratings for several major franchises (Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, MCU TV shows).
I think it's pretty clear that most people in the west would like less "wokeness" in their world. That most people dislike it. And it could even be argued that many of the woke themselves would enjoy greater emotional well-being from not being woke.
So opposing wokeness seems to me as both a way to genuinely serve utilitarian goals while also making utilitariansm more popular with the general population. With such a win/win proposition just sitting there, completely consistent with utilitarian goals/beliefs, it's odd to me that the movement doesn't go for it more than it does.
Is it that "wokeness" isn't defined as well as most utilitarians would like? Is it that utilitarians believe it'll implode on its own? Is it just that... actively opposing wokeness would feel like being pro-Republican, and most utilitarians really don't want that? I'm genuinely curious here.
I think a utilitarian would say that specialization is good, and if we have a gender that is born a bit more empathic and another that is born with a bit more innate understanding of how objects work then it is good that they specialize on that. The issue is that it is only true on the average with many outliers.
Don't woke people think that wokeness will be beneficial in the long run? And perhaps in the short run, at least for some people (eg, supposed victims of racism, speech wokesters deem harmful, etc). Unless a utilitarian knows those things are untrue, wouldn't a utilitarian be agnostic?
Note also that the Civil Rights Movement likely made 80% of the people in much of the Deep South unhappy in the short term. What should utilitarian at the time have believed about it?
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Since you raised the Civil Rights Movement, I thought it only fitting to raise this famous quote from arguably the greatest leader involved in that movement.
Do you think that modern wokism is consistent with Dr. King's statement here? To me, the answer is very clear. Even if it's not clear to your, I hope you'll think about it, and maybe keep it in mind when you read woke commentary in the future.
I really don't understand what you are talking about. Did you somehow misinterpret my comment as an endorsement of "wokism"? It was neither an endorsement nor a criticism.
The Civil Rights movement has very strong moral valiance. That might not be why you raised it, but even if not, it gives strength to your question.
So I'm replying by saying "Ok... but does modern wokism share the same moral valiance and moral values of the civil rights movement?" And I'm saying no, it doesn't... so it shouldn't get to benefit from the comparison.
It's entirely possible you're just being fair and neutral and raising open questions here. I fully respect that. Still, I feel that wokism gets far too easy of a pass by simply equating itself with things like the Union side of the Civil War, the armies that fought against the Nazis on D-Day, and the American Civil Rights movement. Wokeness is very different from these 3, it has very different values propelling it forward than these 3, so it shouldn't get to benefit from the widespread agreement that modern people have with these three.
Honestly, you need to read more carefully. It is very clear why I mentioned the Civil Rights Movement: Because it made people happier in the long term, and hence a utilitarian might support it, even if it made most people unhappy in the short-term. That is the same for wokeness: unless we are sure that wokesters are incorrect that wokeness will increase happiness in the long term, then it makes sense for utilitarians to be agnostic. That is true even though wokeness is not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, it is true of permitting reform and NIMBYism and YIMBYism and 1000 other things that are not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement.
> At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy
I don't think this is clear at all, at least for a definition of 'happy' that you could get a utilitarian to agree to
First of all, you don't present any evidence that wokeness has made people less happy _in toto_. That seems like a prerequisite for a utilitarian caring / taking action. Quality of media is just one part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and not even really something utilitarians typically care much about. On the assumption that you reckon you have such evidence but just haven't presented it (for brevity), I still don't think it is obvious all utilitarians should oppose wokeness.
Even the worst critics of wokeness view the process as being one of redistributing power and prestige. Therefore for every loser (typically characterised as being straight white men) there are winners (typically characterised as racial or sexual minorities). Maybe the utility gain isn't zero sum, but it isn't like woke utilitarians are totally ignorant of the fact that the utility gain *might not* be zero sum; they just believe that in fact the gains of making the worst off better are worth the costs of harming the better off. So the evidence you would need to convince a utilitarian is not just that things have got worse in the last decade, and that this is a direct result of wokeness, but also that the specific utility function of the utilitarian you are talking to is not satisfied by this state of affairs. This is nontrivial.
Arguing that media has got worse over the last decade is totally irrelevant to a woke utilitarian. Even if they agreed with you - and they probably wouldn't - they would say that worse media is a totally reasonable tradeoff to ensure that historic power imbalances were corrected
Even if it were true, it seems like *opposing* wokeness has made a lot of people unhappy. If you look at anti-woke media review channels, the personalities on those channels seem to be in a constant state of heightened anger at finding slights (real and imagined) in that media. For example a bunch of people got really, genuinely, non-performatively angry that Princess Peach was wearing trousers in the Mario movie trailer (her karting outfit, which she has worn since we'll before wokeness was a thing). Those people would be much happier if they stopped opposing wokeness, because opposing wokeness clearly causes them to tilt at ridiculous windmills. A utilitarian must at least consider that efforts to oppose wokeness would cause misery, such that even if it would have been better to oppose it ten years ago, it is too late to do it now and it is better to settle into a slightly suboptimal equilibrium than to perpetuate the culture war
Overall I think your argument requires that nobody genuinely believes wokeness is good. But since some people clearly do believe this, it is unlikely that you'll convince them by appealing to the 'obviousness' of your position
Going by this study, 80% of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem. Political Correctness/SJWism/Wokism... these terms have been used pretty interchangably in my experience. They don't always mean exactly the same thing, but there's substantial overlap here.
If 80% of Americans (strongly) dislike political correctness, then that means 80% of American (strongly) dislike at least a core part of what's considered "wokeness".
If this 80% is even close to accurate, then your suggestion of an even trade-off between "winners" and "losers" is very incorrect. It's not 1-for-1, it's 4 losers-for-1 winner (at best), and at that point it's anti-utilitarian and should be opposed.
I'm going to guess, from your reply, that you yourself are at least somewhat woke or progressive. Fair enough. Wanting greater equality, in at least practical terms, is understandable and admirable. Wokism is just one of many ways to try to achieve that, and a good argument can be made that there are much better and less counter-productive ways to achieve it. Utilitarians in general, and the effective altruism movement specifically, have a good philosophical framework to suggest different ways of achieving that. And to be fair, EA does address this some with the way it promotes altruistic and charitable living, much healthier than actively encouraging people to interpret the words of others in the most uncharitable way possible.
That being said, wokism is a competitor to EA, arguably the main competitor given its prominence in the modern American media landscape. The woke themselves recognize this, which is why the owner of this substack had a NY Times hitpiece wrote against him. Simply ignoring a major competitor, especially one that is not ignoring you, doesn't seem wise or prudent to me.
Given what you wrote about "quality of media", I get the impression you don't care much about it, so probably not worth getting into the various Rotten Tomatoes scores and IMDB scores and TV show ratings at a specific level. Plus, most of this information is not hard to find.
To be clear, I'm not a conservative. On a political compass, I'd consider myself Center-Left. My impression is that wokism has horribly distracted us from much more practical economy inequality concerns, while simultaneously creating a media and narrative landscape that actively repulses most people, thus making for a much less pleasure cultural atmosphere to live within.
Asian-made entertainment, largely free of woke elements, has been dramatically on the rise in recent years and decades. I don't think this is purely a coincidence. I considered getting into detail on this, but again, given what you wrote on "quality of media" probably pointless.
Have a good day. Thanks for the thorough and thought-provoking reply.
Interestingly enough I think we actually totally agree on the fundamental-level issues (I too would consider myself on the economic left and I too consider the culture war a distraction from actually pressing issues of economic inequality). I'd hazard a guess we agree in every particular on the harm that identity politics has wrought on the classic economic left as a political block.
However I'd also consider myself a strong utilitarian, and therefore I bristle at suggestions that the good is something that is trivially easy to determine, particularly when a large number of people think otherwise. I'd be incredibly surprised if at one point 80% of people didn't oppose interracial marriage, or gay marriage, or assisted dying, or anything like that, and it would have been terrible if utilitarians had let them get away with saying 'Since it is obviously wrong that X, we should make it a cornerstone of utilitarian philosophy to oppose X'. It is the 'obvious' bit I disagreed with, rather than the suggestion that in the final accounting we might find wokeness has caused more harm than good.
If I might - I appreciate the polite and good faith indication that you've got better things to do than go back and forth with me (in which case no problem at all) - but it I'd possible your reply indicates a bit of an error in your thinking. Imagine a world where 80% of people had more than enough to eat and 20% of people were starving. You could make the 20% vastly vastly better off by redistributing food from the 80% so that everyone had exactly enough to eat. If you asked 'Are you better off before or after redistribution?' you'd get 80/20 against it. But if you asked 'Solve for U(x) where U(x) is the utility you gain from your next marginal calorie' you'd get an average score much higher in the post-redistribution world. Almost all (possibly all?) utilitarians believe utility is better thought about in the second kind of terms, and woke utilitarians believe that this is true PLUS we actually live in a world like this except it is power / prestige which is inadequately distributed. So your evidence wouldn't convince them. I thought you might be interested in this feedback just in case you had a different expectation of what your evidence would prove to a utilitarian
Utilitarianism isn't a movement, it's just a philosophical position, compatible with all sorts of object-level political beliefs. You'll find utilitarians supporting all sorts of different things.
According to Aristotle we have two appetites - the concupiscible appetite directs us towards good things which are pleasant - food etc. while the irascible appetite directs us towards good things which are difficult to achieve e.g hiking up a mountain. The irascible appetite needs to be put in its place but we all need some difficult goals in life. I assume the woke are relatively unhappy while focused on the difficult goal of achieving equality as they see it, but many will have concupiscible goals that balance this.
Utilitarians are well aware that wokeness is a strawman that pretends that every form of egalitarianism is part of the over-corrective push of an outspoken minority, so they focus their utils on things that actually matter.
Some random thoughts on the Qur'an, in no particular order, since I've been reading it*:
- The Qur'an is extremely rambly and meandering, which makes it a bit hard to read. Most of the chapters cover a very, very wide range of topics, except for those at the end, which only cover one topic because they're only one paragraph or so long. There are a few anecdotes that are interesting enough to read (mostly various abbreviated versions of corresponding incidents from the Bible), but it's kinda hard to fish them out of the sheer mass of purple prose about how Allah is great and nonbelievers are evil. A lot of modern translations (eg Clear Quran) tend to only intensify the purple prose, making it even more unreadable.
- For example, surah 2 relates the tale of how Moses told the Israelites to slaughter a cow. In the Qur'an's version, this is apparently a one-off incident to resolve a disputed murder. In Deuteronomy 21's version, however, God commands the Israelites to slaughter a cow *every time* there is a disputed murder.
- There are a few points it really, *really*, likes to drive home. Some version of this is repeated in nearly every chapter.
- In Islam, all Muslims will go to Paradise, but all non-Muslims will go to "the fire", which is how the Qur'an *always* refers to the Islamic version of hell.
- Allah is almighty, wise, all-seeing, all-knowing, and so on.
- There are two or three cryptic-looking letters at the beginning of each chapter. (By the way, these are called the "muqatta'at", and have fueled a truly insane amount of speculation.)
Any further thoughts on this? Am I misunderstanding anything?
*proofreading it on Wikisource, as a matter of fact!
- Are you reading it in the traditional order, or the chronological order in which it was written and received by Mohammed (the latter makes much more sense)?
- The biography of Mohammed by Karen Armstrong is a highly readable book which I would strongly recommend as a companion piece to the Quran, especially when reading the surahs in chronological order.
- These taken together highlight how much many parts of the Quran are highly relevant to Mohammed's day to day live and evolving circumstances, including a few bits highly convenient to the prophet himself at that particular point.
I only just started a few days ago and haven't mustered the patience to get past the second surah, but what you describe fits with my impressions - it's like a fire-and-brimstone preacher riffing on vaguely-alluded-to Old Testament stories, with the stringency of a Trump campaign rally speech. You really have to wonder if Allah the All-Knowing couldn't afford a better editor.
I was gifted a Quran by a Muslim coworker a few years ago. I found it difficult to read too. I’ve read that in the original Arabic the repetition that I found frustrating reads as poetic and is actually a pleasure to read.
All that babbling by the concern trolls on the right and in the MSM about Kamala's issues and positions is just noise. Anna Navarro (a Republican BTW) reminds us that's there only one big issue we need to be concerned about this election. And it's the GOP elephant in the room...
"Let's be serious. Donald Trump and his minions have called Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was eight years old. I don't take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do, and it's never just for one day. They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs so they can get rich off their positions like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela. Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anyone running for president who reminds you of that? And I know one thing. It's not Kamala Harris..."
Politics is the mind-killer. It is the little death that precedes total obliteration. I will face the hot takes and I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when the thinkpieces and quips have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the dunks have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Kamala is a Communist the same way Trump is a Fascist, which is to say it's all very damn stupid, I'm not even going to touch "but *they* started it!" by both sides, and it's just the way modern politics is going.
Party A says Party B is not alone stupid but evil, and trying to bring back Bad Thing X.
Party B says Party A is not alone evil but stupid, and trying to bring back Bad Thing Y.
Stop calling Trump a Fascist, stop calling Harris a Communist. I would like that, but it's not gonna happen.
Help me out here. I find it hard to distinguish authoritarian communists from authoritarian fascists. What criteria make them different?
1. Authoritarian fascists and authoritarian communists both try to control the media, and penalize vocal and active dissent.
2. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to control the courts to get the desired results politically and legally, and to veil their illegal actions in a cloak of legality.
3. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote corruption to divert money and power into their hands — and authoritarian fascist and communist leaders give cushy positions to family and friends so they can profit from their control of the state.
4. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote nationalist agendas, identifying themselves as true patriots and their enemies as enemies of the nation.
5. Authoritarian fascists and communists both target out-groups such as ethnic minorities or religious minorities for persecution to direct their citizens' anger at the out-groups rather than the leadership.
6. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to distort the economy for their own and the benefit of the leadership clique.
The only difference that I can see between the two is that communists try to micro-manage businesses with a command-and-control economy, while fascists allow favored businesses to create monopolies (in return for kickbacks) that put pressure on businesses that don't play along. Either way, independent entrepreneurial activities are stifled.
The simplest way to tell fascists from communists is that fascists identify as fascists while communists identify as communists. Trying to make up some list of criteria for who belongs to a particular political movement just seems like a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that nobody outside the lunatic fringe self-identifies as fascist or communist anymore, except in the latter case for a few historical ruling parties that are stuck with "communist" in their name and everybody then says that the Chinese aren't *really* communist.
And, yeah, the Chinese probably don't count as communist any more, but the people who do mostly call themselves "socialist". Close enough, I suppose. The fascists call themselves a bunch of other things, depending on the local political clime, and their critics then say "but with policies like those, they're basically admitting they're fascists".
Started out with Lexapro to try and improve my mood and sociability... and WOW! Absolutely amazing effects on day 4, though on days 5 and 6 things have gone back to baseline so far. Is there a reason why the effects haven't been consistent? Perhaps there's a way to speed up the onset of Lexapro to get me to feel great again sooner?
I'm 100% sure its not placebo: I track my mood every day consistently and three days ago was THE best mood of my entire year, by far. I was also skeptical the SSRI would actually do anything so I don't think it was placebo.
Wrote an answer but somehow it didn't get through. Here tis again: Most drugs in this class take 4 weeks plus to work, but lexapro is unusually fast, with some feeling a difference in 1 week. So maybe you are just an unusually fast responder. If what you felt was a drug effect then you can expect the mood lift to be stable once the drug fully kicks in. Don't discount placebo completely, though. Scott was sure he was microdosing on the real deal, but found out at end of study he's been taking placebo.
I hadn't really been following the story of the luxury superyacht which was sunk by a waterspout off the coast of Sicily, until I learned the name of it.
It was renamed "Bayesian" or "the Bayesian", thanks to the owner (?) who is the wife (now widow) of a guy involved in tech and finance:
"Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week.
Lynch’s wife is linked to the yacht. The Bayesian is held by the company Revtom Limited, according to records from the maritime information service Equasis. The company’s latest annual return from April lists Bacares as the proprietor.
“Bayesian,” the name given to the vessel, is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according to Reuters."
That is not all, however, The man, Michael Lynch, was involved in a long legal battle with Hewlett-Packard over the sale of his company, Autonomy, to them, along with his VP of finance and another company member. Allegations of financial jiggery-pokery, which is all being covered in detail over at The Motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/1131/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
So Lynch is acquitted, goes on a celebratory yacht trip, and ends up dead. But wait, there's more! That same weekend, his co-defendant *also* ends up dead after being struck by a car:
What's that quote from "The Importance of Being Earnest"? "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."?
To have one Rationalist or Rationalist-adjacent billionaire involved in financial shenanigans (SBF) may be a misfortune, to have two (Lynch and Bayesianism) looks like carelessness 😁
I know, it's "throw a stone and hit one" territory. But for a movement all about winning bigly, maybe try and avoid the appearance of criminality because you assume you are just that much smarter than the normies?
It's all sorts of ironic. The boat's problem was probably that it had one very tall mast not two shorter ones. Tallest aluminium mast in the world. You would expect a statistician to ask: what are the odds of someone making a bigger one? If they do is it likely to be twice as high, or one metre higher? What do the constraints governing that question tell me about my own mast?
There is also some question about whether the keel of the yacht was in its lowered position or not, and whether some hatchways had been left open in spite of a storm warning.
I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy. Or is this just an American thing?
This is not about Israel, Gaza, or even specifically Democrats. But people seem to think their non-expert opinion matters. Don't we appoint people to government positions so they can make the best decisions for us? They should be giving us what we NEED, which isn't necessarily what we WANT.
It's ridiculous to think something as complex as foreign policy should be determined by how people feel about a situation.
In general issue polling is terrible and cursed, since people will say they support more services, less taxes, lower deficits, and whatever else you want them to answer in your poll. Unless it's very careful to explicitly list the tradeoff involved in a neutral way, issue polling should be completely ignored.
As of 2024, approximately 92% of Republicans believe that violent crime in the United States is increasing, while all the data seems to suggest that violent crime is lower than at the beginning of the 1960s. Why should something as complex as the criminal justice system be left up to people who have no clue on how to look at the data?
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and the early 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high as the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
I don't think many Democrats look at the data either. I don't think most people look at the data. Seems to me most people vote based on vibes, group identification, and what's currently being said in their echo chamber.
Sometimes I wonder whether the modern world is too complex for democracy toe even sort of work. I have no idea what a better alternative would be, though.
The alternative is to have a permanent stable of experts and lobby groups that are indirectly influenced by public opinion. Which is roughly what we ended up with.
I must be misunderstanding. The only place I can find for public opinion in your point of view is in choosing who we elect to office. After that, people should pipe down and do what they’re told?
Shouldn’t policy makers continue to consider the will of the people after they’re elected? And isn’t polling a tool to help them understand the people’s will?
Yes, policy makers should CONSIDER the will of the people, but people seem to think their collective will should be the policy. As Professor Feynman said, one cannot claim to be smarter than 1000 other people, but can certainly claim to be smarter than the average of 1000 other people.
So long as people only express their opinion, that is reasonable. If others, even policy-makers, find it reasonable, it can influence policy. I just find it unreasonable for the mob to think it can dictate policy.
I think you are directionally correct that people want to exert too much influence over the fine details of policy, and that people should leave more questions up to the experts, and judge them by long-term results.
However, I think you picked a really bad example to start with. "Should that war stop?" is exactly the kind of question the average voter is pretty well capable of judging for themselves.
Maybe they THINK they are, but I opine they are not. It's much more complicated than should they stop trying to kill people. Here are some points to consider:
* What can they do to prevent a 10/7 again? If they let them rearm, maybe they will plot another one.
* They don't want to kill more people, but having their own citizens killed is worse than killing more people.
* Some people in the US support the Palestinians, and some support the Israelis. This is not trivial to resolve.
* Consider other countries participating: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. One must also consider potential impacts of China's influence, and others.
* If we support Israel less, could those resources be better used at home? Abroad? What pushback will happen for any of these choices?
I'm not an expert, as I have said, and there are probably dozens of other implications to consider. I have no reason to think this is a bad example.
If the public couldn't dictate policy, the policy would be to give all the money to policymakers. It happens in every country without a working democratic system.
The public informs policy by voting out people who make decisions they don't like. They don't dictate it.
For this particular instance, I doubt anyone would vote for Trump because of a disagreement on the Israel thing, but they might stay "uncommitted" and not vote at all, which is close to the same thing for this election.
To be precise, I believe those who run the country should take expert advice into consideration to make decisions for running the country. I don't expect the leaders to be experts in all things, not even all the things for which they have charge.
Yeah, direct democracy for every choice would be a disaster--a majority vote for which drugs should be approved by the FDA or something would make no sense. I think the main value of democracy is that when lots of people are unhappy about how things are going or about big visible decisions made by public officials, they can provide feedback that the elected officials have to care about. So the public isn't voting on specific FDA approvals, but if they are sufficiently unhappy about FDA actions, they can make the president and many congressmen care about that, and apply pressure to the FDA's leadership.
It all depends on the terms of the cease-fire, right?
The poll answer might as well be saying "war is bad", perhaps extending to "Palestinian civilians dying is bad" (given that Israel is inflicting most of the casualties).
Technically, there's also a difference between "being in favor of a cease-fire" and thinking that the US government should use carrots and sticks to get both sides to agree to something they'd otherwise not agree to. (Which, I think, they're already trying.)
Ultimately, though, this is a tension in any representative democracy: whether the representative should merely reflect the will of their constituents, or whether they were chosen to exercise their independent judgement? (And in practice, where in between should an individual politician fall at a given moment?)
And there's also the civil service, which in theory exists to provide expertise and consistency to governmental affairs. The State Department probably has it's own views on this situation.
I think no one, especially in this forum, would think war is not bad. My point isn't whether Israel should cease fire, but that people think they know what's best for the country based on their limited knowledge and experience. Everyone is, of course, entitled to their opinion, but only informed opinions should make policy, whether foreign or some other kind.
I know this may shock you, but some people actually believe in democracy, and I don't just mean picking between one of two multimillionaire oligarchs every couple years
Democracy works if people do what they think is best for the country, not for themselves. It is not two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. And uninformed, ignorant people have no credibility for their opinions on policy, just because of how they feel.
In terms of being uninformed I’d say the pro Israel lobby tops that list. So much so that future historians and their students will find it hard to explain the support.
Democracy IS two wolves voting to eat the one sheep. The usual objection to that is to advocate some kind of "individual rights"-based "liberalism" instead. You can just admit you don't care much for either, and prefer some kind of oligarchy/aristocracy, instead of misrepresenting them.
This could be the basis of an ad to encourage voting. Show the wolves voting over how to allocate the sheep (we don't want to be gory, something like Claymation would be good). Then the punchline: "If you don't vote, you are the sheep!"
It is the strict definition of democracy, just as Bob is outvoted as one vote in 10 in lifeboat survivors (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers). But as a system of governing, no, that is a bad idea. It's simply self-interest, first and foremost, and do you really need government for that?
So democracy works when people vote not necessarily for what is best for them, but for the right thing to do, about which there can be legitimate disagreements.
There is not yet any perfect form of government discovered or invented.
A Kissinger-like policy of acting in "US interests," would not (and did not!) result in a lot of support for Israel, which is hated by oil-rich neighbors. Our support is floating on a raft of humanitarian interest. Without getting into a long recounting of the emergence of US support, Israel has always been upsetting to advisors and forced through over their objections by elected officials.
Fortunately, I guess, opinions on foreign policy don't matter as much since people in the US usually rate FP at the bottom of what they care about. This is why the Biden regime has largely been able to (correctly) support Israel to allow them to pursue their terror eradication goal, while the potential for more direct US involvement has constituted a credible threat to Hezbollah/Iran, keeping them to the periphery of the conflict. Much of the pro-Palestine movement is just an opportunity for "socially conscious" people to get pictures of themselves supporting The Current Thing on social media, thereby boosting their own social status, and is not representative of anything like an informed opinion.
Russia news. Russia welcomes Westerners who are willing to abandon liberal values, except if they are Evangelicals, because then they will be killed (in Ukraine) or imprisoned (in Russia). I don't link because it is all over Google. Are these people really stupid? Alienating the largest anti-liberal group in the West? This does not look like a coherent state. One cannot at the same time drain away Western conservatives and be murderously paranoid about everyone who might be an American agent...
Isn't the largest anti-liberal group in the West Roman Catholics? At least they seem to be the only ones who sometimes manage to get their countries to not be too liberal on abortion and divorce.
Russia lies about this. I was surprised how few people knew that the free world has far more religious freedom. It's also the more religious of the two sides including theocratic Iran. I thought it was one of those things we all learned in school. Ukraine sometimes flies over Russian Evangelicals to talk with American Evangelicals to impress this fact on them.
Anyway, if you want to leave the decadent US for a place where your dollar goes farther and people are more religious and traditional then there's much better options. Russia is a world leader in divorce and alcoholism. It has the same church attendance as Sweden. It also has a lot of crime and a life expectancy comparable to North Korea. You can argue that China's doing well but not Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc.
This is partly false (alcoholism) and partly misleading. Russian (and Ukrainian) life expectancy are very similar and very close to the world average. The murder rate (a proxy for the crime level as murders are harder to ignore) is similar to that of the US.
It's true that it's mostly secular but why invent things?
The WHO shows Russia as either the highest or second highest in alcohol addiction rate. It trades with Belarus though Hungary is creeping up close. It is not number one in alcohol consumption but that's not the claim.
The Russian murder rate is about 15% higher than the US which is still fairly significant. And its life expectancy at birth is about the same as North Korea, 73 years, vs 79 in the US.
Well, why did you choose North Korea rather than any other country having approximately the same (world average) life expectancy like Paraguay, Dominican Republic or Ukraine?
Russia is definitely one of heavy-drinking countries (breaking news!), I just think this data doesn't tell us whether it's "normal East European drinking" or "a world leader in alcoholism" on par with Hungary, of all places.
Because they're allies that border each other and both undemocratic. But if you want to compare them to Paraguay then go ahead.
The WHO statistics are based on people who have long term addictive behaviors, not on raw consumption, because the WHO is interested in alcoholism as a disease. By most measures Russia is unusually socially dysfunctional even compared to Eastern Europe. I don't really care whether a country drinks. Finland drinks a lot. Saudi Arabia drinks very little. But people who need treatment for alcoholism is unambiguously a social issue in a way that Italians drinking wine is not.
Alcoholism and per capita alcohol consumption are (naturally) correlated but not exactly the same. Russia has a high concentration of substance abusers of various types and alcohol is among them.
Again - a lot of people in Russia (and other ex-USSR states) were hit hard by USSR collapse, and turned to alcohol (and other substances)... but they largely dies out by mid-00
It's WHO data. And while you're right alcoholism rates declined after the late 1990s/2000s they still remain higher than pretty much everyone else. The main competitors are Belarus or Hungary. And looking at the latest data it does look like Russia's slipped into second behind Belarus and, if trends continue, might slip into third behind Hungary. But this is due to Hungary/Belarus going up rather than Russia going down. And they're all neck in neck anyway.
At a purely pragmatic level, persecuting Evangelicals is likely to increase US support for Ukraine.
But also: do you *really* want to incur the wrath of the kind of Evangelical that donates a Red Heifer to Israel for .. um ... Biblical prophetic reasons. Those guys mioht not have any qualms about nuking Russia into annihilation.,
My wife and I do IVF to do genetic testing (we need to) and we want a large family. Based on our experiences I suspect that the Dr isn’t trying hard enough to optimize for a large family. Anyone have any thoughts on how to go about optimizing the process to get more out of each retrieval, increase the chances of successful transfers etc..?
Feel free to reply or email me at iz8162k23 at gmail
Try and convince the doctor that yes, you really *do* want a large family and won't end up with frozen embryos that you then leave in storage forever because "eh, we changed our minds, one kid is enough" or that, if you end up with twins/triplets in the successful round of implantation, you won't go to court over "we wanted ONE baby not THREE".
Multiple births seem to be considered a risk, and the recommendation is "selective reduction":
"What can I do to reduce the risk of multiple births?
During a fertility treatment cycle when fertility drugs are used with timed intercourse or insemination, your doctor will monitor your cycle very carefully. The use of fertility medications makes it more likely that one or more eggs will be fertilized. However, if it appears that too many eggs are developing, your doctor may cancel your cycle and tell you not to have an insemination or intercourse to reduce or eliminate your risk of multiple births. During in vitro fertilization (IVF), the egg and sperm are joined (fertilized) in the laboratory. The resulting embryo (fertilized egg) is then placed into the womb (uterus). Multiple gestations are least likely when one embryo is placed in the womb. ASRM has published guidelines on the number of embryos to transfer when undergoing an IVF cycle. These guidelines can be found at www.asrm.org.
Some pregnancies may start as a multiple gestation but undergo what’s called a “spontaneous reduction”. This is when one of the pregnancies stops growing (miscarriage) and the other pregnancy continues normally. No treatment is needed when this occurs, and ultrasounds can determine if the remaining pregnancy is growing normally. In some cases, the risk of a multiple gestation is too great. A doctor may suggest that you consider a procedure called selective reduction. Selective reduction is a procedure to reduce the number of fetuses to one or two. Usually, the procedure is done after the risk of a miscarriage, but still early in the pregnancy to increase the chance of a healthy and successful pregnancy. Choosing to do this procedure is difficult. Individuals and couples who are thinking about this option should talk to their doctor and a counselor."
I suspect my dr is too conservative with this but Idk. We’re hopefully going to be working with an advocate\concierge of sorts going forward but all the info I can get is good as I’m sure they aren’t perfectly informed either
There may be some disadvantages of getting lots of eggs per cycle. You would need to check on that. It def uses up the woman's remaining eggs faster. But whether it reduces quality of eggs or is hard on the woman's system I don't know. I had IVF and only made about 4 eggs per cycle. Talked with other women who were making a dozen or so per cycle, and nobody seemed worried about that. You will probably also have speak up to the doctor and tell him your preferences. If there are some disadvantages to doing it the way you want to, let him explain that. Then, if you decide that the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages, just state clearly that you understand the pros and cons, but have some unusual priorities and would like treatment to be carried out in the way you prefer, rather than the usual way. Many docs would be OK with that, so long as what you're proposing isn't actually dangerous for the woman. Others, however, are not able to see you as in informed consumer of their services. But to be heard even by the responsive ones you have to speak up really loudly and clearly (but in a polite friendly way).
It is probably easier for all docs to do their jobs if their patients accept the role of compliant children, so docs give subtle cues that that is what they prefer. However, into every life a little rain must fall, and there are situations where active patient involvement complicates the docs life and slows them down, but leads to a better outcome. I would recommend speaking up despite the cues that smiling compliance is preferred. You can start with something not a bit argumentative, something like "we've been thinking things over and would like to ask what is done in situations where people would like to have a large family. Are there adjustments that favor that outcome?" And then ask about pros and cons of the adjustments. You have to be willing to say things that defy the cues and make things awkward. Obviously if the doctor says, "I never do that, if you want someone who will then go elsewhere," then there's no point in continuing. But most are not that rigid.
Could be 'Ozempic undoes the specific toxic effects of the modern environment', those being large amounts of calories in the form of ultraprocessed food and lack of exercise, and those toxic effects including, but not limited to, obesity.
I'm skeptical that brainwashing is a useful concept on average - I mean the chance that you or anyone you know has been brainwashed or will be brainwashed is low enough to consider other options first: horses not zebras.
External evidence for brainwashing [alternative explanation]:
- Membership of a niche political or religious organisation [the English speaking world prizes such groups highly in its history and culture, even if this or that group is cringe]
- Devotion to a charismatic leader [also cringe, but also the human condition - ancestor worship; monarchism; great man theory of history; fan culture]
- Refusal to engage in reasoned argument [an idea can be useful X% of the time and still break down the rest of the time. Many people find this embarrassing and don't like talking about it]
- breaks off contact with people outside the organisation [half-empty: teenage angst or mid-life crisis. Half-full: having constantly to defend your treasured imperfect idea to friends and family is exhausting, even if they are right that doesn't stop them being assholes about it, cutting off may be rational]
- sudden change in personality [half-empty: teenage angst or midlife crisis; half-full: “find yourself” is a trope but personality is a compromise, encountering a transformative idea can make a person e.g less agreeable and that is a good thing if they were too agreeable previously]
People delude themselves into believing ridiculous nonsense all the time, based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Human belief systems are far more of a social construct than anything else. So the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low. But there are clearly psychological mechanisms to get people to believe in obvious nonsense, and someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
Having an idea that works less than 100% of the time seems pretty universal! And if culture is brainwashing then we don't have a word for what real cults do and that seems a shame.
I think you left off most of the traits that distinguish cults from people being raised in a culture that carries with it a few assumptions about the world. Such as,
- Sleep deprivation.
- Replacement of normal activities with ideological reinforcement.
- Threat of isolation from group for deviation made the subject of continual, active concern.
- Near-term promises of an apocalypse or great change, intended to promote near-term thinking.
There is also the matter of degree or quantity. Threats of isolation for deviance are universal, but not a continual, active threat for very small deviations or lack of devotion.
I don't deny there really are cults that really do brainwash - I deny that the next crazy person you meet on the Internet has been brainwashed (on average).
This community really loves truth. Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
Basically investigate an issue thoroughly or shut up about it. But "truthbombing" is not helpful.
Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns. People just throwing 14/50 out (purported US racial crime stats) are really not helping anyone to understand this well. It is better if they shut up.
Understand that we are in a new historic situation. The legacy media obsessing about listening to both sides can be sometimes ridiculous but handles this kind of situation really well. Instagram memes do not. In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
No it doesnt, its probabilistic for a reason
>Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns.
>I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
what if PURELY HYPOTHETICALLY, we lived in a system when you were accused of a crime you got to say your side of the story before a judgement was ruled; and maybe imagine "rights" such as something about everyone saying what they wanted
Your link goes to an assertion that being aware of a stereotype, even when the stereotype is true, can cause people to make worse decisions. And of course, that is possible, if the person has a poor understanding of probability. But that certainly doesn't go against Bayesianism. In fact it is the opposite! The point of Bayesianism is to help make an accurate assessment in the context of numerous sources of information, even if many are somewhat inconclusive.
What you are saying is pretty old and trite: that we should promote the well-intentioned lie in the hope of attaining a happier future. What you neglect is that people have memory and you can only go to that well so many times before it dries up. Maybe if people were more aware of the 14/50 statistic (it's for homicides collated by the FBI and I believe it's gotten worse over the last few years; "purported" is an adjective with little justification) they might be less eager to leap to simplistic explanations of the statistics of fatal interactions with police - but I don't see you complaining about *those* errors.
Or is your quibble just with statements made in isolation? But they never are; even if someone just posts "14/50", they are posting it in a context of implied assertions, some of which may well be false, and it is right to challenge those. But by that token, your argument also provides only a small part of the picture...
What makes you think this community loves truth? I'd say that's a false statement right off the bat. Most of the interactions on these threads seem to be people arguing their opinions without any supporting data.
I'd say it's better than most places for discussing things, but not great. Things weighing in favor of people being responsive when they hear the case for an unfamiliar truth is that people are are less identified with groups united by common views; and are smart and have trained minds, so can understand complex arguments and data. Things weighing against are that many people are very identified with their smarts and erudition, and so experience attacks on things they believe as attacks on them; many people are not good listeners; and many people are not good introspectionists, so are much less likely to be consciously aware that they are rejecting an idea because of wounded vanity.
The best set-up I ever heard about for fruitful idea exchange was the Yale Political Union, who had (and may still have -- I don't know) the idea that all debaters could expect to be "broken" in some debate, i.e. to say at some point, "I have no rebuttals for your main argument. You have convinced me you are right." Most debaters broke others and were broken from time to time, and having some of each on their record earned people respect.
Nothing drives soi-disant rationalists crazier than someone who swamps their preconceived notions with contrary data. I hang out here for those moments, and I cherish them. Can you provide a link to the exchange? ;-)
So in the abstract, I think it's worth refining the concept of "true" into three variants.
* illustrative = correspondence between signifier and signified
* faithful = correspondence between signified and referent
* factual = correspondence between signifier and referent
In the ivory tower, "factual" (i.e. "truth" being a property of whether propositions are descriptive of reality) tends to be privileged over the others. But what's often more important is "faithfullness" (i.e. whether your mental model is faithful to reality). Because mental-models (not blobs of ink) are what pay the rent.
So when I hear
> Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
my initial reaction is: "focusing on statements over models is a red-herring to begin with". E.g. this is the issue with statements like "dihydrogen monoxide is a key component of acid rain". Technically correct, but pragmatically misleading for those who slept through chemistry class.
----
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
To reiterate, I think it's a mistake to privilege statements over models. E.g. copper is a micronutrient. Copper is needed for a healthy diet, but you can't just eat copper ingots in isolation and expect to live very long. Likewise, a proposition is often just a single node in a bayesian network. That node might be *needed* to achieve 100% accuracy. But of course it's not *sufficient* to achieve 100% accuracy. And there's no guarantee that adding that particular node to the model will result in a monotonic increase in accuracy, on the margin. This is what Peter is really getting at, when he talks about conditionalization.
----
Yes, epistemology is hard work. No royal road. Dunning Kruger. Facts are cheaper than models. Etc. So on the individual level, I'd agree that "deep dive or stfu" is probably a good heuristic. That being said,
> Understand that we are in a new historic situation.
> In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
As I understand, no actually, we're in an old historical situation. The Pull Request [0] tells me (don't remember where exactly, but I'll look if asked) that Ben Franklin, et al would have felt right at home with modern shitposters on twitter. It's the post-WWII era that's unique in the quality of its information environent. The theories I've heard on why include: A) market segmentation was not as advanced; B) government regulation. I wish I could comment more on this, but I don't really understand it that well myself at the moment.
The idea "freedom of speech" was predicated on the idea that the media environment is a market, and bad ideas would lose to their competition. So an advocate for freedom of speech would probably counter that the best counter to "truthbombing about the 13%" is for others to advocate for the contrary position. Personally, I have some reservations about why this might not always be the case, which I find hard to articulate [1] at the moment. But I think it's worth acknowledging that the original solution was to have the racists, the antiracists, and any other willing contenders, to duke it out in an epistemic battle royale. Rather than to expect one's ideological rivals to cultivate a sense of discipline and rigor.
A) the idea that "truth always wins" seems sort of optimistic to me. I do think truth tends to win the long-run. But, as the saying goes: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". I think falsehoods can be very effective in the short-term/medium-term.
B) I think the market incentives for falsehood can be stronger than the market incentives for verisimilitude, even in the long-term, if the falsehoods are loadbearing components of the simulacrum.
The problem with info hazards in the real world is that they are usually highly contextual: a fact that might challenge one person's deeply held incorrect belief can push another further down the road of confirmation bias. Free speech is a concern because people who are challenged by a true fact can claim to just be preventing confirmation bias and protecting everyone from true but misleading info and thus suppress it. Allowing only true information is the worst solution, except for all the others.
Following on from the interesting "slave/master morality" discussion I had with Concerned Citizen in the previous thread, I've now written a more sustained criticism of Nietzsche's work:
As well as criticising his idea, I try to work through the political implications for us. Basically, the master/slave thing is lurking in the background of the Culture War, even when not explicitly invoked -- so dissolving it makes the whole debate look a lot less intractable (at least to me).
Even if you have no interest in Nietzsche, please take a look at Section 4, which is the politically juicy part (but fairly short and simple).
Does anyone know anything about mold-related respiratory issues? I’ve been having intermittent breathing issues for the past year, which I have finally, (nearly) conclusively linked to mold exposure. I’ve seen doctors for this a few times, but they have tended to focus on the wrong things, and I have yet to actually be diagnosed with anything.
The problem started with my car: within a week or so of getting it back from a body shop (where it had sat idle for two months last summer) I started having symptoms while driving it and for some time afterwards. Once I figured this out I mostly stopped driving it, but the symptoms persisted intermittently for weeks afterwards, slowly fading in frequency and intensity. For the next several months I made repeated attempts to clean the car (not knowing what exactly was responsible), only to have the symptoms return at full intensity if I tried driving it again. In December I discovered mold growing under the seats, which I assumed was responsible, but my best efforts to clean it still didn’t render it safe to drive. We ultimately just got rid of the car, but that didn’t solve the problem: I had several recurrences of high-intensity symptoms in the months following (which led me to doubt the mold had been responsible), before gradually returning to something like normalcy during the middle of the summer. Then, towards the end of July, I started gradually having symptoms return in my apartment. I’ve managed to play whack-a-mold with several clusters–one of which I identified conclusively, dispelling my remaining doubts as to the cause–and intend to scour the apartment thoroughly, but that won’t happen instantly.
The major symptoms have been aching lungs, shortness of breath (sometimes extreme but generally short-lived) and a strange, altered-state-of-consciousness feeling that’s a little like (but not exactly like) dizziness, lightheadedness or being high. Each of these differs in its pattern of presentation, and they don’t necessarily occur all at the same time. There’s a long list of other possible minor symptoms, but none of them have the same combination of consistency, frequency and unusualness as those three. My spouse has had exactly none of these issues despite driving the same car (far more than I did after the trouble started) and living in the same apartment, which suggests that it’s an allergic or other autoimmune problem.
The single most helpful thing to have right now would be something to take to my doctor to start rending this problem legible and hopefully treatable: a test or a specialist referral I could request, or something like that. To keep this from getting to novel length. I’ll write a separate comment in reply to this one detailing what tests I’ve already had done, and a few relevant pieces of medical history.
The next most useful thing to have would be any non-medical strategies for mitigating the problem. I’m doing my best to both avoid affected areas and to clean proactively, but neither are easy when I usually can’t tell there’s a problem somewhere until it starts making me sick.
And if anyone has similar experiences to share, I’d be happy to hear about them, even if they don’t contain any actionable advice.
Finally, I’ve tried to strike a balance between brevity and describing the situation, but I could write many times more than this on the details of the symptoms, circumstances and sequence of events. If there’s anything you want to hear more detail about, by all means ask.
I don't know anything about this, but I came across this chronic illness programme focussed on nervous system regulation: https://retrainingthebrain.com/
If you scroll down, a couple of their physician endorsements mention mold-related illness.
I came across the programme linked to by this person who used it to recover from ME: https://alexmeeka.com/about/
I'm 37, male, in generally active and in good health (though significantly overweight). The one medication I take regularly medication is extended-release methylphenidate for ADHD (Biphentin here in Canada, better known as Ritalin in the U.S.). I started taking it four or five months before the trouble started and stepped up to a much higher dose (which pushed it from "not really working" to "working quite well") about two months prior. I've had COVID once, at the very end of 2022; I was up-to-date on vaccinations and recovered within a few days: I didn't have any lingering effects that would indicate long-COVID in the 8 months between then and the start of my breathing issues.
I'd been totally out of shape at the start of 2023, but made a serious effort to get more exercise starting in March or early April. When I moved to the higher Biphentin dose in June I stepped these efforts up further, as I discovered the medication worked more reliably on days when I'd exercise. I still wasn't in what I'd consider good shape by the time the issues began, but I was well on my way there: at the beginning of the month I'd gone on vacation and spent a week hiking nearly every day, something I'd never have managed a year earlier. I've been very consistent in keeping up with exercise in the year since, though breathing issues have sometimes limited what I can do, and gains have come much slower than in the past.
When the breathing issues started I had a couple of appointments with my GP, who ordered some blood tests, an ECG, none of which returned anything unusual. His only other suggestion was that the Biphentin could be responsible. I was highly skeptical because the timing didn't match well, but went down to a lower dose for a while, with no obvious effect on the issues. I didn't seek medical help for months after, believing I had the problem in-hand (since it was then confined to my car). When it started to crop up elsewhere in March, I booked an appointment with a doctor at the health center at my university (I don't think much of my GP, and was happy to realize I had a quick alternative). She ordered more blood work, another ECG and a chest x-ray. Blood work came back normal other than a slightly-elevated white blood cell count. ECG showed a minor irregularity, which got me referred to a cardiologist, which seems to have been a dead-end. She also ordered a spirometry test: unfortunately the wait time was 1-2 months and there was no way to ensure the test occurred on a day when I was significantly symptomatic: I ended up having mild shortness of breath that day but nothing else. The test came back normal.
And that's the extent of it. Other than the spirometry (which was unfortunately timed) I don't feel like any of the tests I had were especially suited to detect the problems I'm actually having, but I don't especially know what to request instead or how to pursue this further. I have an appointment with the university doctor on Friday, and I will at least be able to tell her pretty definitely that the mold is the cause; she was dubious before, when the evidence was, admittedly, much more ambiguous.
Not to sound all Fat Person Complaining (because that is precisely what I am going to do), but it could be that, as you say you are overweight and out of shape/getting back into shape, that the doctor(s) consider "well duh, of course you're breathless, you're fat - lose the tubbiness, you'll breathe better".
It's often hard to get concerns taken seriously when the doctor is looking at the 'obvious' answer - your bloodwork came back okay so it's not mould spores, it's because you're fat (insert saw about 'hoofbeats and zebras' here).
If you're going to pursue this, you really do need to have a lot of evidence about yes, I am exposed to mould, no it's not allergies, etc.
It's a real concern, though I think I've been lucky enough to avoid most of it in this case. It probably helps that by pure coincidence, the day I had my first appointment with the university doctor I also had probably the single worst shortness of breath event I've had to date. I usually don't notice it unless I'm doing something that involves at least mild exertion, but she said I was audibly gasping for breath *while talking to her* (which I actually *hadn't* noticed, thanks ADHD hyperfocus). Anyhow, she did make a bit of a comment on my weight, but clearly didn't regard it has the whole problem. And she did prescribe me an inhaler, which is (one presumes) not intended as merely a treatment for Being Fat.
The annoying line I've got instead, from both doctors, is "maybe it's anxiety." Setting aside all the reasons I think that's exceedingly unlikely, it would still be an unbelievably stupid place to *start.* Anxiety would be pretty much the best-case-scenario: it's not going to cause any long-term damage to my lungs, and the optimal treatment might well be to just ignore it. But it's also extremely difficult to falsify: there's no test that will conclusively rule out anxiety the way you can rule out infection or allergies or anything else. I've tried to push back against that suggestion as firmly as I can without crossing the line into coming across as "crazy person loudly insisting they're not crazy."
Part of all that is my own fault, too. The times when I've sought medical help have specifically been the times when I felt like I didn't know what was going on. In December I was sure (correctly, as it turns out) that it was the mold in my car; I didn't see any reason to involve a doctor again because I was sure I could handle it myself. Only when stuff happened to make me doubt that conclusion did I go seek out a doctor again; this means I didn't make a point of impressing on her quite how strong the evidence for "it's the mold, damn it" really was (and even, doubts aside, it was really pretty strong). So when I mentioned it as the most likely possibility she said "well, maybe" and went on to focus on other things.
In hindsight, I should have been more proactive about looking for more info even when I *was* pretty sure it was the mold. Even when I finish getting my apartment clean, I'm sure this isn't the last time I'll have to deal with this, and I want as much information and as many weapons as I can: I should have had that mindset from the start. Regardless, I do wish the doctors had taken me more seriously. Which is the refrain of every Fat Person Complaining ever. :-)
See a respiratory physician and consider getting a CT scan of your lungs. There are various types of interstitial lung disease that could explain these symptoms, many triggered by external allergens such as mold (see - extrinsic allergic alveolitis)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the suppression of the self, in the context of meditation. So I was thinking about this during a recent debate on race. And it occurred to me that one form of white privilege, and in particular white male privilege, is that it appears that we have an easier time detaching ourselves from our identity. If someone says something mean about white males, my visceral emotional response is rather low. And so is my visceral emotional response about most of my identity. I know not everyone is the same. But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity. If you don’t like me because of how I look or where I come from, then “I” must be real and different than you. So while I think that identity politics are objectively bad, and that enlightened people would benefit from disassociating themselves from their various identities in most cases, I can also see why this would be easier to do, as in requiring less mental stamina, for a non-marginalized group. In this context I’m talking about white privilege not as a systemic advantage of itself (I’m more likely to be promoted just because I’m white) but as an intrinsic advantage (I can reason with less identity bias), even if the latter is a second order effect from the former.
That's an interesting choice of words; I would have expected something more like "dissolution of the self". That would take the perspective that what we call the "self" is an illusion.
> But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity.
I think you're taking small population-level differences and blowing them up into absolutes. Even if you've correctly identified a general trend, you shouldn't assume that every person you encounter is an example of that trend, especially in places where people are already pre-selected for being outliers in other dimensions.
I often feel something like this. Let's take a historic look. National, ethnic and religious identities used to be big. Then after WW2 Sartre and other existentialists came up with this idea that existing-as-something is unauthentic. This has been rather explicitly about Nazis making a big deal out of national-racial identity. And then Alan Watts and hippie buddhism happened and so on. Anyway by the 1970's there was this type of a completely freely floating individual who does not need to belong to anywhere, with Frank Zappa a typical example.
And then at some point people realized that this works for white men and not so well for everybody else, partially because everybody else still treats them according to their perceived identity, partially because they actually need that identity as a sort of a group-therapy-safe-space way.
What you call privilege I call virtue. I'm not sure how true your theory is, but I don't think it's productive to make excuses for undesirable tendencies.
If I had to guess, it's personal insecurity in a social context where resentment is the order of the day.
Another possible reason for not being very distressed by criticism and mockery of your demographic group is not identifying with it very powerfully. I am a woman, but have never felt much personal rage in response to screeds about unfair treatment of women, sexism, etc. I think it's because I don't feel much bond with other members of my gender. I feel a strong bond with female friends, of course, but not with womanhood as a whole. In general, I tend not to from bonds with groups. I don't know why -- something to do with not being very social in general I think. Anyhow, I don't know whether any of this applies to you, but it's another route by which someone can end up relatively impervious to attacks on one's demographic.
Hypothesis: everyone who generally supports a major party in US politics believes the other party to be more authoritarian. Americans, with the exception of Curtis Yarvin, don't like authoritarianism and identify with the party they perceive to be more freedom loving. Or does anyone reading this believe the party they support is more authoritarian than the other side?
I think of both parties as theEnemyOfFreedom(TM), (albeit they have different mixes of the chains in which they would bind us) so I don't support either one.
Paradoxically, I think the bugman would willingly describe himself simultaneously as both an authoritarian and a freedomphile. To paraphrase his own words: "Neon-Redox is to Libertarianism as Relativity is to Newtonian Physics". Or perhaps it would be more helpful to describe his salespitch as "small government, but with strong state-capacity". And he speaks rather highly of Rothbard, Von Mises, etc (but also Friedrich List).
Good point. I shouldn't have made an exception for him. He seems to believe democracy is more authoritarian than monarchy. He's just another freedom loving American like the rest of us but with different perceptions.
People I like, who tell me to do things I already want to do, aren't authoritarian! It's only authoritarian when it comes from people I dislike, or people who want me to do something I don't want to do.
I'm not American but every party I have voted for has at least some authoritarian tendencies. I don't believe liberty is the highest good, so I'm okay with that, but even if I did, it's reasonable to trade off authoritarian tendencies in one area against another. Murray Rothbard voted Democrat sometimes because they were more anti-war, even though he was a libertarian.
I vote party A more often than party B and think party A is more authoritarian (thats not why i vote for them) maybe regularly voting for both disqualifies me here.
*NYC People*: We want to host a weekly AI group to discuss papers, new developments, etc. Here's a form to gauge people's availability: https://whenisgood.net/5mffk8h - I'm assuming this would be a weekly thing, so just mark whatever time slots you'd expect to be available on a weekly basis. Time zone is EST.
My personal vote is we meet in person + host a camera feed that runs on Zoom. In-person chats are just so much more fruitful in my experience.
It's not just a matter of SF. I'd call it "narrative bias". Stories/narratives in general are systematically biased by their very nature and this tends to bias the expectations of anyone who isn't thrust in contact with the ground reality data of the relevant question.
Ways that stories are biased include
* Everything important is done by a small number of memorable characters
* Everything important happens due to the intentional actions of the heroes and villains or at the very least is an identifiable consequence of the character flaws/virtues of said characters.
* The audience already knows that everything will work out in the end. And also usually knows a lot more about the world than the characters should know.
* The audience also knows everything mentioned in the story is relevant to the story, which greatly constraints what will happen next.
* The world operates at the fidelity of simulation by one person with no special expertise
* No matter what happens, the world and people have to be similar to the modern day audience so they can identify with the story
And of course it goes on and on.
One of the greatest correctives of this is to read stories about real life. For example, I read a lot about WW2 and I was struck over and over by how accounts of war are never remotely like fiction. Not just in technical details but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless. This often even bleeds through in movies that are *based* on real life stories, though the filmwriters often take significant liberties in order to fight this and make the story more story-like.
Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual. It is not bad epistemology. It is people watching films. Note: popular, not good. It is people watching the rather lowbrow or maybe youth-targeting kinds of films. The kinds with Lex Luthor kinds of characters. If you rather watch Space Odyssey the result will be different, but ultimately still too story-like.
Another thing is that it really matters who is accusing whom. I distinctly remember the first Star Wars reboots, early 2000s, when Palpatine was conspiring to overthrow the republic, and people were looking at each other funny and gulped. They did not say so, but they thought about Bush/Cheney. The whole kind of thing sounded believable for a moment, even when not very probable. Of course that was not a very high brow movie either. Higher brow movies avoid these very obviously evil characters and show someone more conflicted.
Let's call this the Popcorn Theory of making sense of the world.
>Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual.
This is sometimes a problem with "based on a true story" movies. If it was completely fiction, the script writer could just make up something dramatically appropriate. But, they are constrained by what actually did happen...
(Of course, "based on a true story" movies contain much that is made up)
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how writers handle this.
One notable case is Riphagen: The Untouchable. As the name suggests, in real life the villain got away scott free. The movie solves this by a) making him seem like a hero at first and b) once that is revealed, introducing a completely fictional sympathetic character trying to bring him to justice. Said character eventually manages to track him down and gets into a dramatic confrontation, at which point the villain makes a speech, kills him, and drives away.
> but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless.
That's something that bugs me about a lot of self-help stuff. Shit happens. Maybe our brains process it through narrative, but that's a limitation that we need to work around. "Crafting a personal narrative" is an exercise in hubris and narcissistic naval gazing.
Ah, yes, personal brands. Self as commodity.. Yecch to all of it. People who in midlife are feeling a certain loss of enthusiasm for self might consider viewing this change as a developmental step -- increased maturity, decreased self-centeredness. If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self. "Crafting personal narratives," OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .." Back when there were no dating apps, but people used to advertise for dates in the Personals part of the Classifieds, I was once browsing the personals in the Village Voice and flinching at all the glowing personal narratives on display. Then I came to this guy: "Fat dirty depressed writer seeks woman who can stand him." If I had been someone capable of answering a date ad, I would have responded to that guy.
> If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self.
LOL! Good point. Come to think of it, plastic psychosurgery reminds me of the line from the original Planet of the Apes: "You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!"
>OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .."
Conjures up an image of taking an advertisement down into Doctor Frankenstein's lab, and when the lightening bolt flows through the cardboard cut-out: "It's alive!" (well, sort-of...).
Just tried googling the phrase "craft personal narrative," and there sure were a lot of hits. Sounds like its about as popular as Brazilion butt lifts.
That's why I asked whether there were actual *non-online circles* where this is a thing. I've never heard anyone say it in real life (and for that matter, never heard of it online until right now).
A small, family-owned business, High Sierra Showerheads, would love your votes for their product in a manufacturing association's contest for the Coolest Thing Made in California.
They make water- and energy-saving shower heads that use a unique nozzle design; this product also incorporates a truly fogless mirror.
Voting takes 2 clicks and 10 seconds max: the first to get to a web page, the other to click on a "VOTE NOW" button. (You won't be asked for your email address or any other info to vote.) Thanks!
Here's the direct link to the voting page, on a California manufacturing association's website:
Update: great points by both Al Quinn and Arrk Mindmaster, in replies below!
The "details for anyone interested" web page answers these questions, but clearly there's benefit in describing the 'ask' more fully in this post, as well!
High Sierra Showerheads is a small business in the California mountains. For over a decade, they've made water- and energy-saving shower heads using a globally-unique nozzle design that splits and collides water streams. They have customers like Ohio State and the US Air Force Academy, and their products are best picks by the likes of CNET and CNN Underscored.
High Sierra's owner/founder, David Malcolm, created a design for a truly fogless mirror, fully integrated into a shower head. This is the product entered in the current contest. We'd love to see it become more widely known; it's a great tool for shaving and many other beauty or health needs in the shower!
This contest is for the Coolest Thing Made in California, sponsored by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association (CMTA). This is the second year of this contest, which spotlights great products built in California, with the goal of publicizing and supporting manufacturing in California and the USA.
This year, there are 158 entrants. The contest has multiple rounds; the 16 products with the most votes in the initial round will go on to the next round. Last year, a Tesla SUV was the winner. And a different product made by High Sierra Showerheads, their Half Dome rain shower head, also reached the Top 16 last year.
What is the point of these "contests"? Getting randos to click on something with no understanding for you to "win" is such a depressing thought. Just hire some people on Mechanical Turk.
Thanks for this super-helpful feedback, Al. I've added info to my original post above that I'm hoping will help answer this question. And I'll definitely put more info into these posts if I ever do this again!
Nothing really here to make me want to click. Is the only enticement to support a small, family-owned business I don't even know the name of, let alone what they do. Yes, it's a small amount of effort, but my internet security instincts also take over and make me not want to click strange links.
I recommend you describe the product, and what voting for it will help win, so I know why it would help and what it would help with.
Thanks so much, Arrk Mindmaster, for this incredibly helpful feedback. I tend to err on the side of verbosity, so in this post I veered too far into the terse side.
I've added more info that I'm hoping will make this clearer!
Weird fragment from today's New York Times summary, with emphasis added to one word:
>“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
>This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, _populist_, progressive patriot.
Haven't they been using "populist" as a term of derision, close to a slur, for years? And yet, here they are using it either neutrally or positively??? Is all the previous use being flushed down the memory hole this week? Usually they use it to mean something a large fraction of the electorate likes, but which isn't enough to the left for the Times's taste. This has the flavor of "we were always at war with East Asia"...
"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time. I'm not sure "populist" by itself has the same connotation. I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
>I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Admittedly I didn't follow Sanders's campaign closely, so I probably missed that...
>"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time.
Presumably by the left and sort-of kind-of center-left (including the non-Fox media)? Do you happen to remember if Fox used "left-wing populist" as a term of derision for Sanders?
I feel the need to plug "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", a musical about our most (in)famously populist President, from the good old days of the W. Bush administration. The first song is called "Populism, Yea Yea", and a chorus from a later song is:
> Sometimes, you have to take the initiative
> Sometimes, your whole family dies of cholera
> Sometimes, you have to make your own story
> Sometimes, you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck
Many Thanks! I'd heard of Jackson, but hadn't known of the musical about him. I tend to think of Jackson as a predecessor to General Masaharu (Bataan Death March) Homma.
It could just be accurate. Price controls are a populist measure, and so are subsidies for consumers. So is a chant at a rally. "It worked once," I can imagine the campaign managers thinking.
I have rather the same feeling as Jeffrey; political rallies where the candidate flies the flag and their proposals are described as "populist" were described in terms that went as far as "this is a threat to democracy!" because something something strongman il duce fascism something something.
Seems that if it's a strong woman, that makes it all okay. See also the crafting of Walz as "now this is a *real* guy who is a veteran and is a white Mid-western man and is down home and fits all the stereotypes, but now we *like* that kind of thing".
Oh, well: we have always supported Mom and apple pie, right?
It would be okay if it was anyone from the right party, because the majority of newspapers are, and have always been, "party papers." It's a little unnatural to see the Times reveal it.
I shouldn't be so surprised, politics and indeed partisanship have always been like this. "These are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others!"
Many Thanks! It still feels weird to me to see the spin on this reverse so suddenly.
>Price controls are a populist measure
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch. Yeah, in the sense of both popular, and anti-elitist (in the _unfortunate_ sense of: Economists have _studied_ this, and have actual knowledge of what goes wrong, and the general public doesn't know/remember this, and Harris is (actively?) ignoring specialist knowledge. This isn't a good-for-the-99%, bad-for-the-1% antielitism. :-( )
I wouldn't worry too much, politics is a machine for turning promises into air. I also doubt the other candidate would really bring back public hangings.
I agree that all the debt forgiveness etc. etc. are campaign promises, which are on a par with "be a good child and Santa will bring you a present", except you are more likely to get something from Santa.
> The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her.... culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month
And that was before the term "coconutpilled" was even invented.
Anyway populism is cool now, and Democrats chant "USA USA" at rallies, and it has always been this way, quit misremembering.
I think "populist" has always been neutral-ish, at least in my parlance. It refers to a platform or candidate that builds its platform and power by (charitably) appealing to the people, rather than by ingratiating itself with the elite, or (uncharitably) by debasing itself before the whims of the lowest-common-denominator Joe Schmoe without regard for what's actually good policy.
I don't think there's anything inconsistent about liking some populists and disliking others. Trump is a populist on the right; Bernie is a populist on the left. Romney is a non-populist on the right; Hillary is a non-populist on the left.
I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
It's been used to describe anyone with more restrictionist views on immigration/migrants that are more closely aligned with public opinion. Orban, Meloni, PiS etc etc. And it's been deemed deeply negative by the West's thought leaders since migration is one of the contemporary left's sacred cows.
>I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
Could be, though I've also seen the Times use it to describe many politicians that it dislikes, typically in Europe as well as the USA, e.g. Viktor Orban.
The government has made it clear they would rather sleepwalk into a sectarian, fractured society than try to police the scary parts of the population.
The arrests and media crackdowns are happening for one reason only: to signal to the aboriginal British that they cannot get away with the same tactics that minority or politically favoured groups are allowed to use to influence policy.
A while ago I argued with someone on here who smugly told me that if a gang of thugs wants to burn down my business, the only moral thing to do is let them go right ahead and hope I can eventually claim on the insurance afterwards.
Those are the rules for me, a white British man. If instead you're a Muslim and you believe a gang of Far Right are coming to burn down your mosque, you're allowed to form gangs of your own and roam the streets wielding machetes, which the police won't take off you and the media will call "mostly peaceful" for a few moments before once again talking about the Far Right.
A lot of people right now are holding that I would be in the wrong yet the Muslims are in the right. There are all sorts of fine distinctions they can reach for to justify this - distinctions that need not necessarily be coherent with each other, or still apply tomorrow when talking about a different case.
Their *motivation* for rushing to find these distinctions is that the organised, motivated and coordinated Muslim communities are *not to be crossed*, but I can be without consequence.
People unconsciously assume that things will stay as they are. They watch the fuel gauge falling and note that yes that's theoretically a concern, but they cannot viscerally imagine that the car will actually stop, because the car has always been running.
When the teacher is weak and unauthoritative, de facto control of the class reverts to the rowdiest group of kids. Playground rules don't work on the basis of universal principles, it's about who has the strength and the numbers and the will to impose their desires on others. The modern white British do not have these things.
We've just had an election, so it's five years before anyone in power next has to pretend to give a shit about people's opinions. The power of media and government "nudge psychology" programs will eventually sap the British people of any will to coordinate, while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
But if it wasn't well-documented, it would still be a safe assumption that it happened. Which is true everywhere. Which means that no one is aboriginal.
Surely the term is used to connote some kind of inherited ownership, and the line you draw it totally arbitrary. What's the point of the concept "aboriginal" again?
Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me. For example, further down Turtle advocates material by Tommy Robinson. He was banned from Twitter for years for his calls for violence before Musk took over, he was co-founder of the "English Defense League", some members of which actively planned terrorist attacks (though it is unclear how much Robinson knew about that or approved that), and he has served four prison terms.
For me, your reply sounds too metaphorical and too unspecific to be believable. You mention a previous conversation here on ACX. Could you provide a link so that I can check out the conversation?
This immediate recourse to character assassination is a tactic I wish more people would spot and hold in contempt. Tommy Robinson is uncouth, therefore the English have no legitimate grievances and in fact Harehills didn't happen at all?
Horror at the idea of others accessing out-of-bubble source material is another thing I have little respect for, and have seen time and time again from people who fervently believe themselves to be reasonable intellectuals.
The game plan is always: 1: sound like a smart person, 2: raise uncertainty and reasonable doubt so the other guy looks like less of a smart person than you, 3: your work is done when people are no longer talking about the original issue.
The midwit version is very similar, but replace "be smart and reasonable" with gotchas, tribal scorn and character attacks.
I have no idea when that previous conversation was. It was an Open Thread, the thread starter was asking a hypothetical about Kyle Rittenhouse and the guy was called NobodySpecial or NobodysPerfect or something like that.
There is a difference between out-of-bubble source material and source material from an extremist. I was willing to look into your conversation, but I very much doubt that the video is worth my time.
And after finding out that the video is 2 hours, sorry, no way. If you have a good summary, you can point me to that.
- A video clip went viral on UK social media showing a white schoolboy tackling a Syrian schoolboy and pouring a bottle of water on his face
- Prominent newscasters including Piers Morgan and Jeremy Vine immediately condemned it as a racist, despicable attack that has no place in the UK
- Theresa May (the PM at the time) mentioned it in a speech
- The white schoolboy faced a torrent of abuse on social media and people threatening his family in real life. He dropped out of school and attempted suicide
- Someone alerted Tommy that there was more to the story and the Syrian schoolboy had a history of violence against the girls in the class
- He went to the school to investigate
- He found that many of the teachers had been paid not to speak to any press
- Of the ones who were willing to speak to him, they unanimously agreed that the Syrian schoolboy was violent against girls and smaller boys, lied frequently, and had been subject to more than 100 school disciplinary actions
- In contrast, the white schoolboy was a "good boy" with a "strong sense of justice"
- The attack had been motivated by the Syrian schoolboy threatening to rape the white schoolboy's younger sister
- Another schoolgirl told him that the Syrian schoolboy had hit her with a hockey stick, viciously, with her back turned, that had led to chronic pain
- This context got absolutely no mention in the media, almost like they had orders from the top to portray things a certain way
- When Tommy went public with the story, he was promptly sued for libel by the Syrian schoolboy's family
- His family was subsequently targeted and his 11 year old son got death threats
- When the case went to court, the judge threw out all the evidence from the numerous school kids who gave evidence in favour of Tommy, siding with the Syrian schoolboy (who, again, had several school disciplinary actions against him for lying.) His reasoning was "People lie for all sorts of reasons, and they may lie for no reason at all."
- The press failed to report on any of this, in fact they left the courtroom when the other school kids were giving evidence (if you Google the story in the press, you will find a few headlines like "Far right activist Tommy Robinson loses court case for libel")
- He was subsequently bankrupted for 1.6 million pounds
- He had to divorce his wife because she was being targeted
Actually, him showing the video at all is illegal in the UK. The current spate of riots were triggered, partly by the Southport attacks, but partly because he held a huge rally the week prior where he showed the video and was immediately arrested on suspicion of "terrorism." (They later let him go and last I heard he was in Canada giving an interview to Jordan Peterson.)
The target of Robinson’s libel was a fifteen year old schoolboy. The Court wrote: “As was entirely predictable, the Claimant then became the target of abuse which ultimately led to him and his family having to leave their home, and the Claimant to have to abandon his education. The Defendant is responsible for this harm, some of the scars of which, particularly the impact on the Claimant’s education, are likely last for many years, if not a lifetime.”
Robinson attempts to portray himself as a victim, but he’s about as unsympathetic a victim as one can imagine.
So it is his version of the court case on libeling that he lost? No wonder that he is the good guy in his version. But regardless of whether his version is plausible or not, what is the connection to the recent riots and imprisonments?
Edit: Sorry, I misread the last paragraph. I see it now. But sorry, they may have been angry due to the video, but being angry does not justify posting addresses, instructions for arson, and calls for violence and murder.
Lol. The word "extremist" literally means outside the Overton window. "There's a difference between out-of-bubble source material and material that's outside the acceptable realms of my bubble."
This is awful. My condolences. You are always welcome here in Australia and in the meantime I will advocate for people in other English speaking countries (USA, Canada) to vote right wing before the totalitarian globalist agenda stifles us all
Some people were jailed for “inciting violence” eg calling for attacks on migrant hotels.
Others were jailed for “sharing misinformation” eg saying incorrectly that the Southport attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat.
Jailing people for either offence is totally wrong, even if in the first case some consequences (eg loss of one’s job) might be appropriate.
I don’t think the first one is protected by the first amendment even in the US. I was expecting stories of people making mildly inappropriate jokes on their podcasts getting knocks at their doors. If you call for violence at a specific time and place in the us, with some shades of gray like can they prove intent, that’s a crime even here.
It was indeed specific times and specific locations. I don't know which case exactly is meant here, but probably it refers to a telegram group with several thousand members, in which they posted target addresses together with instructions for malicious arson and calls for violence.
That absolutely justifies arresting them. It has nothing to do with a mean post or an unpleasant opinion. I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
Do you mean this thread here on ACX? And do you mean my comment -- "Your honor, he's a meanie asshole" -- then asking what the content of the posts was? If so, why was my response part of orchestrated propaganda? By "orchestrated" do you literally mean you think Turtle and I conferred about something supportive I could say in reply to Turtle's original post? Um, no, we did not confer. And I don't even see how my post is supportive of Turtle's view. I didn't say, "damn right, there's no way that's ok,." I asked what the posts were that got people jailed. And, for the record, when I heard that some were calls for violence, my thought was that if they weren't just random rage, but actual suggestions of times, places, means and people to target, then I thought that legal action was warranted.
No, I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to turtle and rebelcredential. I think the first three or so posts in this thread were by them, and these were all very out of place of the usual discourse. Not just content-wise, but also in terms of style. My impression by these three posts were indeed that this was the same person, playing a game of posting with different accounts.
I am no longer sure it is the case. There seem to be differences between them in their further posts. For turtle, I do think the posts are actively misleading, and I find "propaganda" still a fitting term. For rebelcredential it was just the first post which I find misplaced, and the subsequent posts are simply a reaction to me being confrontative. I certainly wasn't kind.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me.
Funny, to me "orchestrated propaganda" is stuff like seeing the same phrasing posted multiple times, as if someone was trying to hammer in a carefully worded message through repetition.
If by "multiple times" you mean "twice, by the same person, which makes it less surprising that they would reuse the same phrasing."
Also, it's bold to claim a conspiracy from two posts when there's a guy replying to every one of your comments in support. (Not that I'm accusing him of being orchestrated propaganda either, I'm well aware that some people just Post A Whole Dang Lot.)
You really shouldn't, the guy is hardly unbiased and known for playing the victim when he has done a lot of pretty reprehensile stuff. You yourself seem rather desperate to downplay what has been a lot of serious rioting as "social media posts", and seem to ignore that your own links show that muslims as well as whites have been imprisoned for the rioting.
Totally get people being imprisoned for violent rioting. Strongly against people being imprisoned for saying mean things while other people are violently rioting. Do you disagree? And have you watched the documentary before commenting about it?
IANAL but I believe that to lose first amendment protection for incitement, speech must be calling for both imminent and specific acts. Something broad and vague like "We should burn down immigrant businesses" would be protected, whereas something like "Come join us in 15 minutes to burn down (specific and real local business): wouldn't be. It doesn't look like the exact text of the posts is quoted in the articles (although I just skimmed and could have missed it), but even something like "I think people should burn down the hotels housing immigrants" would, I think, still be protected in the US.
The Yezer-ra is a more general evil influence analogous to dopa-mine. The suffix "mine" suggests selfishness. Dopa-mine is involved in over-arching selfish attention and reward systems. The Christian correlate might be oxy-to-sin which is involved in bonding and ingroup preference and, by association, anti-outgroup bias. It is Christian, since 'sin' is not a natively Jewish concept.
The left kidney produces levo-adrenaline. It is, in contrast, much more situation specific, providing small bursts of evil or selfishness to get a person through tough moral dilemmas.
I saw an interesting question on DSL that I am going to paraphrase here. This is sort of a sci-fi future hypothetical. There is a new medical process that can change your biological sex. Some stipulations:
1. Your entire body would change, with corresponding differences in height/muscle mass/bone density/structure, etc.
2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
3. You are comfortable with your body and don't need to relearn how to move with different limbs or have traumatic phantom sensations or anything like that.
4. The procedure is expensive, not enough to break the bank but a considerable cost, and takes a while to go through. E.g. this isn't something you do for a joke at a party, but a commitment of weeks/months.
5. None of your characteristics change, if you are old/fat/ugly or the reverse that will still be true when you are the other sex.
6. The procedure is completely reversible and you can switch back to the way you were before.
Would you do it? What would you think of other people who did it? Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
Personally, I think I would have to briefly switch purely out of curiosity. It would be very enlightening to see how the other half lives, so to speak.
No, I'm not really curious to know what the male version of me would be like, and if I'm still going to be old fat and ugly, it's pointless.
I think more people would be motivated to try it if it were "you get that young, fit, attractive body you always wanted, *plus* you can switch sex if you like!"
As for the "what would you think of other people?", well, that depends. If it really is a genuine sex-swap so that it's a natally female or male body, instead of the current procedures we use, then it really would be "I am a genuine woman/man, now I can have the body to fit my mind" for some. For others, it might be a fad or a phase, and I'd judge them a lot more harshly than someone who always had dysphoria and really did feel better once 'adjusted'.
It's a shame you added the cost and time constraints. I could imagine trying this out of curiosity in my teens or twenties. But in your twenties you can't afford it and in your thirties it's not easy to commit weeks or months to something like this if you have work, family, etc to maintain.
Realistically the main draw is to see what sex is like as a girl. Maybe as a close second there's an element of competitiveness - I'd wanna see how hot I was as a girl, and whether I could act hotter than other girls.
I'm going to predict that everyone ends up bisexual, on the grounds that you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men. The mind-body connection is two-way and sex drive is overspill-y enough that I think you'd end up keeping both.
But yeah, this is a what-happens-in-Vegas experience, or at the very least bored Sunday afternoon territory. Good Lord I wouldn't want this anywhere normal life! Imagine having to meet your parents. Or explain to your girlfriend.
"you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men"
That's the question, isn't it? I think the mind would over-ride the body, see the phenomenon of "transbians". If you always liked women as a 'man', then even in a new female body with female hormones, you'll still like women - or so it seems for some trans women today.
I don't think it would actually rewire your brain to adjust your sexual orientation. The description just specifies your brain being exposed to different hormones, and I know from personal experience that hormones alone don't necessarily change your sexual orientation: I liked girls when my body was full of testosterone ,and I still like girls now that my body is full of estrogen.
Isn't the "consequence-free" a decent approximation in the real world? Accidental pregnancy is a non-issue for this case, and STD transmission probability is lower than for all other pairings. :-)
Ethics and morality: less fun than thinking about sex, so it goes in a separate comment.
If the transition was free and instant, I predict:
- all whinging about feminism to disappear overnight. You can't guilt trip people when they can just go and check if you're full of shit.
- in a short space of time, any actual social inequality between the sexes to balance out. In the same way that showing people a live aerial view of the roads would solve traffic jams, by letting everyone see the full picture and coordinate independently.
- the ratio of men vs women would now obey the laws of supply and demand. I predict that would be great for everyone.
- I think we'd see the death of mystique and romance. I mean, the Internet already drove multiple nails into the coffin anyway. But while the opposite sex is a dark, uncharted mystery it's fascinating and glamorous. If you can just go there and see, it becomes mundane.
- no idea what happens with reproduction. But heuristically, giving people more social choice has resulted in fewer of them sticking with the main pathway (find straight partner, marry, have kids) necessary for society to sustain itself. So I predict we all die out.
While it would be interesting to have the experience, such an invasive procedure, if real (and if incapable of reversing things like aging), almost certainly has risks that I'm not willing to endure.
Also: I'm reasonably healthy and in good shape, but with significant hair loss. How would that work out? It's particularly brutal to be a bald woman.
Heck yeah I'd try. Curiosity would impel me. And I'd want to go back, too, after I'd gotten a bit used to it, to see what that experience felt like to me.
Whether I'd do it long term, how I'd look at people who did it, what the implications would be... those would depend on a lot of stuff about how this affected society.
Likewise. I'm skeptical that such a technology could exist without a _lot_ of other capabilities being implied. Enough massively parallel microsurgery to swap XX<-->XY in each of trillions of cells (on top of the macroscopic changes) implies many other capabilities.
I think it would be easier to clone a replacement body then upload the brain into it, which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements, but still easier than trying to turn "adult body of one sex into adult body of the other sex".
Unless we're either invoking something like Star Trek transporters, so the settings can be changed there, which is a huge difference in society already, or magic to do it (again, another huge difference in society).
Frankly, I think "magic is real and it works, look, I can change Samuel into Samantha" is much more of an upheaval than "Samuel is now Samantha".
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that something like constructing a replacement body would probably be a simpler path than having to dig into each and every cell and change its chromosomes. ( Open question as to whether cloning or mechanically constructing the cells, molecule by molecule (massively parallel) a la Drexler would be more feasible. )
As you said
>which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements
and, if we actually _had_ those, fixing _any_ damage to the person's body, including aging, seems like it would be implied by those capabilities. Which changes the thought experiment rather strongly - but without it, the experiment doesn't look very self-consistent...
I think I would try it, and I would expect that flipping around would be widespread.
Of course, if there was a third mode "asexual without genitals", I might eventually settle on that.
Other things to consider is if sexual preferences would change, as Christina has pointed out they are kinda tied to hormones. If sexual preferences did not change, then this would completely change the dating market. At the moment, the dating prospects of a male in the lower quarter of the attractiveness distribution are rather slim. But the moment incels would magically transition, they could just start to have lots of lesbian sex with each other, which to me sounds preferable even given that per the hypothetical, they would not turn into super-hot women.
Yeah, but that's still the problem: they don't want average to bad looking trans woman incel, they want the 'pretty or hot popular girl is my girlfriend and likes me and loves me' experience.
'The only partner I can get is ugly former man, just like me' isn't going to be more appealing than "why don't you guys just have sex with each other already, that'll solve your problems about not having a relationship" right now.
Per the hypothetical, the transition would be much easier, faster and thorough than what is possible with present day medical interventions.
From a market perspective, it would not be functionally different from a pill which just makes the incels attracted to men -- which is notably different from just dating a gender you are not attracted to.
Now I don't know anything about the gay dating market dynamics. I would expect that some matches will be complementary (a rich person living in a mansion and an extra hot person may both prefer each other to someone similar to themselves), but a model where income, style, charisma and hotness are all projected on a single axis called attractiveness is probably not terrible far from the truth. (This is sweeping complementary traits like dom/sub under the rug, but I am not convinced they are key to the dating market.)
Also, for sufficiently large populations, the dating goals should align. For heterosexual dating markets, this is not generally true: if men are mostly interested in causal hookups and women are mostly interested in starting families, then this imbalance will distort the respective markets.
Now it is certainly possible that there a significant fraction of gays living in high population areas are involuntary celibate because they would only have sex with someone who is in twice their own quantile in the attractiveness distribution. This would be some evidence for 'incels are celibate because they have unrealistic standards'.
Or it could be that there are few gay incels, which would be evidence for 'inceldom is partly caused by difference in dating preference between men and women'.
> 2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
You wildly underestimate the plausibility of this. Hormones make a LOT of the mind.
To that end, I would almost certainly try it, if only to see if the hormones would switch a sexual attraction.
When I was experiencing a sexual dysfunction I incorrectly attributed to asexuality, I was intellectually bi, but when that dysfunction was accidentally corrected, I switched to straight, *totally against my will.* I went from general attraction to women to being actively repulsed by them with no inciting event or trauma, just the hormonal correction.
I just meant the procedure wouldn't transform your mind as if you had been the other sex your whole life or something like that. My impression from accounts of FtM people is that the transition to testosterone is especially jarring.
I agree that, if we were to look at it the way we look at other drugs, testosterone should probably be only accessible under a doctor's supervision. It's a known cause of violence!
We know from the accounts of trans people who have taken hormones that they a big effect...
So, yeah, your mind would not be the same.
Though I get the impression that we shouldnt overestimate the effect either. Trans people are typically gender variant even before they started on hormones.
(What I'm getting at here is that a study of trans people would tell you the effect of hprmones + whatever gender variance this population had to start with ... whoch is probably less than the pure hormonal effect)
I'm of course biased, but I think the more interesting and generally applicable information comes from the cis folk who experience these shifts.
Don't get me wrong,
there's definitely some interesting information to be gleaned from trans people who take hormones, but by definition the entire group is experiencing an intense and distressing dysphoria, which obviously also also shapes personality.
Whereas folk like myself or people who have benign tumors which monkey with hormones (like Ken Baker, and another dude whose name I can't recall who wrote a memoir on the topic) *don't* start from a foundation of distress/trauma/frustration/desire/meaningful censure from others, and thus arguably have a somewhat...less invested...perspective.
Wouldn't do it, but mostly from a terminal lack of curiosity. There's nothing about it I'd be looking forward to and a number of things I'd either dread or miss.
Weird coincidence that this is posted right after I watch a Youtube clip of Joe Rogan talking about how excited he would be to become a woman and have sex with a man.
I'm trans, so I'd be all over this. Sounds strictly better than existing options for medical and surgical transition.
More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning. Being fully reversible answers that in large part. It'd also be beneficial for adults who are unsure if they want to transition or not, since they can always go back if they don't like it.
>More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning.
I agree with this characterization, but I think it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
> it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
How so? Despite my problems with some of the political ideology that got popular in the 2010s, I'm 100% on team "individual people have individual worth" and "it's inhumane to make some people suffer for the good of all". If transition fixes dysphoria, then so be it. And everything I heard, from a number of trans people whom I knew in the before time, was that it did work. Heck, I didn't even need to talk to them, I knew a few of them before and after, and just watching them go from being miserable and depressed to bouncy and happy was heartwarming.
I remember around a decade ago when my mother and I were idly chatting about her younger years. I can't recall exactly what past incident it was, but I remember asking her why she hadn't made a certain choice that, being your standard cardboard cutout college lib at the time, seemed obvious to me the correct one. To paraphrase, she responded to me by saying that people should take into account the effects of their decisions on not only themselves but also those close to them. You'll have to take my word for it that she didn't seem to regret the choice she ended up making. She wasn't saying that she had no individual worth, nor am I now saying that individuals don't have worth. My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
Point 2, to quote myself:
>The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier.
The number of trans-identifying youth has exploded as trans acceptance has increased. Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever. Trans acceptance might not have caused the unhappiness, but it's certainly not an endorsement of the idea that the benefits to your trans acquaintances is evidence that it would be a net benefit for all.
> My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
I agree, especially with the part about ”respective individuals making the decision". I'm making a lot of life decisions right now based on the benefits to other people. But I feel like it's important that they're *my* decisions, you know?
> Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever.
I suspect that these things are not directly linked. That is, there's a bunch of toxic stuff in the culture, which is making people unhappy. And some of the toxic stuff has infected trans discourse, and the interaction means that kids try to fix their unhappiness with transition. (Alternatively, it might be possible that something in our culture is actually causing more dysphoria than in the past.)
I get both your points. There's value in people feeling like they are more or less free to own their own actions and to act without too many constraints, including cultural norms. And it's difficult to disentangle cause and effect of cultural trends. I was questioning the near ubiquitous assumption that things be evaluated solely on the benefits to individuals and the freeing of individuals from constraints. And I've become increasingly wary of tearing down fences.
Apart from our Enlightenment heritage, I think it's too easy to advocate for tearing them down. It's easy to identify the beneficiaries of a change. In this case, you identified people you knew personally who went from miserable to happy. In contrast, it's difficult to predict who'll be worse off due to a change and more difficult still to draw a line between cause and effect, particularly because people are loathe to acknowledge that a change they advocated for did any harm at all. No one wants to believe that they harmed anyone else, and people are great at believing what they want to believe. Another factor is that people's behavior changes when the game is different and it's difficult to predict how their behaviors will change. I alluded to the explosion of trans identifying young people, but another example is electoral reform and the popular vote. It's common for people to complain about the Electoral College producing a winner that got fewer votes, but they don't realize that none of the actors (voters, candidates, parties) would behave in the same way in a system where the popular vote matters.
Commitment of weeks/months only? I suspect many people would do it back and forth just out of curiosity, I'd probably consider it myself. To give the ultimate boring answer, it depends on the cost!
>Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
At a societal level it would probably wreck at least some number of families that are currently functioning fine or better than fine. I can't think of any benefits at a societal level that would be sufficient to counterbalance this beyond the vague sort of titillating eye-opening enlightenment from seeing through others' eyes. It reminds me of that Indian fellow who pretended to be black to get into med school and, while he did have an easier time getting into med school, experienced racism.
Edit: On the other hand, the high price tag would mean that the wrecking would be limited to high income families, and so the procedure would be good for equity.
I have heard a number of anecdotes from other trans people on online forums who lost spouses over their transitions, usually because spouse's sexual orientation wasn't compatible with the transition. So I do have to admit that in the short term, increasing the availability of transitions would at least marginally increase how often that happens. But there are a few other things that I think need to be taken into account here.
For one thing, the characteristic of these marriages as "functioning fine or better than fine" is dubious. By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition. I'd expect it to play out as something like what happened a generation or so ago, when increased awareness about and acceptance of being gay lead to some broken marriages at first when people married to a member of the opposite sex accepted that they're gay and would be happier in a same-sex relationship, but longer term there are a lot fewer gay people are trying to be straight, especially those committing to the role enough to get married.
The last bit is to note that a lot of marriages do survive one parter realizing they're trans. The other partner might already identify as bisexual, or they may find there's some flexibility in their orientation at least with regard for their spouse.
I've heard from a number of transwomen that taking hormones made them attracted to guys. SO, apparently, this sometimes happens, even if its not universal. Also apparently: transmen dont experience a effect like this, or at least, its even rarer.
>By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier. And it also disregards the effect on their children.
>For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition.
I agree that this could mitigate the number of broken marriages. But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place. You could argue that marriage numbers wouldn't be affected because post-transition people can get married after, but then you'd have to assume that the number of FTM transitioners would equal the number of MTF transitioners and I don't think that's true now nor would it be true in a world with the hypothetical procedure.
My impression is that there are far more MTF transitions than FTM, so it would create a gender imbalance.
And we can theorize X leads to Y all day long, but the proof is in the pudding. In general do the societies that treat rainbow flags as sacred value marriage as much as the ones that don't? My roommate is from India. He rolls his eyes at Pride Parades and his parents have been sending him profiles of girls on Indian dating sites on a daily basis since his early 20s.
Edit: >Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
I think desire for marriage is as much or more a socially ingrained priority than it is a matter of individual personal preference.
Used to be way more MTF but now FTM is catching up and it's often teenage girls. Hence the worries over social contagion and the subsequent fighting between trans activists, portraying such things as the Cass Report as institutional transphobia, and those wanting to restrict "healthcare for trans kids".
"Results: Through June 2017, a total of 421 transgender individuals were seen who initiated hormonal therapy after 1990. Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals seen. The mean age at initiation has remained higher in MTF than in FTM but has decreased steadily in both groups with the overall average dropping <30 years since 2015 (27.5±10.6). Since 1990, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of FTM such that it is now equivalent to MTF.
Conclusion: Consistent with many reports, we are seeing an increasing number of gender dysphoric individuals seeking hormonal therapy. The age at initiation has been dropping over the past 25 years, and we have seen a steady increase in the number of FTM such that the incidence now equals that of MTF. Possible reasons for these changes are discussed."
"Sex assigned at birth. Sex assigned at birth differs from gender identity because it is based on phenotypic sex characteristics and is the sex stated on an individual’s birth certificate. It may or may not align with gender identity. Trans and non-trans adults are equally likely to have been assigned either male or female at birth."
If I'm reading this right, then the trans adults who were "assigned male at birth" (meaning now they're trans women or non-binary or agender or other identification) make up 48% of respondents, and "assigned female at birth" (meaning they're now trans men etc.) make up 52%.
At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
Also, about 70% of trans people surveyed are gay or bi, and other surveys I've seen suggest that a plurality of both trans men and trans women are bisexual. And a fair number of cis people are bisexual, too, which gives at least a few percent worth of cushion against uneven gender ratios.
The KFF survey also helpfully gives data about marital status. Marriage rates are quite a bit lower among trans adults than cis adults (26% currently married vs 49%), but a lot of this is likely age effects as trans people in the sample skew quite a bit younger (53% of trans adults are under 35, compared with 28% for cis adults). Raw divorce rates are almost identical (8% vs 9%), but that does give a higher divorce rate if you look at the number relative to if they've ever been married.
>At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
I'm confused. Is this saying that that more men transition to female than vice versa despite both sexes being as likely to *say* that they are trans?
There are more MtF than FtM, but there are also more FtX than MtX, so FtX + FtM ~= MtX + MtF.
"Nonbinary" (or NB, or Enby) means any gender identity other than strictly male or strictly female. There are a bunch of subcategories, but the big ones I'm familiar with are Genderqueer (aiming for a mix of masculine and feminine characteristics), Agender (minimizing gendered characteristics), and Genderfluid (gender identity varies with mood).
Enbies often but don't always pursue medical transition, sometimes the same sort of hormones that MtFs or FtMs take and sometimes variations thereof (lower doses, adding SERMs to suppress breast development in MtX, adding finasteride to reduce body and facial hair in FtX, etc).
I just want to gauge what other people think about it. I assume your stance is there would be no implications. But I could see a spiritual/religious perspective of it being immoral to reject God's plan/destiny/etc.
If anyone claims that as the reason but has willingly received medical treatment in the past, they're lying. It makes no sense to suddenly draw the line there unless it's a rationalization for something else.
I'm gonna be mean here: the special cases ones who seem to be excessively online and lap up all the attention would be immensely dissatisfied to now be "only" a straight/gay woman (or man).
The general run of trans people would like this, I think, but the "oh tee-hee am I a man? am I a woman? am I a cute anime cat-girl? today I think I'm going girl-mode! feeling cute, skirt spinny!" set would hate having the I'M SO SPECIAL label taken away. I think that, even with perfect body swap technology, they would *still* insist on "but I'm *trans*, I'm not like you cis lumpenproles who were born that way".
>just as long as they don't demand that uninvolved third parties pay for it or approve of it
What do you think the odds are that activists don't try to frame this procedure as "healthcare" with the implication that it be publicly funded? What do you think the odds are that they don't get their way at some point?
Pretty much daily updates on the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, and as warranted stuff about e.g. Taiwan/China or Houthi/All Mankind. The Gaza stuff is under the "Iran" heading.
Has summaries, maps, and in-depth analysis. Follows basically all the even semi-credible sources from both sides, with an appropriate (not necessarily symmetric) level of skepticism.
In the past week, Peter Thiel and Demis Hassabis gave separate interviews, and both said the AI industry is in a bubble, but at the same time that real progress in the technology was happening and few people understood how big the impact would be in the medium term. Thiel analogized the present state of the industry to the internet in 1999: poised for a massive breakout while simultaneously in a bubble that was about to pop.
What are some examples of AI startups and proposed applications that seem likely to fail when the "bubble" pops?
I think the "bubble popping" is a subtly wrong way to look at it. I think a lot of current businesses will collapse, but that's because increasing AI power will render them pointless. They'll end up like companies offering dial-up Internet access over land lines.
In particular, I predict that prompt engineering, while useful for the foreseeable future (such as that is), won't really be a thing for more than a few years. It'll get about as much use as Linux virtual consoles, which is to say that they'll primarily be used by very tech-savvy people who are troubleshooting a custom private installation.
Yes, but what happens if/when market disenchantment with general-purpose LLMs causes GPU sales to plummet? My understanding is that greater than 80% of Nvidia's GPU output goes to support these beasts. Sure, specialized AI applications will continue to prosper in their own limited way, but if the demand for Nvidia's H200 chip suddenly craters, we'll see ripples across the entire spectrum of tech industries — but especially in the semi sector. Maybe I'm over-worrying, but I see a potential Dot Com bubble situation if that happens.
I honestly don't see that happening any time soon. Yeah, there's hype that's out of hand, and irrational enthusiasm, but there's also useful demand for those things, and ongoing R&D. The hype dying away just means that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. will be able to get more computing power for their money. I didn't think we've hit the limit of the usefulness of GPT-style AIs, and even once we do, there's effort being put into finding the next transformer-level improvement.
I think it's much easier to see that many will fail than to identify exactly which ones will fail.
Even companies which have a shit business model today might easily be able to pivot to a less shit business model in the future, if they have a good team and good management. I remember the first internet bubble and how everybody decried all these companies like Google with "millions of users and no revenue model" -- but it turned out that finding a revenue model isn't that hard once you have millions (and soon billions) of users.
Similarly, I think right now if you have a company with a lot of high quality in-house AI expertise, _and_ smart management, _and_ a funding source that can keep the lights on in the medium term, then it doesn't matter that much what your current business model is. But if you're a couple of clueless trend followers with no deep understanding of AI *or* business, currently living off seed funding from an equally clueless VC, then you're almost certainly doomed.
I think it would be easier to try to find AI startups that *won't* fail when the bubble pops. To be fair, nearly all startups fail even under normal circumstances.
The AI industry appears to have hit on a very powerful new set of tools that is too expensive to fully utilize and likely plateaued at its current level of capability in a way that will not be improved by the price coming down. I think LLMs are essentially what I think Google search and other narrow AI tools are: A technology that will be a component of an eventual AGI.
I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together.
"I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together."
I agree. I think the first "AGI" will be a sort of Frankenstein machine that is a collection of dozens of more specialized LLMs and programs. Whenever it receives a prompt, it will usually know which of its specialized modules to activate to handle it best. It will be inelegant and will require an enormous amount of computer servers and electricity to function, but will still exhibit enough "general" intelligence from the end user's perspective to fool a sizeable minority of people into thinking it's an AGI. The term I use for it is "Fake AGI."
I think even fake AGI is probably that far away as anything that is actually useful or cost-competitive. A real single model AI agent that can outperform humans with an annual cost less than several times a human’s salary to operate may actually not be something we do for generations.
There are a lot of economic incentives, but there have also been waves of hype around this and lots of tools that cost a lot and don’t work very well. Once there is a legit AI-bubble driven economic crash, it will be a decade before anyone will invest serious money into anything new and capital intensive. IMO, this is unlikely to be more than a year out from now and may already be in very early stages
I probably wouldn’t short Nvidia, but I both wouldn’t go long on them right now and would hold off on buying a new gaming GPU, because the AI bubble bursting could see a hell of a lot of silicon with nowhere to go being repurposed for consumer GPUs at a relative bargain.
Without venture capital and irrational confidence to subsidize it, the current wave of LLM AI will even recede as providers are forced to charge what it actually costs to provide. You can see that process already kind of starting with OpenAI putting GPT-5 on ice and shifting their focus to GPT-4omini. A model which is less useful than the big ones but which can be run at manageable cost. Unfortunately it’s hard to hype up a model that trades capability for provider margins, and interest is already waning even in the big boys that are legit impressive as they have stopped becoming more impressive fast enough to draw attention.
It’s a gut feeling, but I think that Sam Altman is going to personally fall from grace and the board that tried to fire him will be almost entirely vindicated in the not too distant future.
Yeah, right now they're trying to throw AI into everything as an incentive to purchase - I'm getting lots of Dell emails about "our new laptops with Copilot built in!" - but I think it'll end up like the Internet of Things where we don't, in general, have our kettles telling us that the water is now boiled so come make the tea.
Right now I think it's a bubble, and it'll burst, and we'll eventually get useful products but not the anticipated bonanza that everyone is staking their money on today where AI is the new buzzword to throw around when trying to sell your product or service.
I posted about this a while ago, there's a huge crop of startups trying to develop "AI for some specific field", whose engineering mostly amounts to wrapping a generic LLM API with some proprietary prompts. This is pretty low value add and doesn't necessarily work very well, so I don't expect most of those to survive.
I think that "AI Whispering Consultancy" is likely to be a viable business model just like "SEO Consultancy". Someone who understands the subtleties of the various models and can help you design an optimal custom prompt for your specific application.
I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets. You give me a million dollars and I try to make sure that the phrase "Pepsi tastes better than Coke" is incorporated into the training set of GPT-5 in at least five million different locations.
>I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets.
One of the things that currently creeps me out about LLMs is that OpenAI doesn't disclose its training sets. It is reasonably clear that wikipedia is in there. What about textbooks? Which _parts_ of Reddit? r/FemaleDatingStrategy ? What about Hamlet? What about fiction in general? What about religious texts in general?
I thought *everything* that was in print format and online was in their training sets? I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
>I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Many Thanks! Yeah, I've seen claims that one of the problems further scaling is running into is running out of human-generated text. I've tried looking for a statement of what is in their training set but was not successful.
>Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
Or that the LLM was unable to make full use of the information in them? :-)
They’re cagey about it. And the real problem is twofold. They’re running out of training data/increasingly losing access to once-available data, and the training data needs scale logarithmically for linear improvements in capability. There seems to be several orders of magnitude too little data available in the whole world for for LLMs to 10x their current capability. And even if that weren’t true, you’d need Victor Fries or Raymond Cocteau to design the cooling solutions for the training servers.
It seems to me that that would be fairly useful actually. I’m not saying there’s any money in it, but narrowing down what an AI can do with a few buttons would be helpful for many applications.
This, and I also expect many of the much smaller funded foundation models to wither away; assuming scale continues to be king, there's only room (and funding) for a couple of big models + an open source uncensored version.
I honestly don't see how things would improve by having a fake 'person' talking to you about "Hi, I'm Bob/Babs and I'm here to help! Your bus will be arriving in ten minutes at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "Yeah, but it's already 10:10 a.m. and no sign of it, what's the hold up?" "I'm sorry you seem to be having a bad experience with GoSlow Bus Services. Your bus will arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "I already said it's late, what is happening?" "Are you sure you are at the right stop? By the timetable, the next 125BC bus is due to arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!"
Good luck with trying to get the AI to tell you what the hell is going on and sort out your problem. Maybe it'll end up like the Canadian airline chatbot that promised refund to a passenger, the airline went to court to deny this because the chatbot was allegedly its own entity, and the court ruled nope, have to pay up:
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
I honestly don't think we *do* need "many things in the built environment" to "wake up", and I don't think it's cowardice holding it back so much as "we tried to do it on the cheap and replace our real humans, the end product was crappy, and it caused so much hassle we had to scrap it".
I don't want a Talkie Toaster, I want accurate information.
> A trivial example: you could make a train car or a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions
That's just a voice UI slapped on top of Google Maps. Which Google will probably release soon if they haven't already.
*Snerk.* Exactly. They can't even get Google Flights right as a *website,* with tens of thousands of genius Phd's toiling in their clickfarm mines.
I'd dearly like to be able to tell Gemini to book me a flight with 20kg of luggage to X on Y date and have it handle the details, but I predict that this will never happen, even though they could literally do it today.
Contrary to **Level 50 Lapras** above, I also don't expect a usable AI interface in Google Maps either, although I would dearly love and use that too. I'd love to be able to tell it "look at all the pictures of 4 star hotel gyms in <city> and list which ones have an actual power rack, not a smith machine, and their prices."
Once again, I'd bet on never being able to usably do this with a Google product, even though they are literally THE best positioned company to do this and much other "AI personal assistant" style stuff. They're just going to ruin it, full stop, just like they ruined search, their core competency, much less all their other acquisitions and bright ideas that are used by tens to hundreds of millions that they just let trail off into oblivion.
The way I hear it, the fear of a minor miscalculation or the reality of a hallucination is too much for LLM tech to be loadbearing right now. A current LLM, tech-wise, could easily handle such a transaction. But maybe it would sometimes spend thousands of dollars by accident, or share your credit card with a scammer. Or, even easier, book the wrong day or something because it doesn't know you can't make it to the airport in 20 minutes and that's the [best price/other metric it is using to pick].
I just don't think this is so much of an issue, and even if it were, they should let people opt-in and assume the risk of things going wrong. I've built little "hallucination detection" tools locally where you just pipe results to another LLM via the API and have it double check things, and it significantly improves things and lets you do a "hallucination estimator", and I'm sure Google can do much better than that.
Also, it would be a dialogue like OP envisions. "There's flights at 7AM, 2PM, and 10PM, and they're all within $50 of each other, which one do you want?"
I actually do the "power rack detection" thing today with GPT4, it's just frustrating for a number of reasons (it won't do inline pictures, OR deep link specific pics, so you can double check, and only has ~70% accuracy), and being able to directly access Google maps pics instead of Trip Advisor pics would be a major step up in terms of coverage in given cities.
This sounds like a retrofuturistic idea, the future imagined by a past that did not see us all walking around with powerful computers in our pockets, reliably connected to a network providing near-immediate access to incomprehensibly vast amounts of information.
My thoughts exactly. It also reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's prediction from 1999 that, within 20 years, the average person would be wearing a dozen little computers on them, embedded in jewelry, their wristwatches, and their clothes, that would be linked together through a LAN. In reality, all of that was consolidated into one device--the smartphone.
Likewise, instead of making a train station kiosk "intelligent" by allowing travelers to ask it when the next train is arriving, it would be better if the rail company fed live data to the internet about the locations of its trains, track problems, delays, etc., where private users could access it and make sense of it themselves. It would be most convenient if you could ask your AI personal assistant on your smartphone when the train was coming, it could look at the rail company's live data, and answer you.
I wish google directions worked better when i am already on one of the trains i need to be on. It instead thinks i have to walk to the station and get on the next one. Then the directions might not be optimized around the exact timing of express trains and such. Bolting google maps on to the train itself could solve that.
And yet every time I try to plan a trip, Google tells me they don't have the latest bus schedule for my area, or the location data are minutes out of date.
I agree that kind of information would be a good thing. But you just need a website, not a talking train station (which would itself need to get up-to-date information through a website of some kind anyway).
Finding the correct train timetable for my line, and then squinting at it, and then zooming in, and then figuring out that actually _that's_ the timetable for days starting with "T" in odd-numbered years in March and I need to look at another timetable... is a frustrating experience.
I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me.
But it's easier if I can ask my phone rather than needing to go to the station. What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
If there was an agreed-upon feed for this sort of data which sufficiently-trusted sources could publish to, and which language models could read from in real time, that would be useful. It would need to be curated so it didn't wind up as spam.
"I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me."
Provided you're willing to run the risk that it will hallucinate an answer as it doesn't want to say "No trains" and thus it assures you that there are three imaginary trains running at these times, where you'll wait for them and none of them show up, because it's the third Tuesday and a full moon and you want to travel to Zone Y outside of peak rush non-standard discounted Zone Z hours, so of course there are no trains from that station to that destination today.
> What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
Sure, that'd be good, but this problem doesn't take large language models to solve. Better integration with Google Maps will be enough. (I'd actually prefer to use that over having to talk to an LLM-powered assistant.)
You are being argued against but that’s exactly where I think AI should go. Take the general model with its ability to understand complex English sentences, and follow on questions, add some real time data and an ability to retort in natural sounding language.
I’m pretty sure that call centres are setting this up as we speak. Apples new AI service (Apple intelligence) seems to also focus on narrow tasks using general LLMS in the background.
Isn’t that just normal lag between early and late adopters? Train station and car manufacturers aren’t going to invest in that kind of thing until they know the companies behind technology will still be alive in 10 years.
>a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions.
That doesn't take AI, that just takes Internet connection and access to the company website.
Having it respond to freeform questions fluently enough that people wouldn't have to switch mental contexts into UI navigation or careful phrasing would be part of the huge difference, surely?
Like, bus stations have static placards showing the bus routes. Airports have updating billboards telling you whether a flight is delayed or not. I don't know what else people are trying to ask here.
In the cases I'm primarily thinking about, I don't mean that the semantics of the question make it impossible for the passenger to answer using those static resources. I am referring mainly to the secondary attributes of the experience, which are often important to start with and which I would expect to be more important in circumstances like “harried traveler on not much sleep” where mental “stack space” is more limited. There is a substantial difference in mental effort between “babble a question in whatever order makes sense to you at the time and get a narrow response delivered directly” and “understand the format of this chart and scan it for which combination of cells contains the information you need”, a substantial difference in flow effects between “say a question now and it is buffered for you” and “wait for the site to load before you can start scrolling”, etc.
For an analogy, think pocket calculator versus paper arithmetic. The question may indeed be as simple as “which routes here get me to Raging Rabbit Station”, but the delivery method is totally different.
Being able to synthesize even a *little* bit past the edge of the locally authoritative database would amplify this further: “If I get out of Luigi's Pizzeria at eleven, what bus will I be able to take home?” And in-context follow-up questions: “How much will it cost?”
Which, now that I've written it out, leads me to actually think that this application may not show up because in anticipation it gets displaced by “everyone has a smartphone and asks Siri or Gemini, and the transit company uploads their tables to the major map sites, has them scraped implicitly, or offers the AI access using local OS integrations when their app is installed”.
So what is being asked for here seems to be "give me an AI that I don't have to look up things myself, just ask it for this information". I don't know if that's 'cooler', it's certainly lazier, it might be more efficient, but it's also making us ever more dependent on things to replace our brains.
I do get the appeal for "I've been travelling for hours, I'm tired and hungry and I just want to know where to go when" use, but a lot of this sounds like "aw man, you expect me to TYPE the QUESTION in MANUALLY like a caveman?" issues.
The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability. There are a *lot* of tasks where the thing that matters most is avoiding being wrong 1% of the time. If your train station tells even 0.5% of customers that the train is leaving 15 minutes later than it is, and they miss the train, that is going the make it useless. So until the hallucination problem is fixed (or greatly, *greatly* reduced), the kinds of applications you are talking about aren't going to happen. You see the reason why in every single example of a business trying to do something similar and it fails spectacularly in some edge case or when some troll manages to jailbreak it.
Don't get me wrong, I find the current gen LLMs immensely useful, but that's because I understand their limitations and am willing to accept the situations where they just don't do what I want them to do.
They are very much not ready for interacting with average customers in ways that actually matter.
>The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability.
Yup. In general, I've almost never found the current version of customer assistance applications useful to me. Now, I may be a corner case. The usual reason that I've encountered one of these is that I've already used the business's web site, and I've hit something ambiguous or contradictory, so I'm calling them on the phone, and they've connected me to their AI. And the AI does _not_ have access to better information to resolve the problem than the website does. So I almost always wind up having to get to a human.
The chatbot will be working off the published timetable, and in reality that depends heavily on the conditions on the day - are there breakdowns, diversions, delays, what? - and those being updated regularly and in a timely manner. The AI can't look out the window to see if it's raining or if there are the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks.
If the train is delayed because a passenger had a medical emergency so everything is running half an hour late, that needs some human somewhere to enter that information. If everyone is too busy calling an ambulance and dealing with the passengers already on board, the AI is just going to tell you happily "The train will be arriving in ten minutes!" as per the timetable, but then you're waiting half an hour due to the delay that the AI didn't know about.
LLMs trained on specific information are too small to outperform giant models on specific tasks. (Source: review paper that I saw once.) This is because "specific information" is like, a million times less information about general reasoning and English grammar than the entirety of the scrape-able internet + books.
If they're not updating the signs, they're sure as heck not updating the AI. Or rather, they're not updating the information the AI needs to tell you, because Joe told Bill the line is blocked, but Bill hasn't entered that on the computer yet.
I'm still mulling this study over, but I am inclined to believe its conclusions that ~10% of students given mindfulness meditation training were adversely affected by the program (and for the rest it didn't provide any measurable benefits). However, I don't know how the British educational system implemented their School-Based Mindfulness Training (SBMT) curricula. I'm sorry, but I don't think teachers (or child psychologists for that matter) are capable of being effective meditation instructors by taking a course or two and passing a certification exam. It seems to me that if someone is going to teach mindfulness, they need a couple of decades in the meditation trenches before they're qualified to teach meditation to adults — let alone children! I remember the well-meaning boob who first taught me Buddhist meditation. He was a young bliss-head who couldn't get his brain around that I was having some very weird negative experiences with my initial forays into mindfulness meditation. Luckily I met a Lama who, when I described what I was experiencing, gave me some visualization exercises to get around the crazy stuff I was experiencing.
Anyway, the study tested more than 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK from 2016 to 2018. Its results showed that mindfulness failed to improve the mental well-being of children compared to a control group, and very likely had detrimental effects on those who were at risk of mental health problems.
Heard from someone who has done years of training and meditation with Tibetan buddhists that Tibetans like to start kids out by sounding a gong and having them listen to the sound as it grows fainter and fainter, seeing whether they can identify the moment when it becomes silence. This lovely exercise seems benign to me.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that they're not really teaching "mindfulness meditation", what they are trying to teach is "sit down, be quiet, focus" for modern kids who are hyper-stimulated and the old methods of expecting discipline and good behaviour in class have gone because you're not allowed use corporal punishment anymore.
The end results that this is supposed to achieve is "And then little Johnny paid attention in class, did his homework, and got better grades in his tests". Judge for yourself if you think this is very likely the second the kids leave the classroom environment and go home.
Also I suspect anyone who needs to reduce an esoteric practice into an acronym has missed the point of that esoteric practice and doesn't know what the f**k they're doing.
it's like CBT - oh, this really works for a small subset of people when it's a new thing? Well, let's try it for everyone!
And now we've got "ten online sessions of CBT to cure your lumbago, fix your depression, spray for blight on the spuds, and get ten more miles to the gallon for your car" watered-down to sweet damn-all version of it recommended by the health system over here instead of real therapy which is too long and expensive.
(I may be *slightly* jaundiced about my experiences with the Irish mental health services, brief and pointless as they were).
It's actually short for "SuBMiT", which is a joint project by BDSM evangelists and Islamic fundamentalists to get people to shut up and do what they say...
There seems to be fair amount of evidence that a small percentage of people trying mindfullness experience really bad effects - on the order of a psychotic break. But his seems to be way less than 10%.
I can totally believe results along the line of, "actually, not much benefit".
To date, I have only encountered people with anxiety disorders from it (I'm a psychologist). But anxiety disorders are torturous and disabling. One man I saw had become unable to stop paying attention to his breath because he had a fear that if he did he would stop breathing. He understood perfectly well that the body does not work that way, but that knowledge did nothing to reduce his fear and his habit of paying attention to his breath. Sometimes he would get stuck imagining what it would be like to be unable to inhale & then he'd have a panic attack. He had a terrible time sleeping because the moment his attention began to diffuse he'd be yanked awake by the awareness that he was forgetting to pay attention to his breathing.
Oh, that sounds terrible. Typically, of course, you'll be fine because unconcious breathing reflexes will take over.
Though, kind of reminiscent of the time I was in the ER recently where the nurse was asking me if she could disable my Sp02 alarm (it was giving major hypoxia warning alerts) and I'm thinking to myself, how likely is it that if I go to sleep right now, I might never wake up.
Something like, my blood oxygen was going low but not fatally low when I tried to sleep, and unneccessary alarms distract attention from the ones that actually matter. (The following morning, when the ER doc is round to see me, he's like, yeah, some people's blood oxygen goes low like that when they try to sleep, thats not a big problem)
Is it true, though, that it's not a big problem? People with sleep apnea do badly on various cognitive tests, and if they use a C-PAP cognitive scores improve, but some never get back into the average range. I believe that's thought to be the result of brain damage from the years with untreated sleep apnea.
There's something else that can shake some people up in a way that I think is similar to what mindfulness training does: philosophy. I myself, as a freshman, went through a period of depersonalization set off by lots of reading and rumination about free will and the nature of consciousness, and since then have run across several other people who have experienced the same thing. One, a philosophy major, actually ended up changing majors in his junior year because he could not face taking even one more philosophy course.
Can totally sympathize with the guy who doesn't want to know whether he is in The Matrix or not. If I recall correctly, Plato's Republic has a character who makes this point...
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?"
That sounds like the standard gatekeeping everyone does, with occupational licensing being the formalized version of that. Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely.
"Massage therapy is quite safe, but nothing’s perfect. Strong, deep tissue massage causes the most trouble, of course. It may aggravate problems, instead of helping. Some chronic pain patients may be disastrously traumatized by intense massage (what I call a “sensory injury”). Occasionally it causes new physical injuries, usually just minor bruises and nerve lesions, but sometimes far worse: there’s a small but serious risk of spinal injury or stroke with any neck manipulation, and blood clots can be dangerously dislodged causing pulmonary embolism (a “stroke” in the lung).
On the milder side, patients often feel sore and a bit icky after massage (post-massage soreness and malaise). Although often rationalized by massage therapists as a healing crisis or the effects of “detoxifying,” it’s probably a minor muscle crush injury (rhabdomyolysis).
Athletic performance may be slightly impaired by pre-event massage — a minor consideration for most of us, but not for serious competitors.
Finally, sometimes massage therapy is a costly distraction from more appropriate care (as with any alternative medicine)."
Like anything else, if you don't know what you're doing, then cutting and styling hair or massage can cause harm ranging from the minor (she chopped my hair off! I'll have to wear a hat until it grows out!) to the more serious. And of course, there are always lawyers waiting to help you take a case:
"Immediately after the accident, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial. In severe cases, calling an ambulance could be necessary, however, if the injury seemed less severe, consulting your family doctor or GP is advised. In the event of a reaction to adhesive from eyelash extensions, eyelash tint, hair colour, or other beauty products, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial.
Timely medical attention is crucial in addressing allergic reactions, as they can lead to severe health complications. Delaying medical treatment may impact your ability to file a personal injury claim. To evaluate your eligibility for compensation regarding an allergic reaction from a beauty treatment, further details about the treatment context are necessary. We recommend consulting our personal injury solicitors to assess your case and determine the potential for making a claim related to allergic reactions in the beauty salon."
Well, one of the baristas at my local coffee shop had a small bald patch on the side of her head. She said it came from a chemical burn from some hair treatment that had gone wrong. Of course, she regularly dyed her hair in bright primary colors, and she changed them up regularly. So she was probably in a high-risk group for Hair Styling Trauma (HST). ;-)
That's what I thought too, but then I occasionally hear stories about people who mess their lives up. Maybe the quality-religious group dedicated to ending suffering took it a bit more seriously than average? Even if it's most often just some guy who has weird visions and found another religion...
I agree, heavy introspection is a strong and rather unnatural thing to do; like all such things it can be beneficial or harmful, so care and good guidance is needed.
Can I ask what kind of crazy stuff you experienced, and what was the remedy?
One common side effect of badly guided meditation is dissociation, where you learn to push your urgent feelings away from attention in the name of following the breath or some such.
My issue was hallucinatory sensations. Very early in my meditative practice, my body would start to itch. My instructor said to just acknowledge the itching sensation and it would pass. The more I resisted scratching myself, the more parts of my body began to itch. I could resist scratching, but my meditative internal discourse became "I will not scratch the itch" — I will not scratch the itch" — instead of following my breath. After several sessions of uncomfortable sitting meditation, suddenly one of the itching sensations on my forearm turned into a burning sensation. I tried to ignore it, but it really felt like my arm was on fire. I glanced at my arm, and it wasn't on fire. I tried to relax and acknowledge the sensation, but it was torture. Then, I felt the fire sensation on my back and at the crown of my head. I screamed and ran from the room. The burning sensation went away when I rubbed the affected places. When I explained the situation to the instructor, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He thought I was making it up. The following week, I attended a talk by the late Tara Rinpoche (not the current one). During the question and answer period, I explained my problem. He said that things like what I was experiencing could happen and it was best to scratch the itch instead of resisting it. He also suggested that at the beginning of my meditation, I visualize myself as floating in a cool pool of still water, and to return to that visualization if the itching started up. That worked for me.
The dissociation is my personal experience; I tend naturally towards the "3rd party observer" mode of my own existence and meditation amplified that in somewhat unhelpful ways, in addition to e.g. making me hyper aware of minor aches and pains and irregular breathing.
> I've learned to avoid any sort of meditation like the plague because it invariably just intensifies all the unpleasant sensations and makes it harder for me to function, whether I'm leaning into the sensations, trying to focus on a specific innocuous sensation, not explicitly focusing on anything, counting, trying to visualize something, or whatever.
That does sound slightly unusual to me. One pretty common thing that the mind does is that it automatically stops paying attention to something that is just there without changing much. When there are lots of unpleasant sensations in the body or noise around, it's usually our own reactive complaining thoughts that keep the mind paying attention to those unwanted stimula. So when one achieves a decent level of concentration on *whatever technique*, while not suppressing the stimulus but just allowing them to be there, the usual result is that the reactive complaints eventually stop and the stimulus kind of fades into the background, and you can rest for a while in the sense of just being there. For me at least that is the measure of a meditation session having done its job.
Though I would note that in the chod tradition of vajrayana Buddhism, people would deliberately seek out frightening settings ... like a charnel ground with decomposing cadavers
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.
My wife's grandmother is turning 104 and one of her biggest complaints is how bored she always is. Her sight and hearing are both poor, and her mobility isn't great either. She's also more comfortable in Greek than in English.
Any suggestions for what she can do to keep herself occupied other than nagging her 80+ year old daughter who's taking care of her?
Knitting or crochet might be an option, depending on just how bad her eyesight and dexterity are. There are things like winter hats that are made with thick yarns and fairly simple patterns. I'm also fairly certain knitting books are available in Greek.
Audiobooks might be easier to follow than either paper books or films, because she doesn't have to use her eyes. If she's comfortable using an ebook reader, you can also get her one of those and set it to show very large print.
This last one is only feasible in specific circumstances, but she might benefit from a mobility scooter which would allow her to make short trips on her own (if that's safe in her neighborhood and feasible with her overall health).
There might also be organisations (red cross, churches, sport clubs and so on) that offer guided activities for seniors. Maybe it will do her good to meet some new people.
Has anyone in your extended family caught the family-tree/genealogy bug? (In my family I'm that nut.) Got the Ancestry.com account, pestering people for old photos to scan, etc?
The very best advice to newbies in that hobby is, "interview your oldest surviving relatives. Do it now while you still can. Just get them talking and telling all the old stories from their childhood and young adulthood. Telling the stories is what's fun for them so get them going and just listen and write. Write down every single thing they can recall, every story, every person they mention, the old rumors, all of it. Transcribe, don't debate. Half of it at least will turn out to be wrong or mangled but that's for you to figure out later. It will also include some gems of info and personal stories and new leads that you'd never otherwise discover."
A 104-year-old who's still corpus mentus, holy moly that is rare gold for this particular purpose. Find that relative and set up some times for this, maybe with you or somebody else there for some Greek-to-English translation if that makes things easier on Grandma. If handled right it should be a lot of fun for her, I've sure never had a relative in that age bracket who didn't enjoy telling family stories.
The objective in the moment is not to extract data points or fill out family group sheets it's just to get her talking. Maybe pay for cousin whoever the family-tree hobbyist to visit once a week for a while for one-hour sessions or something like that? And of course quietly set up an audio recorder in the corner and record it all for your and others' future remembrances and enjoyment.
If done gently/persistently those sessions will tire Grandma out while also becoming something she looks forward to each week for as long as she's able. And could end up being pure family gold. I am quite jealous typing this!
Unfortunately (or fortunately) she already wrote her memoirs back when she was a relative spring chicken of 90. And other family members have assisted with translating it from Greek to English.
So that's off the table as a constructive outlet, although she certainly likes telling stories about the past to anyone who will listen. The most interesting ones IMHO are her salient memories of WW2, like when the Nazis came through and put gold stars on all of the Jewish houses in her village.
What about her recording an oral or video version of selected parts of her memoirs? That would reach more people than her memoirs, even if they are published. I think I read somewhere that there's a project going on of compiling interviews of holocaust survivors. I wonder whether the group is interested in memoirs of witnesses. Another idea: would she enjoy a pet? My grandmother, who also stayed alert and lively up to a great age, had a parakeet that amused her a lot (and in fact it heard her laugh so much that it learned to do an excellent imitation of her laugh). And cats provide a lot of entertainment, and also adapt well to spending a lot of time cuddling with elderly owners who don't move around much.
Full disclosure - I work on GPCR agonists for a pharmaceutical company, and while GLP1R is not the target I am an expert on, I do work on GLP1R. I am a structural biologist, so general cell biology and endocrinology are not my strongest suits either.
I was traveling and missed the initial discussion on the GLP1/GLP1R post. I applaud everyone making a genuine attempt to understand the mechanisms here, but I also wanted to offer some perspective that I didn't see in either the post or the comments.
There are mainly two things I want to bring up:
1) No one knows the mechanism for all these effects. And this isn't one of those "we don't yet understand" things where everyone does understand but there are one or two loose ends yet to be fully elucidated so to cover their but in a paper's discussion section, they have to attenuate whatever it is they are saying type-things. No, this is actually no one knows. The folks doing the bleeding edge research, in universities, in drug development, are asking a lot of the same fundamental questions that are being asked here, and don't yet have answers. It's a complicated field, it's a confusing field, and even when we do get answers, I wouldn't expect them to be satisfying.
2) The situation as presented (GLP1 binds to GLP1R which does X, Y or Z), is simply too much of a simplification to ever arrive at a solution, even if the data where out there. Because there are some confounding factors I want to bring up.
I saw no real mention of signal bias. I think that this is very worth pointing out. When GLP1 binds to GLP1R on the outside of a cell, it enables (well maybe*) GLP1R to bind a G⍺ protein on the inside of the cell. That protein then starts a signaling cascade, leading to the opening of calcium channels, which will transduce the signal throughout the neurons.
However, there are more than one G⍺ protein. The most well known G⍺ protein is G⍺s. This is the protein that is thought to be the primary binder of GLP1R when GLP binds, which results in the cyclic AMP/protein kinase A (PKA). However, GLP1R can also bind G⍺i and G⍺o, which will cause ERK1/2 mediated signaling, and also G⍺q which will go down the protein kinase B (PKB) pathway. Finally, (well maybe not finally, there's probably even more we don't know about or I have missed), you have two β-arrestin proteins (1 & 2) that can bind in place of G⍺. These are widely misunderstood. Most people think they facilitate internalization of the receptor from the membrane - i.e. shutting the signal off, but actually when GLP1 binds GLP1R extracelluarly, it's possible for G⍺ to never bind intracellularly, and instead just one of the β-arrestins will bind and then you have a situation called "G-protein independent signaling" in which the GLP1-GLP1R-β-arrestin complex is capable of signaling intracellularly on its own, and in some cases this signaling is more sustained than the G-protein mediated signaling.
In general, for most GPCR agonists, all the pathways get activated, just in a specific ratio. With GLP1 and GLP1R, you get mostly, but not entirely, G⍺s signaling. However, if you look at the cryo-EM structures of semaglutide and taspoglutide bound to GLP1R, there are minor conformational differences in the receptors that could lead to slightly different G⍺ signaling biases. Perhaps a little more G⍺q or something - we don't totally know (yet).
One thing that's beginning to be reported, is that the mixture of side effects and on-target effects seems to depend on that bias profile. So for example (I'm making this example up just FYI, just to illustrate the point), binding more G⍺i might lead to more nausea, while binding more G⍺o might lead to more weight loss. Unfortunately, I can't really go more into detail here at the moment, although there's plenty of published work out there.
Tl;dr:
Semaglutide and liraglutide are not perfect GLP1 clones. This can cause a change in the bias profiles for G⍺s recruitment, which can lead to slightly different effects vs just plain GLP1. Dose and efficacy could also play a role here. Also, lots of other things can impact G⍺s recruitment such as GIPR and GCGS.
*Incretins specifically (GLP1R, GIPR, GCGR) have relatively high constitutive activity in the cell, meaning they can bind G⍺ without their agonists being present. This is at lower, but still significant levels. Specifically this makes me wonder if the idea of the lone receptor fishing for an agonist in the membrane is perhaps incomplete, and some, or all receptors could be primed by a G⍺.
Does anyone have a good link for what the modern thinking is on “mirror neurons”? The two extremes I’ve come across are ‘it’s responsible for the human ability for mimicry and is a critical component for proper development’ and ‘it exists, sort of, but its importance has been greatly overblown.’ Thanks for helping me understand what these are and how important they currently seem to be!
Also, the wiki page on the subject is only a stub 4+ years without an update. If you are knowledgeable on this subject, please feel free to update it!
Hm, what do you mean by "mirror neurons have been debunked"? I do believe that the importance of mirror neurons has been terribly overblown, but there seems pretty hard evidence in monkeys (and rodents, I believe) that there are neurons which activate when the monkey moves, and which also activate when they observe another monkey make a similar movement. Do you challenge those findings?
To be clear, I don't find those findings super exciting. Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that those neurons are in the motor control areas.
Now, the situation in humans is a lot less clear, because we can't implant electrodes into humans. With a few exceptions for epilepsy reasons, but epilepsy is usually not generated in those motor control regions, so they are basically black boxes for us on the level of individual neuronal activity. Researchers have tried to get something out of fMRI data (a "mirror neuron system"), but that data is so coarse that any findings for humans are on very shaky grounds. Perhaps you meant that this mirror neuron system is debunked? I agree that this looks fishy and that we have no proof of mirror neurons in humans. But "debunked" sounds pretty strong to me. We simply have no way of looking for them.
And of course, in popular press there were lots of misconceptions which never had a chance of being correct. Even if mirror neurons exist, they are not little homunculi which receive their knowledge about the other person from ether. They are not different from the other neurons that surround them. Knowing that mirror neurons exist is more like a statistical statement, and doesn't have vast philosophical implications.
I'm considering quitting my job without much of a backup plan, and I have a family to support. I don't really have easy to market skills nor experience in high demand right now, but my job is making me a worse person than I ought to be and it's not where I want to stay. It's affecting me physically--I need to leave soon. I've known this for 2+ years but couldn't land a new job. I've applied to probably a thousand jobs in the last year and a half with only a handful of interviews. I don't know what I'm asking for really, but if anyone has experience in this situation, I am interested in what you have to say.
Not sure what industry you're in, but you could consider some kind of trade or "lower skill" job as a temporary stop gap while you look for something in your preferred industry. In my area jobs like a bus driver, substitute tracher, CNC Machinest, etc. are easy to get and pay well. They can be fairly low stress depending on the org. Plus they may be physical and/or provide more time outdoors which usually does wonders for mental health
I once had a lousy job I didn't like and which was slowly getting worse. I figured out exactly how much I was earning per day and every day I asked myself "Can I put up with one more day in exchange for $X?" Every day the answer was yes, so I kept on going to work, until eventually I had another job offer in hand. But I gave myself permission to quit if the answer was ever no.
I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful, since I was no longer focused on the big and unfixable problems associated with the job, I was just focused on the fact that if I go to work and sit in a chair and do the bare minimum for a while, then have a nice lunch, then do the bare minimum for a while again, then I'll wind up hundreds of dollars richer.
Your job shouldn't be making you a worse person. Would it still be making you a worse person if you were just going through the motions day to day?
I have difficulty allowing myself to do the bare minimum, I'd feel guilty or if I got called out, that'd be another set of headaches. Plus it would probably show on our already pretextual, exploitative performance reviews heavily influenced by my micromanager who is threatened by me. I'll try to come up with a dollar amount per day as you suggested, and try that. It might help, and I appreciate it.
Hey Stan. I don’t have any direct advice, but just my experience. Last year (exactly 12 months ago) I was fired from my last full time job. (Honestly, a lot about the place annoyed me, and I probably semi-engineered the firing subconsciously.)
The last 12 months has been a killer. I’ve applied for lots of jobs without any joy, and have been freelancing to make ends meet. Several months I haven’t managed to make ends meet. I’ve done a lot of work on my mentality, especially around money and value and worth (including self worth), and it’s definitely improving, but slowly. The stress of financial pressure (I also have a family to support) seems to have affected my health and made me more prone to infection and illness.
Highly recommend finding something else before quitting (one possibly useful tactic could be to experiment with not-giving-a-fuck at work - identify the minimum allowed or expected and deliver that, and use other time you have to work on your own skills and mindset). I also understand none of this might be possible for you if your job is completely unpalatable.
Wow, thank you for sharing your experience. I know things can get worse, but I know they can get better and I do not want to be the guy who freezes in the face of uncertainty. I hope things get better for you fast. Appreciate your thoughtful advice, I have some thinking to do.
No worries man. Good luck with it all. For what it’s is worth, I suspect that the rate of digital transformation/evolution/disruption in the wider commercial ecosystem over the past 10-20 years means most jobs (and effectively 100% of jobs in older companies and organisations) feel like terrible jobs, because they create a vast cognitive dissonance between the individual (who is agile and appreciates that change is inevitable and is seeking ways to integrate that change into his life) and the organisation (which is necessarily inagile and inflexible and run by systems, processes and policies).
It's harder to live without enough money than you think. Don't do it yet.
The AskAManager blog has a *lot* of great advice, including how to fine tune resumes/cover letters, ace interviews, and so on. Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows. There might be little nuggets of advice in there that will put you slightly ahead of your peers. Good luck.
Thanks Christina, I will check out that blog. I loved how you phrased it, "Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows." Been there and probably still am there in many respects!
My impression is that most people looking for a new job aren't going about it in the best way. So whether you keep your present job or not, try to improve your job-hunting game. Here are some suggestions for how to:
-Find out what kinds of jobs are easiest to get now, and which have a glut of applicants.. Target the former
-Find out which applicants for a certain job get hired. Target the ones for which you fit the profile.
-Look for info about how to get hired for particular jobs. Is it crucial to have certain keywords on your resume? Will it improve your chances to apply directly at the company's site, rather than via some job-hunting site?
-Consider the possibility that if you picked up one new skill you would qualify for some appealing jobs you currently don't qualify for. If there isn't currently a glut of applicants for those jobs, it might be worth putting in the time to learn the skill.
-Network. Tell everyone you know that you are looking for a job. I know someone who just got a great lead from his old high school football coach.
-Consider funky possibilities. There are jobs that are not advertised. If you have a high LSAT score there's a company that will pay you $120/hour to tutor LSAT prep. People who do LSAT tutoring independently sometimes charge twice that. There are many wealthy people who are willing to pay quite a lot for things that will help their children advance in life, but most know enough to be able to tell whether you have a high level of competence. If you are extraordinarily accomplished in an academic field, the arts, or even in certain sports you can earn quite a lot per hour tutoring and mentoring the children of the prosperous. There are also well-off people who will pay well for a personal assistant who will run errands, look up recipes, book flights, hotels etc for their upcoming trips, search for info of various kinds, find someone reliable to take care of the yellow-jacket nest under the eaves, etc etc.
You've given me a lot to think about. I haven't really considered funky possibilities, and I definitely need to up my networking game (introvert here). Thanks for the astute response, Eremolalos!
I don't really see how someone would actually get that information. Companies seem to have sources of labor market statistics and they know their own hiring data, and I vaguely remember seeing statistics compiled from H1Bs, but unless you know of some websites I don't you're proposing doing more than an economics PhD of sleuthing there.
It's possible you're right. I was able to find information for a family friend who was applying for Data Science jobs, but that was my only foray into job app stats. However, a quick google does turn up a lot of sites that say they have data.
Is there reason to think all these sites are bullshit?
I do get that individual companies might not want to make public the stats about how many applicants they get, but what I was talking about in my initial post was not individual companies, but particular jobs. One reason I think the info is probably findable is that so many people want it -- not just people applying for jobs, but economists, investors, etc. Stands to reason there would be organizations set up to make money by providing this info. Another is that a lot of job-hunting takes place through organizations that have no reason to hide the info they about how many people are apply for particular jobs. In fact selling that data would be a source of income for them.
For Data Science jobs, I found good info at The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on some sites and publications for people in the Data Science field, and from this YouTube guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13zJB_jyBI
The YouTuber tells what sources he used, but I judged him to be reliable and did not go to the sources.
I don't know how it whether it would be harder or easier to get the info on other jobs.
BLS data tends to be bad about lumping, I was surprised to see that data science had its own category. "Mathematicians and Statisticians" alone covers at least a dozen wildly different jobs.
Talk to people, lean on your support network, try find ways to pause whatever it is that's making you a worse person.
But don't jump until you have a replacement job lined up. Your family is your primary responsibility, but your continued health is also their responsibility.
Maybe lower your standards for jobs a bit, and find something that will let your family survive, while giving you the peace of mind to recover and do a proper job search. It's possible that the time and stress savings could put you ahead, even if the pay is less.
The consensus, even among my family, is not to quit. I've been not quitting for 2 years. So frustrating, but I am occasionally hopeful. I recently lowered my standards, especially if the job title & new experience looks good on a resume--we'll see. My sincere thanks Moon Moth.
If you feel like your spending is not under control, look into frugality (FIRE movement is one place to check). If you can make meaningful improvements to your budgeting, it will give you much more flexibility on employment options (maybe take a risk and change fields if yours feels dead end). That isn't an immediate fix but can set you up to be more flexible in the future. I kind of dislike my current job, but that feeling is largely negated by the fact that I could quit today and not have any money problems.
I dipped my toes into FIRE a few years ago and developed a few good habits along with some small investing. I am pretty much debt free and it'd be nice to retire early. But I'll reacquaint myself with it! Appreciate your response.
Don’t do it yet. It could send you into a negative spiral and keep you out of the labor market for much longer than you want. Look for jobs, take interviews from time to time, but don’t quit cold turkey. Find ways to reinvent your job. Look for interesting projects. Think of it as doing a masters on X and put another year or two with that mindset. Meditate. Think of whether your inner voice is part of why your job is making you miserable.
I understand how you feel, but the way. I’ve quit before. It feels liberating, for a moment. But I was always financially secure, and finding my next thing took 9-12 months. If you can’t afford that, and you have a family, the stress of not having an income will be really bad.
Yeah, I cannot do 9-12 months. Maybe 6 and then I'd be in trouble. You're probably right, at least partly, about the inner voice. But at this point it is pretty ingrained and I get headaches the instant certain aspects of my job pop up, sometimes even just by thinking about them. Thanks for the advice, it's persuasive.
What is a respected job in your local area? If you do something that is highly respected, that can be worth a pay-cut or career change.
Eg. Operators at my local oil refinery are well-respected, and I will likely soon be working there (a change that does not require experience… they give you a standard IQ test + mechanical reasoning test, then train you if you do well).
Thanks, Brad. I sort of started recently looking for anything that looks great on a resume, even if it pays less. I'll try to see what others do around here and elsewhere I could possibly do and expand my search. Honestly, I'd take a significant pay cut for a non-miserable, reduced stress job.
I sympathize but having sampled the tech job market for over a year now I got the impression it is not easy at all to find a good job at the moment. Certainly more difficult than 5 years ago. If you can, I would suggest you continue looking/interviewing while you keep your current job.
Thanks alstoc, this is the advice everyone seems to be saying, it's quite reasonable, sage, and with no offense intended, miserable. I'll probably stick with my job but redouble my efforts at landing something new.
I wouldn’t recommend redoubling your efforts, as that can lead to frustration, anxiety, stress, and even depression. Instead, keep searching while your carry on with your life. Let the job search simmer in the background—steadily ongoing, but not dominating your focus. All you can do is improve the odds in your favor, but remember that the outcome is largely beyond your control. Don’t count time. And avoid setting strict deadlines or constantly waiting for responses from companies; you never know how long the process will take, and counting the days (or months) can become all-consuming.
Thanks, that sounds like a less stressful way to go. Unfortunately, there was a development thanks to the high stress (especially lately), and I had a medical situation unfold that made me rethink my priorities. Health got bumped up a lot.
For those of you believe in effective altruism (trying to maximize the value of charitable donations), I've found a cause that saves more lives per $ than the top ranked GiveWell charity.
GiveWell
(https://givewell.org/charities/top-charities) ranks charities by cost per life saved. Malaria nets is the most efficient, at $5,000 per life saved. And that's amazing, but I found a better one.
If you donate towards getting drone jammers for Ukrainian medics, the cost per life saved is even better. It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough. The impact is probably even higher since medics will go on to save more lives. So you can donate $100 towards a jammer and saves lives basically as efficiently as possible.
'It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough.'
Where can I find the data or analysis that produced this lower bound? Intuitively, it sounds unrealistically high to me. Less than $5k per personel life saved seems like it would be a far better spending opportunity on the margin for Ukraine's military than most other things they could buy. So I would expect this to have been arbitraged down to less anomalous levels already.
It's also easy to think of many ways it could be false. For example, the drone jammers probably don't have a 100% success rate, and in any case can't stop artillery. More importantly, they don't know who will be attacked in advance and so they have to give them to everyone.
It had not even occurred to me that the implicit argumentation was literally 'let's just assume each additional jammer leads to an additional person equipped with a jammer, and each person so equipped will survive when they counterfactually wouldn't have'.
I now suspect that this was indeed the line of thought here.
If so, this is a very silly analysis. I'm not going to claim that GWWC's estimates are really all that great. But if you've ever glanced at what their attempts at impact calculations look like, it's a completely different world compared to this. If GWWC used this sort of reasoning, they could probably claim something like <$5 per life saved for their top charities and call it a day. (one per mosquito net!)
If Ukraine regularly targeted Russian medics and medical facilities then that would be valid. But they don't. There are some opportunities in Gaza if you really want to both sides this. Though not really for drone jammers.
Why? Effective Altruism isn't a pacifist ideology. There've been multiple debates in the ratsphere about whether assassinating Putin would work as a cause area if it ended the war.
That's the problem. Were there similar discussions around assassinating Zelensky? A Ukrainian surrender would end the war too, and save just as many QALYs.
But I get the sense that's not really what this is about. This feels much closer to starting with the desired political outcome, and reasoning backwards into a narrative of how actually this is the totally utilitarian outcome. This has *always* been a failure mode of utilitarianism.
Perhaps EA shouldn't stick to pure pacifism, but that at least provides a backstop against its more nasty tendencies.
Not about assassinating Zelensky. The parallel argument was about whether the US should pressure Ukraine to surrender or cut off aid. This is because Zelensky is not a dictator and the situation is not parallel.
You're starting from a premise ("We're being unfair to Russia!") and then trying to reason back from it. But it's not actually true in this case. There's plenty of people who are pro-Putin around. To the contrary, it seems like it's the other side that desperately wants to complicate what is a fairly easy moral calculus because they don't like that it might condemn their side.
Also, providing lifesaving medical treatment even on a battlefield is allowed by most pacifist religions and ideologies. Likewise moving someone out of danger or running jammers. The usual line is you can't participate in an act of killing even in a supporting role. But plenty of pacifists served as combat medics and wore body armor without complaint.
I think cost per life saved is not an ideal metric. What you want to optimize for is cost per QALY, but this is harder to measure because it is not enough to observe that you lowered Malaria by x%, you would also have to observe what age your population reaches at what health level.
Of course, there are reasons why the QALY per life saved would be lower for either prospective Malaria victims (they are generally poor people in poor countries) or Ukrainian soldiers (they will either survive with injuries disqualifying them from military service (which would lower QALY) or will likely find themselves in a situation to get shot at again (which will also lower their QALY)).
The other thing to consider is that if this is such an effective investment, then why is the Ukrainian military not paying for it? From a quick google search, Ukraine has around 1.2M active troops and received 64G$ in military aid in 2024, for about 50k$ per soldier.
Now, granted, not all of that is cash to be spent how they see fit, a lot of it is likely fancy Western weapon systems with insane sticker prices, but I don't think that this is enough to explain the difference. You can always argue that due to corruption, the Ukrainian military is not willing to invest into cheap devices to save their soldiers lives, but the other hypothetical is that these jammers are less cost effective than advertised.
For another thing, a Ukrainian conscript makes 20kUAH a month, which is around 500$. I will grant you that the median conscript does have some obligations, so this is not his disposable income, but I would personally invest a week's salary into a device which is guaranteed to save my life (even if it will only work once).
Part of the benefits of the bed net figure is that it is backed up by rigorous evidence, not just a claim by some bed net manufacturer, and it seems unlikely that the insects will come up with a strategy to circumvent the nets. With the jammers, the error bars are much higher.
To the people bringing up "saving lives could lead to ending other lives." Medics do not engage in general combat and are protected by the Geneva Conventions. The chances they will kill anyone outside of self-defense is very low. They are supposed to carry weapons only to defend themselves and their patients. They also are obliged to provide aid to Russians as well. The fact Russia target them at all is a war crime.
Protecting medics and medical facilities (and keeping them out of combat, unlike certain militaries using them as shields) is the one of the most established ways to make war a little less horrible. So no, the fact it might facilitate other killing is not the moral complexity. It's a more efficient and better charity. So are things like medical supplies or other high need goods. You can also get them to Myanmar, Sudan, or Gaza but the risk of it being stolen/intercepted is much higher there. (And if you want to argue the jammers might be used for non-medical purposes that too is a valid concern. But it's like body armor or medical supplies: more likely to save than end even other lives.)
Also, not to sideswipe EA, but you usually get best value for money per live saved in refugee situations or wars. (Which are honestly usually the same thing.) Why doesn't EA do more with that?
It's really not black and white. Soldiers rescued by medical personnel are going to end up back on the front unless they are crippled. Something like 1/2-2/3 of casualties will end up combat viable at some point in the future, depending on the severity of their wounds and quality of treatment.
It is in most moral philosophies and in the international rules of war both sides have agreed to. What morality are you exploring? It can't be pure utilitarianism because the math works out there (you save more lives in net at cheaper cost).
There's the moral quandary that soldiers kill people, so saving the lives of soldiers enables them to do more killing in the future. Anyway I don't have strong moral claims here, I was more concerned with the math of effective charity. Reducing preventable malaria deaths is straightforward. Saving a medic from drones attacks is much more complicated. The jammer might not even do anything, they can still be shot or hit by artillery or blown up by a glide bomb. Rescued soldiers are much more likely to die in the future, with the ongoing war. And they are also likely to kill soldiers on the opposing side. Of course all the saved lives that are too crippled to be soldiers any more are subtracted from the above.
It depends on your system of morality. Most systems agree that if you save someone and they go on to kill someone else you are not responsible for that. Some don't. Utilitarianism is one of them but if you do the utilitarian calculation then you find it still nets out to be more efficient and a net positive. Firstly because of the 50x cost multiplier and secondly because if you're indifferent to whose lives then you also have to factor in all the lives the soldier saves as well as their likelihood of killing nobody (since most soldiers don't) and living through the war (as most soldiers do).
Your objections (that the person could go on to kill someone or be killed in another way) are true in Africa as well. Especially with low life expectancies the latter in particular is a huge downward pressure if you count not by lives but by quality adjusted life years. Which I suspect is why they generally don't.
Russians have a fantastic, wonderful path to saving their lives, and a lot of money too - stop their war and get out of the neighboring country. Ukrainians don't have that luxury (well, now they control some 1000 sq. km of actual Russian territory, there will need to be an exchange. OTOH Russia doesn't have an established border anymore, so who knows how this is going to work out).
If your charity goes to saving someone on the battlefield, there is a good chance they are either going to a) kill someone else, or b) get killed by someone else. I don't think the math is quite as simple as the malaria net scenario.
Hold on, why do you say "gun safety" is a misnomer? There are clear and simple rules for gun safety, they work when followed, and not following them results in Alec Baldwin shooting a bystander. What am I missing here?
Indeed, yes, there are four rules for gun safety, but mostly the people who use those two words in succession mean that law abiding people are safer without guns. How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Hoplophobes call gun control "Gun Safety" because "gun control" is racist. Gun nuts call avoidance of negligent discharges "Gun Safety" because there are ways to handle guns safely. Same word used by different parties with different, conflicting even, meanings.
> How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Well for one thing, the largest cause of gun deaths is suicide.
Another issue is that an armed society is a MAD society, where there's a tendency for people to shoot first in fear of getting shot in return. At the very least, that's the excuse that that guy in Texas who killed a protestor used.
People who want to kill themselves use an effective means. Guns are widely available in the US, and are effective, so people use guns. There is no evidence that reducing gun availability will decrease the suicide rate.
Yeah this is a strange own goal, it’s almost as if they don’t care if the policies they advocate get actually enabled. Like, they need to convince a large proportion of people who disagree with them - you’d think the least they could do is to learn the basic lingo as at least a sign of respect? to be taken seriously? Especially basic policies like requiring safe storage - BTW, every badass former military guy I’ve trained with, and shot weapons with, has had only utter disdain for careless civilians who refuse to learn basic gun safety. These people’d be natural allies for sensible safety proposals if those proposing the safety cared to engage respectfully.
Ah, but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used. It usually means, "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."
Without looking too hard, here's an article from TODAY (I hadn't seen it before I posted my comment): https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4831399-gun-safety-election-issues/. The headline says "gun safety," and the article is about restricting who can own guns, and what kind, what you might call "gun control" instead.
You don't know? There's giffords, everytown, 97percent, Shannon Watts just for a start. Our illustrious VP has talked about gun safety when she meant gun control.
By anyone using the phrase. That's almost certainly gonna be activists advocating for "gun safety", and they DON'T mean teaching children trigger discipline, or anything like it.
Do you have a specific example of someone (e.g., an activist) saying something like "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."?
He used the word "means", which in this context I think "means" something like "my outgroup alternates between two incompatible positions, and this is what it would sound like if they tried to articulate both at once, but of course the underlying principle is simply who-whom".
On the object level, I think the support isn't quite there. There are factions on the left that are against police (especially armed police) and against the military, although I think the left's lock on the federal bureaucracy means that they tend to be OK with the FBI, ATF, and USSS. But even then, I think they view law enforcement guns as a regrettable necessity required by everyone else being armed.
I suppose the exception is the lunatic left fringe when some vocal right-winger gets busted, but even then I think it's less about the guns, and more about the exact same feeling that motivated the right wing to cheer when Osama bin Laden was killed.
Is this a genuine question, or an argument phrased as a question?
For what it's worth, everything I know about Scott suggests he believes that AI will, in the coming decades, potentially pose an existential threat to humanity. So I would wager he's very unlikely to give a grant to someone promoting the position "AI safety is an absurd field and we should always and everywhere oppose it".
It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control. Seems to me like we should be studying the possibility, not seeking to limit the use of AI. And yet "AI Safety" means "AI Control" just like "Gun Safety" means "Gun Control". And it's not their own AIs or guns that they're talking about controlling -- it's YOUR AI.
The whole thing is just stoooopid, because who is the most likely to create an AI which can go out of control? Someone who is beyond a government's control in the first place. So why are governments talking about restricting AIs when it's the criminals who will be running rogue AIs. Same thing with guns. And yet grownups keep enacting childish fantasies of a society where the good people don't have guns and the bad people do.
I want to hit somebody with a stick, Jo, really, I do. A cluebat. Or ClueBringer, even.
(3) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she doesn't get elected
(4) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she does get elected
Me, I think it's going to be a combination of (1) and (2). Should she be elected, the fine words butter no parsnips.
Add in that I lived under Fianna Fáil governments passing populist "spend spend spend" budgets, and the chickens eventually come home to roost, the cows do come home at last, and the bills have to be paid.
As for the likes of the first time buyers' grants for housing, it's a nice idea on paper. But I think the reality is, as in Ireland with these, that (a) they do little when supply is the problem and (b) some developers and construction firms will hike up prices in response, e.g. you're looking to buy a house for €250,000, you get relief of €30,000, now you just have to get a mortgage for €220,000. Except some developers took that as "oh great, an extra €20,000 is available" and slapped that on the price so now you're paying €270,000 and are back where you started, looking for a mortgage on €250,000.
The IMF also warned back in 2016/17 that this would likely drive up housing prices. So I think that good intentions may not work out as intended.
As for medical debt forgiveness, price controls, etc. - well, I'll believe them when I see them. Again, likely to be a lot of court cases over "can you do this?" by Big Pharma, big grocery chains, and so on.
But what do I know, I'm just some peasant out of the bog, so informed opinion welcome, please!
I have just very low confidence anything she put out yet maps to any evidence for what she will attempt, honestly. She doesn't seem like she has any personal beliefs about almost anything related to economics or foreign policy. She's just saying random stuff someone she trusts thinks will poll well. After she gets elected various interests will decide what the policy is, very hard to predict at this point.
I'm not American, but I think Biden's and now Harris' anti capitalism and anti market rhetoric is deeply scary and signals the possibility that America, a lone (relative) beacon of economic liberty will turn away from principles that have enriched her and humanity, for the detriment of all involved. I hope this will not happen, of course, but I am occasionally mildly annoyed that they are so stupid
I suspect that you're getting a heavily distorted view of Harris's proposals, but in any case, there's a conspicuous omission from your post - what is Trump saying.
Almost anything looks sane when compared to Trump's plans to tax trade into oblivion. Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free. But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway.
(1) It's not helping to say "sure, our proposals are stupid, but have you seen what the other guy is saying?" I'm not at all sure that these items are anything more than campaign promises, which is to say crap designed to get voters to support you, but the fact remains - if they are anything like what she really said, and the reason I used the BBC was precisely to avoid 'partisan bias', then they have to be evaluated on the basis of "what the candidate says she intends to do if elected".
If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse". That's like saying "Sure, my economics are screwed up, but if you compare them to Stalin, they look pretty good!"
(2) "Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free."
Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
(3) "But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway"
No, this is real questions because I don't know anything about economic policy apart from being a human living in the current world, and I wondered if these were genuine policies or just "vote for me and I'll give you sunshine and rainbows!" guff.
But sure, keep telling yourself that any questioning of the Coconut Tree World is simply trolling and motivated reasoning.
> Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
Since I don't follow the news, I didn't realize that Harris had copied Trump's proposal there. But yes, that's a dumb proposal no matter who makes it.
I'm not even saying that there aren't dumb parts of Harris's proposals, just that I think a) you're getting a distorted view and ignoring the good parts and b) ignoring the even dumber things that Trump has proposed.
I did wonder if you were just reflexively going "But Trump did Dumb Thing!" (and by the bye, if you don't follow the news, how did you know? Getting your information in canned talking points from The Usual Sources?)
That's why I wanted you to clarify if you meant Harris' proposal. Since you have clarified that you were "getting a distorted view", I can now ignore anything else you throw at me, on the grounds that if I'm ignorant, tu quoque, yes?
Oh, certainly. But the difference between "crappy" and "slightly less crappy" may not be very wide, and it does matter when one side is leaning heavily into "they're weird, they're dumb, they're stoopid" about the opponents.
If you're presenting yourself as the smart choice then the onus is on you to have smart policies, not "well they're not quite as terrible as the terrible ones our dumb, weird opponents have".
Noah smith had a good article on how Singapore manages this. Basically they control the housing starts to keep prices relatively high (as a major asset for the middle class) but not too high with grants of up to $61k for first time lower income earners. Thus the lower income family gains an asset class worth up to $61k more than they paid after buying a house, a grant that is financed out of general taxation, and therefore is a form of redistribution.
However the Singaporean government have some advantages - the government owns 90% of the land, and they never let the prices go to bubble territory.
As the Irishman said when asked for directions by the way off track tourist “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, i wouldn’t start from here if we were us.
Noah overstates the tension between owners and buyers and makes a common mistake when looking at pct of household wealth in housing.
The correct understanding is one Zvi makes. Homeowners are net flat housing, not net long. They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
To make things less abstract, if housing nominal prices stayed fixed, meaning the real price fell overtime, which homeowners would be screwed? None. Landlords might be screwed if they are currently cash flow negative and relying on some nominal appreciation. But thats not the tension he referred to. Meanwhile that would be a great outcome for long term affordability.
> They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
I’m not sure what that means in practice. The liability to house themselves is what? Rent, if they sell the house?
Maybe, but a lot of people depend on downsizing or moving out of the city later in life - by buying another house rather than renting.
Imputed rent is the technical term, the theoretical cost of renting from yourself. But yes rent would be the cost if they sold, or the new house price if they moved. So long as they don't sell they bear no *net* cost because the asset = the liability.
Assume for the moment that all house prices move proportionally together. If house prices go down, theyd take a paper loss but they still have just as much house, and if they move theyd be able to buy cheaper as well. Basically once you buy a house, then for the cost of the mortgage + upkeep and property tax, you get to have that much house in terms of overall space/quality for the rest of your life no matter what house prices do, even if you move. To the extent that property tax is somewhat linked to price, overall you will have less cost for the same amount of house if prices go down in fact.
You are of course long the specific location you buy a house in and would benefit from a local boom, but we are talking about national housing policy here.
It is true that to the extent people down size at end of life and so will consume less house in the future they may be be slightly long house on average, but that future change in position should also be discounted at appropriate rates. So people may have some positive house wealth (if the property tax effect is not stronger), but it is much smaller than a stat that ignores the liability side altogether.
I think the proposals are even less likely than Obama's to get implemented, because while his were primarily opposed by "the system," the new set of proposals are the kind that attract votes but cause disasters. The incentives for demanding price controls are inverted between the campaign, where they win the non-economist demographic, and the white house where the laws of economics and the empty shelf would apply even to those unaware of the cause. The same goes for the housing subsidy: democrats who are not first-time homebuyers may tolerate promises the subsidy now under the belief that promises are never kept, but if their friends actually got $25,000 from their own pockets they'd riot at the next election.
I'm with you on the secondary effects (a student of Frederic Bastiat).
I would think she should know better, Kamala is two years younger than I. We lived through milk shortages in the 70s, when then President Nixon capped milk price. Dairies failed causing a large drop in production. Perhaps as a teen, she wasn't the news junkie I was, or her Marxist parents didn't enlighten her on concepts such as open markets. Or perhaps that she grew up in Berkeley, California; the Marxist capitol of the world. But still, you'd think someone would be much more aware than to propose price caps with today's knowledge.
The same with throwing money at housing. This will be a repeat of the 2008 housing bubble. Throwing money at a slow growth market will only cause price inflation. If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage??? We don't have fewer houses, home prices should be falling.
All these things going wrong, she says she'll fix !!! spoiler alert, you're already in the executive suite, why are you not doing anything?
> If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage???
As a news junkie you should know that the population is increasing, not shrinking. In any case the problem with housing is a regional issue, demand outstripping supply in certain areas, but by no means all.
Listen, I think the motivations he granted the globalists weren't very charitable but what he said earlier was quite true and for people who suffered the effect of it (which, as a professional you likely to not suffer quite as much as most) the annoyance over the course of decades well who are we kidding over the course of all of civilization where the elite control what goes on can definitely upset an annoyed people and have them given over to hyperbole.
It is after all very annoying how the vast majority of people are at the very bottom of the pyramid having their lives governed by people way way above them and not necessarily to the benefit of anybody.
I myself don't care for the elite much but the following subjectively important and interesting video did quite poorly on YouTube precisely because I obviously don't feel hatred towards the elitists, even though I absolutely think that they are doing harm that I could reverse if I had even the smallest amount of influence.
That video as the only non reporter at Maxwell's trial was the very first video on my channel.
My second video proves the point that I lack the desire for fire and pitchfork to be employed against them (without precluding the possibility that it may be necessary).
His loathing borne of frustration undoubtedly does not serve him well, certainly not as well as stoicism or actually getting involved with what I'm doing, but I think his anger needs to be understood to the degree that if you do not empathize, no doubt you can still sympathize.
There is a helluva lot more to the housing plan than has yet reached the headlines, and a lot less to the $25K homebuyer subsidy part of it. It is also perhaps relevant to note that none of this is actually brand-new now -- Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago.
(A) The proposed $25K would not be to all first-time home buyers. It would be limited to those who can document two years of on-time rent payments. It is an expansion on the Biden proposal to provide that $25K subsidy to an estimated 400,000/year first-generation home buyers (US citizens and legal permanent residents who could document that none of their parents or grandparents had been homeowners).
The Harris proposed $25K would apply to an estimated 1 million home buyers per year, which would be somewhere between 1/6th and 1/8th of US home purchases in a typical year. How much that would inflate housing prices is an open question, particularly if realtors and sellers don’t have a way to know in advance which interested buyers do and do not have that subsidy in their hip pocket.
(B) There is a good deal more in the proposal to cut through America's NIMBY problem (the supply side) than about boosting demand with subsidies. This Noah Smith writeup both details that and contextualizes it:
If you think, as I do, that bureaucratic sclerosis turning us into a society that can't build stuff anymore is one of this country's most urgent issues, then this Biden/Harris policy approach is very welcome. For my money that part is much more significant than a new subsidy aimed at a limited subset of new homebuyers.
"Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago."
Ah, so this is the usual political gambit of repeating even louder the announcements about "more of thing!" that you already made, so that it sounds like a whole new tranche of "more thing!" instead of "same amount of thing we already announced".
I would expect that when the details (if any) are hashed out, then "terms and conditions will apply" and a lot fewer people will get less money than the big, vague announcement makes it sound.
I'm suspicious of his argument that the $25k subsidy/$10k tax credit is actually fine because Singapore does it. I imagine Singapore does a lot of things differently that might make individual factors play out differently in Singapore than in the US. Maybe the US should also set ethnic quotas for neighbourhoods because Singapore does it and Noah can make up some post hoc rationalization about how it improves race relations.
I don't think anything the President does can actually fix the NIMBY problem, even if they legitimately wanted to and weren't just politically posturing. Most of that has to do with state/local ordnances, building codes and zoning laws, as well as adversarial review. Changing that is entirely outside the scope of the fedgov, excepting judicious application of the FYTW clause of the Constitution. Harris' plan seems to consist of price controls for rent (very bad), tax benefits and incentives for people who otherwise wouldn't own homes (brings the 2008 sub-prime mortgage fiasco to mind), and incentives to build "affordable" housing. If this means houses that are cheaper to build, great. If this means affordable housing in the California way, where it is required to be sold/rented at below market rates to selected beneficiaries, very bad.
That is a poor and highly selective summary of the Biden/Harris policy proposal. If it was accurate I would entirely agree with you about it. Fortunately it is not accurate.
The Smith writeup that I linked has a much better description of what Biden and now Harris have proposed on this subject (of which some smallish parts have already been implemented by Biden).
So Kamala is going to tackle the Sacred Parking Lot, is she?
Yes, that's rather snarky, but I was more amused by the brass-necked cheek of the grift going on: sorry, you can't build here because this is a sacred plot of land for our tribe, why thank you very much for your kind donation. Ah, good old San Francisco!
"The city of Berkeley will purchase Spenger’s parking lot and transfer the property to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust as part of a recent settlement agreement over the contested plot of land in West Berkeley.
The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.
The decision appears to mark the end of a years-long legal battle over the property at 1900 Fourth St. between the city and developer Ruegg & Ellsworth. The parties in the case filed a notice of settlement in Alameda County Superior Court Friday."
Now, why does my wizened cold black stony heart whisper to me that, should a nice big fat lump of developer money be pushed across the desk of the Land Trust, that this sacred shellmound will be turned into office buildings or apartment blocks faster than you can say "rip up the tarmac, Patsy me boy!"?
I don't know if this is true or not, I'm going by various comments I've read, but nobody knows if there actually *is* a sacred tribal site under the parking lot, it's just an assumption being made by the "give us money or else" set of objectors? Though I probably am being unreasonably mean about that:
"Efforts to develop the property, a parking lot once owned by Spenger’s Fish Grotto, date back two decades. Developers faced opposition from some Ohlone, who protested the development of a sacred shellmound site. In 2018, Berkeley blocked a streamlined permit to build housing on the site. They had been embroiled in a legal battle since.
Beneath the parking lot, adjacent to an upscale commercial area in West Berkeley, some Ohlone say, is the last undeveloped part of the oldest shellmound and village site around the Bay, a ceremonial site and fishing village.
“It’s one of the most culturally significant sites for the Lisjan people and to have it protected forever, I think I’m without words,” said Corrina Gould, a co-director of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Gould also leads Confederated Villages of Lisjan (pronounced Le-shawn), a group of seven tribes across the Bay Area that was involved in the lawsuit alongside the city of Berkeley.
The city of Berkeley designated the site a landmark in 2000 and it was added to a list of endangered historic places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2020, though questions have been raised about the exact location of the shellmound."
> Incentivizing people who otherwise can't afford to buy a house.
I miss the days when pro capitalists would argue that the system while not equal was great for everybody. A subsidy that gets people on the housing market seems good to me, and good for people’s attitude to the system. In any case Fannie Mae is an existing subsidy and one which most conservatives - if not libertarians - are ok with.
> > A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
> Price controls.
That's not price controls. That's anti-price-fixing. If businesses in an area use a centralized authority to set prices that's exactly what anti-price-fixing is supposed to stop.
Subsidizing demand is dumb and will basically end up the same way that Bush 43 tried really really hard to encourage home ownership and we got a housing bubble. We need to build a lot more, but we don't necessarily need to worry about home ownership.
Looking into this some more, describing it as price control was incorrect. But I'm not sure it's price fixing either. It seems like some landlords hired consultants to evaluate their rent prices, in part using private data from previous clients. The fedgov alleges that this is the same thing as the landlords directly colluding with each other to set prices, a claim I am somewhat dubious of.
Kamala Harris: "There’s a serious housing shortage. In many places, it’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up. As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels." 🇺🇸 (4). This seems reasonably clearly described, specific, and good policy, but also not policy that pools stupidly well and thus gets said whether or not you intend to do so (such as being against price gouging).
The grocery store "price controls" thing seems to be people taking vague "anti-price gouging" statement and then interpreting it in the worst possible manner; as your first article mentions, there's no specific attached policy.
I mean, I think that it is a nonsense populist policy since grocery stores are not actually engaged in price gouging (grocery store margins, like food prices in general, are razor thin because the product is both fungible and regularly repurchased). However, again, there's no actually attached policy yet, so claims of "price controls" are overblown. It could be something like NY's law which forbids excessively raising rates (i.e. raising rates much more than increases in costs) during a crisis, for example. Existing federal anti-price-fixing laws are pretty weak and highly specific, against stuff to the effect of "hoarding to sell later".
She is obviously in a bind here. Blaming "price gouging" for what is obviously good old-fashioned inflation is the only option Democrats have. They can't blame inflationary policy because their administration did absolutely nothing to combat the ghastly inflationary fiscal and monetary policies put into place during the Trump administration--indeed they carried those policies forward and did their damnedest to add a few of their own during the Biden administration. (I know that monetary policy is set by the Fed, which is nominally independent, but in reality the President and Congress do have some influence, and in 2022 the Democrats were very loudly lobbying the Fed to keep monetary policy *loose*!)
Note that Republicans, though far from blameless when it comes to inflationary policy (did I mention that the most horrifically inflationary fiscal and monetary policies of the last five years were put into place during the Trump administration?), feel no compunction about railing against actual inflationary policy while pretending that their guys didn't enthusiastically take part in kicking it off in 2020. This gives them the huge advantage of being able to complain about the actual problem.
Being an incumbent really sucks when your performance on a given issue has been bad. Voters will blame you--not without justification!--for your bad performance while ignoring the poor performance of your immediate predecessor. It would be great if it were politically tenable to just admit that you fucked up (while pointing out that the other guys fucked up too, if applicable) rather than make up obvious silly lies about e.g. "price gouging" but it isn't.
I think there's a good 3-minute explanation for inflation that Harris could give that would substantially reduce the negative impact of this issue for her, but it involves
* reminding people about inflation
* taking a little bit of the blame
* reminding people about COVID and no one wants to think about it any more
* requiring Americans to have a 3-minute attention span
As far as I can tell, parties across countries and the political spectrum are increasingly realizing that their voters can be bribed. Buying the public using the public's money seems to be democracy's endgame.
We're in the completely opposite territory of roughly 1992-2002 when politicians ran as responsible fiscal stewards. Now it's "YOLO just get elected, so no tax on tea, no tax on tips, no tax on Tuesdays, no tax on tacos."
>their administration did absolutely nothing to combat the ghastly inflationary fiscal and monetary policies put into place during the Trump administration--indeed they carried those policies forward and did their damnedest to add a few of their own during the Biden administration.
The best the USA can do for bipartisan governance! :-)
Literally yes. No snark required. The consumer inflation, asset bubbles, and upward wealth transfer of the last four and a half years were genuinely a stunning bipartisan achievement. Just imagine what we could do if we could get the two parties to agree to do something *not* massively stupid and unjust.
The fed's interest rate is higher than it's been in a long time (last time it was higher was 2006), I don't think it's correct to say that they haven't tried to rein in inflation given interest rates have been over 5% for the past full year. Especially given high interest rates do have lots of downside risks on the economy (namely, potentially causing a recession, which fortunately has not materialized), holding them up is obviously a good and strong action against inflation. Inflation has been low (<4%) since June 2023. Fixing inflation is just a thing that takes a while for people to notice, because getting rid of inflation doesn't make prices go down, it just makes them stop going up.
>"The fed's interest rate is higher than it's been in a long time (last time it was higher was 2006)…"
Although the Fed communicates via interest rate targets, interest rates themselves are *not* monetary policy; more important is the difference between the target and the unobservable "natural rate", and in that aspect the Fed has been behind the curve (cf. interest rates during the Carter administration).
The Fed has indeed been trying, albeit too slowly and cautiously imo, to rein in inflation by bringing back "high" (that is to say, historically rather low but normal) interest rates and by letting some of their massively excessive bond purchases mature without reinvesting the proceeds. I knew someone would point that out, which is why I noted that the Fed is nominally independent. And Jerome Powell is a Republican anyway. And the whole time he has been cautiously trying to rein in inflation, he has been yelled at over and over by Democrats lime Liz Warren and Katie Porter insisting that he turn the free money machine back on! (And that was on top of getting yelled at by Trump in 2019 for exactly the same thing.)
Now I have to push back, a bit hard, against two of your claims. Three first, of course, is that interest rates are high. This is nonsense, as you should already know: in order to find the point (2006) at which rates were last this "high," you surely had to look at a chart. Well, zoom out a little bit! The last twenty years were an aberration, and the pandemic years were an aberration on top of another aberration. These rates are *normal*, in fact they're on the low side of the normal range. They only look high compared to the absolutely batshit rates of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) years.
The second claim is that "inflation has been low (<4%) since June 2023. I truly don't know how top say this except directly: that is not what the word "low" means. The Fed's target inflation rate is 2%. Many people believe that that's too high, but let's give the Fed the entirely unearned benefit of the doubt here. 4% is literally twice the Fed's target! It is quite literally 100% too high! I know you said "less than," not "at," but please think about where you are setting the bar. If we generously assume that inflation overall is closer to 3%, that's still 50% over target, and that's on top of the ghastly high prices that resulted from the years of 8 or 9% inflation. With that in mind, I'm afraid that you simply cannot with a straight face describe inflation as "low," especially to anybody still picking their jaw back up off the floor from seeing their car insurance renewal offer.
>holding [rates] up is obviously a good and strong action against inflation.
Agreed. Unfortunately, they've been signaling that they won't do it much longer. One can only be yelled at for so long, I guess.
I must mention that $25,000 in down payment relief doesn't lower the price of the house by $25,000. If you have a house priced at €250,000 then the buyer needs to come up, for a traditional mortgage, with €50,000, or €25,000 under this plan. This could indeed make it easier for a buyer to get into a house. If the owner instead raises the price to €275,000 because of the policy, then the buyer must only come up with €30,000 of the now €55,000 down payment.
But I haven't heard any details of this "policy". Where does this money come from? What do those that already own homes and those that don't want to buy a first home think of subsidizing that $25,000 for other people? Or if it's a loan, how is the system wrong now to make this a good financial choice for people who couldn't get a home without it?
Disclosures: I'm conservative, currently own a home, and think this is an idiotic idea plainly aimed to try to buy votes from those it would benefit with my (and others') money.
I'm not conservative, do not currently own a home, and think that this is an idiotic idea because like so many "housing affordability" measures that involve direct subsidies, it simply increases demand which pumps prices up higher.
"Demand subsidy" has been one of my favorite bits of rhetoric lately. It encapsulates the problem so perfectly, in just 5 syllables (even suitable for haiku!).
What’s your feeling on Fannie Mae and long term fixed mortgages (which seems to me to be a US only thing, backed by government). That’s clearly a subsidy and one that looks unique to the US. It’s the kind of thing that, if it existed in France only, would be condemned as communist. Nevertheless it has increase home ownership in the US. Increasing demand and supply for housing seems like a good bet, if possible.
My understanding is Fannie Mae is only one of the buyers of mortgage-backed securities. Others can also buy them, so it isn't a government-mandated price-fixing plan. And 30-year mortgage existed before mortgage-backed securities were a thing, so we've been doing that a long time, apparently since 1971.
The 30-year-fixed-mortgage, with no prepayment penalty, is not anything that you would ever find in a free market. No one would ever offer to be on the other side of that market.
Americans' views of debt markets has been warped by their experience with consumer credit.
Just try to fix America's system to be like, say, Canada's. You'll get denounced as "un-American" which I guess is true in the most depressing sense.
Donald Trump's campaign had a tweet complaining about how much home values have risen. Or fallen, I forget which, which is the horrible irony of the situation that anything that makes real estate more valuable (😊!) makes housing more expensive (😡!)
But much of the money the government spends does not come from taxes. It comes from inflation of the money supply, or printing, or quantitative easing, or long term bond debt, or Modern Monetary Theory (whatever people decide to call it). Which, I believe (I’m no fiscal or macroeconomics expert), erodes value in currency for everyone, screwing the poor and compelling the rich to exit the system.
Home buyer tax credit: 2-ish. This would cost somewhere around$25B/year by my quick back of the envelope calculations, and while I don't think it will do much to help the problem it is otherwise mostly harmless. It has a little bit of "value" as a redistribution program, since it would apply only to first time buyers (about 25% of the market) an would probably be means tested if implemented. I think she'll try to include it in budget proposals but there's a good chance it'll get dropped or nerfed into insignificance during the legislative process.
Price controls: probably 1. If she employs competent advisors and occasionally listens to their advice, she knows this is a terrible idea, but one that will play well with voters who are cranky about inflation and don't know much about price theory. Actually dusting off failed Nixon economic policies and causing massive shortages of consumer staples would be a terrible look once in office.
Insulin price fixing at $35/month just got vetoed by Gavin Newsom in California, who is instead proposing the state government produce its own subsidized generic insulin. Harris might drop it completely, or engage in failure theater (propose it and let Congress vote it down), or limit it to basic generic varieties that don't cost (much) more than $35 anyway.
Medical debt forgiveness: 1-2. The government mostly isn't the lender, which makes it difficult for it to forgive the debts.
The Harris campaign estimates that about 4 million people will benefit from the home buyer tax credit. I don't know how many will be added per year, but that's $100 billion for the existing ones.
You might benefit from reading the entirety of the Biden/Harris homebuilding plan, of which the subsidy to a subset of new home buyers is just one part, and deciding whether you think its actual policy objectives are worthwhile.
I don’t think she could get those proposals past even a Democratic Senate, much less a Republican one, so they’re meaningless pandering.
The possibility of them being realized gives me pause, for sure, because they’re terrible. But so do Trump’s tariffs and proposed tax cuts, and I would give those a somewhat even higher chance of getting enacted in a 2nd Trump term.
So on net, it makes me less excited about the prospect of a Harris administration, though it doesn’t flip my preference.
As your Guantanamo example (perhaps inadvertently) demonstrates, she is not going to be able to enact anything without the agreement of Congress, which in most cases means 60 votes in the Senate, which she will not have.
Re #3 and #4, it is a stretch to frame a couple of policy proposals as "a vision for the economy." But encouraging the construction of housing is sound policy which will actually address a real problem. Down-payment assistance will benefit first-time buyers at the expense of older buyers; whether that is a good thing depends on your policy preferences. Re anti-gouging, it all depends on what that means. Finally, people can get medical debt relief now, by filing bankruptcy. Of course, when that happens, the medical providers get paid pennies on the dollar, if anything. An alternative that has govt picking up some or all of the tab might be an improvement, depending on how it is structured.
Thing is, *is* it encouraging the construction of new housing? I think it would be intended to do that, but might not do so in reality; a lot easier to slap increases on the price of houses you're already building than to decide to build an extra 20 on that site.
The problems of zoning, NIMBY, there's plenty of housing but nobody wants to live here/no jobs, etc. will still exist.
Agreed. In many dimensions she shames her economics professors. Price controls for food? Expropriation of patents? Tariffs? Subsidizing demand when it is supply that is short? Insane.
What exactly is wrong with US shipbuilding? Why is the US so inept at building commercial ships, compared to other developed countries like South Korea, Japan, and even Finland? I saw some stat floating around the other day saying that even in the 70s, when manufacturing employment was a larger % of the US economy, Japan was out-building the US by a large margin.
If your answer is 'the Jones Act', I'd like to hear a bit of a deeper explanation as to why. If the answer is 'well the US de-industrialized', it's worth noting that the US is still the world's second largest manufacturer. (1) So I don't completely buy that either
The US has had a labor shortage for its entire lifetime, including colonial times. The way it solved it in the past was immigration including low wage immigration. But that has been cut off for about a century at this point. When you have a labor shortage the lowest profit/productivity work goes first. So it showed up first as difficulty finding servants and continued into the offshoring of lower value manufacturing. This included things like mass shipbuilding (especially with the old WW2 supply ship glut).
Now, there is high value ship building. But the US Congress declared war on it in the for populist economic reasons. You see, the type of boat with the highest margins are yachts and luxury craft. This just caused it to move abroad to friendlier, less anti-rich destinations like... Europe. The Jones Act doesn't help either. Plus the heavy industry subsidy reach East Asian model meant new global competition. But that's more or less the story: the reason the US can still be the second biggest manufacturer on chemicals is that, while we offshored a lot of the low value work, no one in Congress declared jihad on clorox for being a sign of inequality.
>You see, the type of boat with the highest margins are yachts and luxury craft
Are yacht manufacturers really also commercial vessel manufacturers? Like, very large tankers and so on. I am a bit skeptical. Also, how did Congress 'declare war on it'? The US is set up to a pretty industry-friendly system of government, which I think is fine, so I'm also a bit skeptical that Congress actually drove an industry out of the country via populism
> Are yacht manufacturers really also commercial vessel manufacturers?
Some are. But even if they weren't there's a great deal of skill crossover between making large pleasure boats and other kinds of large boats among the workforce. And in terms of shipbuilding statistics both count as ships.
> Also, how did Congress 'declare war on it'?
With a series of specifically targeted taxes and regulations. The idea that economic populism doesn't exist in the US, or that it doesn't have consequences, or that the US is maximally business friendly is reasoning with stereotypes. It didn't help that multiple Congresspeople specifically said they were hostile to the industry as they passed legislation which caused producers to anticipate further hostility and leave. Congress did backpedal in the 1990s but by that point they were already out the door.
I would guess that, based on how the defence sector operates, shipbuilders' highest profit margins would be for warships, by a very considerable, er, margin. They wouldn't have the volume there, of course, compared to pleasure craft, and the massive military contractors building warships are a very different sort of business to the shipyards producing glass-fibre yachts.
The idea that military contracts are unusually profitable is one of those widely believed myths. If anything all of the controls on making profits, combined with long sales cycles, means that the government sector is underserved. A lot of the extra expense is specifically besides the government does things like cost plus or fee plus T&M which doesn't incentivize companies to control costs. But if you do things like fixed fee then you get some contractor who makes a nice profit margin and that becomes a whole investigation.
Related to this issue is this article about Anduril and it’s founder (the same guy who invented the Oculus Rift.) he talks a lot about the structure of defense contracting in this country and it’s perverse incentives. I found it a very, very fascinating read.
The defence contracts I've been involved with have all been very profitable indeed (though sadly not for me personally.)
Terribly small and personal sample size, I know; if you have a bird's-eye-view understanding of the defence sector as a whole of course I shan't argue with you!
I'd be curious to hear more. My experience is there's usually a lot of money flying around but most of it goes to salaries/parts/that kind of thing. And that's where there's real money to be made because the further you get away from the contract holder the less controls there are and the more you can arbitrage high government prices while pushing costs down.
I can't really expand on that owing to commercial sensitivity, I'm afraid (and sorry for being so vague in the first place!)
Defence/aerospace salaries are very ..healthy.. it's true, and one-off componentry made to military spec (I've seen one-offs fabricated of everything from matchbox-sized PCBs to three-storey-high spare parts for slow-speed "cathedral" diesel engines) can undertsandably be very expensive - but I was talking specifically about profit margins, not overall expenditure.
South Korea, Japan, and the Nordics have made a concerted, national-level effort to invest in and develop their shipyards in a way that historically-good shipbuilders like Britain and the US haven't. There are also differences in design philosophies - for example Korean naval architecture favours increased modularisation compared to similar-spec British designs - that, whilst not necessarily resulting in *better* ships, definitely do result in *better value for money* ships.
(This being said, I've navigated both 1980s British ships and 2020s Korean and Nordic ships, and I very much prefrred the old Brit designs owing to their seakeeping, their propulsion and handling characteristics, "organic" (as opposed to external-contractor-dependent) repairability, and the general niceness of their layout and accommodation (er, for officers at least..) even though they were less efficient economically and required thrice the crew complement to operate.)
This seems to be a general problem with any form of US manufacturing project large enough to require special government investment - American ports, trains, and other infrastructure all have the same issue.
Governments don't invest. Investment requires anticipation of profits. Governments waste money on projects that will only begun because no investor expects to get their money back.
How do you determine if a project is necessary? Answer: it isn't a waste of money. That is, it returns a profit. But governments give the thing away, so they have no idea whether they are creating too much or too little of it. They can't begin to measure the gain to society, so they don't even bother. They just assume that everything is for the good of everyone.
On a libertarianish theory of government... Government shouldn't invest when there's a clear way for a single entity to make a profit on the returns. Government should invest when the returns are distributed intangibly across most of the population, or over large timescales, or just when any attempt to collect the returns would be impractical or intolerable. But just because the returns from, say, mass vaccinations are hard to measure, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Governments can't invest over large timescales because the next regime (whether dictatorial or democratic) might change their mind about the value of it. E.g. in Guatemala, one regime made a contract with a US firm to restore and run the country's 3' narrow gauge railways. The next regime declared that contract to be against the country's best interests, and refused to prevent people from stealing rails, OTM and even bridges.
Just because the existence of ghosts is hard to measure, doesn't mean they don't exist.
The solution to that is the "deep state", i.e. have rule of law and bureaucracy and strong norms so it's hard to change things on a dime for no reason. But it takes a very long time for investors to get the confidence that they'll be treated fairly, and no time at all to lose it.
Everywhere I look I see examples of government investments that generate massive returns. The motorway network, the telecoms network, the sewer network, the National Grid, the Tube - even the ludicrously expensive Apollo programme is estimated to have generated a 7:1 return on investment! (Randomly-plucked-from-internet citation: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html)
"Phase III (2010-2020): Establish colonies on other planets. This phase should be largely funded by participants, with funds flowing back to the owners and providers of the infrastructure-if it is not an integral part of the project. As colonization begins, products and services-on Earth and in space-should be completely revolutionized, leading to a planetary wealth beyond our wildest imagination: There will be an abundance of resources available from space, new products developed to exploit space, and an abundance of demands that can be met here on Earth as a result of the expanded resource base."
I don't think the return on investment is serious.
Interstate highways undeniably turbocharge GDP, yet it was government that built them, not private investors. It was an investment in future profit and development, even if the government doesn't capture all of that value. Cabining the term "investment" to mean only what your comment claims it means is excessively narrow.
The Interstate Highway system was (like ARPANET) a fundamentally defense-oriented project (so the Feds actually cared about ROI) which had massive positive externalities.
I read a fascinating book recently. It was written by Horace Busby who worked for Lyndon Johnson from Johnson's time in the House through the Senate, Senate Majority leader, US Presidential Candidate, Vice President and Presidency. What a ride! The book is like a collection of essays from different periods, but they are all fascinating, and in the end they help you to form a picture of the man, LBJ, who was unlike any other. I reviewed it here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-the-thirty-first-of-march
He writes "Logic cannot help you if your axioms are false. Scott unthinkingly accepts one: that ethics must have an ultimate foundation, from which all the specifics can be derived rationally."
And then he says Scott "gets the right answer" at the end of his post: "I want to be happy so I can be...", which is the "groundless answer" Vajrayana gives. Does anyone understand why this is "the right answer", and how this is the "groundless answer" Vajrayana gives?
I am also confused by "...because moral reasoning is not, and should not be, the main cause for moral action." So what is moral action for him?
> He writes "Logic cannot help you if your axioms are false. Scott unthinkingly accepts one: that ethics must have an ultimate foundation, from which all the specifics can be derived rationally."
> And then he says Scott "gets the right answer" at the end of his post: "I want to be happy so I can be...", which is the "groundless answer"
I have no idea who this is, but its possible he's just not a hyper reductionist morden world view
We live in a bubble with one extremely strange and extremely dominate world view about the supremacy of data; there is of course the other option to the rationalist take that "you must believe all data" and saying no every once in a while.
I can't claim any familiarity with his work, but reading the post I'm left with the impression that for David Chapman, moral ethics are grounded in himself, and that this can possibly be manifested in others by experiencing necrophilia (seriously, why are there multiple references to necrophilia in this post...). Moral action is then: "What Would David Champman Do?"
Overall, I agree his argument seems confused, in that he states that there is no ultimate basis for good, but also says good can be objectively measured. These seem inherently contradictory to me, as all quantitative measurements require a grounding to function (eg, distance is measured by a ruler, pollution is measured by particles per million). The great morality debate is such a debate precisely because nobody has an incontestable real grounding frame to claim. Chapman seems to insist that there isn't and can't be one (this is the part he thinks Scott got right in the end), but then never grapples with how that makes it impossible to measure moral good as he claims is possible: Thus, my conclusion is that the grounding frame he implicitly uses (whether he admits it or not) is his own internal sense of right/wrong, good/bad. This does seem to comport with his obsession of being a god-emperor, but is basically useless for anyone who isn't David Chapman and resolves no debates.
That said, I believe what Chapman is trying to say here is that trying to ground all your ethical decisions in a single self-coherent "ground" is a fruitless endeavor (and a significant amount of the rest of his writings are mostly about this), but that one can act in an ethical manner nonetheless by observing the real world and thinking straightforwardly about concrete interactions.
I do not believe he feels he needs to "prove" this is the "right answer" - to him it is self-evident and he feels it to agree with Vajrayana Buddhism's system.
When he says that "moral reasoning (...) should not be the cause for moral action", he is essentially stating that he believes that "what is right" is not something that has an eternal, unchanging definition - it can only be grasped within concrete interactions and not derived from an eternal, unchanging set of laws.
I'm probably not qualified to talk about Buddhism or Chapman. But when I was younger, I had a brief period where I checked out the hype around Zen Buddhism. And my impression is that Buddhists reject Platonism.
There's a word that keeps getting thrown around, called "emptiness". When they say things like "the universe is empty of meaning, what they really mean is that the universe is empty of *inherent* meaning. I.e. platonic essences don't exist. Because an object's existence is fundamentally predicated on its interaction with other objects.
This gets extended in all sorts of ways. One of which is a distrust of all abstraction. Only concrete things are real. Logic is a trickster god that leads you to ruin. So they have a bunch of koans (e.g. "what is the sound of one hand clapping?") that are meant to drive students nuts until they flip the table and go touch grass.
Except for the "meant to drive students nuts", which I guess was meant to be a joke anyway. The idea is that forcing yourself to reflect deeply and insistently on something illogical is one of many possible ways to shut off the logical, self-reflecting part of your mind in order to experience unmediated reality.
Also Chapman is a Tibetan Buddhist, which is quite different from Zen (they focus more on the idea that there is no metaphysically privileged standpoint vs. the idea of there being no inherent essence)
> they focus more on the idea that there is no metaphysically privileged standpoint
I see, I see. Fair enough. Don't know too much about the Tibetan variant. It certainly does shed further light on Chapman's writings. I'm also reminded of reading some anecdote about the Dalai Lama, which was amazed at his ability to rapidly context-switch from marveling at a flower(?) to <pondering something more expansive, but my memory fails me>.
> Except for the "meant to drive students nuts", which I guess was meant to be a joke anyway.
Yeah, half-joking. But only half. In my defense, it was hard to get an accurate read, since most of what I read was buried under deliberate obscurantism about "the nameless name behind the gateless gate". Although I suppose this is by design, to hint that "understanding enlightenment qua words/logic" is counterproductive to "understanding enlightenment qua raw-experience".
In any case, I know *I* certainly wanted to flip some tables. Supposedly, Zen is unique in attracting western monkey-minds like me. And as TLP always said, "if you're reading it, it's for you".
It means figuring out what is the right thing to do within that specific, nebulous moment. You might say it isn't really "ethical" necessarily and that's what I believe Chapman means by "you should be less ethical".
Perhaps, but that's where my comment below comes in. If you said that to him, he'd probably say something like "coherentism is simply a mistaken view based on your naive Western beliefs" and never explain himself.
Chapman generally plays quite fast and loose with the idea of something being "right" - which I think is sort of unavoidable if you generally reject the idea that "being correct" can be determined in a context-free manner.
I find much that Chapman says to be useful, but I also think that he often refuses to let his ideas be "pinned down" in a way where a fact could prove him wrong. Whenever he seems to contradict himself or say something questionable, he just goes "ha ha, you clearly do not have a deep understanding of Vajrayana Buddhism, I pity your infantile Western concepts!" and goes on as if nothing happened.
Despite finding a lot of what he says intriguing, I find it hard to take him seriously for this reason.
A few threads ago, someone asked the question "why do people support Trump?" And a lot of the people gave the answer "here's why someone who doesn't particularly like the man would vote for him: it's because they prefer his policies." Because that's the type of people who comment here. That doesn't address the question of those people who actually like him. Here's my take on it: much of Trumpism is a great big lower-class "pride" parade.
When it comes to gay pride parades, many ask the question "what's there to be proud of?" After all, the mantra is always that they didn't choose to be gay, so why take pride in it as if it were an actual accomplishment? It's hard to see what positive externality homosexuality provides to society. It reduces the fertility rate and spreads sexually transmitted diseases. Maybe homosexuality makes people better at art, though that's rather questionable IMO.
Of course, the real reason for pride parades isn't a theory of homosexuality's positive externality. It's not really about political demands either; if all the political demands are fulfilled in one year, you can be sure there will still be a pride parade next year, perhaps with a new set of political demands. It's a way for those who have been bullied, laughed at, and shamed for their homosexuality to say "f*** you" to their tormentors. If people respond with disgust and offense to the pride parade, that's all the better.
Trumpism is a pride parade for lower-class whites. All their lives they've been laughed at and looked down on for their lack of money and educational credentials, and also for their lower-class cultural habits, for dressing like cowboys, watching daytime court shows, listening to country music, shopping at Wal-Mart, buying lotto scratchers, speaking with an accent, eating junk food, and (until recently) drinking Bud Light. And then there's a movement that comes along promising a celebration of lower-class identity. Take the reality TV star you were mocked for looking up to and make him President. They laugh at you for watching professional wrestling? Take a professional wrestler and make him a party convention speaker. If the upper-class people respond with disgust, compare it to Idiocracy, mission accomplished! If they respond with positive fear, say it's the second coming of fascism, well, that's all the better! As with the gay pride parade, it's not really about policy. It's the fact that Kidd Rock and Hulk Hogan are up on that stage and not asked to leave, not anything they say.
Now, I'm not asserting here that this explains ALL of Trump's appeal to lower-class whites. For many working-class people in the Midwest, it was a vote against NAFTA instead of for Trump. But it is a lot of Trump's appeal.
Reminds me of something I read once speculating that "rolling coal" is the Redneck version of the Gay pride parade, i.e. spitting in the face of those you hate. And Scott's argument that Gay pride parades look a lot like religious parades for interesting reasons (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/). Also related is this description of "yanking down sacred fetishes to prove dominance" I once read:
"... Two young IRA men from his community were ambushed and slaughtered by the SAS on the anniversary of the Ballykelly bombing, which struck Carlin and everybody in Carlin’s community as a revenge killing indistinguishable from the actions of the IRA or the UVF. At their funeral, three thousand mourners turned out ready to fight for the right to bury them in dignity. Challenging them was a small army of RUC men.
What followed was a running battle/riot/stand-off to get the corpses to the place of burial, with constant negotiations with the coppers about what compromises to make in terms of cultural symbols- use the hearse or not, drape the tricolor flag on the coffin or not, with or without the black beret and gloves. During one skirmish, the pallbearer standing next to Carlin was shot in the head with a plastic bullet and died.
His description of the running street battle kind of reminds me of two Stone Age tribes battering each other about, trying to yank down the other’s sacred fetishes to prove dominance..."
> It's hard to see what positive externality homosexuality provides to society. It reduces the fertility rate and spreads sexually transmitted diseases.
Lesbians have much lower rates of std transmission; on the net, homosexuality has no or even negative effect on std transmission.
"One thing that Trump never communicates, and cannot possibly communicate, is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed toward self-aggrandizement. Even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters. Even when he is calling himself a genius, he is never actually communicating that he is better than you, more enlightened, more decent, because he's not, and everyone knows it.
The man is just a bundle of sin and gore. And he never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps more importantly, he never even aspires to be anything more. And because of this, because he is never really judging you, he cannot possibly judge you, he offers a truly safe space for human frailty and hypocrisy and self-doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer, a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual balm. Trump is fat Jesus. He's grab-'em-by-the-pussy Jesus. He's I'll-eat-nothing-but-cheeseburgers-if-I-want-to Jesus. He's I-want-to-punch-them-in-the-face Jesus. He's go-back-to-your-shithole-countries Jesus. He's no-apologies Jesus.
And now consider the other half of this image, what are we getting from the Left? We're getting exactly the opposite message. Pure sanctimony. Pure judgement. You are not good enough. You're guilty, not only for your own sins, but the sins of your fathers. The crimes of slavery and colonialism are on your head. And if you're a cis-white-heterosexual male—which we know is the absolute core of Trump's support—you're a racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist barbarian. Tear down those statues, and bend the fucking knee. It's the juxtaposition between those two messages that is so powerful."
I don’t think this is quite right… the divide isn’t quite class… it’s more frequently rural/urban (which does correlate a lot with class).
I do think George is correct about the authenticity part… and to me the question is *why do rural people value that over all other aspects?*
(Other aspects being kindness, attempts and helping those less fortunate, etc.)
I do think rural people value those other aspects, but the anti-value they place on inauthenticity has a far greater weight. In their world, you must have common sense, be able to do things yourself, and trust your neighbor. People that can talk a good talk but can’t help them if they’re stranded on the side of the road are useless to them and potentially net harmful.
As for your tweet, that's populism? Without a centralized cultural authority enforcing standards, it's hard to get 50.1% of votes (individual or electoral) to support a party that presents as refined and classy.
There might be some truth in this, but I think it mostly misses the mark. I'm going to say part of the Trump appeal is that regardless of how you feel about him, what you see is what you get. He's honestly who he is at all times. You can hate this or love it, but it's the honesty that people want and that is seemingly missing in much of our political realm. Well that's my simple take.
I think that this is correct. But, not "honesty" but rather authenticity. He comes across as authentic, as opposed to a manufactured politician, which is the case with many of his opponents (certainly Hillary Clinton and most of his opponents in the 2016 primary. But not Joe Biden). And this is not about honesty, since he obviously lies constantly. (Though it is possible that, in the moment, he believes his own lies. But that is a separate topic).
I think you have a point although I don’t really agree that Trump can be called ”authentic”.
There is an expression ”hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” and maybe Trump is not a hypocrite as much as the usual public figure in this sense eg. he doesn’t seem to pretend to respect things he doesn’t like.
> he doesn’t seem to pretend to respect things he doesn’t like.
I mean sometimes he does when he really can't get away with not doing so. For instance I don't get the impression that he likes religion at all, but he knows he can't get elected as a Republican with that attitude.
Yeah you are right. The word I meant to write was authenticity. (Thanks to gdanning) He lies a lot (perhaps) but they are all authentically Trumpian lies.
I'm looking for podcast and nonfiction recommendations in French (blogs are welcome too). I'm asking here because I found a number of good books and blogs in English through this community, so if there are some other French speakers we hopefully have some common tastes...
I'm a native speaker (French parent), but I've never lived in France for significant periods of time, and since I no longer live with my parents or take classes my French is feeling a bit rusty... Regarding language level: I don't have trouble reading the news\listening to radio, I can read academic texts with no issues, but I don't know any slang (this can be an issue, for example in Marchika's "Les gardiens d'aleph-deux", which I find incomprehensible, and in youtube channels).
Non fiction stuff I've liked in the past have been about history (usually not modern though), nature\biology, linguistics, history of science and technology.
Some podcasts - 99% invisible, Storiavoce, Solastalgie (last 2 are french). I know France culture has many things, if there's a specific rec I'd love to hear about it.
Some non-fiction - Reich's Who we are and how we got here, Clark's The sun kings, Sobel's Longitude, S. Sagan's For small creatures such as we, Rhode's The making of the atomic bomb, Strauss's Ten caesars, Pryor's Scenes from prehistoric life, Finlay's Fabric, Beaussant's Le roi-soleil se lève aussi, Barnavi's Dix thèses sur la guerre.
I come from a physics-math background which tends to make me dislike podcasts on those topics. History of science is usually good.
In large projects, man-years are used to count allocated human resources. I think we should also use this to track humanity's progress. I'll use BAMYs (Billion Accumulated Man-Years) as a handy unit.
Right now, we are progressing with ~8 BAMYs per year. In total, humanity up to today has logged ~1800 BAMYs.
I like this idea a lot, and would love to see it built out more comprehensively with, as other commentors note, things like a spreadsheet with data, non-scientific points, and more non-western points.
With the exception of the first two items, these all come from "Western" civilization. How much input did China and India have?
Were the accumulated BAMYs of the New World mostly lost or redundant?
You seem to be measuring scientific/technological progress, specifically. Going back to the Civ analogy, this means that taxation, entertainment, culture, and infrastructure are only valued in terms of their (potentially long term) impact on technology.
> Were the accumulated BAMYs of the New World mostly lost or redundant?
Almost all accumulated BAMYs are redundant for tech development. For example, you don't need to accumulate 150 BAMY to invent writing. Writing was invented independently on multiple continents. If the continents of the Old World had sunk below the ocean just after settlers arrived in the New World, this would not have affected the Mayans developing their script much.
Mostly technological process was very inefficient. You could likely invent writing -- including all the precursor techs with just a few BAMY if you knew what you were doing. Just like the Rite of AshkEnte can be performed with a few cubic centimeters of mice blood, but usually is much more elaborate.
I've been thinking about this for the last couple of hours, and I think the answer is no (we shouldn't ignore it), after initially thinking the answer is yes, because the agricultural impact alone is enormous (corn, potatoes, tomatoes), and these *are* technologies; their predecessors were not great foods. There's also quite a few smaller/ indirect/softer inspirations that I think are worth *something*; snowshoes, sunglasses, kayaks, and certain sewing techniques from the Inuit, for instance. The modern environmental movement draws (imperfectly and crudely, but clearly inspired by) from many native American traditions. Combine that with their low populations and I think the contribution per billion man-years holds up.
This comment thread is exactly the sort of discussion I was hoping for... I find the responses here extremely valuable, especially in terms of AMYs being a useful concept to think about accumulated progress and at the same time highlighting stuff I haven't thought about yet.
(this applies to all of you, just adding it here once to not litter the discussion)
No I don't think so, and nice idea. (I wish you also shared the spreadsheet you used to estimate these BAMYs to save potential collaborators time, if you used one that is)
Signal-boosting a generally-negative comment on the comic book review feels to me like a pretty strong signal to readers that you didn’t like that review (or at least, like Gwern, felt it was half-baked), which feels like “illegal” interference with the book review contest…
Gwern generally has interesting things to say, even if I don't always agree. In this case, I think the criticism is fairly mild, and the length of the comment should be taken half as a statement that the review was interesting enough to inspire that much response.
I found the comment interesting and useful, and missed it when reading the thread (maybe it wasn't there yet) and I'm glad Scott highlighted it.
I think highlighting interesting discussion for the readers is probably more valuable than Scott completely avoiding giving the impression of having an opinion for "fairness" reasons.
Scott seems to avoid commenting on the book review posts, so it seems like, in general, he is trying to avoid leaking information about his own opinions.
I agree that that thread was an interesting discussion, but it was an interesting discussion that can be summarized as “we think this book review is half-baked and should not win the contest”. And Scott apparently thinks it’s worth our time to read that thread. Ok.
Agreed. The start of the comment reads like a snickering mocking of the review writer, or at least is very easily interpretable as such that I and several others did interpret it as such. The rest of the comment is a good elaboration on the review but it doesn't cancel out the bad prefix. It's generally good discussion/writing etiquette to not "Steal the show" from something you're commenting on: if you have a very good contribution, wrap it inside praising or neutral commentary on the thing you're commenting on.
More generally, writing styles is like humor: You can never uncontroversially say "Not Good" about it without being contradicted by a bunch. I have once read a Marxist critic of Scott that sharply and harshly called Scott's writing "bland" (or was it "grey"?) and incompetent... and then proceeded to cite I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup * as an example. Laugh all you want, I certainly did after I got tired of raising my eyebrows, but the same general phenomenon happens when Rationalists/STEM tribe harshly calls Post-Modern or Critical Theory writing embellished nonsense. *I* certainly believe Post-Modern writing styles are more deserving of the label "bullshit" than Scott's, but then again that's exactly what someone who have read Scott for years but Post-Modern writing for perhaps an aggregate total of 1 hour would say.
Was it the piece by Elizabeth Sandifer at Eruditorum? I'll omit the link, because of her rather annoying insistence on meat-naming Scott throughout.
That one had stuck in my mind for a while, too. Some of her criticisms on style hit the mark, and the temptation to just string together cool and exotic analogies and thought experiments is one LW-adjacent writers seem self-aware about (see the term "insight porn", for example), but I think the whole effort is doomed by her distaste at his politics.
I don't remember, I distinctly remember he was a man though, so maybe not an Elizabeth, but I could be wrong.
> meat-naming Scott
I'm tempted to take this as evidence it was her, because I also remember the author did that a lot, but then again, it's a bit of a shibboleth among anti-ACX types to say the middle name, perhaps not an identifying characteristic.
Some of the commenters in that thread were mocking, but I don’t think Gwern’s comment was. He is basically saying “this could have been a better essay if the author had spent a bit more time polishing it”.
Having read the comment, I think it was spot-on. Others had already read the comment, too.
I wasn't going to vote for that review (my current favorite is Real Raw News), but found it hard to nail down what I thought this review lacked or needed. The comment did a good job of briefly showing what the review was trying to do.
The Democratic messaging seems to have shifted from "Republicans are racist" to "Republicans are theofascists who will cause Christian nationalism".
Is this due to some real change in the Republican Party? Why? Isn't Christianity in long-term decline, and even the right supposedly taking a "post-Christian turn?"
Or is it about what scare words play better with focus groups? If so, why has this changed? Is it all just abortion?
I want to point out the incredible cultural primacy of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" in every left-leaning narrative not just abortion but any cultural or legal aspect of young women's lives.
It's an interesting story taken to a silly dystopian extreme, almost cartoonish, and the writing and prose are best described as, well ... "Canadian". It's 40 (50?) years old, it was certainly read by most women in my college cohort, and yes there was a movie (or miniseries?) At the time, stories about the creepy menace of charismatic Evangelical Christians, and the hypocricy and misdeeds of "Televangelists" were very popular in the culture. Those themes have faded away (except for any Mormon like Mitt Romney being shunned.)
And yet in the last month I have read an opinion piece (not just a blog comment) by a woman who directly warned that discussions of the "fertility crisis" and "natalism" was really a sinister Christian plot to force all women to bear a government-mandated number of children. OMG JUST LIKE IN HANDMAID'S TALE!! She wrote this with no typos and proper grammar, if not much reasoning or logic. One other example: Justice Barrett was an easy target for the paranoia (*)
As the saying goes, "It's all so tiresome." But thinking about it this week, it hit me that a big part of the reason that story scares the crap out of young women is: They are not being oppressed by MEN. They are being used and enslaved by other, older WOMEN. Betrayed, as it were. Given the absolute central role that in-group social rivalry seems to play in women's relationships (**), this narrative detail is a stroke of genius. [The story also has a stark simple visual brand, easy to use, like a placard or chanted slogan. The Handmaid outfit is the visual equivalent of a Sammy Hagar song (***) -- simple, unambiguous, perfect for shout-alongs and fist-pumps.]
Has anybody else noted this evergreen go-to dystopian scenario?
*** - I think Sammy Hagar is a stone genius at saying simple things in a simple way: Wanna discuss fuel economy and highway fatalities, or shout "I Can't Drive 55"? Guy could have been a speechwriter.
Predictably, everybody - including affluent liberal, though they'd never admit it - got sick of relentless fixation on the must pessimistic possible viewpoint on race
It's just more of the pot calling the kettle black, preemptively accusing conservatives of bigotry through gaslighting. In the imaginary world they're trying to conjure, All conservatives are 'Christian nationalists' or Deniers of a Woman's Right to Choose. But imagining conservatives don't have an interest in women's biological autonomy is mistaken, and labeling them extremists is foolish.
If the clueless Left want extremists, they need look no farther than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and supporters of Hamas. Although I won't vote for either candidate, wannabe 'progressives' telling ridiculously fanciful stories about conservatives won't win them any votes. In fact, it remains to be seen whether Harris can win without at least some Deplorable votes. The Democrats' proud lurch to appease the extremist Left just may bring us a surprise like 2016.
I’m not American, admittedly but I have not noticed that so much. It’s an odd strategy for a party that has a lot of ethnic Christians.
However the Vance is weird messaging is interesting, and probably cuts the new right off at the knees. After all Vance has said a lot less controversial stuff than many of the Substack right.
In the US we have about a hundred branches of Christianity that live in peace, but who will dogpile on any one group that tries to climb to the top. This goes all the way back to the democratic selection of borderline atheistic founding fathers, from a patchwork of deeply religious local districts who would view a continental representative carrying the distinctive marks of any of their neighbors as a deeply dangerous usurpation. It is why separation of church and state went over so well in a country of farmers who by today's standards would be considered flame-spitting fundamentalists. It's not so much separation of *their* church and the state they were after, but separation of the other thousand churches that had a long history of elbowing them!
The arrival of a large number of Catholics one hundred years later threatened to upset the balance, and caused several waves of panic. The fear (in "bad years,") was that if allowed to be elected on their own merits, Catholic politicians would coordinate with each other to ensure their church stayed on top. In the end it turned out to be a bundle of discriminatory lies propagated by hack journalists, and encouraged by politicians who did not personally stand to lose from it. Now it is barely mentioned in history textbooks.
The Christians most prominently associated with the Trump campaign represent a distinct sect, "dominionists," that the other branches are uneasy about. That provides the basis for making Christofascism the rallying cry for a largely (63%) Christian party.
If I had to guess, I would expect the message is under tension, whatever it is. The Democrats probably want the most damning thing they can tie to the GOP that won't result in someone trying to take another literal shot at Trump.
I've heard relatively little "Republicans are theofascists" and rather more "Republicans are weird", as was suggested elsewhere in this thread. It'll probably bounce around like that for a while.
The goal is to associate the entire party with their least popular, yet well-documented members, see also: "Israel is its finance or defense minister," and "Democrats are woke and hate anyone with European ancestry." The politically demanding and well-organized "dominion" bloc is very real, and very worrisome to established conservatives, and even to more conventional Christians who see their churches being linked into hierarchical networks of business-like mentorship.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
I think that the criticism they're making is that the Republican party has become minoritarian: national politicians will endorse policies that are very unpopular, other than among evangelical Christians, such as total nationwide abortion bans or restricting divorce.
I think the reason Democrats are saying this at the moment is probably more because it's not really saying anything meaningful: people think Kamala Harris is the frontrunner, and as a frontrunner, one should generally avoid saying anything as much as possible.
>I think that the criticism they're making is that the Republican party has become minoritarian: national politicians will endorse policies that are very unpopular, other than among evangelical Christians, such as total nationwide abortion bans or restricting divorce.
Yet notably Trump has taken all mentions of abortion out of the Republican platform this year, and is explicitly running on *not* banning abortion nationwide.
Yeah, even Trump can tell it's a vote loser and wants to downplay it. Just like he previously broke with Republican orthodoxy on attacking SS/Medicare.
I think sampling episodes of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, a left critique of SCOTUS, at least shows partly why the Democratic Party is picking up this messaging. Even beyond Dobbs and the related dominoes, recent SCOTUS cases touching on the 1st amendment establishment clause seem to have squarely gone to the litigant presenting a Christian/christian nationalist argument.
As to where the republican party is "truly," today, I perceive Josh Hawley's rising star as a clean counter-argument to the claim that the right is taking a "post-Christian turn." Cynically, I suspect that the vast majority of religious invocation by politicians is merely pandering, rather a than a true expression of deeply held beliefs, but the christian/CN interest group is clearly valued and respected by republican politicians and is rewarded by them with policy action when republicans are in power.
Finally, the abortion issue appears to be a winner for democrats, if they can keep the issue in focus and express it clearly.
Not alone the Republicans, or are you not aware of all the "Kamala Harris is a good Baptist" reports now?
American Baptist, not Southern Baptist, of course, but seeing less of "her mother brought her and her sister to Hindu temples" and more emphasis on "neighbour brought them to sing for the choir in local church" because turning out the black vote does inevitably rely on ministers and churches getting the congregants organised:
"Black women, including clergy and activists who have not stopped organizing and praying since the COVID-19 pandemic, are quickly embracing Harris.
The Rev. Traci Blackmon, who joined 4,000 Black clergy on a recent pro-Harris call, said the outpouring of support for her is connected to the anticipated ugliness and opposition she is bound to face in her sprint against former President Donald Trump.
“She should be president because she’s equipped, prepared and the best candidate for the job,” said Blackmon, a St. Louis-based United Church of Christ minister, who spoke to the AP as Harris gathered delegate support.
The call was organized by the Black Church PAC, co-founded by the Rev. Michael McBride, a longtime Harris supporter and pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley. McBride told the AP that he was still in the pulpit on Sunday when Biden withdrew his candidacy. After the benediction, McBride said, one of the church mothers stood up, shared that news, and asked, in effect, “What do we do now?”
...On Sunday, after Harris was endorsed by Biden. she sought out Brown with an evening phone call, about an hour before the AP reached him at his home in San Francisco.
“I’m calling my pastor,” Harris said in her typical greeting, referring to the man that staffers in her office are instructed to get to know during their first week on the job.
She wanted her pastor to pray, and pray Brown did, that Harris “would be the quintessential instrument to bring healing, hope and wholeness” to the United States of America."
Though, as this article points out, she is religiously diverse:
I'm not sure which part of my comment is linked to your response. In case it is "I suspect that the vast majority of religious invocation by politicians is merely pandering, rather a than a true expression of deeply held beliefs" then I agree it applies across the board.
That's mostly what I was saying. The Democrats play the religion card to appeal to voters just as much, but it doesn't get written up in the same apocalyptic CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM WHITE SUPREMACY THEOCRATIC FASCISM terms.
As I said, Hillary was touting her Methodist credentials, Kamala (or her campaign) is doing the same with the Baptist link. Suppose we got an article that ended with Trump calling up 'his pastor' to pray with and for him. Imagine the RELIGIOUS BIGOT ZEALOTS INFLUENCE IN THE WHITE HOUSE headlines there!
Yet black churches are often conservative on certain issues, every bit as much as the 'religious right', while being liberal or in line with secular views on other issues. But of course, you can't really accuse black churches of white supremacism, so they don't make a good scary monster and super creep.
American Baptist is the same denomination as Bill Clinton. They seem to be the 'nice', liberal Baptists as contrasted with the Southern Baptists, though the latter have undergone a lot of changes in the past couple of decades.
Though now I'm wondering - was Kamala ever baptised? They don't practice infant baptism, so it would have been up to her to arrange to get baptised. She attends Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, but has she ever been formally baptised?
In the US, I think the christian religious right has had more policy wins granted to them by republicans than religious groups have gotten from democrats, at least in the last 20ish years.
I'm ready to update with new evidence, though.
FWIW, I don't think imagining news headlines is worth the mental energy.
Also, I am personally concerned about the capture of governments by religious organizations, whether they are white christian denominations, majority black churches, mosques of whatever color, hindu nationalists (ex. in india), jewish extremists (ex. in Israel), buddhist fanatics (ex Sri Lanka). They are all scary monsters, to me.
Abortion should also be a winner for Republicans, if they could manage to have some discipline on the subject.
After decades of work they finally got it back to the old and new status quo of "leave it to the states". The majority of everybody, including the majority of elected Republicans, seem quite happy to leave it at that. But predictably there's some voices somewhere going "Well y'know we _could_ do something at the Federal level..."
Because they are true believers and their true belief is not aligned with the majority of the us.
This seems to be a case where pro-abortion activists claiming "if you let them take away roe it's a slippery slope to more restrictive policy" seems to actually have been correct, at least w.r.t. the primary activists.
Whereas that same argument about gay marriage (legalize this and they'll soon be clamoring for polygamous marriage" seems to have been incorrect, so far
I don't think it does play particularly well with focus groups. Not in the big blue city where I live and work anyway, nor in the swing state in which my family also spends a lot of time. Most of the people energized by it were going to vote anyway and certainly weren't going to vote for Trump.
One factor is simply that the racism cliches have worn out their welcome with a lot of voters, the Dems needed some newer messaging about the other guys.
And that said, it also does reflect a change in the Republican Party. Red states really are passing or trying to pass stuff along Christian nationalism lines, some astonishing stuff is spelled out inside that "Project 2025" plan, etc.
And yes what's happened with reproductive rights helps make all that tangible rather than just the same old lib bogeyman. Not just abortion either: _lots_ of women of my acquaintance noticed when a sitting justice of the current Supreme Court majority declared -- on the record -- that the 60-year-old ruling that normalized access to birth control needs to be reversed. Etc.
>Not just abortion either: lots of women of my acquaintance noticed when a sitting justice of the current Supreme Court majority declared -- on the record -- that the 60-year-old ruling that normalized access to birth control needs to be reversed.
That was and is one of my concerns with the Dobbs decision. Personally, as _policy_, I support Roe v Wade, Obergefell, Lawrence, and Griswold. Unfortunately, as SCOTUS rulings, they can all be viewed as built on sand. Which justice wants to revisit Griswold?
Both currents were always there in the D rhetoric, so I think it's a matter of emphasis. The memetic evolution is converging on something that the Ds think will work best, except that it's actually that only some of them think it will work best, and others simply want to hop on the bandwagon. It's like how all of a sudden everyone went from being angry at each other about whether Biden should step aside, to being in lockstep about how great Harris is. Coconut and watermelon emojis were everywhere. Then "weird" happened. I guess now it's "Dominionism", or whatever is being called these days? (The nomenclatural parallels with the ideology sometimes known as "woke" are amusing.)
I do wonder about the wisdom of leaning into anti-Christian rhetoric when there's a possibility of literal Islamist protest at the DNC, but maybe they think they've got that wing under control?
Overturning Roe v. Wade is definitely a factor, and obviously all attempts to define political opponents are to some degree instrumental, but there's plenty of material to work with:
- Louisiana passed a law requiring displaying the Ten Commandments in school
- The Oklahoma State superintendent instructed schools to teach students from the Bible (in some unspecified way)
- Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker directly cited the Bible and theologians and in a recent ruling which also called destroying embryos an affront to God
- Marjory Taylor Green (the ultimate foil for Democrats) literally calls herself a Christian Nationalist
I think the biggest actual CHANGE here is how much Trump and his fellow travellers have really enthusiastic support from far-right religious groups, not in the lukewarm sense that those people might be willing to support a McCain or a Romney, but in the sense that they feel those politicians are very strongly on their side. (Like most things Trump this is a Rorschach test, where it's easy to make the case he's not at all religious and doesn't care about them, but hat doesn't change anybody's mind.)
The real change is that conservative Christianity is weak enough that attacking conservative Christianity as conservative Christianity is now a viable electoral strategy.
Project 2025, for example, is still being stuck to Trump even though he never supported it and actively denounced it. It's also being emphasized in a way Project 2017 wasn't. The Heritage Foundation puts out one of these every time there's an election without a Republican incumbent. So do most of the big policy orgs. It's basically an audition for the policies they want and serve as a signal that if the president wants X policy in Y agency they can hire the experts from that think tank and they'll come in with the right ideology/technical experts. Of course, Trump could put Heritage types in power. But that's not really his base or JD Vance's base.
The lesson there is that conservative Christianity is so weak a political force and has so many toxic policies you actively want to stick Trump with it the same way Trump wants to stick the left with its far left/socialist wing. This is always a thing (nut picking) but who are the nuts have changed. It's interesting in particular that the rich/corporations have fallen out of favor as the leftist bogeyman.
>The real change is that conservative Christianity is weak enough that attacking conservative Christianity as conservative Christianity is now a viable electoral strategy.
I think this is correct. Christianity is so weak in 2024 that you hardly ever see explicitly religious arguments against LGBT outside of explicitly religious spaces. Nobody takes the argument, “that’s against God’s law,” seriously anymore, so accusing one’s opponents of being secretly motivated by said argument can be an effective strategy.
If it's Protestant theofascism, can it really be called theofascism?
We had a dang good try at it with the Pope claiming temporal as well as spiritual authority, and the Orthodox got at it from the other side with Caesaropapism.
America has a lot of different denominations and non-denominational churches which fall under the umbrella of the "Religious Right", but that really has waned in influence since its hey-day, I think. Not to say that appealing to religious voters is not in play, still, but all parties do it - Hillary was touting her Methodist credentials, and there is the religious left, or liberal churches, which want to be as involved.
The focus has shifted; if you look at complaints about the Supreme Court, it's that it's packed with Catholics. Nobody is complaining about the conservative Supreme Court with its majority of Southern Baptists imposing their doctrines.
And that's where accusations of Christian Nationalism are going to hit an obstacle. If we're talking abortion (or "healthcare services" as I believe the current preferred term is), then the Church is officially agin' it, no matter what the laity on the ground may do. However, the Church is *also* for things that the Democrats, or liberals would like: pro-immigration, anti-death penalty, pro-unions:
"Supporters of the Christian right have no one unified stance on the role of government since the movement is primarily one that advocates social conservatism; in fact, "struggles [have] broken out in state party organizations" between supporters of the Christian right and other conservatives. It promotes conservative interpretations of the Bible as the basis for moral values and enforcing such values by legislation. Some members of the Christian right, especially Catholics, accept the Catholic Church's strong support for labor unions."
So while I wouldn't say that the influence of appeals to the bloc of religious/conservative voters is not there, I also think that the focus has shifted, the influence is not what it was, and that it's a handy bogeyman for the progressive factions to trot out: "oh no those Christofascists are going to make The Handmaid's Tale come true!"
See if the Democrats are still out there canvassing black churches, and with black churches, for the election and then judge how seriously you think they are worried about Christian Nationalism. When the President of the Southern Baptist Convention appears in the triple tiara, then I think it's time to worry 😁
This survey is from 2014, I think, so the figures are outdated, but it gives a general idea that even Evangelical churches have Democrat-leaning members:
Couldn't make it stick, and indeed the Puritans who won the war to overthrow the king and (as good as) Romanism immediately started having to purge and put down the extremists on their 'side', including religious zealots, proto-communists, and dissatisfied soldiers looking for back pay and the promised equality of all:
Olly was able to force through the new Puritan way of life, but it pretty much ended as soon as he died, and here we go with the Restoration, Charles II who is a Catholic in all but name, and the re-establishment of the Church of England.
(Is it just me, or is there a bizarre parallel to Cromwell in C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian"? "Lord Protector", no king, modernity replacing the wildness and magic, people keeping the old religion alive in small secret meetings, even the super-scary old old religion...)
"Or is it about what scare words play better with focus groups? If so, why has this changed? Is it all just abortion?"
If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
Planned Parenthood seem to know which side their bread is buttered:
"Planned Parenthood Great Rivers of St. Louis announced in a X post that a bus is headed to the DNC in Chicago on Aug. 19-20 to offer free services.
"Here we come, Chicago! Our mobile health clinic will be in the West Loop with @ChiAbortionFund & @TheWienerCircle Aug 19-20, providing FREE vasectomies & medication abortion," the post said. "EC will also be available for free without an appointment."
The Planned Parenthood location noted that there is a waiting list for vasectomies duirng their time at the convention.
"We currently have a waitlist for free vasectomies," a follow-up X post said. "Repost to spread the word!"
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
It's an issue where the Republican position is very unpopular. Same reason the Republicans attack "wokeness" so much.
I think abortion in the US has got to be one of the biggest own goals in history for the Democrats. The vast majority of abortions are committed by single mothers, the poor, minorities, etc - that is, disproportionately Democratic voting blocs. Some quick napkin math:
Abortions from 1973 - 2005 (excluding those who would have been <18): ~ 31 million
Assuming a ratio of 4:1 Democrat bias, ~24.8 million, 3:1 ~23.3 million, 2:1 ~20.5 million
Voter turnout in presidential elections is somewhere in the 50-60% range, ~55%
So abortion has cost the Democrat party something like 11-13.5 million votes in the last presidential election. This is probably an overestimate, as potential children of abortive mothers would likely be on the lower end of political engagement, lowering the turnout. There would also be a fraction of abortions that would occur even if they were illegal. Still, if that many Democrat voters were alive today I think they would have a permanent majority in the federal government. It's the great irony of our time that the Democrats so vehemently support abortion and the Republicans so vehemently oppose it.
To more directly answer the question, Democrats were the original party of slavery and a lot of the progressives of the early-mid 20th century were quite racist. Think Woodrow Wilson or LBJ types. They approved of abortion on eugenics grounds, as most abortions were committed by poor/black women (same as now, really). This is the legacy of Planned Parenthood, for instance. Later in the 1970s/80s, the conservative Christians aligned with the Republican party, and obviously they were opposed to abortion for religious reasons. The right wasn't going to alienate such a huge power bloc and the left already supported abortion. By current day, abortion has just become coded as another blue tribe/red tribe issue.
> I think abortion in the US has got to be one of the biggest own goals in history for the Democrats. The vast majority of abortions are committed by single mothers, the poor, minorities, etc - that is, disproportionately Democratic voting blocs.
This has to be the cynical take I have read on the net in a while. It is right on par with:
> Republicans should not try to prevent school shootings, because these disproportionally kill young people and teachers, both of which lean Democrat.
Or:
> Democrats should not try to prevent the loss of life of military men, as these mostly vote Republican.
Luckily for humanity, politics mostly don't work like that (with some notable exceptions as the incentives provided by the three fifths compromise).
Personally, I do not want future human generations to be selected for 'their parents were too stupid or high or irresponsible to use a condom', but I guess that makes me an eugenicist in your eyes.
Eugenics isn't necessarily a bad thing. The sort of voluntary genetic selection in IVF that Scott is a proponent of seems like an unambiguously good thing to me. I am wary of eugenics when it becomes low functioning people should not reproduce, and it's not too far from there to forcibly sterilizing them. But I agree people shouldn't have children they are unable to materially and emotionally support, and voluntary abortion is possibly the least bad way to do so.
On abortion itself I'm pretty conflicted. I don't think there is any bright line between a fetus and an infant human, nor any medical or ethical framework that consistently can differentiate between the two. A framework where a fetus has no human value would be hard pressed to argue against infanticide. A framework where a fetus has the same rights as a person presents a strong argument against contraception, which seems like it would just make life objectively worse for everyone.
Some people arguing the pro-abortion side, notably Peter Singer, bite the infanticide bullet. I think he is correct in his reasoning, but virtually everyone arguing that side is politically savvy enough to not mention it.
> A framework where a fetus has the same rights as a person presents a strong argument against contraception, which seems like it would just make life objectively worse for everyone.
For abortion to be bad, the actual fetus would have to have person rights.
For contraception to be bad, any hypothetical fetus would have to be person rights.
If the latter is true, then I am a monster beyond redemption. I don't donate sperm. I don't engage in stealthing. I don't rape women. Even marrying a woman and producing as many babies as nature will allow is not a goal of mine. With just the last point, I will have probably denied perhaps a dozen potential humans their existence over my life. Should I serve my murder sentences consecutive or in parallel?
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
The R restrictions on abortion are really unpopular, and not just on paper, but in terms of motivating actual voter behavior. My district swung ~40 points to the left when we had an abortion measure on the ballot.
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
There's a lot of fertile female Americans who now have to worry about which states they travel to. They all grew up with the law being one way, but now the rug of progress has been pulled from under their feet. Abortion is, I think, the greatest single victory for the American right since Reagan, and it's a continuous slap in the face to everyone who thinks that "the arc of history bends toward my idea of justice", or that there's a right side of history, or heck, just in the idea of directional progress.
Repealing Prohibition, you mean? I think that got overshadowed by fighting actual Nazis. And once that was over, we started realizing that the early Progressives were ... problematic. Good thing we learned our lesson and can never fall into that trap again!
Are comments here basically unusable for anyone else? I get replies I’d like to reply to but the “reply” link takes me to the top of the page. Is this true for others?
Exact same issue for me. UX flow is: I get notification of a reply in Substack app > I tap on it > it takes me to the top of the page (so I need to go hunting to find it). Likely an app issue … will check later whether it works fine on browser (I expect it will, as issue seems to be an anchor tag that the app doesn’t recognise).
Edit: I do sometimes have mobile problems due (I think) to browser/site slowness. I act on the page, there's lag in processing the action, and when I click somewhere, the click is treated as though it were on whatever part of the page should be showing, even though that isn't what's shown. (That is, the structure of clickable controls on my screen updates faster than the pixels.)
This happens to me sometimes but not others. I have a vague sense that it depends on where you click in order to reply. It feels like if I click on the words “your comment” it takes me to the right place or it’s just random.
Are people getting colds more often than, say, 5-6 years ago?
Anecdotally, I used to catch 1-2 cold per year before COVID. During COVID that number dropped to 0. But that number has been steadily rising since the end of COVID. I've had at least 5 colds this year and it's I my august. Actually just got off a 3 day bout of wheezing and coughing.
My environment hasn't changed much in that period. If anything I am more fit than before. My job stress has decreased slightly. I spend slightly less time in public places (eg. subway) than before COVID. My travel--air and roadtrips--are back to pre-covid levels.
Again, anecdotally, I see my coworkers call out sick more often. My family reports more colds too.
Im planning to take a look at Google search queries to see if I can find patterns of people googling for "cold remedy" and other similar phrases and hopefully compare the data across a few years and regions.
This is an area where personal anecdotes are not very helpful. We need strong data to confirm or refute.
My Bayesian priors are what was taught before covid. People get cold 4-5 times per year on average, children about 10 times per year.
Obviously individual experiences may be vastly different. We can get older and our immunity is no longer as strong as before and we may get worse symptoms. Or maybe isolation during covid prevented us our immune system to be retrained that now we are less protected. I expect that any increase will return to the baseline, including that covid is become just another cold virus.
Less, for me, but I attribute that to general higher levels of hygiene in my lefty social circles. Someone who's around people who've rejected a lot of disease-control measures might experience the opposite?
[epistemic status: some nerd can try to quantify all that complexity, sure ain't me. And I doubt we even have enough/the right data, tbh]
Immunity debt works as an explanation. Since I don't think we can easily quantify, how much of an increase it "should" account for and there's the second order effects to consider. When people have collectively functioning immune systems, they have some degree of herd immunity against any disease. If I never get a cold, I'll also spread fewer colds. Now, even if I don't have individual immunity debt, I'm still under higher threat, because herd immunity levels in general have been lowered. More people will be spreading the cold to me, giving me more chance to catch it now.
The original cause of the lock downs might be gone, but all these diseases affecting the herd, reduces general herd immunity for longer. Maybe years. We can't have a control group for such a dynamic either, since long-lockdown populations affect short-lockdown populations.
The article mentions China though:
"Whooping cough, or pertussis, cases have climbed by 45 times in China in the first four months compared with last year."
45 times seems extreme. If those numbers are true and the spray-everything in antiseptic mist you see on YouTube, that seems way worse than just the effect from social distancing/isolation. I'd guess that might have been the equivalent to putting lots of people on immunosuppressant drugs. Bubble boy gets it worse than lonely boy. Also given, that these spray-campaigns were based on magical thinking, I'd not be surprised if what they were spraying had horrible quality control. Who cares, if it's just for show? In which case it might have been outright substituted with low-grade poison, if it could cheaply meet the absurd demand. China is the land of sewer oil, after all.
Are you misidentifying COVID infections as colds? I remember a statistic from a while ago that the average person in the UK had about 1.5 COVID infections per year. I remember another statistic from before COVID that the average person would catch about 3 respiratory virus infections per year. So, if you identify all COVID infections as colds, then you would observe a 50% increase in colds, on the assumption that you're catching about as many non-COVID colds as before.
It's really easy to misidentify COVID as a cold, because the symptoms are similar for many people, and the COVID tests you can buy generally don't work [1]. To emphasize the last point: if you have COVID, and then take a rapid test, you will almost certainly test negative in the first 48 hours of the infection. If you take a rapid test a few days into the infection, there is a two-thirds chance you will test negative. So rapid tests can confirm COVID, but a negative test result doesn't really give you any information at all. This is why, if someone has a respiratory infection but says it's not COVID, you should not believe them, and should just assume that there's about a one-third chance that it is COVID (since COVID is roughly half as common as other colds AFAICT).
Interesting. I did not factor mild COVID infections into my model.
My admittedly shallow model of contemporary COVID suggests the weird colds I've been getting (eg. wheezing cough, no fever or runny nose) might then be covid-related.
Yeah, my understanding is that different people respond quite differently to COVID infection, in contrast to common colds where most people have roughly the same experience.
It's the opposite for me. I used to have almost constant colds from late October until about April. I tracked symptoms weekly for one of the flu monitoring research programmes, and most weeks I was entering some kind of sniffle. I think I have had about three colds since Covid, plus two bouts of Covid itself (which very much resembled a mid-range unpleasant cold, for me). I commute over an hour each way on a busy train, too, although I'm working from home more now than I used to - but still going in several times a week. I'm not sure whether it's because more people are working from home when they're ill, or what, but I very much appreciate the difference.
Yeah, well I never had almost constant colds, but I haven't been laid up with a bug since 2019. I'm not working in the city anymore, I have a job in rural america and spend most of my time here. I don't know if that is what has changed for me. But I certainly have exposure to a fewer number of different people, than I did when I was working in the city.
It would be interesting as an annual survey question here. I have had Covid once (2022) and 2 colds (2022, 2024) since having covid. Normal for me is a cold once every ~3 years, and flu maybe once per ~10 years, so no obvious signal. I'm guessing those with young children might have higher frequency in general.
Before Covid, I used to get a bad "cold" about every five months, where I would take two days off of work and take about three weeks to fully recover. They weren't actually colds, but close enough. I followed advice and went to a doctor after two weeks with it, but the last time my doctor said the antibiotic and cessation may be coincidence, and that turned out to be good advice: I forbore taking the antibiotic for a week, and it ended up going away anyway.
Once Covid hit, I worked remotely, and then noticed I didn't get sick "on schedule". I assumed my illnesses must have been related to being around other people.
I was laid off in 2022, and got a new permanent job in December of that year, going in to work every day. The illnesses still have not recurred. I conclude there must have been something about the previous workplace, but have no clue what it may have been. It was a typical office building in a downtown.
Anecdotally, I'm having the opposite experience here in Seattle. I'm in the same public-facing job that I was prior to COVID, but instead of 2-3 colds a year, I'm down to one at most. And now that I think about it, my coworkers seem to be calling out less than they were pre-COVID, and I'm hearing less complaining from friends and family about colds. I'm back to flying as often as I was pre-COVID, if not moreso.
My allergy symptoms have increased, though! While colds and allergies can have very similar presentations, based on factors like length of the symptoms, when and how they abated, and so on, I'm pretty sure my colds are way down
(Tags are AI generated for roughly 200 out of 1500 posts for now as I gather feedback. @Scott you have an email from me in your inbox if you ever want to chat directly!)
One topic I am interested in is 'good comments'. There are many comments which are substantive, recount original anecdotes or experiences, or otherwise well worth reading, but get buried intrinsically by threading and just being in the comment section. Scott highlights some, but I'm sure there are many that I am missing. Perhaps you could bootstrap a selection of best comments starting from the ones that Scott links in the Open Thread or 'Comments on X' posts as positive labels?
(I've been musing for a while about doing a 'Tales from the Hacker News Archives' focused on 'war stories' and other personal material which are a lot of the value I get from HN, as a demo of the latest wave of ultra-cheap LLMs, but of course the point applies to SSC/ACX as well.)
Since Robin isn't adding this to his website for now, we could instead crowdsource a list by each sharing 50 favorite SSC/ACX comments we've got bookmarked. Then, someone could use an LLM to hunt for similar comments.
I'm confident I have at least 50 quality comments bookmarked since the move from SSC to ACX. Let me know if you're keen to try.
Sounds pretty interesting! I'm gong to focus on the posts for now, but comment analysis could be a fun project. There are almost 500k comments[1] so it's a more substantive volume than the posts to analyze.
Also I would love to read "Tales from HN", so I can only encourage you to do it if you feel called to it :)
This rocks, thanks for making it. Feature request: if you’re running the posts through AI, could you also get it to assign each post e.g. a 'seriousness' score where 0 would be humour etc., 0.5 is speculation, and 1.0 would be a deep dive on a topic with lots of citations?
I'd love to be able to sort by seriousness and read the most well researched posts, but also it'd be great to read the all-time least serious posts too (I actually followed Scott on twitter for ~3 years just because I loved his puns. Had no idea who he was or that he had a blog.)
Could also assign scores for lots of other metrics too
That's a great idea, thanks! There are a few tags related to humor (like "humor" or "satire") and others related to hard science ("statistics", "study critique") but it's binary instead of a spectrum and hard to find for the user.
I'll play around with "humor" and "well researched" scores and whatever others dimensions I can think of - if you have any other suggestions, feel free to add them here too
Darn! Google Forms has a thing where if you force a response to be a number, it silently forces it to be a positive number, and I always forget about this because it's so dumb. I've changed it to force it to be higher than -99999, hope that works. If it messed up a response you've already sent in, you can either do it again or email me with the correction, sorry.
If you had to come up with a canonical list of articles / books to study the replication crisis, what would be on it? I'm looking for suggestions on both the causes and impacts of the replication crisis.
Once you're finished researching, could you please share the full list of things you've found with me, even if they don't make it into what I assume is your upcoming post? Replying here or via a Substack DM would work. Thanks!
Thanks for this! This is a great list. A few books I’d to the list are The Cult of Statistical Significance, Science Fictions, and also Bernoulli’s Fallacy.
I had very mixed feelings on Bernoulli’s Fallacy. He blames frequentism for the majority of the replication crisis. I thought it was a great history of statistics and how frequentism came to dominate. It has a conceptual overview of bayesianism vs frequentism, but if you’ve read even half the links above you won’t learn anything technical from it. I’m still glad I read it because while I knew the names of Galton/Fisher/Pearson, I didn’t know anything about them. Some of them were more open to Bayesian approaches than others, but frequentism came to dominate in large part because of personality conflicts and academic politics between them. I thought that part was very interesting and he traced things back all the way to Ars Conjectandi in 1712.
I had some parts that I disagreed with. He argued that frequentism was driven by eugenics research. He made a great case that belief in eugenics correlated with belief in frequentist approaches (they were both popular among the British aristocracy of the late 1800s and early 1900s). But I wasn't fully convinced that they preferred frequentist statistics and silenced bayesian approaches _because_ they wanted eugenics policies.
My overall thought on the replication crisis is that the causes could vary widely per field:
- Eric Hoel argued that he thinks that neuroscience is struggling because people have a lot of faulty priors that they haven’t confronted.
- I think this could be the case in physiology and sociology where their priors are all downstream of Critical Theory, which has had its own replication crisis with the Sokal Squared Hoax. But I don’t believe neuroscience gets its theoretical priors from Critical Theory, so I’m not sure where they’re coming from. With regards to psychology, I did really enjoy this post on the lack of impact of the crisis on social psychology (https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss), which argued that the field had made so little progress that it doesn’t really matter if most studies fail to replicate.
- Then I’ve spoken with biostatisticians who told me they think their work won’t replicate, and they say they're doing their work at academic medical centers where the patient population isn’t representative of the broader population. I brought up that they could use data from the broader population as a prior, but they said that this might be a problem for them in peer review.
- This post (https://crunchnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-replication-crisis) has an inside look from the point of view of a physics grad student. I’d summarize it as: physics professors just don’t seem to care that much. But physics hasn’t been as impacted as other fields either, so maybe they don’t need to take it quite so seriously.
> could you please share the full list of things you've found with me
Will do, I'll probably be digging into this off and on over a few posts over the next year. I think sometimes the problem is frequentism, sometimes fraud, but what isn’t covered often in these discussions is that sometimes there’s a cascading failure here with Critical Theory having non-falsifiable ideas and then those ideas become the ideology for social science fields like social psychology and even economics. I dug into one example with economics here: https://taboo.substack.com/p/book-review-the-two-parent-privilege
That list from megabase seems consistent with the fact that many social scientists I talk to have never even heard of forecasting marketplaces, let alone attempted to participate.
Thanks for the book titles and links. I read the overview of the Galton-Fisher-Pearson history in the pop sci book The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.
Can we get a full cost/benefit analysis for donating part of one's liver vs. donating a kidney (both to anonymous, first-come-first-serve, and no, no Milei-inspired comments on selling one's kidneys, please)?
On a naïve, intuitive basis, donating part of one's liver is more appealing, since the liver simply grows back. If you donate a kidney, then one you could be one serious illness away from needing a kidney transplant yourself. (Also, why would having one kidney not be limiting in any way whatsoever? You can lead a normal life with one lung, but you have to accept that it's limiting in some ways: yes, your remaining lung takes over, but lung capacity will obviously never be quite the same.) On the other hand, if I understand correctly, donating some liver is not just more painful than donating a kidney, but substantially more dangerous. Is this so? What are the actual risks of death or disability for the donor nowadays?
Perhaps are livers less in demand? How much of the demand would be taken care of if there were simply an effective campaign for people to check the donor boxes on their driving licenses?
Liver surgery tends to be more difficult than kidney surgery. Up until the nineties, it was pretty much impossible to control liver bleeding, for example. So at least I would expect longer anesthesia times and more need for blood with corresponding higher risks in liver donation.
I looked into it a while back, the risk of kidney donation is very small (something like 10-20h of driving), the risk of liver donation are still low but significant (~1%). I can't remember the exact stats, sorry.
My understanding is that harvesting a kidney is a very straightforward procedure. Harvesting a portion of a liver requires much more time, skill, and a much larger incision. The risk of death to the donor during the procedure is probably an order of magnitude greater for a living liver donor than a living kidney donor.
Possibly there's a perceived virtue of recipient issue? Crudely I think of liver disease as resulting from being obese or drunk, whereas I have no idea what other than bad luck causes kidney disease.
For the avoidance of doubt I am just speculating about a possible mindset. Personally I am a cancer survivor so nobody wants any part of me anyway.
PS. How much of a cancer survivor does one need to be in order for one's organs not to be in demand? Take a limit case - someone who had melanoma in situ 25 years ago. Obviously that's not someone who would be thought of as a "cancer survivor" usually, but it's enough not to be in bone marrow transplant lists, or at least it used to be. Is it also a no for other organs?
I thought of that as well. But surely inveterate alcoholics who are not on their way to recovery and will just fry through their new liver (e.g. George Best) are kept out of transplant lists nowadays anyhow?
We understand nowadays that people can damage their liver through non-antisocial, supposedly moderate (but not really) drinking that happens every day or often enough; that was most likely one of the main causes of Beethoven's death, for instance (he was already born with a genetic predisposition to liver disease - again, not atypical). Seems more than a bit heartless to say all those people deserve to die. *If* I were to donate part of my liver, I would not be one bit upset to learn that it had gone to a person in that situation; that's just to be expected.
As for the lack of virtue of those who get liver failure through food: more than two thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese, and more than 40% are obese. Of course that doesn't make overeating virtuous, but let's be realistic - this is a societal problem. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the readers of this blog had first-stage non-alcoholic fatty liver. (Tip: go to a doctor not in the US.)
Statistically, I'm overweight, but I don't really think I am. Sure my BMI is about 28, but no one measures my muscle mass, which is denser than fat. Since I don't have a measurement, I can't tell how much this impacts me, but my intuitive sense is that it is significant.
I suspect others may well be in my situation, too, so it may not be two thirds of Americans that are actually overweight or obese.
Let's agree it's a valid statistic, even if it's not a good measure for large athletes. It's not two-thirds for other developed countries, or for the US in the past.
You got me. Pretty embarrassing since I was really into geography as a kid too.
But hey, I could tell you all sorts of other interesting trivia. For example, there are only two countries in the world with purple on their flags, and they're both in the same area.
Edit: Oddly, Wikipedia lists five national flags with purple.
"Should" as in "Normatively" or "Objectively"? I.e. is the expectation of competence that you're looking for that which minimizes error compared to the actual, existing levels of competence or that which humanity/the state/education/the learned individual should *strive* to make common?
I think that, objectively, you can't expect a lot from **all** the people currently alive, or even 85% of them. You can probably safely get away with assuming that people can read (and mediocrely write) their native language. You can probably safely get away with assuming that they know Space is a thing where many other non-Earth things exist, and that the Earth is a sphere. In geopolitics, you can probably only safely assume that they know their 4 or 6 directly bordering neighbors and a caricature of both their neighbors' history as well as their own, maybe the idea of continents is safe to assume too (but not necessarily the count or the list of continents).
You probably can't safely assume fraction multiplication because that doesn't come up very often in everyday finance (it occurs in Banking, but assuming everybody has Banking is huge), indeed a lot of people not very interested in arithmetic will struggle with the notion that a numerator-denominator fraction is the same as a 0-100 percentage, and both are the same as [0,1] real number*. You can't assume computers let alone the Internet let alone writing and reading English emails.
Normatively, I'm a bit of a radical. I think people should know 4 languages from 4 different immediate families, ("know" as in: a native shouldn't distinguish you from a fellow native in writing, it's okay to have an accent as long as the speech is fluent and grammatical), counting the native language among the four. People should know mathematics up to elementary Calculus, Computer Science up to a NAND2Tetris level ** on the hardware side and 50-line pidgin-Python scripts on the software side. Biology, History, and Philosophy up to following a public lecture from a specialist who's not trying to show off. Physics up to what a physicist knew in 1860, and Chemistry up to what a Chemist knew in 1910.
I don't expect all people will all be uniformly too excited about this vision though, and there is plenty of distinctions that could be drawn between types and levels of knowledge/competence that will make my vision look too narrow and short-sighted, for example the "book smarts vs. street smarts" distinction: some people think Philosophy is bullshit and would rather know how plumbing works.
* : (but actually, the numerator-denominator notation is strictly less general because it can't express irrationals, in practice though almost nobody cares about infinite precision and [0,1] numbers of interest are almost always rationals.)
Hmm... All the non-radioactive elements except hafnium and rhenium... (And several of the radioactive ones were known by then - uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, actinium, radon) and quite a bit of organic chemistry... I think this is a high bar...
Well, it kinda is, but in my vision there is brain augmentation, the abolition of sleep as a necessary time-waste in human life, pervasive and hyper-realistic VR/AR tech, etc.... Plus life extension and post-scarcity.
I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's what I imagine.
Ok, yes, if that becomes feasible then raising goals to the extent you suggest would be reasonable.
>I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's what I imagine.
That's fair. My personal guess is that, despite the limitations of today's LLMs, we will probably transition to a machine civilization before we are able to extend biology to that degree.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education says 31% of university students know the capital of Russia. University students are now near average intelligence, but the study is a bit old, so let's say 20% of general population. Venezuela is more obscure than Russia, so I would guess 5-10%.
You can probably figure out the fraction question through the math proficiency stuff linked in that post, but I would guess 25%
With Venezuela, whether you know the capital basically measures how interested you are in South American politics. I don't think it's a measure of general competence.
Actually, I doubt that such a thing as "general competence" exists. Most people are interested in a range of different things, and have a certain amount of competence within those areas. I couldn't tell you what the last baseball team to win the Pennant was, because I'm not at all interested in baseball. But I could probably debug a Snobol program. (It would probably take me awhile to recover my memories, and I doubt I'd do a very efficient job.)
I think there's definitely a general good-at-trivia vs bad-at-trivia factor. Some people are just good at remembering random facts that they've been exposed to, while others tend to forget them unless they're used.
What about basic economic literacy? One operates within everpresent macroeconomic forces, and a concept like supply & demand allows one to evaluate statements like "build more housing" or "introduce price controls" or "Venezuelas economy is failing because of sanctions" much more accurately than going by gut feeling.
One of these things is not like the other, I think!
Is the capital of Venezuela relevant to most people? I'd argue "no," and knowing it off the top of one's head doesn't make one more productive or useful (especially when the information can be acquired in less than four seconds).
Multiplying fractions with or without a calculator and reading and responding to emails are reasonably critical skills.
Yeah. I phone-swiped it in from memory, and this wasn't a mistake that jumped out at me. :-/ I noticed later, but since I didn't catch it in the first few minutes, and was basically betting on whether people needed to Google it, I decided to let my shame hang out here where all could see. :-)
It's from A Wrinkle in Time. A teacher asks the tweenage protagonist about the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua, but she can't remember and exasperatedly sasses the teacher, "Who cares about the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua, anyhow?" She's sent to the creepy principal's office for it.
Notably, given the extremely weird sci-fi things currently happening in her life and that she's living in rural New England, the book very much agrees that the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua is more or less beneath our protagonist's notice.
I don't understand that kind of logic, in a 70 year adult life you are probably going to meet 5+ Venezuelans in random social and business settings and it useful in life not to seem like an idiot in conversation with them.
>in a 70 year adult life you are probably going to meet 5+ Venezuelans
And so we see the importance of knowing fractions. 5/70 is 1 Venezuelan every 14 years. A thing you only do once every fourteen years is a thing you look up when you need it.
No-one looks like an idiot for not knowing the capital of Venezuela, outside of Venezuela. It's an inconsequential awful country in the southern hemisphere.
Your example list of what it takes to be competent is a pretty poor list. Stop focusing on memorising useless facts. That doesn't indicate competence.
How about: is able to independently come to the conclusion that someone from {OBVIOUS OUTGROUP} is not what is claimed about them?
How about: when faced with a problem too complex to solve given current knowledge and skills, is able to find information and methods that will add to skillset and knowledge set such that the problem becomes solveable?
How about: when faced with an angry mob trying to cancel you, can convince potential allies that they should not cave to the mob?
These seem like somewhere between a million times and infinite times more useful than knowing the capital of some useless dictatorship or how to multiply numbers.
Bluey is one of my media errors. I thought I hated it based on a single episode, but it turns out I was totally wrong (other major media errors include Stargate SG1 and Farscape).
Bluey, however, might be the most egregious error I've ever made, as I now consider one episode in particular, Sleepytime, to be amongst the finest works of animation of all time.
I kinda hate Bluey. Maybe it's because I'm a dad of a kid in the age range of Bingo, but I really hate the way they handle gender roles. The dad is the stereotypical irresponsible, callous, absent-minded and, yes, violent, who is the one mostly causing all the problems. The mom is obviously the angelic, patient person who comes and provides all the resolution. The typical examples are the Pool and the Yoga ball episodes you embed in your post. I felt gross watching them.
It's not *all* like that, I really loved Bandit in the Seesaw episode, and some like the Magic Asparagus are just absurd enough to be neutral, but you never know when the harmful stereotypes will snap onto you and I want to keep them away from my kid, thank you.
Maybe it's not quality animation, it is more formulaic and shallower, but I'd rather go for something neutrally educational like Octonauts or similar.
Because describing Bandit as "violent" is...uh...that's pretty amazing.
But assuming this isn't literally parody, no, stereotypes don't "snap onto you," they are acquired by observation to the point of exaggeration because they reflect actual trends (not absolutes, but trends) in reality.
Broadly speaking, men *tend* to be more into physical horse play than women. Broadly speaking, women *tend* to be more conscientious about care-taking chores. These are exceedingly common *trends* today because they reflect hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation; men hunt and go to war, women nurture offspring.
One of Bluey's greatest joys is that it isn't ashamed of observing - even celebrating - these gender dynamics that *most* (straight, intact) families' experience. Not all families - not yours, apparently - but *most.* That's why the planet is watching it more than any other IP; many, many people recognize themselves and their families in the Heelers, because of...you know...hundreds of thousands of years of men hunting and warring and women nurturing offspring and what that looks like in 2024.
And for what it's worth: Chili is the disciplinarian in the family and the kids are quite a bit more scared of her anger than Bandit's. She's the one who can gain instant compliance after naughty behavior or defiance with a sharp, threatening glare, while Bandit is a much softer touch who often capitulates to his kids' demands, even when he probably shouldn't (like playing with them when he's supposed to be working!). While this isn't a stereotype per se, it certainly is a family dynamic that I witnessed in friends' families, particularly fathers parenting daughters (especially in contrast with how they parented their sons).
Last, beware of attempting to deny your kid the observation of real trends. Oftentimes they rebel by embracing them.
I think the polite way of handling a conversation is to assume seriousness unless the irony is otherwise obvious :-)
I think you should try watching the Yoga ball episode with more empathy turned on and try to see it with the eyes of a dad (or Bingo, for that matter). She gets thrown and shoved to the point of crying, if that's not violent for you...
And sure, it's a popular IP, that's great for them, but in Italy we say that then you should go and eat poop: trillions of flies can't be wrong. Specifically, you can't disprove the thought "a meme is bad" just by saying that society at large loves it. Pick any example from the past to your choice -- my favorite is how in Roman times there wasn't even mourning for the death of a <1 year old because they weren't really humans -- and figure it out if you'd prefer that the meme has changed or not. And it can't change if we continue celebrating it, or shrugging and telling"well, boys be boys".
Kids observe what they observe, but for sure I don't want to endorse what I don't want to endorse, that should be... fairly obvious?
I would advise you rewatch the Yoga ball episode and empathize with the actual Bingo on the screen, not the one you are projecting.
In the actual episode, the actual context is that Bingo *very much* wants to engage in physical horseplay with her father - Chili recognizes this and later even very explicitly advocates for it continuing - but Bingo doesn't have any confidence about asserting her boundaries when play gets too rough for her until Chili coaches her on how to do it.
This is arguably one of the most important lessons anyone can ever learn, EVER; that we can't just trust that others will intuit when we are hurt, but that we must advocate for ourselves, sometimes loudly. It's a fundamental part of communication.
Witness that Bandit is instantly contrite when he hears how Bingo feels and apologizes for unwittingly hurting Bingo during horseplay. He explains that he's used to playing with a bigger, more robust kid. *He didn't know,* because he *couldn't* know.
Because Bingo had to be her own person and say what she needed and wanted.
Here's a second reminder to engage with my position without throwing unnecessary shade about it being worthy of a parody. It's not really that I can't take the shade, but then maybe it would be a good idea to actually address the point rather than dodging it?
The original grievance is about the bad gender role meme, not about clearly expressing boundaries when things get too violent. I provided the example because you denied there was ever violence. But please let me know where in my original message I said that the final morale of Yoga ball was bad, which is all you can focus on in your reply.
You reply to a point that was never made. And you indirectly support my original point: the dad is the source of the problem (because that's what dads are, right? Boys will be boys), the mom is the source of the solution (because that's what moms are, right?).
And, I mean, that's *fine*. If you love traditional gender roles and you're ok with fitting them on yourself and your kids, by all means you do you. It's what everybody does. But it'd be nice to own it. And not to pretend that something is awesome because it just "observes what's out there" without aiming to be something more -- would we prefer a Roman cartoon to be nonchalant about throwing a non-human 9 month baby in a dumpster or one that shows more empathy to them?
I'm engaging with what I find interesting in your comments. There are no rules of the internet which dictate that every point in a comment must be addressed.
My thesis, which I admittedly neglected to state directly, is that it is *absolutely absurd* -
(so absurd I was sincerely wondering if you were engaging in parody, and didn't want to look like a fool by not addressing that possibility)
- to describe Bandit's consensual horseplay with his kids as "violence." That you would describe it as "violence" is actually alarming. Surely you know that purpose of rough play in early childhood (and amongst all young predators and most young mammals) is to learn about intention, physical restraint, emotional regulation, negotiation, and how to appropriately responding to pain inflicted by others. That can't happen without rough play sometimes going too far.
Of course there's no "violence" in Yoga Ball! "Violence" the *intention* to harm, and of course Bandit has no intention whatsoever to hurt Bingo. Again...I'm gobsmacked that you aren't perceiving that.
And if your endorse the final message of the story, then surely you endorse the use of not-"violence" harm necessary to arrive at that message.
And to get back to your point, there is no gender role "meme." What you're describing is a common behavioral trend based on genetics and evolution, and it will not be overcome by "culture." Maybe someday it can be reprogrammed with sufficiently advanced tech, but right now that kind of tech is a sci-fi fairy tale. It's extremely likely your kid is going to conform to some gender role stereotypes that will disappoint you. I hope you will be as okay with them fitting those stereotypes on themselves as you are with me doing it for myself.
Last, as for ancient cultures attempting to minimize emotional suffering via the practice of emotionally disassociating from and thus not mourning infant deaths under one year, due to the exceedingly high infant mortality rate? There was great wisdom and utility in it, just as there is wisdom and utility in some modern cultures not considering a pregnancy "real" enough to be worth mentioning until certain benchmarks are met. Given their environment at the time, those cultures were right to be less sentimental about infants than modern people are. Do you have the empathy to see that?
You didn't have reason to know this, but the Starz Spartacus series is my favorite TV show of all time (and I have *excellent* taste), in part because it's a rare case of a storyteller attempting to unflinchingly present the characters circumstances and moral dilemmas through the prism of *their* culture and values, not our modern one. It's an utterly brutal show about a very brutal people, and I adored its utter disregard for its audiences' likely squeamishness about slavery, violence, homosexuality, rape, misogyny, and so on.
It wasn't for preschoolers and toddlers, of course, but some content isn't. Bluey takes place in contemporary times, but not in a contemporary universe with the kind of human suffering we witness every day; we're never going to see a story where a neighborhood child predator grooms Bingo into his backyard shed.
It's appropriate to show common gender roles in families, as that's what the vast population of families are actually experiencing. Not so much infant murder or child predators.
For that episode, making use of such amazing music is both a good choice and a cheat. My impression is that The Planets are somewhat unique in being so accessible, rewarding of re-listens, emotionally evocative, and under-utilized.
For me, Bluey wasn't a surprise. In general, my experience has been friends with small children over-recommending episodes that didn't really hit with me. Some have been very good (S1E25 Taxi), but I made an attempt to watch them all during COVID and it fizzled out.
Also, I had previously had to make a big correction with Peppa Pig. Based on the low-effort style of animation and the universal presence of PP merchandise around my children's friends at the time, I expected to really hate it. While I'm not sure any of the episodes are candidates for "finest work of animation of all time," I did have true adult enjoyment from almost every episode and some real moments of delight at the choices or quips.
Veering pi radians away from children's animation, one of my biggest errors was my original attitude toward Rick & Morty. The first taste was very unpleasant and I avoided watching it for several years. However, trapped on a long flight at one point, I ran out of tolerable alternatives and decided to re-sample. I was hooked. There are some parts of episodes and full episodes that are really amazing (including really effective use or choice of music.)
I think Sleepytime avoids "cheating" by setting the music of "The Planets" in literal space, with the celestial bodies representing different things within the family dynamic.
I haven't seen any of Peppa Pig, but now I'm intrigued.
And I likewise didn't initially enjoy Rick & Morty - I thought the animation was ostentatiously ugly and found the writing style jarring. But a friend urged me to give it at least three episodes, and then I was likewise hooked.
Although I'm in a small minority of folks who actually likes Solar Opposites even better.
I've been exposed to Bluey by virtue of having a 4 year old and a 2 year old. I suspect a large part of its success is that it manages to be appealing to kids without being rigidly formulaic or overly moralizing like most children's entertainment. If you've seen an episode of super kitties, you've basically seen them all (substitute villain and vice/virtue of the day). That stuff can be fine for kids, who don't really pay attention to any of that in favor of cool kitty superpowers, but to me it's like nails on a chalkboard. It's also pretty coherent story telling, as opposed to something like paw patrols where plot development could have been written by a toddler.
The general format as well, which explores parental issues, helps to draw parents themselves in as they are experiencing many of these things in real time. Though as with anything, there are some stinkers, my wife and I weren't big on the recent house sale set of episodes. They painted themselves into a narrative corner (of course the house wouldn't sell, that would either end the series or require a massive cast overhaul), and chose a particular poor 'out' in our opinion (man bad for wanting more dumb currency, woman better: value things like family), which felt like a low blow to the many parents out there who are struggling financially and want to take a better opportunity for the sake of their children and an unnecessary jibe at men (as if women never want more money for their family). Of course the Heeler's are already presented as being pretty wealthy and privileged, so it was probably a poor choice to tackle moving as a financial benefit to them since they don't appear to have any financial struggles to begin with.
For whatever it's worth, my favorite episode is Creek, probably because playing in creeks was a big part of my childhood so it has a lot of nostalgia value, but also because I want my kids to enjoy the outdoors as well and not just be purely screen junkies like so many kids these days.
As a pretty wealthy and privileged kid whose dad moved us across the country into a place where he *REALLY* increased our wealth and privilege (my-own-horse level of wealth and privilege), I didn't necessarily support the Heelers backing out of their move, either.
But on the other hand, staying in an extended network of friends and family is pretty great. Even as a single, child-free adult, I wouldn't want to move away from mine and start over somewhere else merely for the sake of a more luxurious lifestyle. I would do it for *survival,* of course, but not for a mere upgrade to the home.
I think it's also worth noting the authorial intent. Joe Brumm said both in subtext of Bluey episodes and explicitly in a podcast interview that a mentor said "...'we die at the end...you don't need to tell people and remind people that life has sad endings all the time'....In his view, role of art and stories was to be one of the rare places where we can go and it'll work out and we get rejuvenated a bit and we get a bit of hope. So I thought, I think that has helped me in Bluey for the last 140 eps. And so it just felt right in ending this season to focus on a story that has a bit of a weird ending. The farmer, it's not a sad ending, it's not a happy ending. It goes a bit beyond endings. But of course The Sign itself is a story and the whole thing is meant to remind you that this isn't real life. It's a story, works out for everyone...Brandy gets pregnant, the marriage works, the kids get what they want. It's ridiculously happy because it's a story. We all know, the adults all know it never is that neat a life."
And, as one Bluey essayist pointed out, it's worth noting that none of the "happy endings" in The Sign have actually concluded yet. We don't know if Brandy's pregnancy is going to be okay, if Bradley and Frisky's marriage is okay, if Bandit is going to be okay without his job. *This* season, when Brumm was still making up his mind if it would be his last, might have all "happy endings," but future seasons might not. "We'll see," said the Farmer.
Now, is that possibly way too heady for the casual adult Bluey viewer (and possibly way, way too heady for their six year old)? Sure, I won't stand on that hill!
Ironically, I'm pretty sure that six year old me would have been thoroughly disinterested in Bluey. When I was Bluey's age, I didn't want to see media about "kids like me"; I wanted either very dramatic and ideally pathos-and-death fantasies about adults (The Last Unicorn, Disney princess movies), or stories about kids slightly older than me doing adult adventures. Why would I want to go to school and play all day and then watch a show about someone else going to school and playing? I was just *there*!
That is a very inconvenient detail that I didactically hang on to.
Maybe because "pony" sounds even more privileged than "horse," given that ponies are too small to be used by anyone but children (unless one hooks the pony up to a cart, I suppose).
Whereas a horse can be used by one's parents, which eventually ended up happening. Then my dad got his own horse to ride with mine, then a horse-trailer to take them places, then upgraded the car to a truck to pull the horse trailer, then purchased horse property to park all of it.
It's not clear in the Blueyverse if cats are a real species or if "Cat Squad" (a parody of high-energy kids shows) is supposed to be strictly fantasy, but Muffin's into them.
The important people in history question surely generalises to a question about how we think about causation, under headings like causa causans vs causa sine qua non, sufficient vs necessary conditions etc.
I can't speak to why they aren't, but I can speak to why they shouldn't be. The sort of evidence you cite is simply not sufficient to imply the sort of actions you suggest.
The first problem is that you don't really have enough information to know whether this would be a net good or now. Let's suppose we take your reporting of the happiness research fully at face value: societies that follow traditional gender roles have higher self-reported happiness. The trouble is, correlation is not causation, especially when you have to measure via a fairly flimsy proxy (survey results).
For your conclusion to follow, you need a specific causal model to be true: Weakening of Gender Roles -> Lower Happiness -> Reporting Less Happiness of Surveys. There are any number of alternative causal models that could explain the results. We could, for example, simply reverse the key direction of causation: Lower Happiness -> Weakening of Gender Roles. Formally we don't even need to justify this (it can be true even if we don't know why it's true), but a stab-in-the-dark justification might be something like "unhappy people are more likely to try to change their social circumstances, which includes pushing back against the gender roles expected of them." We could also have a model where some third factor (industrialization/urbanization seems like an obvious choice, but it could be other things as well) causes both lower happiness and weakened gender roles. Or a model in which the weakening of gender roles *doesn't* coincide with a decrease in happiness, but the cultural changes that it implies cause people to report lower happiness on surveys[1]. With any of these other models, it's very possible for a restoration of traditional gender roles to have no effect on happiness or even decrease it.
The second problem is that "[be] in favor of traditional gender roles" isn't really an action. Even among vocally feminist writers and speakers I have seen very few people come out as *actively against* "traditional gender roles[2] in the sense of not believing they should be an option at all. It's far more common for people to believe that adherence to gender roles should be a choice made by each individual. This should also serve as the default utilitarian assumption because as a general rule, people are more likely to know what makes them happy than you are. You either need quite good evidence that in this particular case they don't (which puts us back at the first problem: weak evidence) or to point to negative externalities of the choice.
This last point touches on the heart of the problem: ignoring higher-order effects is the cardinal sin of naive utilitarian reasoning everywhere. We can't possibly gauge the higher-order effects of a proposed course of action without knowing anything about the proposal, which "[be] in favor of traditional gender roles" doesn't really give us. Elsewhere you say something like "if what people wants makes them unhappy, should we give it to them" but that's not actually the choice in front of anyone right now. Sound utilitarian proposals must interact with the world as it is, and nobody in the world right now has a choice that amounts to "either give more people freedom from traditional gender roles or don't do that." Instead, depending on the society, the choices might look more like "try to prevent people from eschewing traditional gender roles" or "attempt to persuade or coerce people who have abandoned traditional gender roles to return to them." Even those are pretty vague, but simply the verbs "prevent" and "coerce" should signal to us that we're entering territory that might have very large, very negative higher-order effects. Using, for example, the coercive power of a state to accomplish anything always carries negative second-order effects: you have to punish some people to get others to comply, which decreases their happiness. How large those second order effects are (and whether they spawn third and fourth order effects) can vary quite a lot from policy to policy.
The final problem is opportunity cost. To be worth a utilitarian's support, a given action needs not only to net positive utility (as best as can be told with the limits of uncertainty) it needs to be the MOST net positive option that can be accomplished with those resources. Even if the entirety of the resources being expended are the time and reputation the go into speaking about the issue, they could be spent elsewhere. Is this cause the *best* use of those efforts? I seem to remember Scott making the point once, when discussing his view towards charity, that anything that needs to pass through a contentious political system to happen is going to require disproportionate investment because there will always be people pushing back. This seems like one of those cases: most things you could do socially or politically in the field of "promoting traditional gender roles" are going to get a LOT of push back, meaning you'll need to expend a lot of resources for every tiny sliver of progress. Are those resources better spent on this than they are on bed nets? Doubtful.
[1] This is not to imply that self-reported happiness data is totally useless, but it is certainly rather hard to validate. I would expect it to be much more reliable within a single culture than across cultures.
[2] Unless you count things like violence, arrogance, emotional unavailability and unwillingness to express emotions as core parts of "traditionally masculine" gender roles. Some people certainly would, but if that's the case you need REALLY GOOD evidence for why these traits increase a person's happiness and the happiness of those around them, since the obvious naive assumption is that they're net-harmful.
Don't many Western societies try to 'persuade or coerce' women into the workplace? It is rarely described as coercion - and certainly it is very much less harsh than the approach of the Taliban to achieving the opposite - but significant resources are devoted to special programs aimed at equalising female participation in many occupations regardless of whether there is evidence that this is desired by men, women or employers. Just one example. I think far fewer resources are devoted to upholding traditional gender roles.
I get a distinct impression that unequal participation is often taken as evidence of repression. A society operating on such a basis is clearly working towards reducing or even eliminating traditional gender roles (perhaps allowing a few eccentrics to carry on with them if they can afford it.)
I agree with almost all of your argument, but want to push back a bit on his part:
> Even among vocally feminist writers and speakers I have seen very few people come out as *actively against* "traditional gender roles[2] in the sense of not believing they should be an option at all.
People may not literally explicitly be arguing that traditional gender roles shouldn’t be an option, but I think a ton of leftists/feminists do essentially believe this. You see this in for example:
• Judgement of women who choose to prioritize family over career, or who change their last name.
• Arguing that such women are misguided/trapped/have internalized the patriarchy/etc., and need to be protected.
• Advocating for mandatory parental leave for men (as in some Scandinavian countries).
I don't think "traditionally gender roles" is a very coherent goal. For instance, the way my mom an grandma tell it, it is very traditonal for an unmarried woman to not be allowed to socialize with men without supervision. Women could not file for divorce. Sex was a near-explicitly transactional affair that women endured in return for economic and social protection. All the women over ~55 I know well have told me they were instructed to never directly say "no" to, or beat a boy in any competition, because he might attack/rape/kill them. I can't imagine this is what you are referring to as plausibly social good! I understand that these are not universal experiences, but whatever traditional gender system we had here in the US in the mid 1900's clearly had some big liabilities. That sort of thing is, relative to me, what traditional gender roles are. Traditional gender roles were/are huge personal sacrifice for lot of people, mostly (but not exclusively) women. There are people who are trying to bring highly gendered living back, look up "ex-trad wife" to see how badly that can go. The evidence for these things comes from old, suspect studies. While I'm not 100% claiming the new, pro-gender equality studies are not also confounded, I do trust them slightly more and they fit better with all of my known lived/second-hand experiences.
TL:DR evidence for them being actually better is weak at best and the risks are way, way too high.
(also, you mentioned below that you thought the higher gender equality -> higher happiness results might be confounded by wealth. There are some results indicating that high gender egalitarianism *creates* more wealth, so really this whole area is tangled mess.)
I am a 31-year-old, divorced woman. I was a stay-at-home mother during most of my marriage, which lasted 6 years. I am under no illusions that my personal experiences are valuable in the sense of being broadly representative of reality at a societal level; however, during my divorce I did find a lot of statistical data that suggests my experience with divorce as a stay-at-home mother is not unusual, so perhaps I have some insight that is useful.
I never believed in traditional gender roles when I was young. My maternal grandmother, if I may speak for the dead, endured a very stressful marriage with my alcoholic grandfather from the time she was 15 years old until her death at age 52. She was very meek and soft-spoken. My grandfather was the opposite. They had five children, and by all accounts her life was not a very happy one. She had no escape except for death, and according to my mother she harbored a singular and almost preoccupying fear and dread of death. Even as she was losing the her battle with cancer, she refused to believe she was going to die. When at last she lay on her death bed and all the extended family came to say their goodbyes to her, she was utterly confused as to why they were all gathering in her house, and then, when realization came to her, she gasped in horror and cried: "You all think I'm dying!"
I had no desire to take up her chains, but the world did not care what I wanted.
I got pregnant by a man much older than me when I was 20 years old. My mother had just died, my father was in prison, and this man seemed to be the only stable thing in the world for me to cling to. Even as his affections for me cooled and transformed into bitterness and then finally into open hostility, I clung to him. The more brutal he was to me, the harder I held on. What a misery it was gestating for him. I felt like the loneliest, most friendless person in the world.
I can't account for the terror that possessed me during my unhappy pregnancy and caused me to stay in a situation so unworthy of me, but were I to venture a guess I would assume my terror had evolutionary roots. The primal fear of being impregnated and then abandoned by the child's father apparently is vital to the survival of the species, and for me it was constantly blaring its timeless alarm.
When my son was 3 weeks old, his father went to prison as was his custom every few years at the time. Naturally, being in prison caused him to see my hopeless devotion to him in a new and appealing light, and our relations improved.
He was, and still is, a very loving and devoted father. I did get lucky in that regard, considering how often the opposite is true in circumstances like mine.
During his time in prison, I was faced with the necessity of providing for my son by my own efforts, and I struggled endlessly in this direction. Having little work experience, I held almost no value in the market economy. I found working in the service industry profoundly miserable, and my misery was compounded by the fact that I did not have the option of quitting. I was not at all glad that women had won the right to join the workforce, and I wondered forlornly how anyone in their right mind could even have been persuaded to fight for such a thing.
When my son's father was released from prison (by then we were married), he immediately went to work and relieved me of that burden. I stayed home with our son and eventually gave birth to our youngest boy.
My ex-husband was well-liked at work and he started getting promotions and earning more money. Our boys adore him, and he them, and he has completely turned his life around and found comfort and stability in fatherhood.
But our personal relations as husband and wife were not good, although I did rather enjoy being home with my kids and infinitely preferred it to compulsory low-wage employment. But my ex-husband always belittled my contribution to the household, since he earned all the money. He had rather old-fashioned views on marriage and what his status as the sole breadwinner of the household entitled him to, and to him I was not very satisfactory and, much to his indignation, I did not care. We divorced in 2023.
Since the divorce, my economic circumstances have been terrible. I have no practical objections to becoming employed; in fact, the older I get, the more it bothers me that I have not proven myself to be a useful and productive member of society. I have no desire to simply cost the system money. I have been working toward earning professional certifications (more than one) to improve my earning potential; however, I honestly don't anticipate this being more fulfilling to me than being fully devoted to raising my children into healthy and responsible adults.
My conclusion is that traditional gender roles can be great and produce a very fulfilling and comfortable life, but if the marriage is unhappy, the woman (or whichever parent is the one who stays at home with the kids) will be at a disadvantage. Many women who have poor economic prospects will choose to remain in oppressive marriages rather than face economic ruin, and this dynamic produces unaccountable misery, which is probably why so many modern feminists are so vehemently opposed to it.
"hey were instructed to never directly say "no" to, or beat a boy in any competition, because he might attack/rape/kill them"
I remember when Scott calculated even knife murder has higher rates in the US than in the avg European country. So the issue is less guns than a culture of violence, and this also looks like less of a trad thing but a culture of violence.
These things looked a whole lot less bad in countries with less of a culture of violence. Where wives did not get beaten (in the urban middle class), they could interpret that role more flexibly.
Anyhow, I am not a supporter of trad roles, but hypothetically if someone could take the violence part out and just take the rest, things would look different.
How about some data and links to support your claims, please? I did some poking around on Google Scholar and most of those women-are-happier-in-traditional-gender-role studies seem to date back to the 1970s and 1980s. If you're going to engage with rationalists you'll need to do like rationalists do, you can't just make wild claims and not support them.
Using studies that utilized more refined methodologies, we find that "policies promoting gender equality tend to improve the quality of life for everyone, not just direct beneficiaries of the policies (women). Indeed, men also see strong and significant gains in life satisfaction when the sexes are more equal."
We also find that women seem to be happier than men: "Women reported higher levels of life satisfaction than men across all income, education, and employment groups. The direction of gender differences in life satisfaction was inconsistent across age and regional groups. Men scored higher than women only over the age of about 63, and in sub-Saharan Africa.
Hmm, this review has a link to some studies. Seems like maybe marriage is the confounding factor here? And maybe a pattern of more women's rights => happiness shock that then recovers over time? That's something like what the authors propose.
The first study is, I think, confounded by the fact that rich countries are happier, on average, and that the world economy has been growing. I can't read it but that is what makes sense by the abstract. I'd hope they control for that. (https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349487/world-happiness-report.aspx)
This piece claims that "unhappiness has been rising for a decade", which would be quite surprising if true, considering the massive increase in global wealth in that time.
The article you linked has no mention of politics. Also measuring rates of depression is not the same thing as measuring rates of happiness.
Not to say it's not relevant, but it doesn't immediately counteract the claims the person you're responding to is saying, especially since you are not linking research articles like they are. The claim that many of the "traditional lifestyles = more happiness" papers came from so long ago is a valid argument and one you didn't address.
I did like the first article you linked because it was an interesting perspective by someone who is an expert in her field. She also commented on how women are reporting more stress at the same time they are reporting more happiness, which goes back to the depression rates =/= unhappiness rates.
>This piece claims that "unhappiness has been rising for a decade", which would be quite surprising if true, considering the massive increase in global wealth in that time.
This says nothing about gender or politics, so has not a whole lot of correlation to the topic. You might as well use this to support the philosophy everyone should go to a cave and meditate 8 hours a day to find inner peace (people across many cultures and over several millennia have been saying that wealth is antithetical to happiness)
>I do not like happiness research, it is akin to gender politics research in unhelpfulness.
That is a somewhat not helpful thing to say, and also not true. Sure there are shortcomings to the methods and questions being asked about happiness, but it does have a quantifiable result, unlike gender politics research.
I do think the correct mindset to be in is confused if you don't have a full understanding of the topic (many people are quick to come up with ideas on things they are not experts in so it is good you are not doing that) but to just throw it away as meaningless as a result of being confused is not the correct response.
I don't think confusion is the appropriate response, though. Lórien: a rational position would be just to say that the data does not unambiguously support your assertion that traditional gender roles are correlated with happiness. I'll admit I'm biased against that idea, but the data supporting my position after a quick Google Scholar search is sort of squidgy, too (though I suspect that if I trawled the literature, I could probably come up with more data to support my position). But it doesn't rationally follow that utilitarians *should* support traditional gender roles as the best option for the common good. BTW, thanks taking up my challenge and linking to some other data points! (That's more than most people do when they argue.)
I like my gender roles the same way I like my software: highly configurable, with sane defaults. The average mom is probably more nurturing than the average dad, and the average man probably finds the provider role more satisfying than the average woman. But not all women have the warmth and patience needed to be nurturing moms, and not all men have the career ambitions needed to provide for a family, so society's theoretical point of optimal-happiness-and-fertility would probably be in the ballpark of an 80/20 split between traditional couples and inverted-gender-role couples.
Note that an 80/20 split is one in five, aka "one of the couples you personally know is an exception," aka "common enough that you definitely should not attempt to enforce uniformity on this issue."
My wife, for one, would go crazy if she had to be a stay-at-home mom, and the idea of being the sole breadwinner for my family doesn't fill me with excitement either.
I'm sorry, but this is unsatisfying. Please rework it, and bring it back to me when you've got something I can use to force people to be needlessly unhappy while doing things they don't want to do.
Rationalist utilitarians are often just San Fransisco progressives. They don't follow their premises where they would actually lead if it violates those orthodoxies. Their edginess is orthogonal at best.
That said, the argument that traditional societies are happier is based on working backward form a decline in happiness from the mid-20th century and attributing it to the end of gender roles. This is not ironclad proof and in societies that have gone their farthest toward enforcing gender roles like Iran you do not see a particularly happy population. The US is also not particularly unhappy by global standards and is happier than most societies which score higher on traditionalism. It's also not certain what "in favor of traditional gender roles" means in effect here. Of course, happiness as a cause is worthy. But what's the specific idea here?
>That said, the argument that traditional societies are happier is based on working backward form a decline in happiness from the mid-20th century and attributing it to the end of gender roles.
Interesting! That sounds completely wrong. People used to be so much more optimistic about the future, this is why retrofuturism is a thing. The view of technology / industry went from expecting future utopia, then to we will have cool stuff, then to we are polluting the rivers and then to we are killing the planet. I think it was impossible to watch the Moon Landing and NOT think awesome things are coming.
Yeah, the decline in happiness is absolutely a real phenomenon. But there's no direct evidence linking it to the decline of gender roles. That did happen. And women in traditional relationships do tend to be happier. But that is not nearly sufficient to prove that declining gender roles caused the unhappiness or that reversing course would increase happiness. Which is what the argument usually is. And there's plenty of alternative explanations.
We are undoubtably programmed to find a space for ourselves within society, and a society with legible roles - of which gender is one of the most important - to which one is forcibly allocated, albeit probably with some degree of personal input, lends itself to that. Not to mention that in a highly gendered society compared to a non-gendered one - if that existed - you are competing with 50% of your peers rather than 100%. An instant win, surely.
Some people will have odd motivations unrelated to fitting in, and indeed such a society will tend to be unkind to such people. But if we are going to be utilitarians, the average level of happiness must be important, even if we can see that it cannot be the complete basis of our philosophy.
I don't think I agree with anything you said in the first paragraph. I don't think we're particularly programmed to find our space. And I think we at least equally, and in my opinion more so, make our spaces communally. I don't think legible roles necessarily make fitting in easier and actually think they tend to be maladaptive. And I don't think having gender roles means you're only competing with half the population. And even if it did I'm not sure that reducing competition is a win.
Regardless of whether we agree, empirically societies that legislate gender roles or exert immense social pressure around them are not empirically happier.
I was thinking more of children than adults. It seems to me that if they were not so programmed, it would constitute a shocking lapse on the part of Mother Nature.
Children copy and roleplay as adults for *some* reason, right?
I don't think nature has directionality such that it programs us. And if it did I don't think we get to tell that force what it should be doing. Whether it's god or evolution it's a force beyond our capacity to condemn.
Hmm. Then wouldn't a good question be "if modernity makes us unhappy, why do we want to modernize / make more wealthy poor countries?" I think (on my unreliable memory) Ted K. thought something like this, although I rather disagree with his methods.
I guess I'm looking for situations where good things make people unhappy, and wondering if utilitarians would be against those goods things? Because if we can find one, that would be rather disconcerting.
I think it's moving goalposts. If you're hungry and living in an unstable region where there's regularly a new warlord spinning up a batch of fighters to come burn your village down, then "hey, no more warlords!" is going to be a huge boost to your happiness.
Then your kids get used to living in "no more warlords, pretty regular meals" world, so their set of conditions for being unhappy is "but I don't even have an outdoor toilet".
Then the grandkids get used to "what are warlords, as much food as we want" and they then move on to "but I'm not happy because I should be living in a four room house with an indoor bathroom".
It's sort of a dark mirror image of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; as soon as the basic unhappiness causes are taken care of, we move up a tier to the next set of problems. That's how you get "I have so much money I'm swimming in it, I'm in great health, I live in a peaceful and prosperous and stable country - but I'm not contented" or White People Problems, as I understand one satirical site puts it.
People have gotten less happy over time. But wealthier and more modern countries are, on average, happier. And where you see variation it's mostly between fairly rich countries like Japan vs Denmark or something. The least happy continent is Africa iirc. (The happiest is Australia but that's kind of cheating.) So there's a direct happiness premium in making most of the world richer/more advanced.
The example I can think of is personal lifestyle. Most evidence shows that the biggest contributors to happiness is someone who is personally secure, financially well off, married with friends and children, in good health, and religious. This doesn't mean forcing people into the religious brainwashing camps. But utilitarians do not generally go around encouraging people to find churches they like or marriage. You can also find stuff that violates progressive politics like how incarceration increases net safety but is unfashionable.
But that's the opposite: things that certain morality thinks are bad (or enemy coded) that make you happy that get ignored.
I don't know today, but 20 years ago the stories about Australia were that it is the new America. You go there, work in a warehouse for two years then buy a boat-yacht and spend a year on it not working.
If you view utilitarianism as a good metric for general cases, but not for extremes (as many people who read this blog do) then the obvious counter argument is to take something like Kantian view (or other non-utilitarian ethical system) that people should not be treated as a means to an end (people are ends in and of themselves), and thus a woman needs to be able to work in order to leave her partner if he is causing her unhappiness. On average people might be happier with traditional gender roles but the system itself allows for some individuals to be extremely unhappy, which has huge problems. People who read this blog generally aren't okay with killing one person to harvest their organs if it means saving a dozen other people in the hospital, and you can view the traditional gender roles problem similarly.
Even if you view it completely utilitarian, how do you quantify happiness in this regard? Is 9 happy housewives enough to counteract 1 abused housewife? What about 9 happy housewives versus 1 housewife who would rather make a name for herself? What about 49 happy housewives vs 1 abused housewife?
Additionally, its not clear that going back to such a system will actually increase happiness. At the time when it was done, raising a family was a much more important goal on a societal level than it is now and also women had no option but to participate in it. Even if now every partnership suddenly became a traditional setup, there's no guarantee that the women would be happier, as now they have ingested the "forbidden fruit of knowledge" and know that the way to make your mark on history is to become famous for your work and that that is something they would be allowed to do.
I think the older surveys about female dissatisfaction came about because "well we're all supposed to be liberated now and not stuck in the traditional roles, so I work too, but how come I'm *still* doing all/most of the housework, child-minding, elder care and so on on top of my job?"
Newer generations (Millennials, Gen Z) may have a more balanced approach where the male partners/spouses do housework and 'traditional' female tasks so there is more division of labour and less 'still a housewife on top of being a working wife and mother'.
Utilitarianism is good for general cases, like ending all animal consumption, but you have to fall back to deontology for really extreme stuff like traditional gender roles.
How to actually quantify happiness is a problem for utilitarianism all the time.
Yeah I mean it sounds silly to say it's an extreme edge case but when it involves someone's agency I'm not sure that's too crazy. It's on par with if someone were to argue slavery was a net positive for utility.
>Utilitarianism is good for general cases, like ending all animal consumption, but you have to fall back to deontology for really extreme stuff like traditional gender roles.
As an omnivore in a society (USA) that is overwhelmingly omnivorous, "ending all animal consumption" here counts as "extreme stuff" to most of us.
I think this is what I'm getting at – if what people want doesn't make them happy, should we give it to them?
I personally would rather not be in a traditional relationship, and let's say I find a partner who feels the same. If you could prove the downstream societal effects of normalizing non-traditional relationships outweighed the happiness gained by us being in one, would the ethical thing to do be not enter in one?
The utilitarian debate about the prohibition of alcohol is a balance between the individual enjoyment of drinking, the individual, family and social costs of alcohol abuse, and the long-range secondary effects like funding mob takeovers in every major city. (I know some conservatives treat going back to the past as a proven-safe option with respect to side effects, but getting to the point of being able to ban women from employment, home ownership and bank accounts would require a revolution on a scale that would destroy almost every institution in our country.)
Myself and a number of friends fit this bill - utilitarian and in favor of traditional gender roles. Is it really so rare? I don't really know any female utilitarians, but I know a bunch of utilitarian / grey tribe-ish men who would be happy with traditional gender roles, and myself and several of them are paired with appropriate women.
It's probably more of a supply / demand thing. There's not a lot of supply of "happy with traditional gender roles women" also compatible / happy with with "gray tribe, non-religious, utilitarian men." So, the few that actually exist get snatched up, and all the remaining gray / utilitarian guys need to tug the forelock and convince themselves into whatever mindset / beliefs successfully gets them a mate.
I mean, at the high level how can you be pro-natalist and plan a big family if you DON'T have a traditional gender role couple? Seems like playing on hard mode.
But I guess the utilitarian / pro-natalist crowd probably has less direct overlap overall than I'm thinking.
It's quite rare in my circles. The traditional gender roles crowd is also the "no fault divorce was a mistake" and the "spare the rod" crowd.
There are lots of Utilitarians IN traditional couples, but they are not pro-trad gender roles, presumably because the people that want them can get them and the people that don't want them will fuck them up
Anecdote: all the libby libs I know are married once, 2.5 kids and a dog and a house with a fence and a garden, all the traditional gender roles evangelists are married 3 times, some amount of kids but it's hard to say given that they are at somebody else's house by court order, fucking each others wives drama melt down zones.
The people that aren't libs and are living the drama free trad life just don't think that much about it, and definitely don't ever talk about it. It's just the default to them.
Ah, yeah - seeing yours and some of the other comments now, I think I was interpreting "in favor of" personally, vs politically.
I wasn't thinking of being "pro trad gender roles" as being "pro forcing gender roles using the apparatus of the state," which yeah, I'm definitely not about, and I'm pretty sure none of the people I know would be.
I mean, isn't that bit of a stretch, given that most gray tribe / utilitarian men are libertarian, and intrinsically leery of state power and regulations around personal lives?
Maybe I just missed a shibboleth here or something. But definitely, traditional gender roles for those who want them, and nontraditional roles or lifestyles also for those who want them, and may it be a matter of personal choice for everyone.
I thought the OP was more an observation along the lines of "you know, all the gray tribe / utilitarian guys I see don't end up with trad wives, even though that would theoretically be more in line with their philosophies, what's up with that?"
Could be my bias, but in my mind you can't be pro-traditional gender roles without the compulsive element, because they are just the default background of society.
They are the gravity well we live in, if you want a poly relationship or to be rosie the riveter you have to spend lots of societal energy to hit escape velocity to even get there. 's why even though it's mostly women in college, it's still mostly men on the tenure track to pick the first thing that came to mind.
How would such compulsion work, operationally? It seems to me if the "cultural" element isn't there naturally, you would need a huge amount of state intrusion and legal framework and enforcement apparatus to even attempt it, to a degree that we haven't seen in any democracies, or even classical monarchies. I just don't see how it's accomplishable at all, and attempting it seems like it would reliably induce rioting and guerilla style resistance.
Surely, inventing uterine replicators or something has to be easier?
They way it worked in the past was state compelled; women not being able to open bank accounts in their own name or own property and such.
They way it currently works is social pressure and norms. It's shameful for a man to be a virgin, it's shameful for a woman to be a slut, your grandmother asking "When are you gonna get married?", the child tax credit, the marriage tax credit, legal non-recognition of non-monogamy etc and so forth.
It's so baked in to society people who fail to fit the mold exactly (homosexuals, transgenders, etc.) still try to match it as closely as possible. Eg, civil union isn't enough. Gays want the real full fat marriage; because it having that word attached to it MEANS something.
EDIT: didn't answer directly: the cultural element grew out of traditions of inheritance and not the other way around IMO, and here's another IMO for free: It's not that traditional roles are particularly good or bad or stable or not; it's that everything about society just flows more smoothly if you stay in the rut that 7000 years of history has worn in the road.
1. Download anki and spend a bit of time each day learning the most common words so you fast-forward to the point where you can read and watch tv. Recommend downloading a deck that includes audio with the most common 500-1000 words. Even better if there are example sentences. I like using the "low-key" anki setup: https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-1/a/anki-setup. 15-30 minutes per day.
2. https://www.dreamingspanish.com/. Any form of comprehensible input, but this is the most popular one for spanish. 15-30 minutes per day.
3. https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish. Some sort of site that teaches the fundamentals of the language, this one is popular for spanish. 15-30 minutes per day. Also if studying through reading or listening and you encounter something weird don't hesitate to google grammar questions.
4. Read books aimed at beginners. Use a kindle because it lets you long-press a word to see the translation (if the spanish-english dictionary is not automatically enabled there's a way to do that on your kindle). If you don't have a kindle you can get one for cheap on https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/.
Overall the more time you spend on the language the more you will learn, but don't burn yourself out. Aiming for an hour a day is reasonable for most people (15 minutes of each type of practice) but you can feel free to play around with how much you spend on each type.
Just came across this article (https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril), which is a pretty wild interesting story. But I also found it very ironic, because right after talking about how Luckey was smeared by inaccurate media articles, the article itself proceeds to smear Facebook the same way!
Tablet is at war with Facebook for a while: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
This is kind of funny..
As i may have mentioned before, I am currently struggling with Grave's disease (overactive thyroid0.
The cardiology department has just had the bright idea they could prescribe spironolactone for thw water retention (edema) I get as a symptom of the thyroid condition. Which will probably work, yes.
And, I am thinking to myself... spironolactone? I just happen to know what *else* that is prescribed for, having been following the news about restrictions on prescribing puberty blockers. It's a testosterone blocker, also often prescribed for MtF transsexuals. Fine. Fine. I shall play dumb and pretend that I do not know this.
And are you okay with having less testosterone?
Before the pedants point this out: puberty blocker ban applies to e..g triptorelin but not to testosterone blockers like spironolactone.
Has anyone read [Anti-tech revolution: Why and How](https://annas-archive.org/md5/5d393d7d4b253ea73308250affeb4098) or anything by the same author?
Chapter 2 has some interesting and plausible (to me) insights on AI safety.
I started some of his books and liked them but haven't finished anything yet. I mostly liked his analysis of the psychology of the modern man, I didn't get a lot of insights on AI.
I'm not saying that the Unabomber wasn't a smart guy, but I am going to say that someone who couldn't even manage to keep himself from blowing up buildings and airplanes probably isn't who we should turn to when it comes to keeping AI from doing likewise.
I also question the wisdom of linking to one of the premiere resources for literary piracy, personally.
Piracy is based. But yeah, I get your point.
I've seen Scott link to sci-hub before
Orange county meetup announcement for this Saturday.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iAPDEeUMkIs38OXiOASp9EvExwn5-Kyv1_rKjAzKAkc/edit?usp=sharing
I thought this might have been a clip from an SNL skit — sort of a reprise of their classic Bass-O-Matic skit — but, no, it's a real company with a real product! And how much development time was required to make its lips sync with its voice?
https://x.com/i/status/1826636139970621747
https://www.trumpytrout.com/?mid=12243062
Has anyone played the new "Black Myth: Wukong" game yet? Yes, I know it's only just been released, but who else can I ask but you guys?
Pros: It's about Sun Wukong so that's immediately appealing to me, the visuals look *amazing*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr5rQ1NZ0Tw
Cons: I see it described as "soulslike" and I'm not too hot at the aul' combat, so would the difficulty level be too high?
I have not played it, but of course somebody has. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLnywm2XgJg You can see what the game is going to expect of you.
Thanks for the link! Very helpful. So basically "stand there and hit with your staff and/or run like hell when over-matched" - I can do that 😁
Mention of some issues with PC version so I may wait to see if there are any patches. Much more inclined to try this now, though.
This is just shameless self promotion. I wrote about geoengineering recently, including the use of aerosols to reflect the sun and carbon mineralization to sequester CO2: https://www.aei.org/articles/the-promise-of-geoengineering/
What would be the optimal immigration policy for the USA? I don't believe it is either Open Borders or Zero Immigrants. My best guess is we need to allow way, way more immigrants with college degrees and maybe the same or fewer without degrees? In either category, what would be a method for determining what the optimum number per year would be?
The critical question is whether we maintain a welfare state for the immigrants. If we do, then we don't want poor immigrants, since they cost us more than they pay us. That leads to the popular policy of letting in only high end immigrants.
But the immigrants who we, and they, can gain most from are at the other end of the scale, poor people happy to do unskilled work at a wage high for them, low for us, and work their way up from there, the equivalent of my ancestors who came in from eastern Europe to work in sweatshops in New York a century and more ago. They are better off coming in without the protections of a welfare state than being kept out — but that option is barred by current ideology.
Don't you need to consider the labour capital ration as well? Expanding the labour supply will probably push down per capita gdp and wages for a fixed amount of capital.
Also, if the source of higher incomes in developed countries is non-rivalous, like institutions or governance, surely it makes more sense to extend them to low-income countries rather than concentrating everyone in places that are already high income.
Does it depend at all on the particular state? My guess is that unskilled immigrants to Texas, which has a relatively small welfare state, are a net positive to the economy whereas low skilled immigrants to California are a net negative, but I don't know what the data says.
I'll perversely say, more unskilled laborers and fewer skilled or degreed immigrants. Also, dismantle the H1-B visa system which is really a soft form of indentured servitude.
Something like Australian / NZ point system would be a good start. Less “family re-unification”, more “we have shortage of this labor type, come in”. Our immigration system is such a hopeless mess, any streamlining and simplification would be welcome at this point.
The optimal immigration policy is a Schengen Area within the core American Empire (US, Anglosphere, EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel) and a MrBeast style gameshow at the southern border open to any IQ > 115, where contestants have to pass through several rounds of challenges testing intelligence, fitness, creativity, patience, sociability, and adherence to American Empire cultural norms.
Optimal for what? What's the aim?
It sounds like you are looking for workers who will add value: I don't know if your strategy for achieving that is right or not, but more importantly I don't know if it's the right aim - or more to the point the aim most people would agree on.
I recognize my comment isn't adding to the conversation, but just wanted to echo this sentiment.
I am confused why none of the other responders have either posed this same question or engaged with it, even in passing, in their own responses.
There's a review of the book "Then I Am Myself the World" by Christof Koch in the latest Science News. Koch is into ITT (integrated information theory), which postulates you can measure a system's consciousness by measuring the amount of integrated information within it. Koch did this with the generative AI ChatGPT, and the money quote is -
"(it) has an itsy bitsy bit of consciousness" but experiences the world something much less than a worm with only 300 neurons.
So maybe we're safe from AI doom for a little while.
IIRC, Scott Aaronson was very critical of ITT on his blog.
How conscious is Amazon, Microsoft, or the DoD under IIT?
Can you say a bit about what Koch means by integrated information? What's an example? Is what is integrated things about self and things about world? (So, for instance, GPT4 will tell you it's an LLM, and whether LLM's like itself can or can't do a certain task. That seems to me like some knowledge about self integrated with knowledge about the world. )
I didn't read Koch's book. Integrated information theory (IIT, got the acronym wrong the first time) is something I tried to learn about by reading Erik Hoel's book "The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science", but it was over my head and, altho he helped develop the theory, he winds up trashing it. If only someone more expert than me could write up a review of either of these books for next years contest.
I wasn't asked and have no idea what he means with the fluffy phrase "integrated information" but I think his overall idea is panpsychism plus the assumption that an atom has a different - and vastly poorer experience - than a fox because an atom can do viewer and less complex actions than a fox. That's my interpretation of him saying that what matters is how much "irreducible causal power" a thing has.
My example is, a fox can do actions that its individual atoms can't. Not its atoms hunt rats, the fox does.
And I think, for sure: hunting a rat feels much different than to only swing arround a few nanometer. I know, I've done both.
I don't get it. Clearly, my group is right, and the other group is wrong. So why don't all utilitarians join my group and declare a war on the other group? Is it because they are stupid, or because they are hypocrites? What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
> What cause could possibly bring more utility than making my group win?
Have you considered making *my* group win? Obviously more utilitarian.
If you let me win the argument, the endorphin rush will trickle down to everyone's benefit.
So many people disagree with me, *too*! Must be that same group of stupid and /or hypocritical nincompoops.
I am also baffled. Me and my in-group are clearly utility monsters, so why aren't utilitarians fulfilling our every whim at the expense of the out-group?
Thank you for point #3 here.
Metallica just donated $40,000 to a Mpls homeless shelter.
https://www.fox9.com/news/minneapolis-homeless-shelter-thanks-metallica-donation
Maybe they aren’t a bunch of assholes.
For the benefit of folks who haven’t watched The Big Lebowski a half a dozen time that’s a reference to The Dude describing his time in the music business. As a roadie for Metallica, along with his opinion of the group. Mettalica loved the joke BTW.
Maybe they're not assholes, but the ad I saw on that website is. It popped up over the video, and the x in the corner was actually a download link.
I didn’t get that when I played it. I’ll delete the link.
Edit; I’m finding YouTube clips for a lot of Big Lebowski scenes. Not that one though.
Further Edit: I did find it dubbed into French, Japanese and a language I can only guess at with non ASII character set letters with diacritics and other ornamentations I don’t know the names of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXXOGYqbK5o (14.10)
I've heard time and again that in Chasidic culture, men don't work. And I've said it.
At least for Williamsberg Chasidim, it just isn't true, and I'm wondering to what extent it's true elsewhere.
The video is an overview of the lively business culture of Williamsberg, with a lot of work being done by men. What they generally don't have is college degrees, but you can do a lot without a degree. There are many business supplying specialized cultural products (kosher food, wigs for women, etc.), non-religious products and services (plumbing, extermination), and selling outside the community. Computers are more of factor than they used to be, and so is entertainment.
I've heard that Jews are some of the most value-add people on the planet. But this subset is the extreme opposite? What's up with that?
Note that my link is about Chasidic culture where men work, but there's a possibility (if I can trust what I keep hearing about Israel) where Chasidic men (at least in some groups) don't work.
What's up with that is that the universe is out to get you. You think you have a nice handy generalization, and wham! the universe hits you with an exception. This is especially true for biology and for humans.
An interesting idea of "the bezzle", the window of time after a fraud has been committed when the action appears positive-sum, since the fraudster benefited, and the mark hasn't realized anything is amiss.
It helps explain why people get mad at whistleblowers, because everyone is happier *before* the whistle is blown, even if in reality some of the parties were worse off.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/06/29/the-science-bezzle/
Whistleblowers probably aren't very popular even before they blow the whistle. In order to be willing to do it, you probably need to have a bond with the company and your coworkers that's defective, i.e. falls short of what's needed by the other parties. The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player. Still, we need them. If every crew rebelled against their Capt. Bligh there would be no Navy. But if there were many Capt. Blighs there also would be no Navy.
Every place I've worked there has been a huge glob of stuff that everybody knows is bad, but everybody thinks of it as stuff you can't acknowledge, much less challenge. The first place I ever worked was a small diner in the south. I was a waitress. The owner came in most days to check on things and punch and smack the busboys (all black, by the way) for not moving as fast as the thought they should. I remember him tasting the day's special and saying "Jesus, they must be hungry today!"
> The thing that makes someone capable of blowing the whistle also generally makes them a bad team player
???????????????????????????????????????????????
That sounds like the largest "its ok to be immoral" cope ive heard in a while
Honesty is the first virtue, its incredibly prosocail to tell the truth at the cost of a job
Whistleblowers are people who see something wrong in an organization and want to fix it. If they're not getting along with the rest of the organization, whistleblowing is one of the primary ways we hear about them. If they *are* getting along with the rest of the organization, then they're probably just working with their management (upwards or down; some of these people are themselves managers), getting the change that way, and we people outside the organization never hear of them.
Therefore, by the time we hear of someone in the news as a whistleblower, it's virtually certain they didn't get along with their team.
There's a catch here, though. Some people don't get along with their team because their team is corrupt and doing illegal things and then they go to the press. Others don't get along with their team because their team is trying to do its job and it's the individual who's corrupted by delusions of speaking truth to power and goes to the press. The press doesn't have a very large incentive to tell one from the other, but it often has a large incentive to report pot stirring and underdog stories, so both types of people are reported as whistleblowers, and it falls to us readers to figure out whether the person reported as a whistleblower actually *is* one, assuming we ourselves have any incentive to do so.
What makes you think I'm saying people who blow the whistle are immoral? I'm saying they're bad team players. They do not bond deeply with coworkers or the organization itself, are less loyal to it and its workers, less willing to forgive the organization its various lies and injustices, more skeptical of its view of how it should be seen. That's not equivalent to their being immoral. As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school. I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
> I have tried to do a good job, and treat my coworkers fairly, but I have always been angry and creeped out by the lies and injustices that went on at the place, that everybody else seemed to shrug off as part of the package.
Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
> As a matter of fact, I think I am a bad team player. I have never been able to feel affection and loyalty for the places where I worked and went to school.
Actions are what matter
> If you're going to pull Reddit-style rude gotchas on here, how about you at least try first to get clear what people are saying, and ask for clarification if it sounds ridiculous, instead of pulling out your dick and whizzing a steam of exclamatory question marks?
Why? Im no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
<Why? I'm no less angry at the statement, but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
ACX reasons: Because this is not Reddit, and if you engage in Reddit style rudeness, especially in response to someone who has not been rude to you, a lot of people are going to think you're a jackass and not take your posts seriously.
My reasons: I am not exactly distressed by your various negative takes on me, but I am irritated, and am likely in the future to skip over comments by you because, ugh, it's that monky guy who adds extra y's or something to monky. I have the impression that you read my posts on this thread not trying to get what I was saying, but scanning for bits that will give you a chance to exclaim about ways I am lame and dumb and wrong. Specifically: (1) A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct. But you just went with your first impression, rather than re-reading, or asking me whether I was saying that being a team player is more important than being honest. So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
(2) So then I clarify what I meant, and you let me off the hook for being a bad player who hogs the ball, but you still ended with an insult: I am calling myself a bad player because I am pussy-whipped by the HT lady. Again, rather than assuming I have been intimidated by a mean cunt into thinking I am Bad when actually I am a Good Guy, you could have asked me why I was calling myself a bad team player even though I believe I treat my coworkers fairly and pull my weight. But nope, you went for pussy whip.
If you want to get meta about this.... fine
> A quick reading of my first post gave you the impression that I thought whistleblowers were bad people because honesty is less important than team players. Unless you have lousy reading comprehension skills you will have noticed, though, that I was not expressing any anger at or personal disapproval of whistleblowers, so it would be natural to wonder whether your first interpretation is correct.
I quoted a statement because I was responding to a statement
> So then you posted exclamations about how INCREDIBLY WRONG AND DUMB I WAS -- WAHHHHHHH!
>> Then it isnt *your* cope, but all the same.
>> The chance your the person who take credit for others work, or makes delusional shots in basketball rather then passing, sound low. i.e. a bad team player.
I granted/clarified it wasn't a cope about your actions.
> I pulled my weight....
I believe you confused by my lazy sentence structure on this comment, to rephrase it verbosely
1. the definition of a bad team player is related to taking undue credit
2. given your claims you dont sound like you do that
3. qed you are there not a bad team player
I was also hoping to imply that that a "bad team player" commits local anti social behavior, a whistle blower commits high-cost, pro-socail behavior at a higher level of abstraction and its extremely unlikely for an ethical person to actually be less ethical at less abstract, lower cost, situations
> a mean cunt
From my point of view this is the first direct(i.e. about people here) insult in this thread
I pulled my weight, and did the hospital equivalent of passing the ball. But here are they ways I was not a team player: If I had a patient to refer, I sent them to whoever I thought was best, not to the person who had recently done me a favor, or the person I knew needed to pick up some more patients. I did not make an effort to pretend to like and respect various people on staff that I thought were dishonest, greedy and self-serving. I made a few friends on staff, but did not feel a bond with the rest of staff — skipped their baby showers, holiday parties, retirement parties, etc. Did not schmooze with them. Did not respect the head of the unit where I worked, and sometimes warned people to beware of his tendency to do various unscrupulous and unfair things. Had some major objections to certain hospital policies, and spoke about them bluntly whenever it was relevant. Overall, I just did not exude the “I’m OK you’re OK” feeling that organizations want and need from staff. I was respected, and was not disliked, but I definitely did not pull my weight when it came to working to create an atmosphere of “we’re all fine folks here.”
> but presumably mean girls turned hr ladies have convinced you of something
Is hr Human Relations? I don't think I ever spoke with one, or even knew who the hospital HR staff were. What on earth do you think one convinced me of? And what makes you expect that it's easy to convince me of things? You sure didn't get very far with convincing me I'm immoral.
At the risk of receiving a whizzing stream of exclamatory question marks, I wonder if Monkyyy could explain his Simiiforme reasoning for his belief that honesty is necessarily a prosocial behavior? Honesty is usually perceived by those on the receiving-end of it as an antisocial behavior.
Its more simiiforeme intuition /s
Id draw the line closer to kant's axe murder then most. Everything depends on truth surviving lies, charitys that work rather then are money laundering schemes. If theres to much causal lying in society, something like giving to charity could easily break down and your giving money to a gold plated throne of the middle ages church. The proper use of violence depends on finding the right guy, etc etc etc etc
One of my friends lost a job because he wouldn't pad his expense account. He didn't report that everyone else was padding their expense accounts, but they were afraid he would.
serpico
I predict a few more people in the typical ACX age cohort will pick up on my joking Big Lebowski reference above.
Serpico is definitely a film worth seeking out though.
Wow that's disgusting. Which industry, finance?
I don't remember and we're out of touch. I don't think it was finance.
Lorien made a question earlier asking why utilitarians more in favor of gender roles. A good discussion came from that. I have a similar comment, but different enough that I want to post about it separate from the discussion thread that Lorien started.
My question is... why aren't utilitarians more active in opposing what's called wokeness? At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy, particularly the woke themselves. This philosophy/ideology is known for deriding toxicity, but is itself highly toxic. It focuses the mind almost exclusively on negative externalities, and it actively encourages very uncharitable interpretations of the words/actions of others through the promotion of ideas like micro-aggressions.
The art/entertainment that arises from it is widely considered inferior to what came before, as we can see with various viewer satisfaction metrics and falling ratings for several major franchises (Dr. Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, MCU TV shows).
I think it's pretty clear that most people in the west would like less "wokeness" in their world. That most people dislike it. And it could even be argued that many of the woke themselves would enjoy greater emotional well-being from not being woke.
So opposing wokeness seems to me as both a way to genuinely serve utilitarian goals while also making utilitariansm more popular with the general population. With such a win/win proposition just sitting there, completely consistent with utilitarian goals/beliefs, it's odd to me that the movement doesn't go for it more than it does.
Is it that "wokeness" isn't defined as well as most utilitarians would like? Is it that utilitarians believe it'll implode on its own? Is it just that... actively opposing wokeness would feel like being pro-Republican, and most utilitarians really don't want that? I'm genuinely curious here.
I think a utilitarian would say that specialization is good, and if we have a gender that is born a bit more empathic and another that is born with a bit more innate understanding of how objects work then it is good that they specialize on that. The issue is that it is only true on the average with many outliers.
I think I see what you're saying, as it pertains to gender roles.
And yes, I think you're basically right here.
Don't woke people think that wokeness will be beneficial in the long run? And perhaps in the short run, at least for some people (eg, supposed victims of racism, speech wokesters deem harmful, etc). Unless a utilitarian knows those things are untrue, wouldn't a utilitarian be agnostic?
Note also that the Civil Rights Movement likely made 80% of the people in much of the Deep South unhappy in the short term. What should utilitarian at the time have believed about it?
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Since you raised the Civil Rights Movement, I thought it only fitting to raise this famous quote from arguably the greatest leader involved in that movement.
Do you think that modern wokism is consistent with Dr. King's statement here? To me, the answer is very clear. Even if it's not clear to your, I hope you'll think about it, and maybe keep it in mind when you read woke commentary in the future.
I really don't understand what you are talking about. Did you somehow misinterpret my comment as an endorsement of "wokism"? It was neither an endorsement nor a criticism.
The Civil Rights movement has very strong moral valiance. That might not be why you raised it, but even if not, it gives strength to your question.
So I'm replying by saying "Ok... but does modern wokism share the same moral valiance and moral values of the civil rights movement?" And I'm saying no, it doesn't... so it shouldn't get to benefit from the comparison.
It's entirely possible you're just being fair and neutral and raising open questions here. I fully respect that. Still, I feel that wokism gets far too easy of a pass by simply equating itself with things like the Union side of the Civil War, the armies that fought against the Nazis on D-Day, and the American Civil Rights movement. Wokeness is very different from these 3, it has very different values propelling it forward than these 3, so it shouldn't get to benefit from the widespread agreement that modern people have with these three.
Honestly, you need to read more carefully. It is very clear why I mentioned the Civil Rights Movement: Because it made people happier in the long term, and hence a utilitarian might support it, even if it made most people unhappy in the short-term. That is the same for wokeness: unless we are sure that wokesters are incorrect that wokeness will increase happiness in the long term, then it makes sense for utilitarians to be agnostic. That is true even though wokeness is not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, it is true of permitting reform and NIMBYism and YIMBYism and 1000 other things that are not the moral equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement.
> At this point, in 2024, it's pretty clear that what's called "wokeness" has made people less happy
I don't think this is clear at all, at least for a definition of 'happy' that you could get a utilitarian to agree to
First of all, you don't present any evidence that wokeness has made people less happy _in toto_. That seems like a prerequisite for a utilitarian caring / taking action. Quality of media is just one part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and not even really something utilitarians typically care much about. On the assumption that you reckon you have such evidence but just haven't presented it (for brevity), I still don't think it is obvious all utilitarians should oppose wokeness.
Even the worst critics of wokeness view the process as being one of redistributing power and prestige. Therefore for every loser (typically characterised as being straight white men) there are winners (typically characterised as racial or sexual minorities). Maybe the utility gain isn't zero sum, but it isn't like woke utilitarians are totally ignorant of the fact that the utility gain *might not* be zero sum; they just believe that in fact the gains of making the worst off better are worth the costs of harming the better off. So the evidence you would need to convince a utilitarian is not just that things have got worse in the last decade, and that this is a direct result of wokeness, but also that the specific utility function of the utilitarian you are talking to is not satisfied by this state of affairs. This is nontrivial.
Arguing that media has got worse over the last decade is totally irrelevant to a woke utilitarian. Even if they agreed with you - and they probably wouldn't - they would say that worse media is a totally reasonable tradeoff to ensure that historic power imbalances were corrected
Even if it were true, it seems like *opposing* wokeness has made a lot of people unhappy. If you look at anti-woke media review channels, the personalities on those channels seem to be in a constant state of heightened anger at finding slights (real and imagined) in that media. For example a bunch of people got really, genuinely, non-performatively angry that Princess Peach was wearing trousers in the Mario movie trailer (her karting outfit, which she has worn since we'll before wokeness was a thing). Those people would be much happier if they stopped opposing wokeness, because opposing wokeness clearly causes them to tilt at ridiculous windmills. A utilitarian must at least consider that efforts to oppose wokeness would cause misery, such that even if it would have been better to oppose it ten years ago, it is too late to do it now and it is better to settle into a slightly suboptimal equilibrium than to perpetuate the culture war
Overall I think your argument requires that nobody genuinely believes wokeness is good. But since some people clearly do believe this, it is unlikely that you'll convince them by appealing to the 'obviousness' of your position
This study is from 2018, so slightly dated, but probably recent enough.
https://reason.com/2018/10/11/political-correctness-americans-vote-maj/
Going by this study, 80% of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem. Political Correctness/SJWism/Wokism... these terms have been used pretty interchangably in my experience. They don't always mean exactly the same thing, but there's substantial overlap here.
If 80% of Americans (strongly) dislike political correctness, then that means 80% of American (strongly) dislike at least a core part of what's considered "wokeness".
If this 80% is even close to accurate, then your suggestion of an even trade-off between "winners" and "losers" is very incorrect. It's not 1-for-1, it's 4 losers-for-1 winner (at best), and at that point it's anti-utilitarian and should be opposed.
I'm going to guess, from your reply, that you yourself are at least somewhat woke or progressive. Fair enough. Wanting greater equality, in at least practical terms, is understandable and admirable. Wokism is just one of many ways to try to achieve that, and a good argument can be made that there are much better and less counter-productive ways to achieve it. Utilitarians in general, and the effective altruism movement specifically, have a good philosophical framework to suggest different ways of achieving that. And to be fair, EA does address this some with the way it promotes altruistic and charitable living, much healthier than actively encouraging people to interpret the words of others in the most uncharitable way possible.
That being said, wokism is a competitor to EA, arguably the main competitor given its prominence in the modern American media landscape. The woke themselves recognize this, which is why the owner of this substack had a NY Times hitpiece wrote against him. Simply ignoring a major competitor, especially one that is not ignoring you, doesn't seem wise or prudent to me.
Given what you wrote about "quality of media", I get the impression you don't care much about it, so probably not worth getting into the various Rotten Tomatoes scores and IMDB scores and TV show ratings at a specific level. Plus, most of this information is not hard to find.
To be clear, I'm not a conservative. On a political compass, I'd consider myself Center-Left. My impression is that wokism has horribly distracted us from much more practical economy inequality concerns, while simultaneously creating a media and narrative landscape that actively repulses most people, thus making for a much less pleasure cultural atmosphere to live within.
Asian-made entertainment, largely free of woke elements, has been dramatically on the rise in recent years and decades. I don't think this is purely a coincidence. I considered getting into detail on this, but again, given what you wrote on "quality of media" probably pointless.
Have a good day. Thanks for the thorough and thought-provoking reply.
Interestingly enough I think we actually totally agree on the fundamental-level issues (I too would consider myself on the economic left and I too consider the culture war a distraction from actually pressing issues of economic inequality). I'd hazard a guess we agree in every particular on the harm that identity politics has wrought on the classic economic left as a political block.
However I'd also consider myself a strong utilitarian, and therefore I bristle at suggestions that the good is something that is trivially easy to determine, particularly when a large number of people think otherwise. I'd be incredibly surprised if at one point 80% of people didn't oppose interracial marriage, or gay marriage, or assisted dying, or anything like that, and it would have been terrible if utilitarians had let them get away with saying 'Since it is obviously wrong that X, we should make it a cornerstone of utilitarian philosophy to oppose X'. It is the 'obvious' bit I disagreed with, rather than the suggestion that in the final accounting we might find wokeness has caused more harm than good.
If I might - I appreciate the polite and good faith indication that you've got better things to do than go back and forth with me (in which case no problem at all) - but it I'd possible your reply indicates a bit of an error in your thinking. Imagine a world where 80% of people had more than enough to eat and 20% of people were starving. You could make the 20% vastly vastly better off by redistributing food from the 80% so that everyone had exactly enough to eat. If you asked 'Are you better off before or after redistribution?' you'd get 80/20 against it. But if you asked 'Solve for U(x) where U(x) is the utility you gain from your next marginal calorie' you'd get an average score much higher in the post-redistribution world. Almost all (possibly all?) utilitarians believe utility is better thought about in the second kind of terms, and woke utilitarians believe that this is true PLUS we actually live in a world like this except it is power / prestige which is inadequately distributed. So your evidence wouldn't convince them. I thought you might be interested in this feedback just in case you had a different expectation of what your evidence would prove to a utilitarian
Utilitarianism isn't a movement, it's just a philosophical position, compatible with all sorts of object-level political beliefs. You'll find utilitarians supporting all sorts of different things.
According to Aristotle we have two appetites - the concupiscible appetite directs us towards good things which are pleasant - food etc. while the irascible appetite directs us towards good things which are difficult to achieve e.g hiking up a mountain. The irascible appetite needs to be put in its place but we all need some difficult goals in life. I assume the woke are relatively unhappy while focused on the difficult goal of achieving equality as they see it, but many will have concupiscible goals that balance this.
Utilitarians are well aware that wokeness is a strawman that pretends that every form of egalitarianism is part of the over-corrective push of an outspoken minority, so they focus their utils on things that actually matter.
Some random thoughts on the Qur'an, in no particular order, since I've been reading it*:
- The Qur'an is extremely rambly and meandering, which makes it a bit hard to read. Most of the chapters cover a very, very wide range of topics, except for those at the end, which only cover one topic because they're only one paragraph or so long. There are a few anecdotes that are interesting enough to read (mostly various abbreviated versions of corresponding incidents from the Bible), but it's kinda hard to fish them out of the sheer mass of purple prose about how Allah is great and nonbelievers are evil. A lot of modern translations (eg Clear Quran) tend to only intensify the purple prose, making it even more unreadable.
- For example, surah 2 relates the tale of how Moses told the Israelites to slaughter a cow. In the Qur'an's version, this is apparently a one-off incident to resolve a disputed murder. In Deuteronomy 21's version, however, God commands the Israelites to slaughter a cow *every time* there is a disputed murder.
- There are a few points it really, *really*, likes to drive home. Some version of this is repeated in nearly every chapter.
- In Islam, all Muslims will go to Paradise, but all non-Muslims will go to "the fire", which is how the Qur'an *always* refers to the Islamic version of hell.
- Allah is almighty, wise, all-seeing, all-knowing, and so on.
- There are two or three cryptic-looking letters at the beginning of each chapter. (By the way, these are called the "muqatta'at", and have fueled a truly insane amount of speculation.)
Any further thoughts on this? Am I misunderstanding anything?
*proofreading it on Wikisource, as a matter of fact!
- Are you reading it in the traditional order, or the chronological order in which it was written and received by Mohammed (the latter makes much more sense)?
- The biography of Mohammed by Karen Armstrong is a highly readable book which I would strongly recommend as a companion piece to the Quran, especially when reading the surahs in chronological order.
- These taken together highlight how much many parts of the Quran are highly relevant to Mohammed's day to day live and evolving circumstances, including a few bits highly convenient to the prophet himself at that particular point.
Traditional order. Might switch to chronological order, but apparently people differ a lot on which surahs should be considered the earliest or latest (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surah#Chronological_order_of_surahs for more info).
I only just started a few days ago and haven't mustered the patience to get past the second surah, but what you describe fits with my impressions - it's like a fire-and-brimstone preacher riffing on vaguely-alluded-to Old Testament stories, with the stringency of a Trump campaign rally speech. You really have to wonder if Allah the All-Knowing couldn't afford a better editor.
I was gifted a Quran by a Muslim coworker a few years ago. I found it difficult to read too. I’ve read that in the original Arabic the repetition that I found frustrating reads as poetic and is actually a pleasure to read.
This is similar to e.g. the Iliad which reads as trudgingly repetitive but has a much better spoken quality.
I'm impressed! I got bogged down in the purple prose. And the different translations of key points make me more confused about what it's saying.
All that babbling by the concern trolls on the right and in the MSM about Kamala's issues and positions is just noise. Anna Navarro (a Republican BTW) reminds us that's there only one big issue we need to be concerned about this election. And it's the GOP elephant in the room...
"Let's be serious. Donald Trump and his minions have called Kamala a communist. I know communism. I fled communism from Nicaragua when I was eight years old. I don't take it lightly. And let me tell you what communist dictators do, and it's never just for one day. They attack the free press. They call them the enemy of the people like Ortega does in Nicaragua. They put their unqualified relatives in cushy government jobs so they can get rich off their positions like the Castros do in Cuba. And they refuse to accept legitimate elections when they lose and call for violence to stay in power like Maduro is doing right now in Venezuela. Now you tell me something. Do any of those things sound familiar? Is there anyone running for president who reminds you of that? And I know one thing. It's not Kamala Harris..."
https://youtu.be/PgNQrCdsG1I?t=91
Politics is the mind-killer. It is the little death that precedes total obliteration. I will face the hot takes and I will permit them to pass over me and through me. And when the thinkpieces and quips have gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the dunks have gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Kamala is a Communist the same way Trump is a Fascist, which is to say it's all very damn stupid, I'm not even going to touch "but *they* started it!" by both sides, and it's just the way modern politics is going.
Party A says Party B is not alone stupid but evil, and trying to bring back Bad Thing X.
Party B says Party A is not alone evil but stupid, and trying to bring back Bad Thing Y.
Stop calling Trump a Fascist, stop calling Harris a Communist. I would like that, but it's not gonna happen.
Trump literally tried to rig the election by calling that guy and ask him to find votes. That's fascist or close enough.
It's authoritarian, but not fascist. Fascisim is a specific ideology that is a subset of authoritarianism.
Help me out here. I find it hard to distinguish authoritarian communists from authoritarian fascists. What criteria make them different?
1. Authoritarian fascists and authoritarian communists both try to control the media, and penalize vocal and active dissent.
2. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to control the courts to get the desired results politically and legally, and to veil their illegal actions in a cloak of legality.
3. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote corruption to divert money and power into their hands — and authoritarian fascist and communist leaders give cushy positions to family and friends so they can profit from their control of the state.
4. Authoritarian fascists and communists both promote nationalist agendas, identifying themselves as true patriots and their enemies as enemies of the nation.
5. Authoritarian fascists and communists both target out-groups such as ethnic minorities or religious minorities for persecution to direct their citizens' anger at the out-groups rather than the leadership.
6. Authoritarian fascists and communists both try to distort the economy for their own and the benefit of the leadership clique.
The only difference that I can see between the two is that communists try to micro-manage businesses with a command-and-control economy, while fascists allow favored businesses to create monopolies (in return for kickbacks) that put pressure on businesses that don't play along. Either way, independent entrepreneurial activities are stifled.
What am I missing here?
The simplest way to tell fascists from communists is that fascists identify as fascists while communists identify as communists. Trying to make up some list of criteria for who belongs to a particular political movement just seems like a bad idea.
I'm pretty sure that nobody outside the lunatic fringe self-identifies as fascist or communist anymore, except in the latter case for a few historical ruling parties that are stuck with "communist" in their name and everybody then says that the Chinese aren't *really* communist.
And, yeah, the Chinese probably don't count as communist any more, but the people who do mostly call themselves "socialist". Close enough, I suppose. The fascists call themselves a bunch of other things, depending on the local political clime, and their critics then say "but with policies like those, they're basically admitting they're fascists".
Started out with Lexapro to try and improve my mood and sociability... and WOW! Absolutely amazing effects on day 4, though on days 5 and 6 things have gone back to baseline so far. Is there a reason why the effects haven't been consistent? Perhaps there's a way to speed up the onset of Lexapro to get me to feel great again sooner?
I'm 100% sure its not placebo: I track my mood every day consistently and three days ago was THE best mood of my entire year, by far. I was also skeptical the SSRI would actually do anything so I don't think it was placebo.
Wrote an answer but somehow it didn't get through. Here tis again: Most drugs in this class take 4 weeks plus to work, but lexapro is unusually fast, with some feeling a difference in 1 week. So maybe you are just an unusually fast responder. If what you felt was a drug effect then you can expect the mood lift to be stable once the drug fully kicks in. Don't discount placebo completely, though. Scott was sure he was microdosing on the real deal, but found out at end of study he's been taking placebo.
I hadn't really been following the story of the luxury superyacht which was sunk by a waterspout off the coast of Sicily, until I learned the name of it.
It was renamed "Bayesian" or "the Bayesian", thanks to the owner (?) who is the wife (now widow) of a guy involved in tech and finance:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/20/europe/bayesian-yacht-what-we-know-intl/index.html
"Built in 2008, the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht was manufactured by Italian company Perini Navi, Reuters reported. According to the Associated Press, the boat has been available for charter for $215,000 (€195,000) per week.
Lynch’s wife is linked to the yacht. The Bayesian is held by the company Revtom Limited, according to records from the maritime information service Equasis. The company’s latest annual return from April lists Bacares as the proprietor.
“Bayesian,” the name given to the vessel, is linked to the statistical theory on which Lynch built his fortune, according to Reuters."
That is not all, however, The man, Michael Lynch, was involved in a long legal battle with Hewlett-Packard over the sale of his company, Autonomy, to them, along with his VP of finance and another company member. Allegations of financial jiggery-pokery, which is all being covered in detail over at The Motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/1131/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week
So Lynch is acquitted, goes on a celebratory yacht trip, and ends up dead. But wait, there's more! That same weekend, his co-defendant *also* ends up dead after being struck by a car:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/19/uk/stephen-chamberlain-mike-lynch-co-defendant-dies-car-intl-latam/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc
What's that quote from "The Importance of Being Earnest"? "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."?
To have one Rationalist or Rationalist-adjacent billionaire involved in financial shenanigans (SBF) may be a misfortune, to have two (Lynch and Bayesianism) looks like carelessness 😁
t's kind of like hoe we were speculating on just how long it was going to be until Putin killed Yevgeny Prigozhin...
Seriously, I think Lynch was a tragic accident and weird co-incidence. Yevgeny Prigozhin on the other hand...
I was told that the bayesian.org website went down for a while around the same time the yacht did. <queue eerie theremin music>
NB: I don't know if this was a Bayesian joke or not.
Possibly a joke, but if it's real, Not A Coincidence Because Nothing Is Ever A Coincidence 😁
I dunno. Looking for fraud amongst billionaires is like looking for criminals at a prison.
I know, it's "throw a stone and hit one" territory. But for a movement all about winning bigly, maybe try and avoid the appearance of criminality because you assume you are just that much smarter than the normies?
It's all sorts of ironic. The boat's problem was probably that it had one very tall mast not two shorter ones. Tallest aluminium mast in the world. You would expect a statistician to ask: what are the odds of someone making a bigger one? If they do is it likely to be twice as high, or one metre higher? What do the constraints governing that question tell me about my own mast?
There is also some question about whether the keel of the yacht was in its lowered position or not, and whether some hatchways had been left open in spite of a storm warning.
Also Bazos’ yacht has a taller mast.
I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy. Or is this just an American thing?
This is not about Israel, Gaza, or even specifically Democrats. But people seem to think their non-expert opinion matters. Don't we appoint people to government positions so they can make the best decisions for us? They should be giving us what we NEED, which isn't necessarily what we WANT.
It's ridiculous to think something as complex as foreign policy should be determined by how people feel about a situation.
In general issue polling is terrible and cursed, since people will say they support more services, less taxes, lower deficits, and whatever else you want them to answer in your poll. Unless it's very careful to explicitly list the tradeoff involved in a neutral way, issue polling should be completely ignored.
As of 2024, approximately 92% of Republicans believe that violent crime in the United States is increasing, while all the data seems to suggest that violent crime is lower than at the beginning of the 1960s. Why should something as complex as the criminal justice system be left up to people who have no clue on how to look at the data?
Both could be true!
I assume that when people say "violent crime is increasing", they aren't necessarily taking 1961 as a baseline?
What if we take 2015 as a baseline? Or 2010? Or 2000? Or any other time in the adult life of someone under the age of 50? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:Timeline_of_U.S._homicide_rate._FBI_and_CDC.png
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and the early 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high as the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Age-Adjusted_Homicide_Rates_in_the_USA,_1900-2022,_with_Major_Theorized_Contributors.jpg/2
> Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out.
Why not zoom out even more, there has been a major increase of gun violence since the dinosaurs went extinct
What if it was gun violence and not a giant asteroid that caused their extinction? Interesting thought. Hmmm.
Because you see the bigger pattern if you zoom out. Unfortunately, I can't post graphs as a response. But there's this — the age-adjusted homicide rates since 1900. For some reason, they're tracking it against the inflation rate (post 1962 there *does* seem to visually be a rough correlation). The three most recent peaks were 1974, 1981, and 1991. In this chart the 2022 COVID peak is about half the height of those three peaks and has fallen since then. The un-age-adjusted homicide rate has dropped from 6.8/100K in 2022 to 4.8/100K (2Q of this year). This in line with late 1950s and 1960s.
What's interesting to me is that the age-adjusted homicide rate back in the 1920s and early 1930s was nearly as high the later 20th Century peaks. I wonder if other categories of violent crimes were also as high back then as they were in early 1990s? See, you learn new things when you zoom out. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Age-Adjusted_Homicide_Rates_in_the_USA,_1900-2022,_with_Major_Theorized_Contributors.jpg/2
For some reason, Substack duplicated my reply. It must have eaten Eremelalos's reply (above) as compensation. Sorry, Eremolalos!
I don't think many Democrats look at the data either. I don't think most people look at the data. Seems to me most people vote based on vibes, group identification, and what's currently being said in their echo chamber.
Sometimes I wonder whether the modern world is too complex for democracy toe even sort of work. I have no idea what a better alternative would be, though.
The alternative is to have a permanent stable of experts and lobby groups that are indirectly influenced by public opinion. Which is roughly what we ended up with.
And we sort of muddle along with this system. But we muddle along better than authoritarian societies!
Because if you instituted a nomenklatura they would send everybody *else* to jail.
I must be misunderstanding. The only place I can find for public opinion in your point of view is in choosing who we elect to office. After that, people should pipe down and do what they’re told?
Shouldn’t policy makers continue to consider the will of the people after they’re elected? And isn’t polling a tool to help them understand the people’s will?
People were arrested for protesting at the Democratic National Convention over this (https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/protesters-breach-security-fence-democratic-national-convention/).
Yes, policy makers should CONSIDER the will of the people, but people seem to think their collective will should be the policy. As Professor Feynman said, one cannot claim to be smarter than 1000 other people, but can certainly claim to be smarter than the average of 1000 other people.
So long as people only express their opinion, that is reasonable. If others, even policy-makers, find it reasonable, it can influence policy. I just find it unreasonable for the mob to think it can dictate policy.
I mean, the threat here is pretty clear: govern in a way I find acceptable or you will lose my vote.
I think you are directionally correct that people want to exert too much influence over the fine details of policy, and that people should leave more questions up to the experts, and judge them by long-term results.
However, I think you picked a really bad example to start with. "Should that war stop?" is exactly the kind of question the average voter is pretty well capable of judging for themselves.
Maybe they THINK they are, but I opine they are not. It's much more complicated than should they stop trying to kill people. Here are some points to consider:
* What can they do to prevent a 10/7 again? If they let them rearm, maybe they will plot another one.
* They don't want to kill more people, but having their own citizens killed is worse than killing more people.
* Some people in the US support the Palestinians, and some support the Israelis. This is not trivial to resolve.
* Consider other countries participating: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. One must also consider potential impacts of China's influence, and others.
* If we support Israel less, could those resources be better used at home? Abroad? What pushback will happen for any of these choices?
I'm not an expert, as I have said, and there are probably dozens of other implications to consider. I have no reason to think this is a bad example.
You might be overestimating how far the effects of a second ceasefire would reach.
My estimates, whether over or under, are almost certainly wrong, not being an expert.
If the public couldn't dictate policy, the policy would be to give all the money to policymakers. It happens in every country without a working democratic system.
The public informs policy by voting out people who make decisions they don't like. They don't dictate it.
For this particular instance, I doubt anyone would vote for Trump because of a disagreement on the Israel thing, but they might stay "uncommitted" and not vote at all, which is close to the same thing for this election.
Politicians care a lot about opinion polls and the effects on the marginal voter. That is how public opinion "dictates policy."
Do you actually believe experts should run the country or are you making a reductio?
To be precise, I believe those who run the country should take expert advice into consideration to make decisions for running the country. I don't expect the leaders to be experts in all things, not even all the things for which they have charge.
Yeah, direct democracy for every choice would be a disaster--a majority vote for which drugs should be approved by the FDA or something would make no sense. I think the main value of democracy is that when lots of people are unhappy about how things are going or about big visible decisions made by public officials, they can provide feedback that the elected officials have to care about. So the public isn't voting on specific FDA approvals, but if they are sufficiently unhappy about FDA actions, they can make the president and many congressmen care about that, and apply pressure to the FDA's leadership.
That's my position too but I think it implies there is a balance to be struck between expert opinion and what the man in the street can stomach.
>I just heard someone say 83-86% of Democrats are in favor of a cease-fire in Israel. So apparently people think polls should influence policy.<
...this doesn't follow. They make polls for ice cream flavors too. https://www.idfa.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2404080_topline_IDFA_US_Adults.pdf It doesn't mean they're trying to pressure ice cream shops into anything, it means they like to talk about themselves.
I have a sense that the war provokes a little more emotional engagement among both parties than ice cream preferences...
Well, if you have a sense, then by all means apply a double standard.
It all depends on the terms of the cease-fire, right?
The poll answer might as well be saying "war is bad", perhaps extending to "Palestinian civilians dying is bad" (given that Israel is inflicting most of the casualties).
Technically, there's also a difference between "being in favor of a cease-fire" and thinking that the US government should use carrots and sticks to get both sides to agree to something they'd otherwise not agree to. (Which, I think, they're already trying.)
Ultimately, though, this is a tension in any representative democracy: whether the representative should merely reflect the will of their constituents, or whether they were chosen to exercise their independent judgement? (And in practice, where in between should an individual politician fall at a given moment?)
And there's also the civil service, which in theory exists to provide expertise and consistency to governmental affairs. The State Department probably has it's own views on this situation.
I think no one, especially in this forum, would think war is not bad. My point isn't whether Israel should cease fire, but that people think they know what's best for the country based on their limited knowledge and experience. Everyone is, of course, entitled to their opinion, but only informed opinions should make policy, whether foreign or some other kind.
A lot of people think the current war in Gaza is good, and some of them argue such at length in these comment sections whenever the subject comes up.
I know this may shock you, but some people actually believe in democracy, and I don't just mean picking between one of two multimillionaire oligarchs every couple years
Democracy works if people do what they think is best for the country, not for themselves. It is not two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner. And uninformed, ignorant people have no credibility for their opinions on policy, just because of how they feel.
In terms of being uninformed I’d say the pro Israel lobby tops that list. So much so that future historians and their students will find it hard to explain the support.
Democracy IS two wolves voting to eat the one sheep. The usual objection to that is to advocate some kind of "individual rights"-based "liberalism" instead. You can just admit you don't care much for either, and prefer some kind of oligarchy/aristocracy, instead of misrepresenting them.
This could be the basis of an ad to encourage voting. Show the wolves voting over how to allocate the sheep (we don't want to be gory, something like Claymation would be good). Then the punchline: "If you don't vote, you are the sheep!"
It COULD, though that sounds to me like it'd imply "Be a wolf instead!", which in context would mean "gang up on minorities."
It is the strict definition of democracy, just as Bob is outvoted as one vote in 10 in lifeboat survivors (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/lifeboat-games-and-backscratchers). But as a system of governing, no, that is a bad idea. It's simply self-interest, first and foremost, and do you really need government for that?
So democracy works when people vote not necessarily for what is best for them, but for the right thing to do, about which there can be legitimate disagreements.
There is not yet any perfect form of government discovered or invented.
A Kissinger-like policy of acting in "US interests," would not (and did not!) result in a lot of support for Israel, which is hated by oil-rich neighbors. Our support is floating on a raft of humanitarian interest. Without getting into a long recounting of the emergence of US support, Israel has always been upsetting to advisors and forced through over their objections by elected officials.
Fortunately, I guess, opinions on foreign policy don't matter as much since people in the US usually rate FP at the bottom of what they care about. This is why the Biden regime has largely been able to (correctly) support Israel to allow them to pursue their terror eradication goal, while the potential for more direct US involvement has constituted a credible threat to Hezbollah/Iran, keeping them to the periphery of the conflict. Much of the pro-Palestine movement is just an opportunity for "socially conscious" people to get pictures of themselves supporting The Current Thing on social media, thereby boosting their own social status, and is not representative of anything like an informed opinion.
"terror eradication" is an interesting euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Reminiscent of Nazi "anti-partisan operations"
I'm not here to challenge you in believing whatever you want
Russia news. Russia welcomes Westerners who are willing to abandon liberal values, except if they are Evangelicals, because then they will be killed (in Ukraine) or imprisoned (in Russia). I don't link because it is all over Google. Are these people really stupid? Alienating the largest anti-liberal group in the West? This does not look like a coherent state. One cannot at the same time drain away Western conservatives and be murderously paranoid about everyone who might be an American agent...
Isn't the largest anti-liberal group in the West Roman Catholics? At least they seem to be the only ones who sometimes manage to get their countries to not be too liberal on abortion and divorce.
It's very traditional and illiberal to persecute heretics :)
Russia lies about this. I was surprised how few people knew that the free world has far more religious freedom. It's also the more religious of the two sides including theocratic Iran. I thought it was one of those things we all learned in school. Ukraine sometimes flies over Russian Evangelicals to talk with American Evangelicals to impress this fact on them.
Anyway, if you want to leave the decadent US for a place where your dollar goes farther and people are more religious and traditional then there's much better options. Russia is a world leader in divorce and alcoholism. It has the same church attendance as Sweden. It also has a lot of crime and a life expectancy comparable to North Korea. You can argue that China's doing well but not Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc.
This is partly false (alcoholism) and partly misleading. Russian (and Ukrainian) life expectancy are very similar and very close to the world average. The murder rate (a proxy for the crime level as murders are harder to ignore) is similar to that of the US.
It's true that it's mostly secular but why invent things?
The WHO shows Russia as either the highest or second highest in alcohol addiction rate. It trades with Belarus though Hungary is creeping up close. It is not number one in alcohol consumption but that's not the claim.
The Russian murder rate is about 15% higher than the US which is still fairly significant. And its life expectancy at birth is about the same as North Korea, 73 years, vs 79 in the US.
Well, why did you choose North Korea rather than any other country having approximately the same (world average) life expectancy like Paraguay, Dominican Republic or Ukraine?
As to the WHO alcohol addiction data, you're right but I find it strange that it differs so much from alcohol consumption per capita rankings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita) and that similar countries have very different alcohol addiction rates.
Is Portugal 4x worse than Spain? Is Ukraine so much better than nearly all of its neighbours (3x less than Russia, Hungary and Belarus, 2x less than Poland and Slovakia)? (https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/alcohol-use-disorders-(15-)-12-month-prevalence-(-)-with-95-) It seems like the definition of "alcohol use disorder" plays a role here. Of course consumption per capita data is not perfect as well, it may not capture illegal production of alcohol.
Russia is definitely one of heavy-drinking countries (breaking news!), I just think this data doesn't tell us whether it's "normal East European drinking" or "a world leader in alcoholism" on par with Hungary, of all places.
Because they're allies that border each other and both undemocratic. But if you want to compare them to Paraguay then go ahead.
The WHO statistics are based on people who have long term addictive behaviors, not on raw consumption, because the WHO is interested in alcoholism as a disease. By most measures Russia is unusually socially dysfunctional even compared to Eastern Europe. I don't really care whether a country drinks. Finland drinks a lot. Saudi Arabia drinks very little. But people who need treatment for alcoholism is unambiguously a social issue in a way that Italians drinking wine is not.
FWIW, per capita alcohol consumption in Russia is lower than in Poland, UK, Germany or Ireland (and bunch of other countries), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita
It _used_ to be higher - but never as high as movies would lead you to believe...
Alcoholism and per capita alcohol consumption are (naturally) correlated but not exactly the same. Russia has a high concentration of substance abusers of various types and alcohol is among them.
Any data to back that claim?
Again - a lot of people in Russia (and other ex-USSR states) were hit hard by USSR collapse, and turned to alcohol (and other substances)... but they largely dies out by mid-00
It's WHO data. And while you're right alcoholism rates declined after the late 1990s/2000s they still remain higher than pretty much everyone else. The main competitors are Belarus or Hungary. And looking at the latest data it does look like Russia's slipped into second behind Belarus and, if trends continue, might slip into third behind Hungary. But this is due to Hungary/Belarus going up rather than Russia going down. And they're all neck in neck anyway.
At a purely pragmatic level, persecuting Evangelicals is likely to increase US support for Ukraine.
But also: do you *really* want to incur the wrath of the kind of Evangelical that donates a Red Heifer to Israel for .. um ... Biblical prophetic reasons. Those guys mioht not have any qualms about nuking Russia into annihilation.,
My wife and I do IVF to do genetic testing (we need to) and we want a large family. Based on our experiences I suspect that the Dr isn’t trying hard enough to optimize for a large family. Anyone have any thoughts on how to go about optimizing the process to get more out of each retrieval, increase the chances of successful transfers etc..?
Feel free to reply or email me at iz8162k23 at gmail
Try and convince the doctor that yes, you really *do* want a large family and won't end up with frozen embryos that you then leave in storage forever because "eh, we changed our minds, one kid is enough" or that, if you end up with twins/triplets in the successful round of implantation, you won't go to court over "we wanted ONE baby not THREE".
Multiple births seem to be considered a risk, and the recommendation is "selective reduction":
https://www.reproductivefacts.org/news-and-publications/fact-sheets-and-infographics/fertility-drugs-and-the-risk-of-multiple-births/
"What can I do to reduce the risk of multiple births?
During a fertility treatment cycle when fertility drugs are used with timed intercourse or insemination, your doctor will monitor your cycle very carefully. The use of fertility medications makes it more likely that one or more eggs will be fertilized. However, if it appears that too many eggs are developing, your doctor may cancel your cycle and tell you not to have an insemination or intercourse to reduce or eliminate your risk of multiple births. During in vitro fertilization (IVF), the egg and sperm are joined (fertilized) in the laboratory. The resulting embryo (fertilized egg) is then placed into the womb (uterus). Multiple gestations are least likely when one embryo is placed in the womb. ASRM has published guidelines on the number of embryos to transfer when undergoing an IVF cycle. These guidelines can be found at www.asrm.org.
Some pregnancies may start as a multiple gestation but undergo what’s called a “spontaneous reduction”. This is when one of the pregnancies stops growing (miscarriage) and the other pregnancy continues normally. No treatment is needed when this occurs, and ultrasounds can determine if the remaining pregnancy is growing normally. In some cases, the risk of a multiple gestation is too great. A doctor may suggest that you consider a procedure called selective reduction. Selective reduction is a procedure to reduce the number of fetuses to one or two. Usually, the procedure is done after the risk of a miscarriage, but still early in the pregnancy to increase the chance of a healthy and successful pregnancy. Choosing to do this procedure is difficult. Individuals and couples who are thinking about this option should talk to their doctor and a counselor."
use more ovary-stimulating drug
to get more eggs
per
cycle
I suspect my dr is too conservative with this but Idk. We’re hopefully going to be working with an advocate\concierge of sorts going forward but all the info I can get is good as I’m sure they aren’t perfectly informed either
There may be some disadvantages of getting lots of eggs per cycle. You would need to check on that. It def uses up the woman's remaining eggs faster. But whether it reduces quality of eggs or is hard on the woman's system I don't know. I had IVF and only made about 4 eggs per cycle. Talked with other women who were making a dozen or so per cycle, and nobody seemed worried about that. You will probably also have speak up to the doctor and tell him your preferences. If there are some disadvantages to doing it the way you want to, let him explain that. Then, if you decide that the disadvantages are outweighed by the advantages, just state clearly that you understand the pros and cons, but have some unusual priorities and would like treatment to be carried out in the way you prefer, rather than the usual way. Many docs would be OK with that, so long as what you're proposing isn't actually dangerous for the woman. Others, however, are not able to see you as in informed consumer of their services. But to be heard even by the responsive ones you have to speak up really loudly and clearly (but in a polite friendly way).
They seem pretty unwilling to engage with us in any way other than treating us as children.
It is probably easier for all docs to do their jobs if their patients accept the role of compliant children, so docs give subtle cues that that is what they prefer. However, into every life a little rain must fall, and there are situations where active patient involvement complicates the docs life and slows them down, but leads to a better outcome. I would recommend speaking up despite the cues that smiling compliance is preferred. You can start with something not a bit argumentative, something like "we've been thinking things over and would like to ask what is done in situations where people would like to have a large family. Are there adjustments that favor that outcome?" And then ask about pros and cons of the adjustments. You have to be willing to say things that defy the cues and make things awkward. Obviously if the doctor says, "I never do that, if you want someone who will then go elsewhere," then there's no point in continuing. But most are not that rigid.
Here's something very important and frequently ignored. For older women, frozen embryo transfers work better than fresh embryo transfers.
Interesting. Thanks !
Thanks! Replied
Just wanted to applaud Manifold for being so transparent with their finances!
*where* did they disclose their finances?
Could be 'Ozempic undoes the specific toxic effects of the modern environment', those being large amounts of calories in the form of ultraprocessed food and lack of exercise, and those toxic effects including, but not limited to, obesity.
I'm skeptical that brainwashing is a useful concept on average - I mean the chance that you or anyone you know has been brainwashed or will be brainwashed is low enough to consider other options first: horses not zebras.
External evidence for brainwashing [alternative explanation]:
- Membership of a niche political or religious organisation [the English speaking world prizes such groups highly in its history and culture, even if this or that group is cringe]
- Devotion to a charismatic leader [also cringe, but also the human condition - ancestor worship; monarchism; great man theory of history; fan culture]
- Refusal to engage in reasoned argument [an idea can be useful X% of the time and still break down the rest of the time. Many people find this embarrassing and don't like talking about it]
- breaks off contact with people outside the organisation [half-empty: teenage angst or mid-life crisis. Half-full: having constantly to defend your treasured imperfect idea to friends and family is exhausting, even if they are right that doesn't stop them being assholes about it, cutting off may be rational]
- sudden change in personality [half-empty: teenage angst or midlife crisis; half-full: “find yourself” is a trope but personality is a compromise, encountering a transformative idea can make a person e.g less agreeable and that is a good thing if they were too agreeable previously]
People delude themselves into believing ridiculous nonsense all the time, based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Human belief systems are far more of a social construct than anything else. So the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low. But there are clearly psychological mechanisms to get people to believe in obvious nonsense, and someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
> the odds of any one person you meet with outlandish views having been brainwashed is extremely low
Well said.
>someone with access to those mechanisms would be a very effective brainwasher.
Indeed. The question is what the odds are that the next type-A political/religious communicator you encounter is trying to brainwash you.
Alternatively, culture brainwashes everybody, making the familiar experiences you put in brackets universal.
Having an idea that works less than 100% of the time seems pretty universal! And if culture is brainwashing then we don't have a word for what real cults do and that seems a shame.
I think you left off most of the traits that distinguish cults from people being raised in a culture that carries with it a few assumptions about the world. Such as,
- Sleep deprivation.
- Replacement of normal activities with ideological reinforcement.
- Threat of isolation from group for deviation made the subject of continual, active concern.
- Near-term promises of an apocalypse or great change, intended to promote near-term thinking.
There is also the matter of degree or quantity. Threats of isolation for deviance are universal, but not a continual, active threat for very small deviations or lack of devotion.
I don't deny there really are cults that really do brainwash - I deny that the next crazy person you meet on the Internet has been brainwashed (on average).
Oh, it never occurred to me that you'd be denying that because I never thought anyone believed it. Yes I agree.
I'm pretty sure people use the word for fringe political groups on the other side of the divide e.g QAnon, BLM or whatever.
This community really loves truth. Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
https://substack.com/@peteri394q/note/c-65138247
Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
Basically investigate an issue thoroughly or shut up about it. But "truthbombing" is not helpful.
Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns. People just throwing 14/50 out (purported US racial crime stats) are really not helping anyone to understand this well. It is better if they shut up.
Understand that we are in a new historic situation. The legacy media obsessing about listening to both sides can be sometimes ridiculous but handles this kind of situation really well. Instagram memes do not. In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
No it doesnt, its probabilistic for a reason
>Thinking about this, I am much less sympathetic to free speech concerns.
>I know there are dangers of people having too much power, I really wish this was somehow democratized.
what if PURELY HYPOTHETICALLY, we lived in a system when you were accused of a crime you got to say your side of the story before a judgement was ruled; and maybe imagine "rights" such as something about everyone saying what they wanted
Your link goes to an assertion that being aware of a stereotype, even when the stereotype is true, can cause people to make worse decisions. And of course, that is possible, if the person has a poor understanding of probability. But that certainly doesn't go against Bayesianism. In fact it is the opposite! The point of Bayesianism is to help make an accurate assessment in the context of numerous sources of information, even if many are somewhat inconclusive.
What you are saying is pretty old and trite: that we should promote the well-intentioned lie in the hope of attaining a happier future. What you neglect is that people have memory and you can only go to that well so many times before it dries up. Maybe if people were more aware of the 14/50 statistic (it's for homicides collated by the FBI and I believe it's gotten worse over the last few years; "purported" is an adjective with little justification) they might be less eager to leap to simplistic explanations of the statistics of fatal interactions with police - but I don't see you complaining about *those* errors.
Or is your quibble just with statements made in isolation? But they never are; even if someone just posts "14/50", they are posting it in a context of implied assertions, some of which may well be false, and it is right to challenge those. But by that token, your argument also provides only a small part of the picture...
There's a classic Scott post on "Learned Epistemic Helplessness" in this vein.
What makes you think this community loves truth? I'd say that's a false statement right off the bat. Most of the interactions on these threads seem to be people arguing their opinions without any supporting data.
I'd say it's better than most places for discussing things, but not great. Things weighing in favor of people being responsive when they hear the case for an unfamiliar truth is that people are are less identified with groups united by common views; and are smart and have trained minds, so can understand complex arguments and data. Things weighing against are that many people are very identified with their smarts and erudition, and so experience attacks on things they believe as attacks on them; many people are not good listeners; and many people are not good introspectionists, so are much less likely to be consciously aware that they are rejecting an idea because of wounded vanity.
The best set-up I ever heard about for fruitful idea exchange was the Yale Political Union, who had (and may still have -- I don't know) the idea that all debaters could expect to be "broken" in some debate, i.e. to say at some point, "I have no rebuttals for your main argument. You have convinced me you are right." Most debaters broke others and were broken from time to time, and having some of each on their record earned people respect.
Even worse, I was recently chastised by someone on here for providing too much data to support an empirical claim.
Nothing drives soi-disant rationalists crazier than someone who swamps their preconceived notions with contrary data. I hang out here for those moments, and I cherish them. Can you provide a link to the exchange? ;-)
https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/magic-runes-and-sand-dunes-the-binary
So in the abstract, I think it's worth refining the concept of "true" into three variants.
* illustrative = correspondence between signifier and signified
* faithful = correspondence between signified and referent
* factual = correspondence between signifier and referent
In the ivory tower, "factual" (i.e. "truth" being a property of whether propositions are descriptive of reality) tends to be privileged over the others. But what's often more important is "faithfullness" (i.e. whether your mental model is faithful to reality). Because mental-models (not blobs of ink) are what pay the rent.
So when I hear
> Is it widely known that learning one true statement in isolation can lead to a less accurate view or worse decision?
my initial reaction is: "focusing on statements over models is a red-herring to begin with". E.g. this is the issue with statements like "dihydrogen monoxide is a key component of acid rain". Technically correct, but pragmatically misleading for those who slept through chemistry class.
----
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
To reiterate, I think it's a mistake to privilege statements over models. E.g. copper is a micronutrient. Copper is needed for a healthy diet, but you can't just eat copper ingots in isolation and expect to live very long. Likewise, a proposition is often just a single node in a bayesian network. That node might be *needed* to achieve 100% accuracy. But of course it's not *sufficient* to achieve 100% accuracy. And there's no guarantee that adding that particular node to the model will result in a monotonic increase in accuracy, on the margin. This is what Peter is really getting at, when he talks about conditionalization.
----
Yes, epistemology is hard work. No royal road. Dunning Kruger. Facts are cheaper than models. Etc. So on the individual level, I'd agree that "deep dive or stfu" is probably a good heuristic. That being said,
> Understand that we are in a new historic situation.
> In the past free speech was more defensible, because the standards of argumentation and attention spans were higher.
As I understand, no actually, we're in an old historical situation. The Pull Request [0] tells me (don't remember where exactly, but I'll look if asked) that Ben Franklin, et al would have felt right at home with modern shitposters on twitter. It's the post-WWII era that's unique in the quality of its information environent. The theories I've heard on why include: A) market segmentation was not as advanced; B) government regulation. I wish I could comment more on this, but I don't really understand it that well myself at the moment.
The idea "freedom of speech" was predicated on the idea that the media environment is a market, and bad ideas would lose to their competition. So an advocate for freedom of speech would probably counter that the best counter to "truthbombing about the 13%" is for others to advocate for the contrary position. Personally, I have some reservations about why this might not always be the case, which I find hard to articulate [1] at the moment. But I think it's worth acknowledging that the original solution was to have the racists, the antiracists, and any other willing contenders, to duke it out in an epistemic battle royale. Rather than to expect one's ideological rivals to cultivate a sense of discipline and rigor.
----
[0] https://www.thepullrequest.com/
[1] If I had to put it into words, I'd say that
A) the idea that "truth always wins" seems sort of optimistic to me. I do think truth tends to win the long-run. But, as the saying goes: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". I think falsehoods can be very effective in the short-term/medium-term.
B) I think the market incentives for falsehood can be stronger than the market incentives for verisimilitude, even in the long-term, if the falsehoods are loadbearing components of the simulacrum.
For an intra-rationalist debate about how certain kinds of evidence can skew reasoning, I recommend this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
> Note that learning one true statement and then having a less accurate view goes 100% against Bayesianism!
I don't see this - we're picking marbles from a bag, of course picking one extra marble can skew your picture of what's in the bag.
See https://nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf for an academic dive into this.
The problem with info hazards in the real world is that they are usually highly contextual: a fact that might challenge one person's deeply held incorrect belief can push another further down the road of confirmation bias. Free speech is a concern because people who are challenged by a true fact can claim to just be preventing confirmation bias and protecting everyone from true but misleading info and thus suppress it. Allowing only true information is the worst solution, except for all the others.
The secret to being a bore is to say everything.
Following on from the interesting "slave/master morality" discussion I had with Concerned Citizen in the previous thread, I've now written a more sustained criticism of Nietzsche's work:
https://gayasarainbow.substack.com/p/ni-dieu-ni-maitre
As well as criticising his idea, I try to work through the political implications for us. Basically, the master/slave thing is lurking in the background of the Culture War, even when not explicitly invoked -- so dissolving it makes the whole debate look a lot less intractable (at least to me).
Even if you have no interest in Nietzsche, please take a look at Section 4, which is the politically juicy part (but fairly short and simple).
Does anyone know anything about mold-related respiratory issues? I’ve been having intermittent breathing issues for the past year, which I have finally, (nearly) conclusively linked to mold exposure. I’ve seen doctors for this a few times, but they have tended to focus on the wrong things, and I have yet to actually be diagnosed with anything.
The problem started with my car: within a week or so of getting it back from a body shop (where it had sat idle for two months last summer) I started having symptoms while driving it and for some time afterwards. Once I figured this out I mostly stopped driving it, but the symptoms persisted intermittently for weeks afterwards, slowly fading in frequency and intensity. For the next several months I made repeated attempts to clean the car (not knowing what exactly was responsible), only to have the symptoms return at full intensity if I tried driving it again. In December I discovered mold growing under the seats, which I assumed was responsible, but my best efforts to clean it still didn’t render it safe to drive. We ultimately just got rid of the car, but that didn’t solve the problem: I had several recurrences of high-intensity symptoms in the months following (which led me to doubt the mold had been responsible), before gradually returning to something like normalcy during the middle of the summer. Then, towards the end of July, I started gradually having symptoms return in my apartment. I’ve managed to play whack-a-mold with several clusters–one of which I identified conclusively, dispelling my remaining doubts as to the cause–and intend to scour the apartment thoroughly, but that won’t happen instantly.
The major symptoms have been aching lungs, shortness of breath (sometimes extreme but generally short-lived) and a strange, altered-state-of-consciousness feeling that’s a little like (but not exactly like) dizziness, lightheadedness or being high. Each of these differs in its pattern of presentation, and they don’t necessarily occur all at the same time. There’s a long list of other possible minor symptoms, but none of them have the same combination of consistency, frequency and unusualness as those three. My spouse has had exactly none of these issues despite driving the same car (far more than I did after the trouble started) and living in the same apartment, which suggests that it’s an allergic or other autoimmune problem.
The single most helpful thing to have right now would be something to take to my doctor to start rending this problem legible and hopefully treatable: a test or a specialist referral I could request, or something like that. To keep this from getting to novel length. I’ll write a separate comment in reply to this one detailing what tests I’ve already had done, and a few relevant pieces of medical history.
The next most useful thing to have would be any non-medical strategies for mitigating the problem. I’m doing my best to both avoid affected areas and to clean proactively, but neither are easy when I usually can’t tell there’s a problem somewhere until it starts making me sick.
And if anyone has similar experiences to share, I’d be happy to hear about them, even if they don’t contain any actionable advice.
Finally, I’ve tried to strike a balance between brevity and describing the situation, but I could write many times more than this on the details of the symptoms, circumstances and sequence of events. If there’s anything you want to hear more detail about, by all means ask.
I don't know anything about this, but I came across this chronic illness programme focussed on nervous system regulation: https://retrainingthebrain.com/
If you scroll down, a couple of their physician endorsements mention mold-related illness.
I came across the programme linked to by this person who used it to recover from ME: https://alexmeeka.com/about/
She reviews the programme here: https://alexmeeka.com/2024/07/14/my-review-of-dnrs-a-neuroplasticity-based-program-for-chronic-illness-recovery/
Health and Medical Information:
I'm 37, male, in generally active and in good health (though significantly overweight). The one medication I take regularly medication is extended-release methylphenidate for ADHD (Biphentin here in Canada, better known as Ritalin in the U.S.). I started taking it four or five months before the trouble started and stepped up to a much higher dose (which pushed it from "not really working" to "working quite well") about two months prior. I've had COVID once, at the very end of 2022; I was up-to-date on vaccinations and recovered within a few days: I didn't have any lingering effects that would indicate long-COVID in the 8 months between then and the start of my breathing issues.
I'd been totally out of shape at the start of 2023, but made a serious effort to get more exercise starting in March or early April. When I moved to the higher Biphentin dose in June I stepped these efforts up further, as I discovered the medication worked more reliably on days when I'd exercise. I still wasn't in what I'd consider good shape by the time the issues began, but I was well on my way there: at the beginning of the month I'd gone on vacation and spent a week hiking nearly every day, something I'd never have managed a year earlier. I've been very consistent in keeping up with exercise in the year since, though breathing issues have sometimes limited what I can do, and gains have come much slower than in the past.
When the breathing issues started I had a couple of appointments with my GP, who ordered some blood tests, an ECG, none of which returned anything unusual. His only other suggestion was that the Biphentin could be responsible. I was highly skeptical because the timing didn't match well, but went down to a lower dose for a while, with no obvious effect on the issues. I didn't seek medical help for months after, believing I had the problem in-hand (since it was then confined to my car). When it started to crop up elsewhere in March, I booked an appointment with a doctor at the health center at my university (I don't think much of my GP, and was happy to realize I had a quick alternative). She ordered more blood work, another ECG and a chest x-ray. Blood work came back normal other than a slightly-elevated white blood cell count. ECG showed a minor irregularity, which got me referred to a cardiologist, which seems to have been a dead-end. She also ordered a spirometry test: unfortunately the wait time was 1-2 months and there was no way to ensure the test occurred on a day when I was significantly symptomatic: I ended up having mild shortness of breath that day but nothing else. The test came back normal.
And that's the extent of it. Other than the spirometry (which was unfortunately timed) I don't feel like any of the tests I had were especially suited to detect the problems I'm actually having, but I don't especially know what to request instead or how to pursue this further. I have an appointment with the university doctor on Friday, and I will at least be able to tell her pretty definitely that the mold is the cause; she was dubious before, when the evidence was, admittedly, much more ambiguous.
Not to sound all Fat Person Complaining (because that is precisely what I am going to do), but it could be that, as you say you are overweight and out of shape/getting back into shape, that the doctor(s) consider "well duh, of course you're breathless, you're fat - lose the tubbiness, you'll breathe better".
It's often hard to get concerns taken seriously when the doctor is looking at the 'obvious' answer - your bloodwork came back okay so it's not mould spores, it's because you're fat (insert saw about 'hoofbeats and zebras' here).
If you're going to pursue this, you really do need to have a lot of evidence about yes, I am exposed to mould, no it's not allergies, etc.
It's a real concern, though I think I've been lucky enough to avoid most of it in this case. It probably helps that by pure coincidence, the day I had my first appointment with the university doctor I also had probably the single worst shortness of breath event I've had to date. I usually don't notice it unless I'm doing something that involves at least mild exertion, but she said I was audibly gasping for breath *while talking to her* (which I actually *hadn't* noticed, thanks ADHD hyperfocus). Anyhow, she did make a bit of a comment on my weight, but clearly didn't regard it has the whole problem. And she did prescribe me an inhaler, which is (one presumes) not intended as merely a treatment for Being Fat.
The annoying line I've got instead, from both doctors, is "maybe it's anxiety." Setting aside all the reasons I think that's exceedingly unlikely, it would still be an unbelievably stupid place to *start.* Anxiety would be pretty much the best-case-scenario: it's not going to cause any long-term damage to my lungs, and the optimal treatment might well be to just ignore it. But it's also extremely difficult to falsify: there's no test that will conclusively rule out anxiety the way you can rule out infection or allergies or anything else. I've tried to push back against that suggestion as firmly as I can without crossing the line into coming across as "crazy person loudly insisting they're not crazy."
Part of all that is my own fault, too. The times when I've sought medical help have specifically been the times when I felt like I didn't know what was going on. In December I was sure (correctly, as it turns out) that it was the mold in my car; I didn't see any reason to involve a doctor again because I was sure I could handle it myself. Only when stuff happened to make me doubt that conclusion did I go seek out a doctor again; this means I didn't make a point of impressing on her quite how strong the evidence for "it's the mold, damn it" really was (and even, doubts aside, it was really pretty strong). So when I mentioned it as the most likely possibility she said "well, maybe" and went on to focus on other things.
In hindsight, I should have been more proactive about looking for more info even when I *was* pretty sure it was the mold. Even when I finish getting my apartment clean, I'm sure this isn't the last time I'll have to deal with this, and I want as much information and as many weapons as I can: I should have had that mindset from the start. Regardless, I do wish the doctors had taken me more seriously. Which is the refrain of every Fat Person Complaining ever. :-)
See a respiratory physician and consider getting a CT scan of your lungs. There are various types of interstitial lung disease that could explain these symptoms, many triggered by external allergens such as mold (see - extrinsic allergic alveolitis)
I wrote about why you need a mentor (or become one), mainly because of regretting that I haven't had one yet myself: https://handpickedberlin.com/why-you-need-a-mentor/
Late to the party, but if you still see this I'd appreciate feedback.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the suppression of the self, in the context of meditation. So I was thinking about this during a recent debate on race. And it occurred to me that one form of white privilege, and in particular white male privilege, is that it appears that we have an easier time detaching ourselves from our identity. If someone says something mean about white males, my visceral emotional response is rather low. And so is my visceral emotional response about most of my identity. I know not everyone is the same. But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity. If you don’t like me because of how I look or where I come from, then “I” must be real and different than you. So while I think that identity politics are objectively bad, and that enlightened people would benefit from disassociating themselves from their various identities in most cases, I can also see why this would be easier to do, as in requiring less mental stamina, for a non-marginalized group. In this context I’m talking about white privilege not as a systemic advantage of itself (I’m more likely to be promoted just because I’m white) but as an intrinsic advantage (I can reason with less identity bias), even if the latter is a second order effect from the former.
> suppression of the self
That's an interesting choice of words; I would have expected something more like "dissolution of the self". That would take the perspective that what we call the "self" is an illusion.
> But I can see someone who experiences discrimination from a young age to have a naturally stronger sense of identity.
I think you're taking small population-level differences and blowing them up into absolutes. Even if you've correctly identified a general trend, you shouldn't assume that every person you encounter is an example of that trend, especially in places where people are already pre-selected for being outliers in other dimensions.
I often feel something like this. Let's take a historic look. National, ethnic and religious identities used to be big. Then after WW2 Sartre and other existentialists came up with this idea that existing-as-something is unauthentic. This has been rather explicitly about Nazis making a big deal out of national-racial identity. And then Alan Watts and hippie buddhism happened and so on. Anyway by the 1970's there was this type of a completely freely floating individual who does not need to belong to anywhere, with Frank Zappa a typical example.
And then at some point people realized that this works for white men and not so well for everybody else, partially because everybody else still treats them according to their perceived identity, partially because they actually need that identity as a sort of a group-therapy-safe-space way.
What you call privilege I call virtue. I'm not sure how true your theory is, but I don't think it's productive to make excuses for undesirable tendencies.
If I had to guess, it's personal insecurity in a social context where resentment is the order of the day.
if you look at the history if it, it is privilege: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-343/comment/66072476
I'm seeing excuses decorated with namedropping of famous people who were probably not as influential as you think they are.
Another possible reason for not being very distressed by criticism and mockery of your demographic group is not identifying with it very powerfully. I am a woman, but have never felt much personal rage in response to screeds about unfair treatment of women, sexism, etc. I think it's because I don't feel much bond with other members of my gender. I feel a strong bond with female friends, of course, but not with womanhood as a whole. In general, I tend not to from bonds with groups. I don't know why -- something to do with not being very social in general I think. Anyhow, I don't know whether any of this applies to you, but it's another route by which someone can end up relatively impervious to attacks on one's demographic.
relax, everybody is on the spectrum around here :)))
Hypothesis: everyone who generally supports a major party in US politics believes the other party to be more authoritarian. Americans, with the exception of Curtis Yarvin, don't like authoritarianism and identify with the party they perceive to be more freedom loving. Or does anyone reading this believe the party they support is more authoritarian than the other side?
I think of both parties as theEnemyOfFreedom(TM), (albeit they have different mixes of the chains in which they would bind us) so I don't support either one.
Paradoxically, I think the bugman would willingly describe himself simultaneously as both an authoritarian and a freedomphile. To paraphrase his own words: "Neon-Redox is to Libertarianism as Relativity is to Newtonian Physics". Or perhaps it would be more helpful to describe his salespitch as "small government, but with strong state-capacity". And he speaks rather highly of Rothbard, Von Mises, etc (but also Friedrich List).
Good point. I shouldn't have made an exception for him. He seems to believe democracy is more authoritarian than monarchy. He's just another freedom loving American like the rest of us but with different perceptions.
People I like, who tell me to do things I already want to do, aren't authoritarian! It's only authoritarian when it comes from people I dislike, or people who want me to do something I don't want to do.
I'm not American but every party I have voted for has at least some authoritarian tendencies. I don't believe liberty is the highest good, so I'm okay with that, but even if I did, it's reasonable to trade off authoritarian tendencies in one area against another. Murray Rothbard voted Democrat sometimes because they were more anti-war, even though he was a libertarian.
I vote party A more often than party B and think party A is more authoritarian (thats not why i vote for them) maybe regularly voting for both disqualifies me here.
*NYC People*: We want to host a weekly AI group to discuss papers, new developments, etc. Here's a form to gauge people's availability: https://whenisgood.net/5mffk8h - I'm assuming this would be a weekly thing, so just mark whatever time slots you'd expect to be available on a weekly basis. Time zone is EST.
My personal vote is we meet in person + host a camera feed that runs on Zoom. In-person chats are just so much more fruitful in my experience.
I wrote an article about a phenomenon I’ve noticed where people’s predictions tend to follow the rules of fiction even though reality is usually much more boring: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wXyXtQTCZ8upjgBvZ/beware-the-science-fiction-bias-in-predictions-of-the-future
It's not just a matter of SF. I'd call it "narrative bias". Stories/narratives in general are systematically biased by their very nature and this tends to bias the expectations of anyone who isn't thrust in contact with the ground reality data of the relevant question.
Ways that stories are biased include
* Everything important is done by a small number of memorable characters
* Everything important happens due to the intentional actions of the heroes and villains or at the very least is an identifiable consequence of the character flaws/virtues of said characters.
* The audience already knows that everything will work out in the end. And also usually knows a lot more about the world than the characters should know.
* The audience also knows everything mentioned in the story is relevant to the story, which greatly constraints what will happen next.
* The world operates at the fidelity of simulation by one person with no special expertise
* No matter what happens, the world and people have to be similar to the modern day audience so they can identify with the story
And of course it goes on and on.
One of the greatest correctives of this is to read stories about real life. For example, I read a lot about WW2 and I was struck over and over by how accounts of war are never remotely like fiction. Not just in technical details but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless. This often even bleeds through in movies that are *based* on real life stories, though the filmwriters often take significant liberties in order to fight this and make the story more story-like.
Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual. It is not bad epistemology. It is people watching films. Note: popular, not good. It is people watching the rather lowbrow or maybe youth-targeting kinds of films. The kinds with Lex Luthor kinds of characters. If you rather watch Space Odyssey the result will be different, but ultimately still too story-like.
Another thing is that it really matters who is accusing whom. I distinctly remember the first Star Wars reboots, early 2000s, when Palpatine was conspiring to overthrow the republic, and people were looking at each other funny and gulped. They did not say so, but they thought about Bush/Cheney. The whole kind of thing sounded believable for a moment, even when not very probable. Of course that was not a very high brow movie either. Higher brow movies avoid these very obviously evil characters and show someone more conflicted.
Let's call this the Popcorn Theory of making sense of the world.
>Once someone made a summary of the common elements of conspiracy theories and it immediately struck me that it can also double as a "how to write a popular movie script" manual.
QAnon is/was a mirrored Alternate Reality Game:
https://archive.ph/20240424153811/https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/qanon-game-plays-believers/2021/05/10/31d8ea46-928b-11eb-a74e-1f4cf89fd948_story.html
This is sometimes a problem with "based on a true story" movies. If it was completely fiction, the script writer could just make up something dramatically appropriate. But, they are constrained by what actually did happen...
(Of course, "based on a true story" movies contain much that is made up)
I tend to assume that "a true story" contains much that is made up. And "based on a true story" contains little that isn't!
Yeah, it's really interesting to see how writers handle this.
One notable case is Riphagen: The Untouchable. As the name suggests, in real life the villain got away scott free. The movie solves this by a) making him seem like a hero at first and b) once that is revealed, introducing a completely fictional sympathetic character trying to bring him to justice. Said character eventually manages to track him down and gets into a dramatic confrontation, at which point the villain makes a speech, kills him, and drives away.
> but the way that things happen mostly due to random chance and fog of war and the "story" is completely directionless.
That's something that bugs me about a lot of self-help stuff. Shit happens. Maybe our brains process it through narrative, but that's a limitation that we need to work around. "Crafting a personal narrative" is an exercise in hubris and narcissistic naval gazing.
Ewwww, are we supposed to be crafting personal narratives these days?
<mildSnark>
Is crafting a personal narrative better or worse than promoting a personal brand? :-)
</mildSnark>
Ah, yes, personal brands. Self as commodity.. Yecch to all of it. People who in midlife are feeling a certain loss of enthusiasm for self might consider viewing this change as a developmental step -- increased maturity, decreased self-centeredness. If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self. "Crafting personal narratives," OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .." Back when there were no dating apps, but people used to advertise for dates in the Personals part of the Classifieds, I was once browsing the personals in the Village Voice and flinching at all the glowing personal narratives on display. Then I came to this guy: "Fat dirty depressed writer seeks woman who can stand him." If I had been someone capable of answering a date ad, I would have responded to that guy.
Many Thanks!
>Yecch to all of it.
Agreed!
> If someone's really bothered by falling out of love with themselves I think simple interventions, things like having their butt liposuctioned, make more sense than plastic surgery of the self.
LOL! Good point. Come to think of it, plastic psychosurgery reminds me of the line from the original Planet of the Apes: "You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!"
>OMG. It's like that shit people write about themselves on dating apps: "Joyful, insightful 40-something, loves deep conversations, art, staying fit . . .."
Conjures up an image of taking an advertisement down into Doctor Frankenstein's lab, and when the lightening bolt flows through the cardboard cut-out: "It's alive!" (well, sort-of...).
Not that I'm aware of. Are there actual non-online circles in which this is meaningfully a thing?
Just tried googling the phrase "craft personal narrative," and there sure were a lot of hits. Sounds like its about as popular as Brazilion butt lifts.
That's why I asked whether there were actual *non-online circles* where this is a thing. I've never heard anyone say it in real life (and for that matter, never heard of it online until right now).
I know this term has another meaning, but it literally feels like self-abuse to me.
A small, family-owned business, High Sierra Showerheads, would love your votes for their product in a manufacturing association's contest for the Coolest Thing Made in California.
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https://coolestthingcalifornia.com/contestants/reflections/
(Just click the "VOTE NOW" button at the top.)
Here are details for anyone interested. You can cast up to 5 votes in a row, each day. And every vote will help:
https://mailchi.mp/highsierrashowerheads/2024-coolest-thing-contest-1
Thanks!
Update: great points by both Al Quinn and Arrk Mindmaster, in replies below!
The "details for anyone interested" web page answers these questions, but clearly there's benefit in describing the 'ask' more fully in this post, as well!
High Sierra Showerheads is a small business in the California mountains. For over a decade, they've made water- and energy-saving shower heads using a globally-unique nozzle design that splits and collides water streams. They have customers like Ohio State and the US Air Force Academy, and their products are best picks by the likes of CNET and CNN Underscored.
High Sierra's owner/founder, David Malcolm, created a design for a truly fogless mirror, fully integrated into a shower head. This is the product entered in the current contest. We'd love to see it become more widely known; it's a great tool for shaving and many other beauty or health needs in the shower!
This contest is for the Coolest Thing Made in California, sponsored by the California Manufacturers & Technology Association (CMTA). This is the second year of this contest, which spotlights great products built in California, with the goal of publicizing and supporting manufacturing in California and the USA.
This year, there are 158 entrants. The contest has multiple rounds; the 16 products with the most votes in the initial round will go on to the next round. Last year, a Tesla SUV was the winner. And a different product made by High Sierra Showerheads, their Half Dome rain shower head, also reached the Top 16 last year.
What is the point of these "contests"? Getting randos to click on something with no understanding for you to "win" is such a depressing thought. Just hire some people on Mechanical Turk.
Thanks for this super-helpful feedback, Al. I've added info to my original post above that I'm hoping will help answer this question. And I'll definitely put more info into these posts if I ever do this again!
Some constructive criticism here.
Nothing really here to make me want to click. Is the only enticement to support a small, family-owned business I don't even know the name of, let alone what they do. Yes, it's a small amount of effort, but my internet security instincts also take over and make me not want to click strange links.
I recommend you describe the product, and what voting for it will help win, so I know why it would help and what it would help with.
Thanks so much, Arrk Mindmaster, for this incredibly helpful feedback. I tend to err on the side of verbosity, so in this post I veered too far into the terse side.
I've added more info that I'm hoping will make this clearer!
Weird fragment from today's New York Times summary, with emphasis added to one word:
>“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
>This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, _populist_, progressive patriot.
Haven't they been using "populist" as a term of derision, close to a slur, for years? And yet, here they are using it either neutrally or positively??? Is all the previous use being flushed down the memory hole this week? Usually they use it to mean something a large fraction of the electorate likes, but which isn't enough to the left for the Times's taste. This has the flavor of "we were always at war with East Asia"...
"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time. I'm not sure "populist" by itself has the same connotation. I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Many Thanks!
>I remember Bernie Sanders being described as a populist fairly often in 2016, and it didn't seem like most people who said it intended it derogatorily.
Admittedly I didn't follow Sanders's campaign closely, so I probably missed that...
>"Right-wing populist" has certainly been a term of derision for a long time.
Presumably by the left and sort-of kind-of center-left (including the non-Fox media)? Do you happen to remember if Fox used "left-wing populist" as a term of derision for Sanders?
No populist is not considered a slur in itself.
They come in a lot of flavors.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson, J D Vance and Sarah Palin are all considered by some to be populists.
I don’t watch cable news but ‘left wing populist’doesn’t have a whole lot of zing when you consider that Bernie calls himself a Democratic Socialist.
That sounds reasonable. Many Thanks!
I feel the need to plug "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson", a musical about our most (in)famously populist President, from the good old days of the W. Bush administration. The first song is called "Populism, Yea Yea", and a chorus from a later song is:
> Sometimes, you have to take the initiative
> Sometimes, your whole family dies of cholera
> Sometimes, you have to make your own story
> Sometimes, you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck
> Sometimes, you have to take back the country
> Sometimes, you have to kill everyone
> Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone!
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13222FB159C4B271
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Bloody_Andrew_Jackson
https://genius.com/albums/Michael-friedman/Bloody-bloody-andrew-jackson
Many Thanks! I'd heard of Jackson, but hadn't known of the musical about him. I tend to think of Jackson as a predecessor to General Masaharu (Bataan Death March) Homma.
Just part of the centrist vibe shift. Left-populism used to be a thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_a_King_(song)
Many Thanks! I'd known of Huey Long, but not of his policy proposals. Yup, definitely left of center.
He drove FDR to the left during the Great Depression.
Many Thanks!
It could just be accurate. Price controls are a populist measure, and so are subsidies for consumers. So is a chant at a rally. "It worked once," I can imagine the campaign managers thinking.
I have rather the same feeling as Jeffrey; political rallies where the candidate flies the flag and their proposals are described as "populist" were described in terms that went as far as "this is a threat to democracy!" because something something strongman il duce fascism something something.
Seems that if it's a strong woman, that makes it all okay. See also the crafting of Walz as "now this is a *real* guy who is a veteran and is a white Mid-western man and is down home and fits all the stereotypes, but now we *like* that kind of thing".
Oh, well: we have always supported Mom and apple pie, right?
It would be okay if it was anyone from the right party, because the majority of newspapers are, and have always been, "party papers." It's a little unnatural to see the Times reveal it.
I shouldn't be so surprised, politics and indeed partisanship have always been like this. "These are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others!"
Many Thanks! It still feels weird to me to see the spin on this reverse so suddenly.
>Price controls are a populist measure
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch. Yeah, in the sense of both popular, and anti-elitist (in the _unfortunate_ sense of: Economists have _studied_ this, and have actual knowledge of what goes wrong, and the general public doesn't know/remember this, and Harris is (actively?) ignoring specialist knowledge. This isn't a good-for-the-99%, bad-for-the-1% antielitism. :-( )
I wouldn't worry too much, politics is a machine for turning promises into air. I also doubt the other candidate would really bring back public hangings.
Then again, we have nothing else to go on...
I agree that all the debt forgiveness etc. etc. are campaign promises, which are on a par with "be a good child and Santa will bring you a present", except you are more likely to get something from Santa.
Yup, I think of all politicians as two-faced - but that is probably an underestimate, particularly for the recent crops of them...
Many Thanks!
>politics is a machine for turning promises into air
Very true!
In Open Thread 339 I wrote:
> The thing that bugs me most about Kamala is the way that reality is about to shift around her.... culture is downstream of politics, and in particular culture is downstream of the short-term electoral needs of the Democratic Party, which means she's about to be beatified, canonised, and then deified in rapid succession. The things that people think they believe about her this week will be gone by the end of next month
And that was before the term "coconutpilled" was even invented.
Anyway populism is cool now, and Democrats chant "USA USA" at rallies, and it has always been this way, quit misremembering.
Many Thanks!
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
I think "populist" has always been neutral-ish, at least in my parlance. It refers to a platform or candidate that builds its platform and power by (charitably) appealing to the people, rather than by ingratiating itself with the elite, or (uncharitably) by debasing itself before the whims of the lowest-common-denominator Joe Schmoe without regard for what's actually good policy.
I don't think there's anything inconsistent about liking some populists and disliking others. Trump is a populist on the right; Bernie is a populist on the left. Romney is a non-populist on the right; Hillary is a non-populist on the left.
I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
It's been used to describe anyone with more restrictionist views on immigration/migrants that are more closely aligned with public opinion. Orban, Meloni, PiS etc etc. And it's been deemed deeply negative by the West's thought leaders since migration is one of the contemporary left's sacred cows.
Many Thanks!
>I think the negative aura the word has acquired in the last few years is just a symptom of it having been used to describe Trump too often.
Could be, though I've also seen the Times use it to describe many politicians that it dislikes, typically in Europe as well as the USA, e.g. Viktor Orban.
Apparently the UK is releasing prisoners now to make room for people who posted mean things on social media during the recent riots.
What’s going on in the UK?? Are you guys doing alright??
No! We're not!
The government has made it clear they would rather sleepwalk into a sectarian, fractured society than try to police the scary parts of the population.
The arrests and media crackdowns are happening for one reason only: to signal to the aboriginal British that they cannot get away with the same tactics that minority or politically favoured groups are allowed to use to influence policy.
A while ago I argued with someone on here who smugly told me that if a gang of thugs wants to burn down my business, the only moral thing to do is let them go right ahead and hope I can eventually claim on the insurance afterwards.
Those are the rules for me, a white British man. If instead you're a Muslim and you believe a gang of Far Right are coming to burn down your mosque, you're allowed to form gangs of your own and roam the streets wielding machetes, which the police won't take off you and the media will call "mostly peaceful" for a few moments before once again talking about the Far Right.
A lot of people right now are holding that I would be in the wrong yet the Muslims are in the right. There are all sorts of fine distinctions they can reach for to justify this - distinctions that need not necessarily be coherent with each other, or still apply tomorrow when talking about a different case.
Their *motivation* for rushing to find these distinctions is that the organised, motivated and coordinated Muslim communities are *not to be crossed*, but I can be without consequence.
People unconsciously assume that things will stay as they are. They watch the fuel gauge falling and note that yes that's theoretically a concern, but they cannot viscerally imagine that the car will actually stop, because the car has always been running.
When the teacher is weak and unauthoritative, de facto control of the class reverts to the rowdiest group of kids. Playground rules don't work on the basis of universal principles, it's about who has the strength and the numbers and the will to impose their desires on others. The modern white British do not have these things.
We've just had an election, so it's five years before anyone in power next has to pretend to give a shit about people's opinions. The power of media and government "nudge psychology" programs will eventually sap the British people of any will to coordinate, while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
>while in the short term the internet censorship destroys their ability to do so.
BTW, the EU is trying to censor _in the USA_ https://jonathanturley.org/2024/08/19/the-eu-just-declared-war-on-free-speech-in-america-it-is-time-to-fight-back/
> aboriginal British
For anyone past the Celts, this description seems like a stretch when their conquest of the group preceding them is reasonably well-documented.
But if it wasn't well-documented, it would still be a safe assumption that it happened. Which is true everywhere. Which means that no one is aboriginal.
I'd say "aboriginal" could reasonably be used to describe the earliest KNOWN group in a particular place.
Surely the term is used to connote some kind of inherited ownership, and the line you draw it totally arbitrary. What's the point of the concept "aboriginal" again?
Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me. For example, further down Turtle advocates material by Tommy Robinson. He was banned from Twitter for years for his calls for violence before Musk took over, he was co-founder of the "English Defense League", some members of which actively planned terrorist attacks (though it is unclear how much Robinson knew about that or approved that), and he has served four prison terms.
For me, your reply sounds too metaphorical and too unspecific to be believable. You mention a previous conversation here on ACX. Could you provide a link so that I can check out the conversation?
This immediate recourse to character assassination is a tactic I wish more people would spot and hold in contempt. Tommy Robinson is uncouth, therefore the English have no legitimate grievances and in fact Harehills didn't happen at all?
Horror at the idea of others accessing out-of-bubble source material is another thing I have little respect for, and have seen time and time again from people who fervently believe themselves to be reasonable intellectuals.
The game plan is always: 1: sound like a smart person, 2: raise uncertainty and reasonable doubt so the other guy looks like less of a smart person than you, 3: your work is done when people are no longer talking about the original issue.
The midwit version is very similar, but replace "be smart and reasonable" with gotchas, tribal scorn and character attacks.
I have no idea when that previous conversation was. It was an Open Thread, the thread starter was asking a hypothetical about Kyle Rittenhouse and the guy was called NobodySpecial or NobodysPerfect or something like that.
There is a difference between out-of-bubble source material and source material from an extremist. I was willing to look into your conversation, but I very much doubt that the video is worth my time.
And after finding out that the video is 2 hours, sorry, no way. If you have a good summary, you can point me to that.
Here's my summary:
- A video clip went viral on UK social media showing a white schoolboy tackling a Syrian schoolboy and pouring a bottle of water on his face
- Prominent newscasters including Piers Morgan and Jeremy Vine immediately condemned it as a racist, despicable attack that has no place in the UK
- Theresa May (the PM at the time) mentioned it in a speech
- The white schoolboy faced a torrent of abuse on social media and people threatening his family in real life. He dropped out of school and attempted suicide
- Someone alerted Tommy that there was more to the story and the Syrian schoolboy had a history of violence against the girls in the class
- He went to the school to investigate
- He found that many of the teachers had been paid not to speak to any press
- Of the ones who were willing to speak to him, they unanimously agreed that the Syrian schoolboy was violent against girls and smaller boys, lied frequently, and had been subject to more than 100 school disciplinary actions
- In contrast, the white schoolboy was a "good boy" with a "strong sense of justice"
- The attack had been motivated by the Syrian schoolboy threatening to rape the white schoolboy's younger sister
- Another schoolgirl told him that the Syrian schoolboy had hit her with a hockey stick, viciously, with her back turned, that had led to chronic pain
- This context got absolutely no mention in the media, almost like they had orders from the top to portray things a certain way
- When Tommy went public with the story, he was promptly sued for libel by the Syrian schoolboy's family
- His family was subsequently targeted and his 11 year old son got death threats
- When the case went to court, the judge threw out all the evidence from the numerous school kids who gave evidence in favour of Tommy, siding with the Syrian schoolboy (who, again, had several school disciplinary actions against him for lying.) His reasoning was "People lie for all sorts of reasons, and they may lie for no reason at all."
- The press failed to report on any of this, in fact they left the courtroom when the other school kids were giving evidence (if you Google the story in the press, you will find a few headlines like "Far right activist Tommy Robinson loses court case for libel")
- He was subsequently bankrupted for 1.6 million pounds
- He had to divorce his wife because she was being targeted
Actually, him showing the video at all is illegal in the UK. The current spate of riots were triggered, partly by the Southport attacks, but partly because he held a huge rally the week prior where he showed the video and was immediately arrested on suspicion of "terrorism." (They later let him go and last I heard he was in Canada giving an interview to Jordan Peterson.)
That’s a fair summary of what is claimed in the video. For the facts, skip the video and read the Court’s judgement:
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hijazi-v-Yaxley-Lennon-judgment-220721.pdf
The target of Robinson’s libel was a fifteen year old schoolboy. The Court wrote: “As was entirely predictable, the Claimant then became the target of abuse which ultimately led to him and his family having to leave their home, and the Claimant to have to abandon his education. The Defendant is responsible for this harm, some of the scars of which, particularly the impact on the Claimant’s education, are likely last for many years, if not a lifetime.”
Robinson attempts to portray himself as a victim, but he’s about as unsympathetic a victim as one can imagine.
Many Thanks for the detailed context!
So it is his version of the court case on libeling that he lost? No wonder that he is the good guy in his version. But regardless of whether his version is plausible or not, what is the connection to the recent riots and imprisonments?
Edit: Sorry, I misread the last paragraph. I see it now. But sorry, they may have been angry due to the video, but being angry does not justify posting addresses, instructions for arson, and calls for violence and murder.
Lol. The word "extremist" literally means outside the Overton window. "There's a difference between out-of-bubble source material and material that's outside the acceptable realms of my bubble."
LOL! Great point!
You can believe whatever helps you sleep at night. You should watch the video though.
"Always click through to the source material." -Elon Musk
This is awful. My condolences. You are always welcome here in Australia and in the meantime I will advocate for people in other English speaking countries (USA, Canada) to vote right wing before the totalitarian globalist agenda stifles us all
> You are always welcome here in Australia
LOL.
"Your honor, he is a meanie asshole."
Jeez. What kind of post qualifies as mean enough to merit jail time? Were there any examples?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy76dxkpjpjo.amp
https://www.standingforfreedom.com/2024/08/think-before-you-post-the-u-k-is-now-jailing-people-for-social-media-comments/
Some people were jailed for “inciting violence” eg calling for attacks on migrant hotels.
Others were jailed for “sharing misinformation” eg saying incorrectly that the Southport attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat.
Jailing people for either offence is totally wrong, even if in the first case some consequences (eg loss of one’s job) might be appropriate.
I don’t think the first one is protected by the first amendment even in the US. I was expecting stories of people making mildly inappropriate jokes on their podcasts getting knocks at their doors. If you call for violence at a specific time and place in the us, with some shades of gray like can they prove intent, that’s a crime even here.
It was indeed specific times and specific locations. I don't know which case exactly is meant here, but probably it refers to a telegram group with several thousand members, in which they posted target addresses together with instructions for malicious arson and calls for violence.
That absolutely justifies arresting them. It has nothing to do with a mean post or an unpleasant opinion. I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
Do you mean this thread here on ACX? And do you mean my comment -- "Your honor, he's a meanie asshole" -- then asking what the content of the posts was? If so, why was my response part of orchestrated propaganda? By "orchestrated" do you literally mean you think Turtle and I conferred about something supportive I could say in reply to Turtle's original post? Um, no, we did not confer. And I don't even see how my post is supportive of Turtle's view. I didn't say, "damn right, there's no way that's ok,." I asked what the posts were that got people jailed. And, for the record, when I heard that some were calls for violence, my thought was that if they weren't just random rage, but actual suggestions of times, places, means and people to target, then I thought that legal action was warranted.
No, I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to turtle and rebelcredential. I think the first three or so posts in this thread were by them, and these were all very out of place of the usual discourse. Not just content-wise, but also in terms of style. My impression by these three posts were indeed that this was the same person, playing a game of posting with different accounts.
I am no longer sure it is the case. There seem to be differences between them in their further posts. For turtle, I do think the posts are actively misleading, and I find "propaganda" still a fitting term. For rebelcredential it was just the first post which I find misplaced, and the subsequent posts are simply a reaction to me being confrontative. I certainly wasn't kind.
> I think this whole thread is orchestrated propaganda, including the first reply.
> Frankly, this whole thread, including your reply, sounds like orchestrated propaganda to me.
Funny, to me "orchestrated propaganda" is stuff like seeing the same phrasing posted multiple times, as if someone was trying to hammer in a carefully worded message through repetition.
If by "multiple times" you mean "twice, by the same person, which makes it less surprising that they would reuse the same phrasing."
Also, it's bold to claim a conspiracy from two posts when there's a guy replying to every one of your comments in support. (Not that I'm accusing him of being orchestrated propaganda either, I'm well aware that some people just Post A Whole Dang Lot.)
There’s also a guy who was arrested for chanting “who the f**k is Allah” (hate speech!)
You guys should watch the Tommy Robinson documentary. Search for “Silenced” on X. Eye opening
You really shouldn't, the guy is hardly unbiased and known for playing the victim when he has done a lot of pretty reprehensile stuff. You yourself seem rather desperate to downplay what has been a lot of serious rioting as "social media posts", and seem to ignore that your own links show that muslims as well as whites have been imprisoned for the rioting.
In context, your username is amusing.
Totally get people being imprisoned for violent rioting. Strongly against people being imprisoned for saying mean things while other people are violently rioting. Do you disagree? And have you watched the documentary before commenting about it?
IANAL but I believe that to lose first amendment protection for incitement, speech must be calling for both imminent and specific acts. Something broad and vague like "We should burn down immigrant businesses" would be protected, whereas something like "Come join us in 15 minutes to burn down (specific and real local business): wouldn't be. It doesn't look like the exact text of the posts is quoted in the articles (although I just skimmed and could have missed it), but even something like "I think people should burn down the hotels housing immigrants" would, I think, still be protected in the US.
This is a pretty accurate summary of US law, but of course US law is very much an outlier in this respect.
This type of speech has long been illegal in W. Europe, so the recent arrests are not evidence of negative change, as OP seems to imply.
Very disingenuous to claim what's happening here is not a negative change and it somehow represents "business as usual" for the government.
Jordan Parlour is the guy in question. The messages went something like:
JP: Let's smash this hotel (which was housing asylum seekers)
Other: I'm down if you are
JP: I'll be there at 5
Not sure if that counts as imminent incitement, but he did provide a specific time and target.
Clearly Ozempic works because it suppresses the yetzer-ra. It is an evil antagonist.
Just to check, that's a different sort of evil than the evil of the left kidney?
Yes!
The Yezer-ra is a more general evil influence analogous to dopa-mine. The suffix "mine" suggests selfishness. Dopa-mine is involved in over-arching selfish attention and reward systems. The Christian correlate might be oxy-to-sin which is involved in bonding and ingroup preference and, by association, anti-outgroup bias. It is Christian, since 'sin' is not a natively Jewish concept.
The left kidney produces levo-adrenaline. It is, in contrast, much more situation specific, providing small bursts of evil or selfishness to get a person through tough moral dilemmas.
Nah. Yetzer-hara is an evil myth. People are naturally calm.
Is there a way for me to donate to the SSC grantmaking fund? Specifically the AI safety part. I have about $10-15k.
(Very) short story I wrote about AI not needing "diamondoid nanobots" to pose a threat: https://blakehouseholder.substack.com/p/recommended
I saw an interesting question on DSL that I am going to paraphrase here. This is sort of a sci-fi future hypothetical. There is a new medical process that can change your biological sex. Some stipulations:
1. Your entire body would change, with corresponding differences in height/muscle mass/bone density/structure, etc.
2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
3. You are comfortable with your body and don't need to relearn how to move with different limbs or have traumatic phantom sensations or anything like that.
4. The procedure is expensive, not enough to break the bank but a considerable cost, and takes a while to go through. E.g. this isn't something you do for a joke at a party, but a commitment of weeks/months.
5. None of your characteristics change, if you are old/fat/ugly or the reverse that will still be true when you are the other sex.
6. The procedure is completely reversible and you can switch back to the way you were before.
Would you do it? What would you think of other people who did it? Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
Personally, I think I would have to briefly switch purely out of curiosity. It would be very enlightening to see how the other half lives, so to speak.
No, I'm not really curious to know what the male version of me would be like, and if I'm still going to be old fat and ugly, it's pointless.
I think more people would be motivated to try it if it were "you get that young, fit, attractive body you always wanted, *plus* you can switch sex if you like!"
As for the "what would you think of other people?", well, that depends. If it really is a genuine sex-swap so that it's a natally female or male body, instead of the current procedures we use, then it really would be "I am a genuine woman/man, now I can have the body to fit my mind" for some. For others, it might be a fad or a phase, and I'd judge them a lot more harshly than someone who always had dysphoria and really did feel better once 'adjusted'.
It's a shame you added the cost and time constraints. I could imagine trying this out of curiosity in my teens or twenties. But in your twenties you can't afford it and in your thirties it's not easy to commit weeks or months to something like this if you have work, family, etc to maintain.
Realistically the main draw is to see what sex is like as a girl. Maybe as a close second there's an element of competitiveness - I'd wanna see how hot I was as a girl, and whether I could act hotter than other girls.
I'm going to predict that everyone ends up bisexual, on the grounds that you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men. The mind-body connection is two-way and sex drive is overspill-y enough that I think you'd end up keeping both.
But yeah, this is a what-happens-in-Vegas experience, or at the very least bored Sunday afternoon territory. Good Lord I wouldn't want this anywhere normal life! Imagine having to meet your parents. Or explain to your girlfriend.
"you'd bring your old mind with you, which is attracted to girls, but your new body would be attracted to men"
That's the question, isn't it? I think the mind would over-ride the body, see the phenomenon of "transbians". If you always liked women as a 'man', then even in a new female body with female hormones, you'll still like women - or so it seems for some trans women today.
https://medium.com/the-identity-current/plight-of-the-transbian-4ab1a048b09b
I don't think it would actually rewire your brain to adjust your sexual orientation. The description just specifies your brain being exposed to different hormones, and I know from personal experience that hormones alone don't necessarily change your sexual orientation: I liked girls when my body was full of testosterone ,and I still like girls now that my body is full of estrogen.
Get away with your logic while I'm trying to imagine consequence-free girl on girl action.
<mildSnark>
>consequence-free girl on girl action.
Isn't the "consequence-free" a decent approximation in the real world? Accidental pregnancy is a non-issue for this case, and STD transmission probability is lower than for all other pairings. :-)
</mildSnark>
Yeah, and as a man in a world bereft of this fictional technology, I'm not getting in on it.
Same here! Many Thanks!
Ethics and morality: less fun than thinking about sex, so it goes in a separate comment.
If the transition was free and instant, I predict:
- all whinging about feminism to disappear overnight. You can't guilt trip people when they can just go and check if you're full of shit.
- in a short space of time, any actual social inequality between the sexes to balance out. In the same way that showing people a live aerial view of the roads would solve traffic jams, by letting everyone see the full picture and coordinate independently.
- the ratio of men vs women would now obey the laws of supply and demand. I predict that would be great for everyone.
- I think we'd see the death of mystique and romance. I mean, the Internet already drove multiple nails into the coffin anyway. But while the opposite sex is a dark, uncharted mystery it's fascinating and glamorous. If you can just go there and see, it becomes mundane.
- no idea what happens with reproduction. But heuristically, giving people more social choice has resulted in fewer of them sticking with the main pathway (find straight partner, marry, have kids) necessary for society to sustain itself. So I predict we all die out.
Of course I would. Just imagine the experience points.
While it would be interesting to have the experience, such an invasive procedure, if real (and if incapable of reversing things like aging), almost certainly has risks that I'm not willing to endure.
Also: I'm reasonably healthy and in good shape, but with significant hair loss. How would that work out? It's particularly brutal to be a bald woman.
Heck yeah I'd try. Curiosity would impel me. And I'd want to go back, too, after I'd gotten a bit used to it, to see what that experience felt like to me.
Whether I'd do it long term, how I'd look at people who did it, what the implications would be... those would depend on a lot of stuff about how this affected society.
Likewise. I'm skeptical that such a technology could exist without a _lot_ of other capabilities being implied. Enough massively parallel microsurgery to swap XX<-->XY in each of trillions of cells (on top of the macroscopic changes) implies many other capabilities.
I think it would be easier to clone a replacement body then upload the brain into it, which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements, but still easier than trying to turn "adult body of one sex into adult body of the other sex".
Unless we're either invoking something like Star Trek transporters, so the settings can be changed there, which is a huge difference in society already, or magic to do it (again, another huge difference in society).
Frankly, I think "magic is real and it works, look, I can change Samuel into Samantha" is much more of an upheaval than "Samuel is now Samantha".
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that something like constructing a replacement body would probably be a simpler path than having to dig into each and every cell and change its chromosomes. ( Open question as to whether cloning or mechanically constructing the cells, molecule by molecule (massively parallel) a la Drexler would be more feasible. )
As you said
>which is indeed a whole other set of technological requirements
and, if we actually _had_ those, fixing _any_ damage to the person's body, including aging, seems like it would be implied by those capabilities. Which changes the thought experiment rather strongly - but without it, the experiment doesn't look very self-consistent...
I think I would try it, and I would expect that flipping around would be widespread.
Of course, if there was a third mode "asexual without genitals", I might eventually settle on that.
Other things to consider is if sexual preferences would change, as Christina has pointed out they are kinda tied to hormones. If sexual preferences did not change, then this would completely change the dating market. At the moment, the dating prospects of a male in the lower quarter of the attractiveness distribution are rather slim. But the moment incels would magically transition, they could just start to have lots of lesbian sex with each other, which to me sounds preferable even given that per the hypothetical, they would not turn into super-hot women.
Yeah, but that's still the problem: they don't want average to bad looking trans woman incel, they want the 'pretty or hot popular girl is my girlfriend and likes me and loves me' experience.
'The only partner I can get is ugly former man, just like me' isn't going to be more appealing than "why don't you guys just have sex with each other already, that'll solve your problems about not having a relationship" right now.
Per the hypothetical, the transition would be much easier, faster and thorough than what is possible with present day medical interventions.
From a market perspective, it would not be functionally different from a pill which just makes the incels attracted to men -- which is notably different from just dating a gender you are not attracted to.
Now I don't know anything about the gay dating market dynamics. I would expect that some matches will be complementary (a rich person living in a mansion and an extra hot person may both prefer each other to someone similar to themselves), but a model where income, style, charisma and hotness are all projected on a single axis called attractiveness is probably not terrible far from the truth. (This is sweeping complementary traits like dom/sub under the rug, but I am not convinced they are key to the dating market.)
Also, for sufficiently large populations, the dating goals should align. For heterosexual dating markets, this is not generally true: if men are mostly interested in causal hookups and women are mostly interested in starting families, then this imbalance will distort the respective markets.
Now it is certainly possible that there a significant fraction of gays living in high population areas are involuntary celibate because they would only have sex with someone who is in twice their own quantile in the attractiveness distribution. This would be some evidence for 'incels are celibate because they have unrealistic standards'.
Or it could be that there are few gay incels, which would be evidence for 'inceldom is partly caused by difference in dating preference between men and women'.
> 2. Your mind would be the same but your brain would be immersed in a body with different hormones and all that entails.
You wildly underestimate the plausibility of this. Hormones make a LOT of the mind.
To that end, I would almost certainly try it, if only to see if the hormones would switch a sexual attraction.
When I was experiencing a sexual dysfunction I incorrectly attributed to asexuality, I was intellectually bi, but when that dysfunction was accidentally corrected, I switched to straight, *totally against my will.* I went from general attraction to women to being actively repulsed by them with no inciting event or trauma, just the hormonal correction.
I'd love to be a straight man.
I just meant the procedure wouldn't transform your mind as if you had been the other sex your whole life or something like that. My impression from accounts of FtM people is that the transition to testosterone is especially jarring.
e.g. I am in a bar with an FtM who is on testosterone for about the first time.
Now, the landlord of this bar is an alcoholic, and, truth be told, a bit annoying.
This is not a good reason for starting a bar fight.
However, FtM person is on testosterone, and not used to the effect yet.
So, there am I, trying to calm people down before a movie-style bar fight breaks out,
I totally believe that testosterone has psychological effecrs.
Yeah, it's like a can of "instant teenage boy". :-)
I agree that, if we were to look at it the way we look at other drugs, testosterone should probably be only accessible under a doctor's supervision. It's a known cause of violence!
We know from the accounts of trans people who have taken hormones that they a big effect...
So, yeah, your mind would not be the same.
Though I get the impression that we shouldnt overestimate the effect either. Trans people are typically gender variant even before they started on hormones.
(What I'm getting at here is that a study of trans people would tell you the effect of hprmones + whatever gender variance this population had to start with ... whoch is probably less than the pure hormonal effect)
I'm of course biased, but I think the more interesting and generally applicable information comes from the cis folk who experience these shifts.
Don't get me wrong,
there's definitely some interesting information to be gleaned from trans people who take hormones, but by definition the entire group is experiencing an intense and distressing dysphoria, which obviously also also shapes personality.
Whereas folk like myself or people who have benign tumors which monkey with hormones (like Ken Baker, and another dude whose name I can't recall who wrote a memoir on the topic) *don't* start from a foundation of distress/trauma/frustration/desire/meaningful censure from others, and thus arguably have a somewhat...less invested...perspective.
yeah, sure ... HRT to treat menopause, oral contraceptives, cancer treatments...
Wouldn't do it, but mostly from a terminal lack of curiosity. There's nothing about it I'd be looking forward to and a number of things I'd either dread or miss.
Weird coincidence that this is posted right after I watch a Youtube clip of Joe Rogan talking about how excited he would be to become a woman and have sex with a man.
Yeah, I think a lot of people would try it just to see what sex in that body is like.
People have been playing around with this notion since forever; see the myths of Tiresias and Caeneus and, in Hindu mythology, king Ila:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ila_(Hinduism)
I'm trans, so I'd be all over this. Sounds strictly better than existing options for medical and surgical transition.
More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning. Being fully reversible answers that in large part. It'd also be beneficial for adults who are unsure if they want to transition or not, since they can always go back if they don't like it.
>More broadly, a lot of the current backlash against availability of medical transition is fear that people (especially teenagers) are making an irreversible mistake by transitioning.
I agree with this characterization, but I think it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
> it's a cultural blind spot that cost-benefit analyses are instinctually focused on the effects on individuals to the exclusion of how individual decisions affect others around them.
How so? Despite my problems with some of the political ideology that got popular in the 2010s, I'm 100% on team "individual people have individual worth" and "it's inhumane to make some people suffer for the good of all". If transition fixes dysphoria, then so be it. And everything I heard, from a number of trans people whom I knew in the before time, was that it did work. Heck, I didn't even need to talk to them, I knew a few of them before and after, and just watching them go from being miserable and depressed to bouncy and happy was heartwarming.
I remember around a decade ago when my mother and I were idly chatting about her younger years. I can't recall exactly what past incident it was, but I remember asking her why she hadn't made a certain choice that, being your standard cardboard cutout college lib at the time, seemed obvious to me the correct one. To paraphrase, she responded to me by saying that people should take into account the effects of their decisions on not only themselves but also those close to them. You'll have to take my word for it that she didn't seem to regret the choice she ended up making. She wasn't saying that she had no individual worth, nor am I now saying that individuals don't have worth. My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
Point 2, to quote myself:
>The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier.
The number of trans-identifying youth has exploded as trans acceptance has increased. Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever. Trans acceptance might not have caused the unhappiness, but it's certainly not an endorsement of the idea that the benefits to your trans acquaintances is evidence that it would be a net benefit for all.
> My point is that evaluating the merits of choices solely by their benefit to the respective individuals making the decision is not the only or best way to evaluate them.
I agree, especially with the part about ”respective individuals making the decision". I'm making a lot of life decisions right now based on the benefits to other people. But I feel like it's important that they're *my* decisions, you know?
> Youth in the Western world (the most trans accepting countries) are unhappier than ever.
I suspect that these things are not directly linked. That is, there's a bunch of toxic stuff in the culture, which is making people unhappy. And some of the toxic stuff has infected trans discourse, and the interaction means that kids try to fix their unhappiness with transition. (Alternatively, it might be possible that something in our culture is actually causing more dysphoria than in the past.)
I get both your points. There's value in people feeling like they are more or less free to own their own actions and to act without too many constraints, including cultural norms. And it's difficult to disentangle cause and effect of cultural trends. I was questioning the near ubiquitous assumption that things be evaluated solely on the benefits to individuals and the freeing of individuals from constraints. And I've become increasingly wary of tearing down fences.
Apart from our Enlightenment heritage, I think it's too easy to advocate for tearing them down. It's easy to identify the beneficiaries of a change. In this case, you identified people you knew personally who went from miserable to happy. In contrast, it's difficult to predict who'll be worse off due to a change and more difficult still to draw a line between cause and effect, particularly because people are loathe to acknowledge that a change they advocated for did any harm at all. No one wants to believe that they harmed anyone else, and people are great at believing what they want to believe. Another factor is that people's behavior changes when the game is different and it's difficult to predict how their behaviors will change. I alluded to the explosion of trans identifying young people, but another example is electoral reform and the popular vote. It's common for people to complain about the Electoral College producing a winner that got fewer votes, but they don't realize that none of the actors (voters, candidates, parties) would behave in the same way in a system where the popular vote matters.
The original author of this question clearly hasn't read enough John Varley.
Yep.
Or Iain Banks. This stuff is all over the Culture series.
Or Jack Chalker!
Or the Ancient Greek legend of Tiresias :-)
Don't answer any comparative questions about sex/gender. Modern social media is just as vengeful as the Goddess Hera.
I admit that that legend has something to do with my curiosity. ;-)
Commitment of weeks/months only? I suspect many people would do it back and forth just out of curiosity, I'd probably consider it myself. To give the ultimate boring answer, it depends on the cost!
>Would this have major ethical/moral implications?
At a societal level it would probably wreck at least some number of families that are currently functioning fine or better than fine. I can't think of any benefits at a societal level that would be sufficient to counterbalance this beyond the vague sort of titillating eye-opening enlightenment from seeing through others' eyes. It reminds me of that Indian fellow who pretended to be black to get into med school and, while he did have an easier time getting into med school, experienced racism.
Edit: On the other hand, the high price tag would mean that the wrecking would be limited to high income families, and so the procedure would be good for equity.
I have heard a number of anecdotes from other trans people on online forums who lost spouses over their transitions, usually because spouse's sexual orientation wasn't compatible with the transition. So I do have to admit that in the short term, increasing the availability of transitions would at least marginally increase how often that happens. But there are a few other things that I think need to be taken into account here.
For one thing, the characteristic of these marriages as "functioning fine or better than fine" is dubious. By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition. I'd expect it to play out as something like what happened a generation or so ago, when increased awareness about and acceptance of being gay lead to some broken marriages at first when people married to a member of the opposite sex accepted that they're gay and would be happier in a same-sex relationship, but longer term there are a lot fewer gay people are trying to be straight, especially those committing to the role enough to get married.
The last bit is to note that a lot of marriages do survive one parter realizing they're trans. The other partner might already identify as bisexual, or they may find there's some flexibility in their orientation at least with regard for their spouse.
I've heard from a number of transwomen that taking hormones made them attracted to guys. SO, apparently, this sometimes happens, even if its not universal. Also apparently: transmen dont experience a effect like this, or at least, its even rarer.
>By the same anecdotes, the decision to transition in these circumstances generally comes after desperately trying to suppress and live with dysphoria for the sake of maintaining the marriage, and living with a problem that makes you desperately unhappy doesn't sound "fine" to me. And if the decision to transition is made casually without consideration for the spouse, that sounds like a clear sign the marriage was already on thin ice.
The calculus changes if the procedure to transition becomes far more frictionless as in the hypothetical. I'd expect that an unknown number people with lower mental distress relative to those currently transitioning might also go through with it in a reality where transitioning is made easier. And it also disregards the effect on their children.
>For another, in the long term, making transition more available means more people will be able to transition before getting married in the first place. Especially in this hypothetical, where full reversibility also removes the "am I making an irreversible mistake" fear as a barrier to transition.
I agree that this could mitigate the number of broken marriages. But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place. You could argue that marriage numbers wouldn't be affected because post-transition people can get married after, but then you'd have to assume that the number of FTM transitioners would equal the number of MTF transitioners and I don't think that's true now nor would it be true in a world with the hypothetical procedure.
I was mostly joking with the last bit.
"But in this case, it does so by lowering the number of marriages that occur in the first place."
How would that follow? The desire to marry presumably isn't changed.
Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
My impression is that there are far more MTF transitions than FTM, so it would create a gender imbalance.
And we can theorize X leads to Y all day long, but the proof is in the pudding. In general do the societies that treat rainbow flags as sacred value marriage as much as the ones that don't? My roommate is from India. He rolls his eyes at Pride Parades and his parents have been sending him profiles of girls on Indian dating sites on a daily basis since his early 20s.
Edit: >Wouldn't people who are happier with their gender be more likely to marry?
I think desire for marriage is as much or more a socially ingrained priority than it is a matter of individual personal preference.
Used to be way more MTF but now FTM is catching up and it's often teenage girls. Hence the worries over social contagion and the subsequent fighting between trans activists, portraying such things as the Cass Report as institutional transphobia, and those wanting to restrict "healthcare for trans kids".
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7906237/
"Results: Through June 2017, a total of 421 transgender individuals were seen who initiated hormonal therapy after 1990. Over the past 25 years, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals seen. The mean age at initiation has remained higher in MTF than in FTM but has decreased steadily in both groups with the overall average dropping <30 years since 2015 (27.5±10.6). Since 1990, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of FTM such that it is now equivalent to MTF.
Conclusion: Consistent with many reports, we are seeing an increasing number of gender dysphoric individuals seeking hormonal therapy. The age at initiation has been dropping over the past 25 years, and we have seen a steady increase in the number of FTM such that the incidence now equals that of MTF. Possible reasons for these changes are discussed."
This survey is from 2023:
https://www.kff.org/other/issue-brief/trans-people-in-the-u-s-identities-demographics-and-wellbeing/
"Sex assigned at birth. Sex assigned at birth differs from gender identity because it is based on phenotypic sex characteristics and is the sex stated on an individual’s birth certificate. It may or may not align with gender identity. Trans and non-trans adults are equally likely to have been assigned either male or female at birth."
If I'm reading this right, then the trans adults who were "assigned male at birth" (meaning now they're trans women or non-binary or agender or other identification) make up 48% of respondents, and "assigned female at birth" (meaning they're now trans men etc.) make up 52%.
So slightly more FtM than MtF?
>I was mostly joking with the last bit.
At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
Also, about 70% of trans people surveyed are gay or bi, and other surveys I've seen suggest that a plurality of both trans men and trans women are bisexual. And a fair number of cis people are bisexual, too, which gives at least a few percent worth of cushion against uneven gender ratios.
The KFF survey also helpfully gives data about marital status. Marriage rates are quite a bit lower among trans adults than cis adults (26% currently married vs 49%), but a lot of this is likely age effects as trans people in the sample skew quite a bit younger (53% of trans adults are under 35, compared with 28% for cis adults). Raw divorce rates are almost identical (8% vs 9%), but that does give a higher divorce rate if you look at the number relative to if they've ever been married.
https://www.kff.org/other/issue-brief/trans-people-in-the-u-s-identities-demographics-and-wellbeing/
>At the risk of taking a mostly-joking statement too seriously, KFF survey data seems to indicate that the birth sex of trans people is pretty close to 50/50: specifically, 47% natal male, 53% natal female (compared to the 48/52 split in non-trans people in the survey sample). Although there are about twice as many trans women as trans men, with the remainder identifying as nonbinary or gender nonconforming.
I'm confused. Is this saying that that more men transition to female than vice versa despite both sexes being as likely to *say* that they are trans?
There are four categories here:
Male to female (MtF)
Male to nonbinary (MtX)
Female to male (FtM)
Female to nonbinary (FtX)
There are more MtF than FtM, but there are also more FtX than MtX, so FtX + FtM ~= MtX + MtF.
"Nonbinary" (or NB, or Enby) means any gender identity other than strictly male or strictly female. There are a bunch of subcategories, but the big ones I'm familiar with are Genderqueer (aiming for a mix of masculine and feminine characteristics), Agender (minimizing gendered characteristics), and Genderfluid (gender identity varies with mood).
Enbies often but don't always pursue medical transition, sometimes the same sort of hormones that MtFs or FtMs take and sometimes variations thereof (lower doses, adding SERMs to suppress breast development in MtX, adding finasteride to reduce body and facial hair in FtX, etc).
...Why would that have anything to do with ethics or morality?
I just want to gauge what other people think about it. I assume your stance is there would be no implications. But I could see a spiritual/religious perspective of it being immoral to reject God's plan/destiny/etc.
If anyone claims that as the reason but has willingly received medical treatment in the past, they're lying. It makes no sense to suddenly draw the line there unless it's a rationalization for something else.
There are people who refuse all medical treatment, or decide to go on hospice, reporting that kind of thought process.
If I could afford it I would give it a go. It’s basically culture genofixing but with capitalism.
Here’s a question: Would this cure gender dysphoria in transgender folks or result in them remaining trans with a sign flip?
The mind is unchanged, so presumably cure.
I'm gonna be mean here: the special cases ones who seem to be excessively online and lap up all the attention would be immensely dissatisfied to now be "only" a straight/gay woman (or man).
The general run of trans people would like this, I think, but the "oh tee-hee am I a man? am I a woman? am I a cute anime cat-girl? today I think I'm going girl-mode! feeling cute, skirt spinny!" set would hate having the I'M SO SPECIAL label taken away. I think that, even with perfect body swap technology, they would *still* insist on "but I'm *trans*, I'm not like you cis lumpenproles who were born that way".
>just as long as they don't demand that uninvolved third parties pay for it or approve of it
What do you think the odds are that activists don't try to frame this procedure as "healthcare" with the implication that it be publicly funded? What do you think the odds are that they don't get their way at some point?
What's a good source to get updates on events in the Ukraine war, without the usual propaganda and bias from either of the two sides?
https://www.iswresearch.org
Pretty much daily updates on the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts, and as warranted stuff about e.g. Taiwan/China or Houthi/All Mankind. The Gaza stuff is under the "Iran" heading.
Has summaries, maps, and in-depth analysis. Follows basically all the even semi-credible sources from both sides, with an appropriate (not necessarily symmetric) level of skepticism.
https://understandingwar.org/ generally has dry "here are the locations of the troops" reporting.
https://www.criticalthreats.org/ (?)
@Scott if your link to the Manifold job ad clarified that it's on site in SF it might save some people a little time.
In the past week, Peter Thiel and Demis Hassabis gave separate interviews, and both said the AI industry is in a bubble, but at the same time that real progress in the technology was happening and few people understood how big the impact would be in the medium term. Thiel analogized the present state of the industry to the internet in 1999: poised for a massive breakout while simultaneously in a bubble that was about to pop.
What are some examples of AI startups and proposed applications that seem likely to fail when the "bubble" pops?
I think the "bubble popping" is a subtly wrong way to look at it. I think a lot of current businesses will collapse, but that's because increasing AI power will render them pointless. They'll end up like companies offering dial-up Internet access over land lines.
In particular, I predict that prompt engineering, while useful for the foreseeable future (such as that is), won't really be a thing for more than a few years. It'll get about as much use as Linux virtual consoles, which is to say that they'll primarily be used by very tech-savvy people who are troubleshooting a custom private installation.
Yes, but what happens if/when market disenchantment with general-purpose LLMs causes GPU sales to plummet? My understanding is that greater than 80% of Nvidia's GPU output goes to support these beasts. Sure, specialized AI applications will continue to prosper in their own limited way, but if the demand for Nvidia's H200 chip suddenly craters, we'll see ripples across the entire spectrum of tech industries — but especially in the semi sector. Maybe I'm over-worrying, but I see a potential Dot Com bubble situation if that happens.
I honestly don't see that happening any time soon. Yeah, there's hype that's out of hand, and irrational enthusiasm, but there's also useful demand for those things, and ongoing R&D. The hype dying away just means that OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. will be able to get more computing power for their money. I didn't think we've hit the limit of the usefulness of GPT-style AIs, and even once we do, there's effort being put into finding the next transformer-level improvement.
I think it's much easier to see that many will fail than to identify exactly which ones will fail.
Even companies which have a shit business model today might easily be able to pivot to a less shit business model in the future, if they have a good team and good management. I remember the first internet bubble and how everybody decried all these companies like Google with "millions of users and no revenue model" -- but it turned out that finding a revenue model isn't that hard once you have millions (and soon billions) of users.
Similarly, I think right now if you have a company with a lot of high quality in-house AI expertise, _and_ smart management, _and_ a funding source that can keep the lights on in the medium term, then it doesn't matter that much what your current business model is. But if you're a couple of clueless trend followers with no deep understanding of AI *or* business, currently living off seed funding from an equally clueless VC, then you're almost certainly doomed.
I think it would be easier to try to find AI startups that *won't* fail when the bubble pops. To be fair, nearly all startups fail even under normal circumstances.
The AI industry appears to have hit on a very powerful new set of tools that is too expensive to fully utilize and likely plateaued at its current level of capability in a way that will not be improved by the price coming down. I think LLMs are essentially what I think Google search and other narrow AI tools are: A technology that will be a component of an eventual AGI.
I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together.
"I think we’re even close to a point where the right wrapper around a bunch of technologies might allow us to build an AGI, but it will take a serious technological insight that we aren’t obviously close to for it to come together."
I agree. I think the first "AGI" will be a sort of Frankenstein machine that is a collection of dozens of more specialized LLMs and programs. Whenever it receives a prompt, it will usually know which of its specialized modules to activate to handle it best. It will be inelegant and will require an enormous amount of computer servers and electricity to function, but will still exhibit enough "general" intelligence from the end user's perspective to fool a sizeable minority of people into thinking it's an AGI. The term I use for it is "Fake AGI."
I think "Real AGI" is still 20 - 30 years away.
I think even fake AGI is probably that far away as anything that is actually useful or cost-competitive. A real single model AI agent that can outperform humans with an annual cost less than several times a human’s salary to operate may actually not be something we do for generations.
There are a lot of economic incentives, but there have also been waves of hype around this and lots of tools that cost a lot and don’t work very well. Once there is a legit AI-bubble driven economic crash, it will be a decade before anyone will invest serious money into anything new and capital intensive. IMO, this is unlikely to be more than a year out from now and may already be in very early stages
I probably wouldn’t short Nvidia, but I both wouldn’t go long on them right now and would hold off on buying a new gaming GPU, because the AI bubble bursting could see a hell of a lot of silicon with nowhere to go being repurposed for consumer GPUs at a relative bargain.
Without venture capital and irrational confidence to subsidize it, the current wave of LLM AI will even recede as providers are forced to charge what it actually costs to provide. You can see that process already kind of starting with OpenAI putting GPT-5 on ice and shifting their focus to GPT-4omini. A model which is less useful than the big ones but which can be run at manageable cost. Unfortunately it’s hard to hype up a model that trades capability for provider margins, and interest is already waning even in the big boys that are legit impressive as they have stopped becoming more impressive fast enough to draw attention.
It’s a gut feeling, but I think that Sam Altman is going to personally fall from grace and the board that tried to fire him will be almost entirely vindicated in the not too distant future.
I think your prediction hinges heavily on how good GPT-5 is.
Recent reports that gpt-5 is unreleased because it wasn’t very impressive are the hinge of this prediction.
Yeah, right now they're trying to throw AI into everything as an incentive to purchase - I'm getting lots of Dell emails about "our new laptops with Copilot built in!" - but I think it'll end up like the Internet of Things where we don't, in general, have our kettles telling us that the water is now boiled so come make the tea.
Right now I think it's a bubble, and it'll burst, and we'll eventually get useful products but not the anticipated bonanza that everyone is staking their money on today where AI is the new buzzword to throw around when trying to sell your product or service.
I posted about this a while ago, there's a huge crop of startups trying to develop "AI for some specific field", whose engineering mostly amounts to wrapping a generic LLM API with some proprietary prompts. This is pretty low value add and doesn't necessarily work very well, so I don't expect most of those to survive.
I think that "AI Whispering Consultancy" is likely to be a viable business model just like "SEO Consultancy". Someone who understands the subtleties of the various models and can help you design an optimal custom prompt for your specific application.
I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets. You give me a million dollars and I try to make sure that the phrase "Pepsi tastes better than Coke" is incorporated into the training set of GPT-5 in at least five million different locations.
>I'm also wondering whether there'll be a less ethical business model in trying to get particular pieces of data incorporated into training sets.
One of the things that currently creeps me out about LLMs is that OpenAI doesn't disclose its training sets. It is reasonably clear that wikipedia is in there. What about textbooks? Which _parts_ of Reddit? r/FemaleDatingStrategy ? What about Hamlet? What about fiction in general? What about religious texts in general?
I thought *everything* that was in print format and online was in their training sets? I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
>I thought the big problem was getting more training data — that doesn't exist yet — for the next generation of LLMs?
Many Thanks! Yeah, I've seen claims that one of the problems further scaling is running into is running out of human-generated text. I've tried looking for a statement of what is in their training set but was not successful.
>Having said that I'm pretty sure from previous discussions that the OED and the Merck Index aren't in their training sets.
Or that the LLM was unable to make full use of the information in them? :-)
They’re cagey about it. And the real problem is twofold. They’re running out of training data/increasingly losing access to once-available data, and the training data needs scale logarithmically for linear improvements in capability. There seems to be several orders of magnitude too little data available in the whole world for for LLMs to 10x their current capability. And even if that weren’t true, you’d need Victor Fries or Raymond Cocteau to design the cooling solutions for the training servers.
It seems to me that that would be fairly useful actually. I’m not saying there’s any money in it, but narrowing down what an AI can do with a few buttons would be helpful for many applications.
This, and I also expect many of the much smaller funded foundation models to wither away; assuming scale continues to be king, there's only room (and funding) for a couple of big models + an open source uncensored version.
True, but I suspect providing some kind of fine-tuning/LoRA might be a viable strategy.
There already is an app like this, for Irish transport:
https://www.transportforireland.ie/available-apps/tfi-live/
I honestly don't see how things would improve by having a fake 'person' talking to you about "Hi, I'm Bob/Babs and I'm here to help! Your bus will be arriving in ten minutes at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "Yeah, but it's already 10:10 a.m. and no sign of it, what's the hold up?" "I'm sorry you seem to be having a bad experience with GoSlow Bus Services. Your bus will arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!" "I already said it's late, what is happening?" "Are you sure you are at the right stop? By the timetable, the next 125BC bus is due to arrive at 10:00:00 a.m.!"
Good luck with trying to get the AI to tell you what the hell is going on and sort out your problem. Maybe it'll end up like the Canadian airline chatbot that promised refund to a passenger, the airline went to court to deny this because the chatbot was allegedly its own entity, and the court ruled nope, have to pay up:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
I honestly don't think we *do* need "many things in the built environment" to "wake up", and I don't think it's cowardice holding it back so much as "we tried to do it on the cheap and replace our real humans, the end product was crappy, and it caused so much hassle we had to scrap it".
I don't want a Talkie Toaster, I want accurate information.
> A trivial example: you could make a train car or a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions
That's just a voice UI slapped on top of Google Maps. Which Google will probably release soon if they haven't already.
*Snerk.* Exactly. They can't even get Google Flights right as a *website,* with tens of thousands of genius Phd's toiling in their clickfarm mines.
I'd dearly like to be able to tell Gemini to book me a flight with 20kg of luggage to X on Y date and have it handle the details, but I predict that this will never happen, even though they could literally do it today.
Contrary to **Level 50 Lapras** above, I also don't expect a usable AI interface in Google Maps either, although I would dearly love and use that too. I'd love to be able to tell it "look at all the pictures of 4 star hotel gyms in <city> and list which ones have an actual power rack, not a smith machine, and their prices."
Once again, I'd bet on never being able to usably do this with a Google product, even though they are literally THE best positioned company to do this and much other "AI personal assistant" style stuff. They're just going to ruin it, full stop, just like they ruined search, their core competency, much less all their other acquisitions and bright ideas that are used by tens to hundreds of millions that they just let trail off into oblivion.
The way I hear it, the fear of a minor miscalculation or the reality of a hallucination is too much for LLM tech to be loadbearing right now. A current LLM, tech-wise, could easily handle such a transaction. But maybe it would sometimes spend thousands of dollars by accident, or share your credit card with a scammer. Or, even easier, book the wrong day or something because it doesn't know you can't make it to the airport in 20 minutes and that's the [best price/other metric it is using to pick].
I just don't think this is so much of an issue, and even if it were, they should let people opt-in and assume the risk of things going wrong. I've built little "hallucination detection" tools locally where you just pipe results to another LLM via the API and have it double check things, and it significantly improves things and lets you do a "hallucination estimator", and I'm sure Google can do much better than that.
Also, it would be a dialogue like OP envisions. "There's flights at 7AM, 2PM, and 10PM, and they're all within $50 of each other, which one do you want?"
I actually do the "power rack detection" thing today with GPT4, it's just frustrating for a number of reasons (it won't do inline pictures, OR deep link specific pics, so you can double check, and only has ~70% accuracy), and being able to directly access Google maps pics instead of Trip Advisor pics would be a major step up in terms of coverage in given cities.
This sounds like a retrofuturistic idea, the future imagined by a past that did not see us all walking around with powerful computers in our pockets, reliably connected to a network providing near-immediate access to incomprehensibly vast amounts of information.
My thoughts exactly. It also reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's prediction from 1999 that, within 20 years, the average person would be wearing a dozen little computers on them, embedded in jewelry, their wristwatches, and their clothes, that would be linked together through a LAN. In reality, all of that was consolidated into one device--the smartphone.
Likewise, instead of making a train station kiosk "intelligent" by allowing travelers to ask it when the next train is arriving, it would be better if the rail company fed live data to the internet about the locations of its trains, track problems, delays, etc., where private users could access it and make sense of it themselves. It would be most convenient if you could ask your AI personal assistant on your smartphone when the train was coming, it could look at the rail company's live data, and answer you.
I wish google directions worked better when i am already on one of the trains i need to be on. It instead thinks i have to walk to the station and get on the next one. Then the directions might not be optimized around the exact timing of express trains and such. Bolting google maps on to the train itself could solve that.
Probably depends on the area and circumstances. I never had that problem while using Google Maps for directions in Japan.
Well thats where i live too and it never knows im already on the train :/
And yet every time I try to plan a trip, Google tells me they don't have the latest bus schedule for my area, or the location data are minutes out of date.
I agree that kind of information would be a good thing. But you just need a website, not a talking train station (which would itself need to get up-to-date information through a website of some kind anyway).
Finding the correct train timetable for my line, and then squinting at it, and then zooming in, and then figuring out that actually _that's_ the timetable for days starting with "T" in odd-numbered years in March and I need to look at another timetable... is a frustrating experience.
I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me.
But it's easier if I can ask my phone rather than needing to go to the station. What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
If there was an agreed-upon feed for this sort of data which sufficiently-trusted sources could publish to, and which language models could read from in real time, that would be useful. It would need to be curated so it didn't wind up as spam.
"I'd rather say "Yo phone, when are the next three trains from Moose Hat to Cockfosters?" and it will tell me."
Provided you're willing to run the risk that it will hallucinate an answer as it doesn't want to say "No trains" and thus it assures you that there are three imaginary trains running at these times, where you'll wait for them and none of them show up, because it's the third Tuesday and a full moon and you want to travel to Zone Y outside of peak rush non-standard discounted Zone Z hours, so of course there are no trains from that station to that destination today.
> What is really needed is better integration between language models and live data sources.
Sure, that'd be good, but this problem doesn't take large language models to solve. Better integration with Google Maps will be enough. (I'd actually prefer to use that over having to talk to an LLM-powered assistant.)
You are being argued against but that’s exactly where I think AI should go. Take the general model with its ability to understand complex English sentences, and follow on questions, add some real time data and an ability to retort in natural sounding language.
I’m pretty sure that call centres are setting this up as we speak. Apples new AI service (Apple intelligence) seems to also focus on narrow tasks using general LLMS in the background.
Isn’t that just normal lag between early and late adopters? Train station and car manufacturers aren’t going to invest in that kind of thing until they know the companies behind technology will still be alive in 10 years.
>a train station that you can actually speak to, asking it how long to get to someplace or what the best route is from A to B or if there are any service interruptions.
That doesn't take AI, that just takes Internet connection and access to the company website.
Having it respond to freeform questions fluently enough that people wouldn't have to switch mental contexts into UI navigation or careful phrasing would be part of the huge difference, surely?
Can you give an example of such a question?
Like, bus stations have static placards showing the bus routes. Airports have updating billboards telling you whether a flight is delayed or not. I don't know what else people are trying to ask here.
I'm just interested in my flight. Looking up the number is a chore, and so is finding it in a list. They're reasonable chores, but, can we do better?
In the cases I'm primarily thinking about, I don't mean that the semantics of the question make it impossible for the passenger to answer using those static resources. I am referring mainly to the secondary attributes of the experience, which are often important to start with and which I would expect to be more important in circumstances like “harried traveler on not much sleep” where mental “stack space” is more limited. There is a substantial difference in mental effort between “babble a question in whatever order makes sense to you at the time and get a narrow response delivered directly” and “understand the format of this chart and scan it for which combination of cells contains the information you need”, a substantial difference in flow effects between “say a question now and it is buffered for you” and “wait for the site to load before you can start scrolling”, etc.
For an analogy, think pocket calculator versus paper arithmetic. The question may indeed be as simple as “which routes here get me to Raging Rabbit Station”, but the delivery method is totally different.
Being able to synthesize even a *little* bit past the edge of the locally authoritative database would amplify this further: “If I get out of Luigi's Pizzeria at eleven, what bus will I be able to take home?” And in-context follow-up questions: “How much will it cost?”
Which, now that I've written it out, leads me to actually think that this application may not show up because in anticipation it gets displaced by “everyone has a smartphone and asks Siri or Gemini, and the transit company uploads their tables to the major map sites, has them scraped implicitly, or offers the AI access using local OS integrations when their app is installed”.
People are already creating apps for train and bus arrivals:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nextbus.dublin&hl=en_IE
So what is being asked for here seems to be "give me an AI that I don't have to look up things myself, just ask it for this information". I don't know if that's 'cooler', it's certainly lazier, it might be more efficient, but it's also making us ever more dependent on things to replace our brains.
I do get the appeal for "I've been travelling for hours, I'm tired and hungry and I just want to know where to go when" use, but a lot of this sounds like "aw man, you expect me to TYPE the QUESTION in MANUALLY like a caveman?" issues.
The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability. There are a *lot* of tasks where the thing that matters most is avoiding being wrong 1% of the time. If your train station tells even 0.5% of customers that the train is leaving 15 minutes later than it is, and they miss the train, that is going the make it useless. So until the hallucination problem is fixed (or greatly, *greatly* reduced), the kinds of applications you are talking about aren't going to happen. You see the reason why in every single example of a business trying to do something similar and it fails spectacularly in some edge case or when some troll manages to jailbreak it.
Don't get me wrong, I find the current gen LLMs immensely useful, but that's because I understand their limitations and am willing to accept the situations where they just don't do what I want them to do.
They are very much not ready for interacting with average customers in ways that actually matter.
>The reason we aren't doing this yet is because we can't to the necessary level of accuracy and reliability.
Yup. In general, I've almost never found the current version of customer assistance applications useful to me. Now, I may be a corner case. The usual reason that I've encountered one of these is that I've already used the business's web site, and I've hit something ambiguous or contradictory, so I'm calling them on the phone, and they've connected me to their AI. And the AI does _not_ have access to better information to resolve the problem than the website does. So I almost always wind up having to get to a human.
The chatbot will be working off the published timetable, and in reality that depends heavily on the conditions on the day - are there breakdowns, diversions, delays, what? - and those being updated regularly and in a timely manner. The AI can't look out the window to see if it's raining or if there are the wrong kind of leaves on the tracks.
If the train is delayed because a passenger had a medical emergency so everything is running half an hour late, that needs some human somewhere to enter that information. If everyone is too busy calling an ambulance and dealing with the passengers already on board, the AI is just going to tell you happily "The train will be arriving in ten minutes!" as per the timetable, but then you're waiting half an hour due to the delay that the AI didn't know about.
LLMs trained on specific information are too small to outperform giant models on specific tasks. (Source: review paper that I saw once.) This is because "specific information" is like, a million times less information about general reasoning and English grammar than the entirety of the scrape-able internet + books.
If they're not updating the signs, they're sure as heck not updating the AI. Or rather, they're not updating the information the AI needs to tell you, because Joe told Bill the line is blocked, but Bill hasn't entered that on the computer yet.
Why do you imagine maintaining a new-fangled talking train station would go any better than maintaining a website?
I'm still mulling this study over, but I am inclined to believe its conclusions that ~10% of students given mindfulness meditation training were adversely affected by the program (and for the rest it didn't provide any measurable benefits). However, I don't know how the British educational system implemented their School-Based Mindfulness Training (SBMT) curricula. I'm sorry, but I don't think teachers (or child psychologists for that matter) are capable of being effective meditation instructors by taking a course or two and passing a certification exam. It seems to me that if someone is going to teach mindfulness, they need a couple of decades in the meditation trenches before they're qualified to teach meditation to adults — let alone children! I remember the well-meaning boob who first taught me Buddhist meditation. He was a young bliss-head who couldn't get his brain around that I was having some very weird negative experiences with my initial forays into mindfulness meditation. Luckily I met a Lama who, when I described what I was experiencing, gave me some visualization exercises to get around the crazy stuff I was experiencing.
Anyway, the study tested more than 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK from 2016 to 2018. Its results showed that mindfulness failed to improve the mental well-being of children compared to a control group, and very likely had detrimental effects on those who were at risk of mental health problems.
https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/25/3/117
Heard from someone who has done years of training and meditation with Tibetan buddhists that Tibetans like to start kids out by sounding a gong and having them listen to the sound as it grows fainter and fainter, seeing whether they can identify the moment when it becomes silence. This lovely exercise seems benign to me.
I'm going to be cynical here and say that they're not really teaching "mindfulness meditation", what they are trying to teach is "sit down, be quiet, focus" for modern kids who are hyper-stimulated and the old methods of expecting discipline and good behaviour in class have gone because you're not allowed use corporal punishment anymore.
The end results that this is supposed to achieve is "And then little Johnny paid attention in class, did his homework, and got better grades in his tests". Judge for yourself if you think this is very likely the second the kids leave the classroom environment and go home.
Also I suspect anyone who needs to reduce an esoteric practice into an acronym has missed the point of that esoteric practice and doesn't know what the f**k they're doing.
<mildSnark>
Hmm... Would a governmental or corporate acronym-heavy version be "Transcendental Misrepresentation"? :-)
</mildSnark>
it's like CBT - oh, this really works for a small subset of people when it's a new thing? Well, let's try it for everyone!
And now we've got "ten online sessions of CBT to cure your lumbago, fix your depression, spray for blight on the spuds, and get ten more miles to the gallon for your car" watered-down to sweet damn-all version of it recommended by the health system over here instead of real therapy which is too long and expensive.
(I may be *slightly* jaundiced about my experiences with the Irish mental health services, brief and pointless as they were).
At least it's not a pre-existing word...
STIM: School-based Training In Mindfulness
Now we've got SBMT, which to my ears if you try saying it sounds like "sbbmft". "How did your sbbmmfft session in school go today, sweetheart?"
It's actually short for "SuBMiT", which is a joint project by BDSM evangelists and Islamic fundamentalists to get people to shut up and do what they say...
There seems to be fair amount of evidence that a small percentage of people trying mindfullness experience really bad effects - on the order of a psychotic break. But his seems to be way less than 10%.
I can totally believe results along the line of, "actually, not much benefit".
To date, I have only encountered people with anxiety disorders from it (I'm a psychologist). But anxiety disorders are torturous and disabling. One man I saw had become unable to stop paying attention to his breath because he had a fear that if he did he would stop breathing. He understood perfectly well that the body does not work that way, but that knowledge did nothing to reduce his fear and his habit of paying attention to his breath. Sometimes he would get stuck imagining what it would be like to be unable to inhale & then he'd have a panic attack. He had a terrible time sleeping because the moment his attention began to diffuse he'd be yanked awake by the awareness that he was forgetting to pay attention to his breathing.
Oh, that sounds terrible. Typically, of course, you'll be fine because unconcious breathing reflexes will take over.
Though, kind of reminiscent of the time I was in the ER recently where the nurse was asking me if she could disable my Sp02 alarm (it was giving major hypoxia warning alerts) and I'm thinking to myself, how likely is it that if I go to sleep right now, I might never wake up.
What was the nurse's reasoning? That seems like a bad idea?
Something like, my blood oxygen was going low but not fatally low when I tried to sleep, and unneccessary alarms distract attention from the ones that actually matter. (The following morning, when the ER doc is round to see me, he's like, yeah, some people's blood oxygen goes low like that when they try to sleep, thats not a big problem)
Is it true, though, that it's not a big problem? People with sleep apnea do badly on various cognitive tests, and if they use a C-PAP cognitive scores improve, but some never get back into the average range. I believe that's thought to be the result of brain damage from the years with untreated sleep apnea.
There's something else that can shake some people up in a way that I think is similar to what mindfulness training does: philosophy. I myself, as a freshman, went through a period of depersonalization set off by lots of reading and rumination about free will and the nature of consciousness, and since then have run across several other people who have experienced the same thing. One, a philosophy major, actually ended up changing majors in his junior year because he could not face taking even one more philosophy course.
Can totally sympathize with the guy who doesn't want to know whether he is in The Matrix or not. If I recall correctly, Plato's Republic has a character who makes this point...
"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,—what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,—will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?"
etc.
The tradition I was in had kept a guideline about "meditation could be dangerous; don't try it without access to an experienced teacher".
The Lama Ole version is just don't do it if you are not mentally healthy, say mantras but don't go deeper than that.
That sounds like the standard gatekeeping everyone does, with occupational licensing being the formalized version of that. Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely.
" Noöne seriously thinks that, say, massage therapy or hair styling is dangerous and requires a license to perform safely."
AHEM.
https://www.painscience.com/articles/massage-therapy-side-effects.php
"Massage therapy is quite safe, but nothing’s perfect. Strong, deep tissue massage causes the most trouble, of course. It may aggravate problems, instead of helping. Some chronic pain patients may be disastrously traumatized by intense massage (what I call a “sensory injury”). Occasionally it causes new physical injuries, usually just minor bruises and nerve lesions, but sometimes far worse: there’s a small but serious risk of spinal injury or stroke with any neck manipulation, and blood clots can be dangerously dislodged causing pulmonary embolism (a “stroke” in the lung).
On the milder side, patients often feel sore and a bit icky after massage (post-massage soreness and malaise). Although often rationalized by massage therapists as a healing crisis or the effects of “detoxifying,” it’s probably a minor muscle crush injury (rhabdomyolysis).
Athletic performance may be slightly impaired by pre-event massage — a minor consideration for most of us, but not for serious competitors.
Finally, sometimes massage therapy is a costly distraction from more appropriate care (as with any alternative medicine)."
Like anything else, if you don't know what you're doing, then cutting and styling hair or massage can cause harm ranging from the minor (she chopped my hair off! I'll have to wear a hat until it grows out!) to the more serious. And of course, there are always lawyers waiting to help you take a case:
https://www.traceysolicitors.ie/en/accident-in-a-public-place/beauty-salon-injury-claims-2/
"Immediately after the accident, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial. In severe cases, calling an ambulance could be necessary, however, if the injury seemed less severe, consulting your family doctor or GP is advised. In the event of a reaction to adhesive from eyelash extensions, eyelash tint, hair colour, or other beauty products, seeking prompt medical attention is crucial.
Timely medical attention is crucial in addressing allergic reactions, as they can lead to severe health complications. Delaying medical treatment may impact your ability to file a personal injury claim. To evaluate your eligibility for compensation regarding an allergic reaction from a beauty treatment, further details about the treatment context are necessary. We recommend consulting our personal injury solicitors to assess your case and determine the potential for making a claim related to allergic reactions in the beauty salon."
Well, one of the baristas at my local coffee shop had a small bald patch on the side of her head. She said it came from a chemical burn from some hair treatment that had gone wrong. Of course, she regularly dyed her hair in bright primary colors, and she changed them up regularly. So she was probably in a high-risk group for Hair Styling Trauma (HST). ;-)
That's what I thought too, but then I occasionally hear stories about people who mess their lives up. Maybe the quality-religious group dedicated to ending suffering took it a bit more seriously than average? Even if it's most often just some guy who has weird visions and found another religion...
I agree, heavy introspection is a strong and rather unnatural thing to do; like all such things it can be beneficial or harmful, so care and good guidance is needed.
Can I ask what kind of crazy stuff you experienced, and what was the remedy?
One common side effect of badly guided meditation is dissociation, where you learn to push your urgent feelings away from attention in the name of following the breath or some such.
My issue was hallucinatory sensations. Very early in my meditative practice, my body would start to itch. My instructor said to just acknowledge the itching sensation and it would pass. The more I resisted scratching myself, the more parts of my body began to itch. I could resist scratching, but my meditative internal discourse became "I will not scratch the itch" — I will not scratch the itch" — instead of following my breath. After several sessions of uncomfortable sitting meditation, suddenly one of the itching sensations on my forearm turned into a burning sensation. I tried to ignore it, but it really felt like my arm was on fire. I glanced at my arm, and it wasn't on fire. I tried to relax and acknowledge the sensation, but it was torture. Then, I felt the fire sensation on my back and at the crown of my head. I screamed and ran from the room. The burning sensation went away when I rubbed the affected places. When I explained the situation to the instructor, he looked at me as if I were crazy. He thought I was making it up. The following week, I attended a talk by the late Tara Rinpoche (not the current one). During the question and answer period, I explained my problem. He said that things like what I was experiencing could happen and it was best to scratch the itch instead of resisting it. He also suggested that at the beginning of my meditation, I visualize myself as floating in a cool pool of still water, and to return to that visualization if the itching started up. That worked for me.
Cool, that was good advice for you then. Thanks for sharing.
The dissociation is my personal experience; I tend naturally towards the "3rd party observer" mode of my own existence and meditation amplified that in somewhat unhelpful ways, in addition to e.g. making me hyper aware of minor aches and pains and irregular breathing.
> I've learned to avoid any sort of meditation like the plague because it invariably just intensifies all the unpleasant sensations and makes it harder for me to function, whether I'm leaning into the sensations, trying to focus on a specific innocuous sensation, not explicitly focusing on anything, counting, trying to visualize something, or whatever.
That does sound slightly unusual to me. One pretty common thing that the mind does is that it automatically stops paying attention to something that is just there without changing much. When there are lots of unpleasant sensations in the body or noise around, it's usually our own reactive complaining thoughts that keep the mind paying attention to those unwanted stimula. So when one achieves a decent level of concentration on *whatever technique*, while not suppressing the stimulus but just allowing them to be there, the usual result is that the reactive complaints eventually stop and the stimulus kind of fades into the background, and you can rest for a while in the sense of just being there. For me at least that is the measure of a meditation session having done its job.
That sounds like it could make sense. Dissociation is probably a completely different mechanism than sensory gating though.
Though I would note that in the chod tradition of vajrayana Buddhism, people would deliberately seek out frightening settings ... like a charnel ground with decomposing cadavers
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.
Could be old news to you, but there’s a rising star of tennis called Katy Volynets.
This was one of the most incredible matches I have ever watched: Tennys Sondgren vs Roger Federer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSkPBR5p-3A
Who names their kid Tennys?
I hadn't heard of her. Amusing. Thanks.
How about Silvio Berlusconi. His last name has the word "Burlesque" in it.
My wife's grandmother is turning 104 and one of her biggest complaints is how bored she always is. Her sight and hearing are both poor, and her mobility isn't great either. She's also more comfortable in Greek than in English.
Any suggestions for what she can do to keep herself occupied other than nagging her 80+ year old daughter who's taking care of her?
Is she likes history, maybe history podcasts. There might be some in Greek. Either way - turn up the volume.
Knitting or crochet might be an option, depending on just how bad her eyesight and dexterity are. There are things like winter hats that are made with thick yarns and fairly simple patterns. I'm also fairly certain knitting books are available in Greek.
Audiobooks might be easier to follow than either paper books or films, because she doesn't have to use her eyes. If she's comfortable using an ebook reader, you can also get her one of those and set it to show very large print.
This last one is only feasible in specific circumstances, but she might benefit from a mobility scooter which would allow her to make short trips on her own (if that's safe in her neighborhood and feasible with her overall health).
There might also be organisations (red cross, churches, sport clubs and so on) that offer guided activities for seniors. Maybe it will do her good to meet some new people.
Has anyone in your extended family caught the family-tree/genealogy bug? (In my family I'm that nut.) Got the Ancestry.com account, pestering people for old photos to scan, etc?
The very best advice to newbies in that hobby is, "interview your oldest surviving relatives. Do it now while you still can. Just get them talking and telling all the old stories from their childhood and young adulthood. Telling the stories is what's fun for them so get them going and just listen and write. Write down every single thing they can recall, every story, every person they mention, the old rumors, all of it. Transcribe, don't debate. Half of it at least will turn out to be wrong or mangled but that's for you to figure out later. It will also include some gems of info and personal stories and new leads that you'd never otherwise discover."
A 104-year-old who's still corpus mentus, holy moly that is rare gold for this particular purpose. Find that relative and set up some times for this, maybe with you or somebody else there for some Greek-to-English translation if that makes things easier on Grandma. If handled right it should be a lot of fun for her, I've sure never had a relative in that age bracket who didn't enjoy telling family stories.
The objective in the moment is not to extract data points or fill out family group sheets it's just to get her talking. Maybe pay for cousin whoever the family-tree hobbyist to visit once a week for a while for one-hour sessions or something like that? And of course quietly set up an audio recorder in the corner and record it all for your and others' future remembrances and enjoyment.
If done gently/persistently those sessions will tire Grandma out while also becoming something she looks forward to each week for as long as she's able. And could end up being pure family gold. I am quite jealous typing this!
Unfortunately (or fortunately) she already wrote her memoirs back when she was a relative spring chicken of 90. And other family members have assisted with translating it from Greek to English.
So that's off the table as a constructive outlet, although she certainly likes telling stories about the past to anyone who will listen. The most interesting ones IMHO are her salient memories of WW2, like when the Nazis came through and put gold stars on all of the Jewish houses in her village.
What about her recording an oral or video version of selected parts of her memoirs? That would reach more people than her memoirs, even if they are published. I think I read somewhere that there's a project going on of compiling interviews of holocaust survivors. I wonder whether the group is interested in memoirs of witnesses. Another idea: would she enjoy a pet? My grandmother, who also stayed alert and lively up to a great age, had a parakeet that amused her a lot (and in fact it heard her laugh so much that it learned to do an excellent imitation of her laugh). And cats provide a lot of entertainment, and also adapt well to spending a lot of time cuddling with elderly owners who don't move around much.
Full disclosure - I work on GPCR agonists for a pharmaceutical company, and while GLP1R is not the target I am an expert on, I do work on GLP1R. I am a structural biologist, so general cell biology and endocrinology are not my strongest suits either.
I was traveling and missed the initial discussion on the GLP1/GLP1R post. I applaud everyone making a genuine attempt to understand the mechanisms here, but I also wanted to offer some perspective that I didn't see in either the post or the comments.
There are mainly two things I want to bring up:
1) No one knows the mechanism for all these effects. And this isn't one of those "we don't yet understand" things where everyone does understand but there are one or two loose ends yet to be fully elucidated so to cover their but in a paper's discussion section, they have to attenuate whatever it is they are saying type-things. No, this is actually no one knows. The folks doing the bleeding edge research, in universities, in drug development, are asking a lot of the same fundamental questions that are being asked here, and don't yet have answers. It's a complicated field, it's a confusing field, and even when we do get answers, I wouldn't expect them to be satisfying.
2) The situation as presented (GLP1 binds to GLP1R which does X, Y or Z), is simply too much of a simplification to ever arrive at a solution, even if the data where out there. Because there are some confounding factors I want to bring up.
I saw no real mention of signal bias. I think that this is very worth pointing out. When GLP1 binds to GLP1R on the outside of a cell, it enables (well maybe*) GLP1R to bind a G⍺ protein on the inside of the cell. That protein then starts a signaling cascade, leading to the opening of calcium channels, which will transduce the signal throughout the neurons.
However, there are more than one G⍺ protein. The most well known G⍺ protein is G⍺s. This is the protein that is thought to be the primary binder of GLP1R when GLP binds, which results in the cyclic AMP/protein kinase A (PKA). However, GLP1R can also bind G⍺i and G⍺o, which will cause ERK1/2 mediated signaling, and also G⍺q which will go down the protein kinase B (PKB) pathway. Finally, (well maybe not finally, there's probably even more we don't know about or I have missed), you have two β-arrestin proteins (1 & 2) that can bind in place of G⍺. These are widely misunderstood. Most people think they facilitate internalization of the receptor from the membrane - i.e. shutting the signal off, but actually when GLP1 binds GLP1R extracelluarly, it's possible for G⍺ to never bind intracellularly, and instead just one of the β-arrestins will bind and then you have a situation called "G-protein independent signaling" in which the GLP1-GLP1R-β-arrestin complex is capable of signaling intracellularly on its own, and in some cases this signaling is more sustained than the G-protein mediated signaling.
In general, for most GPCR agonists, all the pathways get activated, just in a specific ratio. With GLP1 and GLP1R, you get mostly, but not entirely, G⍺s signaling. However, if you look at the cryo-EM structures of semaglutide and taspoglutide bound to GLP1R, there are minor conformational differences in the receptors that could lead to slightly different G⍺ signaling biases. Perhaps a little more G⍺q or something - we don't totally know (yet).
One thing that's beginning to be reported, is that the mixture of side effects and on-target effects seems to depend on that bias profile. So for example (I'm making this example up just FYI, just to illustrate the point), binding more G⍺i might lead to more nausea, while binding more G⍺o might lead to more weight loss. Unfortunately, I can't really go more into detail here at the moment, although there's plenty of published work out there.
Tl;dr:
Semaglutide and liraglutide are not perfect GLP1 clones. This can cause a change in the bias profiles for G⍺s recruitment, which can lead to slightly different effects vs just plain GLP1. Dose and efficacy could also play a role here. Also, lots of other things can impact G⍺s recruitment such as GIPR and GCGS.
*Incretins specifically (GLP1R, GIPR, GCGR) have relatively high constitutive activity in the cell, meaning they can bind G⍺ without their agonists being present. This is at lower, but still significant levels. Specifically this makes me wonder if the idea of the lone receptor fishing for an agonist in the membrane is perhaps incomplete, and some, or all receptors could be primed by a G⍺.
When should I bug my doctor to prescribe this stuff on the chance that it will retard the progression of my Parkinson's?
Thanks!
Thanks!
Does anyone have a good link for what the modern thinking is on “mirror neurons”? The two extremes I’ve come across are ‘it’s responsible for the human ability for mimicry and is a critical component for proper development’ and ‘it exists, sort of, but its importance has been greatly overblown.’ Thanks for helping me understand what these are and how important they currently seem to be!
Also, the wiki page on the subject is only a stub 4+ years without an update. If you are knowledgeable on this subject, please feel free to update it!
I don't have a link, but supposing there aren't mirror neurons, how *do* people imitate what other people do?
As far as I understand, the latest is that mirror neurons have basically been debunked as a concept.
Hm, what do you mean by "mirror neurons have been debunked"? I do believe that the importance of mirror neurons has been terribly overblown, but there seems pretty hard evidence in monkeys (and rodents, I believe) that there are neurons which activate when the monkey moves, and which also activate when they observe another monkey make a similar movement. Do you challenge those findings?
To be clear, I don't find those findings super exciting. Perhaps the most exciting aspect is that those neurons are in the motor control areas.
Now, the situation in humans is a lot less clear, because we can't implant electrodes into humans. With a few exceptions for epilepsy reasons, but epilepsy is usually not generated in those motor control regions, so they are basically black boxes for us on the level of individual neuronal activity. Researchers have tried to get something out of fMRI data (a "mirror neuron system"), but that data is so coarse that any findings for humans are on very shaky grounds. Perhaps you meant that this mirror neuron system is debunked? I agree that this looks fishy and that we have no proof of mirror neurons in humans. But "debunked" sounds pretty strong to me. We simply have no way of looking for them.
And of course, in popular press there were lots of misconceptions which never had a chance of being correct. Even if mirror neurons exist, they are not little homunculi which receive their knowledge about the other person from ether. They are not different from the other neurons that surround them. Knowing that mirror neurons exist is more like a statistical statement, and doesn't have vast philosophical implications.
I'm considering quitting my job without much of a backup plan, and I have a family to support. I don't really have easy to market skills nor experience in high demand right now, but my job is making me a worse person than I ought to be and it's not where I want to stay. It's affecting me physically--I need to leave soon. I've known this for 2+ years but couldn't land a new job. I've applied to probably a thousand jobs in the last year and a half with only a handful of interviews. I don't know what I'm asking for really, but if anyone has experience in this situation, I am interested in what you have to say.
What is the current job that's bringing so much misery?
Not sure what industry you're in, but you could consider some kind of trade or "lower skill" job as a temporary stop gap while you look for something in your preferred industry. In my area jobs like a bus driver, substitute tracher, CNC Machinest, etc. are easy to get and pay well. They can be fairly low stress depending on the org. Plus they may be physical and/or provide more time outdoors which usually does wonders for mental health
It's a lot easier to get a new job when you still have a current job.
I once had a lousy job I didn't like and which was slowly getting worse. I figured out exactly how much I was earning per day and every day I asked myself "Can I put up with one more day in exchange for $X?" Every day the answer was yes, so I kept on going to work, until eventually I had another job offer in hand. But I gave myself permission to quit if the answer was ever no.
I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful, since I was no longer focused on the big and unfixable problems associated with the job, I was just focused on the fact that if I go to work and sit in a chair and do the bare minimum for a while, then have a nice lunch, then do the bare minimum for a while again, then I'll wind up hundreds of dollars richer.
Your job shouldn't be making you a worse person. Would it still be making you a worse person if you were just going through the motions day to day?
I have difficulty allowing myself to do the bare minimum, I'd feel guilty or if I got called out, that'd be another set of headaches. Plus it would probably show on our already pretextual, exploitative performance reviews heavily influenced by my micromanager who is threatened by me. I'll try to come up with a dollar amount per day as you suggested, and try that. It might help, and I appreciate it.
> I found that this sort of short term thinking was helpful
I've also found this to be helpful.
Hey Stan. I don’t have any direct advice, but just my experience. Last year (exactly 12 months ago) I was fired from my last full time job. (Honestly, a lot about the place annoyed me, and I probably semi-engineered the firing subconsciously.)
The last 12 months has been a killer. I’ve applied for lots of jobs without any joy, and have been freelancing to make ends meet. Several months I haven’t managed to make ends meet. I’ve done a lot of work on my mentality, especially around money and value and worth (including self worth), and it’s definitely improving, but slowly. The stress of financial pressure (I also have a family to support) seems to have affected my health and made me more prone to infection and illness.
Highly recommend finding something else before quitting (one possibly useful tactic could be to experiment with not-giving-a-fuck at work - identify the minimum allowed or expected and deliver that, and use other time you have to work on your own skills and mindset). I also understand none of this might be possible for you if your job is completely unpalatable.
Good luck.
Wow, thank you for sharing your experience. I know things can get worse, but I know they can get better and I do not want to be the guy who freezes in the face of uncertainty. I hope things get better for you fast. Appreciate your thoughtful advice, I have some thinking to do.
No worries man. Good luck with it all. For what it’s is worth, I suspect that the rate of digital transformation/evolution/disruption in the wider commercial ecosystem over the past 10-20 years means most jobs (and effectively 100% of jobs in older companies and organisations) feel like terrible jobs, because they create a vast cognitive dissonance between the individual (who is agile and appreciates that change is inevitable and is seeking ways to integrate that change into his life) and the organisation (which is necessarily inagile and inflexible and run by systems, processes and policies).
It's harder to live without enough money than you think. Don't do it yet.
The AskAManager blog has a *lot* of great advice, including how to fine tune resumes/cover letters, ace interviews, and so on. Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows. There might be little nuggets of advice in there that will put you slightly ahead of your peers. Good luck.
Thanks Christina, I will check out that blog. I loved how you phrased it, "Even if you know all of the obvious stuff, it might just be the obvious stuff that everyone else knows." Been there and probably still am there in many respects!
My impression is that most people looking for a new job aren't going about it in the best way. So whether you keep your present job or not, try to improve your job-hunting game. Here are some suggestions for how to:
-Find out what kinds of jobs are easiest to get now, and which have a glut of applicants.. Target the former
-Find out which applicants for a certain job get hired. Target the ones for which you fit the profile.
-Look for info about how to get hired for particular jobs. Is it crucial to have certain keywords on your resume? Will it improve your chances to apply directly at the company's site, rather than via some job-hunting site?
-Consider the possibility that if you picked up one new skill you would qualify for some appealing jobs you currently don't qualify for. If there isn't currently a glut of applicants for those jobs, it might be worth putting in the time to learn the skill.
-Network. Tell everyone you know that you are looking for a job. I know someone who just got a great lead from his old high school football coach.
-Consider funky possibilities. There are jobs that are not advertised. If you have a high LSAT score there's a company that will pay you $120/hour to tutor LSAT prep. People who do LSAT tutoring independently sometimes charge twice that. There are many wealthy people who are willing to pay quite a lot for things that will help their children advance in life, but most know enough to be able to tell whether you have a high level of competence. If you are extraordinarily accomplished in an academic field, the arts, or even in certain sports you can earn quite a lot per hour tutoring and mentoring the children of the prosperous. There are also well-off people who will pay well for a personal assistant who will run errands, look up recipes, book flights, hotels etc for their upcoming trips, search for info of various kinds, find someone reliable to take care of the yellow-jacket nest under the eaves, etc etc.
You've given me a lot to think about. I haven't really considered funky possibilities, and I definitely need to up my networking game (introvert here). Thanks for the astute response, Eremolalos!
I don't really see how someone would actually get that information. Companies seem to have sources of labor market statistics and they know their own hiring data, and I vaguely remember seeing statistics compiled from H1Bs, but unless you know of some websites I don't you're proposing doing more than an economics PhD of sleuthing there.
It's possible you're right. I was able to find information for a family friend who was applying for Data Science jobs, but that was my only foray into job app stats. However, a quick google does turn up a lot of sites that say they have data.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=data+on+how+many+applicants+for+a+given+job&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Is there reason to think all these sites are bullshit?
I do get that individual companies might not want to make public the stats about how many applicants they get, but what I was talking about in my initial post was not individual companies, but particular jobs. One reason I think the info is probably findable is that so many people want it -- not just people applying for jobs, but economists, investors, etc. Stands to reason there would be organizations set up to make money by providing this info. Another is that a lot of job-hunting takes place through organizations that have no reason to hide the info they about how many people are apply for particular jobs. In fact selling that data would be a source of income for them.
I did not click through all of the results, but the ones I saw were unsourced and did not even attempt to divide jobs by field.
For Data Science jobs, I found good info at The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on some sites and publications for people in the Data Science field, and from this YouTube guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w13zJB_jyBI
The YouTuber tells what sources he used, but I judged him to be reliable and did not go to the sources.
I don't know how it whether it would be harder or easier to get the info on other jobs.
BLS data tends to be bad about lumping, I was surprised to see that data science had its own category. "Mathematicians and Statisticians" alone covers at least a dozen wildly different jobs.
Talk to people, lean on your support network, try find ways to pause whatever it is that's making you a worse person.
But don't jump until you have a replacement job lined up. Your family is your primary responsibility, but your continued health is also their responsibility.
Maybe lower your standards for jobs a bit, and find something that will let your family survive, while giving you the peace of mind to recover and do a proper job search. It's possible that the time and stress savings could put you ahead, even if the pay is less.
The consensus, even among my family, is not to quit. I've been not quitting for 2 years. So frustrating, but I am occasionally hopeful. I recently lowered my standards, especially if the job title & new experience looks good on a resume--we'll see. My sincere thanks Moon Moth.
Are you able to build up savings while working? The more savings you have, the easier things will be.
I probably can be doing a better job at this. But it's definitely harder than it used to be. Thanks
If you feel like your spending is not under control, look into frugality (FIRE movement is one place to check). If you can make meaningful improvements to your budgeting, it will give you much more flexibility on employment options (maybe take a risk and change fields if yours feels dead end). That isn't an immediate fix but can set you up to be more flexible in the future. I kind of dislike my current job, but that feeling is largely negated by the fact that I could quit today and not have any money problems.
I dipped my toes into FIRE a few years ago and developed a few good habits along with some small investing. I am pretty much debt free and it'd be nice to retire early. But I'll reacquaint myself with it! Appreciate your response.
Don’t do it yet. It could send you into a negative spiral and keep you out of the labor market for much longer than you want. Look for jobs, take interviews from time to time, but don’t quit cold turkey. Find ways to reinvent your job. Look for interesting projects. Think of it as doing a masters on X and put another year or two with that mindset. Meditate. Think of whether your inner voice is part of why your job is making you miserable.
I understand how you feel, but the way. I’ve quit before. It feels liberating, for a moment. But I was always financially secure, and finding my next thing took 9-12 months. If you can’t afford that, and you have a family, the stress of not having an income will be really bad.
Yeah, I cannot do 9-12 months. Maybe 6 and then I'd be in trouble. You're probably right, at least partly, about the inner voice. But at this point it is pretty ingrained and I get headaches the instant certain aspects of my job pop up, sometimes even just by thinking about them. Thanks for the advice, it's persuasive.
What is a respected job in your local area? If you do something that is highly respected, that can be worth a pay-cut or career change.
Eg. Operators at my local oil refinery are well-respected, and I will likely soon be working there (a change that does not require experience… they give you a standard IQ test + mechanical reasoning test, then train you if you do well).
Thanks, Brad. I sort of started recently looking for anything that looks great on a resume, even if it pays less. I'll try to see what others do around here and elsewhere I could possibly do and expand my search. Honestly, I'd take a significant pay cut for a non-miserable, reduced stress job.
I sympathize but having sampled the tech job market for over a year now I got the impression it is not easy at all to find a good job at the moment. Certainly more difficult than 5 years ago. If you can, I would suggest you continue looking/interviewing while you keep your current job.
Thanks alstoc, this is the advice everyone seems to be saying, it's quite reasonable, sage, and with no offense intended, miserable. I'll probably stick with my job but redouble my efforts at landing something new.
I wouldn’t recommend redoubling your efforts, as that can lead to frustration, anxiety, stress, and even depression. Instead, keep searching while your carry on with your life. Let the job search simmer in the background—steadily ongoing, but not dominating your focus. All you can do is improve the odds in your favor, but remember that the outcome is largely beyond your control. Don’t count time. And avoid setting strict deadlines or constantly waiting for responses from companies; you never know how long the process will take, and counting the days (or months) can become all-consuming.
Thanks, that sounds like a less stressful way to go. Unfortunately, there was a development thanks to the high stress (especially lately), and I had a medical situation unfold that made me rethink my priorities. Health got bumped up a lot.
For those of you believe in effective altruism (trying to maximize the value of charitable donations), I've found a cause that saves more lives per $ than the top ranked GiveWell charity.
GiveWell
(https://givewell.org/charities/top-charities) ranks charities by cost per life saved. Malaria nets is the most efficient, at $5,000 per life saved. And that's amazing, but I found a better one.
If you donate towards getting drone jammers for Ukrainian medics, the cost per life saved is even better. It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough. The impact is probably even higher since medics will go on to save more lives. So you can donate $100 towards a jammer and saves lives basically as efficiently as possible.
Here's more info and a good place to donate:
https://x.com/Harri_Est/status/1823010493386142022,
@bekamaciorowski is a combat medic in Ukraine who helps fundraiser and distribute jammers.
'It's $5k for a drone jammer to protect medics going to the front line. Each jammer saves *at least* one life and they do not have nearly enough.'
Where can I find the data or analysis that produced this lower bound? Intuitively, it sounds unrealistically high to me. Less than $5k per personel life saved seems like it would be a far better spending opportunity on the margin for Ukraine's military than most other things they could buy. So I would expect this to have been arbitraged down to less anomalous levels already.
It's also easy to think of many ways it could be false. For example, the drone jammers probably don't have a 100% success rate, and in any case can't stop artillery. More importantly, they don't know who will be attacked in advance and so they have to give them to everyone.
It had not even occurred to me that the implicit argumentation was literally 'let's just assume each additional jammer leads to an additional person equipped with a jammer, and each person so equipped will survive when they counterfactually wouldn't have'.
I now suspect that this was indeed the line of thought here.
If so, this is a very silly analysis. I'm not going to claim that GWWC's estimates are really all that great. But if you've ever glanced at what their attempts at impact calculations look like, it's a completely different world compared to this. If GWWC used this sort of reasoning, they could probably claim something like <$5 per life saved for their top charities and call it a day. (one per mosquito net!)
Lol. You can also buy drone jammers for Russians if they're more your style - QALY's are QALY's after all!
If Ukraine regularly targeted Russian medics and medical facilities then that would be valid. But they don't. There are some opportunities in Gaza if you really want to both sides this. Though not really for drone jammers.
The point is more that once you're buying military hardware, stop pretending this is "effective altruism"
Why? Effective Altruism isn't a pacifist ideology. There've been multiple debates in the ratsphere about whether assassinating Putin would work as a cause area if it ended the war.
That's the problem. Were there similar discussions around assassinating Zelensky? A Ukrainian surrender would end the war too, and save just as many QALYs.
But I get the sense that's not really what this is about. This feels much closer to starting with the desired political outcome, and reasoning backwards into a narrative of how actually this is the totally utilitarian outcome. This has *always* been a failure mode of utilitarianism.
Perhaps EA shouldn't stick to pure pacifism, but that at least provides a backstop against its more nasty tendencies.
Not about assassinating Zelensky. The parallel argument was about whether the US should pressure Ukraine to surrender or cut off aid. This is because Zelensky is not a dictator and the situation is not parallel.
You're starting from a premise ("We're being unfair to Russia!") and then trying to reason back from it. But it's not actually true in this case. There's plenty of people who are pro-Putin around. To the contrary, it seems like it's the other side that desperately wants to complicate what is a fairly easy moral calculus because they don't like that it might condemn their side.
Also, providing lifesaving medical treatment even on a battlefield is allowed by most pacifist religions and ideologies. Likewise moving someone out of danger or running jammers. The usual line is you can't participate in an act of killing even in a supporting role. But plenty of pacifists served as combat medics and wore body armor without complaint.
I think cost per life saved is not an ideal metric. What you want to optimize for is cost per QALY, but this is harder to measure because it is not enough to observe that you lowered Malaria by x%, you would also have to observe what age your population reaches at what health level.
Of course, there are reasons why the QALY per life saved would be lower for either prospective Malaria victims (they are generally poor people in poor countries) or Ukrainian soldiers (they will either survive with injuries disqualifying them from military service (which would lower QALY) or will likely find themselves in a situation to get shot at again (which will also lower their QALY)).
The other thing to consider is that if this is such an effective investment, then why is the Ukrainian military not paying for it? From a quick google search, Ukraine has around 1.2M active troops and received 64G$ in military aid in 2024, for about 50k$ per soldier.
Now, granted, not all of that is cash to be spent how they see fit, a lot of it is likely fancy Western weapon systems with insane sticker prices, but I don't think that this is enough to explain the difference. You can always argue that due to corruption, the Ukrainian military is not willing to invest into cheap devices to save their soldiers lives, but the other hypothetical is that these jammers are less cost effective than advertised.
For another thing, a Ukrainian conscript makes 20kUAH a month, which is around 500$. I will grant you that the median conscript does have some obligations, so this is not his disposable income, but I would personally invest a week's salary into a device which is guaranteed to save my life (even if it will only work once).
Part of the benefits of the bed net figure is that it is backed up by rigorous evidence, not just a claim by some bed net manufacturer, and it seems unlikely that the insects will come up with a strategy to circumvent the nets. With the jammers, the error bars are much higher.
The device is $5k, or 10 months of a Ukrainian soldier's salary.
To the people bringing up "saving lives could lead to ending other lives." Medics do not engage in general combat and are protected by the Geneva Conventions. The chances they will kill anyone outside of self-defense is very low. They are supposed to carry weapons only to defend themselves and their patients. They also are obliged to provide aid to Russians as well. The fact Russia target them at all is a war crime.
Protecting medics and medical facilities (and keeping them out of combat, unlike certain militaries using them as shields) is the one of the most established ways to make war a little less horrible. So no, the fact it might facilitate other killing is not the moral complexity. It's a more efficient and better charity. So are things like medical supplies or other high need goods. You can also get them to Myanmar, Sudan, or Gaza but the risk of it being stolen/intercepted is much higher there. (And if you want to argue the jammers might be used for non-medical purposes that too is a valid concern. But it's like body armor or medical supplies: more likely to save than end even other lives.)
Also, not to sideswipe EA, but you usually get best value for money per live saved in refugee situations or wars. (Which are honestly usually the same thing.) Why doesn't EA do more with that?
It's really not black and white. Soldiers rescued by medical personnel are going to end up back on the front unless they are crippled. Something like 1/2-2/3 of casualties will end up combat viable at some point in the future, depending on the severity of their wounds and quality of treatment.
It is in most moral philosophies and in the international rules of war both sides have agreed to. What morality are you exploring? It can't be pure utilitarianism because the math works out there (you save more lives in net at cheaper cost).
There's the moral quandary that soldiers kill people, so saving the lives of soldiers enables them to do more killing in the future. Anyway I don't have strong moral claims here, I was more concerned with the math of effective charity. Reducing preventable malaria deaths is straightforward. Saving a medic from drones attacks is much more complicated. The jammer might not even do anything, they can still be shot or hit by artillery or blown up by a glide bomb. Rescued soldiers are much more likely to die in the future, with the ongoing war. And they are also likely to kill soldiers on the opposing side. Of course all the saved lives that are too crippled to be soldiers any more are subtracted from the above.
It depends on your system of morality. Most systems agree that if you save someone and they go on to kill someone else you are not responsible for that. Some don't. Utilitarianism is one of them but if you do the utilitarian calculation then you find it still nets out to be more efficient and a net positive. Firstly because of the 50x cost multiplier and secondly because if you're indifferent to whose lives then you also have to factor in all the lives the soldier saves as well as their likelihood of killing nobody (since most soldiers don't) and living through the war (as most soldiers do).
Your objections (that the person could go on to kill someone or be killed in another way) are true in Africa as well. Especially with low life expectancies the latter in particular is a huge downward pressure if you count not by lives but by quality adjusted life years. Which I suspect is why they generally don't.
I donated! Thanks for sharing!
Does this account for Russian lives that saving a Ukrainian life might cost?
It should also account for the Ukrainian lives saved by costing the Russian lives as well.
was thinking about the same thing too
Russians have a fantastic, wonderful path to saving their lives, and a lot of money too - stop their war and get out of the neighboring country. Ukrainians don't have that luxury (well, now they control some 1000 sq. km of actual Russian territory, there will need to be an exchange. OTOH Russia doesn't have an established border anymore, so who knows how this is going to work out).
If your charity goes to saving someone on the battlefield, there is a good chance they are either going to a) kill someone else, or b) get killed by someone else. I don't think the math is quite as simple as the malaria net scenario.
Would your "AI Safety" grants also go to people who are advocating for the idea that restrictions on AI are like restrictions on prosperity?
To me, "AI Safety" is like "Gun Safety" -- a misnomer.
Hold on, why do you say "gun safety" is a misnomer? There are clear and simple rules for gun safety, they work when followed, and not following them results in Alec Baldwin shooting a bystander. What am I missing here?
Indeed, yes, there are four rules for gun safety, but mostly the people who use those two words in succession mean that law abiding people are safer without guns. How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Isn't that "gun control"? I'm not American but FWIW I've never heard gun safety used the same way as gun control.
I'm American and I've never heard "gun safety" used to mean "gun control" either.
Here's a bunch of examples of "gun control" and "gun safety" being used interchangeably:
https://thehill.com/social-tags/gun-safety/.
(Paywalled) Articles from a rudimentary Google search,
The New York Times - Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/gun-safety-republicans.html
The Washington Post - How two gun-friendly senators are turning the tide on gun safety: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/03/gun-bill-king-heinrich-assault-weapons-ban/
Here's an organization called "Everytown for Gun Safety": everytown.org.
https://x.com/search?q=gun%20safety&src=typed_query
https://www.google.com/search?q=gun+safety
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_safety
And now? We keep throwing links at each other until one loses interest?
If you don't believe the US President, who are you going to believe?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/23/fact-sheet-vice-president-harris-announces-gun-safety-solutions-while-continuing-efforts-to-keep-schools-safe-from-gun-violence/
Hoplophobes call gun control "Gun Safety" because "gun control" is racist. Gun nuts call avoidance of negligent discharges "Gun Safety" because there are ways to handle guns safely. Same word used by different parties with different, conflicting even, meanings.
> How they can come to this conclusion given that police and criminals will still have guns, I cannot imagine.
Well for one thing, the largest cause of gun deaths is suicide.
Another issue is that an armed society is a MAD society, where there's a tendency for people to shoot first in fear of getting shot in return. At the very least, that's the excuse that that guy in Texas who killed a protestor used.
People who want to kill themselves use an effective means. Guns are widely available in the US, and are effective, so people use guns. There is no evidence that reducing gun availability will decrease the suicide rate.
Yeah this is a strange own goal, it’s almost as if they don’t care if the policies they advocate get actually enabled. Like, they need to convince a large proportion of people who disagree with them - you’d think the least they could do is to learn the basic lingo as at least a sign of respect? to be taken seriously? Especially basic policies like requiring safe storage - BTW, every badass former military guy I’ve trained with, and shot weapons with, has had only utter disdain for careless civilians who refuse to learn basic gun safety. These people’d be natural allies for sensible safety proposals if those proposing the safety cared to engage respectfully.
One can only dream.
Ah, but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used. It usually means, "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."
...are you talking about Gun Control? I've only ever heard Gun Safety in the "treat every gun as if it's loaded" sense.
Without looking too hard, here's an article from TODAY (I hadn't seen it before I posted my comment): https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4831399-gun-safety-election-issues/. The headline says "gun safety," and the article is about restricting who can own guns, and what kind, what you might call "gun control" instead.
And more from the same site, https://thehill.com/social-tags/gun-safety/.
And just pulling up (paywalled) articles from a rudimentary Google search,
The New York Times - Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/gun-safety-republicans.html
The Washington Post - How two gun-friendly senators are turning the tide on gun safety: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/03/gun-bill-king-heinrich-assault-weapons-ban/
Here's an organization called "Everytown for Gun Safety": everytown.org.
They all use the terms "gun control" and "gun safety" interchangeably.
"but that's not how "gun safety" is usually used" - usually used by whom? Who are these people in your hypothetical example?
You don't know? There's giffords, everytown, 97percent, Shannon Watts just for a start. Our illustrious VP has talked about gun safety when she meant gun control.
By anyone using the phrase. That's almost certainly gonna be activists advocating for "gun safety", and they DON'T mean teaching children trigger discipline, or anything like it.
Do you have a specific example of someone (e.g., an activist) saying something like "OUR guns are safe, even when we use them to shoot you (and your little dog too!). YOUR guns are not safe, regardless of what you use them for, hunting, defending yourself against rapists, your family against home-invaders, etc."?
He used the word "means", which in this context I think "means" something like "my outgroup alternates between two incompatible positions, and this is what it would sound like if they tried to articulate both at once, but of course the underlying principle is simply who-whom".
On the object level, I think the support isn't quite there. There are factions on the left that are against police (especially armed police) and against the military, although I think the left's lock on the federal bureaucracy means that they tend to be OK with the FBI, ATF, and USSS. But even then, I think they view law enforcement guns as a regrettable necessity required by everyone else being armed.
I suppose the exception is the lunatic left fringe when some vocal right-winger gets busted, but even then I think it's less about the guns, and more about the exact same feeling that motivated the right wing to cheer when Osama bin Laden was killed.
Is this a genuine question, or an argument phrased as a question?
For what it's worth, everything I know about Scott suggests he believes that AI will, in the coming decades, potentially pose an existential threat to humanity. So I would wager he's very unlikely to give a grant to someone promoting the position "AI safety is an absurd field and we should always and everywhere oppose it".
It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control. Seems to me like we should be studying the possibility, not seeking to limit the use of AI. And yet "AI Safety" means "AI Control" just like "Gun Safety" means "Gun Control". And it's not their own AIs or guns that they're talking about controlling -- it's YOUR AI.
The whole thing is just stoooopid, because who is the most likely to create an AI which can go out of control? Someone who is beyond a government's control in the first place. So why are governments talking about restricting AIs when it's the criminals who will be running rogue AIs. Same thing with guns. And yet grownups keep enacting childish fantasies of a society where the good people don't have guns and the bad people do.
I want to hit somebody with a stick, Jo, really, I do. A cluebat. Or ClueBringer, even.
'It's a question. We have no reason to believe that an AI will go out of control.'
We have plenty of reason to believe that. Or at least people like me and Scott (I presume) think we do.
If you want an introductory resource, there isn't really a truly great one I'm aware of. Here's a selection of popular intro material anyway:
Scott's old Superintelligence FAQ: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LTtNXM9shNM9AC2mp/superintelligence-faq
Robert Miles' youtube channel. The older videos are probably the most useful ones here: https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI/videos
Superintelligence by Bostrom: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20527133-superintelligence
Human Compatible by Russel: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Human-Compatible-AI-Problem-Control/dp/0241335205#
AI Safety Fundamentals course material: https://course.aisafetyfundamentals.com/alignment
If you're starting to feel familiar with some of the standard intro points like the orthogonality thesis, list of lethalities by Eliezer briefly summarises a lot of other stuff: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uMQ3cqWDPHhjtiesc/agi-ruin-a-list-of-lethalities
It might be in the course materials as well, but many people report that this writeup is what made the nature of the distinction between the goals of an AI and its loss functions properly click: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pdaGN6pQyQarFHXF4/reward-is-not-the-optimization-target
John Wentworth has a series of short writeups on the problems with some common alignment proposals: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/TLSzP4xP42PPBctgw
Is it possible? Of course. Is it probable? Not at all. There isn't a good introductory resource because it Isn't Going To Happen.
Worry more, MUCH more, about the coming polar magnetic shift.
What are your opinions on Kamala Harris' economic proposals? (I don't think we can call them policies as yet).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8xqy0jv24o
(1) They're campaign promises, Deiseach, and will fade away like the morning dew should she be elected
(2) I totally believe she will do all this when she gets into power, just like Obama shut down Guantanamo Bay. Oh, wait...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/why-obama-has-failed-to-close-guantanamo
(3) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she doesn't get elected
(4) If this is her vision for the economy, I freakin' hope she does get elected
Me, I think it's going to be a combination of (1) and (2). Should she be elected, the fine words butter no parsnips.
Add in that I lived under Fianna Fáil governments passing populist "spend spend spend" budgets, and the chickens eventually come home to roost, the cows do come home at last, and the bills have to be paid.
As for the likes of the first time buyers' grants for housing, it's a nice idea on paper. But I think the reality is, as in Ireland with these, that (a) they do little when supply is the problem and (b) some developers and construction firms will hike up prices in response, e.g. you're looking to buy a house for €250,000, you get relief of €30,000, now you just have to get a mortgage for €220,000. Except some developers took that as "oh great, an extra €20,000 is available" and slapped that on the price so now you're paying €270,000 and are back where you started, looking for a mortgage on €250,000.
The IMF also warned back in 2016/17 that this would likely drive up housing prices. So I think that good intentions may not work out as intended.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/imf-warns-states-help-to-buy-scheme-adding-to-pressures-on-housing-market/35710046.html
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/owning-a-home/help-with-buying-a-home/help-to-buy-scheme/
As for medical debt forgiveness, price controls, etc. - well, I'll believe them when I see them. Again, likely to be a lot of court cases over "can you do this?" by Big Pharma, big grocery chains, and so on.
But what do I know, I'm just some peasant out of the bog, so informed opinion welcome, please!
I have just very low confidence anything she put out yet maps to any evidence for what she will attempt, honestly. She doesn't seem like she has any personal beliefs about almost anything related to economics or foreign policy. She's just saying random stuff someone she trusts thinks will poll well. After she gets elected various interests will decide what the policy is, very hard to predict at this point.
I'm not American, but I think Biden's and now Harris' anti capitalism and anti market rhetoric is deeply scary and signals the possibility that America, a lone (relative) beacon of economic liberty will turn away from principles that have enriched her and humanity, for the detriment of all involved. I hope this will not happen, of course, but I am occasionally mildly annoyed that they are so stupid
It worked for Trump. It seems like that's just what the political market demands nowadays.
I suspect that you're getting a heavily distorted view of Harris's proposals, but in any case, there's a conspicuous omission from your post - what is Trump saying.
Almost anything looks sane when compared to Trump's plans to tax trade into oblivion. Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free. But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway.
(1) It's not helping to say "sure, our proposals are stupid, but have you seen what the other guy is saying?" I'm not at all sure that these items are anything more than campaign promises, which is to say crap designed to get voters to support you, but the fact remains - if they are anything like what she really said, and the reason I used the BBC was precisely to avoid 'partisan bias', then they have to be evaluated on the basis of "what the candidate says she intends to do if elected".
If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse". That's like saying "Sure, my economics are screwed up, but if you compare them to Stalin, they look pretty good!"
(2) "Then there's the more minor idiocies like wanting to make "tips" tax free."
Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
(3) "But I suspect that you're working backward from your conclusion so this is all irrelevant anyway"
No, this is real questions because I don't know anything about economic policy apart from being a human living in the current world, and I wondered if these were genuine policies or just "vote for me and I'll give you sunshine and rainbows!" guff.
But sure, keep telling yourself that any questioning of the Coconut Tree World is simply trolling and motivated reasoning.
> Do you mean Kamala's proposal to make tips tax free is idiocy? So you do think some, at least, of what is being reported to be her proposals are bad proposals?
Since I don't follow the news, I didn't realize that Harris had copied Trump's proposal there. But yes, that's a dumb proposal no matter who makes it.
I'm not even saying that there aren't dumb parts of Harris's proposals, just that I think a) you're getting a distorted view and ignoring the good parts and b) ignoring the even dumber things that Trump has proposed.
I did wonder if you were just reflexively going "But Trump did Dumb Thing!" (and by the bye, if you don't follow the news, how did you know? Getting your information in canned talking points from The Usual Sources?)
That's why I wanted you to clarify if you meant Harris' proposal. Since you have clarified that you were "getting a distorted view", I can now ignore anything else you throw at me, on the grounds that if I'm ignorant, tu quoque, yes?
> If the proposals are bad, it is no defence to say "but my opponent's views are worse".
It's pretty darn relevant when you're talking about choosing between them.
Oh, certainly. But the difference between "crappy" and "slightly less crappy" may not be very wide, and it does matter when one side is leaning heavily into "they're weird, they're dumb, they're stoopid" about the opponents.
If you're presenting yourself as the smart choice then the onus is on you to have smart policies, not "well they're not quite as terrible as the terrible ones our dumb, weird opponents have".
Noah smith had a good article on how Singapore manages this. Basically they control the housing starts to keep prices relatively high (as a major asset for the middle class) but not too high with grants of up to $61k for first time lower income earners. Thus the lower income family gains an asset class worth up to $61k more than they paid after buying a house, a grant that is financed out of general taxation, and therefore is a form of redistribution.
However the Singaporean government have some advantages - the government owns 90% of the land, and they never let the prices go to bubble territory.
As the Irishman said when asked for directions by the way off track tourist “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you”, i wouldn’t start from here if we were us.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-housing?r=3lk55z&utm_medium=ios
Noah overstates the tension between owners and buyers and makes a common mistake when looking at pct of household wealth in housing.
The correct understanding is one Zvi makes. Homeowners are net flat housing, not net long. They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
To make things less abstract, if housing nominal prices stayed fixed, meaning the real price fell overtime, which homeowners would be screwed? None. Landlords might be screwed if they are currently cash flow negative and relying on some nominal appreciation. But thats not the tension he referred to. Meanwhile that would be a great outcome for long term affordability.
> They have a large future liability to house themselves that offsets their asset. Combine assets and liabilities and most peoples wealth is not wrapped up in housing.
I’m not sure what that means in practice. The liability to house themselves is what? Rent, if they sell the house?
Maybe, but a lot of people depend on downsizing or moving out of the city later in life - by buying another house rather than renting.
Imputed rent is the technical term, the theoretical cost of renting from yourself. But yes rent would be the cost if they sold, or the new house price if they moved. So long as they don't sell they bear no *net* cost because the asset = the liability.
Assume for the moment that all house prices move proportionally together. If house prices go down, theyd take a paper loss but they still have just as much house, and if they move theyd be able to buy cheaper as well. Basically once you buy a house, then for the cost of the mortgage + upkeep and property tax, you get to have that much house in terms of overall space/quality for the rest of your life no matter what house prices do, even if you move. To the extent that property tax is somewhat linked to price, overall you will have less cost for the same amount of house if prices go down in fact.
You are of course long the specific location you buy a house in and would benefit from a local boom, but we are talking about national housing policy here.
It is true that to the extent people down size at end of life and so will consume less house in the future they may be be slightly long house on average, but that future change in position should also be discounted at appropriate rates. So people may have some positive house wealth (if the property tax effect is not stronger), but it is much smaller than a stat that ignores the liability side altogether.
I think the proposals are even less likely than Obama's to get implemented, because while his were primarily opposed by "the system," the new set of proposals are the kind that attract votes but cause disasters. The incentives for demanding price controls are inverted between the campaign, where they win the non-economist demographic, and the white house where the laws of economics and the empty shelf would apply even to those unaware of the cause. The same goes for the housing subsidy: democrats who are not first-time homebuyers may tolerate promises the subsidy now under the belief that promises are never kept, but if their friends actually got $25,000 from their own pockets they'd riot at the next election.
Noah Smith is bullish on her housing plan: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/harris-has-the-right-idea-on-housing
Also bearish on the "anti-price gouging" thing, but that one's vaguer and hopefully less likely to get implemented.
I'm with you on the secondary effects (a student of Frederic Bastiat).
I would think she should know better, Kamala is two years younger than I. We lived through milk shortages in the 70s, when then President Nixon capped milk price. Dairies failed causing a large drop in production. Perhaps as a teen, she wasn't the news junkie I was, or her Marxist parents didn't enlighten her on concepts such as open markets. Or perhaps that she grew up in Berkeley, California; the Marxist capitol of the world. But still, you'd think someone would be much more aware than to propose price caps with today's knowledge.
The same with throwing money at housing. This will be a repeat of the 2008 housing bubble. Throwing money at a slow growth market will only cause price inflation. If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage??? We don't have fewer houses, home prices should be falling.
All these things going wrong, she says she'll fix !!! spoiler alert, you're already in the executive suite, why are you not doing anything?
> If we have a shrinking population, why do we have a housing shortage???
As a news junkie you should know that the population is increasing, not shrinking. In any case the problem with housing is a regional issue, demand outstripping supply in certain areas, but by no means all.
Banned because the last sentence degenerated into things with too high of an inflammatoriness-to-evidence-provided ratio.
Listen, I think the motivations he granted the globalists weren't very charitable but what he said earlier was quite true and for people who suffered the effect of it (which, as a professional you likely to not suffer quite as much as most) the annoyance over the course of decades well who are we kidding over the course of all of civilization where the elite control what goes on can definitely upset an annoyed people and have them given over to hyperbole.
It is after all very annoying how the vast majority of people are at the very bottom of the pyramid having their lives governed by people way way above them and not necessarily to the benefit of anybody.
https://youtu.be/pN6eAYPVy4w
I myself don't care for the elite much but the following subjectively important and interesting video did quite poorly on YouTube precisely because I obviously don't feel hatred towards the elitists, even though I absolutely think that they are doing harm that I could reverse if I had even the smallest amount of influence.
https://youtu.be/BzHYd2Uar6s
That video as the only non reporter at Maxwell's trial was the very first video on my channel.
My second video proves the point that I lack the desire for fire and pitchfork to be employed against them (without precluding the possibility that it may be necessary).
https://youtu.be/2fYRLbyUPCw
His loathing borne of frustration undoubtedly does not serve him well, certainly not as well as stoicism or actually getting involved with what I'm doing, but I think his anger needs to be understood to the degree that if you do not empathize, no doubt you can still sympathize.
There is a helluva lot more to the housing plan than has yet reached the headlines, and a lot less to the $25K homebuyer subsidy part of it. It is also perhaps relevant to note that none of this is actually brand-new now -- Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago.
(A) The proposed $25K would not be to all first-time home buyers. It would be limited to those who can document two years of on-time rent payments. It is an expansion on the Biden proposal to provide that $25K subsidy to an estimated 400,000/year first-generation home buyers (US citizens and legal permanent residents who could document that none of their parents or grandparents had been homeowners).
The Harris proposed $25K would apply to an estimated 1 million home buyers per year, which would be somewhere between 1/6th and 1/8th of US home purchases in a typical year. How much that would inflate housing prices is an open question, particularly if realtors and sellers don’t have a way to know in advance which interested buyers do and do not have that subsidy in their hip pocket.
(B) There is a good deal more in the proposal to cut through America's NIMBY problem (the supply side) than about boosting demand with subsidies. This Noah Smith writeup both details that and contextualizes it:
https://substack.com/@noahpinion/p-147849831
If you think, as I do, that bureaucratic sclerosis turning us into a society that can't build stuff anymore is one of this country's most urgent issues, then this Biden/Harris policy approach is very welcome. For my money that part is much more significant than a new subsidy aimed at a limited subset of new homebuyers.
"Harris is simply tweaking and building upon of a set of policy changes/proposals that the Biden Administration began carrying out and issuing more than a year ago."
Ah, so this is the usual political gambit of repeating even louder the announcements about "more of thing!" that you already made, so that it sounds like a whole new tranche of "more thing!" instead of "same amount of thing we already announced".
I would expect that when the details (if any) are hashed out, then "terms and conditions will apply" and a lot fewer people will get less money than the big, vague announcement makes it sound.
I'm suspicious of his argument that the $25k subsidy/$10k tax credit is actually fine because Singapore does it. I imagine Singapore does a lot of things differently that might make individual factors play out differently in Singapore than in the US. Maybe the US should also set ethnic quotas for neighbourhoods because Singapore does it and Noah can make up some post hoc rationalization about how it improves race relations.
Hey, if we introduced caning for littering and everything above, I'd happily take that housing subsidy...
I don't think anything the President does can actually fix the NIMBY problem, even if they legitimately wanted to and weren't just politically posturing. Most of that has to do with state/local ordnances, building codes and zoning laws, as well as adversarial review. Changing that is entirely outside the scope of the fedgov, excepting judicious application of the FYTW clause of the Constitution. Harris' plan seems to consist of price controls for rent (very bad), tax benefits and incentives for people who otherwise wouldn't own homes (brings the 2008 sub-prime mortgage fiasco to mind), and incentives to build "affordable" housing. If this means houses that are cheaper to build, great. If this means affordable housing in the California way, where it is required to be sold/rented at below market rates to selected beneficiaries, very bad.
That is a poor and highly selective summary of the Biden/Harris policy proposal. If it was accurate I would entirely agree with you about it. Fortunately it is not accurate.
The Smith writeup that I linked has a much better description of what Biden and now Harris have proposed on this subject (of which some smallish parts have already been implemented by Biden).
So Kamala is going to tackle the Sacred Parking Lot, is she?
Yes, that's rather snarky, but I was more amused by the brass-necked cheek of the grift going on: sorry, you can't build here because this is a sacred plot of land for our tribe, why thank you very much for your kind donation. Ah, good old San Francisco!
https://www.berkeleyside.org/2024/03/12/berkeley-shellmound-spengers-lot-sogorea-te-settlement
"The city of Berkeley will purchase Spenger’s parking lot and transfer the property to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust as part of a recent settlement agreement over the contested plot of land in West Berkeley.
The Berkeley City Council unanimously approved an ordinance today authorizing the purchase, making Berkeley among the first in the country to outright return land to Indigenous people. The city will purchase the property with $25.5 million from Sogorea Te’, an Indigenous-led land trust based in Oakland, and $1.5 million from the city’s general fund.
The decision appears to mark the end of a years-long legal battle over the property at 1900 Fourth St. between the city and developer Ruegg & Ellsworth. The parties in the case filed a notice of settlement in Alameda County Superior Court Friday."
Now, why does my wizened cold black stony heart whisper to me that, should a nice big fat lump of developer money be pushed across the desk of the Land Trust, that this sacred shellmound will be turned into office buildings or apartment blocks faster than you can say "rip up the tarmac, Patsy me boy!"?
I don't know if this is true or not, I'm going by various comments I've read, but nobody knows if there actually *is* a sacred tribal site under the parking lot, it's just an assumption being made by the "give us money or else" set of objectors? Though I probably am being unreasonably mean about that:
"Efforts to develop the property, a parking lot once owned by Spenger’s Fish Grotto, date back two decades. Developers faced opposition from some Ohlone, who protested the development of a sacred shellmound site. In 2018, Berkeley blocked a streamlined permit to build housing on the site. They had been embroiled in a legal battle since.
Beneath the parking lot, adjacent to an upscale commercial area in West Berkeley, some Ohlone say, is the last undeveloped part of the oldest shellmound and village site around the Bay, a ceremonial site and fishing village.
“It’s one of the most culturally significant sites for the Lisjan people and to have it protected forever, I think I’m without words,” said Corrina Gould, a co-director of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. Gould also leads Confederated Villages of Lisjan (pronounced Le-shawn), a group of seven tribes across the Bay Area that was involved in the lawsuit alongside the city of Berkeley.
The city of Berkeley designated the site a landmark in 2000 and it was added to a list of endangered historic places by The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2020, though questions have been raised about the exact location of the shellmound."
I read the article you linked and that is what the key elements were listed as.
> A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
Price controls.
> Up to $25,000 in down-payment support for first-time homebuyers.
> To provide a $10,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers.
> Tax incentives for builders that build starter homes sold to first-time buyers.
Incentivizing people who otherwise can't afford to buy a house.
> An expansion of a tax incentive for building affordable rental housing.
> To repurpose some federal land for affordable housing.
Affordable housing, with the caveat of what "affordable" means (because the article doesn't specify).
> Incentivizing people who otherwise can't afford to buy a house.
I miss the days when pro capitalists would argue that the system while not equal was great for everybody. A subsidy that gets people on the housing market seems good to me, and good for people’s attitude to the system. In any case Fannie Mae is an existing subsidy and one which most conservatives - if not libertarians - are ok with.
> > A ban on algorithm-driven price-setting tools for landlords to set rents.
> Price controls.
That's not price controls. That's anti-price-fixing. If businesses in an area use a centralized authority to set prices that's exactly what anti-price-fixing is supposed to stop.
Subsidizing demand is dumb and will basically end up the same way that Bush 43 tried really really hard to encourage home ownership and we got a housing bubble. We need to build a lot more, but we don't necessarily need to worry about home ownership.
Looking into this some more, describing it as price control was incorrect. But I'm not sure it's price fixing either. It seems like some landlords hired consultants to evaluate their rent prices, in part using private data from previous clients. The fedgov alleges that this is the same thing as the landlords directly colluding with each other to set prices, a claim I am somewhat dubious of.
Kamala Harris: "There’s a serious housing shortage. In many places, it’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up. As president, I will work in partnership with industry to build the housing we need, both to rent and to buy. We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels." 🇺🇸 (4). This seems reasonably clearly described, specific, and good policy, but also not policy that pools stupidly well and thus gets said whether or not you intend to do so (such as being against price gouging).
The grocery store "price controls" thing seems to be people taking vague "anti-price gouging" statement and then interpreting it in the worst possible manner; as your first article mentions, there's no specific attached policy.
In Harris's words, it's the "first-ever" federal ban on price gouging on food. Not just using existing anti-trust or anti-price-fixing laws.
Trump also promises to tell his cabinet to do whatever it takes to lower prices, which should be similarly frightening if we ever take him seriously.
I mean, I think that it is a nonsense populist policy since grocery stores are not actually engaged in price gouging (grocery store margins, like food prices in general, are razor thin because the product is both fungible and regularly repurchased). However, again, there's no actually attached policy yet, so claims of "price controls" are overblown. It could be something like NY's law which forbids excessively raising rates (i.e. raising rates much more than increases in costs) during a crisis, for example. Existing federal anti-price-fixing laws are pretty weak and highly specific, against stuff to the effect of "hoarding to sell later".
She is obviously in a bind here. Blaming "price gouging" for what is obviously good old-fashioned inflation is the only option Democrats have. They can't blame inflationary policy because their administration did absolutely nothing to combat the ghastly inflationary fiscal and monetary policies put into place during the Trump administration--indeed they carried those policies forward and did their damnedest to add a few of their own during the Biden administration. (I know that monetary policy is set by the Fed, which is nominally independent, but in reality the President and Congress do have some influence, and in 2022 the Democrats were very loudly lobbying the Fed to keep monetary policy *loose*!)
Note that Republicans, though far from blameless when it comes to inflationary policy (did I mention that the most horrifically inflationary fiscal and monetary policies of the last five years were put into place during the Trump administration?), feel no compunction about railing against actual inflationary policy while pretending that their guys didn't enthusiastically take part in kicking it off in 2020. This gives them the huge advantage of being able to complain about the actual problem.
Being an incumbent really sucks when your performance on a given issue has been bad. Voters will blame you--not without justification!--for your bad performance while ignoring the poor performance of your immediate predecessor. It would be great if it were politically tenable to just admit that you fucked up (while pointing out that the other guys fucked up too, if applicable) rather than make up obvious silly lies about e.g. "price gouging" but it isn't.
I think there's a good 3-minute explanation for inflation that Harris could give that would substantially reduce the negative impact of this issue for her, but it involves
* reminding people about inflation
* taking a little bit of the blame
* reminding people about COVID and no one wants to think about it any more
* requiring Americans to have a 3-minute attention span
As far as I can tell, parties across countries and the political spectrum are increasingly realizing that their voters can be bribed. Buying the public using the public's money seems to be democracy's endgame.
We're in the completely opposite territory of roughly 1992-2002 when politicians ran as responsible fiscal stewards. Now it's "YOLO just get elected, so no tax on tea, no tax on tips, no tax on Tuesdays, no tax on tacos."
<mildSnark>
>their administration did absolutely nothing to combat the ghastly inflationary fiscal and monetary policies put into place during the Trump administration--indeed they carried those policies forward and did their damnedest to add a few of their own during the Biden administration.
The best the USA can do for bipartisan governance! :-)
</mildSnark>
Literally yes. No snark required. The consumer inflation, asset bubbles, and upward wealth transfer of the last four and a half years were genuinely a stunning bipartisan achievement. Just imagine what we could do if we could get the two parties to agree to do something *not* massively stupid and unjust.
The fed's interest rate is higher than it's been in a long time (last time it was higher was 2006), I don't think it's correct to say that they haven't tried to rein in inflation given interest rates have been over 5% for the past full year. Especially given high interest rates do have lots of downside risks on the economy (namely, potentially causing a recession, which fortunately has not materialized), holding them up is obviously a good and strong action against inflation. Inflation has been low (<4%) since June 2023. Fixing inflation is just a thing that takes a while for people to notice, because getting rid of inflation doesn't make prices go down, it just makes them stop going up.
>"The fed's interest rate is higher than it's been in a long time (last time it was higher was 2006)…"
Although the Fed communicates via interest rate targets, interest rates themselves are *not* monetary policy; more important is the difference between the target and the unobservable "natural rate", and in that aspect the Fed has been behind the curve (cf. interest rates during the Carter administration).
The Fed has indeed been trying, albeit too slowly and cautiously imo, to rein in inflation by bringing back "high" (that is to say, historically rather low but normal) interest rates and by letting some of their massively excessive bond purchases mature without reinvesting the proceeds. I knew someone would point that out, which is why I noted that the Fed is nominally independent. And Jerome Powell is a Republican anyway. And the whole time he has been cautiously trying to rein in inflation, he has been yelled at over and over by Democrats lime Liz Warren and Katie Porter insisting that he turn the free money machine back on! (And that was on top of getting yelled at by Trump in 2019 for exactly the same thing.)
Now I have to push back, a bit hard, against two of your claims. Three first, of course, is that interest rates are high. This is nonsense, as you should already know: in order to find the point (2006) at which rates were last this "high," you surely had to look at a chart. Well, zoom out a little bit! The last twenty years were an aberration, and the pandemic years were an aberration on top of another aberration. These rates are *normal*, in fact they're on the low side of the normal range. They only look high compared to the absolutely batshit rates of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) years.
The second claim is that "inflation has been low (<4%) since June 2023. I truly don't know how top say this except directly: that is not what the word "low" means. The Fed's target inflation rate is 2%. Many people believe that that's too high, but let's give the Fed the entirely unearned benefit of the doubt here. 4% is literally twice the Fed's target! It is quite literally 100% too high! I know you said "less than," not "at," but please think about where you are setting the bar. If we generously assume that inflation overall is closer to 3%, that's still 50% over target, and that's on top of the ghastly high prices that resulted from the years of 8 or 9% inflation. With that in mind, I'm afraid that you simply cannot with a straight face describe inflation as "low," especially to anybody still picking their jaw back up off the floor from seeing their car insurance renewal offer.
>holding [rates] up is obviously a good and strong action against inflation.
Agreed. Unfortunately, they've been signaling that they won't do it much longer. One can only be yelled at for so long, I guess.
I must mention that $25,000 in down payment relief doesn't lower the price of the house by $25,000. If you have a house priced at €250,000 then the buyer needs to come up, for a traditional mortgage, with €50,000, or €25,000 under this plan. This could indeed make it easier for a buyer to get into a house. If the owner instead raises the price to €275,000 because of the policy, then the buyer must only come up with €30,000 of the now €55,000 down payment.
But I haven't heard any details of this "policy". Where does this money come from? What do those that already own homes and those that don't want to buy a first home think of subsidizing that $25,000 for other people? Or if it's a loan, how is the system wrong now to make this a good financial choice for people who couldn't get a home without it?
Disclosures: I'm conservative, currently own a home, and think this is an idiotic idea plainly aimed to try to buy votes from those it would benefit with my (and others') money.
I'm not conservative, do not currently own a home, and think that this is an idiotic idea because like so many "housing affordability" measures that involve direct subsidies, it simply increases demand which pumps prices up higher.
"Demand subsidy" has been one of my favorite bits of rhetoric lately. It encapsulates the problem so perfectly, in just 5 syllables (even suitable for haiku!).
Housing pricing highs
Have a simple solution:
Demand subsidy!
What’s your feeling on Fannie Mae and long term fixed mortgages (which seems to me to be a US only thing, backed by government). That’s clearly a subsidy and one that looks unique to the US. It’s the kind of thing that, if it existed in France only, would be condemned as communist. Nevertheless it has increase home ownership in the US. Increasing demand and supply for housing seems like a good bet, if possible.
My understanding is Fannie Mae is only one of the buyers of mortgage-backed securities. Others can also buy them, so it isn't a government-mandated price-fixing plan. And 30-year mortgage existed before mortgage-backed securities were a thing, so we've been doing that a long time, apparently since 1971.
The 30-year-fixed-mortgage, with no prepayment penalty, is not anything that you would ever find in a free market. No one would ever offer to be on the other side of that market.
Americans' views of debt markets has been warped by their experience with consumer credit.
Just try to fix America's system to be like, say, Canada's. You'll get denounced as "un-American" which I guess is true in the most depressing sense.
Donald Trump's campaign had a tweet complaining about how much home values have risen. Or fallen, I forget which, which is the horrible irony of the situation that anything that makes real estate more valuable (😊!) makes housing more expensive (😡!)
What do you mean by “with my (and others’) money”?
Sorry, I thought it was obvious that money the government spends comes from taxes, and many people pay taxes, including me.
To be fair, it IS only a campaign promise, and those are writ in water.
But much of the money the government spends does not come from taxes. It comes from inflation of the money supply, or printing, or quantitative easing, or long term bond debt, or Modern Monetary Theory (whatever people decide to call it). Which, I believe (I’m no fiscal or macroeconomics expert), erodes value in currency for everyone, screwing the poor and compelling the rich to exit the system.
Home buyer tax credit: 2-ish. This would cost somewhere around$25B/year by my quick back of the envelope calculations, and while I don't think it will do much to help the problem it is otherwise mostly harmless. It has a little bit of "value" as a redistribution program, since it would apply only to first time buyers (about 25% of the market) an would probably be means tested if implemented. I think she'll try to include it in budget proposals but there's a good chance it'll get dropped or nerfed into insignificance during the legislative process.
Price controls: probably 1. If she employs competent advisors and occasionally listens to their advice, she knows this is a terrible idea, but one that will play well with voters who are cranky about inflation and don't know much about price theory. Actually dusting off failed Nixon economic policies and causing massive shortages of consumer staples would be a terrible look once in office.
Insulin price fixing at $35/month just got vetoed by Gavin Newsom in California, who is instead proposing the state government produce its own subsidized generic insulin. Harris might drop it completely, or engage in failure theater (propose it and let Congress vote it down), or limit it to basic generic varieties that don't cost (much) more than $35 anyway.
Medical debt forgiveness: 1-2. The government mostly isn't the lender, which makes it difficult for it to forgive the debts.
>Actually dusting off failed Nixon economic policies and causing massive shortages of consumer staples would be a terrible look once in office.
<mildSnark>
I had mentioned in an email to a friend that the price controls sounded like Harris was channeling Nixon (in a "spirit" of bipartisanship???). :-)
How to prevent the markets from clearing and create shortages in one easy lesson...
</mildSnark>
The Harris campaign estimates that about 4 million people will benefit from the home buyer tax credit. I don't know how many will be added per year, but that's $100 billion for the existing ones.
That estimate is a total over 4 years.
The government is currently spending about $763 billion on interest (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/). So what's another $25 billion?
They're spending $78 billion on "Community and Regional Development". How about we increase that by 32%?
A billion here, a billion there...pretty soon you're talking about real money.
So Harris is trying to buy first-time home buyer votes for $100 billion of other people's money, paid over four (and continuing) years.
You might benefit from reading the entirety of the Biden/Harris homebuilding plan, of which the subsidy to a subset of new home buyers is just one part, and deciding whether you think its actual policy objectives are worthwhile.
I don’t think she could get those proposals past even a Democratic Senate, much less a Republican one, so they’re meaningless pandering.
The possibility of them being realized gives me pause, for sure, because they’re terrible. But so do Trump’s tariffs and proposed tax cuts, and I would give those a somewhat even higher chance of getting enacted in a 2nd Trump term.
So on net, it makes me less excited about the prospect of a Harris administration, though it doesn’t flip my preference.
Harris suffers because her positions are taken seriously, while Trump's ramblings are just taken as ramblings.
Also, people take the worst sounding bits and scream them everywhere while ignoring the sensible proposals (e.g. fighting NIMBYism).
As your Guantanamo example (perhaps inadvertently) demonstrates, she is not going to be able to enact anything without the agreement of Congress, which in most cases means 60 votes in the Senate, which she will not have.
Re #3 and #4, it is a stretch to frame a couple of policy proposals as "a vision for the economy." But encouraging the construction of housing is sound policy which will actually address a real problem. Down-payment assistance will benefit first-time buyers at the expense of older buyers; whether that is a good thing depends on your policy preferences. Re anti-gouging, it all depends on what that means. Finally, people can get medical debt relief now, by filing bankruptcy. Of course, when that happens, the medical providers get paid pennies on the dollar, if anything. An alternative that has govt picking up some or all of the tab might be an improvement, depending on how it is structured.
Thing is, *is* it encouraging the construction of new housing? I think it would be intended to do that, but might not do so in reality; a lot easier to slap increases on the price of houses you're already building than to decide to build an extra 20 on that site.
The problems of zoning, NIMBY, there's plenty of housing but nobody wants to live here/no jobs, etc. will still exist.
By "it" do you mean the down-payment assistance? That is a separate proposal.
My informed opinion is option 3
Agreed. In many dimensions she shames her economics professors. Price controls for food? Expropriation of patents? Tariffs? Subsidizing demand when it is supply that is short? Insane.
Shaming economics professors is something that we all should do. We could make it a game show, maybe.
What exactly is wrong with US shipbuilding? Why is the US so inept at building commercial ships, compared to other developed countries like South Korea, Japan, and even Finland? I saw some stat floating around the other day saying that even in the 70s, when manufacturing employment was a larger % of the US economy, Japan was out-building the US by a large margin.
If your answer is 'the Jones Act', I'd like to hear a bit of a deeper explanation as to why. If the answer is 'well the US de-industrialized', it's worth noting that the US is still the world's second largest manufacturer. (1) So I don't completely buy that either
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_States
Finland is a coastal country with a long tradition of heavy industry, why wouldn't we be good at modern shipbuilding?
How much of is it environmental? Nobody wants a giant shipyard built to spoil their ocean views.
1. Subsidies especially China.
2. U. S has terrible project management and keeps changing design., which is why other U.S. infrastructure projects are so costly.
See Whats going on with shipping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsYak_SARo
The US has had a labor shortage for its entire lifetime, including colonial times. The way it solved it in the past was immigration including low wage immigration. But that has been cut off for about a century at this point. When you have a labor shortage the lowest profit/productivity work goes first. So it showed up first as difficulty finding servants and continued into the offshoring of lower value manufacturing. This included things like mass shipbuilding (especially with the old WW2 supply ship glut).
Now, there is high value ship building. But the US Congress declared war on it in the for populist economic reasons. You see, the type of boat with the highest margins are yachts and luxury craft. This just caused it to move abroad to friendlier, less anti-rich destinations like... Europe. The Jones Act doesn't help either. Plus the heavy industry subsidy reach East Asian model meant new global competition. But that's more or less the story: the reason the US can still be the second biggest manufacturer on chemicals is that, while we offshored a lot of the low value work, no one in Congress declared jihad on clorox for being a sign of inequality.
>You see, the type of boat with the highest margins are yachts and luxury craft
Are yacht manufacturers really also commercial vessel manufacturers? Like, very large tankers and so on. I am a bit skeptical. Also, how did Congress 'declare war on it'? The US is set up to a pretty industry-friendly system of government, which I think is fine, so I'm also a bit skeptical that Congress actually drove an industry out of the country via populism
> Are yacht manufacturers really also commercial vessel manufacturers?
Some are. But even if they weren't there's a great deal of skill crossover between making large pleasure boats and other kinds of large boats among the workforce. And in terms of shipbuilding statistics both count as ships.
> Also, how did Congress 'declare war on it'?
With a series of specifically targeted taxes and regulations. The idea that economic populism doesn't exist in the US, or that it doesn't have consequences, or that the US is maximally business friendly is reasoning with stereotypes. It didn't help that multiple Congresspeople specifically said they were hostile to the industry as they passed legislation which caused producers to anticipate further hostility and leave. Congress did backpedal in the 1990s but by that point they were already out the door.
I would guess that, based on how the defence sector operates, shipbuilders' highest profit margins would be for warships, by a very considerable, er, margin. They wouldn't have the volume there, of course, compared to pleasure craft, and the massive military contractors building warships are a very different sort of business to the shipyards producing glass-fibre yachts.
The idea that military contracts are unusually profitable is one of those widely believed myths. If anything all of the controls on making profits, combined with long sales cycles, means that the government sector is underserved. A lot of the extra expense is specifically besides the government does things like cost plus or fee plus T&M which doesn't incentivize companies to control costs. But if you do things like fixed fee then you get some contractor who makes a nice profit margin and that becomes a whole investigation.
Related to this issue is this article about Anduril and it’s founder (the same guy who invented the Oculus Rift.) he talks a lot about the structure of defense contracting in this country and it’s perverse incentives. I found it a very, very fascinating read.
https://www.tabletmag.com/feature/american-vulcan-palmer-luckey-anduril
The defence contracts I've been involved with have all been very profitable indeed (though sadly not for me personally.)
Terribly small and personal sample size, I know; if you have a bird's-eye-view understanding of the defence sector as a whole of course I shan't argue with you!
Is your context the US or the UK (defence)?
I'd be curious to hear more. My experience is there's usually a lot of money flying around but most of it goes to salaries/parts/that kind of thing. And that's where there's real money to be made because the further you get away from the contract holder the less controls there are and the more you can arbitrage high government prices while pushing costs down.
I can't really expand on that owing to commercial sensitivity, I'm afraid (and sorry for being so vague in the first place!)
Defence/aerospace salaries are very ..healthy.. it's true, and one-off componentry made to military spec (I've seen one-offs fabricated of everything from matchbox-sized PCBs to three-storey-high spare parts for slow-speed "cathedral" diesel engines) can undertsandably be very expensive - but I was talking specifically about profit margins, not overall expenditure.
South Korea, Japan, and the Nordics have made a concerted, national-level effort to invest in and develop their shipyards in a way that historically-good shipbuilders like Britain and the US haven't. There are also differences in design philosophies - for example Korean naval architecture favours increased modularisation compared to similar-spec British designs - that, whilst not necessarily resulting in *better* ships, definitely do result in *better value for money* ships.
(This being said, I've navigated both 1980s British ships and 2020s Korean and Nordic ships, and I very much prefrred the old Brit designs owing to their seakeeping, their propulsion and handling characteristics, "organic" (as opposed to external-contractor-dependent) repairability, and the general niceness of their layout and accommodation (er, for officers at least..) even though they were less efficient economically and required thrice the crew complement to operate.)
This seems to be a general problem with any form of US manufacturing project large enough to require special government investment - American ports, trains, and other infrastructure all have the same issue.
Governments don't invest. Investment requires anticipation of profits. Governments waste money on projects that will only begun because no investor expects to get their money back.
Exactly. Private enterprise won’t invest in necessary projects so the government has to do so.
How do you determine if a project is necessary? Answer: it isn't a waste of money. That is, it returns a profit. But governments give the thing away, so they have no idea whether they are creating too much or too little of it. They can't begin to measure the gain to society, so they don't even bother. They just assume that everything is for the good of everyone.
On a libertarianish theory of government... Government shouldn't invest when there's a clear way for a single entity to make a profit on the returns. Government should invest when the returns are distributed intangibly across most of the population, or over large timescales, or just when any attempt to collect the returns would be impractical or intolerable. But just because the returns from, say, mass vaccinations are hard to measure, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Also when the amount of capital required makes it impractical for the private sector to invest.
Governments can't invest over large timescales because the next regime (whether dictatorial or democratic) might change their mind about the value of it. E.g. in Guatemala, one regime made a contract with a US firm to restore and run the country's 3' narrow gauge railways. The next regime declared that contract to be against the country's best interests, and refused to prevent people from stealing rails, OTM and even bridges.
Just because the existence of ghosts is hard to measure, doesn't mean they don't exist.
The solution to that is the "deep state", i.e. have rule of law and bureaucracy and strong norms so it's hard to change things on a dime for no reason. But it takes a very long time for investors to get the confidence that they'll be treated fairly, and no time at all to lose it.
Everywhere I look I see examples of government investments that generate massive returns. The motorway network, the telecoms network, the sewer network, the National Grid, the Tube - even the ludicrously expensive Apollo programme is estimated to have generated a 7:1 return on investment! (Randomly-plucked-from-internet citation: https://nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html)
That citation talks about
"Phase III (2010-2020): Establish colonies on other planets. This phase should be largely funded by participants, with funds flowing back to the owners and providers of the infrastructure-if it is not an integral part of the project. As colonization begins, products and services-on Earth and in space-should be completely revolutionized, leading to a planetary wealth beyond our wildest imagination: There will be an abundance of resources available from space, new products developed to exploit space, and an abundance of demands that can be met here on Earth as a result of the expanded resource base."
I don't think the return on investment is serious.
Interstate highways undeniably turbocharge GDP, yet it was government that built them, not private investors. It was an investment in future profit and development, even if the government doesn't capture all of that value. Cabining the term "investment" to mean only what your comment claims it means is excessively narrow.
The Interstate Highway system was (like ARPANET) a fundamentally defense-oriented project (so the Feds actually cared about ROI) which had massive positive externalities.
I read a fascinating book recently. It was written by Horace Busby who worked for Lyndon Johnson from Johnson's time in the House through the Senate, Senate Majority leader, US Presidential Candidate, Vice President and Presidency. What a ride! The book is like a collection of essays from different periods, but they are all fascinating, and in the end they help you to form a picture of the man, LBJ, who was unlike any other. I reviewed it here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-the-thirty-first-of-march
Could someone familiar with David Chapman's work help me understand his take on Scott's Master vs Slave morality post, at https://meaningness.substack.com/p/you-should-be-a-god-emperor ?
He writes "Logic cannot help you if your axioms are false. Scott unthinkingly accepts one: that ethics must have an ultimate foundation, from which all the specifics can be derived rationally."
And then he says Scott "gets the right answer" at the end of his post: "I want to be happy so I can be...", which is the "groundless answer" Vajrayana gives. Does anyone understand why this is "the right answer", and how this is the "groundless answer" Vajrayana gives?
I am also confused by "...because moral reasoning is not, and should not be, the main cause for moral action." So what is moral action for him?
> He writes "Logic cannot help you if your axioms are false. Scott unthinkingly accepts one: that ethics must have an ultimate foundation, from which all the specifics can be derived rationally."
> And then he says Scott "gets the right answer" at the end of his post: "I want to be happy so I can be...", which is the "groundless answer"
I have no idea who this is, but its possible he's just not a hyper reductionist morden world view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVxvLd6cF0k
We live in a bubble with one extremely strange and extremely dominate world view about the supremacy of data; there is of course the other option to the rationalist take that "you must believe all data" and saying no every once in a while.
I can't claim any familiarity with his work, but reading the post I'm left with the impression that for David Chapman, moral ethics are grounded in himself, and that this can possibly be manifested in others by experiencing necrophilia (seriously, why are there multiple references to necrophilia in this post...). Moral action is then: "What Would David Champman Do?"
Overall, I agree his argument seems confused, in that he states that there is no ultimate basis for good, but also says good can be objectively measured. These seem inherently contradictory to me, as all quantitative measurements require a grounding to function (eg, distance is measured by a ruler, pollution is measured by particles per million). The great morality debate is such a debate precisely because nobody has an incontestable real grounding frame to claim. Chapman seems to insist that there isn't and can't be one (this is the part he thinks Scott got right in the end), but then never grapples with how that makes it impossible to measure moral good as he claims is possible: Thus, my conclusion is that the grounding frame he implicitly uses (whether he admits it or not) is his own internal sense of right/wrong, good/bad. This does seem to comport with his obsession of being a god-emperor, but is basically useless for anyone who isn't David Chapman and resolves no debates.
That said, I believe what Chapman is trying to say here is that trying to ground all your ethical decisions in a single self-coherent "ground" is a fruitless endeavor (and a significant amount of the rest of his writings are mostly about this), but that one can act in an ethical manner nonetheless by observing the real world and thinking straightforwardly about concrete interactions.
I do not believe he feels he needs to "prove" this is the "right answer" - to him it is self-evident and he feels it to agree with Vajrayana Buddhism's system.
When he says that "moral reasoning (...) should not be the cause for moral action", he is essentially stating that he believes that "what is right" is not something that has an eternal, unchanging definition - it can only be grasped within concrete interactions and not derived from an eternal, unchanging set of laws.
I'm probably not qualified to talk about Buddhism or Chapman. But when I was younger, I had a brief period where I checked out the hype around Zen Buddhism. And my impression is that Buddhists reject Platonism.
There's a word that keeps getting thrown around, called "emptiness". When they say things like "the universe is empty of meaning, what they really mean is that the universe is empty of *inherent* meaning. I.e. platonic essences don't exist. Because an object's existence is fundamentally predicated on its interaction with other objects.
This gets extended in all sorts of ways. One of which is a distrust of all abstraction. Only concrete things are real. Logic is a trickster god that leads you to ruin. So they have a bunch of koans (e.g. "what is the sound of one hand clapping?") that are meant to drive students nuts until they flip the table and go touch grass.
You are... Very correct.
Except for the "meant to drive students nuts", which I guess was meant to be a joke anyway. The idea is that forcing yourself to reflect deeply and insistently on something illogical is one of many possible ways to shut off the logical, self-reflecting part of your mind in order to experience unmediated reality.
Also Chapman is a Tibetan Buddhist, which is quite different from Zen (they focus more on the idea that there is no metaphysically privileged standpoint vs. the idea of there being no inherent essence)
> they focus more on the idea that there is no metaphysically privileged standpoint
I see, I see. Fair enough. Don't know too much about the Tibetan variant. It certainly does shed further light on Chapman's writings. I'm also reminded of reading some anecdote about the Dalai Lama, which was amazed at his ability to rapidly context-switch from marveling at a flower(?) to <pondering something more expansive, but my memory fails me>.
> Except for the "meant to drive students nuts", which I guess was meant to be a joke anyway.
Yeah, half-joking. But only half. In my defense, it was hard to get an accurate read, since most of what I read was buried under deliberate obscurantism about "the nameless name behind the gateless gate". Although I suppose this is by design, to hint that "understanding enlightenment qua words/logic" is counterproductive to "understanding enlightenment qua raw-experience".
In any case, I know *I* certainly wanted to flip some tables. Supposedly, Zen is unique in attracting western monkey-minds like me. And as TLP always said, "if you're reading it, it's for you".
"...but that one can act in an ethical manner nonetheless by observing the real world and thinking straightforwardly about concrete interactions."
Thank you. But what does "act in an ethical manner" even mean if there is no coherent system of ethics?
It means figuring out what is the right thing to do within that specific, nebulous moment. You might say it isn't really "ethical" necessarily and that's what I believe Chapman means by "you should be less ethical".
A groun d for moral action would foundationalist. He seems to be promoting something more like coherentism.
Perhaps, but that's where my comment below comes in. If you said that to him, he'd probably say something like "coherentism is simply a mistaken view based on your naive Western beliefs" and never explain himself.
Chapman generally plays quite fast and loose with the idea of something being "right" - which I think is sort of unavoidable if you generally reject the idea that "being correct" can be determined in a context-free manner.
I find much that Chapman says to be useful, but I also think that he often refuses to let his ideas be "pinned down" in a way where a fact could prove him wrong. Whenever he seems to contradict himself or say something questionable, he just goes "ha ha, you clearly do not have a deep understanding of Vajrayana Buddhism, I pity your infantile Western concepts!" and goes on as if nothing happened.
Despite finding a lot of what he says intriguing, I find it hard to take him seriously for this reason.
A few threads ago, someone asked the question "why do people support Trump?" And a lot of the people gave the answer "here's why someone who doesn't particularly like the man would vote for him: it's because they prefer his policies." Because that's the type of people who comment here. That doesn't address the question of those people who actually like him. Here's my take on it: much of Trumpism is a great big lower-class "pride" parade.
When it comes to gay pride parades, many ask the question "what's there to be proud of?" After all, the mantra is always that they didn't choose to be gay, so why take pride in it as if it were an actual accomplishment? It's hard to see what positive externality homosexuality provides to society. It reduces the fertility rate and spreads sexually transmitted diseases. Maybe homosexuality makes people better at art, though that's rather questionable IMO.
Of course, the real reason for pride parades isn't a theory of homosexuality's positive externality. It's not really about political demands either; if all the political demands are fulfilled in one year, you can be sure there will still be a pride parade next year, perhaps with a new set of political demands. It's a way for those who have been bullied, laughed at, and shamed for their homosexuality to say "f*** you" to their tormentors. If people respond with disgust and offense to the pride parade, that's all the better.
Trumpism is a pride parade for lower-class whites. All their lives they've been laughed at and looked down on for their lack of money and educational credentials, and also for their lower-class cultural habits, for dressing like cowboys, watching daytime court shows, listening to country music, shopping at Wal-Mart, buying lotto scratchers, speaking with an accent, eating junk food, and (until recently) drinking Bud Light. And then there's a movement that comes along promising a celebration of lower-class identity. Take the reality TV star you were mocked for looking up to and make him President. They laugh at you for watching professional wrestling? Take a professional wrestler and make him a party convention speaker. If the upper-class people respond with disgust, compare it to Idiocracy, mission accomplished! If they respond with positive fear, say it's the second coming of fascism, well, that's all the better! As with the gay pride parade, it's not really about policy. It's the fact that Kidd Rock and Hulk Hogan are up on that stage and not asked to leave, not anything they say.
Now, I'm not asserting here that this explains ALL of Trump's appeal to lower-class whites. For many working-class people in the Midwest, it was a vote against NAFTA instead of for Trump. But it is a lot of Trump's appeal.
https://x.com/AlexanderTurok/status/1817162880321495411
I like this thought a lot!
I'm reasonably sure that pride parades aren't about pride in being gay, they're about pride in being publicly gay.
Even in the highly-selected online ratsphere, I've seen several Trump supporters say that the like Trump because he fights people they hate.
Reminds me of something I read once speculating that "rolling coal" is the Redneck version of the Gay pride parade, i.e. spitting in the face of those you hate. And Scott's argument that Gay pride parades look a lot like religious parades for interesting reasons (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/). Also related is this description of "yanking down sacred fetishes to prove dominance" I once read:
"... Two young IRA men from his community were ambushed and slaughtered by the SAS on the anniversary of the Ballykelly bombing, which struck Carlin and everybody in Carlin’s community as a revenge killing indistinguishable from the actions of the IRA or the UVF. At their funeral, three thousand mourners turned out ready to fight for the right to bury them in dignity. Challenging them was a small army of RUC men.
What followed was a running battle/riot/stand-off to get the corpses to the place of burial, with constant negotiations with the coppers about what compromises to make in terms of cultural symbols- use the hearse or not, drape the tricolor flag on the coffin or not, with or without the black beret and gloves. During one skirmish, the pallbearer standing next to Carlin was shot in the head with a plastic bullet and died.
His description of the running street battle kind of reminds me of two Stone Age tribes battering each other about, trying to yank down the other’s sacred fetishes to prove dominance..."
(from https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/kdfo4a/book_review_thatchers_spy_my_life_as_an_mi5_agent/, by u/mcjunker, reviewing "Thatcher’s Spy: My Life as an MI5 Agent Inside Sinn Féin" by Willie Carlin)
So perhaps it's always about tribalism, even in our day & age...
"running street battle" is the best description of the one time I saw antifa in action.
> It's hard to see what positive externality homosexuality provides to society. It reduces the fertility rate and spreads sexually transmitted diseases.
Lesbians have much lower rates of std transmission; on the net, homosexuality has no or even negative effect on std transmission.
I like Sam Harris's description (from The Key to Trump's Appeal - Episode #224: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3xBUNIkA_c):
"One thing that Trump never communicates, and cannot possibly communicate, is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed toward self-aggrandizement. Even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters. Even when he is calling himself a genius, he is never actually communicating that he is better than you, more enlightened, more decent, because he's not, and everyone knows it.
The man is just a bundle of sin and gore. And he never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps more importantly, he never even aspires to be anything more. And because of this, because he is never really judging you, he cannot possibly judge you, he offers a truly safe space for human frailty and hypocrisy and self-doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer, a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual balm. Trump is fat Jesus. He's grab-'em-by-the-pussy Jesus. He's I'll-eat-nothing-but-cheeseburgers-if-I-want-to Jesus. He's I-want-to-punch-them-in-the-face Jesus. He's go-back-to-your-shithole-countries Jesus. He's no-apologies Jesus.
And now consider the other half of this image, what are we getting from the Left? We're getting exactly the opposite message. Pure sanctimony. Pure judgement. You are not good enough. You're guilty, not only for your own sins, but the sins of your fathers. The crimes of slavery and colonialism are on your head. And if you're a cis-white-heterosexual male—which we know is the absolute core of Trump's support—you're a racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist barbarian. Tear down those statues, and bend the fucking knee. It's the juxtaposition between those two messages that is so powerful."
Sounds reasonable to me.
I was reading your quote and thought "this is really reflective from Kamala". Then I noticed that there are other people named Harris as well.
Great post. Sam is sometimes a nutcase but when he gets it right he really gets it right.
I don’t think this is quite right… the divide isn’t quite class… it’s more frequently rural/urban (which does correlate a lot with class).
I do think George is correct about the authenticity part… and to me the question is *why do rural people value that over all other aspects?*
(Other aspects being kindness, attempts and helping those less fortunate, etc.)
I do think rural people value those other aspects, but the anti-value they place on inauthenticity has a far greater weight. In their world, you must have common sense, be able to do things yourself, and trust your neighbor. People that can talk a good talk but can’t help them if they’re stranded on the side of the road are useless to them and potentially net harmful.
Yeah, I think you're on to something here.
As for your tweet, that's populism? Without a centralized cultural authority enforcing standards, it's hard to get 50.1% of votes (individual or electoral) to support a party that presents as refined and classy.
You forgot buying food from McDonald's to provide to groups that are visiting him.
I'm strongly anti-Trump, but that did strike me as pretty endearing.
There might be some truth in this, but I think it mostly misses the mark. I'm going to say part of the Trump appeal is that regardless of how you feel about him, what you see is what you get. He's honestly who he is at all times. You can hate this or love it, but it's the honesty that people want and that is seemingly missing in much of our political realm. Well that's my simple take.
I think that this is correct. But, not "honesty" but rather authenticity. He comes across as authentic, as opposed to a manufactured politician, which is the case with many of his opponents (certainly Hillary Clinton and most of his opponents in the 2016 primary. But not Joe Biden). And this is not about honesty, since he obviously lies constantly. (Though it is possible that, in the moment, he believes his own lies. But that is a separate topic).
I think you have a point although I don’t really agree that Trump can be called ”authentic”.
There is an expression ”hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” and maybe Trump is not a hypocrite as much as the usual public figure in this sense eg. he doesn’t seem to pretend to respect things he doesn’t like.
> he doesn’t seem to pretend to respect things he doesn’t like.
I mean sometimes he does when he really can't get away with not doing so. For instance I don't get the impression that he likes religion at all, but he knows he can't get elected as a Republican with that attitude.
Yes, please change honesty to authenticity in my above post.
I have a hard time thinking anyone would associate Trump with honesty. He certainly stiffs people he's made promises to frequently.
Yeah you are right. The word I meant to write was authenticity. (Thanks to gdanning) He lies a lot (perhaps) but they are all authentically Trumpian lies.
Authenticity is very important. If you can fake that, you have it made.
In this context I don’t think it can be faked.
I'm guessing Arrk's comment was half tongue-in-cheek.
The Bayesian is down.
This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
What are the priors for mega yachts sinking during storms?
I'm looking for podcast and nonfiction recommendations in French (blogs are welcome too). I'm asking here because I found a number of good books and blogs in English through this community, so if there are some other French speakers we hopefully have some common tastes...
I'm a native speaker (French parent), but I've never lived in France for significant periods of time, and since I no longer live with my parents or take classes my French is feeling a bit rusty... Regarding language level: I don't have trouble reading the news\listening to radio, I can read academic texts with no issues, but I don't know any slang (this can be an issue, for example in Marchika's "Les gardiens d'aleph-deux", which I find incomprehensible, and in youtube channels).
Non fiction stuff I've liked in the past have been about history (usually not modern though), nature\biology, linguistics, history of science and technology.
Some podcasts - 99% invisible, Storiavoce, Solastalgie (last 2 are french). I know France culture has many things, if there's a specific rec I'd love to hear about it.
Some non-fiction - Reich's Who we are and how we got here, Clark's The sun kings, Sobel's Longitude, S. Sagan's For small creatures such as we, Rhode's The making of the atomic bomb, Strauss's Ten caesars, Pryor's Scenes from prehistoric life, Finlay's Fabric, Beaussant's Le roi-soleil se lève aussi, Barnavi's Dix thèses sur la guerre.
I come from a physics-math background which tends to make me dislike podcasts on those topics. History of science is usually good.
I was hoping for some recommendations here...
I can propose https://www.radiofrance.fr/podcasts or https://apprendre.tv5monde.com/fr but I guess you know those already.
In large projects, man-years are used to count allocated human resources. I think we should also use this to track humanity's progress. I'll use BAMYs (Billion Accumulated Man-Years) as a handy unit.
Right now, we are progressing with ~8 BAMYs per year. In total, humanity up to today has logged ~1800 BAMYs.
A few selected events on the BAMY scale:
150: First writing (3000 BC)
400: Buddhism, Plato
520: Christianity
600: fall of the western Roman Empire
900: Copernican revolution, Columbus reaches America, printing press
1000: Newtonian physics
1100: steam engine
1260: lightbulbs become available (Edison)
1300: theory of relativity
1370: atomic bomb
1420: silver age of marvel comics (added here because of Friday's review)
1580: mobile phones and internet become affordable (mid-1990s)
1640: iphone
1750: GPT-2
Has this been used somewhere else?
I like this idea a lot, and would love to see it built out more comprehensively with, as other commentors note, things like a spreadsheet with data, non-scientific points, and more non-western points.
Other comments:
With the exception of the first two items, these all come from "Western" civilization. How much input did China and India have?
Were the accumulated BAMYs of the New World mostly lost or redundant?
You seem to be measuring scientific/technological progress, specifically. Going back to the Civ analogy, this means that taxation, entertainment, culture, and infrastructure are only valued in terms of their (potentially long term) impact on technology.
> With the exception of the first two items, these all come from "Western" civilization. How much input did China and India have?
Their contribution was being there in parallel, giving additional chances for technologies to come along.
> taxation, entertainment, culture, and infrastructure are only valued in terms of their (potentially long term) impact on technology
yes.jpg
Actually I would say that culture and entertainment are part of technology.
> Were the accumulated BAMYs of the New World mostly lost or redundant?
Almost all accumulated BAMYs are redundant for tech development. For example, you don't need to accumulate 150 BAMY to invent writing. Writing was invented independently on multiple continents. If the continents of the Old World had sunk below the ocean just after settlers arrived in the New World, this would not have affected the Mayans developing their script much.
Mostly technological process was very inefficient. You could likely invent writing -- including all the precursor techs with just a few BAMY if you knew what you were doing. Just like the Rite of AshkEnte can be performed with a few cubic centimeters of mice blood, but usually is much more elaborate.
I've been thinking about this for the last couple of hours, and I think the answer is no (we shouldn't ignore it), after initially thinking the answer is yes, because the agricultural impact alone is enormous (corn, potatoes, tomatoes), and these *are* technologies; their predecessors were not great foods. There's also quite a few smaller/ indirect/softer inspirations that I think are worth *something*; snowshoes, sunglasses, kayaks, and certain sewing techniques from the Inuit, for instance. The modern environmental movement draws (imperfectly and crudely, but clearly inspired by) from many native American traditions. Combine that with their low populations and I think the contribution per billion man-years holds up.
This comment thread is exactly the sort of discussion I was hoping for... I find the responses here extremely valuable, especially in terms of AMYs being a useful concept to think about accumulated progress and at the same time highlighting stuff I haven't thought about yet.
(this applies to all of you, just adding it here once to not litter the discussion)
This sounds like the start of some Civ-like measure of population output. :-)
No I don't think so, and nice idea. (I wish you also shared the spreadsheet you used to estimate these BAMYs to save potential collaborators time, if you used one that is)
I just have an ASCII file with rough mental math, but here you go (I did some rounding as I went along cause this is not so accurate anyways):
Year Mpeople BAMY
10kBC 2 2
9kBC 4 6
8kBC 5 11
7kBC 8 19
6kBC 11 30
5kBC 20 50
4kBC 40 90
3kBC 50 140
2kBC 70 210
1kBC 100 310
1Ad 200 500
100 200 520
200 200 540
300 200 560
400 210 581
500 210 602
600 220 624
700 230 647
800 250 672
900 270 699
1000 300 729
1100 350 764
1200 390 803
1300 390 842
1400 390 881
1500 460 927
1600 550 982
1700 600 1042
1800 1000 1142
1850 1300 1207
1900 1600 1280
1920 1800 1316
1940 2200 1360
1950 2500 1384
1960 3000 1414
1970 3700 1451
1980 4450 1495
1990 5320 1548
2000 6100 1609
2010 6900 1678
2020 7800 1756
Signal-boosting a generally-negative comment on the comic book review feels to me like a pretty strong signal to readers that you didn’t like that review (or at least, like Gwern, felt it was half-baked), which feels like “illegal” interference with the book review contest…
I read through all the comments on that piece and thought this one was the best one. Generally-negative but really good analysis: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel/comment/65707831
The review was bad enough, and enough people thought it was bad enough, that I don't think this matters
Gwern generally has interesting things to say, even if I don't always agree. In this case, I think the criticism is fairly mild, and the length of the comment should be taken half as a statement that the review was interesting enough to inspire that much response.
I found the comment interesting and useful, and missed it when reading the thread (maybe it wasn't there yet) and I'm glad Scott highlighted it.
I think highlighting interesting discussion for the readers is probably more valuable than Scott completely avoiding giving the impression of having an opinion for "fairness" reasons.
Scott seems to avoid commenting on the book review posts, so it seems like, in general, he is trying to avoid leaking information about his own opinions.
I agree that that thread was an interesting discussion, but it was an interesting discussion that can be summarized as “we think this book review is half-baked and should not win the contest”. And Scott apparently thinks it’s worth our time to read that thread. Ok.
I think it's worth linking to the reaction of last year's winner:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-silver-age-marvel/comment/65965901
Agreed. The start of the comment reads like a snickering mocking of the review writer, or at least is very easily interpretable as such that I and several others did interpret it as such. The rest of the comment is a good elaboration on the review but it doesn't cancel out the bad prefix. It's generally good discussion/writing etiquette to not "Steal the show" from something you're commenting on: if you have a very good contribution, wrap it inside praising or neutral commentary on the thing you're commenting on.
More generally, writing styles is like humor: You can never uncontroversially say "Not Good" about it without being contradicted by a bunch. I have once read a Marxist critic of Scott that sharply and harshly called Scott's writing "bland" (or was it "grey"?) and incompetent... and then proceeded to cite I Can Tolerate Anything But The Outgroup * as an example. Laugh all you want, I certainly did after I got tired of raising my eyebrows, but the same general phenomenon happens when Rationalists/STEM tribe harshly calls Post-Modern or Critical Theory writing embellished nonsense. *I* certainly believe Post-Modern writing styles are more deserving of the label "bullshit" than Scott's, but then again that's exactly what someone who have read Scott for years but Post-Modern writing for perhaps an aggregate total of 1 hour would say.
It's always funny to someone.
* : https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup
Was it the piece by Elizabeth Sandifer at Eruditorum? I'll omit the link, because of her rather annoying insistence on meat-naming Scott throughout.
That one had stuck in my mind for a while, too. Some of her criticisms on style hit the mark, and the temptation to just string together cool and exotic analogies and thought experiments is one LW-adjacent writers seem self-aware about (see the term "insight porn", for example), but I think the whole effort is doomed by her distaste at his politics.
I don't remember, I distinctly remember he was a man though, so maybe not an Elizabeth, but I could be wrong.
> meat-naming Scott
I'm tempted to take this as evidence it was her, because I also remember the author did that a lot, but then again, it's a bit of a shibboleth among anti-ACX types to say the middle name, perhaps not an identifying characteristic.
Some of the commenters in that thread were mocking, but I don’t think Gwern’s comment was. He is basically saying “this could have been a better essay if the author had spent a bit more time polishing it”.
Having read the comment, I think it was spot-on. Others had already read the comment, too.
I wasn't going to vote for that review (my current favorite is Real Raw News), but found it hard to nail down what I thought this review lacked or needed. The comment did a good job of briefly showing what the review was trying to do.
The Democratic messaging seems to have shifted from "Republicans are racist" to "Republicans are theofascists who will cause Christian nationalism".
Is this due to some real change in the Republican Party? Why? Isn't Christianity in long-term decline, and even the right supposedly taking a "post-Christian turn?"
Or is it about what scare words play better with focus groups? If so, why has this changed? Is it all just abortion?
I want to point out the incredible cultural primacy of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" in every left-leaning narrative not just abortion but any cultural or legal aspect of young women's lives.
It's an interesting story taken to a silly dystopian extreme, almost cartoonish, and the writing and prose are best described as, well ... "Canadian". It's 40 (50?) years old, it was certainly read by most women in my college cohort, and yes there was a movie (or miniseries?) At the time, stories about the creepy menace of charismatic Evangelical Christians, and the hypocricy and misdeeds of "Televangelists" were very popular in the culture. Those themes have faded away (except for any Mormon like Mitt Romney being shunned.)
And yet in the last month I have read an opinion piece (not just a blog comment) by a woman who directly warned that discussions of the "fertility crisis" and "natalism" was really a sinister Christian plot to force all women to bear a government-mandated number of children. OMG JUST LIKE IN HANDMAID'S TALE!! She wrote this with no typos and proper grammar, if not much reasoning or logic. One other example: Justice Barrett was an easy target for the paranoia (*)
As the saying goes, "It's all so tiresome." But thinking about it this week, it hit me that a big part of the reason that story scares the crap out of young women is: They are not being oppressed by MEN. They are being used and enslaved by other, older WOMEN. Betrayed, as it were. Given the absolute central role that in-group social rivalry seems to play in women's relationships (**), this narrative detail is a stroke of genius. [The story also has a stark simple visual brand, easy to use, like a placard or chanted slogan. The Handmaid outfit is the visual equivalent of a Sammy Hagar song (***) -- simple, unambiguous, perfect for shout-alongs and fist-pumps.]
Has anybody else noted this evergreen go-to dystopian scenario?
___________________
* - I can't find the Onion article, "Amy Barrett Shows up to Confirmation Hearing in "Handmaid" Outfit Just to Mess With People", so this Vox article will have to do: https://www.vox.com/culture/21453103/amy-coney-barrett-handmaids-tale-supreme-court
** - https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/women-as-worriers-who-exclude
*** - I think Sammy Hagar is a stone genius at saying simple things in a simple way: Wanna discuss fuel economy and highway fatalities, or shout "I Can't Drive 55"? Guy could have been a speechwriter.
Abortion is an issue that Republicans are really weak on, so it's only logical to attack them for it.
Predictably, everybody - including affluent liberal, though they'd never admit it - got sick of relentless fixation on the must pessimistic possible viewpoint on race
It's just more of the pot calling the kettle black, preemptively accusing conservatives of bigotry through gaslighting. In the imaginary world they're trying to conjure, All conservatives are 'Christian nationalists' or Deniers of a Woman's Right to Choose. But imagining conservatives don't have an interest in women's biological autonomy is mistaken, and labeling them extremists is foolish.
If the clueless Left want extremists, they need look no farther than Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and supporters of Hamas. Although I won't vote for either candidate, wannabe 'progressives' telling ridiculously fanciful stories about conservatives won't win them any votes. In fact, it remains to be seen whether Harris can win without at least some Deplorable votes. The Democrats' proud lurch to appease the extremist Left just may bring us a surprise like 2016.
I’m not American, admittedly but I have not noticed that so much. It’s an odd strategy for a party that has a lot of ethnic Christians.
However the Vance is weird messaging is interesting, and probably cuts the new right off at the knees. After all Vance has said a lot less controversial stuff than many of the Substack right.
In the US we have about a hundred branches of Christianity that live in peace, but who will dogpile on any one group that tries to climb to the top. This goes all the way back to the democratic selection of borderline atheistic founding fathers, from a patchwork of deeply religious local districts who would view a continental representative carrying the distinctive marks of any of their neighbors as a deeply dangerous usurpation. It is why separation of church and state went over so well in a country of farmers who by today's standards would be considered flame-spitting fundamentalists. It's not so much separation of *their* church and the state they were after, but separation of the other thousand churches that had a long history of elbowing them!
The arrival of a large number of Catholics one hundred years later threatened to upset the balance, and caused several waves of panic. The fear (in "bad years,") was that if allowed to be elected on their own merits, Catholic politicians would coordinate with each other to ensure their church stayed on top. In the end it turned out to be a bundle of discriminatory lies propagated by hack journalists, and encouraged by politicians who did not personally stand to lose from it. Now it is barely mentioned in history textbooks.
The Christians most prominently associated with the Trump campaign represent a distinct sect, "dominionists," that the other branches are uneasy about. That provides the basis for making Christofascism the rallying cry for a largely (63%) Christian party.
If I had to guess, I would expect the message is under tension, whatever it is. The Democrats probably want the most damning thing they can tie to the GOP that won't result in someone trying to take another literal shot at Trump.
I've heard relatively little "Republicans are theofascists" and rather more "Republicans are weird", as was suggested elsewhere in this thread. It'll probably bounce around like that for a while.
The goal is to associate the entire party with their least popular, yet well-documented members, see also: "Israel is its finance or defense minister," and "Democrats are woke and hate anyone with European ancestry." The politically demanding and well-organized "dominion" bloc is very real, and very worrisome to established conservatives, and even to more conventional Christians who see their churches being linked into hierarchical networks of business-like mentorship.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
― Barry Goldwater
Wow, when Goldwater says someone is reluctant to compromise...
Are they worried it might work?
Either in the literal sense by unifying the White (or anti-Black) vote around the Republican party.
Or more likely the more subtle message the GOP could just going all in on attacking Affirmative Action and talking about antisemitism among Democrats.
I think that the criticism they're making is that the Republican party has become minoritarian: national politicians will endorse policies that are very unpopular, other than among evangelical Christians, such as total nationwide abortion bans or restricting divorce.
I think the reason Democrats are saying this at the moment is probably more because it's not really saying anything meaningful: people think Kamala Harris is the frontrunner, and as a frontrunner, one should generally avoid saying anything as much as possible.
>I think that the criticism they're making is that the Republican party has become minoritarian: national politicians will endorse policies that are very unpopular, other than among evangelical Christians, such as total nationwide abortion bans or restricting divorce.
Yet notably Trump has taken all mentions of abortion out of the Republican platform this year, and is explicitly running on *not* banning abortion nationwide.
Yeah, even Trump can tell it's a vote loser and wants to downplay it. Just like he previously broke with Republican orthodoxy on attacking SS/Medicare.
I think sampling episodes of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, a left critique of SCOTUS, at least shows partly why the Democratic Party is picking up this messaging. Even beyond Dobbs and the related dominoes, recent SCOTUS cases touching on the 1st amendment establishment clause seem to have squarely gone to the litigant presenting a Christian/christian nationalist argument.
As to where the republican party is "truly," today, I perceive Josh Hawley's rising star as a clean counter-argument to the claim that the right is taking a "post-Christian turn." Cynically, I suspect that the vast majority of religious invocation by politicians is merely pandering, rather a than a true expression of deeply held beliefs, but the christian/CN interest group is clearly valued and respected by republican politicians and is rewarded by them with policy action when republicans are in power.
Finally, the abortion issue appears to be a winner for democrats, if they can keep the issue in focus and express it clearly.
Not alone the Republicans, or are you not aware of all the "Kamala Harris is a good Baptist" reports now?
American Baptist, not Southern Baptist, of course, but seeing less of "her mother brought her and her sister to Hindu temples" and more emphasis on "neighbour brought them to sing for the choir in local church" because turning out the black vote does inevitably rely on ministers and churches getting the congregants organised:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/kamala-harris-and-faith-a-baptist-with-a-jewish-spouse-and-ties-to-the-black-church-and-gandhi
"Black women, including clergy and activists who have not stopped organizing and praying since the COVID-19 pandemic, are quickly embracing Harris.
The Rev. Traci Blackmon, who joined 4,000 Black clergy on a recent pro-Harris call, said the outpouring of support for her is connected to the anticipated ugliness and opposition she is bound to face in her sprint against former President Donald Trump.
“She should be president because she’s equipped, prepared and the best candidate for the job,” said Blackmon, a St. Louis-based United Church of Christ minister, who spoke to the AP as Harris gathered delegate support.
The call was organized by the Black Church PAC, co-founded by the Rev. Michael McBride, a longtime Harris supporter and pastor of The Way Christian Center in Berkeley. McBride told the AP that he was still in the pulpit on Sunday when Biden withdrew his candidacy. After the benediction, McBride said, one of the church mothers stood up, shared that news, and asked, in effect, “What do we do now?”
...On Sunday, after Harris was endorsed by Biden. she sought out Brown with an evening phone call, about an hour before the AP reached him at his home in San Francisco.
“I’m calling my pastor,” Harris said in her typical greeting, referring to the man that staffers in her office are instructed to get to know during their first week on the job.
She wanted her pastor to pray, and pray Brown did, that Harris “would be the quintessential instrument to bring healing, hope and wholeness” to the United States of America."
Though, as this article points out, she is religiously diverse:
https://www.deseret.com/faith/2024/08/19/kamala-harris-religion/
"Kamala Harris comes to her 2024 campaign for president with much more exposure to the world’s religions than typical American politicians.
The vice president was introduced to both Hinduism and Christianity as a child and has since become part of a Jewish family."
I'm not sure which part of my comment is linked to your response. In case it is "I suspect that the vast majority of religious invocation by politicians is merely pandering, rather a than a true expression of deeply held beliefs" then I agree it applies across the board.
That's mostly what I was saying. The Democrats play the religion card to appeal to voters just as much, but it doesn't get written up in the same apocalyptic CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM WHITE SUPREMACY THEOCRATIC FASCISM terms.
As I said, Hillary was touting her Methodist credentials, Kamala (or her campaign) is doing the same with the Baptist link. Suppose we got an article that ended with Trump calling up 'his pastor' to pray with and for him. Imagine the RELIGIOUS BIGOT ZEALOTS INFLUENCE IN THE WHITE HOUSE headlines there!
Yet black churches are often conservative on certain issues, every bit as much as the 'religious right', while being liberal or in line with secular views on other issues. But of course, you can't really accuse black churches of white supremacism, so they don't make a good scary monster and super creep.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/02/16/faith-among-black-americans/
>Kamala (or her campaign) is doing the same with the Baptist link.
<mildSnark>
Now, if it were the _Westboro_ baptist church, Harris would lose supporters faster than the eye could see...
</mildSnark>
American Baptist is the same denomination as Bill Clinton. They seem to be the 'nice', liberal Baptists as contrasted with the Southern Baptists, though the latter have undergone a lot of changes in the past couple of decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Baptist_Churches_USA#Beliefs
Though now I'm wondering - was Kamala ever baptised? They don't practice infant baptism, so it would have been up to her to arrange to get baptised. She attends Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, but has she ever been formally baptised?
In the US, I think the christian religious right has had more policy wins granted to them by republicans than religious groups have gotten from democrats, at least in the last 20ish years.
I'm ready to update with new evidence, though.
FWIW, I don't think imagining news headlines is worth the mental energy.
Also, I am personally concerned about the capture of governments by religious organizations, whether they are white christian denominations, majority black churches, mosques of whatever color, hindu nationalists (ex. in india), jewish extremists (ex. in Israel), buddhist fanatics (ex Sri Lanka). They are all scary monsters, to me.
Abortion should also be a winner for Republicans, if they could manage to have some discipline on the subject.
After decades of work they finally got it back to the old and new status quo of "leave it to the states". The majority of everybody, including the majority of elected Republicans, seem quite happy to leave it at that. But predictably there's some voices somewhere going "Well y'know we _could_ do something at the Federal level..."
Because they are true believers and their true belief is not aligned with the majority of the us.
This seems to be a case where pro-abortion activists claiming "if you let them take away roe it's a slippery slope to more restrictive policy" seems to actually have been correct, at least w.r.t. the primary activists.
Whereas that same argument about gay marriage (legalize this and they'll soon be clamoring for polygamous marriage" seems to have been incorrect, so far
I don't think it does play particularly well with focus groups. Not in the big blue city where I live and work anyway, nor in the swing state in which my family also spends a lot of time. Most of the people energized by it were going to vote anyway and certainly weren't going to vote for Trump.
One factor is simply that the racism cliches have worn out their welcome with a lot of voters, the Dems needed some newer messaging about the other guys.
And that said, it also does reflect a change in the Republican Party. Red states really are passing or trying to pass stuff along Christian nationalism lines, some astonishing stuff is spelled out inside that "Project 2025" plan, etc.
And yes what's happened with reproductive rights helps make all that tangible rather than just the same old lib bogeyman. Not just abortion either: _lots_ of women of my acquaintance noticed when a sitting justice of the current Supreme Court majority declared -- on the record -- that the 60-year-old ruling that normalized access to birth control needs to be reversed. Etc.
>Not just abortion either: lots of women of my acquaintance noticed when a sitting justice of the current Supreme Court majority declared -- on the record -- that the 60-year-old ruling that normalized access to birth control needs to be reversed.
That was and is one of my concerns with the Dobbs decision. Personally, as _policy_, I support Roe v Wade, Obergefell, Lawrence, and Griswold. Unfortunately, as SCOTUS rulings, they can all be viewed as built on sand. Which justice wants to revisit Griswold?
There are lots of people who describe themselves as evangelicals now that don't go to church, but they are Trump supporters.
Jesus Is My Savior Trump Is My President American Flag T-Shirt https://a.co/d/6NuttAL
Recall the images of January 6th, when after invading the Capitol building, they led the group in prayers.
So yes, it is a long-term shift in the Republican party from being conservatives to being whatever wackos will support Trump.
Both currents were always there in the D rhetoric, so I think it's a matter of emphasis. The memetic evolution is converging on something that the Ds think will work best, except that it's actually that only some of them think it will work best, and others simply want to hop on the bandwagon. It's like how all of a sudden everyone went from being angry at each other about whether Biden should step aside, to being in lockstep about how great Harris is. Coconut and watermelon emojis were everywhere. Then "weird" happened. I guess now it's "Dominionism", or whatever is being called these days? (The nomenclatural parallels with the ideology sometimes known as "woke" are amusing.)
I do wonder about the wisdom of leaning into anti-Christian rhetoric when there's a possibility of literal Islamist protest at the DNC, but maybe they think they've got that wing under control?
>when there's a possibility of literal Islamist protest at the DNC, but maybe they think they've got that wing under control?
I think they are wrong about having control. Last Wednesday, Islamists disrupted part of Harris's event in New York City ( https://www.timesofisrael.com/anti-israel-protesters-disrupt-nyc-support-rally-for-harris-campaign/ )
Overturning Roe v. Wade is definitely a factor, and obviously all attempts to define political opponents are to some degree instrumental, but there's plenty of material to work with:
- In general Republicans still strongly support a greater role for Christianity in governing the US: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/03/15/christianitys-place-in-politics-and-christian-nationalism/
- Louisiana passed a law requiring displaying the Ten Commandments in school
- The Oklahoma State superintendent instructed schools to teach students from the Bible (in some unspecified way)
- Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker directly cited the Bible and theologians and in a recent ruling which also called destroying embryos an affront to God
- Marjory Taylor Green (the ultimate foil for Democrats) literally calls herself a Christian Nationalist
I think the biggest actual CHANGE here is how much Trump and his fellow travellers have really enthusiastic support from far-right religious groups, not in the lukewarm sense that those people might be willing to support a McCain or a Romney, but in the sense that they feel those politicians are very strongly on their side. (Like most things Trump this is a Rorschach test, where it's easy to make the case he's not at all religious and doesn't care about them, but hat doesn't change anybody's mind.)
The real change is that conservative Christianity is weak enough that attacking conservative Christianity as conservative Christianity is now a viable electoral strategy.
Project 2025, for example, is still being stuck to Trump even though he never supported it and actively denounced it. It's also being emphasized in a way Project 2017 wasn't. The Heritage Foundation puts out one of these every time there's an election without a Republican incumbent. So do most of the big policy orgs. It's basically an audition for the policies they want and serve as a signal that if the president wants X policy in Y agency they can hire the experts from that think tank and they'll come in with the right ideology/technical experts. Of course, Trump could put Heritage types in power. But that's not really his base or JD Vance's base.
The lesson there is that conservative Christianity is so weak a political force and has so many toxic policies you actively want to stick Trump with it the same way Trump wants to stick the left with its far left/socialist wing. This is always a thing (nut picking) but who are the nuts have changed. It's interesting in particular that the rich/corporations have fallen out of favor as the leftist bogeyman.
>The real change is that conservative Christianity is weak enough that attacking conservative Christianity as conservative Christianity is now a viable electoral strategy.
I think this is correct. Christianity is so weak in 2024 that you hardly ever see explicitly religious arguments against LGBT outside of explicitly religious spaces. Nobody takes the argument, “that’s against God’s law,” seriously anymore, so accusing one’s opponents of being secretly motivated by said argument can be an effective strategy.
If it's Protestant theofascism, can it really be called theofascism?
We had a dang good try at it with the Pope claiming temporal as well as spiritual authority, and the Orthodox got at it from the other side with Caesaropapism.
America has a lot of different denominations and non-denominational churches which fall under the umbrella of the "Religious Right", but that really has waned in influence since its hey-day, I think. Not to say that appealing to religious voters is not in play, still, but all parties do it - Hillary was touting her Methodist credentials, and there is the religious left, or liberal churches, which want to be as involved.
The focus has shifted; if you look at complaints about the Supreme Court, it's that it's packed with Catholics. Nobody is complaining about the conservative Supreme Court with its majority of Southern Baptists imposing their doctrines.
And that's where accusations of Christian Nationalism are going to hit an obstacle. If we're talking abortion (or "healthcare services" as I believe the current preferred term is), then the Church is officially agin' it, no matter what the laity on the ground may do. However, the Church is *also* for things that the Democrats, or liberals would like: pro-immigration, anti-death penalty, pro-unions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_right
"Supporters of the Christian right have no one unified stance on the role of government since the movement is primarily one that advocates social conservatism; in fact, "struggles [have] broken out in state party organizations" between supporters of the Christian right and other conservatives. It promotes conservative interpretations of the Bible as the basis for moral values and enforcing such values by legislation. Some members of the Christian right, especially Catholics, accept the Catholic Church's strong support for labor unions."
So while I wouldn't say that the influence of appeals to the bloc of religious/conservative voters is not there, I also think that the focus has shifted, the influence is not what it was, and that it's a handy bogeyman for the progressive factions to trot out: "oh no those Christofascists are going to make The Handmaid's Tale come true!"
See if the Democrats are still out there canvassing black churches, and with black churches, for the election and then judge how seriously you think they are worried about Christian Nationalism. When the President of the Southern Baptist Convention appears in the triple tiara, then I think it's time to worry 😁
This survey is from 2014, I think, so the figures are outdated, but it gives a general idea that even Evangelical churches have Democrat-leaning members:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/party-affiliation/democrat-lean-dem/
https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/party-affiliation/
> If it's Protestant theofascism, can it really be called theofascism?
I applaud your rhetoric, but: Oliver Cromwell?
Couldn't make it stick, and indeed the Puritans who won the war to overthrow the king and (as good as) Romanism immediately started having to purge and put down the extremists on their 'side', including religious zealots, proto-communists, and dissatisfied soldiers looking for back pay and the promised equality of all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Model_Army#Revolutionary_politics_and_the_%22Agreement_of_the_People%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranters
Olly was able to force through the new Puritan way of life, but it pretty much ended as soon as he died, and here we go with the Restoration, Charles II who is a Catholic in all but name, and the re-establishment of the Church of England.
(Is it just me, or is there a bizarre parallel to Cromwell in C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian"? "Lord Protector", no king, modernity replacing the wildness and magic, people keeping the old religion alive in small secret meetings, even the super-scary old old religion...)
I never thought of that parallel, and I wonder if Lewis intended it or if it is just something that can be seen in the text?
"Or is it about what scare words play better with focus groups? If so, why has this changed? Is it all just abortion?"
If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
Planned Parenthood seem to know which side their bread is buttered:
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/planned-parenthood-illinois-action/DNC-2024
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5058669/abortion-democrats-chicago-dnc-illinois-reproductive-rights-roe
(Had to use Fox News link since NYT is paywalled)
https://www.foxnews.com/true-crime/planned-parenthood-offering-free-abortions-vascetomies-dnc
"Planned Parenthood Great Rivers of St. Louis announced in a X post that a bus is headed to the DNC in Chicago on Aug. 19-20 to offer free services.
"Here we come, Chicago! Our mobile health clinic will be in the West Loop with @ChiAbortionFund & @TheWienerCircle Aug 19-20, providing FREE vasectomies & medication abortion," the post said. "EC will also be available for free without an appointment."
The Planned Parenthood location noted that there is a waiting list for vasectomies duirng their time at the convention.
"We currently have a waitlist for free vasectomies," a follow-up X post said. "Repost to spread the word!"
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
It's an issue where the Republican position is very unpopular. Same reason the Republicans attack "wokeness" so much.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/abortion-as-the-affirmative-action
I think abortion in the US has got to be one of the biggest own goals in history for the Democrats. The vast majority of abortions are committed by single mothers, the poor, minorities, etc - that is, disproportionately Democratic voting blocs. Some quick napkin math:
Abortions from 1973 - 2005 (excluding those who would have been <18): ~ 31 million
Assuming a ratio of 4:1 Democrat bias, ~24.8 million, 3:1 ~23.3 million, 2:1 ~20.5 million
Voter turnout in presidential elections is somewhere in the 50-60% range, ~55%
So abortion has cost the Democrat party something like 11-13.5 million votes in the last presidential election. This is probably an overestimate, as potential children of abortive mothers would likely be on the lower end of political engagement, lowering the turnout. There would also be a fraction of abortions that would occur even if they were illegal. Still, if that many Democrat voters were alive today I think they would have a permanent majority in the federal government. It's the great irony of our time that the Democrats so vehemently support abortion and the Republicans so vehemently oppose it.
To more directly answer the question, Democrats were the original party of slavery and a lot of the progressives of the early-mid 20th century were quite racist. Think Woodrow Wilson or LBJ types. They approved of abortion on eugenics grounds, as most abortions were committed by poor/black women (same as now, really). This is the legacy of Planned Parenthood, for instance. Later in the 1970s/80s, the conservative Christians aligned with the Republican party, and obviously they were opposed to abortion for religious reasons. The right wasn't going to alienate such a huge power bloc and the left already supported abortion. By current day, abortion has just become coded as another blue tribe/red tribe issue.
> I think abortion in the US has got to be one of the biggest own goals in history for the Democrats. The vast majority of abortions are committed by single mothers, the poor, minorities, etc - that is, disproportionately Democratic voting blocs.
This has to be the cynical take I have read on the net in a while. It is right on par with:
> Republicans should not try to prevent school shootings, because these disproportionally kill young people and teachers, both of which lean Democrat.
Or:
> Democrats should not try to prevent the loss of life of military men, as these mostly vote Republican.
Luckily for humanity, politics mostly don't work like that (with some notable exceptions as the incentives provided by the three fifths compromise).
Personally, I do not want future human generations to be selected for 'their parents were too stupid or high or irresponsible to use a condom', but I guess that makes me an eugenicist in your eyes.
Eugenics isn't necessarily a bad thing. The sort of voluntary genetic selection in IVF that Scott is a proponent of seems like an unambiguously good thing to me. I am wary of eugenics when it becomes low functioning people should not reproduce, and it's not too far from there to forcibly sterilizing them. But I agree people shouldn't have children they are unable to materially and emotionally support, and voluntary abortion is possibly the least bad way to do so.
On abortion itself I'm pretty conflicted. I don't think there is any bright line between a fetus and an infant human, nor any medical or ethical framework that consistently can differentiate between the two. A framework where a fetus has no human value would be hard pressed to argue against infanticide. A framework where a fetus has the same rights as a person presents a strong argument against contraception, which seems like it would just make life objectively worse for everyone.
Some people arguing the pro-abortion side, notably Peter Singer, bite the infanticide bullet. I think he is correct in his reasoning, but virtually everyone arguing that side is politically savvy enough to not mention it.
> A framework where a fetus has the same rights as a person presents a strong argument against contraception, which seems like it would just make life objectively worse for everyone.
For abortion to be bad, the actual fetus would have to have person rights.
For contraception to be bad, any hypothetical fetus would have to be person rights.
If the latter is true, then I am a monster beyond redemption. I don't donate sperm. I don't engage in stealthing. I don't rape women. Even marrying a woman and producing as many babies as nature will allow is not a goal of mine. With just the last point, I will have probably denied perhaps a dozen potential humans their existence over my life. Should I serve my murder sentences consecutive or in parallel?
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
The R restrictions on abortion are really unpopular, and not just on paper, but in terms of motivating actual voter behavior. My district swung ~40 points to the left when we had an abortion measure on the ballot.
> If anyone can explain to me *why* the Democrats have gone so hard on abortion, I'd genuinely like to know. Is it simply "we're appealing to young, college-educated woman as our demographic"?
There's a lot of fertile female Americans who now have to worry about which states they travel to. They all grew up with the law being one way, but now the rug of progress has been pulled from under their feet. Abortion is, I think, the greatest single victory for the American right since Reagan, and it's a continuous slap in the face to everyone who thinks that "the arc of history bends toward my idea of justice", or that there's a right side of history, or heck, just in the idea of directional progress.
> There's a lot of fertile female Americans who now have to worry about which states they travel to
How so? As far as I've heard they're not administering pregnancy test checkpoints on all the roads out of Alabama just yet.
Wasn't Prohibition also a huge slap in the face to the idea of directional progress?
Repealing Prohibition, you mean? I think that got overshadowed by fighting actual Nazis. And once that was over, we started realizing that the early Progressives were ... problematic. Good thing we learned our lesson and can never fall into that trap again!
So who are the Nazis we have to fight until we realize the early pro-choicers were... problematic?
Are comments here basically unusable for anyone else? I get replies I’d like to reply to but the “reply” link takes me to the top of the page. Is this true for others?
Exact same issue for me. UX flow is: I get notification of a reply in Substack app > I tap on it > it takes me to the top of the page (so I need to go hunting to find it). Likely an app issue … will check later whether it works fine on browser (I expect it will, as issue seems to be an anchor tag that the app doesn’t recognise).
only issue for me is loading speed. comment tree usually takes, idk, ~3 seconds to load?
Not so far.
Edit: I do sometimes have mobile problems due (I think) to browser/site slowness. I act on the page, there's lag in processing the action, and when I click somewhere, the click is treated as though it were on whatever part of the page should be showing, even though that isn't what's shown. (That is, the structure of clickable controls on my screen updates faster than the pixels.)
I've definitely noticed the reply link taking me to either the top of the page or somewhere higher in the comment tree a number of times.
This happens to me sometimes but not others. I have a vague sense that it depends on where you click in order to reply. It feels like if I click on the words “your comment” it takes me to the right place or it’s just random.
I don't get the reply issue, but if I try sorting them by new it crashes the app.
Not true for me.
Not for me.
Are people getting colds more often than, say, 5-6 years ago?
Anecdotally, I used to catch 1-2 cold per year before COVID. During COVID that number dropped to 0. But that number has been steadily rising since the end of COVID. I've had at least 5 colds this year and it's I my august. Actually just got off a 3 day bout of wheezing and coughing.
My environment hasn't changed much in that period. If anything I am more fit than before. My job stress has decreased slightly. I spend slightly less time in public places (eg. subway) than before COVID. My travel--air and roadtrips--are back to pre-covid levels.
Again, anecdotally, I see my coworkers call out sick more often. My family reports more colds too.
Im planning to take a look at Google search queries to see if I can find patterns of people googling for "cold remedy" and other similar phrases and hopefully compare the data across a few years and regions.
The only sickness I’ve had since Covid started was Covid itself and that was very late in the game, last December.
This is an area where personal anecdotes are not very helpful. We need strong data to confirm or refute.
My Bayesian priors are what was taught before covid. People get cold 4-5 times per year on average, children about 10 times per year.
Obviously individual experiences may be vastly different. We can get older and our immunity is no longer as strong as before and we may get worse symptoms. Or maybe isolation during covid prevented us our immune system to be retrained that now we are less protected. I expect that any increase will return to the baseline, including that covid is become just another cold virus.
Less, for me, but I attribute that to general higher levels of hygiene in my lefty social circles. Someone who's around people who've rejected a lot of disease-control measures might experience the opposite?
Open question but there does seem to be evidence that yes, infectious diseases are up in general for unclear reasons: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/yes-everyone-really-is-sick-a-lot-more-often-after-covid-220056642.html
[epistemic status: some nerd can try to quantify all that complexity, sure ain't me. And I doubt we even have enough/the right data, tbh]
Immunity debt works as an explanation. Since I don't think we can easily quantify, how much of an increase it "should" account for and there's the second order effects to consider. When people have collectively functioning immune systems, they have some degree of herd immunity against any disease. If I never get a cold, I'll also spread fewer colds. Now, even if I don't have individual immunity debt, I'm still under higher threat, because herd immunity levels in general have been lowered. More people will be spreading the cold to me, giving me more chance to catch it now.
The original cause of the lock downs might be gone, but all these diseases affecting the herd, reduces general herd immunity for longer. Maybe years. We can't have a control group for such a dynamic either, since long-lockdown populations affect short-lockdown populations.
The article mentions China though:
"Whooping cough, or pertussis, cases have climbed by 45 times in China in the first four months compared with last year."
45 times seems extreme. If those numbers are true and the spray-everything in antiseptic mist you see on YouTube, that seems way worse than just the effect from social distancing/isolation. I'd guess that might have been the equivalent to putting lots of people on immunosuppressant drugs. Bubble boy gets it worse than lonely boy. Also given, that these spray-campaigns were based on magical thinking, I'd not be surprised if what they were spraying had horrible quality control. Who cares, if it's just for show? In which case it might have been outright substituted with low-grade poison, if it could cheaply meet the absurd demand. China is the land of sewer oil, after all.
Are you misidentifying COVID infections as colds? I remember a statistic from a while ago that the average person in the UK had about 1.5 COVID infections per year. I remember another statistic from before COVID that the average person would catch about 3 respiratory virus infections per year. So, if you identify all COVID infections as colds, then you would observe a 50% increase in colds, on the assumption that you're catching about as many non-COVID colds as before.
It's really easy to misidentify COVID as a cold, because the symptoms are similar for many people, and the COVID tests you can buy generally don't work [1]. To emphasize the last point: if you have COVID, and then take a rapid test, you will almost certainly test negative in the first 48 hours of the infection. If you take a rapid test a few days into the infection, there is a two-thirds chance you will test negative. So rapid tests can confirm COVID, but a negative test result doesn't really give you any information at all. This is why, if someone has a respiratory infection but says it's not COVID, you should not believe them, and should just assume that there's about a one-third chance that it is COVID (since COVID is roughly half as common as other colds AFAICT).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666535223000976
Interesting. I did not factor mild COVID infections into my model.
My admittedly shallow model of contemporary COVID suggests the weird colds I've been getting (eg. wheezing cough, no fever or runny nose) might then be covid-related.
Yeah, my understanding is that different people respond quite differently to COVID infection, in contrast to common colds where most people have roughly the same experience.
It's the opposite for me. I used to have almost constant colds from late October until about April. I tracked symptoms weekly for one of the flu monitoring research programmes, and most weeks I was entering some kind of sniffle. I think I have had about three colds since Covid, plus two bouts of Covid itself (which very much resembled a mid-range unpleasant cold, for me). I commute over an hour each way on a busy train, too, although I'm working from home more now than I used to - but still going in several times a week. I'm not sure whether it's because more people are working from home when they're ill, or what, but I very much appreciate the difference.
Yeah, well I never had almost constant colds, but I haven't been laid up with a bug since 2019. I'm not working in the city anymore, I have a job in rural america and spend most of my time here. I don't know if that is what has changed for me. But I certainly have exposure to a fewer number of different people, than I did when I was working in the city.
It would be interesting as an annual survey question here. I have had Covid once (2022) and 2 colds (2022, 2024) since having covid. Normal for me is a cold once every ~3 years, and flu maybe once per ~10 years, so no obvious signal. I'm guessing those with young children might have higher frequency in general.
Before Covid, I used to get a bad "cold" about every five months, where I would take two days off of work and take about three weeks to fully recover. They weren't actually colds, but close enough. I followed advice and went to a doctor after two weeks with it, but the last time my doctor said the antibiotic and cessation may be coincidence, and that turned out to be good advice: I forbore taking the antibiotic for a week, and it ended up going away anyway.
Once Covid hit, I worked remotely, and then noticed I didn't get sick "on schedule". I assumed my illnesses must have been related to being around other people.
I was laid off in 2022, and got a new permanent job in December of that year, going in to work every day. The illnesses still have not recurred. I conclude there must have been something about the previous workplace, but have no clue what it may have been. It was a typical office building in a downtown.
Doesn't look like it to me: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-07-19%202024-08-19&q=%EA%B0%90%EA%B8%B0,rhume,erk%C3%A4ltung,resfriado,%E6%84%9F%E5%86%92&hl=en-GB
But https://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/START__AM__AM0209__AM0209A/SjukloneperiodSektor/table/tableViewLayout1/ looks like the number of sick days increased by almost .5 days per employee and quarter between 2019 and 2020 and has stayed elevated since.
Anecdotally, I'm having the opposite experience here in Seattle. I'm in the same public-facing job that I was prior to COVID, but instead of 2-3 colds a year, I'm down to one at most. And now that I think about it, my coworkers seem to be calling out less than they were pre-COVID, and I'm hearing less complaining from friends and family about colds. I'm back to flying as often as I was pre-COVID, if not moreso.
My allergy symptoms have increased, though! While colds and allergies can have very similar presentations, based on factors like length of the symptoms, when and how they abated, and so on, I'm pretty sure my colds are way down
I built a searchable database from ACX & SSC posts over here: https://readscottalexander.com
Any feedback of things you'd like to see?
(Tags are AI generated for roughly 200 out of 1500 posts for now as I gather feedback. @Scott you have an email from me in your inbox if you ever want to chat directly!)
Thanks for making this! Suggestions:
- "Compact" display option e.g. just post title and link, ideally something simple like https://slatestarcodex.com/archives/
- User option to show 20/50/100 results per page
Done!
Both great ideas, thanks!
One topic I am interested in is 'good comments'. There are many comments which are substantive, recount original anecdotes or experiences, or otherwise well worth reading, but get buried intrinsically by threading and just being in the comment section. Scott highlights some, but I'm sure there are many that I am missing. Perhaps you could bootstrap a selection of best comments starting from the ones that Scott links in the Open Thread or 'Comments on X' posts as positive labels?
(I've been musing for a while about doing a 'Tales from the Hacker News Archives' focused on 'war stories' and other personal material which are a lot of the value I get from HN, as a demo of the latest wave of ultra-cheap LLMs, but of course the point applies to SSC/ACX as well.)
Since Robin isn't adding this to his website for now, we could instead crowdsource a list by each sharing 50 favorite SSC/ACX comments we've got bookmarked. Then, someone could use an LLM to hunt for similar comments.
I'm confident I have at least 50 quality comments bookmarked since the move from SSC to ACX. Let me know if you're keen to try.
Sounds pretty interesting! I'm gong to focus on the posts for now, but comment analysis could be a fun project. There are almost 500k comments[1] so it's a more substantive volume than the posts to analyze.
Also I would love to read "Tales from HN", so I can only encourage you to do it if you feel called to it :)
[1] https://readscottalexander.com/stats
This rocks, thanks for making it. Feature request: if you’re running the posts through AI, could you also get it to assign each post e.g. a 'seriousness' score where 0 would be humour etc., 0.5 is speculation, and 1.0 would be a deep dive on a topic with lots of citations?
I'd love to be able to sort by seriousness and read the most well researched posts, but also it'd be great to read the all-time least serious posts too (I actually followed Scott on twitter for ~3 years just because I loved his puns. Had no idea who he was or that he had a blog.)
Could also assign scores for lots of other metrics too
That's a great idea, thanks! There are a few tags related to humor (like "humor" or "satire") and others related to hard science ("statistics", "study critique") but it's binary instead of a spectrum and hard to find for the user.
I'll play around with "humor" and "well researched" scores and whatever others dimensions I can think of - if you have any other suggestions, feel free to add them here too
I'm running this market which might be of interest, "which days will be blessed with an ACX post" https://manifold.markets/warty/which-days-will-be-blessed-with-an
The AI safety grantmaking form doesn't accept negative numbers.
Darn! Google Forms has a thing where if you force a response to be a number, it silently forces it to be a positive number, and I always forget about this because it's so dumb. I've changed it to force it to be higher than -99999, hope that works. If it messed up a response you've already sent in, you can either do it again or email me with the correction, sorry.
Came here to say the same thing. Definitely needed!
If you had to come up with a canonical list of articles / books to study the replication crisis, what would be on it? I'm looking for suggestions on both the causes and impacts of the replication crisis.
I can't say what is canonical, but let me share some potentially interesting links, most of which you've probably seen already.
Descriptions/histories of what is going on:
-https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/
-https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/ubefep/replication_crisis/
-https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/n5g1hc/comment/gx4e6nt/ (historical awareness)
-https://theerrorbar.com/?e=39
-https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jqw35 (generalizability vs replicability)
Initiatives and databases
-https://datacolada.org/
-https://scienceintegritydigest.com/
-https://retractionwatch.com/
-https://i4replication.org/
-https://replicationindex.com/
-https://forrt.org/reversals/
--https://www.gleech.org/psych
-https://replicationmarkets.com/
-comments from a blogger who participated in the above
--https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
--https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/
-https://journalistsresource.org/media/how-to-cover-academic-research-fraud-errors-webinar/
-https://jamesclaims.substack.com/p/how-should-we-fund-scientific-error
-https://chris-said.io (a number of posts)
--https://chris-said.io/2012/04/17/its-the-incentives-structure-people-why-science-reform-must-come-from-the-granting-agencies/ (first one)
--https://chris-said.io/2024/08/18/scientific-whistleblowers-can-be-compensated-for-their-service/ (latest one)
Once you're finished researching, could you please share the full list of things you've found with me, even if they don't make it into what I assume is your upcoming post? Replying here or via a Substack DM would work. Thanks!
Thanks for this! This is a great list. A few books I’d to the list are The Cult of Statistical Significance, Science Fictions, and also Bernoulli’s Fallacy.
I had very mixed feelings on Bernoulli’s Fallacy. He blames frequentism for the majority of the replication crisis. I thought it was a great history of statistics and how frequentism came to dominate. It has a conceptual overview of bayesianism vs frequentism, but if you’ve read even half the links above you won’t learn anything technical from it. I’m still glad I read it because while I knew the names of Galton/Fisher/Pearson, I didn’t know anything about them. Some of them were more open to Bayesian approaches than others, but frequentism came to dominate in large part because of personality conflicts and academic politics between them. I thought that part was very interesting and he traced things back all the way to Ars Conjectandi in 1712.
I had some parts that I disagreed with. He argued that frequentism was driven by eugenics research. He made a great case that belief in eugenics correlated with belief in frequentist approaches (they were both popular among the British aristocracy of the late 1800s and early 1900s). But I wasn't fully convinced that they preferred frequentist statistics and silenced bayesian approaches _because_ they wanted eugenics policies.
My overall thought on the replication crisis is that the causes could vary widely per field:
- Eric Hoel argued that he thinks that neuroscience is struggling because people have a lot of faulty priors that they haven’t confronted.
- I think this could be the case in physiology and sociology where their priors are all downstream of Critical Theory, which has had its own replication crisis with the Sokal Squared Hoax. But I don’t believe neuroscience gets its theoretical priors from Critical Theory, so I’m not sure where they’re coming from. With regards to psychology, I did really enjoy this post on the lack of impact of the crisis on social psychology (https://www.experimental-history.com/p/im-so-sorry-for-psychologys-loss), which argued that the field had made so little progress that it doesn’t really matter if most studies fail to replicate.
- Then I’ve spoken with biostatisticians who told me they think their work won’t replicate, and they say they're doing their work at academic medical centers where the patient population isn’t representative of the broader population. I brought up that they could use data from the broader population as a prior, but they said that this might be a problem for them in peer review.
- This post (https://crunchnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-replication-crisis) has an inside look from the point of view of a physics grad student. I’d summarize it as: physics professors just don’t seem to care that much. But physics hasn’t been as impacted as other fields either, so maybe they don’t need to take it quite so seriously.
> could you please share the full list of things you've found with me
Will do, I'll probably be digging into this off and on over a few posts over the next year. I think sometimes the problem is frequentism, sometimes fraud, but what isn’t covered often in these discussions is that sometimes there’s a cascading failure here with Critical Theory having non-falsifiable ideas and then those ideas become the ideology for social science fields like social psychology and even economics. I dug into one example with economics here: https://taboo.substack.com/p/book-review-the-two-parent-privilege
Additional links:
https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incentives-its-you/
https://x.com/the_megabase/status/1811883606165586164
That list from megabase seems consistent with the fact that many social scientists I talk to have never even heard of forecasting marketplaces, let alone attempted to participate.
Thanks for the book titles and links. I read the overview of the Galton-Fisher-Pearson history in the pop sci book The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy.
You might get some more hypotheses from some of the papers in https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html, e.g. On fraud, Why do scientists lie?, and whatever they cite.
If you haven't done so already, I would search Andrew Gelman's blog https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/
Thanks for this, he's a great resource!
Can we get a full cost/benefit analysis for donating part of one's liver vs. donating a kidney (both to anonymous, first-come-first-serve, and no, no Milei-inspired comments on selling one's kidneys, please)?
On a naïve, intuitive basis, donating part of one's liver is more appealing, since the liver simply grows back. If you donate a kidney, then one you could be one serious illness away from needing a kidney transplant yourself. (Also, why would having one kidney not be limiting in any way whatsoever? You can lead a normal life with one lung, but you have to accept that it's limiting in some ways: yes, your remaining lung takes over, but lung capacity will obviously never be quite the same.) On the other hand, if I understand correctly, donating some liver is not just more painful than donating a kidney, but substantially more dangerous. Is this so? What are the actual risks of death or disability for the donor nowadays?
Perhaps are livers less in demand? How much of the demand would be taken care of if there were simply an effective campaign for people to check the donor boxes on their driving licenses?
Liver surgery tends to be more difficult than kidney surgery. Up until the nineties, it was pretty much impossible to control liver bleeding, for example. So at least I would expect longer anesthesia times and more need for blood with corresponding higher risks in liver donation.
I looked into it a while back, the risk of kidney donation is very small (something like 10-20h of driving), the risk of liver donation are still low but significant (~1%). I can't remember the exact stats, sorry.
My understanding is that harvesting a kidney is a very straightforward procedure. Harvesting a portion of a liver requires much more time, skill, and a much larger incision. The risk of death to the donor during the procedure is probably an order of magnitude greater for a living liver donor than a living kidney donor.
Possibly there's a perceived virtue of recipient issue? Crudely I think of liver disease as resulting from being obese or drunk, whereas I have no idea what other than bad luck causes kidney disease.
For the avoidance of doubt I am just speculating about a possible mindset. Personally I am a cancer survivor so nobody wants any part of me anyway.
PS. How much of a cancer survivor does one need to be in order for one's organs not to be in demand? Take a limit case - someone who had melanoma in situ 25 years ago. Obviously that's not someone who would be thought of as a "cancer survivor" usually, but it's enough not to be in bone marrow transplant lists, or at least it used to be. Is it also a no for other organs?
I believe guidelines are more nuanced now. The first Google result for this question is this: https://bethematch.org/transplant-basics/donation-process/medical-guidelines-when-you-match-a-patient/#:~:text=(In%20situ%20cancer%20is%20diagnosed,time%20since%20treatment%20or%20recovery.
As a leukemia survivor I look into this kind of thing occasionally although I am barred from essentially all donations, forever.
I thought of that as well. But surely inveterate alcoholics who are not on their way to recovery and will just fry through their new liver (e.g. George Best) are kept out of transplant lists nowadays anyhow?
We understand nowadays that people can damage their liver through non-antisocial, supposedly moderate (but not really) drinking that happens every day or often enough; that was most likely one of the main causes of Beethoven's death, for instance (he was already born with a genetic predisposition to liver disease - again, not atypical). Seems more than a bit heartless to say all those people deserve to die. *If* I were to donate part of my liver, I would not be one bit upset to learn that it had gone to a person in that situation; that's just to be expected.
As for the lack of virtue of those who get liver failure through food: more than two thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese, and more than 40% are obese. Of course that doesn't make overeating virtuous, but let's be realistic - this is a societal problem. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the readers of this blog had first-stage non-alcoholic fatty liver. (Tip: go to a doctor not in the US.)
Statistically, I'm overweight, but I don't really think I am. Sure my BMI is about 28, but no one measures my muscle mass, which is denser than fat. Since I don't have a measurement, I can't tell how much this impacts me, but my intuitive sense is that it is significant.
I suspect others may well be in my situation, too, so it may not be two thirds of Americans that are actually overweight or obese.
Let's agree it's a valid statistic, even if it's not a good measure for large athletes. It's not two-thirds for other developed countries, or for the US in the past.
What should be the expected level of competence?
What percentage of people know the capital of Venezuela, can multiply fractions and can read and respond to enails?
internally, i answered "bogota". :^(
to protect my honor, i must go commit sudoku.
You got me. Pretty embarrassing since I was really into geography as a kid too.
But hey, I could tell you all sorts of other interesting trivia. For example, there are only two countries in the world with purple on their flags, and they're both in the same area.
Edit: Oddly, Wikipedia lists five national flags with purple.
When the only tool you have is an ehammer, every problem looks like an enail.
Where is that 'like' button when we really need it?!
I'd happily respond to a snail, but none have talked to me (yet).
> should be the expected level of competence
"Should" as in "Normatively" or "Objectively"? I.e. is the expectation of competence that you're looking for that which minimizes error compared to the actual, existing levels of competence or that which humanity/the state/education/the learned individual should *strive* to make common?
I think that, objectively, you can't expect a lot from **all** the people currently alive, or even 85% of them. You can probably safely get away with assuming that people can read (and mediocrely write) their native language. You can probably safely get away with assuming that they know Space is a thing where many other non-Earth things exist, and that the Earth is a sphere. In geopolitics, you can probably only safely assume that they know their 4 or 6 directly bordering neighbors and a caricature of both their neighbors' history as well as their own, maybe the idea of continents is safe to assume too (but not necessarily the count or the list of continents).
You probably can't safely assume fraction multiplication because that doesn't come up very often in everyday finance (it occurs in Banking, but assuming everybody has Banking is huge), indeed a lot of people not very interested in arithmetic will struggle with the notion that a numerator-denominator fraction is the same as a 0-100 percentage, and both are the same as [0,1] real number*. You can't assume computers let alone the Internet let alone writing and reading English emails.
Normatively, I'm a bit of a radical. I think people should know 4 languages from 4 different immediate families, ("know" as in: a native shouldn't distinguish you from a fellow native in writing, it's okay to have an accent as long as the speech is fluent and grammatical), counting the native language among the four. People should know mathematics up to elementary Calculus, Computer Science up to a NAND2Tetris level ** on the hardware side and 50-line pidgin-Python scripts on the software side. Biology, History, and Philosophy up to following a public lecture from a specialist who's not trying to show off. Physics up to what a physicist knew in 1860, and Chemistry up to what a Chemist knew in 1910.
I don't expect all people will all be uniformly too excited about this vision though, and there is plenty of distinctions that could be drawn between types and levels of knowledge/competence that will make my vision look too narrow and short-sighted, for example the "book smarts vs. street smarts" distinction: some people think Philosophy is bullshit and would rather know how plumbing works.
* : (but actually, the numerator-denominator notation is strictly less general because it can't express irrationals, in practice though almost nobody cares about infinite precision and [0,1] numbers of interest are almost always rationals.)
** : https://www.nand2tetris.org/, https://nandgame.com/
>Chemistry up to what a Chemist knew in 1910
Hmm... All the non-radioactive elements except hafnium and rhenium... (And several of the radioactive ones were known by then - uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, actinium, radon) and quite a bit of organic chemistry... I think this is a high bar...
Well, it kinda is, but in my vision there is brain augmentation, the abolition of sleep as a necessary time-waste in human life, pervasive and hyper-realistic VR/AR tech, etc.... Plus life extension and post-scarcity.
I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's what I imagine.
Many Thanks!
>but in my vision there is brain augmentation
Ok, yes, if that becomes feasible then raising goals to the extent you suggest would be reasonable.
>I'm not saying it's realistic, but it's what I imagine.
That's fair. My personal guess is that, despite the limitations of today's LLMs, we will probably transition to a machine civilization before we are able to extend biology to that degree.
Let me guess - you're 19?
I cannot help but notice the irony of being able to "respond to enails".
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education says 31% of university students know the capital of Russia. University students are now near average intelligence, but the study is a bit old, so let's say 20% of general population. Venezuela is more obscure than Russia, so I would guess 5-10%.
You can probably figure out the fraction question through the math proficiency stuff linked in that post, but I would guess 25%
With Venezuela, whether you know the capital basically measures how interested you are in South American politics. I don't think it's a measure of general competence.
Actually, I doubt that such a thing as "general competence" exists. Most people are interested in a range of different things, and have a certain amount of competence within those areas. I couldn't tell you what the last baseball team to win the Pennant was, because I'm not at all interested in baseball. But I could probably debug a Snobol program. (It would probably take me awhile to recover my memories, and I doubt I'd do a very efficient job.)
I think there's definitely a general good-at-trivia vs bad-at-trivia factor. Some people are just good at remembering random facts that they've been exposed to, while others tend to forget them unless they're used.
Disagree. I have zero interest in South American politics and I know Lima is the capital city.
(In case there’s any doubt, I’m teasing… I know it’s actually Quito.)
Keep going. God loves a trier.
Does an alien weapon hit befall it in a novel by Heinlein?
What about basic economic literacy? One operates within everpresent macroeconomic forces, and a concept like supply & demand allows one to evaluate statements like "build more housing" or "introduce price controls" or "Venezuelas economy is failing because of sanctions" much more accurately than going by gut feeling.
One of these things is not like the other, I think!
Is the capital of Venezuela relevant to most people? I'd argue "no," and knowing it off the top of one's head doesn't make one more productive or useful (especially when the information can be acquired in less than four seconds).
Multiplying fractions with or without a calculator and reading and responding to emails are reasonably critical skills.
Do you recognize the phrase "the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua"? :-)
"Principal", not "principle"! (I normally wouldn't correct this, but since this thread is about potentially useless general knowledge...)
Yeah. I phone-swiped it in from memory, and this wasn't a mistake that jumped out at me. :-/ I noticed later, but since I didn't catch it in the first few minutes, and was basically betting on whether people needed to Google it, I decided to let my shame hang out here where all could see. :-)
I certainly recognized it, but was maddened by not being able to immediately identify its source.
You have to admit that is an *exceedingly* deep cut!
What's the joke?
It's from A Wrinkle in Time. A teacher asks the tweenage protagonist about the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua, but she can't remember and exasperatedly sasses the teacher, "Who cares about the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua, anyhow?" She's sent to the creepy principal's office for it.
Notably, given the extremely weird sci-fi things currently happening in her life and that she's living in rural New England, the book very much agrees that the principle imports and exports of Nicaragua is more or less beneath our protagonist's notice.
I don't understand that kind of logic, in a 70 year adult life you are probably going to meet 5+ Venezuelans in random social and business settings and it useful in life not to seem like an idiot in conversation with them.
I'm in my early 30s and have never met any! I imagine there are fewer Venezuelans in the UK than the US, but still..!
Do I emit an anti-Venezuelan field or am I just going completely Caracas?
>in a 70 year adult life you are probably going to meet 5+ Venezuelans
And so we see the importance of knowing fractions. 5/70 is 1 Venezuelan every 14 years. A thing you only do once every fourteen years is a thing you look up when you need it.
No-one looks like an idiot for not knowing the capital of Venezuela, outside of Venezuela. It's an inconsequential awful country in the southern hemisphere.
Your example list of what it takes to be competent is a pretty poor list. Stop focusing on memorising useless facts. That doesn't indicate competence.
How about: is able to independently come to the conclusion that someone from {OBVIOUS OUTGROUP} is not what is claimed about them?
How about: when faced with a problem too complex to solve given current knowledge and skills, is able to find information and methods that will add to skillset and knowledge set such that the problem becomes solveable?
How about: when faced with an angry mob trying to cancel you, can convince potential allies that they should not cave to the mob?
These seem like somewhere between a million times and infinite times more useful than knowing the capital of some useless dictatorship or how to multiply numbers.
> It's an inconsequential awful country in the southern hemisphere
Northern Hemisphere.
Comment of the day!
Mike drop.
What's the likelihood that any of them are going to randomly ask, "hey, what's the capital of my country, hmmmmmm?"
And if they do, it's very easy to self-deprecatingly say, "please forgive me, I'm a product of the American public school system."
Hey, does anyone want to discuss Bluey?
Bluey is one of my media errors. I thought I hated it based on a single episode, but it turns out I was totally wrong (other major media errors include Stargate SG1 and Farscape).
Bluey, however, might be the most egregious error I've ever made, as I now consider one episode in particular, Sleepytime, to be amongst the finest works of animation of all time.
I wrote about being wrong about Bluey and assembled a curated list of episodes on YouTube here (https://christinathestorygirl.substack.com/p/you-adult-who-has-never-watched-bluey), but this is really more of a general prompt about Bluey or being wrong about media than a promo of this particular writing.
I kinda hate Bluey. Maybe it's because I'm a dad of a kid in the age range of Bingo, but I really hate the way they handle gender roles. The dad is the stereotypical irresponsible, callous, absent-minded and, yes, violent, who is the one mostly causing all the problems. The mom is obviously the angelic, patient person who comes and provides all the resolution. The typical examples are the Pool and the Yoga ball episodes you embed in your post. I felt gross watching them.
It's not *all* like that, I really loved Bandit in the Seesaw episode, and some like the Magic Asparagus are just absurd enough to be neutral, but you never know when the harmful stereotypes will snap onto you and I want to keep them away from my kid, thank you.
Maybe it's not quality animation, it is more formulaic and shallower, but I'd rather go for something neutrally educational like Octonauts or similar.
Was this comment parody?
Because describing Bandit as "violent" is...uh...that's pretty amazing.
But assuming this isn't literally parody, no, stereotypes don't "snap onto you," they are acquired by observation to the point of exaggeration because they reflect actual trends (not absolutes, but trends) in reality.
Broadly speaking, men *tend* to be more into physical horse play than women. Broadly speaking, women *tend* to be more conscientious about care-taking chores. These are exceedingly common *trends* today because they reflect hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary adaptation; men hunt and go to war, women nurture offspring.
One of Bluey's greatest joys is that it isn't ashamed of observing - even celebrating - these gender dynamics that *most* (straight, intact) families' experience. Not all families - not yours, apparently - but *most.* That's why the planet is watching it more than any other IP; many, many people recognize themselves and their families in the Heelers, because of...you know...hundreds of thousands of years of men hunting and warring and women nurturing offspring and what that looks like in 2024.
And for what it's worth: Chili is the disciplinarian in the family and the kids are quite a bit more scared of her anger than Bandit's. She's the one who can gain instant compliance after naughty behavior or defiance with a sharp, threatening glare, while Bandit is a much softer touch who often capitulates to his kids' demands, even when he probably shouldn't (like playing with them when he's supposed to be working!). While this isn't a stereotype per se, it certainly is a family dynamic that I witnessed in friends' families, particularly fathers parenting daughters (especially in contrast with how they parented their sons).
Last, beware of attempting to deny your kid the observation of real trends. Oftentimes they rebel by embracing them.
I think the polite way of handling a conversation is to assume seriousness unless the irony is otherwise obvious :-)
I think you should try watching the Yoga ball episode with more empathy turned on and try to see it with the eyes of a dad (or Bingo, for that matter). She gets thrown and shoved to the point of crying, if that's not violent for you...
And sure, it's a popular IP, that's great for them, but in Italy we say that then you should go and eat poop: trillions of flies can't be wrong. Specifically, you can't disprove the thought "a meme is bad" just by saying that society at large loves it. Pick any example from the past to your choice -- my favorite is how in Roman times there wasn't even mourning for the death of a <1 year old because they weren't really humans -- and figure it out if you'd prefer that the meme has changed or not. And it can't change if we continue celebrating it, or shrugging and telling"well, boys be boys".
Kids observe what they observe, but for sure I don't want to endorse what I don't want to endorse, that should be... fairly obvious?
Huh. Not parody.
I would advise you rewatch the Yoga ball episode and empathize with the actual Bingo on the screen, not the one you are projecting.
In the actual episode, the actual context is that Bingo *very much* wants to engage in physical horseplay with her father - Chili recognizes this and later even very explicitly advocates for it continuing - but Bingo doesn't have any confidence about asserting her boundaries when play gets too rough for her until Chili coaches her on how to do it.
This is arguably one of the most important lessons anyone can ever learn, EVER; that we can't just trust that others will intuit when we are hurt, but that we must advocate for ourselves, sometimes loudly. It's a fundamental part of communication.
Witness that Bandit is instantly contrite when he hears how Bingo feels and apologizes for unwittingly hurting Bingo during horseplay. He explains that he's used to playing with a bigger, more robust kid. *He didn't know,* because he *couldn't* know.
Because Bingo had to be her own person and say what she needed and wanted.
Is *that* something you don't want to endorse?
Here's a second reminder to engage with my position without throwing unnecessary shade about it being worthy of a parody. It's not really that I can't take the shade, but then maybe it would be a good idea to actually address the point rather than dodging it?
The original grievance is about the bad gender role meme, not about clearly expressing boundaries when things get too violent. I provided the example because you denied there was ever violence. But please let me know where in my original message I said that the final morale of Yoga ball was bad, which is all you can focus on in your reply.
You reply to a point that was never made. And you indirectly support my original point: the dad is the source of the problem (because that's what dads are, right? Boys will be boys), the mom is the source of the solution (because that's what moms are, right?).
And, I mean, that's *fine*. If you love traditional gender roles and you're ok with fitting them on yourself and your kids, by all means you do you. It's what everybody does. But it'd be nice to own it. And not to pretend that something is awesome because it just "observes what's out there" without aiming to be something more -- would we prefer a Roman cartoon to be nonchalant about throwing a non-human 9 month baby in a dumpster or one that shows more empathy to them?
I'm engaging with what I find interesting in your comments. There are no rules of the internet which dictate that every point in a comment must be addressed.
My thesis, which I admittedly neglected to state directly, is that it is *absolutely absurd* -
(so absurd I was sincerely wondering if you were engaging in parody, and didn't want to look like a fool by not addressing that possibility)
- to describe Bandit's consensual horseplay with his kids as "violence." That you would describe it as "violence" is actually alarming. Surely you know that purpose of rough play in early childhood (and amongst all young predators and most young mammals) is to learn about intention, physical restraint, emotional regulation, negotiation, and how to appropriately responding to pain inflicted by others. That can't happen without rough play sometimes going too far.
Of course there's no "violence" in Yoga Ball! "Violence" the *intention* to harm, and of course Bandit has no intention whatsoever to hurt Bingo. Again...I'm gobsmacked that you aren't perceiving that.
And if your endorse the final message of the story, then surely you endorse the use of not-"violence" harm necessary to arrive at that message.
And to get back to your point, there is no gender role "meme." What you're describing is a common behavioral trend based on genetics and evolution, and it will not be overcome by "culture." Maybe someday it can be reprogrammed with sufficiently advanced tech, but right now that kind of tech is a sci-fi fairy tale. It's extremely likely your kid is going to conform to some gender role stereotypes that will disappoint you. I hope you will be as okay with them fitting those stereotypes on themselves as you are with me doing it for myself.
Last, as for ancient cultures attempting to minimize emotional suffering via the practice of emotionally disassociating from and thus not mourning infant deaths under one year, due to the exceedingly high infant mortality rate? There was great wisdom and utility in it, just as there is wisdom and utility in some modern cultures not considering a pregnancy "real" enough to be worth mentioning until certain benchmarks are met. Given their environment at the time, those cultures were right to be less sentimental about infants than modern people are. Do you have the empathy to see that?
You didn't have reason to know this, but the Starz Spartacus series is my favorite TV show of all time (and I have *excellent* taste), in part because it's a rare case of a storyteller attempting to unflinchingly present the characters circumstances and moral dilemmas through the prism of *their* culture and values, not our modern one. It's an utterly brutal show about a very brutal people, and I adored its utter disregard for its audiences' likely squeamishness about slavery, violence, homosexuality, rape, misogyny, and so on.
It wasn't for preschoolers and toddlers, of course, but some content isn't. Bluey takes place in contemporary times, but not in a contemporary universe with the kind of human suffering we witness every day; we're never going to see a story where a neighborhood child predator grooms Bingo into his backyard shed.
It's appropriate to show common gender roles in families, as that's what the vast population of families are actually experiencing. Not so much infant murder or child predators.
For that episode, making use of such amazing music is both a good choice and a cheat. My impression is that The Planets are somewhat unique in being so accessible, rewarding of re-listens, emotionally evocative, and under-utilized.
For me, Bluey wasn't a surprise. In general, my experience has been friends with small children over-recommending episodes that didn't really hit with me. Some have been very good (S1E25 Taxi), but I made an attempt to watch them all during COVID and it fizzled out.
Also, I had previously had to make a big correction with Peppa Pig. Based on the low-effort style of animation and the universal presence of PP merchandise around my children's friends at the time, I expected to really hate it. While I'm not sure any of the episodes are candidates for "finest work of animation of all time," I did have true adult enjoyment from almost every episode and some real moments of delight at the choices or quips.
Veering pi radians away from children's animation, one of my biggest errors was my original attitude toward Rick & Morty. The first taste was very unpleasant and I avoided watching it for several years. However, trapped on a long flight at one point, I ran out of tolerable alternatives and decided to re-sample. I was hooked. There are some parts of episodes and full episodes that are really amazing (including really effective use or choice of music.)
I think Sleepytime avoids "cheating" by setting the music of "The Planets" in literal space, with the celestial bodies representing different things within the family dynamic.
I haven't seen any of Peppa Pig, but now I'm intrigued.
And I likewise didn't initially enjoy Rick & Morty - I thought the animation was ostentatiously ugly and found the writing style jarring. But a friend urged me to give it at least three episodes, and then I was likewise hooked.
Although I'm in a small minority of folks who actually likes Solar Opposites even better.
I've been exposed to Bluey by virtue of having a 4 year old and a 2 year old. I suspect a large part of its success is that it manages to be appealing to kids without being rigidly formulaic or overly moralizing like most children's entertainment. If you've seen an episode of super kitties, you've basically seen them all (substitute villain and vice/virtue of the day). That stuff can be fine for kids, who don't really pay attention to any of that in favor of cool kitty superpowers, but to me it's like nails on a chalkboard. It's also pretty coherent story telling, as opposed to something like paw patrols where plot development could have been written by a toddler.
The general format as well, which explores parental issues, helps to draw parents themselves in as they are experiencing many of these things in real time. Though as with anything, there are some stinkers, my wife and I weren't big on the recent house sale set of episodes. They painted themselves into a narrative corner (of course the house wouldn't sell, that would either end the series or require a massive cast overhaul), and chose a particular poor 'out' in our opinion (man bad for wanting more dumb currency, woman better: value things like family), which felt like a low blow to the many parents out there who are struggling financially and want to take a better opportunity for the sake of their children and an unnecessary jibe at men (as if women never want more money for their family). Of course the Heeler's are already presented as being pretty wealthy and privileged, so it was probably a poor choice to tackle moving as a financial benefit to them since they don't appear to have any financial struggles to begin with.
For whatever it's worth, my favorite episode is Creek, probably because playing in creeks was a big part of my childhood so it has a lot of nostalgia value, but also because I want my kids to enjoy the outdoors as well and not just be purely screen junkies like so many kids these days.
As a pretty wealthy and privileged kid whose dad moved us across the country into a place where he *REALLY* increased our wealth and privilege (my-own-horse level of wealth and privilege), I didn't necessarily support the Heelers backing out of their move, either.
But on the other hand, staying in an extended network of friends and family is pretty great. Even as a single, child-free adult, I wouldn't want to move away from mine and start over somewhere else merely for the sake of a more luxurious lifestyle. I would do it for *survival,* of course, but not for a mere upgrade to the home.
I think it's also worth noting the authorial intent. Joe Brumm said both in subtext of Bluey episodes and explicitly in a podcast interview that a mentor said "...'we die at the end...you don't need to tell people and remind people that life has sad endings all the time'....In his view, role of art and stories was to be one of the rare places where we can go and it'll work out and we get rejuvenated a bit and we get a bit of hope. So I thought, I think that has helped me in Bluey for the last 140 eps. And so it just felt right in ending this season to focus on a story that has a bit of a weird ending. The farmer, it's not a sad ending, it's not a happy ending. It goes a bit beyond endings. But of course The Sign itself is a story and the whole thing is meant to remind you that this isn't real life. It's a story, works out for everyone...Brandy gets pregnant, the marriage works, the kids get what they want. It's ridiculously happy because it's a story. We all know, the adults all know it never is that neat a life."
And, as one Bluey essayist pointed out, it's worth noting that none of the "happy endings" in The Sign have actually concluded yet. We don't know if Brandy's pregnancy is going to be okay, if Bradley and Frisky's marriage is okay, if Bandit is going to be okay without his job. *This* season, when Brumm was still making up his mind if it would be his last, might have all "happy endings," but future seasons might not. "We'll see," said the Farmer.
Now, is that possibly way too heady for the casual adult Bluey viewer (and possibly way, way too heady for their six year old)? Sure, I won't stand on that hill!
Ironically, I'm pretty sure that six year old me would have been thoroughly disinterested in Bluey. When I was Bluey's age, I didn't want to see media about "kids like me"; I wanted either very dramatic and ideally pathos-and-death fantasies about adults (The Last Unicorn, Disney princess movies), or stories about kids slightly older than me doing adult adventures. Why would I want to go to school and play all day and then watch a show about someone else going to school and playing? I was just *there*!
"(my-own-horse level of wealth and privilege)"
So not alone room for a pony, but the pony as well! 😁
He was a horse!
That is a very inconvenient detail that I didactically hang on to.
Maybe because "pony" sounds even more privileged than "horse," given that ponies are too small to be used by anyone but children (unless one hooks the pony up to a cart, I suppose).
Whereas a horse can be used by one's parents, which eventually ended up happening. Then my dad got his own horse to ride with mine, then a horse-trailer to take them places, then upgraded the car to a truck to pull the horse trailer, then purchased horse property to park all of it.
Gateway horse!
I enjoyed this, Thanks.
This sounds vaguely appealing but I'm really more of a cat person
So is Muffin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DMOt6zDYMQ
It's not clear in the Blueyverse if cats are a real species or if "Cat Squad" (a parody of high-energy kids shows) is supposed to be strictly fantasy, but Muffin's into them.
The important people in history question surely generalises to a question about how we think about causation, under headings like causa causans vs causa sine qua non, sufficient vs necessary conditions etc.
I can't speak to why they aren't, but I can speak to why they shouldn't be. The sort of evidence you cite is simply not sufficient to imply the sort of actions you suggest.
The first problem is that you don't really have enough information to know whether this would be a net good or now. Let's suppose we take your reporting of the happiness research fully at face value: societies that follow traditional gender roles have higher self-reported happiness. The trouble is, correlation is not causation, especially when you have to measure via a fairly flimsy proxy (survey results).
For your conclusion to follow, you need a specific causal model to be true: Weakening of Gender Roles -> Lower Happiness -> Reporting Less Happiness of Surveys. There are any number of alternative causal models that could explain the results. We could, for example, simply reverse the key direction of causation: Lower Happiness -> Weakening of Gender Roles. Formally we don't even need to justify this (it can be true even if we don't know why it's true), but a stab-in-the-dark justification might be something like "unhappy people are more likely to try to change their social circumstances, which includes pushing back against the gender roles expected of them." We could also have a model where some third factor (industrialization/urbanization seems like an obvious choice, but it could be other things as well) causes both lower happiness and weakened gender roles. Or a model in which the weakening of gender roles *doesn't* coincide with a decrease in happiness, but the cultural changes that it implies cause people to report lower happiness on surveys[1]. With any of these other models, it's very possible for a restoration of traditional gender roles to have no effect on happiness or even decrease it.
The second problem is that "[be] in favor of traditional gender roles" isn't really an action. Even among vocally feminist writers and speakers I have seen very few people come out as *actively against* "traditional gender roles[2] in the sense of not believing they should be an option at all. It's far more common for people to believe that adherence to gender roles should be a choice made by each individual. This should also serve as the default utilitarian assumption because as a general rule, people are more likely to know what makes them happy than you are. You either need quite good evidence that in this particular case they don't (which puts us back at the first problem: weak evidence) or to point to negative externalities of the choice.
This last point touches on the heart of the problem: ignoring higher-order effects is the cardinal sin of naive utilitarian reasoning everywhere. We can't possibly gauge the higher-order effects of a proposed course of action without knowing anything about the proposal, which "[be] in favor of traditional gender roles" doesn't really give us. Elsewhere you say something like "if what people wants makes them unhappy, should we give it to them" but that's not actually the choice in front of anyone right now. Sound utilitarian proposals must interact with the world as it is, and nobody in the world right now has a choice that amounts to "either give more people freedom from traditional gender roles or don't do that." Instead, depending on the society, the choices might look more like "try to prevent people from eschewing traditional gender roles" or "attempt to persuade or coerce people who have abandoned traditional gender roles to return to them." Even those are pretty vague, but simply the verbs "prevent" and "coerce" should signal to us that we're entering territory that might have very large, very negative higher-order effects. Using, for example, the coercive power of a state to accomplish anything always carries negative second-order effects: you have to punish some people to get others to comply, which decreases their happiness. How large those second order effects are (and whether they spawn third and fourth order effects) can vary quite a lot from policy to policy.
The final problem is opportunity cost. To be worth a utilitarian's support, a given action needs not only to net positive utility (as best as can be told with the limits of uncertainty) it needs to be the MOST net positive option that can be accomplished with those resources. Even if the entirety of the resources being expended are the time and reputation the go into speaking about the issue, they could be spent elsewhere. Is this cause the *best* use of those efforts? I seem to remember Scott making the point once, when discussing his view towards charity, that anything that needs to pass through a contentious political system to happen is going to require disproportionate investment because there will always be people pushing back. This seems like one of those cases: most things you could do socially or politically in the field of "promoting traditional gender roles" are going to get a LOT of push back, meaning you'll need to expend a lot of resources for every tiny sliver of progress. Are those resources better spent on this than they are on bed nets? Doubtful.
[1] This is not to imply that self-reported happiness data is totally useless, but it is certainly rather hard to validate. I would expect it to be much more reliable within a single culture than across cultures.
[2] Unless you count things like violence, arrogance, emotional unavailability and unwillingness to express emotions as core parts of "traditionally masculine" gender roles. Some people certainly would, but if that's the case you need REALLY GOOD evidence for why these traits increase a person's happiness and the happiness of those around them, since the obvious naive assumption is that they're net-harmful.
Don't many Western societies try to 'persuade or coerce' women into the workplace? It is rarely described as coercion - and certainly it is very much less harsh than the approach of the Taliban to achieving the opposite - but significant resources are devoted to special programs aimed at equalising female participation in many occupations regardless of whether there is evidence that this is desired by men, women or employers. Just one example. I think far fewer resources are devoted to upholding traditional gender roles.
I get a distinct impression that unequal participation is often taken as evidence of repression. A society operating on such a basis is clearly working towards reducing or even eliminating traditional gender roles (perhaps allowing a few eccentrics to carry on with them if they can afford it.)
I agree with almost all of your argument, but want to push back a bit on his part:
> Even among vocally feminist writers and speakers I have seen very few people come out as *actively against* "traditional gender roles[2] in the sense of not believing they should be an option at all.
People may not literally explicitly be arguing that traditional gender roles shouldn’t be an option, but I think a ton of leftists/feminists do essentially believe this. You see this in for example:
• Judgement of women who choose to prioritize family over career, or who change their last name.
• Arguing that such women are misguided/trapped/have internalized the patriarchy/etc., and need to be protected.
• Advocating for mandatory parental leave for men (as in some Scandinavian countries).
I don't think "traditionally gender roles" is a very coherent goal. For instance, the way my mom an grandma tell it, it is very traditonal for an unmarried woman to not be allowed to socialize with men without supervision. Women could not file for divorce. Sex was a near-explicitly transactional affair that women endured in return for economic and social protection. All the women over ~55 I know well have told me they were instructed to never directly say "no" to, or beat a boy in any competition, because he might attack/rape/kill them. I can't imagine this is what you are referring to as plausibly social good! I understand that these are not universal experiences, but whatever traditional gender system we had here in the US in the mid 1900's clearly had some big liabilities. That sort of thing is, relative to me, what traditional gender roles are. Traditional gender roles were/are huge personal sacrifice for lot of people, mostly (but not exclusively) women. There are people who are trying to bring highly gendered living back, look up "ex-trad wife" to see how badly that can go. The evidence for these things comes from old, suspect studies. While I'm not 100% claiming the new, pro-gender equality studies are not also confounded, I do trust them slightly more and they fit better with all of my known lived/second-hand experiences.
TL:DR evidence for them being actually better is weak at best and the risks are way, way too high.
(also, you mentioned below that you thought the higher gender equality -> higher happiness results might be confounded by wealth. There are some results indicating that high gender egalitarianism *creates* more wealth, so really this whole area is tangled mess.)
I am a 31-year-old, divorced woman. I was a stay-at-home mother during most of my marriage, which lasted 6 years. I am under no illusions that my personal experiences are valuable in the sense of being broadly representative of reality at a societal level; however, during my divorce I did find a lot of statistical data that suggests my experience with divorce as a stay-at-home mother is not unusual, so perhaps I have some insight that is useful.
I never believed in traditional gender roles when I was young. My maternal grandmother, if I may speak for the dead, endured a very stressful marriage with my alcoholic grandfather from the time she was 15 years old until her death at age 52. She was very meek and soft-spoken. My grandfather was the opposite. They had five children, and by all accounts her life was not a very happy one. She had no escape except for death, and according to my mother she harbored a singular and almost preoccupying fear and dread of death. Even as she was losing the her battle with cancer, she refused to believe she was going to die. When at last she lay on her death bed and all the extended family came to say their goodbyes to her, she was utterly confused as to why they were all gathering in her house, and then, when realization came to her, she gasped in horror and cried: "You all think I'm dying!"
I had no desire to take up her chains, but the world did not care what I wanted.
I got pregnant by a man much older than me when I was 20 years old. My mother had just died, my father was in prison, and this man seemed to be the only stable thing in the world for me to cling to. Even as his affections for me cooled and transformed into bitterness and then finally into open hostility, I clung to him. The more brutal he was to me, the harder I held on. What a misery it was gestating for him. I felt like the loneliest, most friendless person in the world.
I can't account for the terror that possessed me during my unhappy pregnancy and caused me to stay in a situation so unworthy of me, but were I to venture a guess I would assume my terror had evolutionary roots. The primal fear of being impregnated and then abandoned by the child's father apparently is vital to the survival of the species, and for me it was constantly blaring its timeless alarm.
When my son was 3 weeks old, his father went to prison as was his custom every few years at the time. Naturally, being in prison caused him to see my hopeless devotion to him in a new and appealing light, and our relations improved.
He was, and still is, a very loving and devoted father. I did get lucky in that regard, considering how often the opposite is true in circumstances like mine.
During his time in prison, I was faced with the necessity of providing for my son by my own efforts, and I struggled endlessly in this direction. Having little work experience, I held almost no value in the market economy. I found working in the service industry profoundly miserable, and my misery was compounded by the fact that I did not have the option of quitting. I was not at all glad that women had won the right to join the workforce, and I wondered forlornly how anyone in their right mind could even have been persuaded to fight for such a thing.
When my son's father was released from prison (by then we were married), he immediately went to work and relieved me of that burden. I stayed home with our son and eventually gave birth to our youngest boy.
My ex-husband was well-liked at work and he started getting promotions and earning more money. Our boys adore him, and he them, and he has completely turned his life around and found comfort and stability in fatherhood.
But our personal relations as husband and wife were not good, although I did rather enjoy being home with my kids and infinitely preferred it to compulsory low-wage employment. But my ex-husband always belittled my contribution to the household, since he earned all the money. He had rather old-fashioned views on marriage and what his status as the sole breadwinner of the household entitled him to, and to him I was not very satisfactory and, much to his indignation, I did not care. We divorced in 2023.
Since the divorce, my economic circumstances have been terrible. I have no practical objections to becoming employed; in fact, the older I get, the more it bothers me that I have not proven myself to be a useful and productive member of society. I have no desire to simply cost the system money. I have been working toward earning professional certifications (more than one) to improve my earning potential; however, I honestly don't anticipate this being more fulfilling to me than being fully devoted to raising my children into healthy and responsible adults.
My conclusion is that traditional gender roles can be great and produce a very fulfilling and comfortable life, but if the marriage is unhappy, the woman (or whichever parent is the one who stays at home with the kids) will be at a disadvantage. Many women who have poor economic prospects will choose to remain in oppressive marriages rather than face economic ruin, and this dynamic produces unaccountable misery, which is probably why so many modern feminists are so vehemently opposed to it.
"hey were instructed to never directly say "no" to, or beat a boy in any competition, because he might attack/rape/kill them"
I remember when Scott calculated even knife murder has higher rates in the US than in the avg European country. So the issue is less guns than a culture of violence, and this also looks like less of a trad thing but a culture of violence.
These things looked a whole lot less bad in countries with less of a culture of violence. Where wives did not get beaten (in the urban middle class), they could interpret that role more flexibly.
Anyhow, I am not a supporter of trad roles, but hypothetically if someone could take the violence part out and just take the rest, things would look different.
How about some data and links to support your claims, please? I did some poking around on Google Scholar and most of those women-are-happier-in-traditional-gender-role studies seem to date back to the 1970s and 1980s. If you're going to engage with rationalists you'll need to do like rationalists do, you can't just make wild claims and not support them.
Using studies that utilized more refined methodologies, we find that "policies promoting gender equality tend to improve the quality of life for everyone, not just direct beneficiaries of the policies (women). Indeed, men also see strong and significant gains in life satisfaction when the sexes are more equal."
https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/jhappi/v20y2019i7d10.1007_s10902-018-0042-8.html
We also find that women seem to be happier than men: "Women reported higher levels of life satisfaction than men across all income, education, and employment groups. The direction of gender differences in life satisfaction was inconsistent across age and regional groups. Men scored higher than women only over the age of about 63, and in sub-Saharan Africa.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00737-019-00998-w
Hmm, this review has a link to some studies. Seems like maybe marriage is the confounding factor here? And maybe a pattern of more women's rights => happiness shock that then recovers over time? That's something like what the authors propose.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-women-happier-than-men-do-gender-rights-make-a-difference/
The first study is, I think, confounded by the fact that rich countries are happier, on average, and that the world economy has been growing. I can't read it but that is what makes sense by the abstract. I'd hope they control for that. (https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349487/world-happiness-report.aspx)
I can't read the second either.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/402839/research-demystifies-gender-gap-life-satisfaction.aspx
This piece claims that "unhappiness has been rising for a decade", which would be quite surprising if true, considering the massive increase in global wealth in that time.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/612125/happiest-country-earth.aspx
It appears to be true, though? Mostly due to segments of the population (young liberal women? https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8713953/) becoming less happy?
This has all made me confused. I do not like happiness research, it is akin to gender politics research in unhelpfulness.
>It appears to be true, though? Mostly due to segments of the population (young liberal women? https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8713953/) becoming less happy?
The article you linked has no mention of politics. Also measuring rates of depression is not the same thing as measuring rates of happiness.
Not to say it's not relevant, but it doesn't immediately counteract the claims the person you're responding to is saying, especially since you are not linking research articles like they are. The claim that many of the "traditional lifestyles = more happiness" papers came from so long ago is a valid argument and one you didn't address.
I did like the first article you linked because it was an interesting perspective by someone who is an expert in her field. She also commented on how women are reporting more stress at the same time they are reporting more happiness, which goes back to the depression rates =/= unhappiness rates.
>This piece claims that "unhappiness has been rising for a decade", which would be quite surprising if true, considering the massive increase in global wealth in that time.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/612125/happiest-country-earth.aspx
This says nothing about gender or politics, so has not a whole lot of correlation to the topic. You might as well use this to support the philosophy everyone should go to a cave and meditate 8 hours a day to find inner peace (people across many cultures and over several millennia have been saying that wealth is antithetical to happiness)
>I do not like happiness research, it is akin to gender politics research in unhelpfulness.
That is a somewhat not helpful thing to say, and also not true. Sure there are shortcomings to the methods and questions being asked about happiness, but it does have a quantifiable result, unlike gender politics research.
I do think the correct mindset to be in is confused if you don't have a full understanding of the topic (many people are quick to come up with ideas on things they are not experts in so it is good you are not doing that) but to just throw it away as meaningless as a result of being confused is not the correct response.
I don't think confusion is the appropriate response, though. Lórien: a rational position would be just to say that the data does not unambiguously support your assertion that traditional gender roles are correlated with happiness. I'll admit I'm biased against that idea, but the data supporting my position after a quick Google Scholar search is sort of squidgy, too (though I suspect that if I trawled the literature, I could probably come up with more data to support my position). But it doesn't rationally follow that utilitarians *should* support traditional gender roles as the best option for the common good. BTW, thanks taking up my challenge and linking to some other data points! (That's more than most people do when they argue.)
I like my gender roles the same way I like my software: highly configurable, with sane defaults. The average mom is probably more nurturing than the average dad, and the average man probably finds the provider role more satisfying than the average woman. But not all women have the warmth and patience needed to be nurturing moms, and not all men have the career ambitions needed to provide for a family, so society's theoretical point of optimal-happiness-and-fertility would probably be in the ballpark of an 80/20 split between traditional couples and inverted-gender-role couples.
Note that an 80/20 split is one in five, aka "one of the couples you personally know is an exception," aka "common enough that you definitely should not attempt to enforce uniformity on this issue."
My wife, for one, would go crazy if she had to be a stay-at-home mom, and the idea of being the sole breadwinner for my family doesn't fill me with excitement either.
I'm sorry, but this is unsatisfying. Please rework it, and bring it back to me when you've got something I can use to force people to be needlessly unhappy while doing things they don't want to do.
Rationalist utilitarians are often just San Fransisco progressives. They don't follow their premises where they would actually lead if it violates those orthodoxies. Their edginess is orthogonal at best.
That said, the argument that traditional societies are happier is based on working backward form a decline in happiness from the mid-20th century and attributing it to the end of gender roles. This is not ironclad proof and in societies that have gone their farthest toward enforcing gender roles like Iran you do not see a particularly happy population. The US is also not particularly unhappy by global standards and is happier than most societies which score higher on traditionalism. It's also not certain what "in favor of traditional gender roles" means in effect here. Of course, happiness as a cause is worthy. But what's the specific idea here?
>That said, the argument that traditional societies are happier is based on working backward form a decline in happiness from the mid-20th century and attributing it to the end of gender roles.
Interesting! That sounds completely wrong. People used to be so much more optimistic about the future, this is why retrofuturism is a thing. The view of technology / industry went from expecting future utopia, then to we will have cool stuff, then to we are polluting the rivers and then to we are killing the planet. I think it was impossible to watch the Moon Landing and NOT think awesome things are coming.
Yeah, the decline in happiness is absolutely a real phenomenon. But there's no direct evidence linking it to the decline of gender roles. That did happen. And women in traditional relationships do tend to be happier. But that is not nearly sufficient to prove that declining gender roles caused the unhappiness or that reversing course would increase happiness. Which is what the argument usually is. And there's plenty of alternative explanations.
We are undoubtably programmed to find a space for ourselves within society, and a society with legible roles - of which gender is one of the most important - to which one is forcibly allocated, albeit probably with some degree of personal input, lends itself to that. Not to mention that in a highly gendered society compared to a non-gendered one - if that existed - you are competing with 50% of your peers rather than 100%. An instant win, surely.
Some people will have odd motivations unrelated to fitting in, and indeed such a society will tend to be unkind to such people. But if we are going to be utilitarians, the average level of happiness must be important, even if we can see that it cannot be the complete basis of our philosophy.
I don't think I agree with anything you said in the first paragraph. I don't think we're particularly programmed to find our space. And I think we at least equally, and in my opinion more so, make our spaces communally. I don't think legible roles necessarily make fitting in easier and actually think they tend to be maladaptive. And I don't think having gender roles means you're only competing with half the population. And even if it did I'm not sure that reducing competition is a win.
Regardless of whether we agree, empirically societies that legislate gender roles or exert immense social pressure around them are not empirically happier.
I was thinking more of children than adults. It seems to me that if they were not so programmed, it would constitute a shocking lapse on the part of Mother Nature.
Children copy and roleplay as adults for *some* reason, right?
I don't think nature has directionality such that it programs us. And if it did I don't think we get to tell that force what it should be doing. Whether it's god or evolution it's a force beyond our capacity to condemn.
Sugar being that delicious and that bad for you is absolutely something that is within my capacity to condemn.
Hmm. Then wouldn't a good question be "if modernity makes us unhappy, why do we want to modernize / make more wealthy poor countries?" I think (on my unreliable memory) Ted K. thought something like this, although I rather disagree with his methods.
I guess I'm looking for situations where good things make people unhappy, and wondering if utilitarians would be against those goods things? Because if we can find one, that would be rather disconcerting.
I think it's moving goalposts. If you're hungry and living in an unstable region where there's regularly a new warlord spinning up a batch of fighters to come burn your village down, then "hey, no more warlords!" is going to be a huge boost to your happiness.
Then your kids get used to living in "no more warlords, pretty regular meals" world, so their set of conditions for being unhappy is "but I don't even have an outdoor toilet".
Then the grandkids get used to "what are warlords, as much food as we want" and they then move on to "but I'm not happy because I should be living in a four room house with an indoor bathroom".
It's sort of a dark mirror image of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; as soon as the basic unhappiness causes are taken care of, we move up a tier to the next set of problems. That's how you get "I have so much money I'm swimming in it, I'm in great health, I live in a peaceful and prosperous and stable country - but I'm not contented" or White People Problems, as I understand one satirical site puts it.
People have gotten less happy over time. But wealthier and more modern countries are, on average, happier. And where you see variation it's mostly between fairly rich countries like Japan vs Denmark or something. The least happy continent is Africa iirc. (The happiest is Australia but that's kind of cheating.) So there's a direct happiness premium in making most of the world richer/more advanced.
The example I can think of is personal lifestyle. Most evidence shows that the biggest contributors to happiness is someone who is personally secure, financially well off, married with friends and children, in good health, and religious. This doesn't mean forcing people into the religious brainwashing camps. But utilitarians do not generally go around encouraging people to find churches they like or marriage. You can also find stuff that violates progressive politics like how incarceration increases net safety but is unfashionable.
But that's the opposite: things that certain morality thinks are bad (or enemy coded) that make you happy that get ignored.
I don't know today, but 20 years ago the stories about Australia were that it is the new America. You go there, work in a warehouse for two years then buy a boat-yacht and spend a year on it not working.
Why is Australia cheating?
Because it's the only country on the continent while other continents have more of a mix.
I think it does lead them to different places. But it never leads them anywhere that would alienate those friends.
If you view utilitarianism as a good metric for general cases, but not for extremes (as many people who read this blog do) then the obvious counter argument is to take something like Kantian view (or other non-utilitarian ethical system) that people should not be treated as a means to an end (people are ends in and of themselves), and thus a woman needs to be able to work in order to leave her partner if he is causing her unhappiness. On average people might be happier with traditional gender roles but the system itself allows for some individuals to be extremely unhappy, which has huge problems. People who read this blog generally aren't okay with killing one person to harvest their organs if it means saving a dozen other people in the hospital, and you can view the traditional gender roles problem similarly.
Even if you view it completely utilitarian, how do you quantify happiness in this regard? Is 9 happy housewives enough to counteract 1 abused housewife? What about 9 happy housewives versus 1 housewife who would rather make a name for herself? What about 49 happy housewives vs 1 abused housewife?
Additionally, its not clear that going back to such a system will actually increase happiness. At the time when it was done, raising a family was a much more important goal on a societal level than it is now and also women had no option but to participate in it. Even if now every partnership suddenly became a traditional setup, there's no guarantee that the women would be happier, as now they have ingested the "forbidden fruit of knowledge" and know that the way to make your mark on history is to become famous for your work and that that is something they would be allowed to do.
I think the older surveys about female dissatisfaction came about because "well we're all supposed to be liberated now and not stuck in the traditional roles, so I work too, but how come I'm *still* doing all/most of the housework, child-minding, elder care and so on on top of my job?"
Newer generations (Millennials, Gen Z) may have a more balanced approach where the male partners/spouses do housework and 'traditional' female tasks so there is more division of labour and less 'still a housewife on top of being a working wife and mother'.
Utilitarianism is good for general cases, like ending all animal consumption, but you have to fall back to deontology for really extreme stuff like traditional gender roles.
How to actually quantify happiness is a problem for utilitarianism all the time.
Yeah I mean it sounds silly to say it's an extreme edge case but when it involves someone's agency I'm not sure that's too crazy. It's on par with if someone were to argue slavery was a net positive for utility.
>Utilitarianism is good for general cases, like ending all animal consumption, but you have to fall back to deontology for really extreme stuff like traditional gender roles.
As an omnivore in a society (USA) that is overwhelmingly omnivorous, "ending all animal consumption" here counts as "extreme stuff" to most of us.
edit: Adding statistics
https://allyallsfoods.com/blogs/news/vegan-statistics-2022-usa states that, out of the roughly 330 million of us:
>According to a study done by Vegetarian Times, 9.7 million Americans follow a vegetarian diet, with about one million of those being vegan.
That was the point... but I guess its not obviously a joke here?
Many Thanks! The range of views here (ACX) is wide enough that knowing whether something is intended seriously or as a joke can get pretty ambiguous.
If it's voluntary, I don't see the problem, or how anybody could see a problem.
I think this is what I'm getting at – if what people want doesn't make them happy, should we give it to them?
I personally would rather not be in a traditional relationship, and let's say I find a partner who feels the same. If you could prove the downstream societal effects of normalizing non-traditional relationships outweighed the happiness gained by us being in one, would the ethical thing to do be not enter in one?
Until someone invents a utility-meter, I remain highly skeptical that we can calculate such a thing precisely.
The utilitarian debate about the prohibition of alcohol is a balance between the individual enjoyment of drinking, the individual, family and social costs of alcohol abuse, and the long-range secondary effects like funding mob takeovers in every major city. (I know some conservatives treat going back to the past as a proven-safe option with respect to side effects, but getting to the point of being able to ban women from employment, home ownership and bank accounts would require a revolution on a scale that would destroy almost every institution in our country.)
Myself and a number of friends fit this bill - utilitarian and in favor of traditional gender roles. Is it really so rare? I don't really know any female utilitarians, but I know a bunch of utilitarian / grey tribe-ish men who would be happy with traditional gender roles, and myself and several of them are paired with appropriate women.
It's probably more of a supply / demand thing. There's not a lot of supply of "happy with traditional gender roles women" also compatible / happy with with "gray tribe, non-religious, utilitarian men." So, the few that actually exist get snatched up, and all the remaining gray / utilitarian guys need to tug the forelock and convince themselves into whatever mindset / beliefs successfully gets them a mate.
I mean, at the high level how can you be pro-natalist and plan a big family if you DON'T have a traditional gender role couple? Seems like playing on hard mode.
But I guess the utilitarian / pro-natalist crowd probably has less direct overlap overall than I'm thinking.
It's quite rare in my circles. The traditional gender roles crowd is also the "no fault divorce was a mistake" and the "spare the rod" crowd.
There are lots of Utilitarians IN traditional couples, but they are not pro-trad gender roles, presumably because the people that want them can get them and the people that don't want them will fuck them up
Anecdote: all the libby libs I know are married once, 2.5 kids and a dog and a house with a fence and a garden, all the traditional gender roles evangelists are married 3 times, some amount of kids but it's hard to say given that they are at somebody else's house by court order, fucking each others wives drama melt down zones.
The people that aren't libs and are living the drama free trad life just don't think that much about it, and definitely don't ever talk about it. It's just the default to them.
Ah, yeah - seeing yours and some of the other comments now, I think I was interpreting "in favor of" personally, vs politically.
I wasn't thinking of being "pro trad gender roles" as being "pro forcing gender roles using the apparatus of the state," which yeah, I'm definitely not about, and I'm pretty sure none of the people I know would be.
I mean, isn't that bit of a stretch, given that most gray tribe / utilitarian men are libertarian, and intrinsically leery of state power and regulations around personal lives?
Maybe I just missed a shibboleth here or something. But definitely, traditional gender roles for those who want them, and nontraditional roles or lifestyles also for those who want them, and may it be a matter of personal choice for everyone.
I thought the OP was more an observation along the lines of "you know, all the gray tribe / utilitarian guys I see don't end up with trad wives, even though that would theoretically be more in line with their philosophies, what's up with that?"
Could be my bias, but in my mind you can't be pro-traditional gender roles without the compulsive element, because they are just the default background of society.
They are the gravity well we live in, if you want a poly relationship or to be rosie the riveter you have to spend lots of societal energy to hit escape velocity to even get there. 's why even though it's mostly women in college, it's still mostly men on the tenure track to pick the first thing that came to mind.
How would such compulsion work, operationally? It seems to me if the "cultural" element isn't there naturally, you would need a huge amount of state intrusion and legal framework and enforcement apparatus to even attempt it, to a degree that we haven't seen in any democracies, or even classical monarchies. I just don't see how it's accomplishable at all, and attempting it seems like it would reliably induce rioting and guerilla style resistance.
Surely, inventing uterine replicators or something has to be easier?
They way it worked in the past was state compelled; women not being able to open bank accounts in their own name or own property and such.
They way it currently works is social pressure and norms. It's shameful for a man to be a virgin, it's shameful for a woman to be a slut, your grandmother asking "When are you gonna get married?", the child tax credit, the marriage tax credit, legal non-recognition of non-monogamy etc and so forth.
It's so baked in to society people who fail to fit the mold exactly (homosexuals, transgenders, etc.) still try to match it as closely as possible. Eg, civil union isn't enough. Gays want the real full fat marriage; because it having that word attached to it MEANS something.
EDIT: didn't answer directly: the cultural element grew out of traditions of inheritance and not the other way around IMO, and here's another IMO for free: It's not that traditional roles are particularly good or bad or stable or not; it's that everything about society just flows more smoothly if you stay in the rut that 7000 years of history has worn in the road.
You got it. Most utilitarians are just "current year" progressives with enough time on their hands to rationalize it into being "objective".
>I'm moving to Buenos Aires in 2 weeks
Why?
/r/languagelearning
1. Download anki and spend a bit of time each day learning the most common words so you fast-forward to the point where you can read and watch tv. Recommend downloading a deck that includes audio with the most common 500-1000 words. Even better if there are example sentences. I like using the "low-key" anki setup: https://refold.la/roadmap/stage-1/a/anki-setup. 15-30 minutes per day.
2. https://www.dreamingspanish.com/. Any form of comprehensible input, but this is the most popular one for spanish. 15-30 minutes per day.
3. https://www.languagetransfer.org/complete-spanish. Some sort of site that teaches the fundamentals of the language, this one is popular for spanish. 15-30 minutes per day. Also if studying through reading or listening and you encounter something weird don't hesitate to google grammar questions.
4. Read books aimed at beginners. Use a kindle because it lets you long-press a word to see the translation (if the spanish-english dictionary is not automatically enabled there's a way to do that on your kindle). If you don't have a kindle you can get one for cheap on https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/.
I like this book: https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Spanish-Beginners-Yourself/dp/1473683254. Get the audio book too and play along as you read so that you learn to connect the sounds of the words to their spelling, instead of making up your own pronunciation in your head. 15-30 minutes per day.
5. Once you have been doing that for a few weeks try talking to people to practice your conversation. You can get paid tutors on italki or go to free online events such as here: https://www.peptalkradio.com/online-spanish-language-events/.
Overall the more time you spend on the language the more you will learn, but don't burn yourself out. Aiming for an hour a day is reasonable for most people (15 minutes of each type of practice) but you can feel free to play around with how much you spend on each type.