I'm sorry, are they seriously mad that the NYT isn't left-wing enough? If even they aren't partisan enough for them, they're free to go get their news from some leftist echo chambers instead.
The guffawing in my Substack/Notes feed this morning is about the discovery that Trump's special "All-American" Bible+American-founding-documents book is in fact printed in China. For my money however that pales next to the revelation that in putting it together they _edited_ the fucking UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION to reflect MAGA wet dreams.
They left out every part of the Constitution added since 1791, with no indication of having done so. Hence the version of the Constitution which MAGAts are now reading does not include any of the following:
-- the abolition of slavery
-- the guarantee of due process
-- that Americans are entitled to vote without regard to race or religion or having previously been enslaved, and can't be made to pay a fee in order to vote
-- that women have the right to vote
-- how Congress certifies the Electoral College votes
-- the POTUS being limited to two terms
-- that persons who've engaged in insurrection are banned from public office
Photos are being posted online of the last page of the Trump book's Constitution and the first page of the section following it. The Trumpified Constitution ends with the batch of amendments that are unofficially known as the Bill of Rights.
So....just in case anybody thought Trump was kidding when (December 4 2022) he publicly proposed "the termination" of "rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" -- he's put it in writing.
In my experience, it is useful as an autocomplete-on-steroids that often saves time while typing code, but people who claim it will replace human software engineers have no idea what they're talking about.
:- The position (zero'th derivative, if you like) of AI is frankly unimpressive - if AI doesn't get massively better at a range of things than it currently is, it won't be a big deal.
:- The first derivative of AI over the past few years has been very impressive indeed. computers can do things now that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
:- The question is what the higher derivatives will look like. If AI goes on improving at the rate it has been over the past 3 years for the next 20 then yes, it really will be revolutionary, but we absolutely shouldn't be confident that that will happen - in fact, I think its more likely, although far from certain, that the current rapid rate of progress will slow long before then (and the question is how soon and by how much.
Predictions about the far future are hard, so how about this? I think is is unlikely that software engineer employment will be lower 25 years from now due to automation. Conditional on it being lower, I think it's more likely to be due to some disaster or economic depression rather than AI takeover.
(a) Bob Woodward claims in his new book that Trump secretly shipped to Putin, during the first weeks of the COVID-19 shutdowns when most Americans couldn't get their hands on COVID tests, several Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.
(b) Hours after that's reported, Trump tells ABC News that the above is "false" and "a made-up story."
(c) A day after Trump's denial, the Kremlin's regular media spokesman confirms that yes "of course" President Trump sent the testing machines to President Putin.
I know, nobody cares about this stuff, it's just "TDS", politicians have always spun and dissembled so what's new, blah blah blah. And after all Vance is still, now, repeating the Haitians-eating-cats thing and nobody gives a crap who didn't already dislike him. Fine, stipulated.
Still though....call me stubborn or something but somehow this level of blunt bald-faced (as my father would call it) lying to the public with no consequences still surprises me.
It *bothers* me. And, clearly, you. I would argue (admittedly conveniently) that continuing to be bothered is a sign of good mental health. But surely it's a bit late still to be surprised?
I just loved the coincided of the following two entries on Liz Lovelaces's twitter:
"yesterday drank 350ml vodka and then:
- climbed a mountain
- accidentally fell into a pool of radioactive water
- climbed DOWN the mountain while wet and cold and radioactive
- got punched in the face for the first time in my life
- drank even more vodka at brat bar"
"decided to install Ubuntu instead. "
Yes I remember reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's _Roadside Picnic_.
a) i, too, have tried getting WIFI to work on Ljnux. No experience with falling into a radioactive cooling pond and then getting into a bar fight in a former USSR country, but I imagine that sucks nearly as badly as getting WiFi to work on Linux.
====
Snark aside, how I redally got WiFi to work on Linux:
Me to our usual supplier of computers: "I'd like a WiFi card thgat works on Linux.W
Their tech guy: "Aww, that's horrible. I mean, even cards that have the same model number sometimes use different chipsets..."
Me: "You guys have a stock of different wifi cards and an Ubunti test maxchine in your workshop. If yiu can get a a card to work well enough that it can connect to an access point, I will buy it"
I honestly haven't had any trouble getting WiFi to work on Linux in the past 15 years. The one time I did, it was because I was trying to install some random distro for fun and the solution was booting Ubuntu long enough to turn the card on.
Chris Williamson's most recent guest is Calley Means, who argues the regulatory systems that are supposed to protect the American food supply and healthcare are fundamentally captured by big food processors and the pharmaceutical industry, and that's why Americans are so obese and unhealthy, and die years before their peers in Europe despite being heavily medicated.
What regulations has Europe put in place that make European food less obesifying than American food? I've visited many European countries, and I seem to recall them having the same range of junk food as the US available for anyone who wants it. But I wasn't studying the issue closely, so maybe I missed something.
Note that I am *not* asking for examples or arguments of typical European diets being healthier than American ones. Nor about the regulation of foods for potential harms other than obesity. I't specifically the "regulation makes Europeans slim" part of this that doesn't ring true to me, and I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video to resolve that.
I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video either, but I would like to point out that to argue "regulatory capture in the US causes Americans to be unhealthier and die sooner than Europeans" is not necessarily to argue "stricter regulations in Europe cause Europeans to be healthier and die later than Americans." An argument could be made, for example, that Europeans are less in need of regulation to provide guardrails against obesity (etc.) because they are more likely to adhere to traditional regional dietary practices that provide those guardrails.
(I have no idea whether Calley Means is actually making that argument--see above re: wading into 2-hour Youtube videos)
If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese". The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices. Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
No, that's not logical. None of those sentences is logical. Please slow down and think.
>If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese".
That simply doesn't follow. If Americans' ad libitum diet is one that would make them obese and unhealthy, and it is one that coulde be meaningfully changed by regulation, then it would be perfectly sensible to argue that lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes in Americans *independently of Europe's regulatory regime or lack of it*. In other words, in that case, it could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by their governments, but it also could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by the Europeans themselves, voluntarily!
> The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices
The reason would be that Americans have different dietary practices. It does not follow, at all, from any of the foregoing assumptions that those differences have to do with tradition or with region. The differences under our hypothetical *could* have to do with tradition or region partially, or entirely, or not at all.
(This is, of course, also true of the Europeans' dietary practices. I offered "traditional regional dietary practices" as an *example* of something other than European government regulation that could explain a difference in outcomes; I am not asserting outright that it explains the differences. I simply wanted to show you where, and how, you are jumping to conclusions.)
>Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
This is simply irrelevant. Whether a diet "counts" as traditional or regional makes no difference as to whether government regulation could meaningfully slow, stop, or reverse its adoption. Either it could, or it couldn't. Again, I want to stress that what I am doing here is offering you a *****hypothetical****** *****example****** of a situation in which American diets could drift toward unhealthiness due to lack of government regulation (and possibly due to lack of countervailing healthier traditional dietary practices, although that need not be a factor) while European diets remain healthier without such government regulation because Europeans make healthier choices on their own.
It is a thing that could happen. I make no claim as to whether it has happened. If you want to know what I really suspect, or even if you don't want to know, I suspect that it's a complex combination of voluntary healthy dietary choices AND stricter regulations on certain obesity-fueling food ingredients AND better access to non-emergency health care AND more walking AND other things that makes Europeans less fat and longer-lived.
Failing to prevent some change, and causing that change, are two different things. In your hypothetical, it is the dietary practices of Americans (which, yes, are traditional and regional) that are the *cause* of America's excess obesity. Government regulation is merely one of several things that could in theory have prevented that outcome, but didn't.
If there were some regulatory body whose default behavior would have been to prevent Americans from adopting obesity-inducing dietary practices, then possibly interference with that regulatory body would qualify. But I don't think that's the case here - at the time the relevant dietary processes were adopted, American food regulation was limited to basically "is it contaminated or actually poisonous?", and no, fattening did not count as poisonous.
And if we imagine that "Big Food" was pushing some profitable but fatteningly healthy dietary practices on Americans and could only have been stopped by regulation, then presumably "Big Food" would have wanted to do the same in Europe, because twice the profit. So, again, what are the regulations that Europe has adopted that prevented "Big Food" from overriding traditional, regional European dietary practices with endless Big Macs and Supersize Fries like they allegedly did in the United States?
I came across this analysis of the backgrounds of Nobel Laureates. I found his analysis interesting. But he's concerned that our society isn't doing enough to find and support kids from non-Nobelist-generating backgrounds to reach their potential as scientists who could fix all our problems. Except from an equity perspective, I don't think this is a critical problem. After all, there are more scientists now than ever before who are publishing more papers than ever before, but scientific advancements have stagnated (yes, I believe John Horgan is correct).
I came across a reference to the relics of St Anthony of Padua today, and if you take a look at the reliquary of his lower jaw, I think you will understand the aesthetics of Guillermo del Toro's movies better 😀
I work for Otherbranch, a tech hiring startup founded and staffed by former Triplebyte employees. Surprisingly enough, our list of clients offering open roles is currently outpacing the growth of our candidate pool. So if you're a software engineer, we want to get you hired for them!
When you sign up and tell us what you're looking for, we keep an eye out for incoming roles that match your interests and skills. Then we'll schedule you for a 90-minute technical interview. Based on your performance, we can vouch for your skills directly to employers and expedite you through the first few steps of their application process. Some other perks:
- You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
- It's free. Our paycheck comes from the employer's side.
- Whether you pass, fail, or crush our interview, you'll get detailed feedback on every section so you know exactly how you did.
(If you want us to help you hire engineers for your company, we're of course happy to work with you as well! You can learn more about that side of the process at https://www.otherbranch.com/landing-j-employers.)
> You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
I don't know about your company, but when I went through Triplebyte (in the early days, before it turned into a generic jobs site), I still had to interview at the client companies in addition to the Triplebyte interview.
I should clarify: you only need to interview with *Otherbranch* once. There are almost always going to be subsequent rounds of interviews with a prospective employer before they hire a candidate, but the Otherbranch interview will often take the place of the first-round tech interview at a given company. At the very least, your application gets shown directly to the hiring manager instead of languishing in the resume slush pile. (The additional steps required by each company are listed clearly on the job postings we publish.)
The benefit is that you'll get to save time and hassle on additional round-1 interviews if you're applying to multiple roles through Otherbranch at once, or if you find yourself back on the job market down the road and want to use our service again.
There was (is?) a Mongol word "tümen" meaning 10 000. There was an Old Slavic word "t'ma" meaning the same. The obvious question is whether these two are etymologically related.
I asked ChatGPT, and it said that Mongols brought the word to Slavs during their invasions to Europe in the 13th century.
And now I wonder whether I have learned an interesting historical fact... or just made ChatGPT produce another hallucination.
Perhaps this is a glimpse to the future of education -- all information will be instantly available and made very easy to understand. But we will always doubt whether the answer is actually true, or was just made up on the spot. Or maybe my generation will always doubt it, but the next generations will probably accept everything as a fact. I mean, what other options will they have: trust the machine, or trust a book written by a human who probably just asked the machine?
Probably shouldn't believe anything on the basis of just ChatGPT's say-so. At the very least ask for a source. As the internet proceeds from a hobbyist playground to corporate ad-world to steaming pools of AI-generated sludge, maybe curated information sources like encyclopedias will come back in style.
Is there any reason, apart from being politically well-connected, why Robin Gunningham aka Banksy couldn't be prosecuted under the UK Proceeds of Crime Act?
Have criminal complaints been filed against Banksy? And is there an open police inquiry as to the identity of Banksy? Other than legal disputes about the ownership of his work, I haven't heard of any.
Is there any proof other than that provided by the Daily Mail (which I grant you is a very very highly super reliable journalistic enterprise) that Gunningham is Banksy? Other potential Banksy candidates have been outed.
And to whom is Gunningham politically well-connected? I think I would need more the Daily Mail to be convinced of his well-connected connections.
Was anyone around Silicon Valley, specifically in tech or close to tech, around 2010?
I have a theory that that's the year when tech/nerd culture began to ingest great numbers of people that would otherwise have gone into law, medicine, or finance--which changed the cultural landscape forever. I'm wondering if anyone has any observations or stories related to this. I'd be curious to see to what extent this theory is true.
I used to hangout in online tech spaces, but only came closer to the industry side of things around 2011-2012, and finally joined the industry in 2013. I think I observe that more non-geek people are working in tech than it used to be. The humor and references have changed quite a bit. There's less Lord of the Rings and Philip K. Dick in the air than there used to be, although these remain landmarks that even folks who went to Ivy League schools at least know of. There's a lot more people from the Ivies for sure. Very smooth, very good at presenting themselves.
As a former member of the board of VLAB (back in 2003), I can assure you that non-techies were infiltrating Silicon Valley long before 2010. "Free" money has always been a great attractor in Silicon Valley. If there has been a change, it's the fact that techies are available in vast quantities overseas, and the Internet allowed the finance, marketing, and legal crew to kick back in Palo Alto while outsourcing product development to India, China, and Eastern Europe.
Outsourcing had begun before the Dot Com bubble burst. It picked up steam afterward. Around 2005, my company bought a small tech company in Romania with a few dozen engineers. They killed the product it made, but reassigned the engineers to work on our competing product and some other projects, and then some other projects. By 2010 our little company (1200 employees worldwide) was the largest hi-tech employer in Romania (500 employees). I was told (I don't know if it's true) that in 2010 we had hired most of all the EE graduates of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UPB). The Romania Gov gave our company an award, and it became aware that it could play in the global hi-tech market. Suddenly big-name tech companies arrived and started stealing our employees. We remained at about 500, but a whole tech ecosystem grew in Romania from a little seed.
Concur with Johan below. I worked in academia largely prior to joining Bell Labs in the late 70s. Prior to about the mid-70s computers involved wires and plugs, card punching programs on cards, and submitting jobs to an rjet facility and picking up the results the next day. In the 80s computers became much smaller and migrated from major labs to personal computers. At the same time some folks were working on better operating systems (e.g. Unix at Bell, which soon became a widely used os or the Bourne shell) and better communication procedures among computers. Mid to late 80s saw massive improvements in data communications among devices. The result was in the 90s an exponential growth in the number of computers dedicated solely to managing communication among computers, what we now call the internet. The 2001 time frame Johan speaks of coincides with the emergence of being able to work on computers anywhere and communicate with other computers anywhere. At the same time lots of software was being integrated from special purpose mainframe programs (like Fortran, LINPACK and EISPACK) into stuff for everyone everywhere like MATLAB and Python. The Apple macintosh graphical interface (which Microsoft basically copied in Windows) made working on a computer lots easier and more intuitive. So I think the nurturing medium matured between 2000 and 2010 so that techie work no longer was done in big labs by hardened geeks, but could be done by anybody. That sweet mixture is I think what lured all the flies and bugs into the tech field and things got a bit juicy after that.
Thanks for the detailed story! I guess I'm one of the kids ruining the lawn then :).
There's a few books about computing in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and early 90's, but precious little about anything later, minus some about Linux/OSS and one or two about very very specific companies like Facebook. Wish there was more about the later period.
I was never perhaps what one would call, "in the industry" as much as an active, participating user of the industry as it matured. I have spent my life in the field of physics (my nickname is a clue for the specialization area.) Now I am retired, but in the sense of the Mummy's view of death, retirement is only the beginning. I am still teaching a bit at university (in a sort of emeritus status) and consulting on various problems that some folks have.
My work with computers has always been aimed at that crucial part of physics, comparing the predictions of theory with experimental or observational outcomes and trying to visualize the results. So I just happened to use whatever were the best calculational capabilities as they came to exist. When I was an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) there were no computers in common use except in very specialized facilities. We depended on paper and pencil and slide rules. There were in those days slide rule contests for students to see who could best and fastest calculate results. When hand held scientific calculators first became available (for about $400+ in olden dollars for one that did what a $10 calculator does today) they were banned from use on tests for fear they gave too great an advantage to students who could afford them. The first device I recall using that was called a computer (apart from some specialized "computers" I used prior to that time, which were actually analog computers, that use switches and variable resistors to do specific calculations, for example, Turing's machine in WW2 that broke Enigma was based on his earlier analog computer) was as a lab assistant using an early PDP device that controlled an experiment. It had a glorious 8K of memory, was housed in a person sized rack, and was programmed using paper tapes (or mylar for frequently used programs) with holes punched in it for the coding. Some of the coding was also done wiring plugs on its backside. The interface device was one of those teletypes that made a great pounding noise when in use. Around that time began more common implementation the so-called mainframes, CDCs, IBMs, and later the Crays.
All the "social" stuff with computers has never interested me. There were some early computer games (first text driven, with statements like "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" then simple character-graphic display games, called names like Zork I think) that the hard core computer folks had fun with but it was not until the communication bandwidth and memory miniaturization boomed after the 90s that it became practical to play with audio-visual stuff like movies, photos and the like. Those things take GB and more, TB for half serious video, of memory and bandwidth to be fun not frustrating. Gone are the days when we worked over 300 or later a glorious 1200 baud modems. When was the last time anyone you know got a DVD from a Redbox or Blockbuster store? In the GB and even TB world we live in a communicating computer can hit a pleasure spot with a large number of people, particularly those who somehow otherwise feel alienated from the main stream a bit or just want attention, neither of which applies to me anymore.
I got into the industry in 2001, and as far as I can tell the change you speak of had already happened by then. There were a lot of folk around who were more businessy than techy, and more preppy than nerdy. My theory is that they started to show up during and after the internet boom.
Thanks for sharing. It looks like my perspective is rooted in becoming aware of the culture of the industry when I began to interact with it, ie. 2010 is year for me and the kids are ruining my lawn!
Kurzgesagt released a new video. It's corny, naive, and overly simplistic in its optimism, but fuck, that's just what I need right now. On the off chance that you do too, here's the link:
That really pulled me down a science rabbit hole. Nice.
though I liked it, I keep thinking of the theme of CS Lewis' Abolition of Man. We in the present have a vast power over they of the future, and once we decide we should edit them, we make them less than they could be (and subject to our whim.. and we've got some pretty serious whims these days, and I don't see that abating any time soon). Okay, okay, they avoided saying any such thing. I just hear that whenever I hear 'we can make utopia right here'. I think we can't, without editing ourselves and kids. And we can't do that without making them lesser in some way. (You're gonna say, diseases. Sure. But the step after that.)
Again, liked it. Also liked the we-are-full-of-friendly-viruses one. Sent the tattoo one to a tattooed friend. Continuing the rabbit hole...
Can anyone suggest reliable historic records regarding:
Thomas Jefferson, North Africa, and pirates?
I'm not sure if there's a connection, but Jefferson's purported interactions with pirates may be -- rightly or wrongly -- associated with a militia movement called Sovereign Citizen. I'm not real familiar with the ideology, but they appear to be separatists a la the 1980s, and refuse taxes, driver licenses, license plates and such. Or is the connection to Jefferson bogus?
'Sovereign Citizens' reference a treaty with Morocco. Is it mythical?
If real, what does Jefferson have to do with it? And who were the pirates?
I can vaguely see a connection between the Sovereign Citizen movement and Thomas Jefferson's ideal of minarchist democracy, with the caveat that Thomas Jefferson was ideologically coherent and the Sovereign Citizens are very much not. Which means studying any coherent body of political thought is unlikely to give you any real insight there.
I'm not seeing any connection with the Barbary Pirates issue; that was Jefferson coming to the realization that, yes, even minarchist democracies will sometimes need to fight a war, even if nobody is literally invading us right this minute. To which end he imposed taxes and raised a navy and did all the usual stuff that annoys sovereign citizens but enables one to actually win a war, but being Jefferson did less of it than say John Adams would have,
The Barbary Wars should be more well known, they hit so many recent political moments in interesting ways.
Basically the English had treaties with the Muslim states in the Mediterranean saying they wouldn't raid english ships and take the crews as slaves. Once America declared independence American ships were no longer under the protection of those treaties.
So American merchant ships started being captured and having their crews auctioned off at slave markets. The US needed a navy to put a stop to it.
They pirates weren't criminals in their countries so they don't really fit the normal use of the term.
I think there's a great mini series to be made exploring the hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal, as well as the history of conflict with the Islamic world.
"The hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal."
Its hypocritical but not uncommon. Perhaps that has always been the most common position when it comes to slavery throughout history. "I don't want my own family/tribe/countrymen/religious brethren to be enslaved but I support enslaving the enemy." The Arabs the Americans fought against most likely felt the same(they opposed Arab Muslims being enslaved while enslaving European Christians and African Pagans). Whats uncommon is extending that anti-slavery principle to all people not just your own "tribe". The Northern US was in the beginning stage of that process closely following Great Britain.
Don't bother with the Sovereign Citizenship stuff, it's all pseudo-law/history and not worth the pixels. Do look into the Barbary Wars, as it's a fascinating bit of US history that not many people know about and laid the foundations for the US navy.
The United States in Jefferson's time did fight Morocco (and the other North African states) over Barbary piracy; piracy was a big part of the economy of Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripolitania at the time. Treaties were surely involved in ending the conflicts and freeing prisoners and such, and would have been negotiated during the Jefferson administration. The search term you want is "Barbary Wars".
Sovereign Citizens are a very deep rabbit hole of crackpottery and I have no idea what claims they're currently making about this aspect of American history.
In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
It redefines common words to mean very specific things, and then exploits the confusion between the common and specific definitions. As with any good manifesto, there's lots of capitalized words, and the cores is a bizarre theory of common law going back to England, which I don't think has anything to do with actual law as practiced anywhere (but I am not a lawyer). It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free. In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
I don't think Sovereign Citizens are a "militia" by any normal definition, and from what I understand, one of the major places the meme spreads is in prison, where gullible or unintelligent people think it's a way to make appeals. I suppose some subgroups of SCs who aren't in prison might form militias, but that's not the same thing as the entire group being a militia.
I don't know about a direct connection with Thomas Jefferson.
The pirates are almost certainly the Barbary Pirates, who operated out of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I don't know how they're relevant to SCs, except that SCs make a big deal about "Admiralty Law".
[edit: But moonshadow's link below suggest another meaning: on the theory that Canadian law only applies to the sea around Canada and not to the land, therefore when Canadian courts attempt to enforce rules on land, they're acting as "pirates".]
I encountered this phenomenon while providing legal services to inmates in lockdown. Librarians were obliged to photocopy legal documents without charge if they were "qualified", i.e., Habeas, Conditions of Confinement, Civil Rights, etc., according to the Lewis v. Casey Supreme Court decision. When I refused to copy an inmate's documents because they were about Sovereign Citizens' gibberish, this particular inmate went on a racist rant. I later ran into him working at a Salvation Army store where I was stuffing some furniture into my compact car. He remembered me and tried to pick a fight. What was unusual is the inmate was black, and apparently didn't understand that if he showed up to a meeting of Sovereign Citizens on the prison yard, he would not be well received. You picks your delusion and take your chances, I guess.
It sounds like you have a lot more contact with them than I do. But the occasional instances that come to my attention have been skewing more and more black over the last decade. *shrug* And I hadn't noticed a racist connection, but I suppose that's also something you'd have a lot more visibility into.
> In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
*gasps and appalled*
They are fantastic, adorable, people on the right side of the debate; they may not be the brightest knife on a shed. But they have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, are so nonviolent in their advocacy in the face of overwhelming pressure.
I have no idea whether you're joking or not... But I do kinda sorta agree; they seem non-violent and willing to solve problems with talk and passive resistance, which is frankly amazing in this day and age. I think with a more sane belief-system they could possibly be an actual force for good. But as is, they're just nuts. It's like dealing with an LLM AI that's been *told* to give you meaningless slop. :-/
The insanity is optimism and the optimism is the cause of non violence. Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence. I imagine we could debate for hours about when and where violence is acceptable, but taxation is theft and given a proud american face to face with a cop there to steal their money(/or other example of state violence hidden under layers of lawyer bullshit) its a hard pill to shallow to pick between martyrdom or cowardice. The untrained human mind often trys to bargain with reality, qed they pick an irrational nonsensical 3rd "options".
"just world fallacy" leads poeple with my personality to hope that you can assert your freedom(which clearly exists, the rural guns outnumber the federal agents 1000:1) to a cop and they will go away without a big mess of violence.
>Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence.
Plenty of people pick up individualistic anarchism ideas without accepting the idea that politics is violence. However, most of those people do not also believe a very specific laundry list of demonstrably untrue and extremely silly things about U.S. history, English common law, money, contracts, taxation, the Uniform Commercial Code, etc., etc., etc. Sovcits are a very particular and somewhat rare kind of weird.
> It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free.
It's hard to blame them for this; it's a completely correct view of how the law works. We have plenty of examples, as when police testify that they were put in fear when they observed someone reach for his waistband. This is accepted, every time, despite the facts that (1) every cop ever called into court gives the same testimony and (2) we know that that they are specifically trained to provide those exact words.
> In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
That's not the fault of the nonsense. It just reflects that judges don't like them.
The problem isn't that there are a magic words in law that win you court cases, there absolutely are. The problem is that Sovereign Citizens have the wrong magic words and subscribe to an understanding of the law that will never generate the right ones.
Isn’t that the same as the case of the cargo cult: it is literally the case that if you build an airstrip lots of good stuff will arrive (if you are the US airforce and/or the US government likes you enough to send you stuff). The thing about the cargo cult is thinking that if you take the same action when the bracketed condition isn’t true that you’ll still get the benefit.
I guess, but I see the airplane deliveries as being performed by the same people who build the airstrips. They're building the airstrips as part of their air freight system, so that their airplanes can land on them. This makes for a significant difference between those people, and other people who build airstrips because airstrips attract airplanes. Airstrips do not in fact attract airplanes. One group sees the airstrips as a channel by which they can deliver something, and the other sees the airstrips as a natural resource, like a fruit tree, which occasionally produces something.
I don't see this type of difference between "people who use magic incantations in ways that the courts feel warmly toward" and "people who are too stupid to realize that the law isn't about magic incantations". I have cast that second perspective uncharitably, but it is not rare, and I think it is incorrect - the law 𝗶𝘀 about magic incantations, but courts feel that it's important to deny this. These two groups are viewing the law in the same way, but it's only working for one of them, for external reasons.
Viewed from one perspective the words about fear when someone reached for their waistband would seem like a magic incantation. But from another perspective those words are a shorthand for an argument that the judge will find persuasive. A non-police-officer probably wouldn’t get off a charge by using the same words, or would a police office get off a different charge (corruption, say) by using those words.
It is of course true that the building of airstrips doesn’t in itself attract cargo. That’s a genuine misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved. But to steelman the cargo cultist, it really is true that the magic words ‘please send us this week’s shipment’ attracts cargo. But it still wouldn’t work for the cargo cultist to send that message using the right magic words: the reason the magic words work is that the people hearing them think they should respond in a particular way.
A little while ago, there was an internal memo from the YouTuber Mr. Beast, which made the rounds. It had some interesting things about how his production system worked. But one part jumped out at me:
> This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.
I think that this is how Trump should be interpreted. All of his "best" and "worst" and "greatest" and "all" and "none", all of the exaggerations, even my "all"s ... it's all showmanship to hook his audience.
Yes, he speaks in hyperbole. I'm not sure that's the way he actually operates, but certainly how he speaks, and he thinks it works, at least for his target audience.
Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,' and thought as one of the SSC-sphere's resident physicists I should weigh in. I'm going to weigh in on the side of `this is definitely physics, quit complaining.' My reasons are two-fold. (1) I (and many other physicists) like to condescendingly believe that ultimately, all scientific fields are just physics (possibly applied), and we should be consistent in our convictions, and (2) the `disordered systems and neural networks' sub-arxiv is one I've read religiously (and contributed to) for over a decade. I've always thought that most of the stuff on there is physics, and it would be bizarre to declare `this subarxiv is physics, but some of the papers that founded it are not.'
Alors, c'est magnifique, et c'est la guerre. And evaluated as statistical physics, it seems to me to be a completely worthy choice of award.
Seeing how I learned about Hopfield's work doing my diploma thesis at the Chair for Computational Physics at the Physics Department of my university - I don't have an issue with the Nobel Prize. It's at the outer edges of what physics is, but it's so much more important than most of what's going on in more traditional fields, so it's fine.
I’m a young adult male who does a lot of hard cardiovascular exercise (usually every day). I just got double-vaccinated for flu and covid. I’ve heard about risk of myocarditis among young adult males who just got vaccinated. Should I lay off the exercise for a few days? When I googled about exercise and vaccination, I found studies saying exercise is helpful, but I’m not sure if these studies considered the myocarditis risk.
There isn't strong evidence that directly links exercise to an increased risk of post-vaccination myocarditis. But intense physical activity can sometimes exacerbate underlying heart conditions. And a bout of myocarditis could further increase your risk. Since you're young, you probably haven't had anything like an ECG or EKG, have you? IANAMD, but it might be worthwhile to have a workup done on your heart (if your insurance covers it).
What would be the downside of not exercising for a few days after the vaccination?
I haven’t had a heart workup done. I use an Apple Watch a lot of the time when doing cardio, and it has some kind of irregular heart beat detection.
Working out is part of my routine, and I get a little stir-crazy if I don’t. I think the kids call it “zoomies”. I also feel like I haven’t earned the right to eat dinner if I haven’t broken a sweat yet. I do occasionally skip the workout in rare scenarios, like if I’m on a plane or working late.
If the damage was done it lasts longer then a few days and "myocarditis" is just the signal. Your bargaining politics and well that just aint how reality works(at least when your not debating with a person); Im pretty sure it wont have an effect. If you rolled the dice badly and spike protein got into your heart you should probably not heavily exercise for a year or 3(and plan on dying a decade earlier); heart damage is no joke and if it happens for an unknown reason from a shot in your arm a very strange cascade of events happened
The advice I got was to not exercise for a few days. For one, I was told that increased blood flow in the muscles where the vaccine was injected could reduce its effecticeness; the other aspect was myocarditis. From what I remember, the odds of getting it are somewhere in the 1/1000 to 1/10000 range, but it's not worth risking anything. (Besides, there's a fair chance that the vaccine hits you hard enough that the question becomes moot. Listen to your body.)
IMHO Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because most of that detail about whales and whaling isn't a relevant part of the story or plot in any way - instead, there's a (not that commonly used) literary technique, where at certain points in the story there are months of mundane routine travel where the protagonist stares at the sea and nothing happens other than months of suspenseful waiting which is key to establishing their mood when the whale is noticed again - and in order to provide a similar feeling and mood to the reader, instead of just saying "x time passed", the author has a long chapter that thoroughly describes vaguely related facts in excruciating detail. And it works, achieving that effect.
I'll admit, I haven't read many techno-thrillers and I have no idea what contemporary ones are like, but I'd be very surprised if they included passages such as these:
"While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."
I think it might be more fun to read it as an alternate-history techno-thriller, by a reader who was ignorant that whaling was ever a real practice.
I think most of it would sound incredibly contrived. How could anyone possibly catch a whale with 19th century technology? "Well y'see, you just wait for it to surface then you chuck in a spear on a rope!" And what could possibly make this whole activity economically worthwhile? "Well, y'see, there's a goo in a sperm whale's head which you can use in cosmetics." It all sounds completely implausible.
Whale oil as lighting source. Before petroleum products were refined, animal-fat derivatives or plant oils lwere what you had to burn for light.
So commercial whale hunting in the 19th century was more like oil prospecting in the 20th century, regarding economic returns, than merely "the oil in the head can be used for cosmetics".
I tend to associate him and Michael Crichton with the start of the genre. I can't point to anyone more recent, but I'd probably recognize the names due to time spent shelving in a mystery/thriller section.
Would Stieg Larsson's _Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ trilogy count as a techno thriller? Lots of hacking and violence. But geez that's almost two decades old now!
By September 2022, US intelligence reports deemed “exquisite” revealed a “deeply unnerving assessment” of Putin — that he was so desperate about battlefield losses that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Based on the alarming new intelligence reports, the White House believed there was a 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon — a striking assessment that had skyrocketed up from 5% and then 10%, Woodward reports.
“On all channels, get on the line with the Russians,” Biden instructed his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “Tell them what we will do in response,” he said, according to Woodward.
The book recounts a tense phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in October 2022.
“If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered,” Austin said to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Woodward. “This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate.”
“I don’t take kindly to being threatened,” Shoigu responded.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said, according to Woodward, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
Two days later, the Russians requested another call. This time, the Russian defense minister dramatically claimed the Ukrainians were planning to use a “dirty bomb” — a false story the US believed the Kremlin was pushing as a pretext to deploy a nuclear weapon.
“We don’t believe you,” Austin said firmly in response, according to Woodward. “We don’t see any indications of this, and the world will see through this.”
Haven't we always known intuitively that this is the reason the Biden administration wants Ukraine to fight Russia with one arm tied behind its back? Other commentators have expressed this idea. Their mistake has been that they see Putin as a leader of a nation-state motivated by nationalist impulses. They expected Putin would eventually realize that he's destroying his nation's economic and military capacity by continuing the war. But Putin is more like a mafia leader. Even though he's assassinated all the other pretenders to the throne, he can't show weakness. And like a mafia boss, he can't go into retirement. That would immediately put a target on his head. Russia can go down the tubes, but Putin has to keep trying. And with all the yes-men surrounding him, he may not realize how much things are deteriorating around him.
This doesn't really make sense. Putin wants to annex the industrial eastern parts of Ukraine and turn the western part into some sort of demilitarized buffer state between Russia and NATO. He would in effect be nuking the territory he wants to control, and the prevailing winds would blow the radiation into Russia anyway. I also don't think it would serve the interest of keeping NATO out at all; nothing is more likely to lead to foreign intervention than dropping a nuke.
Tactical nuclear weapons don't even work very well against enemy troops. They aren't concentrated enough in the theatre. It makes more sense if the nukes are trying to stop hundreds of Soviet divisions from pouring into western Europe over limited routes. The only real target in Ukraine would be Kiev. That wouldn't destroy the Ukrainian military, but it would destroy all the people that the Russians would need to negotiate a surrender with.
The Russians might try to look tough with their nuclear policy, but Ukraine has violated their red lines in the past. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine states that attacks on their nuclear detection or launch infrastructure can trigger nuclear retaliation. But Ukraine partially destroyed the over-the-horizon early warning radar in Armavir this May with a drone strike, and the Russians did nothing.
1. The proper and effective way to use what are generally called "tactical" nuclear weapons is to engage critical logistics and C3I (or whatever) targets. The bit where, ha ha, tanks are so tough and spread out that your fancy nuclear warhead only destroyed six of them, you silly fool who thought nuclear weapons could stop tanks, falls apart when you learn that the nuke didn't destroy any tanks but now all of the tanks aren't getting any more fuel, ammunition, or orders. Assuming the Russians are not *completely* incompetent, the modest use of tactical nuclear weapons would probably have given them a decisive advantage in Ukraine.
2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on their original sites, starting weeks after the attacks. They were somewhat less healthy places to live than they had been, but not to an extent that would seriously concern a Russian, or anyone else whose risk tolerance has been recalibrated to wartime standards. Fallout does not render vast tracts of valuable land inhabitable for any great length of time.
Re: 1, a lot of the Ukrainian command/logistics is already very spread out and decentralized to mitigate conventional strikes from drones/bombs/missiles. And they don't really have local production of much besides drones, most of their supplies are shipped in from NATO neighbors. Nuking Poland or Romania is fully into WW3/MAD territory. I don't doubt that the Russians using tactical nukes against Ukraine would be devastating, but it isn't the same scenario as a typical Cold War era wargame.
Re: 2, see my comment below about grain exports. It's a major pillar of the Ukrainian economy and the public is hysterical about radiation far beyond the factual harms. I imagine the deployment of nuclear weapons there would destroy the export market. Maybe this isn't something Putin or the Duma care about very much, but it would be against their own interest if they want to occupy the land they are conquering (which presumably is the whole reason they are using nukes in the first place).
Also, depending on the time of year where they dropped the nuke, they'd risk fallout blowing back on their territory. I remember when Putin first rattled his nuclear saber (the first of many rattles), I checked the winds in Kyiv and they happened to be blowing towards Moscow. But for much of the year, they blow up towards Poland and the Baltic.
The nuclear strike was being considered specifically in view of the Kherson garrison being surrounded and cut off from supply in late October '22. There might have been adequate troop and armour concentrations west of Kherson for it to make tactical sense.
In the event, Sergei Surovikin, in a remarkable display of political sangfroid and military skill, surrendered Kherson and pulled out the 49th CAA in relatively good order (not remotely as good as the MoD claimed, but better than could have been expected).
Maybe? This would still contradict official Russian nuclear doctrine at the time. The equivalent of a division being cut off doesn't qualify as the sort of existential threat to the Russian state needed to invoke it. And this was an offensive operation, so it doesn't invoke the defensive aspect of the nuclear doctrine either.
It was most of an army, not a division. The Kherson garrison fluctuated between 30,000 and 70,000 men since the city fell to the Russians, though I grant you it was closer to the lower bound in October.
And a month earlier, as I'm sure you know, Russia had annexed the Kherson oblast de jure. Doctrinally, the Kherson garrison was defending Russian territory, as Russia saw it.
ETA: Which is not to say that the pollution concerns you bring up in your other replies are wrong. Kherson controls the North Crimean Canal, which supplies water to Crimea from the Kakhovka reservoir.
I must have got the timeline mixed up; Kherson being annexed at the time does make it plausible that Russia could invoke the nuclear doctrine. I still think it's unlikely for other reasons, but I have updated from the story being nonsense.
The fallout from a small number of "tactical" strikes would be pretty limited, I think. Probably not worth worrying about for someone who already had troops camping in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I think the ship has sailed on annexing anything useful industrially, since the war has been so grindingly destructive that nothing you take by force will end up intact. The only real goal remaining is to claim enough territory to declare victory without it being a total embarrassment, and you can still do that even if the territory you seized is glowing slightly.
I agree that it would draw foreign intervention and be unlikely to end the war, but that's exactly what this phone call is signaling! I don't think it's fair to dismiss this news as "they would never do it" if one of the reasons they wouldn't do it is "the US explained why it would be a bad idea."
The exclusion zone mostly isn't dangerously radioactive; of course the coffin site is, and some other places like the red forest and equipment dumps from the liquidation effort. But people have been living there for decades now with only moderately higher background radiation. Of course there is also a big difference between irradiating some Russian troops and fallout blowing through Rostov.
The industrial infrastructure and urban agglomerations probably are pretty destroyed after the fighting. But a major part of the Ukrainian economy is grain export, and a nuclear strike would cripple that. Even if it was mostly safe to consume, no one would want to buy it on the market. I don't know how much this matters to the Russian command, but it would be against their own long term interests.
This last part I don't find credible. Putin isn't stupid or insane, I think he grasps that launching a nuclear strike would have enormous repercussions. Similarly, I don't think the Russian Minister of Defense needs America to tell him that it would be a bad idea. I don't doubt that the call happened or that the threat of American retaliation was made clear, but that doesn't mean the Russians couldn't figure that part out on their own.
I am continually in awe at how quickly the rationalizations in support of the current doctrine in Ukraine come pouring out in response to claims that go against the accuracy of the doctrine. It doesn't matter how reliable the countervailing information is. It seems nothing will force some of you guys reconsider the soundness of the current doctrine. The response is always more self-serving rationalizations to shore up confidence.
But to what end? This is not how one maintains an accurate view of the world. What good is served by maintaining the reality-distortion field for as long as possible?
I suspect someone here is trying to juice up the story to make elements of the Biden Administration (e.g. SecDef Austin and/or APNSA Sullivan) into the Voices of Wisdom and Prudence who negotiated a time of Great Peril and so Saved the World from Armageddon.
I think it likely that phone calls from Beijing to Moscow had rather more impact than those from Washington to Moscow, and I never assessed the probability of nuclear weapons use in Ukraine at higher than 20% in part because I was confident Beijing was making those phone calls.
I don't know why they would care about China more than the US. If Putin ends up using nuclear weapons, it will only be for one reason: to drag as many people as possible into the grave with him. Strategic considerations are irrelevant at that point.
Putin doesn't much care about the US, because the US has already done pretty much everything it is plausibly going to do to threaten his regime. Putin cares about China because Putin is absolutely dependent on China to keep the Russian economy from outright collapsing (and taking the Putin regime with it). And China is very much not in favor of a world where nuclear warfighting is in any way normalized, even less in favor of a world where China gets any of the blame for a nuclear war and the West starts talking about secondary sanctions.
Having Russia as a client state does benefit China, but almost certainly not enough to justify the cost or risk of opening that can of worms. If Xi tells Putin "no nukes or we're cutting you off", that's a credible and very substantial threat. And I have a hard time thinking of a good reason why Xi would *not* have long since made that phone call.
He already has absolute power nationally. What he wants is international power, and more importantly, to bring back to life a Russian empire. If he fails in that... what's even the point? He would just be a king of nothing. If Russia is doomed to be an irrelevant, impoverished country, then there is no reason for it to continue existing. May as well put it out of its misery.
If all he cared about was maintaining local power, there are far less risky ways to do so. He could've cut his losses a long time ago. This is more than that.
Yes, he wants international power, but dropping nukes won't get him that. Having nukes gets him more of that than ever using them would.
If he could drop a nuke and have the West back down and let him get his way, I'm sure he would do that. Dropping a nuke so the West collectively takes him out doesn't help.
I do think that Putin would consider "Russia is much stronger than when I took over" to be a viable win condition. That he stood up to the West and Russia didn't get destroyed economically or militarily is already pretty good for bragging rights. He also will almost certainly exit the current war with more territory than he started with and a more demoralized and weakened Ukraine.
Nobody lives forever, and conquering the world was never on the table for Russia. I take Putin's end game to be territorial and power gains, which he has achieved. Russia may be a backwater compared to the West, but it's powerful and influential compared to say, Italy. It's more influential than France, Germany, or Britain as well, despite a smaller economy. I think Putin would say that he's winning, but if he were honest not winning by as much as he hoped.
Going nuclear would, for Putin, be a desperation move to forestall a defeat that would *cost* him a great deal of power internationally, and possibly domestically. Putin wouldn't "win" a nuclear war, but he might lose one by less than he would the alternate conventional war.
Also note that these are Vladimir Putin's potential losses we are talking about, not Russia's.
China is on his doorstep and doesn't give a rattling damn about how it is perceived by bleeding-heart liberals in the West or pesky things like "you can't do that, it's a crime against humanity" (see the allegations about how it sources a plentiful supply of donor organs if you want to pay for surgery and skip queues here in the West). If Premier Xi tells Putin "if you do this, we will not take it well", that's a more credible threat than some American blowing hard about "We are the biggest gorilla in the world".
Putin might have thought tactical nukes could be used in Ukraine without escalation to global thermonuclear war. Ukraine is after all not covered by the American nuclear umbrella. In which case the reaction of his patron and chief supplier would be highly relevant.
I had put up some posts objecting to the indefinite ban on LearnedHebrewHatesIP, but I no longer object to the ban. People have linked to some posts of his that were deeply out of line, and I get it. But I have also seem some contemptuous talk that seems unfounded and unfair — for instance, someone saying his apologies were fake, various people saying things along the lines of good riddance. I myself saw very little of his bad side, probably because I avoid threads that are at all political. And his good side was great. So here are my 3 most vivid memories of good encounters with him.
Some time in the first month after 10/7/23 some furious rando put up a post saying that Israelis thirst for the blood of Palestinian children. I posted some sort of objection, and LHHIP, who at that time called himself LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael, defended rando, basically saying that rando’s statement was at least metaphorically true. We then had a long, intense but civil exchange and finally a reached a point that hinged on *syntax,* oddly. He was saying that rando was talking about the Israeli military, I was saying that there was no reason to take rando to mean that. I then wrote a whole obsessive paragraph about syntax: under what circumstances and in what kind of sentences “the Israelis” would be taken as shorthand for “Israeli military,” and when native speakers would naturally take it to mean all Israeli citizens. There was a pause, and then he wrote back that he’d thought it over and yeah, I was right. That impressed me — that he’d be willing, when so furious about the Palestine/Israel situation, to think about such a dry matter, and then concede that I was right, and then concede that rando’s statement would normally be taken to apply to all Israelis, and that when taken that way it was obviously false and inflammatory.
Maybe 6 months ago I asked on here whether someone would give me a consult about future geopolitical matters for a novel I am writing. Nobody responded, and I thought about contacting LHHIP directly even though I had never spoken with him anywhere except here on the forum. I just had the feeling that he was the kind of person who might do it. I hesitated for a while, but then finally did, and he wrote back that he had actually been thinking about offering, and said he’d be happy to. He wrote long, thoughtful answers to my 3 questions about future alliances, hostilities and ways they might play out. In fact, the answers were *too* thoughtful and inventive. I’d have had to change the plot of my novel to accommodate them. So then, feeling awkward and sort of rude, I told him that, and asked for simpler answers that would fit with the basic storyline, and he, without complaint, wrote 3 new answers that this time were just I’d asked for.
Pretty recently we had a long exchange about AI, and questions it prompted for us, having to do with consciousness, and complexity -- for instance is evolution a dumb, in fact mindless, process, or is it then genius of a wordless universe? I think about stuff like that, and he could meet me there. Also sent me to a great paper.
I have also read many posts of his on a variety of subjects, and they seemed to me to stand out in their intelligence and fair-mindedness, even among this crew. But I rarely read political threads, and clearly it was on that subject that he really lost it, over and over. To his credit, he also apologized at length multiple times, and I am sure those apologies were real. Still, you can’t get away with losing it over and over, especially if losing it takes the form of actually arguing that we should assassinate Trump. So I withdraw my protest of his ban. But I do wish more people would speak up about his good side, which was very substantial, and also consider that, as Moon Moth wrote somewhere on this thread, he might have been struggling with a huge ball of anger roiling around his insides I don’t know a thing about his life, but his user name already tells part of the story. Seems like he put substantial effort into bridging the gap between his point of view — I assume he’s Palestinian — and the Israeli one; learned Hebrew as part of that effort; and somehow all that came to nothing. And who knows what he’s been through, or had loved ones go through. People with interior fractures like his are often trauma victims, and by “trauma” I don’t mean something like being poor and lonesome, I mean savage beatings by a parent, witnessing extreme violence, etc.
I think this is about more than just an individual person. His presence was very important for the epistemic health of this space this last year. (Which, otherwise, significantly more Jewish, and significantly less Arabic/Muslim than average. And the people most emotionally invested in Israel are, quite naturally, the best informed about it. He was actively pushing back against what would otherwise - and at times did - become an epistemic bubble, in a way most of us wouldn't be able to, while keeping the discussion civil and factually grounded. Well, usually, the banworthy post was... well, banworthy.)
Hmmm yes, it is a very jewish place, but also pretty liberal place. A jew from LA may be pro-Israeli in the sense that she is more invested in "Israeli jews won't just disappear", but is often very much not what come to the Israeli's mind when thinking about "pro israel"
This was my first thought as well. I'd wanted to write something like that, but a) I share his views on Israel's response to 10/7 so it would just look tribal; and b) I'm an infrequent commenter, and non-central on all axes except my gender.
I assume there's nothing stopping him from LHHIP coming back with a new username? I believe that's what Carateca/Trebuchet did (not that that worked out long-term).
If he similarly feels like the discussion here was interesting and valuable (and especially if he happens to read this commentary) then I'm all for it
Trebuchet? Huh. I actually had a horrid exchange with Trebuchet early on in my time here. I posted saying I was wondering whether my daughter and her boyfriend (both about 30, and planning to marry) would be better off in New Zealand or elsewhere. Described their work skills and personal tastes in lifestyle, hobbies etc, and asked for suggestions of places to move. For some reason this question infuriated Trebuchet. They asked for my reasons for wondering whether my daughter and her partner should move to another country, and I mentioned Jan6 , very high level of hostility between factions in US, disappearance of the middle class and the then-recent abortion ruling. Trebuchet fastened on the abortion issue, furiously informed me that many countries did not permit abortion (as though I did not know that), then went on a long gruesome riff about my apparent acceptance of abortion on demand. All I remember from it was that Trebuchet was talking about a plentitude of dead fetal grandchildren. WTF? I reported the post.
Ouch. That someone as smart, educated, and usually insightful as you believes that the middle class is disappearing is utterly depressing. (I almost understand Trebuchet's reaction.) Or maybe it is *because* (not despite) you are smart and educated that you believe that.
(Side note: for what it's worth, I disagree with most of the bans, especially LHHIP and Carateca.)
Politics and economics are areas of great ignorance for me, and always will be. Occasionally I try to improve myself, and read a book on some subject in that area, and the info just slides out of my head over the next year. It's like I have no mental hooks to hang it on. I don't mentally go over it, the way you do the info in books about things that deeply interest you. I'm interested in a lot of very concrete practical things and some very abstract things, but I am not wired to attend to, sort and store info from the middle realm. I shouldn't even have made a comment, but to be honest I have seen that stuff about the disappearing middle class in many many places, many of them not scuzzy, that I thought it was true -- possible to interpret in various ways, but not open to question. There must be some data that has persuaded a lot of people, though it may be that it is misinterpreted data over which a certain sort of thinker likes to wail.
From 1967 to 2022 the share of the population earning $35,000 or less (in 2022 dollars) dropped from 32% to 23%, while the share earning $100,000 or more increased from 13% to 37%.
> fraction of US population that’s middle class has shrunk significantly in past 50 yrs
Where have they gone?
I know the US tends to use a three-class classification (lower, middle, upper) rather than a four-class classification (lower, working, middle, upper). So where have all these middle class people from 1974 gone? I'm assuming you think they went to the lower class rather than to the upper? What fraction of people were lower class in 1974 versus today?
The current classifications seem to be the loss of "good union jobs" so people in manufacturing/heavy industry dropped down a class or took a reduction in their income and lifestyle; combine that with the Rust Belt and the children of those who used to work in those factory jobs now don't have any factory jobs, so are now lower class/working poor.
Then the children/grand-children of the middle class who went to college are now engaged in gig economy/the precariat jobs, so while they expected the same lifestyle as their parents, they can't achieve it.
So there's a section of the former middle class who have seen reduction in opportunities, income, lifestyle, etc. both at the traditionally working class end and the middle-middle end. They may technically still be counted as "middle class", but by comparison with the days of 1974, they haven't achieved what their parents/grandparents did; the 'permanent pensionable union job'/'a degree will get you a good white collar job' days are pretty much over (unless you're part of the knowledge economy, and AI may be threatening some of that, too).
I don't know Melvin. Maybe some went up and some went down. I am really not knowledgeable about these things, and it's possible I'm repeating an urban myth, except one that much of the news media has bought into anyhow. If you think I'm wrong I'm, not going to argue with you.
The good news is that wages at the bottom actually rose the fastest over the last few years, so there was some partial progress there. After decades of hearing about increasing inequality, it was very unusual to see.
No clue. I sort of assumed male, though. And it looks like in this thread I let my normal gender-neutral references lapse for carateca/trebuchet and LHHI.
I would be astounded if LHHIP was a woman. But Trebuchet -- there was something she said in an exchange with me. Can't remember whether said she was a woman, or something that strongly implied it. Trebuchet/whatever the other name was seemed to have affect that ranged from irritated to furious. That irritable, I'm-mad-about-SO-many things tone was just always there. But women can be dysphoric, smart and rude too! Just look at me! Not that I'm always grouchy and down, but I don't hesitate to go there.
First, my disclaimer: There are a lot of comments posted that I don't read, I accept Scott's right to be dictator here, and I agree that generally a low threshold for banning is needed to keep a piece of the internet from descending into garbage. I cannot and will not speak to whether someone deserves a ban or not.
That said, I agree that LHHI/IP demonstrated admirable qualities. I posted as much in reply to at least one of LHHI/IP's comments, but I haven't noticed other similar examples of an online partisan being open to an alternative perspective and making a real adjustment.
FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
> FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
Yeah. An atheist Egyptian, living in an Islamic country ruled by a secular-ish dictator. And the Gazan war must be especially galling because Egypt is right there, sharing a border, and yet the Egyptian government cooperates with Israel and the US, and unofficial corruption aids Hamas, leaving the Gazan civilians to just ... die.
What am I missing? It seemed to me that his fury at Israel must come from something more direct and immediate than what you describe -- something like having family and friends in Palestine.
Well, I'm a heartless bstrd with a lump of coal in place of wherever emotions come from who leans toward Israel, but even so, I feel bad for the kids in Gaza. It isn't hard for me to imagine someone with a couple degrees closer connection feeling rage at Israel.
That said, the emotion behind the anti-Trump post that drew the ban did surprise me, for someone without apparent direct connections to the US.
Yeah, I think the official death toll (from Hamas, not Israel, so probably not understated) is that > 1% of the population of Gaza has died in the war. That doesn't tell you who is right or wrong, but it does tell you that people with a lot of family/friends in Gaza are likely to know people who have died, and almost certain to know people who've been displaced from their homes, had their home or school wrecked, etc.
I seem to be a lot less shocked by his Trump posts than others, though I do see that they are bannable. Most people I know joked about the assassination attempts, saying things along the same lines as LHHIP's remarks -- "damn, so near and yet so far." I personally wish the man would drop dead. Assassinating him is a terrible idea, though, because it would further weaken the norm of lawful and peaceful transfer of power, which Trump himself put a big dent in. I think we would have something between a long period of riots, and outright civil war. It's odd that LHHIP didn't see that, but I think his thinking goes awry when he's furious.
As someone quite in the thick of things (I'm the Rabbi who first created Hasbara as a sincere outreach organisation and left when powerful folk decided it would be more efficient as a propaganda organization, and I then moved to Egypt where I currently live in order to see what influence I might be able to have upon the conversation from here) and it seemed fairly obvious to me that he wasn't an actual Palestinian
(born or living in the area) but despite his sincere attempt to inform me about Egyptian anti-semitism and how careful I ought to be not to disclose my heritage, I didn't get the impression that he himself was living in Egypt. Possibly born in Egypt, but it just didn't seem like he was living here. I guess I was wrong.
I haven't been able to achieve the very large scale results that I was hoping for in Egypt so I might not be here much longer but if he (or someone else reading this) is currently in Egypt and would like to meet please stop by my page and let me know. If possible, it would be great to meet!
Actually you can email or whatsapp me directly as I shared them both in the following video I put up last week.
"Egypt's Only Rabbi Makes Dramatic Plea to Arabs: Help Me Bring Brotherhood to Mankind الحاخام المصري"
I dunno. My first guess is that LHHIP is smart and passionate and intellectually curious and concerned with ethical behavior, but he's stuck with horrible institutions, and can't be fully open to strangers because of the atheism. And here's this online community full of people who'd be a good match, but most of them treat the nearby ongoing tragedy as a football for their own local politics, which might still be tolerable except that it's the politics of the global superpower that contributes to the tragedy.
Or at least, I imagine that's how I might feel. Maybe I'm just projecting. I wouldn't normally talk like this about someone else, not in public, but I suppose he's not coming back. :-(
As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government. It seems like normal human nature to take the worst things that the worst people in a group say, and judge the entire group by them. :-( But he got better, at least about that.
I don't know where the anger about Trump came from, which is why I started wondering whether the anger wasn't completely about Israel, but more about abstract injustice in the world. And bringing in the anarchism, the abuse of power by governments and rulers. But that's all just guesswork.
<As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government
I try not to even read the news about Israel and related matters. But my oldest and closest friend is married to an Israeli woman, and spends maybe a quarter of the year in Israel. His wife's family are all intellectuals and liberals, but Mark says people in the US don't fully get that there are factions in Israel that are sort of like the lowest kind of Trump supporters, real hate-filled morons, and they fucking hate the Palestinians,, and see nothing wrong with killing as many as possible. So yeah, it's not all Fiddler on the Roof over there.
I was living and intensely involved in Israel 20 years ago but have only been there was since (hosted by the Kahana Chai organization of all people) and have pointedly refused thus far to return since the start of the war that I have been pushing very very hard against.
Here's what I published (as rhe founding Rabbi of Hasbara) on October 10th last year.
I acknowledged that within the context of world culture as it currently exists Israel has no choice but to plow ahead with no plan whatsoever until they've killed ≥ X multiple Arabs as Jews who were killed.
But that before they start doing so they should consider the alternate option of ME DOING MY THING.
Nobody likes to hear from someone who claims that he knows and can do better than the official machine in charge of a country and my lack of funds made it impossible for me to reach as wide an audience as would be necessary to turn ancient violent hatreds into empathy and friendship so despite my numerous (quite risky) efforts on every front, from contacting the mother of a hostage to attempting to deliver food baskets to the Israeli ambassador in Cairo on Purim https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY I have not succeeded.
Realizing that funding was the simple thing that waa missing I caved in and made a public call for funding in a video called: "Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
where I excerpt from the article I published last year in the immediate aftermath of the massacre to point out my prediction has been proven accurate and that every day of murder (on all sides) makes it harder for me to eventually succeed so will some brave and ballsy wealthy person please drop a few hundred thousand dollars on me.
Of course to even reach the attention of people who can do so means that my video would need to be seen by tens of thousands of people, and, as YouTube is very much a pay-to-play for people whose content doesn't fit the algorithm's conception of a clearly defined demographic it only received 100 views in total, which obviously has nearly zero odds of reaching my target audience.
Which is a shame because the ratio of 👍 to views is higher than for any similarly sized video of mine indicating that if it only got more play it might have succeeded.
Yeah, he was an interesting character. I got on his case early on, arguing that his “Hates Israel” name makes it impossible to take anything he says on the matter seriously. He defended it right up to moment when he agreed and changed it. That was… unusual… to say the least.
He also had interesting things to say about all kinds of tech matters.
Yeah, it’s like he had no middle ground between digging his heels in about his right to hate and fury, and being an unusually smart, fair minded guy. Even his username, either version of it, summarizes that doubleness: He went to the effort of *learning Hebrew•, presumably to improve his communication with Israelis and demonstrate his interest in their point of view. But now he hates them (or maybe just their military)
I think it's pretty common to have people who are sensible and careful thinkers in many areas in their lives, but who have other areas where they are so upset/committed/obsessed/whatever that they can't really have a decent conversation in those areas. LHIP could have a decent conversation on many topics, but not on all topics.
Well I think he originally just noticed that as an Arabic speaker he could learn Hebrew really quickly and perhaps do some good defeating The Nazis.
As I mentioned in the comment that started the whole discussion about his value and whether his ban should perhaps be more limited, I recognized his ever-so-rare desire to change his mind through seeking out information against his own beliefs.
He was still of the rabid assumption that Israelis were monsters when I wrote to him but it was obvious to me that as a genuine individualist free thinker his intense hatred was motivated in part by misunderstandings that could be rectified and which many of his subsequent posts show have indeed been rectified.
I don't read many Israel related posts here because as you know from my own Substack and YouTube I am an active third party opposed to the ENTIRE underpinning of what causes war in the first place.
So it never really mattered to me what LHHI had to say about the subject except for its demonstration of his maturing quality of loving Truth over Tribe.
I don't remember the first version of his name (maybe KnowsHebrew?), but when I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels), he changed his name.
As the de facto Chief Rabbi of Egypt I can tell you that of all the Arabics, Egyptian Arabic is pronounced most similarly to Israeli Hebrew for historical reasons related to the closness of both the Jewish and Arab communities of Egypt and the Holy Land over the past few centuries.
Try not to stress conversations here that much, it's not that serious. The mighty gaze of Scott Alexander is one of a human being who also laughs and eats soup (I assume he sometimes eats soup, that seems like a regular human thing to do, and he is a regular human being).
All of the commenters are also regular human beings, like me. We all laugh and eat soup, these are regular human being things to do.
Yes, well I have a sense of humor too, and enjoy joking around here. But this particular event is actually pretty important to me, not because I think, like a little ninny, that Scott is god, but because someone I liked quite a lot has gotten kicked off, and in fact did things that merited that. I made a serious comment about how he was really good and really awful both at once, and you said something you didn't bother to formulate clearly. But it seemed like you meant that LHHIP's learning Hebrew allowed him to rationalize bad behavior. If that's what you really think then say it clearly. If it's not, but you just found it amusing to spray some random scorn and cynicism on some people who are distressed and talking seriously, that seems boorish to me, not lighthearted.
But many (I wouldn't be surprised if most) Americans don't eat soup! Many seem to have a childhood trauma caused by their parents feeding them soup instead of something else they wanted and view any offer of soup as a personal insult - to be dealt with by muttering (or thinking) the incantation "thin soup, thin soup" and pouring the soup down the sink in the full view of the person who put non-trivial effort into cooking it, to make sure the message sinks in.
But maybe the commenters here differ from Americans in general in that they all eat soup?
There's presumably a fair amount of people who have gone out of their way to learn Russian (and not just due to being forced to do so due to growing up in the Soviet Union or East Block in general) and who hate Russia, and also some who have studied Arabic despite hating various Arab systems.
Have you heard that there are only 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in the US?
It's a number that's been going around, but what's the evidence?
"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."
So there's no evidence, though this might be an educated guess.
How would you even find out? How would you define literary fiction? Should the number be viewed with alarm?
This is a discussion of marketing. It's actually about how many read (possibly just those who buy) literary fiction, and possibly just new literary fiction. I expect that literary fiction readers actually include a high proportion of people who are reading older books.
I'm sort of a doomer about literary fiction, for two reasons:
First, I think that although it's a worthy genre, and in theory the pinnacle of literature, it's also succumbed to the post-modern aesthetic in a way that's cut it off from its proper audience. I think there's sort of a progression that people can go through, where first they read fiction because it's about exciting things like rocketships and knights and romance and sex, and then they may grow to appreciate good writing and characterization, and at that point they're ready to take the next step to literary fiction. But it's gone off into its own tangled pocket universe, and become weird and self-referential and self-consciously elite, and that severs the intake path. And with the decline of reading overall, the intake path is important.
Second, it's been eaten by political correctness. It used to be a genre that eschewed "excitement and adventure and really wild things", as being the added sugar of literature. But now it seems that more and more of what gets called "literary fiction" is consciously written to push right-thinking politics and Take A Stand on Important Issues. And I think that is to adventure as high fructose corn syrup is to sugar.
So what these quotes make me wonder about is, how much of that audience is reading the books because they want to be seen to have read the books, because of what the status of "having read the books" will say about them?
There's something I call bad optimization. I think Scott calls it Moloch, and it's at least part of what people on the left call late stage capitalism. Or it's Goodhart.
After a while, a new and lively artistic movement gets simplified and stylized because it's easier to imitate superficial characteristics.
See also a passage from Perelandra-- on a paradisal ocean Venus, there are berries. Most of them are pleasant and wholesome like bread, but occasionally there's one with a red center that tastes wonderful. Ransome, a visiting man from earth, thinks that, on earth, they'd be bred to have exclusively red centers, and that wouldn't be as good.
I'm put in mind of a great quote from a review of a video game that I've never played:
> "Capitalism is a Faustian procedure. It is an excellent tool for creating wealth, inspiring innovation, and improving technology, but it also has a tendency to drain the soul from whatever it squeezes its tentacles into. After the initial flourish, the process of sucking out value for profit's sake begins. This principle applies to virtually any commodity you can name, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in art. Capitalism is the process by which Nirvana becomes Nickelback, journalism becomes gossip, The Simpsons becomes Zombie Simpsons, and meaningful art becomes meaningless crap.
> Art cannot sustain itself without capital. Art loses its value when too much capital is involved. And this is precisely what we're seeing in the video game industry now."
I think it's halfway. Both suffer from pressure to conform to institutional demands, especially when there's any type of scale involved. But when art goes on a market, or rather, an artist repeatedly faces market incentives, there's also a form of dumbing down that can happen - corners get cut, shortcuts get taken, less attention is paid, the demand for familiarity and consistency stifles innovation, and overall the quality declines.
The references in the quote are about popular music, journalism, TV, and video games, which are all things that involve teams of people and scale. An individual artist making unique art and selling it isn't necessarily affected, but it's an old story when a patron starts getting pushy for "more of the same". And the proverbial starving artist in a ghetto clearly has a lot less capital invested than anything involving a multi-million-dollar corporation.
It's at least a good start, but I was tickled by this quote from John Updike.
"In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier ... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit."[27] Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words."[28]"
I will yet again recommend _How Fiction Works_ by James Wood. From what I read of it, it proposes that our ideas of literary fiction were invented something like a century or two ago. The ideas of detailed description and character development and realism are an ideal, possibly from Flaubert) and if you look at actual classics (Jane Austen who does little description, Melville who has a fascinating monomaniac), they don't follow the rules of literary fiction.
I get bogged down in the book because there are long examples from stories I would never read, but I value the ideas I got from it. If nothing else, remember that so much of our environment (like that there's such a thing as literary fiction) were invented by people.
There are 163 literary magazines, but that list includes ~30 that are inactive. Those magazines are the main way that you advertise a novel to “serious literary readers” (I feel a little pretentious just typing that phrase). Out of the ~130 actively publishing, most of them have a few hundred subscribers. The big ones are in the thousands. But the Paris Review claims to have 100,000 on their list and that’s the biggest by far. I bet Ploughshares is only in the thousands and that’s an incredibly prestigious literary magazine. So if you use that for your census, I’d say 100k max, but many of those are going to be international. So somewhere in the five-figures sounds accurate.
> How would you define literary fiction?
The typical career for a literary writer is to publish a series of short stories, hopefully moving their way up that list, which is treated as near-canonical because of the prestige of the Pushcart. Once they have enough stories published in magazines at the top of the list (8 - 12), they’ll submit their collection to prizes that are organized by academic presses. If they win the prize, then their collection of short stories is published by the press. These usually sell a few hundred copies at most. If they sell a few thousand that’s considered wildly successful. If they went to a top MFA program, they can network their way to get connections at presses and get published without a prize as well. Once they have a book out, they’re eligible to apply for tenure-track professorships but those are competitive to get. To finally answer your question: “Literary fiction” is defined as whatever the editors for those magazine and the professors who run top MFA programs and the Pushcart Prize say it is.
To stick with novels for a moment, they typically won’t get an agent or be able to be considered by a literary press until they have a sufficient number of stories published at top journals and that’s when they’ll be able to get a top press to publish their novel. My point is that using those magazine subscribers is probably a reasonable way to get the ballpark figure.
> Should the number be viewed with alarm?
No. It’s a very intellectually incestuous process. It produces a lot of fiction that all sounds the same because it’s largely produced in MFA workshops where it comes out as if it was written by committee. Everyone says the same thing and all the stories blur together and the stories take no risks.
Seriously, the Catholic Church is one of the few organizations to maintain an intellectual establishment outside of the current one. You're probably better off reading Catholic writers.
Now here's an opinion that (as a Catholic myself) I'm not privy to. Who would you recommend? (I've only read Chesterton and Mary Doria Russell, oh and just found out R. A. Lafferty is Catholic)
Probably over a thousand authors in that space. There are some diamonds in the rough. Breece D’J Pancake. Anne Carson. Wells Tower, even though he’s kind of one-hit wonder. George Saunders. Anthony Doerr, although these days he famous and mainstream. But these days most of the authors doing interesting work need to do it pseudonymously, like Scott Alexander with Unsong before he was doxxed.
> Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary?
Good question. If you don’t mind a longer answer, there seems to be some confusion in the thread over what exactly literary fiction is, but some strong opinions about it. I think a brief history of the novel might help clarify how we got into the current situation and answer your question about pseudonyms.
Every art form has a “high art” and “low art” distinction. Think about how four hundred years ago a wealthy patron might go to an opera while a poor person might go hear someone sing a bawdy song in a tavern. But this distinction didn't really exist for novels because until a couple hundred years ago, no one except the wealthy could read. So this distinction of “literary” versus “genre” fiction is a relatively new concept for novels compared with other art forms.
The latter half of the 19th century was dominated by what was now called Realism. In the early part of the 1800s, literacy rates were very low and printing was prohibitively expensive. The industrial revolution made printing much cheaper over the course of the century and literacy rates skyrocketed. You had the first Penny Press newspapers in the early 1800s. Novels at that time were largely produced in a serial format with a chapter released each week or month, often as part of a newspaper. This is how much of the novels were produced at the time. It also explains the length of so many novels of that period: If an author hooked an audience with a story, they would continue the story for as long as possible to make as much as money as they could. They were literally paid by the length, so of course they were long. Most of the authors writing novels were also journalists, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
But there’s a reason why I bring this up. Because these novels were released in serial form, in order to get the audience to buy the next installment, they would want to end each chapter with a cliffhanger. They needed a strong plot in order to hook the audience and keep them coming back the following week. This was how novels consumed by both wealthy and working class readers were written.
But remember that printing continued to get cheaper over the course of the century. Then, in the early 20th century, you had the rise of the movement now known as Modernism. This was a broader philosophical and artistic movement, but the part that is relevant to novels is that the Modernist critique of Realist novels was that they weren’t actually very realistic. In particular, modernist authors, alleged that real life doesn't follow neatly structured plots. They argued that good art must be more realistic and eschew plot. You began to have authors like Hemingway and Faulkner who wrote novels with very limited plots. Around this same time you had the birth of genre magazines, like Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. These were largely referred to as pulp fiction because of the quality of the paper (A friend of mine collects them and has them preserved because they’re literally disintegrating).
Early genre fiction came from executions in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where vendors would go around executions selling pamphlets describing the crimes of the condemned, which were often exaggerated to make better stories. They gradually went from exaggerated accounts of real life crime to the murder mysteries we know today, and these were the earliest forms of what we now call the crime fiction genre. By the latter nineteenth century you had Dime Novels, which were some of the first mass produced books where you purchased the entire book at once.
But it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that buying the whole book at once was the common thing to do. This change in purchasing also changed the narrative structure. The authors weren’t forced to have such a strong plot. The combination of the Modernist critique of the Realist plot (saying that real life doesn’t actually follow a neatly structured plot) with the change in distribution dramatically changed the narrative structure. So finally, in the Modernist period we see novels have a clear bifurcation between their “High Art” and “Low Art” forms.
This distinction widened in the postwar period when we have the Postmodern critique of Modernism. To see a good example of this style, take a look at David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” [https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/1225/brief-interviews-with-hideous-men-david-foster-wallace]. (Also, to circle around to my previous post, note that it was published in The Paris Review). When done well, I enjoy Postmodern short stories, but not Postmodern novels. They’re fun for a few pages, but not for a few hundred pages, because there’s no plot.
Also, in the 1950s was the creation of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At the time someone pointed out that other art forms all have schools for their art, particularly in visual art for painters and sculptures. And music schools as well. But there were no schools for writers. The workshop was very successful and the MFA programs multiplied. I have mixed feelings about the work produced from these workshops. At times it can be very good. But often it feels like it was produced by committee and over the decades has become increasingly bland.
But there’s something else that changed. It created a professional path for people who do nothing but write and teach fiction. They don’t have to actually sell large amounts of fiction to be successful. They just have to get tenure. The writing they produce is successful if it wins awards from other writers, not if it sells a lot of copies. I mentioned that the Modernist period was the first clear bifurcation of High Art (literary) versus Low Art (genre fiction) but the Postmodernist period took that much farther. Hemingway still made his living purely as a writer. But most of the top Postmodernist writers make their living as professors who occasionally sell a few thousand copies of a book.
This brings us to today and to finally answer your question about pseudonyms. The hardliners say that genre fiction has terrible prose written for the half-literate and degrades the mind. But I think this misses that science fiction / fantasy can have allegories that make you think differently about society. Contemporary literary fiction emphasizes that stories must have a social justice message. The environment is very competitive because there are very few tenure track slots for every graduate. Writers attempt to cancel each other over anything they can find in their stories that are perceived as offensive. So people respond by writing stories that take no risks and are incredibly inoffensive. Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
There is nothing offensive there. No one can accuse you of writing a plot (I should note that plots are actually making a comeback but this has gotten way too long already for that tangent).
Consider this quote from Sherman Alexie, a social-justice oriented writer who is one of the top literary writers alive:
“I've been publishing books for 30 years. I'm close friends with approximately twenty writers. I'm casual friends with a few dozen writers. I'm professionally friendly with dozens of other writers. At least 80% of my close, casual, and professional writer friends are politically left of center and at least 80% of them have privately expressed fear about saying or writing the "wrong" thing. And we're talking about some big name writers whom you might assume are immune from such pressures. Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” [https://substack.com/profile/1727692-sherman-alexie/note/c-14880242]
The result of all this is that much of literary fiction feels lifeless. Increasingly, the interesting writing is coming from people sidestepping this self censorship.
[sorry if there are a lot of typos, I had to dictate this quickly]
That was a wonderful description, thank you for sharing!
There's just one thing:
> Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
> There is nothing offensive there.
That almost made me laugh out loud! :-) The other year I streamed a sci-fi movie that basically opens with the destruction of an entire planet of sapient beings, but of all the obligatory warnings to go up front, the only one was "depicts smoking".
You know, ironically (or perhaps appropriately), they cancelled Sherman Alexie for 'sexual harassment' in 2018, whatever that means these days? It seems like he...made a few women uncomfortable?
This is why I always say if I decide to write anything I'm cultivating a right-wing audience!
"Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette."
The impression that comes to mind when I think of modern American literary fiction, in short story form, is: take a couple of de-racinated people, somewhere in the middle class, probably upper-middle or near to it. Have them travelling though the American landscape, describing the long stretches of road, the barren landscape (desert for choice but you can have acres of giant agricultural landscapes, or passing through decaying towns that once were hotspots of the glorious industrial past but are now shells). The journey doesn't matter much, the destination is uncertain, their purpose in going on the journey is ambiguous or unclear.
Have them stop along the way and stay at motels or cheap hotels. Describe the cheapness, the blandness, the uniformity where any hotel of the chain could be located anywhere but yet look identical to how this room looks.
The couple are, of course, dissatisfied. Maybe they're in their forties, maybe in their twenties. Childless (increasingly, formerly there might be a mention of one adult child who lives far away and is no longer part of their lives). He is unhappy (increasingly, it is she who is unhappy). With his/her life, career (if they have one), marriage (if that is what this relationship is), their partner.
Maybe he is having an affair (told from her point of view). Maybe he suspects she is, or wishes he was having one (told from his point of view). Don't have any such a thing as a definite ending, just that they set out the next morning (or will set out) on the remainder of the pointless, meaningless journey and at the end, they'll break up (maybe). Hint that she may ask for that divorce, but don't make it definite. Hint that he will leave her for that younger woman he may (or may not) be having the affair with.
And lard all this with anvil-heavy discussion about how this is a metaphor for the Modern American Condition. We all live like this now, Jake.
EDIT: Why are they driving instead of hopping on a plane to get where they're going fast? Yes, Jake, but then we couldn't have the Fine Writing descriptions of the barrenness of the featureless landscape, the tedium of the hours spent in the car, the pathetic fallacy where the exterior conditions are reflections of the interior lives, or lack thereof, of the couple in the dust, tedium, repetition, boredom, commodification, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
You may be allowed one (1) moment of natural beauty in the story, but watch it, buster: this is not there for you to intimate that maybe life is not always a heap of shit, but rather to show (a) once upon a time she (used to be he, but mostly is she now) had dreams, hopes, a vision of a better, higher life - but that's all gone now (b) to fool the reader with a momentary glimpse of optimism or, you know, beauty before you hit them with that anvil again about the bleak reality of the quotidian small lives the couple (and everyone they know, and society at large) is living in the prosperous yet desolate American milieu of today.
But cool it on the beauty, what do you think you are, writing to give joy in the use of language? Nah, bro, it's about Deepity.
I actually buy most of my stuff secondhand, to avoid giving money to left-wing publishing cartels. I'll even drive out of the city center to give money to the neckbeard with the giant pulp collection over the feminist yuppies. Though I'm kind of on the border between a literary and genre reader; I'll read litfic, but also bad Lovecraft pastiches.
Over in the SF field, Analog and Asimov's, two of the leading short-story magazines in the field, have roughly 15,000 subscribers each. While not all of those are in the US, and some are institutional subscriptions, having a subscription to either one is generally the mark of a very serious SF reader, though exceptions do exist. This leads me to suspect there are at least 10,000 serious SF readers in the US.
SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case. That may not be the sole intent, but it's usually a big part of the intent.
That strikes me as likely to have broader appeal for a style of fiction that disclaims "mere" entertainment, and instead seems intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.
That sort of elitism will coalesce into a fairly small bubble, and 20,000 feels about right to me. Two thousand in a core community that talks to one another about this stuff, and maybe ten times that who read in solitude on the fringes? Anything more than 2,000 would I think mean the core community doesn't feel elite enough, and I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it.
Science fiction, and mystery and romance and all the rest, are read for fun as light entertainment - and sometimes not so light, but the genre's numbers will be driven by the easy fun stuff.
God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular. I am amazed by the insight so many commentators here have into the motives of others, the elites…
Thank goodness for us common folk who can paint such a bright line between entertainment and all that other stuff.
> SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case.
Moby Dick is adventure fiction ( a genre if you will), only times have changed, and now (apparently) it’s a long-winded parable that sullen high-schoolers are forced to pick through. Melville wrote because he needed to make a living. He definitely wanted to entertain people. He didn’t have many other big commercial successes, but that one struck a chord, and he had a potential audience of tv/movie/internet-free people who had to read if they wanted to be entertained. The rest is luck of the draw.
More importantly, what exactly is meant by being entertained, and how broad a brush can one use to put a line between it and what is “intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.”
Pretentiousness comes in many forms and they’re all ugly.
I think "literary fiction" has become a category really only in the 20th century. Certainly, critics in the 19th century would have turned up their noses at "popular" novels which by our time have become Classic Literature.
But I also think there is a definite cleavage between "novels written for entertainment, even if well-written" and "self-consciously high-brow and apart from whatever is piled up on the bookstore Best Seller table".
Look at the current New York Times best seller list, I don't see anything on the fiction that counts as "literary fiction".
You have to look for that in the little magazines (Granta was the big name in British publishing), the heavyweight reviews by the big name critics in the likes of the Times Literary Supplement (if that's still going) etc. The prizewinners, though some of those can cross over to best-sellerdom (some 90s Booker Prize winners did so, for example Anita Brookner with "Hotel du Lac"). The kind of thing written by artists who go to Yaddo on a bursary to produce the next Great American Novel 😁
I think it's been twenty years or more since I last read literary fiction, because the stylisation of novels and short stories which crystallised into a particular set of themes and tropes just turned me off (I dubbed such things the Hampstead Adultery Novel).
Ursula Le Guin, may the heavens be her bed, had a wonderful tart take on the attitude:
"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."*
— Ruth Franklin
(Slate, 8 May 2007)
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
*NOTE: The rest of Ruth Franklin's review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union is quite thoughtful, generally positive, and not dismissive of his longing to destroy phony divisions between “genre” and “literature.” I just couldn't resist the all too familiar image of her first sentence."
Did you ever read "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt? I remember when it came out there were some "sidelong glances" at how she was violating the boundaries of literary fiction by adding too much excitement. I think some of her later books got a bit of the same treatment, but it died down, I suppose because standards changed, and because she was just that good.
"I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it"
I get that a lot of people are in fact snobs, and maybe having read the latest Ferrante or whatever is required to survive certain kinds of cocktail party in America. Fine.
But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic. Maybe it's because I'm actually bad at writing myself, and so the corresponding sense of awe is greater, but there are some scraps of prose out there that have given me as much aesthetic pleasure as anything else in life. And that's without any kind of background in the arts that might have value-primed me for this.
> But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic.
Those aren't special to literary fiction. That's just good writing. Good genre fiction will have that 𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 as having a plot. There's no reason you'd want to go without the plot.
In American Gods, arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol are very cleverly worked into the plot!
If you want linguistic virtuosity for its own sake, I think The 13 Clocks is the best example I know, though it's more of a fairy tale than a novel.
I like many genre novels. I agree without reservation that incredible writing does show up in many genre novels. Some physicists are also exceptionally good pure mathematicians. These added blessings are mostly incidental. Genre novelists are bound by genre conventions and their energies are, correctly and decorously, focused on delivering the usual genre payoffs.
The reason you might not want a plot, or to have a very weak plot (a guy wandering around Dublin; an adman trying to make his first feature; two cousins in love) or a very contrived, near-paceless plot, is that plot constrains. It interferes with the formal puzzles and symmetries and requires too many dead sentences whose only duty is to schlep the plot forward, weakening the overall enchantment.
On reflection, this is really a recasting of Anthony Burgess's old "A-type Novel vs B-type Novel" distinction from Re Joyce. And even back in 1965 he seemed to concede that the B-type novel, the kind focused on language, is severely on the wane. So maybe there's something to that 20,000 number after all.
I would agree that Analog and Asimov's subscribers are serious sf readers, but there's so much other sf that the number of subscribers would be a very low floor for the number of sf readers.
New Yorker also covers current events, and I'm willing to bet people have subscriptions to look fashionable in left-leaning upper-middle and upper-class milieus, as well as middle-class people with pretensions and working-class people who just think that stuff's cool.
If you subscribe it’s very inexpensive, has a great listing of things that are going on in town, and at least one cartoon that can make you chuckle. They’re ideal in the bathroom.
The National Booksellers Association tracks book sales (and they've been increasing over the past decade, BTW), but I can't find any data on literary fiction as a category. On the fiction side of things, depending on how you slice and dice your numbers, and depending on which source you use, "contemporary fiction" tracks third or fourth as a genre. I suspect that this editor may be talking about the type of literary fiction that English Lit academics read, though. Titles like _Lincoln in the Bardo_ come to mind. But that made the NYTimes bestseller list — and a rule of thumb is that sales have to be in the range of 5-10k copies a week to have a chance of hitting the list. That suggests there are more than 20k readers of literary fiction.
I feel like this number could vastly increase or decrease depending on how you define "serious and consistent reader" and "literary fiction". But if your use a relatively narrow definition of litfic and define the reader as "someone who is actively looking for newly published litfic books to read", then I guess the number is somewhat plausible.
Is Anne Tyler in the literati? When I went back to university in the 1980s, an English professor compared her with Jane Austen. Yet lately, many folks we assume are literate don't know her work.
What does a woman have to do ? Stab her spouse with a Boy Scout knife (Mailer)? Commit suicide (Hemingway)? The popularitati elevated Alice Munro in public regard on her death, only to tear her down a few weeks later. She couldn't pass the Left's Political Correctness standard.
Both are writers of qualified substance, but I don't think they meet the definition of self-consciously Literary writers. In this 21st-century environment of cosplay posturing, I doubt either wants the mantle. It's a role vain men are more susceptible to. Most people who demand to be taken seriously don't have the goods.
I think the claim wrt Munro was that she was complicit in child abuse. I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but it's not quite the same as failing a political correctness standard.
I agree that it's not quite the same. But why bring up her alleged complicity in "protecting" an alleged abuser immediately after her death? Self-proclaimed 'progressives' never miss an opportunity to tear down a heroine, and if their accusations are mistaken, they don't apologize. Running roughshod over someone's reputation is all in a day's work. Munro should be held to account, certainly, but the timing of the Thought Police is performative and self-serving.
Ken Burns is doing a biography of DaVinci. I'm curious to see how he'll deal with the hero's homosexual pedophilia, and if the Burns team's examination of DaVinci's history will be as vigorous. Maybe we'll find out if Munro is no DaVinci.
The literary world is mostly female now. Roth and Updike are long in the ground.
It's still full of vain people, but instead of professors sleeping with their students, it's yuppie women forcing their husband to accept polyamory. Whether you think this an improvement depends on who you are, I think.
I assume that publisher estimates this by "the number of serious works of literature our imprint sells". If they're only selling 20,000 books a year across all their authors, then that means there are only 20,000 serious readers, it couldn't possibly be that our stuff is boring or another publisher has the market cornered because they're one of the mega-imprints and we're an indie.
Eh, very few people are consistently reading books nowadays, and even fewer are bothering with the dreck that is modern litfic. I think the number is plausible; it's nothing more than an extremely niche hobby. But given how cheap it is to produce books compared to other media, it's probably still sustainable.
Except that sales of non-fiction and fiction in all formats (included print books) have been increasing over the past decade. There was a big bump during the COVID pandemic, but the trend is continuing.
Google the keywords: national booksellers association book sales increasing
Anecdata: other than Half-Priced Books we didn't have a bookstore in our town since Barnes and Noble shut its doors a decade ago. But a non-chain bookstore that sells new books (not used) opened in my neighborhood two years ago, and they seem to be doing rather well (according to the owner).
Increases until 2008. Steep decreases 2009 to 2012. Slow increases 2013 to 2019. Notable increases 2020 and 2021, and decreases in 2022 and 20023.
I'm seeing a post-2008 crash, with a slow recovery starting in 2013, and then a (probably temporary) spike in 2020-21, and probably a corresponding post-COVID return to the underlying trend in 22 and 23.
It should be the sum of book sales AND how many novels are checked out at public libraries. I hardly ever buy novels. I borrow them from the library instead, on the assumption that I will read it once and that will be enough. I'm much more likely to buy nonfiction books (plus a few novels by authors I really like that I know I will want to reread).
If "serious and consistent" means >1 book a year, and "literary fiction" is referring to new books in what is effectively a particular marketing category, that number actually seems plausible to me. I would have estimated <1 million for sure. I know people who read a lot, but I don't think I've ever met someone of that description..
It's a dumb number. I don't know whether it's dumb on purpose to make you click, or whether it's dumb by accident because you don't get to be the editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house by being good with numbers, but it's not worth thinking too deeply about.
The number wants you to engage with it. The number wants you to huff about it and talk about how implausibly small it is and what silly assumptions must have gone in, and how you are personally a serious and consistent reader of literary fiction but you only read out-of-copyright books on Project Gutenberg. Don't let the number have its way.
Acne is increasing everywhere in the world, except apparently my country of New Zealand.
Why? It is suggested that switching from requiring a specialist doctor (dermatologist) to only a nurse-practitioner (a nurse that can generally prescribe medicines) increased the rate of treatment. The medicine in question being isotretinoin.
According to the article, what's increasing is people who visit a doctor or dermatologist about acne. We don't even know if acne itself is increasing in the rest of the world, nor whether it's decreasing in New Zealand, let alone whether the decrease is because of successful treatment. A better way to study the rate of acne would be to survey a random sample of the population and ask about the severity (if any) of their acne.
Here's my COVID update for epidemiological weeks 37-40 of 2024. Note: I skipped my last biweekly update for personal reasons. This will summarize the past month of COVID activity—plus some updates on H5N1 and some other pathogens of concern.
So far in 2024 COVID has dropped to 14th place in the top 15 causes of death—below septicemia and above nutritional deficiencies.
No sign of increased heart attacks due to Long COVID. And no sigh that the cancer rate is increasing due to Long COVID. In fact both causes of death are down approx 5% from pre-pandemic numbers. I suggest a likely explanation.
And H5N1 is killing dairy cows at much higher rate than expected. But this may be due to the recent heat wave in the West combined with the H5N1 infection.
So I want to share with you all this wonderful creature that I recently learned about, so obscure that it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect"). They look like this: https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/2/7/27efcc1e.jpg (The grub-like appendage isn't its head, that's its abdomen. Its "head", if you can even call it that, is on the opposite side.) These cute little fuzzy pearls are blind and completely incapable of moving around on their own. So how the hell do they survive? Well, they're exclusively found in the nests of a specific species of ant. The ants pick them up and attach them to the healthy roots of plants such as sugarcane and cogongrass, at which point the scale insect starts sucking the sap out of the roots. https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/9/f/9fd7414d.jpg Any excess nutrients are released out of the abdomen as honeydew, and the ants subsist entirely on this honeydew for their entire lives. ...Yes, these bugs somehow evolved into living taps for ants. (actually, they're even better than taps, since they also process the sap as well!) Oh yeah, and when a new queen is born and leaves the nest to start a new one, they bring with them a single pregnant scale insect with them so it can breed a new population of them for the new nest. https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/8M52YNKXZ4/8M52YNKXZ4-editor_06fe7c8398402c3e35a1c79b6a21a861.png
Seeing stuff like this really makes you wonder about the potential of bioengineering to revolutionize industry and agriculture. Self-sufficient machines of flesh, far more economical, adaptable, and robust than metal... Unfortunately, even if the technology is available, I'm pretty sure creating complex lifeforms is too difficult for humans to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe AI will change that.
The ending remark in your note quite literally disturbed me. In regards to AI and Humans integrating, this is inevitable in my view, considering we are already in the process with mobile phones.
> They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect")
Good-ant-seed, for the non-Japanese version. Though the "seed" should probably be translated as "scale insect" too.
I harbor some suspicions that the "ant" root should be -myrmec- and not just -myrm-. This would produce benefits in etymological soundness and in the humor value of the word "eumyrmecococcus".
I learned while looking this up that the same root also refers to warts, apparently because warts are named after anthills.
Many aphids can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis, effectively just making themselves pregnant. I don't know if it's the case for this species in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming so, yes. New queens seem to be able to tell which Eumyrmococcus are female and pregnant. The other ants can probably recognize the sex and fertility of them as well. (Though, how they do that is still unknown.) The ants also take the time to clean their Eumyrmococcuses. Cute!
It looks to me like the California Apartment Association got tired of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation using its money and influence to lobby against building housing, so now they're sponsoring a ballot measure to force them to not do that. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is of course opposing this amendment through their front group Housing Is A Human Right. This superficially healthcare related law that is really a proxy war for housing policy is perhaps the most California thing I have ever seen.
Why does the AIDS Healthcare foundation, which is presumably a foundation dedicated to Healthcare for AIDS patients, have a policy stance on housing at all? (I realize the answer may simply be "because California")
They might just need something to do. To what extent is there an AIDS-healthcare-related problem that they could help with if they redirected their efforts?
"In recent years, AHF has spent more than $150 million on ballot initiatives – including rent control measures in 2018 and 2020. The nonprofit’s annual budget is about $2.5 billion. The vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue comes from its network of 62 pharmacies – largely a result of that 340B drug discount program."
Actually, speaking of nonprofits making their tax info public, I just grabbed their most recent public 990, part of which included the following language on housing. So, at least in their words, this is why they're doing it:
SUSTAINABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE HOMELESS AND LOWINCOME POPULATIONS. IN RESPONSE TO WIDESPREAD GENTRIFICATION AND RISING HOUSINGCOSTS, WHICH DISPLACES AHF PATIENTS THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA, AND ELSEWHERE, THE FOUNDATION HAS LAUNCHED THE HEALTHY HOUSING FOUNDATION (HHF) TO FULFILL ITS PUBLIC HEALTH MISSION. HHF PROVIDES DECENT HOUSING UNITS AT AN AFFORDABLE COST TO LOWINCOME PEOPLE, INCLUDING FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN AND THOSE PREVIOUSLY UNSHELTERED OR HOMELESS. AHF BELIEVES THAT A STABLE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING SITUATION IS CRITICAL FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS, INCLUDING HIV/AIDS.THE FOUNDATION ALSO CREATES AND IMPLEMENTS NEW PROGRAMS IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE U.S. AND ABROAD, AND EXPANDS DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE AND INFLUENCE OVER POLICY WITH THE AIM OF SAVING MORE LIVES.
Well, housing is pretty expensive in California. And the AIDs medical expenses can add up (especially in the end stages of life). This may be stereotyping a bit, but gay men tend to live in urban areas (SF and LA), where renting is a big deal. The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control. And now the California Apartment Association is taking their revenge for the temerity of the AHF to try to gore their real estate cash cow.s...
> The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control.
Not just 2024. They got rent control on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 too. The 2024 version is especially extreme and destructive though, to the point where it could potentially result in de-facto bans on renting entirely.
Extreme and destructive are loaded adjectives. Do you have links to some neutral economic analyses to support such dramatic language? Rent control was around for decades and decades in New York City and SF (and probably many other cities) without "destructive" effects (other than to the pockets of landlords). But we then had the dissolution of rent controls and horror stories about elderly and vulnerable tenants being displaced by drastic rent hikes.
I don't think we're going to agree on anything, since there's basically universal consensus in economics that NYC-style rent control is a disaster. This isn't something that the kind of people who read ACX would normally even dispute.
But for the sake of anyone else following along, the 2024 version is *even worse* than usual rent control precisely because the ballot measure does not contain any numbers. All it says is that the government cannot place *any restrictions at all* on local rent control measures.
This means that NIMBYist communities could say, cap rents at $1 in order to de-facto ban renting, and there's absolutely nothing anyone could do to stop them. Does anyone really think that the kind of city that declared itself a mountain lion sanctuary in an attempt to get out of their housing obligations would not pull stuff like this?
It's been my experience that whenever someone falls back on the consensus argument, they really haven't dug into the question. Dropping the consensus bomb in the middle of an argument is a sure sign that they'd prefer not to be challenged on the facts of their case. So, I suspect the consensus whereof you speak is a lot less consensed than you claimed. Never having investigated this subject myself, I decided to see what The Chat sez...
Me:
Is there a universal consensus that rent controls have negative consequences?
ChatGPT:
There is no universal consensus that rent controls always have negative consequences, but many economists and housing experts express significant concerns about their long-term effects. The debate around rent control policies involves complex trade-offs, with arguments both for and against them.
Arguments Against Rent Control:
Reduced Supply of Rental Housing: Critics argue that rent controls can discourage new housing construction and lead to a reduction in available rental units over time. Developers may find it less profitable to build new rental properties if they cannot charge market rates.
Maintenance and Quality Decline: Landlords may reduce spending on maintenance and property improvements because the cap on rent limits their ability to recoup these investments.
Inefficient Allocation: Rent-controlled units may be occupied by tenants who don’t need the reduced rent, preventing others in greater need from accessing affordable housing. Tenants may also stay in rent-controlled apartments for longer than they otherwise would, reducing housing mobility.
Black Markets: Rent control can sometimes lead to informal markets, where landlords demand under-the-table payments or tenants sublet apartments at higher, unregulated rates.
Distortion of Market Signals: By keeping rents artificially low, rent control may lead to an inefficient distribution of resources, as prices do not reflect actual supply and demand conditions in the housing market.
Arguments in Favor of Rent Control:
Protection from Rent Hikes: Supporters of rent control argue that it helps prevent displacement by protecting tenants from sudden rent increases, especially in cities with rapidly rising housing costs.
Stabilization of Communities: Rent control can help maintain community stability by allowing long-term residents to remain in their homes, preventing gentrification and the displacement of low-income and vulnerable populations.
Immediate Relief: In housing crises where rents are skyrocketing, rent control can offer immediate protection and relief to renters who might otherwise be forced out of their homes.
Social Equity: Proponents suggest that rent control can act as a tool for promoting social equity, ensuring that lower-income households have access to affordable housing in desirable urban areas.
Empirical Evidence and Mixed Results:
Empirical studies on rent control have produced mixed results. For example, studies from places like San Francisco and New York City, which have long-standing rent control policies, suggest some negative side effects, such as reduced housing supply. However, advocates argue that without rent control, these cities would face even worse affordability crises.
Recent Studies: A 2019 study on rent control in San Francisco found that it helped incumbent tenants but reduced the overall housing supply and increased rents in the uncontrolled sector, creating unintended consequences. However, another study might find that rent control provides necessary relief during housing shortages, helping to maintain socio-economic diversity in expensive urban areas.
In sum, while many economists tend to view rent controls skeptically due to concerns about long-term effects on housing supply and market efficiency, there is no universal agreement. The outcome of rent control policies depends on how they are designed and the context in which they are implemented.
What are people's best arguments against free immigration? I read Caplan's _Open Borders_ a while ago and generally agree with it, but it is obviously a piece intended to persuade and I don't have the expertise necessary to identify subtle flaws.
For the sake of avoiding a motte-and-bailey, I'll say that I believe both that immigration levels should be kept the same or increased and that (per Caplan's arguments) removing most if not all restrictions would be good long-term. However, my confidence in both of these positions is pretty low.
I think the Swedish experience provides the best argument. Sweden has not had free immigration but has had an unusually liberal immigration regime. The result has been an explosion in gang rapes, in organized crime, in gun homicides and so on. The situation has gotten so bad that Denmark (which has had open borders with Sweden since the 1950s) has imposed border controls to limit the spillover effects.
Pretty much the only reason that nations like e.g. the United States are appealing enough that large numbers of people want to immigrate to them, is that they are high-trust societies. Everything else is downstream of that, and not from the Magic Prosperity Rays that emanate from the American soil or whatever.
Unassimilated immigrants, degrade public trust. In part because so many of them come from low-trust societies, as that's where the gains from migration are greatest. But even immigrants from high-trust foreign nations will have different norms and customs for maintaining that trust, which do not translate nearly as well as mere words.
Immigrants who assimilate into the broader culture will generally add to the vitality and prosperity of a nation, even if they do still celebrate quaint ethnic holidays and eat exotic ethnic food. Strike that - *especially* if they eat exotic ethnic food, so long as some of them open restaurants the rest of us can eat at/
Wholly unassimilated immigrants, will degrade social trust in a way that makes pretty much everything worse. A modest population of not-yet-assimilated immigrants is a reasonable and necessary price to pay for the long-term benefits of immigration, but don't push it. Don't encourage, and probably don't allow, immigration at a rate faster than your society can reliably do assimilation. And if you are anywhere close to the limit, prioritize immigration from high-trust societies and of people who are most likely to assimilate,
If you feel bad about all the tired, poor, huddled masses in excess of your society's ability to assimilate, and you want to make sacrifices to help them, then pass the hat and set up a fund to help them build their own countries into something better.
I had a look through the other responses. Here's one that didn't come up.
Today, there's a lot of diversity between different countries. Everyone has a different political system in some way, a different blend of people, a different culture, differing supply chains, more internal than external trade, and so on. This is inefficient, but it increases the resilience of the system to shocks.
I haven't read Open Borders, but I bet Caplan's main arguments are for efficiency and morality. Efficiency is great! However, it comes at the cost of fault tolerance, and I would argue that abandoning fault tolerance is immoral. Check out this excellent wikipedia page for who produces what agricultural commodities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_countries_of_agricultural_commodities. If social or political problems take down lentil production in Canada, then India and Australia might have a surplus, or Brazillian and USAian soybeans might be substituted. I bet that if every country reaches an equilibrium, they'll all have basically the same demographics, in which case social problems will spread in a similar way.
My idealism died during corona, I now believe you should dismantle systems in a order that prevents issues; its a problem that theres bans on herion, age limits of beer and the idea you need prove to some useless buecrate that you know to drive to drive on roads that shouldn't be "public". But I should probaly let drunk driving laws stand until after other evils are fixed.
The poor have many evils to navigate; income taxes, college debt not being written off in bankrupcy, zoning laws preventing housing. Yes, nation state boarders are stupid evils. But I dont understand how you can throw even more people into this mess and not have the poor suffer.
Excess immigration leads to populist politics with incompetent leaders who do great harm and increase corruption. At least, that's my experience in my lifetime. It kind of went the other way in the Gilded Age, with the corruption coming first, but you'll notice the Progressive Era also ended in immigration restriction shortly afterward. As Level 50 Lapras says, this has happened before, and immigration waves lead to backlashes and bans on immigration. I can't say that bothers me; seems kind of like homeostasis. Immigration rises, the natives get restless and decrease it, the remaining immigrants assimilate, we have a unitary country again in a few decades, with all the last wave of immigrants' kids complaining about the newcomers. :)
But, less rationally, I've never seen someone try to raise a mob to overthrow an election he lost in this country before in my lifetime, and I don't recall reading about it in the history books either. We're in a bad place, let's go back.
That comment was about me appreciating a somewhat absurd chain of "logic" that ends in the exact opposite place that conventional wisdom would expect. I happen to enjoy that stuff.
But to the object level, yes, I agree? We appear to be living through another period of backlash, and I don't like it.
It seems like a fairly normal political logic to me. The core reasoning is "this policy is too unpopular to work, so we should give up on it before it takes us down with it".
I agree that that isn't the approach actually being taken, and it's not necessarily correct, but I don't see anything unusual about the reasoning.
This seems off base. Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Historically and currently, they are extremely low on the useless eater population (old people).
> Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Currently, that is the case. But you have to consider what would happen under a hypothetical "open borders" system instead.
Given how porus the border is, I think it won't change at all. The major difficulty for people who have productive potential but no money isn't getting into the states, it's getting to the states in the first place.
Then again, we won't know until we actually do it so ???
I was referring to the official refugee program, which is extremely selective.
If you're talking about illegal immigrants, there are filters there too, but the filters are different, mostly related to the risk and difficulty of sneaking into the country (including, as you alluded to, even reaching the border in the first place - walking through the Darien Gap isn't for the faint of heart).
I know allota dudes that got into a place somehow, and most of them are of the opinion that it gets easier the longer you are from where you are running from regardless of where you are running to, because if you are bothering to run the situation is not good to begin with.
What is here the difference between refugee and non refugee migrants? If you had open borders they would all be classified as migrants, and the majority would probably be young people from poor countries, exactly the people who right now are counted as refugees and have been shown to be a net fiscal loss in welfare states.
That said, I am myself troubled whether having a welfare state or open borders it would not be the most humane choice to choose open borders.
Because refugees don't want to be there, so there is less self selection, and I don;t want to make any WAGs cause I've never seen any data on refugees post ww2 that I think would generalize well.
EG, Vietnamese refugees post war were mondo hyper productive, but of course they were, only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing.
> only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing
In the case of the US, that's true of most refugees though. We only take in tiny numbers of official refugees (compared to the total number of refugees).
That's non obvious. Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in? Maybe you can make that case, but you're pulling out studies of expected productivity levels for immigrants, what they're putting into the real, productive economy, and what welfare state benefits they're expected to claim, all of which can of course be contested. It's not a simple proof.
>Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in?
Most countries in Europe have lots of data showing that non-EU immigrants take out (vastly) more than they put in. This Dutch study comes to mind (https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/); non-Western immigrants cost The Netherlands on average $17 billion dollars per year, while Western immigrants net-benefit $1 billion.
I agree that immigrants are a net positive *now*. But that's because it's very hard to immigrate. If you open the floodgates, then people will in fact come here just for the welfare.
Well, I think if you take a nice European country (~5 million population, relatively high wages and reasonable welfare policy) and tell everyone in the world they can come there, I think that there will be millions of immigrants. Once there are more migrants than natives, I can imagine three outcomes
1) This country's culture and institutions become more similar to the countries of origin of the migrants (Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc)
2) Separation into mostly migrant underclass and mostly native elite with the latter living in gated communities and governing by undemocratic means (this can have different flavours: feudalism, millet system, apartheid)
3) Civil war or a lower-intensity conflict
What I don't find likely is 4) all the migrants adopting the culture and institutions of the destination country which made it attractive in the first place. If it were possible then adopting right laws would've immediately fixed a country like Iraq and there would've been no insurgency.
I absolutely believe in assimilation over time but it necessarily requires the natives (including the previous waves of migrants) to be a dominant majority and prevent concentrations of migrants preventing their assimilation.
That's why I think that it should be regulated, with some countries needing less of it. Btw I've myself migrated to a new country, so this is partially based on my own experiences.
I don't know if this happens in reality, but if a dominant factor in institution development is resources? E.g. nice European country has lots of land, and has access to lots of oil/wind power/whatever resources, and those are what enabled its niceness?
Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
> Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
South Africa tends to undermine this idea.
Actually, all of sub-Saharan Africa severely undermines your main idea, because that appears to be just that natural resources are what determine a country's potential, and Africa is rich in those. It was conventional wisdom in the mid-20th century that Africa would shortly grow rich while South Korea stayed impoverished forever.
But South Africa started out with good infrastructure and institutions, and systematically trashed them.
Is that a widespread belief? I think some corners of the left argue that but I think if polled "Do you think it's good to assimilate into the US" you'd get 60+% agreeing.
Or do you mean politicians are anti-assimilation? I haven't really heard much of that either
It might not just be what's in the ground, but also the ability to transport it. Africa is weak on convenient rivers and has a rather flat coastline and a lack of good bays.
I recall reading somewhere that Africa's great rivers are largely shallow and interrupted by rapids, making them poorly navigable, with the exception of the lower Nile
There are quite a few countries that have lots of land and lots of resources, and yet are, by and large, oppressive authoritarian hellholes - Saudi Arabia comes to mind. The only European country I can think of that qualifies as "lots of land and lots of resources" would be Norway, and the main reason that they are not like Saudi Arabia is that they have a fairly homogeneous, high-trust society - much like Sweden did before they imported Muslim immigrants en masse. (Emphasis on DID.)
There's a lot that's unknown about how good institutions develop, but we do have some case studies like East/West Germany and North/South Korea that rule out the most flippant "it's just resources" hypotheses.
Agree that it's definitely not ever JUST resources. But I think your short list of outcomes doesn't take into account the possibility that a large number of pople transplanted into a different environment could actually perform differently.
As an example - I believe 2 million Irish immigrants came to the US in a 10 year period around 1840, when the total US population was 17M. Ireland was going through a famine, in part due to agricultural practices. But the US survived that without turning into Ireland.
Ok re-reading this thread I see that my response #1 to you is off-topic. The person I was responding to was talking about a scenario of massive migration due to open borders, not the current state of US immigration. I agree we don't have a historic example of what happens if the number of first-gen immigrants literally exceeds the number of 2nd+ generation population ("natives"). In those circumstances it's possible institutions would be disrupted.
1. Migrants don't outnumber the us today, far from it. They're only 13% of the us population.
2. The 2 million number is JUST from Ireland. Total immigration during that period was likely higher.
3. In any case, my point was about assimilation vs "making their new country like their old country". I think the Irish immigration example where large influxes did not make the US like Ireland; the fact that was a nativist backlash doesn't change that.
But absolutely the huge influx of Irish had a big negative reaction! (there's a reason there were common ethnic slurs against Irish people) But I think that reaction was incorrect then (in fact that wiki link says that the riots were based on misinformation about Bibles) and I think it's incorrect now.
Yeah, the problem is when too many people come at the same time, especially if they create ghettos that perpetuate parts of the culture they were originally running away from.
Maybe we could prevent the ghettos by having some kind of rule that there can be at most one immigrant family per street (or other unit of space that makes most sense locally). Something like, if you come to a new country, for the next 10 years you are in a database, and when you want to move somewhere, you ask the database keepers whether that street is available for you or not. Importantly, no one is telling you were you should live, no one is sending you away from the place you currently live at, they are just giving you a list of streets you cannot move to. After 10 years you are removed from the database and you can go wherever you want to (if you didn't assimilate until then, you are probably hopeless).
Singapore also comes to mind with their ethnic quotas in public housing.
The history of this program in Denmark and the rarity of such programs (at least I haven't heard about anything like it in the West) hints at the issues with it. These countries have laws and values that make it hard to establish and enforce rules like the one you described. Imagine someone coming to a new country and staying with their relatives. Now there are two families on the street, and enforcing the ban would most likely be pretty bad optics. Again, it's not *bad* that there are human rights defenders and human rights laws, this is what makes this country a nice and attractive place to live.
So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you need to take into account dynamic effects: the laws can be changed or not enforced if there is a constituency that benefits from it.
This was also a major policy of the Roman Empire, and it mattered. When the system broke down and tribes were allowed to stay together after admission, they organized and went marauding.
Yeah, I think there were some similarities but also major differences.
Like most of modern migrants, the German tribes coming to the Roman Empire didn't want to destroy it, they fled from various calamities, their leaders aspired to become and often became members of the Roman elite.
Still, I think that the notion that the movement of these tribes *caused* the disintegration of the Western Empire is not held by many historians nowadays. As long as the state capacity remained strong, as in the Eastern Empire, the incomers could cause troubles but were eventually made part of the system one way or another.
This was true of the Roman army, but not civilians.
If you joined the Roman army, it was absolutely mandatory to assimilate into the army's culture. Hiring barbarian armies without making them join the Roman army caused huge problems.
But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes; rural populations were (and still are) largely descended from whoever was there before the Romans.
It's great if you want a permanent serf class. Free or unlimited immigration means anyone and everyone can come. American agriculture seems to rely heavily on migrant labour to be cheap during the harvesting season, then you can kick them back over the border until it's time for them to come back during the next harvest. (I don't know if anyone else shares the experience during the late 70s and early 80s of every damn act with a guitar in local talent shows singing "Deportees" until I was heartily sick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportee_(Plane_Wreck_at_Los_Gatos)
(Ireland seemingly has a lot of Brazilians involved in the meat-processing industry, don't ask me how that started, so we can't look down our noses at anyone. But at the same time, we too were migrant labourers who were good for work during the season, then expected to go back home when not wanted).
Labour costs are thus (artificially) low, the migrants will live in slum conditions, and it's a great time to be a slumlord. Now if Caplan is happy to be a slumlord, then fine for him, but it's really enshrining "the major benefit from this is for The Sacred and Divine and Ineffable Economy, so having two-tier or more sets of 'this is a person with full rights, this is someone lower down the socio-economic rung, and these are the immigrant workers who don't even deserve hot water in the overcrowded hovels they inhabit*', and I'm fine with that because GDP! GDP! GDP!" as social structure.
(Maybe Caplan isn't saying this, I haven't read his book. Maybe he thinks everyone who comes to America will end up solidly middle-class in a profitable blue-collar trade and then their assimilated kids will be white-collar professionals who went to college).
*We had this sort of argument way back on here, and I got in trouble arguing with the guy saying 'if migrants are happy to work for buttons and live in a room with five other guys and no running water, why should we stop them?'
I think Caplan forgets how bad conditions used to be. There used to be tenements where you didn't have an entire family living in one room, you had several families living in a room, everyone taking one corner. If AI and the wonderful future of automation is coming, then the surplus low-skill/semi-skilled labour has nothing to do. I think manual work like construction and harvesting crops will remain, but even there automation is raising its head.
What happens then to all the workers that have no work? Let them remain in the country? Not feasible unless things *really* change so that money for all! is the magic fairy godmother AI waving its wand to create something out of nothing. Send them home after you've extracted the benefit of their labour, like the Gulf States?
What is Caplan's model of "let as many low-skilled manual workers come into the country as can physically get themselves here" and how that works out in reality? Low wages and slumlords, or "the magic of America makes everyone prosperous"? Because I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many Felipes from South America that work picked up on the corner for day labour in manual work does he know, and associate with, as distinct from "the kind of migrants I know are all my research students"?
I definitely recognize the pattern, I used to work cleaning at a Danish hotel, everyone except me where either eastern european or African refugees.
But to give Caplan his due, all of my coworkers preferred being there instead of working in their home countries. The Easterners could save up considerable money (for their countries) by working one summer season. On couple was saving for the deposit of a house. They would have been worse of if they hadn't been able to migrate.
I know you don’t live in the US and I don’t know how they do things over there, but the USA already has a quasi-caste system with big parts of the economy dependent on foreign workers who are here illegally and theoretically could be deported, but also have lived here for decades and have kids, houses, opinions, etc.
You seem to be using the experiences of temporary seasonal workers as proof that permanent immigrants will have the same problems, but those seem like pretty different categories.
Are there a lot of native-born poor people in the US who are stuck living six to a room without running water? Whatever economic force is protecting them from such a fate, why wouldn't it protect immigrants as well? Are you just expecting that there will be so many immigrants that incomes for native and immigrant alike will plummet?
It doesn't do anything to solve the problems in the source country and is probably making them worse by draining talent. At the same time it decreases the general trust level in the recipient country, a key metric in ensuring an efficient economy and pleasant society. The adjustment period for new migrants can be very long, potentially even two generations.
Solving the problems in the source country first is a better strategy.
Argument-wise, what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?
My house is ~3000 square feet. The united states is 3.8 million square miles (ignoring multi-level buildings), equivalent to 105 million million square feet. I think something like 5% of US land is actually used for human living, so let's say 5 million million square feet.
On a per-space basis, letting one additional person live in my house is the equivalent of 1.7 billion people into the country. I think most people agree we shouldn't do either of those things.
This is the second response about it being a question of scale. Why do you think it's a question of scale? If a random person spends 5 uninvited seconds in your house per week, are you okay with it, because of the low impact?
I... guess? Because I'm often not at home and so the random 5 seconds per week is likely to be completely unnoticed and not affect my life? Which is pretty much how 1 million additional immigrants would feel in the US. I probably wouldn't notice.
Seriously, I'm struggling to see the analogy.
Is your point that you have a *sense* of ownership/attachment to the whole country similar to how I have a *sense* of ownership/attachment of my house? If so I think that's quite unusual - I'd imagine most people aren't as horrified about a murder happening in a small town 1000 miles away as you do in your town, let alone your house. Tribal attachment naturally weakens with scale and distance.
*my* point is that it's pointless to argue about a position no one understands. So far the difference between countries and homes are feelings, of ownership and scale. Are there principles to be drawn around them, or are we just chasing people's gut instincts? If most people are less horrified by murders far away, is it then alright to take actions that increase murders far away? I imagine most people say no. So what lines are we actually drawing?
I'm responding to your question: "what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?"
The difference is two fold:
- Pragmatically, people in your home have much more impact on your life
- Emotionally, I think (and you seem to agree) that people care a lot more about their house boundary lines than their country's.
So I don't think the house analogy is a useful lens through which to talk about immigration. That's the extent of what I'm trying to say.
If you want to now have a conversation about principles, feel free - what principles would you start from, on the actual question of country-level immigration?
It's interesting that sorting territories by how strongly people feel about them -- house, country, city -- is *not* the same as sorting them by size.
Most people don't care about someone moving from one city to another. It's perfectly legal, unless you are in Soviet Russia. House, I get it, the small scale is too personal. Also, you probably paid for it, so you own it.
The fact that people care more about letting strangers enter their state than about letting strangers enter their city, is in my opinion a result of successful propaganda. The kind that can convince you that people who live 1000 miles away from you in one direction are "just like you", but people who live 10 miles away from you in the opposite direction are dangerous strangers.
Well, I suppose it makes intuitive sense if you live somewhere near the geographical middle of your state. But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
> But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
I dunno, I've been on several sides of West Virginia, and the prejudice is palpable. Maybe it's *because* of the lack of other differences, which requires exaggeration of the labels. But sadly enough, this kind of prejudice really does seem like human nature. :-(
i'd say that freely moving into another person's country is much worse than freely moving into someone's house, personally. My nationality is much more important to me than the building in which I happen to live, and rebuilding a nation-state is much more difficult than finding a new house.
What's the difference between the government building an army base and quartering soldiers in your house?
While it's obvious that allowing random people to enter your house is infringing on your property rights, it's not clear why the same would hold for access to the country as a whole. "The country" is not the property of an individual, nor is "citizenship," those are purely defined by the state.
Doesn't Yug have a point? You can't compare one person into the country vs one person into your house. The foreign born rate in the US is ~14%, and in places like Sweden ~20% or one in five.
In my family, one person in my house is equivalent to the foreign-born population in Sweden.
I don't think that any reasonable person could read YesNoMaybe's comment and think that they only wanted one person to be allowed into the country. Yug Gnirob is pretty clearly acting in bad faith here.
As for the question you brought up about population proportions, *that's not a point that Yug ever brought up*. It's possible that *you* have a point, but either way, Yug didn't.
Public education in California is already a wasteful black hole of funding and injecting more children from illegal immigrants exacerbates the problem.
I guess the standard concern is that, if we got a bunch of low-skilled immigrants, they would mostly fail to get jobs, and go on welfare, and many of them would end up as criminals.
When you post "what are your best arguments against (low-skilled) immigration?" it sort of feels like you think it's my job to prove that low-skilled immigration is bad. I guess from my perspective I think it's Caplan's job to prove that it's good -- and I'd be more interested in case studies than in thought experiments. You can prove anything with thought experiments.
I was just reading https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/ (linked from the Milei article). I haven't read all of it, but there's a chapter in there about how a bunch of Salvadoran immigrants settled in Los Angeles and a startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs. This seems like a point of evidence that low-skilled immigration can sometimes have bad consequences.
>startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs.
What is a "startling number"? Because the pct of children who actually ended up being in "brutal street gangs" has to be very low; if it weren't, given the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who live in the LA metro area, the crime rate in Los Angeles would be vastly higher than it is.
Only if you take law enforcement estimates of gang membership seriously. For example, the LAPD claims that there were 38k gang members in the City of Los Angeles in 2005. https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03v.php#google_vignette. If that is true, and if they are all "brutal," then why weren't there more murders? Either the numbers are inflated, or most "gang members" are hangers-on, at most. And it is definitely in part the latter (source: testimony I have read from LAPD and LASD gang experts in cases where I have helped defend gang members, including MS-13 members). And, plenty of gang members are also productive citizens most of the time -- it isn't a full-time job, for the vast majority. Most gang crime is committed by a tiny pct of members.
PS: As the article you link notes, Salvadoran gangs started as defense against predation by existing gangs. There is far less danger of that repeating itself now, when crime is much lower.
Caplan cites stats that show immigrants commit fewer crimes, but other people here have already pointed out a selection effect (the system filters out the criminal ones).
Middle eastern migrants commit crimes at about 3 times the levels of natives, controlled for age and gender. This seems to be what you would expect if you looked at the crime rates in their former countries.
BUT this higher rate is still lower than the american rate, so you might actually be able to lower US crime rates by importing more refugees. And this fact should also make us wary of putting too much weight on crime rates, an ordinary person in the US probably lives almost the same life as an European person, so if the main drawback of migration wad this change in crime it might be a deal worth taking.
I don't know specifically which stats Caplan refers to, but many papers on immigration and crime look at crime rates *controlled for education and/or income*. The new wave of stats does it implicitly, for example by looking at crime rates in locales (e.g. counties) that have a sudden increase in immigration.
The problems with that are:
1- The decrease in crime *rates* is due to the very high rates of the native (often black) population that is displaced. This is also the case when you control for education or income. Immigrants often don't even have a high-school degree and they are, almost by definition, poor. The corresponding native population is typically African-American and very prone to crime. Latinos maybe commit crime at 2 to 3x the rate of white non-immigrants while blacks do at maybe 5-8x, so there is "dilution".
2- The second and third generations may be (and in fact are) more prone to crime.
3- The rates may go down, but number of crimes still goes up.
These may or may not be a problem for you or Caplan. But the discussion about crime and immigration feels a bit disingenuous to me. *Of course* more immigration increase crime. Crime correlates with poverty and immigrants are typically poor. Sure, crime gets diluted or pushed to another neighborhood when they take over a locale, but that's not at all what is implied by Caplan and others.
I'm extremely skeptical of the kind of stats Caplan cites. Is it that immigrants themselves actually commit fewer crimes, or is it that victims *report* fewer crimes (either because they're likely to themselves be immigrants, and/or they're natives who who believe reporting the *crime* is futile, eg, hit-and-run car accidents in border states), and/or because the perpetrators of certain crimes are rarely identified, and/or the police subtly discourage or are overwhelmed by certain kinds of crime and don't factor in the states at all and/or crime stats are cherry-picked to deliberately leave out high-crime regions?
Insurance company stats are probably going to be accurate when it comes to property-related crimes, I'm guessing.
The best argument I've come across is this - rich countries are rich because of a set of very unique and fragile institutions/rules - they limit the power of govt, they protect property rights and encourage trade and competition, both internal and external. This is not a particularly stable equilibrium, it depends on a set of shared values that are very rare in both temporal and spatial distributions - rich countries are few in history, and few in the world today. Being reckless about inviting in people who do not have the shared cultural basis for this wealth is dangerous.
The people who are already there don't like it. If you can convince them, as Caplan attempts to do, fine. But there is a strong tendency in a lot of current governments to ignore the wishes of the public, and for defenders to act like it is a moral imperative to ignore the wishes of the public.
This could go very badly, and if they do, I'm going to blame the people who are creating the problem today.
Well, I'm a member of the public, not a government. We're agreed, I think, that governments generally shouldn't do wildly unpopular things. But that argument only works for governments, not people. "The citizenry doesn't want it" is a good argument for the government not doing something, but I am trying to decide if *I* want it.
I lean towards simplifying the immigration process to make it easier to immigrate legally, and deporting everybody in the country illegally (they can try again, although any crimes committed while here would make the process harder / less likely to succeed). If given dictatorial power, I'd also impose a five year moratorium on -all- immigration, after the deportations, to give people time to calm down and get angry about something else.
Mostly this comes down to a hypothesis I have that the last five decades of economic growth have been slower than it could be because globalization has meant that the lowest-hanging economic fruit is in developing lagging economies - it is much harder for rich countries to get richer while poor countries exist. And one of the ways of subverting this, if you're strictly interested in improving your own country, is importing a bunch of poor people. I'd also pair it with economic development zones - areas with greatly reduced regulatory burdens, in particular labor laws / minimum wages.
Can I ask what you envisage first-world countries as looking like in an open-borders world?
Do you imagine it being "a bit like now, but browner and denser"? Or do you envisage it as "three billion desperately poor wretches living in massive shanty towns surrounding the ruins of what were once wealthy cities"? Do you imagine that, say, Nuremberg (to pick a random picturesque mid-sized city) would look more like Nuremberg or like Lagos?
If you envisage the first then I think we have a disagreement about likely outcomes. If you envisage the latter but think it's worthwhile due to fairness then we have a disagreement about morality.
Where are these three billion people coming from? The entire population of Nigeria is 218 million. The population of all of the Middle East is about 380 million, all of South America is 442 million, the population of all of Africa is about 1.37 billion.
Are you envisioning that, in an open borders world, third-world countries will be literally emptied down to the last man, woman and child? Or do you think things might reach an equilibrium somewhere below 3 billion migrants?
There's another 2.8 billion in India and China, another 700 million in South East Asia. Not all of them want to leave, but a lot will.
You're right, there might be an equilibrium somewhere, after all the nice parts of the world are just as ruined as the worst parts of the world. Note that the Third World is still pretty crap even after you remove 90% of the population, so the equilibrium will be a lot closer to the current level of Nigeria than the current level of Switzerland.
Speculatively, many of the former residents of the civilised world might find a way to go off and found their own city-states, escaping the ruins of their old countries.
A bit of both? I'm talking about a vastly overpopulated urban area where the majority of people are desperately poor and living in vast shanty towns of makeshift dwellings on the outskirts. There's other cities like that in the world, but Lagos springs to mind.
For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
A case could be made for choosing the one with the most severe punishments for nonbelievers or, similarly, the one that promises the greatest rewards for the faithful, but most religions are pretty strong on both counts.
Eventually, it seems inevitable that the free agent will want to narrow their choices to the ones that are most likely true. If our pilgrim instead picked one on vibes or convenience, and it turned out to be one of the countless false ones, that’d be a catastrophic outcome. Better to pick one that might feel wrong or uncomfortable, but is backed by genuine divine authority. Divinity is after all the meat of the sandwich. But what are its indicators? Internal consistency? Historical consistency? Predictive power? Compatibility with Occam’s Razor?
Edit: The free agent is not me. I’m old and already been through more religious adventures than most. Sorry for any confusion.
Have them read up on the perennial philosophy (ex. thru Aldous Huxley) and aim for the spiritual intuition that is the real core of most religions. No need to believe anyone's narratives literally, they're not meant for that - that saves them from the pain and the arbitrariness of having to choose one. If the core intuition fits, then you can feel right at home wherever it is being celebrated, no matter the form or ritual.
This sounds good, and is a practical perspective in many respects, but theologians do often insist that the narratives are truth. A religious follower eventually bumps into the ceiling (or floor) of this insistence the more dedicated they become in their faith (by definition their complete trust or confidence in something). And if one insists that nevertheless it doesn’t matter because religion is personal, this is completely at odds with the missionary aspects of at least Christianity, Islam and many other religions, though notably not Buddhism and Judaism.
I guess the practical answer to that is that what matters is the attitude of the group you're actually joining, not so much the theoretical creed of the wider religion. Abrahamic religions are theoretically exclusivistic at their root, but plenty of their followers and groups on the ground are not. I've personally met a Christian nun who is the leader of her congregation and who is qualified a Zen master at the same time... there's being open minded, and then there's that, and it's really inspiring to see how it makes 100% sense for her and her group. I've also seen plenty of Christian-Buddhists, Judeo-Buddhists, Buddhist-Hindus, Christian-Hindus, and even the odd Sufi-Buddhist, even though such combinations are theoretically impossible.
Note that plenty of Christian academic theologians have defended inclusivistic positions, and somehow they didn't get themselves excommunicated. The Indian religions are generally known for their inclusivism, but that never prevented some Buddhist groups from saying that the guys at the monastery over there didn't have the right view or practice for nirvana. It's really a question of who you associate with.
OTOH, if some group is actively participating in the missionary attempt to convert the whole world to their view, I don't think I'd want to join them in any case.
That’s understandable, but the free agent isn’t an atheist. They are unaffiliated with a religion and open to accepting one. I don’t think the free agent’s behavior implies he thinks religion is bunk. What gave you that impression?
As an atheist: most of these are social clubs anyway. (Not really a criticism as most people need those and at least you get a prosocial peer group--a church is going to be better for you than those guys hanging out on the street corner smoking.) Find one that has people you like and join that one.
As a guy, one should choose a religion that has the best ratio of women to men. Even if he ends up in Hell, at least he will have some fun on the Earth.
It doesn't really make sense to pick any kind of religion at all unless you believe it, so I guess I'd just start reading religious texts until you believe one of them and then live in accordance to what you believe. But if you don't believe it then just find a good routine or life philosophy that you like and follow that. Adding in a spiritual aspect that you don't believe is true is just being false and then you live a lie, so it doesn't really matter how good of a life it leads to because the whole thing will be fake. It just sounds ridiculous to be half spiritual/religious/whatever. I hope this free agent ends up recognizing the truth.
I'm curious, what have you found in your many religious adventures?
Edit: In your many religious adventures you have most definitely heard about Jesus. What do you really know about him/why do you not believe that he's the truth?
Considering it is then, why does networking as “the relevant criterion” obviously outweigh ethical compatibility? Even if the free agent doesn’t believe in the possibility of divinity, which you’ve determined they don’t, they might reasonably favor the religion they think is most ethical.
Hot Take: religions are fan-fictions. This probably comes off as especially flippant toward theists. But conversely, it can also be looked at as especially reverent toward the value of fiction [0]. Because truth isn't just about accuracy, but also about ramifications of your behavior.
> Where religion comes into play, is when a community forms around the values promoted by the story. These shared values means it's easier to form a culture, which means it becomes easier for the members to reap the economies of scale from cooperative behavior. And this is why I've become more interested in literature as of late. The quality of your literary diet influences the quality of your value-system, which may also influence the quality of the community you find yourself in. Choose wisely.
So for me, shopping for a religion is a matter of shopping for a community which cultivates the sort of values you'd like to prioritize. So you can, to paraphrase Gandhi, "be the algorithm you want to see in the world".
It sure is. But if our pilgrim can’t zero in on it, and one of the religions is actually backed by it as they all claim, he’s damned. Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
> Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
You might want to look into Orthodox theology. They pretty much consider those two things to be equivalent, which means, in my idiosyncratic interpretation at least, that you can forget about the "damned" bit and simply (hah) aim toward alignment with the highest good. (And the Catholics explicitly accept Orthodox theology as a valid perspective on the same underlying reality that their theology attempts to describe. And a lot of Protestants tacitly accept the Catholic teachings, except where they explicitly diverge.)
In that case, I think being some flavor of Christian and trying hard to be genuinely righteous is the way to go:
That way, you get the seal of approval from Christianity and also might count as a “person of the book” in Islam and a “righteous gentile” in Judaism. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
Sorry for the late reply, but where I come from, the whole question of reward and punishment is a huge red herring and should be entirely discounted, for two reasons:
1. You can easily account for those in terms of cultural evolutionary incentives. Any group that adds talk of rewards and punishments to their story will likely have an edge over their neighbors in terms of gathering new recruits and keeping them, so any successful religion is likely to accrue these things like barnacles. And once you can account for the emergence of a belief in a way that doesn't require it to have any basis in reality, the voice of those proffering it loses all its authority.
2. More importantly, I want to argue that religious rewards and punishments are spiritually bankrupt. It basically amounts to bartering with the Deity, offering some of your attention and expecting it to massage your ego in return. If you're going to be a spiritual materialist, might as well drop all pretenses and just be a materialist.
I’m confused as to where exactly you stand. In regards to your posts in this thread, when there is an aspect of scripture that could be viewed as constrictive, manipulative or distasteful, you seem to indicate it doesn’t represent the true nature of the religion. Consequently, every claim god or his prophets or his trained representatives make (even in regards to god’s own existence) is thrown into doubt and our pilgrim is left to just follow his spiritual intuition, in violation of most religions’ doctrines. I respect your right to hold whatever view on religion you like, which clearly includes pluralism and the rejection of much scripture, but when you claim your approach is at the core of religion, I see little historical evidence or religious scholarship or teachings that support that. Perhaps that will change over time. You are free to believe it, and no doubt you are not alone as you’ve pointed to some people combing faiths that are mutually exclusive based on their scripture and the teachings of the majority of the churches’ leadership. But our pilgrim, as I stated, sees value in truth, sees that most religions’ claim to see this value as well, and since our pilgrim is without religion at the moment, he must rely on the secular tools that we all rely on to seek that out (evidence, reason, etc.).
We don't have any examples of confirmed true religions, so we're working with a data set with zero pieces of information. We thus start and end with our priors - we could use the principle of indifference to say that every religion is equally likely as the next.
So I wouldn't try to figure out which one is most likely to be true - I don't think you'll get too far.
Instead, just look at the data we do have. Every religious follower lives a life that can be observed - that gives us tons of data to use! Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
> Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
Sounds good but I’m not sure about that last bit. Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny? Do stuff like verify its description of past events with multiple sources. Look for internal inconsistencies that could suggest a lack of authority or forthrightness. If it’s old and it predicted future outcomes, check to see if those outcomes came to pass as predicted. Consider the motive of the author(s) and their credentials, and weigh the arguments they make against what’s known to be true. Test any methodologies to see if their results are reproducible. Isn’t this how we usually assess written truth claims? Nobody wants their religion to be the one invented by a charlatan or a delusional prophet but by process of elimination, most (if not all) must be and surely it’s best for the free agent to critically look into how a doctrine holds up before they choose it.
It's not a bad idea, but I worry that divine truth is so far removed from secular truth as to be unrecognizable.
Internal consistency and predictive power are really, really good measurements for secular truth. But divine truth? It's totally possible (and maybe even expected) that God sometimes changes His mind. That what was permitted today is forbidden tomorrow. Or that seeming contradictions in scripture are actually divine mysteries beyond human comprehension.
I'm not totally convinced that humans are equipped to discover divine truths in the first place. After all, dogs probably will never learn calculus - they just aren't capable of understanding certain kinds of mathematical truth. Even assuming humans *can* learn divine truths, it's totally possible that such revelations haven't happened yet and won't happen in my lifetime - millions of intelligent humans lived and died without learning calculus because it hadn't been discovered yet. I know some calculus, but there are almost certainly mathematical truths that will be discovered long after I'm gone - I see no reason why I should be able to access the divine while there are still secular truths that elude me.
Regardless, I'm ultimately faced with one difficult question (the nature of divine truth) and one simpler question (what is a good life). I choose to assume that my efforts to solve the difficult question will be fruitless, and so I focus my efforts on the second question. By analogy, I'm giving up my quest for canine calculus and focusing instead on playing fetch and being a good boy.
I have a huge amount of respect for people who want to engage with the infinite - the same way I respect Newton and Leibniz for discovering calculus. But I'm not even a Newton or Leibniz, and I'm supposed to figure out who made the universe?
> Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny?
Because "we don't have any examples of confirmed true religions" - in the thousands of years religions have existed, not a single one has shown itself to be as true as, say, heliocentrism or evolution. Some, indeed, claim that this is as expected - do not put your God to the test, you must ask for faith to be granted it, etc etc; we call testable, repeatable, verifiable miracles "science" and most people file them in a different file to "religion", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw notwithstanding.
You can use the texts to /rule out/ religions, absolutely - if you find things in the text you cannot bring yourself to claim or live with, that religion is not for you. This process is necessary - but it's not sufficient; you're very unlikely indeed to end up with The One Text That Holds Up Best To Scrutiny at the end of it if rigorously followed; otherwise there would only be one widely followed religion in the world today. Once you've ruled out everything you possibly can, there is still a leap of faith to go - where there is not, we do not call that religion.
(edit: note also, incidentally, that the very concept of a set of scriptures that everyone agrees on that you can read and verify already massively narrows down your set of options; compare, e.g., east asian animistic religions, where the existence of the supernatural is widely accepted, and there are some very broadly specified parameters most agree on, but pretty much all detail is specific to your local circumstance / spirits / deities / environment and you will not be able to firmly pin down any testable specifics that are supposed to be universally true at all).
Why is this person looking to "join their first religion"? Usually you join with the community / activities because you've come to believe the claims, not the other way around. The best strategy is likely to pin down what, exactly, it is that the person is looking to get from the experience - unlike all the other questions, this should at least be one that, with some effort and introspection, it is possible to satisfyingly answer! - and try joining in with groups / activities that look like they will provide lots of those things.
If the Divine is unknowable, if the Spirit does not move you -- which religions seems to help you achieve the good life? Do you think that the good life is contemplation and contentedness? Buddhism. Is the good life helping others? Probably some flavour of Christianity, or maybe Sikhism. Does the good life come from living in a loving community? Take your pick, but consider one that would get you into a commune / kibbutz if you're willing to make that leap.
Don't know what the good life is? Neither do I, so I cannot help you. Read, talk, pray / meditate / think about it. Take solace in the fact that people have been documenting the difficulty of this task for at least 2,400 years.
Oh, and if you place a strong value on truth, be a deist or agnostic atheist until you find something else to be more truthful.
Up until a few hundred years ago, we humans thought the universe revolved around us, and that our world was what we see day to day, and divine entities cared about us individually and made things happen to suit us and their whims. Around 1600 Galileo, then Newton who was born the day Galileo died, showed us that we were just one of many worlds that went around the sun. About a hundred years ago Hubble and others showed us that we were just one world going around one star in a group of stars called a galaxy of which there were many galaxies. In the past 50 years or so we have come to the point where it seems the universe we live in may be infinite (or not, still TBD) but the observable universe extends about 10 to the 80th power km out and holds about 10 to the 50th power or so kg of mass. Much of what we see has been happening for billions of years at speeds up to the speed of light and power interchanges exceeding those we experience by up to around 48 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, living entities like us (which includes animals and plants of all sizes down to microbial and viral entities) each comprise about Avogadro’s number of atoms (about 10 to the 23rd power) all interacting via electrodynamics several powers of the number of atoms of times at every instant of our existence to comprise our living interaction with the universe. And inside all of this, your mind seeks the Truth, which must somehow encompass, organize, understand, predict, and know it all from beginning to end. And somehow that seeking is driven by the same thing that every other living thing seeks as long as it lives. And sometimes you wonder what it is that you are seeking. If it is Truth, it must encompass all the above and yet somehow fit within your finite existence.
"...how much greater and more wonderful God is, then, that despite me being such an infinitesimal part of creation, He cares deeply and desires a direct, personal relationship!"
You could choose to attend different religious gatherings for different religions. See which ones feel the most welcoming to you, see which of these gatherings resonate with you the most. You could visit a service at a mosque, a synagogue, a cathedral, a buddhist temple, etc...
You could also pray about it, leaving your prayer open-ended, addressing "the divine".
A couple general ideas I'd add to this:
1. I think there's some value in both size and age when it comes to religion. Or, to be clearer about it, I think the smaller and newer you get, the more you risk falling into a cult-like community and/or something that feels like a LARP. So this would likely be an edge for the major world religions and for the larger/older denominations/sects within those major world religions.
2. There is practical value in having the same belief system as close relatives and close friends. It can make such relationships a lot smoother. So if there's already a religion that is predominant in your family, that would be an edge for that religion.
I'm not saying 1 or 2 or even both combined should be totally decisive factors, but they're probably worth considering.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. That seems really accommodating, but implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms. Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it. Because of this when a believer says that everybody can believe in whatever faith they choose, which all the major faiths expressly forbid, it seems disingenuous and patronizing. It makes that person appear either as if they don’t understand basic principles of their faith’s doctrine, or they choose to ignore it when it’s inconvenient, despite its explicit sanctity.
None of this is in judgment of you, obviously, because you didn’t identify with any particular religious doctrine. But I am surprised that most people who believe their god is the one true god won’t just come out and explain what convinced them of that god’s singular, consequential claim and compel other people to save themselves and join them since the stakes are so high.
"Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it"
this isn't true- a great many religions (probably the large majority) are ethnic religions that are for a particular ethnic group, and not only do they not actively seek out converts, they'd be kind of baffled by the concept.
> implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms.
There are non-major faiths that have room for religious pluralism. An argument could be made that such an attitude is desirable because the "we are the only truth" doctrine is hubris, elitist, and lacks epistemic humility.
I sometimes wonder how effective evangelism can be in our modern internet age. Actively evangelizing a religion in a modern 1st world nation is a bit like doing door-to-door sales in the age of amazon and ebay. I mean, if people want a particular good, it's never been easier to try to shop for it online. Likewise, if people are open to joining a religion, it's never been easier to read up on that religion and find what followers of that religion are saying online. When the early Christians evangelized the Christian faith in ancient Rome, for many it was something new that they genuinely never heard of before. Who in the west has never heard of Christianity? And Google is right there for anybody who wants to learn more about it.
I might regret this, but I'll come out and say that I am a Christian. It's clear that my position is a minority one here on Scott's blog, and I learned a long time ago to never get into online debates in places where the solid majority is against you. Simply reading the viewpoints and opinions of people with different beliefs and life experiences than yourself can often be highly informative and give you a greater sense of the world around you, and that's one of the reasons I'm on this blog.
I could say that you and your friend need Jesus, and I basically believe that, but saying that will probably just make you think I'm Ned Flanders given I get a strong materialist vibe from you, like I get from most people on this blog. So, what benefit is there in me doing that, for either you or your friend or me? In fact, this is why I have mixed feelings about writing this right now, since it will probably result in some people here just dismissing my opinion on any other topic based on their views of religious people.
But... yes, I would be completely failing to live in accordance with my faith if at this point I didn't put it out there. So there you go, choose to do with it what you want.
The advice I gave you before was sincere, to be clear. Within our natural life, there really are benefits to belonging to a religion that is the same as our friends and relatives. Newer/smaller religions often do seem cult-like and/or LARPy to me. And if you're going to join a religion, it really helps to be a member of a physical religious community that you find friendly and welcoming. Even many atheists here know that, it's why some try to replicate it through purely secular means.
I'll leave it at this. I hope your friend finds what they're looking for. Have a good day.
I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true, and that Moses, Buddha and Mohammed were enlightened beings the same as Jesus.
I find Christianity more powerful and more personally compelling because Jesus literally died for us - he believed so strongly in what he preached that he was willing to die for the truth.
But if someone is Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu I’m not interested in trying to convert them - I would rather them embody the tenets of their faith, which seem to me to be fundamentally similar to mine.
Hey Turtle, I encourage you to read the Gospels of Matthew and John in the Bible. I understand why you would believe what you're saying as a recent-ish convert, but it is important to know what Jesus actually said and who he is, as well as what he did for the world.
He makes it clear that he alone is the gateway to God and forgiveness of sins, and that we have to accept his sacrifice alone to pay the penalty for our sins (death) and as a result we owe our life to serving him and obeying him. He tells us that whoever is not with him is against him, and that those who love him do what he says. Those who don't do what he says do not love him.
What makes a Christian is someone who recognizes Jesus as the son of God and sees their own evil and imperfection, and then accepts the sacrifice that Jesus made and has faith in him that he purifies them and will take them to live with him for eternity. A Christian gives up his own life to follow and obey Jesus and out of love for God and his fellow man, shares the truth with others in obedience to God's command and in hopes that they will recognize the truth and be united with God and all His children.
Jesus says to do what he says, so that requires knowing what he says. So please, I urge you to read God's word and believe it. It may be more immediately helpful to start with the New Testament, but all of it is very important and it is so wonderful.
> I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true
...then, I am sorry, but you are not a (mainstream) Christian. Christianity is incompatible with those other religions; the Nicene Creed makes some very specific claims, as does the bible itself, and these are at odds with claims the other religions you list make. When you join a mainstream church, you will be required to affirm your agreement with some version of the Nicene creed on a regular basis as one of the terms of your membership.
If you have not already, you might like to investigate your local unitarian or quaker communities, as they hold to a smaller (and therefore less exclusive) set of core beliefs and are more tolerant of a wider range of views; though John 14:6 will still be hard to wrestle with.
Is it growing? Are its members relatively happy and healthy? How has it dealt with the historical problems it faced? When it had to make tough decisions, how often did it come down on the side that you think is right? Nothing involving humans is perfect; does it recover from human-caused errors? What kind of things do you have to agree to do, and what are the reasons for them?
How much crazy stuff is there in the backstory that needs to be interpreted away? Is its global organizational model scalable? How do you feel about it participating in politics? It's going to have factions; are the factions you like ascendant or declining? After you've joined, is it OK to have a crisis of faith?
I was part of a team advocating for a revision of SB 1308 [1], a California bill that would have prevented the use of far-UV [2] in California, as a side effect of banning ozone-producing indoor air cleaners. I'm seeing now that there's a measure on the Berkeley ballot [3] that mandates raising air standards in buildings owned or leased by the city to meet ASHRAE 241 [4] air quality requirements, but specifically NOT by using whole-room far-UV ("the City…shall not install any ultraviolet light disinfection technology in such a manner that the light will come into contact with human skin").
ASHRAE 241 is a solid standard, and it would be good for Berkeley to adopt it, so at first glance, I mostly want this to pass if it seems realistic for it to actually be upheld. However, it could be impractical to meet the standard without using germicidal UV, depending on the typical occupancy of the city-owned/leased buildings (of which I'm unsure). I just don't understand the antipathy toward germicidal UV here. Does anyone know how this measure was developed and why it excludes the use of whole-room far-UV? (Very possibly the authors of the language have never heard of far-UV and just want to guard against the use of carelessly installed upper-room germicidal UV.)
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
I don't think it's a bannable comment, period. It was obviously an expression of emotion, not a statement of LHHIP's actual views about the best strategy for those who strongly oppose Trump. He ends up by talking about how he can't stand the fucking Cheeto one second longer. That's not how people speaking up in favor or assassination as a strategy sound! Come on, it's an emotional rant.
I don't think it would have been a civil war, not immediately. But it would have been enormously bad for American democracy. If you're up on late Republican Roman history, there's a tiny meme that "he's not either Caesar, he's Tiberius Gracchus", and that would have sealed it in.
I don't think it would have happened, but the implication is that Trump's supporters would lose faith in the process itself. First they steal the election, and then they kill the candidate to make sure he can't win again. If they can do that to a wealthy former president, they can do it to anyone.
Whoever "they" are in this scenario, they would obviously control most or all possible candidates, regardless of party (they might cite Kamala being endorsed by pretty much Bush's entire leadership team), so they can't trust a Rubio or DeSantis either.
This is a group with strong independent streaks and lots of weapons, as well as a significant number of supporters in the rank and file military. If any non-majority in the US could fight or win a civil war, that's likely the one.
First off, LHHIP's comment was not "calling for assassination", it was wishing that an already-happened assassination had succeeded. It is a subtle distinction, but relevant in that, for example, it was not a call to action like your comment implies.
It's been months, but that reads to me like an absurd joke, given the absurd question that it answered. If it were serious, I would have issued a warning or a ban, depending on circumstances. Since it's joking, nowadays it's more likely to get a warning:
He surprised me with his sincerity and humility: I'd argue with him and would write him off as a troll, and then he'd write a mea culpa and ask the community for forgiveness. Certainly a remarkable fellow.
But I support the ban, and it's a long time coming. Quite frankly, he often came off as an unhinged and aggressive crank, because, well, he was one. A remarkable and surprisingly humble unhinged crank, but a crank nonetheless. He couldn't keep up the level of civility expected for this comment section, and if you don't pull weeds you don't have a garden (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)
I read most of his posts, even on threads I wasn't very interested in, and don't recall any that sounded unhinged, after the early era when he was incandescent with rage, and his name was LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael. When has he sounded unhinged recently?
"Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure."
"Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character....For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person."
"Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived....In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. "
Problem is the "the shooter did wrong in that he killed an innocent man". The kinds of views about Trump on display here (shit, less than human, should be shot) that I see online also encompass his supporters (and indeed, in these comments we get 'acting like Trump' is enough for someone to deserve having their brains blown out).
Those people would not think that man was innocent. If he went to a rally for Trump then he too deserved to die, because supporting Trump means you are as evil and less than human and shit and so forth as Trump.
I don't think anyone should die for going to a political rally, not even the loo-lahs who went to the Democratic convention soirée about how fabulosa they were for being Harris supporters:
I have to say, I think that last comment you link to is high quality, when considered in full, and I only wish that we (well, you) hadn't had to go through the low quality parts of the previous comments to get to it. Replacing war with assassination of leaders is a classic if fringe position, especially among anarchists. And given that LHHI lives close to a current war, and is subject to a dictator, I can't particularly fault him for it. :-/
I suppose since I'm complimenting people, I shouldn't except those who are still here, so: you're great, thank you for being here, I hope you keep it up. :-) Despite the nice things I said about LHHI, I don't think I could have engaged with him the way you did there.
It was false contrition - how many times did he issue the same fake apology, rake in all the respect for "changing his mind" then go straight back to the same murderous unhinged takes the next day?
I believe there was only one major time when he apologized, changed his user name, and changed dramatically. What's *your* count of how many "fake apologies" he issued ?Can name some other times he did that? -- I'm not talking about something like, "sorry, I was a bit harsh" but a long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change?
Is it possible to simulate quantum computing with (slower) regular computing?
If not, then does this mean the we-are-living-in-a-simulation hypothesis has to be wrong because quantum computing exists? Or maybe the computer simulating us is a quantum computer?
Yes, absolutely, but it's exponentially harder: the state of n entangled cubits requires 2^n complex numbers to track (clever tricks can reduce this, but not by much), and even if a gate only acts on two wires it can still have to perform a calculation using all those numbers.
Which means if (a) quantum computing works (b) we are in a universe simulated by a classical computer… then we can cause a big performance problem for whoever is running the simulation.
You'll also need a source of randomness for the important last step of "actually get a measurement", since the final quantum state basically acts as a probability distribution over N-bit strings. But otherwise yes, a quantum computer can be simulated by a Turing machine with the ability to call a random number generator at the end of the computation (at the cost of exponential time/space).
If this universe is a simulation, how can you use it to draw conclusions about what's possible in the external universe? I mean really, only 3 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension? Once that's off the table what does your question even mean?
Thanks for this, I had an unconsidered assumption that the simulating computer was in a universe like ours. Which led me to think that the simulation hypothesis has infinitesimal odds of correctness because the simulating computer must be larger than our simulated universe, where larger doesn't mean length or volume but number of component pieces. E.g. - To simulate our universe at the level of detail of elementary particles (which is needed to give the substrate upon which our consciousness can arise as an emergent phenomenon) the simulating computer must consist of more elementary particles than the number of elementary particles in our universe. Which seems highly improbable. But in a different kind of universe that we cannot imagine, things could be different - their computers could be made of something different from our elementary particles. I think the concept that the simulator must be larger then the simulated would still be true, that's a part of computer science which is applied math, and I think math is independent of universes.
Oh there are ideas like having part of the server decide whether to combine some high-level parts of the simulation into low-level, so that instead of simulating (say) atoms of stars more than 1AU away from Earth, you just simulate "a star", editing telescope images as needed. It's also argued that some people are lightly simulated NPCs, which allows for near infinite contempt against anyone inconvenient to believers.
I'm not advocating for the simulation theory. It feels like utter bunk. Especially the "trillion-to-one odds against this being the first world" hypothesis.
There's a trend over the last few years of trying to reshore industrialization. So far the focus is on chips (which makes sense, since they're both a critical security need and something America was a world leader on at one point and so plausibly could be again), and ships and anything government infrastructure related (including trains, dredges, steel and buses) which is understandable (the government can much more easily enforce buy america through government programs) but altogether a terrible idea (America has never been especially good at building them and the subsidies and restrictions that exist can't possibly get it to even make a serious attempt, just harm our infrastructure).
What other areas are an especially good idea to be focuses of reshoring industry (given that America can't be a global manufacturing hub for literally everything and does actually need to pick)? And what focuses have been suggested that are especially terrible ones?
I don't think any of these are a good idea, but if I was going to prop up one industry I'd prop up raw materials refining. Oils, metals, gases, pretty much everything. It could be mined anywhere but all refined products would be subject to tariffs.
Why that one? It actually seems like not a very good one for the US, which has an advantage on higher value parts of the production chain? (Specifically steel is one of those things the US has never been good at and offshored to Japan as early as it could).
There exists only one country powerful enough to not sell to the US.
China has a deep hold on refined metals and so when subsidising an industry that is the one I'd pick. By contrast leading edge microprocessors are mostly made in Taiwan, Korea, and the US. Why is it so necessary for the US to make the very best chips in the US instead of Taiwan? Being one year behind Taiwan doesn't seem to pose any national security risk to me.
But when China refines 95% of the world's rare earth elements or 80% of its cobalt? That's a supply chain security risk. (Don't quote me on the exact figures, going off old memory here.)
Drug production. I mean medicinal ones, especially generics. According to a 2014 study, about 40% of generic drugs in the US have only one manufacturer. This has likely become worse since then. Supply chain failures for basic drugs have already become much more common.
Solar panels and wind turbines. America's rise to a preeminent global superpower also coincided with American preeminence in fossil fuel production. If America had been dependent on other countries for such fuels (e.g. Germany or Japan), the world might have been totally different.
Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
Not only do you get to sell the robots, you also get to sell everything else, because the most convenient place to set up the everything-else factories is right next to the robot factories.
I know that robots have been used in manufacturing for decades, but I think they're due for a big step function increase. At some point we get the GPT-3 of robots, which turns them from hyper-specialised tools for use in narrow circumstances into tools that you can use for pretty much any basic manufacturing task. And you really want that to happen in your country, not in China.
Also solar panels, to power all the everything factories.
> Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
That's a great one. GOOG definitely jumped the gun by a decade when acquiring Boston Dynamics. Now Hyundai has them, and is explicitly using them to carve out a niche in automation robotics.
Somebody needs to tell NVIDIA to stop open sourcing their Eureka code, too.
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
I agree on solar, but China literally manufacturers 90% of the world's solar panels, and it's a steep climb from here, especially with our environmental laws.
Cars - plenty of good cars are manufactured in fully developed countries, including all the arguably best ones.
We still manufacture Teslas and Corvettes and whatever domestically, and used to manufacture all the cars sold in America domestically (40's). We're down to about 45% with offshoring and "American" brands being manufactured in Mexico.
And don't cars have absolutely huge trickle-down effects in first, second, and third string parts suppliers and domestic jobs? Isn't that why we bailed the Big 3 out?
If "45%" was enough to bail out the Big 3, how much more domestic jobs and GDP would result in bringing the 55% back? Seems like a win.
But is there evidence we get either strong strategic benefits from it (I think not, since most of the offshored parts are in allied countries) or good bang for your buck job wise (I think not so much since there's a pretty good split now, though not very confident about that). The question isn't just "do we get jobs back with arbitrary cost" but "do we get good jobs and valuable production in return for our cost". Cars seem fairly replacement level on that front - not an especially terrible idea, but also not the most efficient way to turn government subsidies to jobs and domestic production.
It seems a good tradeoff to me - the 45% represents 4-5M jobs across primary manufacturing and first, second, third string suppliers, so bringing back another 45% would bring back 4-5M jobs. That's a solid 3% of the total workforce, and they're all "good, honest manufacturing jobs" that could revitalize Rust Belt towns and whatever.
But as to strategic benefits, yeah, I think we should be doubling and tripling down on chip fabs, large transformer and electrical plant manufacturing (while machete-ing regulation that prevents expansion and new builds with abandon), solar panel production, and so on.
From a strategic standpoint, we should also definitely stop wasting our country's finest minds in eyeball / attention mines and finance. The amount of brainpower that goes into online ads has to be the biggest waste of intellectual horsepower ever known, and they're *really bad at it* on top of it. But the scale of GOOG and FB is enough they're still trillion dollar companies while being really bad at serving relevant ads.
But all those Phd's and brilliant people wasting their talents to create more CDO's and irrelevant ads should be working in cybersecurity and preventing corporate espionage or something actually strategically useful.
If I were in charge, I'd be offering TSMC employees FAANG and OpenAI style compensation packages to incentivize as many of them to come over as possible and start building new factories yesterday, and I'd be "national security lettering" like 10-20% of FAAMG workforces to go do something actually useful instead, but that's all pretty pie in the sky.
But I think jobs-wise, all those things combined would barely move the needle - maybe 20% as much as the cars thing.
We'd be gaining automotive jobs and losing other jobs. Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job. And the principle of comparative advantage says that the trade of sacrificing other jobs to gain automotive jobs will make us net poorer. Seems like a loss.
> Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job.
I don't think that's true. The biggest categories of Mexico's US-origin imports are electrical machinery and equipment, computers, vehicles, oil, plastics, and agriculture.
Most of those are probably at an efficient frontier in terms of US labor-hours going into them vs automation, and the marginal change from Mexico buying less (which tops out at 20-100B per category) is unlikely to result in a substantial reduction of jobs versus the overall production volumes.
In other words, if Mexico buys less corn or soybeans, it's not going to affect jobs because "farming" is basically fully automated and <2% of US jobs are farmers, and because Mexico is buying <1% of our overall farming output.
Same with oil, computers, etc.
I mean yes, I get what the theory of comparative advantage says, I'm just pointing out in the actual empirical world, I doubt we'd see these effects. The gap between theory and practice in economics can be noticeably wide due to regulations, social and business dynamics, etc.
Versus there's 4-5M automotive jobs in the US, considering direct manufacturing and first, second, and third tier suppliers, and that's at the current 45% US-origin manufacturing. I would personally bet on adding 5M manufacturing jobs to the US being more net positive empirically than Mexico buying a little less oil, agricultural products, and computers.
If you think poorer-but-with-more-jobs is a good trade, why not undo automation? Ban tractors and farming machinery etc. That will also add jobs (while impoverishing us) same as autarky will.
Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
But you know, we'd probably have a Terror or Revolution if we went that route.
I think there's always a tradeoff between aggregate social qualiity of life and economic productivity, and although those 5M jobs would in some sense be "welfare" because it's not the strictly maximally-economically optimal thing to do, I think the amount of "GDP and good jobs in the US for average people" tradeoff is fine and probably net positive overall vs the "some corporations / stockholders will make 0.5% more annually."
And just imagine the political capital from whoever did this! "I brought back 5M jobs to the US, good manufacturing jobs, revitalizing entire Rust Belt towns, etc." I mean, whichever side did it would cement a good chunk of those votes for the next 10-20 years, I'm surprised it's not in the Overton Window of stuff being discussed.
>> Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
Your terms are acceptable.
What's the logic here? We've made bad decisions in the past, so we must make more bad decisions in the future?
"Reshoring" refers to bringing industrialization back from other countries. Boeing's largest and now-most-infamous outside supplier has been Spirit AeroSystems. That company, which was previously Boeing's own division before being spun off in 2005, is headquartered in Wichita and was doing virtually all of its Boeing assembly within the US. Boeing is now retaking control of Spirit Aero and its work, having agreed this summer on reacquiring all of those US operations.
Boeing in 2017 had off-shored the detailed-design and operational control of the extremely-complex manufacturing of its planes to software from a French company called Dassault Systèmes. As Boeing planes lately began falling apart and failing to fly safely, Congresscritters and others have seized upon that Dassault decision as "the problem". An awkward fact however is that Boeing's primary competitor, Airbus, made the exact same change to the same software from the same company, Dassault. AirBus planes however are not having anywhere near the problems that Boeing planes now are.
If I recall correctly, Peter Zeihan thought our best move (not that we have to do much moving about it, he thought it would happen naturally) would be to take the light industry we offshored to China and move it to Mexico. Mexico has cheap labor, a large population, is not a geopolitical threat, and is right next door.
Why does the brain age so much slower than the rest of the body? Physical decline (eg. muscle loss) is near-universal amongst the elderly, but many elderly people seem roughly as sharp as they've always been, with relatively little cognitive decline - for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68. Even if he had exceptional ability, no athletes are still competitive at 68 (except in less physical sports like archery)
I'd challenge the idea that the rest of the body ages faster than the brain just because of the distribution of top performers in chess vs physical sports. First off, the brain isn't just a doing organ, it's a learning organ--if we were teaching everybody involved a new game the advantages of youth would be more obvious. Don't kids tend to dominate in video games? I don't think it's just because their little fingers are faster. Or the phenomenon where younger people are responsible for more groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics, cognitively demanding domains where you benefit less from experience than you do in chess, I'd think. Second, there are more organs in the body than those relevant for sports, and moreover one of the sports-relevant organs is actually the brain--one reason for decline is sports performance with age is slower reaction times, which is a brain (and rest of the nervous system) thing. Third, is either of these things even a good proxy for something like 'rate of aging'?
To me the interesting angle is more like, why don't we seem to lose cognitive skills faster as we age? Apparently you can damage a lot of neural tissue before symptoms of a neurodegenerative problem (Alzheimer's, say, I'm generalizing but we're all implicating cortical tissue, which has this property) are obvious. As @pangsofmacha said below, cognitive development requires neural pruning for optimization, so more isn't necessarily better, but brain tissue is metabolically expensive so we must be netting other benefits from neurons we don't strictly "seem to need" to get (what we perceive to be) the cognitive job done. Redundancy enabling longevity might be part of the answer.
I don’t have time to look up references right now, so I’ll just state it as I remember: muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age. Ultrasonic scans of 70 y.o. active triathletes show no signs of muscle loss. There are other aspects of physical decline, such as arthritis, but one can maintain the muscle mass well into old age.
> muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age.
Yeah, I second this. Hunter Gatherers are about 5x more active than Westerners.
If you study Hunter Gatherers vs Western sedentaries, older hunter gatherer women and men in their 60-70’s in general are on par with Westerners in their 40-50’s.
There’s no decline in walking speed among Hadza women as they age (whereas Western women go from 3 feet per second at under 50yo to 2fps by the time they’re over 60.)
Grip strength remains notably higher in both hunter gatherer men and women into their 70’s relative to Westerners, and more.
I think that's the case, because I've run with a lot of people over 70, and many of them are still in very good shape. They might be the lucky few, but I suspect it's more a lifetime of being active that does it.
I suspect these 70+ year old runners started from a higher baseline or didn't realise their (decreasing with age) potential in their youth. Regarding the study mentioned above, without seeing it I'm skeptical - was the study comparing them to the average, or to their younger selves?
I'm not sure looking at world records is the best way to judge decline. I wouldn't dispute that absolute peak levels decline with age, but very few people ever reach that level at any age. It's actually quite extraordinary to me that any 70 year old can run 100m in 12.8s - which would outpace many 18 year olds.
This is a really interesting question. Here’s a few ideas that might be relevant, all off the top of my head, so I haven’t double checked them.
- there is less cell turnover in the brain than most other organs which may affect rate of aging.
- the brain is metabolically different than most other organs, and it seems plausible that it’s metabolic demands continue to be (relatively) adequately met later in life, whereas the same may not be true for other parts of the body eg. skeletal muscle.
- “something-something brain plasticity”, it’s an easy idea to mock because it’s been hijacked by pop psychology, but the ability of the brain to compensate for injuries, adapt, and “rewire“ to some limited extent may help explain it’s robustness.
- just based on what I know about evolutionary theory and genetics I’m not a big fan of group selection and related theories, but that said, it doesn’t seem crazy to think it’s an advantage for our species to have mentally sharp grandmothers and grandfathers. I’m not exactly sure how the actual genetic/mechanistic part would work, but the concept seems reasonable.
I’d speculate that activities showing less decline with age are those that benefit most from experience.
I don’t know that there’s a definition of tissue aging that incorporates brain and body that shows the brain generally ages more slowly than the body. I would expect a priori that different tissue material properties change at different rates in different tissues. There are evolutionary theory reasons to expect that the impact of different aging trajectories for these properties on reproductive fitness will be similar no matter which you look at. But success in sport, chess, etc. isn’t identical to reproductive fitness, of course.
This is likely because the plasticity of learning means the brain is more sensitive to homeostatic feedback. Both brain and body persist for much longer than dead organic tissue because both are open to feedback processes that resist entropic decline. However, this is (relatively) slow in the case of non-cortical tissue due to the feedback mechanisms being coarser and less sensitive. Learning, however, requires highly sensitive on-the-fly re-weighting of neural connections, so any decline in function can be detected and compensated. (When I notice that I'm getting hazy on something I know, I relearn it––and familiarity means I do so efficiently.) So while the brain likely physically declines at the same rate, the cognitive pathways can be 're-routed' before they are lost. Of course, there will eventually come a point where they can't, and this is when permanent cognitive decline sets in.
Does the ability to 're-rout' cognitive pathways not decline much with age? Or is it that it starts from a high enough baseline that the decline has little effect -i.e. that people start with more than they need
I think the answer is yes. Synaptic pruning actively removes extra cortical structure in childhood and makes cognition more effective. This obviously isn't the same as age-related cognitive decline, but it certainly shows that "more is better" doesn't hold true for cortical connectivity. That said, the ability to 're-route' probably does decline a little with age, and it may well be that the skills best preserved are those that have been reinforced by repetition. (Cue elderly stats professor who can to maximum likelihood estimation in her sleep, but does no better than age-related controls on everything else.)
To follow up on the discussion of homeless people, drug addiction, mental health, institutionalization, and "housing first", here's a video about how the current policies are playing out. I am informed that it is accurate.
Around the 29:26 mark, one man she is interviewing says that housing first "sucks" because "they say they'll have this and this and this, they say they'll help you, but only they'll only help you to a certain point" and at 30:19 it's corroborated by staff that there's a period around the 25th of each month where the population has run out of money, and thus is out of drugs, and people begin to sober up and ask for help, but there are no resources to help them: "They want help. I tried, but there was no bed space, I couldn't get people any kind of treatment... I couldn't find bed space, I didn't know where to put them... If I could get them a bed somewhere... there [were] no beds... every month it was the same thing."
Then a few minutes later at 37:49, the program contrasts a housing first model for a model that begins with arrest, which seems to be presented favorably because arrest forces a state of sobriety after which people can be helped. The host interviews a police officer who describes how "it was awesome to see these women, former convicts, get up on stage and tell their story, and every single one of them attributed their success to having been arrested and then being led towards a personal accountability perspective... I would like people to think, and consider, that the most compassionate thing we could do would be to interrupt that cycle of addiction and then provide real meaningful care for those people without the opportunity to go back" and the host agrees "during incarceration, during that separated time, separation, services, and accountability."
That seems to imply that the question isn't one of housing first vs arrest first, but so much as it's one of resources and support services, and whether there is sufficient funding to make those available. Housing first is critiqued for promising but not delivering on support services, while arrest is offered as valuable because it can connect people "separation, services, and accountability." So it seems like the "services" part is the key, which would mean either approach can be effective if it can route someone to support services, and both will be ineffective insofar as there are no support services at the end of the bridge.
And I'm very skeptical that local governments would actually be willing to pay for those kinds of services, so it seems like while we may be debating whether arrest-first or housing-first creates better outcomes, practically speaking what we're choosing between is concentrating the ills of poverty into a single toxic space, or running those ills through a revolving door.
Can someone steel man the case for seed oil for an anti-scientism prospective?
Food science is one of the more publicly corrupt; my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers; and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
Id have to look up meme but butter steps to make is 1. shake cream; while seed oils are gaint walls-o-text with many many scary chemicals.
But Im worried that picking up a butter-based diet maybe an overcorrection
"and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker."
It is interesting to me that at a time when we have more food science than ever before, we also have a lot of obesity, and not much sign of people being healthier on the basis of what we eat. At least, I personally haven't seen much evidence of food science resulting in a healthier populace.
Perhaps this is down to people simply not following up-to-date food science? Still, if this is the case, I find it a bit weird that I haven't heard of much food education efforts by the government or health authorities, especially given increasing weight issues throughout the population.
I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact. I'd genuinely be curious to hear from strong supporters of food science on why we're not reaping as much obvious benefit from food science as we are from computer science or physics or chemistry.
>>I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
>I haven't studied food science in detail...curious
When I last looked into it its a bunch of population studies making dubious and reductionist assumptions; while your stomach is a bioreactor that evolves over your life time. I expect that your need a micro boime test, adding some strains, and only then a standard diet can exist.
Unlike skincolor its unlikely you get half your mircoboime from your father, so I dont even understand how its possible to detect diet requirements based on race
> I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact.
I've been friends with a few food scientists over the years, and food science is fully adversarial, at least in regards to general health and well being.
The things being optimized are creating superstimuli with tastiness and "morishness" where people want more, because those are the things that sells more units, and selling more units is what the companies employing food scientists want to do.
It's not that they WANT to make their customers fat and unhealthy, that's just a side effect of the tastiness and morishness right now. When we get to a point we can legitimately create truly biologically-neutral taste-conveying "food," I'm sure they'll pivot to those.
Why in particular should oils derived from squeezing seeds be bad, but oils derived from squeezing fruits (or a cow's tits) be good? Why not the other way around?
Telos. Fruits and milk want to be consumed. Seeds do not. So, a priori it makes sense that the first two would be more likely to be helpful to their consumer than the latter, due to evolution.
> Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy?
No, probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests and the flip flopping on if a food is considered healthy each decade. The food pyramid story is public knowledge and there just is a "sugar lobby".
> If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
Im pretty sure nothing worth a damn exists in food science with it all being delayed, slow effects over large populations and no proper experiments
Assuming your unwilling to burn the university to the ground just yet, I suggest at least sounding like experimental history:
> probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests
Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
I didn't ask you to trust experts. If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like? If it showed you that seed oils aren't bad, would you then believe that seed oils aren't bad?
> Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
The americain government is onto its 5th food pyramid, Im treating it as given prior that *at least* the 1st one was corrupt.
"In April 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) halted publication of its Eating Right Pyramid, due to objections raised by meat and dairy lobbying groups concerning the guide’s display of their products." -wikipedia
> If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like?
Take samples of mirco boimes of non urbanized populations with low modernization in their diet, mad science up some pills with stains of bacteria that are high in the non-modern groups that eat a specific food like 90% seal fat in the winter, give them to people with food sensitivity's; see if their digestion improves.
My strategy: Don't worry about any particular food stuff. Fall back on heuristics so old they came from our evolutionary environment - find the healthiest and most physically vital person or people you can, and eat what they eat, and avoid what they avoid.
That meme is horsefeathers, or at least severely overstated. You can make most seed oils by grinding up seeds and squeezing and filtering the oil out of the mash. Some you can just let the mash settle and pour the oil off the top, like with natural-style peanut butter. Industrially produced seed oils do get postprocessed for various reasons, but it isn't essential to seed oils.
Yes, I would add “cold-pressed” to my description above if I could edit it, although I’m not sure how important that is vs. for example buying better meat.
Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing.
"Rarely fully removed" is technically true, but "fully" is doing a lot of work there. One of the reasons hexane is the chosen solvent is because it has a very low boiling point (155ºF or 68ºC) so you can distill it out of the finished product efficiently. The EU's limit for hexane residue is 1 ppm. The FDA does not have a specific limit, but in practice most oil on the market seems to be much less than EU's limit. I don't have any particular insight into whether the EU's limit is appropriately set.
My original point was the issue, if there is one, is with processing rather than inherent to the source. Hexane gets used because it's more efficient, not because it's strictly necessary. They can make hexane-free seed oils, but you usually only see it in premium varieties of oil like olive or grapeseed, not stuff like canola or soybean.
I am very good at super quickly looking things up. For this particular question, I did a few google searches on variations of "hexane contents of food oils", "hexane residue canola oil", and the like. I pulled most of the info on my reply from a combination of wikipedia articles (hexane, canola oil), FDA and EPA explainers about hexane in food oil, a few journal articles about hexane residue testing and alternatives to hexane, and an article on the use hexane in oil extraction from a company (Anderson International) that makes equipment for high-yield mechanical extraction of seed oils. I also poked around on some grocery shopping websites to see what I could find in terms of oils labelled "cold pressed" or otherwise indicating mechanical extraction without solvents; I already know about cold-pressed olive oil because I have some in my kitchen, and I found cold-pressed grapeseed oil, but I didn't find canola, soybean, etc in a few minutes of looking (closest I found was "organic", which is pretty close to meaningless).
It helps that I have pretty strong concept-level background knowledge of a wide range of things (product of a good memory, inconsistently-managed ADHD, and good luck in the lottery of fascinations), which helps me quickly skim for and recognize important information and fit it together into a coherent conclusion. It also makes it easier to concoct good search terms.
In this particular case, one useful area of background info is that my father is a chemical engineer/salesman by trade. Most of his career has focused on silica gel and molecular sieves, but he's also worked in industrial food processing, and I've picked up a fair amount listening to him talk about work. I didn't remember specifics until being prompted by the articles I was skimming, but once prompted I realized that I had a 3/4 forgotten framework of understanding that I was able to fit pieces of info into.
For the bit about Republican bloggers hating IRV in another thread of this post, that was about 3/4 from memory. I looked up details, like exactly how many rounds the NYC Democratic Primary went in 2021, who the candidates were running against LePage in 2010 and 2014, and the exact vote totals. But the overall sequence of events and the complaints people had about them I mostly remembered from reading various political blogs at the time. It had stuck in my mind particularly because I generally favor voting system reform and I though the complaints I was hearing were interesting but not entirely fair.
On topics where I don't know where to start looking things up productively, or don't have enough background knowledge to synthesize looked-up info constructively, I usually try to stay quiet. By picking my battles thus, I (hopefully) come off as more knowledgable than I actually am.
"Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing."
I remain astounded by what the hell Americans do to food. I buy rapeseed (canola) oil from a local supermarket which is its own-brand stuff, and that manages to be cold-pressed (which I only learned now by looking it up after reading the above). It's €3.29 for 500 ml, that comes (at current exchange rates) to $3.61 in American money. I don't know if that's considered expensive or not, or what the cheapest American processed seed oils go for.
EDIT: Quick looking up online, Walmart sells Crisco canola oil for $3.28/16 fl oz, which is around 473 ml. Its own-brand "Great Value" canola oil retails at $4.33/48 fl oz, which is around 1.5 litres. So the equivalent from my grocery would be $10.83, more or less.
So yes, somewhat more expensive, but according to one online blog, Crisco do use hexane extraction (can't find out if Walmart do, but at that price I'm guessing "yes").
But yeah, any American grocery stuff which is on sale over here (some of it has crossed the Atlantic) seems - to my untutored view - to be *full* of sugar and chemicals to a degree that equivalent mass-market processed foods here aren't. Of course, some things don't have local equivalents, so that's why I'm trying American products, but goodness me. The things the great American pubic willingly consumes! 😃
I've been to England briefly and visited the "American" sections of a few grocery stores and, while I wouldn't by any means claim that our food is generally healthy, it seems like only the most sugary things make it over there. Like pop tarts.
Here's what I've noticed you can get in one place but not the other:
That's one of the reasons for postprocessing, but it varies by the type of oil and isn't a problem unique to seed oil. Butter, for instance, goes rancid quite a bit faster than raw peanut oil.
The difference is that we accept that butter goes rancid quickly. That's why butter comes in small refrigerated packages while cooking oils are sold in larger bottles on unrefrigerated shelves, even though most households go through butter a lot faster than cooking oil.
An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods. Maybe something like that the oils in seeds were eaten by hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and seeds are good for you because plants generate whole plants with seeds to start with, and the oil helps with that. The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed, packed full of nutrients.
Note no citations supporting any of this, as I'm making it up as I go along. Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
I don't understand why you would ask for a steel-manned anti-science argument from rationalists, who are supposed to do rational things, like use science-based evidence.
Sadly while theres some distrust of experts, he doesn't actually come to a strong conclusion; its all just a big mess of reasons to be confused and he seems to trust science much more then me.
I think you may lack even a basic understanding of anyone anti-science
The data isnt even in yet, but I predict that the long term health of the bone-lost drugs will not be great; and would attempt to lose weight with nicotine and high doses of caffeine before this decades pill.
They are highly correlated with ultraprocessed foods, which is by itself a reason to avoid them. Beyond that, there is no need to get high levels of omega-6 PUFAs in the diet; the 0.5-1.5%% of calories that were obtained in more primitive societies is adequate (compare to 8-10% in the SAD diet currently).
My assumption for a long time has been they are, on net, neutral or slightly harmful (60% chance), or at least moderately harmful (20% chance). However, some of the mechanisms by which they are harmful requires chronic exposure, while the literature exonnerating them relies on either low-duration RCTs or on longer term observational studies where I'm not convinced confounding effects are suitably accounted for.
In terms of mechanisms, the fear is they oxidized easily and can cause inflammation if you don't offset with enough omega-3. OTOH l, there are indications omega-6 PUFAs may lower inflammation by other mechanisms.
So I'm very skeptical about them but I very much agree based on my limited reading that there isn't any smoking gun proving they are harmful.
It seems nothing is too simple about this, but when I was looking into it, vaguely recall that a metabolic product of omega-6 PUFAs are lipoxins that can modulate the immune system away from inflammatory pathways.
It's not exactly anti-scientism, but I wrote a bit about this before at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ . I don't think you can really do this in an anti-scientism way - your prior on any given nutrient being bad is low, you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying, and I think this leaves you open to accusations of selective credulity.
> you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying,
Didnt the ancient greeks care about which foods caused increased ratios of black/yellow bile? Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
I think every culture has comments on food. Its hard to process what they say and apply it outside their narrow focus, but Id expect an opinion from everyone.
I didn't mean you literally couldn't worry, I meant that without any science you should assume your worries are groundless (as were the Greeks' worries about bile and so on)
If an ancient greek asserts that you should apply virtue ethics to food, you should eat enough to feel full but not eat too much and your a gluten, is that a "groundless" assertion with zero predictive power?
I think you're using modern scientific foresight to pick out one specific ancient Greek belief that makes sense to you, whereas at the time that would look no better or worse than other ones like "don't eat black bile" or whatever.
I also think things like "don't eat more than your body wants" are very different from "this one specific nutrient which tastes as good as any other nutrient is evil".
You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that. I do think there are better options out there (olive, and avocado for high heat) but I am dubious that seed oils are particularly toxic.
You said seed oils have “many scary chemicals in them” and I was responding to that. My understanding is that seed oils are often associated with ultra processed foods, and that’s why they get a bad rap.
Seed oils by themselves are ultraprocessed, if McDonalds is ultra processed, they probably add some ~~sawdust~~ soy flour to the meat sure; and theres some emulsifying salt in the cheese, but the real consern is the 10 step process of the rape seeds.
I'm not especially a fan of the UPF thing but my understanding is that seed oils count as Nova level 2, where 1 is unprocessed and 4 is ultra processed
I have no idea what a nova level is, but I instantly distrust it with that single suggestion.
a quick google sreach says rapeseed processing includes "Solvent extraction using hexane", wikipedia say "In industry, hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for shoes, leather products, and roofing."
I feel whoever they are are lying using the same old tricks
Life expectancies in the western world increased significantly from adult as well as childhood starting ages. For example in England+Wales from 1850 to 2000, life expectancy for a 20-year-old increased from 60 to 82. For a 40-year-old the increase was from 67 to 84.
The reduction in childhood death during that period has of course been even greater, making it the largest single factor in the overall increase in life expectancy at birth. That change is among humanity's greatest achievements, and improvement in childhood nutrition is very much one of the elements of it. It is far from being the only such improvement though.
Starting from earlier than 1850 the changes in rates of young-adult death are even more startling, something that everyone who's done serious family-tree research for any length of time learns from the data that we assemble from records. My 17th/18th century ancestral households had _far_ higher rates of young-adult death than my 20th century ones. The causes when noted in the records are largely infectious diseases, accidents, childbirth for women and war for men, with the order of those varying a bit across specific locales/time periods. (For women childbirth is a strong #1 throughout the 17th-19th centuries everywhere that I have ancestors.)
It would take extreme evidence to convince me that general health isnt in decline; "kinetic" deaths(keep blood on the inside and cleanish) are declining with clean running water and wealth, this is related to war, childbrith and being born; and I view this a low hanging fruit; slower causes of death seem mixed and confusing and its not even a "conspiracy theory" to talk about the theory of conspiracy of corruption around the food pyramids .
I'm a mid thirties secular jew moving from Canada to NYC next week. If anyone can host me for post yom Kippur - breaking of the fast meal (or knows of a secular group event to attend), id love to be included. You can learn more about me at danfrank.ca.
OH lol I can see that now. To be honest, the thread looks more like colored spackle or toothpaste or something. Not that it's that important. I've always wondered what it was supposed to be, though. Mystery solved :D
EDIT: I tried using Google Lens. Most of the search results are either for this very blog, for r/slatestarcodex, or for vaguely similar-shaped blue things with holes, which is unsurprising.
It is my impression that the public attitude to improving voting methods over FPTP ranges from complete disinterest to something like "Huh, neat." But has anyone considered advocating for better voting systems as a potential way to mitigate existential risk?
Government bodies have access to the most powerful tools available to mankind and their policies dictate how we deal with existential threats like AI regulation, climate change, use of nuclear weapons etc. Systems like FPTP seem to promote governments that represent the more extreme views of a population who are more likely to enact extreme and catastrophic policies.
If voting systems that benefitted more centrist politicians (approval, etc.) were commonplace globally, would this not reduce the risk of extreme policies?
Star voting is my choice, mostly for simplicity and understandability, and second for their evidence that it performs well under tactical voting: https://www.starvoting.org/
One (weak) anecdote against it is that platforms like YouTube and Netflix switched from star voting to approval voting, presumably because it works better in practice.
YouTube and Netflix don’t have the task of coming up with a single winner.
A major advantage of score voting is that in a polarized election it still allows a 3rd candidate to meaningfully participate.
For example, imagine that 51% of the people vote:
Triden 5/5, Bump 0/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
And 49% vote:
Triden 0/5, Bump 5/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
Then the vote reveals that this Shaked Koplewitz guy is not that bad in the mind of the average voter. Pure score voting would let him win, STAR would still give the win to Triden which I don’t think is right.
In that very artificial situation I think you're right.
But then all the Triden voters are going to look at that result and say "Silly me! If only a few percent of us had given Koplewitz a 0/5 instead of a 3/5 then Triden would have won, I'm not going to make that mistake again". And pretty soon everyone is either voting 0/5 or 5/5 on all candidates... just like they used to on youtube videos.
Sadly, improved voting systems seem to be well on their way to becoming a partisan issue, with Republicans aligning firmly against them.
As far as I know, this starts with Maine adopting IRV by ballot measure in 2016. The incumbent governor at the time, Paul LePage, was a Tea Party Republican who had won in 2010 and 2014 with pluralities (37% and 48% respectively) and had less than 40% approval rating at the time. In both elections, there had been a strong third-party showing by Eliot Cutler (36% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2014), a Democrat running as an Independent, and Democrats blamed LePage's victories on the Democratic vote being split between Cutler and the respective Democratic nominees in both elections. Partisans of both sides saw the measure as a way of changing the rules to keep someone like LePage from winning future elections.
Then there was the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary for mayor. The voting took over a month to process, since it took eight rounds to get to a result and there wasn't a suitably streamlined process in place for counting IRV ballots. The eventual winner, Eric Adams, had plurality support in every round's results, often by substantial margins, but he only won the final round by less than 1%. I remember Republican bloggers at the time (many of whom at least partially bought into Trump's claims about the 2020 election being stolen) complaining that the counting process was opaque and could hide fraud. They also picked up and echoed some complaints by supporters of Adams's opponents about the very narrow margin in the final round.
Then there was the 2022 Alaska special election, where there was an IRV final round between one Democrat (Mary Peltola) and two Republicans (Nick Begich and Sarah Palin). Peltola has a plurality (39.7%) in the first round and won the second round count by about 3%, but Republicans objected that 60% of voters had voted for a Republican candidate and Peltola's margin of victory (about 5k votes) was more than covered by the 15k voters who voted only for Begich and left their second choice blank, and thus abstained from the second round between Peltola and Palin. I've heard two theories underlying these complaints: that some Begich supporters failed to cast a second-choice vote by mistake and in a traditional non-instant runoff election would have voted for Palin, and that the sequence of elimination in IRV is not robust, and Begich (who finished behind Palin by a relatively narrow but nontrivial margin) would very likely have won the second round had Palin been eliminated instead.
Observing this has made me update a bit against IRV (which still think is an improvement over single-round plurality voting (*)) and Condorcet (my traditional first-choice preference) in favor of a system where the counting process is more legible, such as approval voting or Borda count, despite their known flaws.
Tangentially, MAGA Republicans (and Tea Party Republicans before them) opposing IRV seems to weigh towards your main thesis, that improved voting systems incline results away from extremism relative to the current system of two-round plurality elections where the first round is either separate partisan primaries or a top-two "jungle" primary. I.e. that the reform is being most intensely opposed by supporters of extreme candidates who have been winning some elections under the old system.
(*) I strongly object to referring to the current US system as "First Past the Post" because it does a terrible job of describing the system. The key defining feature is that there's no "post" of a specific level of support that a candidate needs to reach to win, by contrast to something like IRV where the first candidate to reach 50% support during the elimination process wins.
In a two-party system, any change to the election procedure will benefit one party more than the other, so there’s going to be a lot of friction to make any kind of change.
Yes, and Institute for Election Science occasionally gets some EA money. I think less than it used to, because many people's timelines have gotten too short for things that only pay off after long political campaigns.
That argument is made all the time, among those who are interested, at places like ACX.
However,
-- many citizens of OECD nations nowadays have a lot of accumulated threat fatigue. For decades now voters have been hearing and reading about X and Y and Z and ten more things that are each an existential threat etc etc. It all runs together for a lot of people now and they mostly tune it out. Many of them don't even vote and this is one key reason they don't. So appeals based on existential threats, particularly regarding relatively arcane things like voting systems, aren't going to ring those folks' bells anymore.
-- meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians. Those convinced that immigration is now the existential threat to their nation/society/culture/racial group _want_ to elect people who will enact extreme responses to it. Ditto those who are obsessed with climate, or who've drunk the woke Koolaid, or who are card-carrying Libertarians, etc etc. For them the urgent objective is to get their own specific fellow obsessives into political power. "Benefitting more centrist politicians" sounds to them like "watering everything down and never dealing with the REAL PROBLEM!!"
The first group outnumbers the second, but the second group is more likely to show up and vote. They don't want fewer extreme views winning elections unless of course it is others' extreme views. Rather they focus on winning the battle, getting their extreme views into office and others' out.
> meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians.
Most people have *zero* knowledge of a single way the structure of a system effects its outcomes, gerry-manning is a mere tip of the iceberg yet people treat it as if its wildly complicated math.
Go beyond mere advocacy of a single position, look for it everywhere; consider it always.
How big of a change was jury selection to american justice?
How much did the halving rate of bitcoin effect its price? With hindight what would you have picked, for what goals?
In ancient china mentioning someones name in a suicide note caused the state to investigate your treatment of them, how would this effect every socail interaction?
If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
I agree, charting out all downstream effects is likely impossible. But is the chain of *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)* perhaps likely, or at least plausible? Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
> If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
No, nor should you give up on impossible (knowledge) tasks
> *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)*
> Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Well, yes; Im anti-centerist.
A boring, polite politics, makes for boring polite people in power, ai doom increases as we sleep walk into many problems.
Saw an ad that made me laugh this morning, and it has the advantage of being for FIRE, which is a great organization, so I'm sharing it here since it doubles as entertaining and getting their name out there.
At first I thought you meant an ad for Financial Independence/Retire Early.
Anyway, the ad did make me laugh too. This is what "free speech" actually means in politics - "I get to say whatever I want, and the other side is forced to shut up".
When this commercial first dropped, I saw numerous non-partisan political science-y types noting this is a much better model of the average voter's political beliefs than a "centrist" voter model (who picks the median position between the two sides).
I'm not sure the Carateca ban was warranted. The one linked comment seems to follow this pattern:
Person A: Kill all the Blacks!
Person B: You're evil for saying that. Your sick attitude has led to so much suffering, and the world would be better without you and your ilk.
Person C: "Sick" is ableist. And your whole comment is ad hominem.
Moderator D: C has a good point. B deserves a ban. Maybe we'll ban A too, for unrelated reasons.
User Carateca said that the user he was talking to (LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael/IP) didn't care about pogroms of Jews by Muslims. That's "ad hominem," but a fair comment about a user who spent a year denying or apologizing for pogroms of Jews by Muslims, denying elements of them, while regularly both-sidesing them and justifying them, often based on complete fabrications.
E.g. a week after the October 7 massacre, said user was still insisting (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41837470) there was no evidence Hamas killed children, after the identities of various children they killed (and kidnapped) had already been published, while also insisting that if Israel is justified in airstrikes that have civilian casualties, then Hamas is also justified in killing children.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1844385928527384727.html
A list of misleading or negligent NYT headlines.
For unclear reasons, I find it hilarious that both this blog and the progressive metafilter.com loathe the NYT.
I'm sorry, are they seriously mad that the NYT isn't left-wing enough? If even they aren't partisan enough for them, they're free to go get their news from some leftist echo chambers instead.
You don't have to be very far left to detest Trump. There are Republicans/conservatives who detest Trump.
The guffawing in my Substack/Notes feed this morning is about the discovery that Trump's special "All-American" Bible+American-founding-documents book is in fact printed in China. For my money however that pales next to the revelation that in putting it together they _edited_ the fucking UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION to reflect MAGA wet dreams.
They left out every part of the Constitution added since 1791, with no indication of having done so. Hence the version of the Constitution which MAGAts are now reading does not include any of the following:
-- the abolition of slavery
-- the guarantee of due process
-- that Americans are entitled to vote without regard to race or religion or having previously been enslaved, and can't be made to pay a fee in order to vote
-- that women have the right to vote
-- how Congress certifies the Electoral College votes
-- the POTUS being limited to two terms
-- that persons who've engaged in insurrection are banned from public office
Photos are being posted online of the last page of the Trump book's Constitution and the first page of the section following it. The Trumpified Constitution ends with the batch of amendments that are unofficially known as the Bill of Rights.
So....just in case anybody thought Trump was kidding when (December 4 2022) he publicly proposed "the termination" of "rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" -- he's put it in writing.
Sabine Hossenfelder summarizes several recent papers that suggest that AI isn't very useful as a coding tool...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-gqHJ1ENI
In my experience, it is useful as an autocomplete-on-steroids that often saves time while typing code, but people who claim it will replace human software engineers have no idea what they're talking about.
You mean within a certain timeframe right? It seems abundantly obvious that before very long it will absolutely replace humans
You confidence seems massively unfounded.
:- The position (zero'th derivative, if you like) of AI is frankly unimpressive - if AI doesn't get massively better at a range of things than it currently is, it won't be a big deal.
:- The first derivative of AI over the past few years has been very impressive indeed. computers can do things now that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.
:- The question is what the higher derivatives will look like. If AI goes on improving at the rate it has been over the past 3 years for the next 20 then yes, it really will be revolutionary, but we absolutely shouldn't be confident that that will happen - in fact, I think its more likely, although far from certain, that the current rapid rate of progress will slow long before then (and the question is how soon and by how much.
Predictions about the far future are hard, so how about this? I think is is unlikely that software engineer employment will be lower 25 years from now due to automation. Conditional on it being lower, I think it's more likely to be due to some disaster or economic depression rather than AI takeover.
(a) Bob Woodward claims in his new book that Trump secretly shipped to Putin, during the first weeks of the COVID-19 shutdowns when most Americans couldn't get their hands on COVID tests, several Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.
(b) Hours after that's reported, Trump tells ABC News that the above is "false" and "a made-up story."
(c) A day after Trump's denial, the Kremlin's regular media spokesman confirms that yes "of course" President Trump sent the testing machines to President Putin.
I know, nobody cares about this stuff, it's just "TDS", politicians have always spun and dissembled so what's new, blah blah blah. And after all Vance is still, now, repeating the Haitians-eating-cats thing and nobody gives a crap who didn't already dislike him. Fine, stipulated.
Still though....call me stubborn or something but somehow this level of blunt bald-faced (as my father would call it) lying to the public with no consequences still surprises me.
Well, one of Putin or Trump is lyingm
It *bothers* me. And, clearly, you. I would argue (admittedly conveniently) that continuing to be bothered is a sign of good mental health. But surely it's a bit late still to be surprised?
Fair. Maybe "surprised" is really just my self euphemism for "disturbed".
I just loved the coincided of the following two entries on Liz Lovelaces's twitter:
"yesterday drank 350ml vodka and then:
- climbed a mountain
- accidentally fell into a pool of radioactive water
- climbed DOWN the mountain while wet and cold and radioactive
- got punched in the face for the first time in my life
- drank even more vodka at brat bar"
"decided to install Ubuntu instead. "
Yes I remember reading Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's _Roadside Picnic_.
a) i, too, have tried getting WIFI to work on Ljnux. No experience with falling into a radioactive cooling pond and then getting into a bar fight in a former USSR country, but I imagine that sucks nearly as badly as getting WiFi to work on Linux.
====
Snark aside, how I redally got WiFi to work on Linux:
Me to our usual supplier of computers: "I'd like a WiFi card thgat works on Linux.W
Their tech guy: "Aww, that's horrible. I mean, even cards that have the same model number sometimes use different chipsets..."
Me: "You guys have a stock of different wifi cards and an Ubunti test maxchine in your workshop. If yiu can get a a card to work well enough that it can connect to an access point, I will buy it"
(Ten minutes later)
Their tech guy: "Here's your wifi card"
I honestly haven't had any trouble getting WiFi to work on Linux in the past 15 years. The one time I did, it was because I was trying to install some random distro for fun and the solution was booting Ubuntu long enough to turn the card on.
Chris Williamson's most recent guest is Calley Means, who argues the regulatory systems that are supposed to protect the American food supply and healthcare are fundamentally captured by big food processors and the pharmaceutical industry, and that's why Americans are so obese and unhealthy, and die years before their peers in Europe despite being heavily medicated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE4c5NO7XWQ
What regulations has Europe put in place that make European food less obesifying than American food? I've visited many European countries, and I seem to recall them having the same range of junk food as the US available for anyone who wants it. But I wasn't studying the issue closely, so maybe I missed something.
Note that I am *not* asking for examples or arguments of typical European diets being healthier than American ones. Nor about the regulation of foods for potential harms other than obesity. I't specifically the "regulation makes Europeans slim" part of this that doesn't ring true to me, and I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video to resolve that.
I'm not going to wade into a 2-hour Youtube video either, but I would like to point out that to argue "regulatory capture in the US causes Americans to be unhealthier and die sooner than Europeans" is not necessarily to argue "stricter regulations in Europe cause Europeans to be healthier and die later than Americans." An argument could be made, for example, that Europeans are less in need of regulation to provide guardrails against obesity (etc.) because they are more likely to adhere to traditional regional dietary practices that provide those guardrails.
(I have no idea whether Calley Means is actually making that argument--see above re: wading into 2-hour Youtube videos)
If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese". The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices. Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
No, that's not logical. None of those sentences is logical. Please slow down and think.
>If that were the case, then regulatory capture by Big Food would not be the reason "why Americans are so obese".
That simply doesn't follow. If Americans' ad libitum diet is one that would make them obese and unhealthy, and it is one that coulde be meaningfully changed by regulation, then it would be perfectly sensible to argue that lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes in Americans *independently of Europe's regulatory regime or lack of it*. In other words, in that case, it could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by their governments, but it also could be that America's lack of regulation leads to poorer health outcomes because Europeans' diets are more strictly regulated by the Europeans themselves, voluntarily!
> The reason would be that Americans have different traditional regional dietary practices
The reason would be that Americans have different dietary practices. It does not follow, at all, from any of the foregoing assumptions that those differences have to do with tradition or with region. The differences under our hypothetical *could* have to do with tradition or region partially, or entirely, or not at all.
(This is, of course, also true of the Europeans' dietary practices. I offered "traditional regional dietary practices" as an *example* of something other than European government regulation that could explain a difference in outcomes; I am not asserting outright that it explains the differences. I simply wanted to show you where, and how, you are jumping to conclusions.)
>Yes, at this point, McDonalds, fried chicken and everything else, and Doritos with a supersized Coke count as "traditional", and nobody had to capture any regulators to make it so.
This is simply irrelevant. Whether a diet "counts" as traditional or regional makes no difference as to whether government regulation could meaningfully slow, stop, or reverse its adoption. Either it could, or it couldn't. Again, I want to stress that what I am doing here is offering you a *****hypothetical****** *****example****** of a situation in which American diets could drift toward unhealthiness due to lack of government regulation (and possibly due to lack of countervailing healthier traditional dietary practices, although that need not be a factor) while European diets remain healthier without such government regulation because Europeans make healthier choices on their own.
It is a thing that could happen. I make no claim as to whether it has happened. If you want to know what I really suspect, or even if you don't want to know, I suspect that it's a complex combination of voluntary healthy dietary choices AND stricter regulations on certain obesity-fueling food ingredients AND better access to non-emergency health care AND more walking AND other things that makes Europeans less fat and longer-lived.
Failing to prevent some change, and causing that change, are two different things. In your hypothetical, it is the dietary practices of Americans (which, yes, are traditional and regional) that are the *cause* of America's excess obesity. Government regulation is merely one of several things that could in theory have prevented that outcome, but didn't.
If there were some regulatory body whose default behavior would have been to prevent Americans from adopting obesity-inducing dietary practices, then possibly interference with that regulatory body would qualify. But I don't think that's the case here - at the time the relevant dietary processes were adopted, American food regulation was limited to basically "is it contaminated or actually poisonous?", and no, fattening did not count as poisonous.
And if we imagine that "Big Food" was pushing some profitable but fatteningly healthy dietary practices on Americans and could only have been stopped by regulation, then presumably "Big Food" would have wanted to do the same in Europe, because twice the profit. So, again, what are the regulations that Europe has adopted that prevented "Big Food" from overriding traditional, regional European dietary practices with endless Big Macs and Supersize Fries like they allegedly did in the United States?
I came across this analysis of the backgrounds of Nobel Laureates. I found his analysis interesting. But he's concerned that our society isn't doing enough to find and support kids from non-Nobelist-generating backgrounds to reach their potential as scientists who could fix all our problems. Except from an equity perspective, I don't think this is a critical problem. After all, there are more scientists now than ever before who are publishing more papers than ever before, but scientific advancements have stagnated (yes, I believe John Horgan is correct).
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1844045388241915960.html
I came across a reference to the relics of St Anthony of Padua today, and if you take a look at the reliquary of his lower jaw, I think you will understand the aesthetics of Guillermo del Toro's movies better 😀
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/st-anthonys-tongue
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> You only need to interview once, and we'll use it to match you with subsequent roles.
I don't know about your company, but when I went through Triplebyte (in the early days, before it turned into a generic jobs site), I still had to interview at the client companies in addition to the Triplebyte interview.
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There was (is?) a Mongol word "tümen" meaning 10 000. There was an Old Slavic word "t'ma" meaning the same. The obvious question is whether these two are etymologically related.
I asked ChatGPT, and it said that Mongols brought the word to Slavs during their invasions to Europe in the 13th century.
And now I wonder whether I have learned an interesting historical fact... or just made ChatGPT produce another hallucination.
Perhaps this is a glimpse to the future of education -- all information will be instantly available and made very easy to understand. But we will always doubt whether the answer is actually true, or was just made up on the spot. Or maybe my generation will always doubt it, but the next generations will probably accept everything as a fact. I mean, what other options will they have: trust the machine, or trust a book written by a human who probably just asked the machine?
Probably shouldn't believe anything on the basis of just ChatGPT's say-so. At the very least ask for a source. As the internet proceeds from a hobbyist playground to corporate ad-world to steaming pools of AI-generated sludge, maybe curated information sources like encyclopedias will come back in style.
Wiktionary has it: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%82%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%B0#Old_Church_Slavonic
I don't think wiktionary is yet corrupted with AI-generated crap, but give it time.
Is there any reason, apart from being politically well-connected, why Robin Gunningham aka Banksy couldn't be prosecuted under the UK Proceeds of Crime Act?
Have criminal complaints been filed against Banksy? And is there an open police inquiry as to the identity of Banksy? Other than legal disputes about the ownership of his work, I haven't heard of any.
Is there any proof other than that provided by the Daily Mail (which I grant you is a very very highly super reliable journalistic enterprise) that Gunningham is Banksy? Other potential Banksy candidates have been outed.
And to whom is Gunningham politically well-connected? I think I would need more the Daily Mail to be convinced of his well-connected connections.
Heh, I'd need more than the Daily Mail in order to be convinced that the King isn't from the fourth planet of Alpha Centauri.
Prosecutorial discretion.
Was anyone around Silicon Valley, specifically in tech or close to tech, around 2010?
I have a theory that that's the year when tech/nerd culture began to ingest great numbers of people that would otherwise have gone into law, medicine, or finance--which changed the cultural landscape forever. I'm wondering if anyone has any observations or stories related to this. I'd be curious to see to what extent this theory is true.
I used to hangout in online tech spaces, but only came closer to the industry side of things around 2011-2012, and finally joined the industry in 2013. I think I observe that more non-geek people are working in tech than it used to be. The humor and references have changed quite a bit. There's less Lord of the Rings and Philip K. Dick in the air than there used to be, although these remain landmarks that even folks who went to Ivy League schools at least know of. There's a lot more people from the Ivies for sure. Very smooth, very good at presenting themselves.
In a way, it's an Eternal September kind of deal.
As a former member of the board of VLAB (back in 2003), I can assure you that non-techies were infiltrating Silicon Valley long before 2010. "Free" money has always been a great attractor in Silicon Valley. If there has been a change, it's the fact that techies are available in vast quantities overseas, and the Internet allowed the finance, marketing, and legal crew to kick back in Palo Alto while outsourcing product development to India, China, and Eastern Europe.
Do you think there is more outsourcing now than, say, in 2000 or 2010?
Outsourcing had begun before the Dot Com bubble burst. It picked up steam afterward. Around 2005, my company bought a small tech company in Romania with a few dozen engineers. They killed the product it made, but reassigned the engineers to work on our competing product and some other projects, and then some other projects. By 2010 our little company (1200 employees worldwide) was the largest hi-tech employer in Romania (500 employees). I was told (I don't know if it's true) that in 2010 we had hired most of all the EE graduates of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (UPB). The Romania Gov gave our company an award, and it became aware that it could play in the global hi-tech market. Suddenly big-name tech companies arrived and started stealing our employees. We remained at about 500, but a whole tech ecosystem grew in Romania from a little seed.
Concur with Johan below. I worked in academia largely prior to joining Bell Labs in the late 70s. Prior to about the mid-70s computers involved wires and plugs, card punching programs on cards, and submitting jobs to an rjet facility and picking up the results the next day. In the 80s computers became much smaller and migrated from major labs to personal computers. At the same time some folks were working on better operating systems (e.g. Unix at Bell, which soon became a widely used os or the Bourne shell) and better communication procedures among computers. Mid to late 80s saw massive improvements in data communications among devices. The result was in the 90s an exponential growth in the number of computers dedicated solely to managing communication among computers, what we now call the internet. The 2001 time frame Johan speaks of coincides with the emergence of being able to work on computers anywhere and communicate with other computers anywhere. At the same time lots of software was being integrated from special purpose mainframe programs (like Fortran, LINPACK and EISPACK) into stuff for everyone everywhere like MATLAB and Python. The Apple macintosh graphical interface (which Microsoft basically copied in Windows) made working on a computer lots easier and more intuitive. So I think the nurturing medium matured between 2000 and 2010 so that techie work no longer was done in big labs by hardened geeks, but could be done by anybody. That sweet mixture is I think what lured all the flies and bugs into the tech field and things got a bit juicy after that.
Thanks for the detailed story! I guess I'm one of the kids ruining the lawn then :).
There's a few books about computing in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and early 90's, but precious little about anything later, minus some about Linux/OSS and one or two about very very specific companies like Facebook. Wish there was more about the later period.
Are you still in the industry?
I was never perhaps what one would call, "in the industry" as much as an active, participating user of the industry as it matured. I have spent my life in the field of physics (my nickname is a clue for the specialization area.) Now I am retired, but in the sense of the Mummy's view of death, retirement is only the beginning. I am still teaching a bit at university (in a sort of emeritus status) and consulting on various problems that some folks have.
My work with computers has always been aimed at that crucial part of physics, comparing the predictions of theory with experimental or observational outcomes and trying to visualize the results. So I just happened to use whatever were the best calculational capabilities as they came to exist. When I was an undergraduate (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) there were no computers in common use except in very specialized facilities. We depended on paper and pencil and slide rules. There were in those days slide rule contests for students to see who could best and fastest calculate results. When hand held scientific calculators first became available (for about $400+ in olden dollars for one that did what a $10 calculator does today) they were banned from use on tests for fear they gave too great an advantage to students who could afford them. The first device I recall using that was called a computer (apart from some specialized "computers" I used prior to that time, which were actually analog computers, that use switches and variable resistors to do specific calculations, for example, Turing's machine in WW2 that broke Enigma was based on his earlier analog computer) was as a lab assistant using an early PDP device that controlled an experiment. It had a glorious 8K of memory, was housed in a person sized rack, and was programmed using paper tapes (or mylar for frequently used programs) with holes punched in it for the coding. Some of the coding was also done wiring plugs on its backside. The interface device was one of those teletypes that made a great pounding noise when in use. Around that time began more common implementation the so-called mainframes, CDCs, IBMs, and later the Crays.
All the "social" stuff with computers has never interested me. There were some early computer games (first text driven, with statements like "you are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" then simple character-graphic display games, called names like Zork I think) that the hard core computer folks had fun with but it was not until the communication bandwidth and memory miniaturization boomed after the 90s that it became practical to play with audio-visual stuff like movies, photos and the like. Those things take GB and more, TB for half serious video, of memory and bandwidth to be fun not frustrating. Gone are the days when we worked over 300 or later a glorious 1200 baud modems. When was the last time anyone you know got a DVD from a Redbox or Blockbuster store? In the GB and even TB world we live in a communicating computer can hit a pleasure spot with a large number of people, particularly those who somehow otherwise feel alienated from the main stream a bit or just want attention, neither of which applies to me anymore.
I got into the industry in 2001, and as far as I can tell the change you speak of had already happened by then. There were a lot of folk around who were more businessy than techy, and more preppy than nerdy. My theory is that they started to show up during and after the internet boom.
Thanks for sharing. It looks like my perspective is rooted in becoming aware of the culture of the industry when I began to interact with it, ie. 2010 is year for me and the kids are ruining my lawn!
Kurzgesagt released a new video. It's corny, naive, and overly simplistic in its optimism, but fuck, that's just what I need right now. On the off chance that you do too, here's the link:
Is Our World Broken? – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1nYtX-NUsc
That really pulled me down a science rabbit hole. Nice.
though I liked it, I keep thinking of the theme of CS Lewis' Abolition of Man. We in the present have a vast power over they of the future, and once we decide we should edit them, we make them less than they could be (and subject to our whim.. and we've got some pretty serious whims these days, and I don't see that abating any time soon). Okay, okay, they avoided saying any such thing. I just hear that whenever I hear 'we can make utopia right here'. I think we can't, without editing ourselves and kids. And we can't do that without making them lesser in some way. (You're gonna say, diseases. Sure. But the step after that.)
Again, liked it. Also liked the we-are-full-of-friendly-viruses one. Sent the tattoo one to a tattooed friend. Continuing the rabbit hole...
Can anyone suggest reliable historic records regarding:
Thomas Jefferson, North Africa, and pirates?
I'm not sure if there's a connection, but Jefferson's purported interactions with pirates may be -- rightly or wrongly -- associated with a militia movement called Sovereign Citizen. I'm not real familiar with the ideology, but they appear to be separatists a la the 1980s, and refuse taxes, driver licenses, license plates and such. Or is the connection to Jefferson bogus?
'Sovereign Citizens' reference a treaty with Morocco. Is it mythical?
If real, what does Jefferson have to do with it? And who were the pirates?
I can vaguely see a connection between the Sovereign Citizen movement and Thomas Jefferson's ideal of minarchist democracy, with the caveat that Thomas Jefferson was ideologically coherent and the Sovereign Citizens are very much not. Which means studying any coherent body of political thought is unlikely to give you any real insight there.
I'm not seeing any connection with the Barbary Pirates issue; that was Jefferson coming to the realization that, yes, even minarchist democracies will sometimes need to fight a war, even if nobody is literally invading us right this minute. To which end he imposed taxes and raised a navy and did all the usual stuff that annoys sovereign citizens but enables one to actually win a war, but being Jefferson did less of it than say John Adams would have,
The Barbary Wars should be more well known, they hit so many recent political moments in interesting ways.
Basically the English had treaties with the Muslim states in the Mediterranean saying they wouldn't raid english ships and take the crews as slaves. Once America declared independence American ships were no longer under the protection of those treaties.
So American merchant ships started being captured and having their crews auctioned off at slave markets. The US needed a navy to put a stop to it.
They pirates weren't criminals in their countries so they don't really fit the normal use of the term.
I think there's a great mini series to be made exploring the hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal, as well as the history of conflict with the Islamic world.
Why is it hypocritical? It's just dog-eat-dog. I try to get you and you try to get me. Hopefully I win.
"The hypocrisy of the US being enraged by slave raids while slavery being legal."
Its hypocritical but not uncommon. Perhaps that has always been the most common position when it comes to slavery throughout history. "I don't want my own family/tribe/countrymen/religious brethren to be enslaved but I support enslaving the enemy." The Arabs the Americans fought against most likely felt the same(they opposed Arab Muslims being enslaved while enslaving European Christians and African Pagans). Whats uncommon is extending that anti-slavery principle to all people not just your own "tribe". The Northern US was in the beginning stage of that process closely following Great Britain.
As a side note, the Barbary Wars are referenced in the Marine Corps Hymn ("The shores of Tripoli")
Don't bother with the Sovereign Citizenship stuff, it's all pseudo-law/history and not worth the pixels. Do look into the Barbary Wars, as it's a fascinating bit of US history that not many people know about and laid the foundations for the US navy.
The United States in Jefferson's time did fight Morocco (and the other North African states) over Barbary piracy; piracy was a big part of the economy of Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripolitania at the time. Treaties were surely involved in ending the conflicts and freeing prisoners and such, and would have been negotiated during the Jefferson administration. The search term you want is "Barbary Wars".
Sovereign Citizens are a very deep rabbit hole of crackpottery and I have no idea what claims they're currently making about this aspect of American history.
In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
It redefines common words to mean very specific things, and then exploits the confusion between the common and specific definitions. As with any good manifesto, there's lots of capitalized words, and the cores is a bizarre theory of common law going back to England, which I don't think has anything to do with actual law as practiced anywhere (but I am not a lawyer). It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free. In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
I don't think Sovereign Citizens are a "militia" by any normal definition, and from what I understand, one of the major places the meme spreads is in prison, where gullible or unintelligent people think it's a way to make appeals. I suppose some subgroups of SCs who aren't in prison might form militias, but that's not the same thing as the entire group being a militia.
I don't know about a direct connection with Thomas Jefferson.
The pirates are almost certainly the Barbary Pirates, who operated out of North Africa in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I don't know how they're relevant to SCs, except that SCs make a big deal about "Admiralty Law".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates#18th%E2%80%9319th_centuries
[edit: But moonshadow's link below suggest another meaning: on the theory that Canadian law only applies to the sea around Canada and not to the land, therefore when Canadian courts attempt to enforce rules on land, they're acting as "pirates".]
I encountered this phenomenon while providing legal services to inmates in lockdown. Librarians were obliged to photocopy legal documents without charge if they were "qualified", i.e., Habeas, Conditions of Confinement, Civil Rights, etc., according to the Lewis v. Casey Supreme Court decision. When I refused to copy an inmate's documents because they were about Sovereign Citizens' gibberish, this particular inmate went on a racist rant. I later ran into him working at a Salvation Army store where I was stuffing some furniture into my compact car. He remembered me and tried to pick a fight. What was unusual is the inmate was black, and apparently didn't understand that if he showed up to a meeting of Sovereign Citizens on the prison yard, he would not be well received. You picks your delusion and take your chances, I guess.
It sounds like you have a lot more contact with them than I do. But the occasional instances that come to my attention have been skewing more and more black over the last decade. *shrug* And I hadn't noticed a racist connection, but I suppose that's also something you'd have a lot more visibility into.
> In my opinion, the Sovereign Citizen belief-system is a literally insane ideology, and you shouldn't attempt to understand it, lest you suffer the fate of a Lovecraft protagonist.
*gasps and appalled*
They are fantastic, adorable, people on the right side of the debate; they may not be the brightest knife on a shed. But they have a wonderful sense of right and wrong, are so nonviolent in their advocacy in the face of overwhelming pressure.
I have no idea whether you're joking or not... But I do kinda sorta agree; they seem non-violent and willing to solve problems with talk and passive resistance, which is frankly amazing in this day and age. I think with a more sane belief-system they could possibly be an actual force for good. But as is, they're just nuts. It's like dealing with an LLM AI that's been *told* to give you meaningless slop. :-/
The insanity is optimism and the optimism is the cause of non violence. Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence. I imagine we could debate for hours about when and where violence is acceptable, but taxation is theft and given a proud american face to face with a cop there to steal their money(/or other example of state violence hidden under layers of lawyer bullshit) its a hard pill to shallow to pick between martyrdom or cowardice. The untrained human mind often trys to bargain with reality, qed they pick an irrational nonsensical 3rd "options".
"just world fallacy" leads poeple with my personality to hope that you can assert your freedom(which clearly exists, the rural guns outnumber the federal agents 1000:1) to a cop and they will go away without a big mess of violence.
>Sovereign citizens are people who picked up individualistic anarchism ideas but generally have not accepted the hard truth, politics is violence.
Plenty of people pick up individualistic anarchism ideas without accepting the idea that politics is violence. However, most of those people do not also believe a very specific laundry list of demonstrably untrue and extremely silly things about U.S. history, English common law, money, contracts, taxation, the Uniform Commercial Code, etc., etc., etc. Sovcits are a very particular and somewhat rare kind of weird.
Whats your disagreement with the premise?
> It's almost like cargo-cult law - they believe that if they say the right words in the right way in court, they can get off free.
It's hard to blame them for this; it's a completely correct view of how the law works. We have plenty of examples, as when police testify that they were put in fear when they observed someone reach for his waistband. This is accepted, every time, despite the facts that (1) every cop ever called into court gives the same testimony and (2) we know that that they are specifically trained to provide those exact words.
> In actuality, they simply annoy judges by spouting non-stop nonsense.
That's not the fault of the nonsense. It just reflects that judges don't like them.
The problem isn't that there are a magic words in law that win you court cases, there absolutely are. The problem is that Sovereign Citizens have the wrong magic words and subscribe to an understanding of the law that will never generate the right ones.
Isn’t that the same as the case of the cargo cult: it is literally the case that if you build an airstrip lots of good stuff will arrive (if you are the US airforce and/or the US government likes you enough to send you stuff). The thing about the cargo cult is thinking that if you take the same action when the bracketed condition isn’t true that you’ll still get the benefit.
I guess, but I see the airplane deliveries as being performed by the same people who build the airstrips. They're building the airstrips as part of their air freight system, so that their airplanes can land on them. This makes for a significant difference between those people, and other people who build airstrips because airstrips attract airplanes. Airstrips do not in fact attract airplanes. One group sees the airstrips as a channel by which they can deliver something, and the other sees the airstrips as a natural resource, like a fruit tree, which occasionally produces something.
I don't see this type of difference between "people who use magic incantations in ways that the courts feel warmly toward" and "people who are too stupid to realize that the law isn't about magic incantations". I have cast that second perspective uncharitably, but it is not rare, and I think it is incorrect - the law 𝗶𝘀 about magic incantations, but courts feel that it's important to deny this. These two groups are viewing the law in the same way, but it's only working for one of them, for external reasons.
Viewed from one perspective the words about fear when someone reached for their waistband would seem like a magic incantation. But from another perspective those words are a shorthand for an argument that the judge will find persuasive. A non-police-officer probably wouldn’t get off a charge by using the same words, or would a police office get off a different charge (corruption, say) by using those words.
It is of course true that the building of airstrips doesn’t in itself attract cargo. That’s a genuine misunderstanding of the mechanisms involved. But to steelman the cargo cultist, it really is true that the magic words ‘please send us this week’s shipment’ attracts cargo. But it still wouldn’t work for the cargo cultist to send that message using the right magic words: the reason the magic words work is that the people hearing them think they should respond in a particular way.
This remains the best reading on the subject of sovereign citizens I am aware of: https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abqb/doc/2012/2012abqb571/2012abqb571.html
A little while ago, there was an internal memo from the YouTuber Mr. Beast, which made the rounds. It had some interesting things about how his production system worked. But one part jumped out at me:
> This is what dictates what we do for videos. “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.
I think that this is how Trump should be interpreted. All of his "best" and "worst" and "greatest" and "all" and "none", all of the exaggerations, even my "all"s ... it's all showmanship to hook his audience.
tropisms
Yes, he speaks in hyperbole. I'm not sure that's the way he actually operates, but certainly how he speaks, and he thinks it works, at least for his target audience.
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Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,' and thought as one of the SSC-sphere's resident physicists I should weigh in. I'm going to weigh in on the side of `this is definitely physics, quit complaining.' My reasons are two-fold. (1) I (and many other physicists) like to condescendingly believe that ultimately, all scientific fields are just physics (possibly applied), and we should be consistent in our convictions, and (2) the `disordered systems and neural networks' sub-arxiv is one I've read religiously (and contributed to) for over a decade. I've always thought that most of the stuff on there is physics, and it would be bizarre to declare `this subarxiv is physics, but some of the papers that founded it are not.'
Alors, c'est magnifique, et c'est la guerre. And evaluated as statistical physics, it seems to me to be a completely worthy choice of award.
> Am seeing commentary on the Nobel Prize in physics along the lines of `c'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre,'
The commentary I saw was more along the lines of "nobody ever cared about that research, nor did it ever lead to anything of note".
Seeing how I learned about Hopfield's work doing my diploma thesis at the Chair for Computational Physics at the Physics Department of my university - I don't have an issue with the Nobel Prize. It's at the outer edges of what physics is, but it's so much more important than most of what's going on in more traditional fields, so it's fine.
I’m a young adult male who does a lot of hard cardiovascular exercise (usually every day). I just got double-vaccinated for flu and covid. I’ve heard about risk of myocarditis among young adult males who just got vaccinated. Should I lay off the exercise for a few days? When I googled about exercise and vaccination, I found studies saying exercise is helpful, but I’m not sure if these studies considered the myocarditis risk.
There isn't strong evidence that directly links exercise to an increased risk of post-vaccination myocarditis. But intense physical activity can sometimes exacerbate underlying heart conditions. And a bout of myocarditis could further increase your risk. Since you're young, you probably haven't had anything like an ECG or EKG, have you? IANAMD, but it might be worthwhile to have a workup done on your heart (if your insurance covers it).
What would be the downside of not exercising for a few days after the vaccination?
I haven’t had a heart workup done. I use an Apple Watch a lot of the time when doing cardio, and it has some kind of irregular heart beat detection.
Working out is part of my routine, and I get a little stir-crazy if I don’t. I think the kids call it “zoomies”. I also feel like I haven’t earned the right to eat dinner if I haven’t broken a sweat yet. I do occasionally skip the workout in rare scenarios, like if I’m on a plane or working late.
If the damage was done it lasts longer then a few days and "myocarditis" is just the signal. Your bargaining politics and well that just aint how reality works(at least when your not debating with a person); Im pretty sure it wont have an effect. If you rolled the dice badly and spike protein got into your heart you should probably not heavily exercise for a year or 3(and plan on dying a decade earlier); heart damage is no joke and if it happens for an unknown reason from a shot in your arm a very strange cascade of events happened
The advice I got was to not exercise for a few days. For one, I was told that increased blood flow in the muscles where the vaccine was injected could reduce its effecticeness; the other aspect was myocarditis. From what I remember, the odds of getting it are somewhere in the 1/1000 to 1/10000 range, but it's not worth risking anything. (Besides, there's a fair chance that the vaccine hits you hard enough that the question becomes moot. Listen to your body.)
I've got a friend who thinks Moby Dick is a techno-thriller because it's got so much detail about whales and whaling.
I think it's not a techno-thriller because they have imaginary tech which at least sounds plausible.
Is there any contemporary fiction with that sort of detail about real tech?
IMHO Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because most of that detail about whales and whaling isn't a relevant part of the story or plot in any way - instead, there's a (not that commonly used) literary technique, where at certain points in the story there are months of mundane routine travel where the protagonist stares at the sea and nothing happens other than months of suspenseful waiting which is key to establishing their mood when the whale is noticed again - and in order to provide a similar feeling and mood to the reader, instead of just saying "x time passed", the author has a long chapter that thoroughly describes vaguely related facts in excruciating detail. And it works, achieving that effect.
I'll admit, I haven't read many techno-thrillers and I have no idea what contemporary ones are like, but I'd be very surprised if they included passages such as these:
"While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.
It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralise.
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."
> I think it's not a techno-thriller because they have imaginary tech which at least sounds plausible.
The whaling tech is imaginary? Just trying to clarify.
I think it might be more fun to read it as an alternate-history techno-thriller, by a reader who was ignorant that whaling was ever a real practice.
I think most of it would sound incredibly contrived. How could anyone possibly catch a whale with 19th century technology? "Well y'see, you just wait for it to surface then you chuck in a spear on a rope!" And what could possibly make this whole activity economically worthwhile? "Well, y'see, there's a goo in a sperm whale's head which you can use in cosmetics." It all sounds completely implausible.
Whale oil as lighting source. Before petroleum products were refined, animal-fat derivatives or plant oils lwere what you had to burn for light.
So commercial whale hunting in the 19th century was more like oil prospecting in the 20th century, regarding economic returns, than merely "the oil in the head can be used for cosmetics".
I'm sorry, I meant that Moby Dick isn't a techno-thriller because techno-thrillers have fake tech, while Moby Dick has real tech.
Ok, gotcha.
I'd classify early Tom Clancy as "techno-thriller", and he almost entirely stuck to real military tech?
I think he did his major work in the 80s. Is there anyone more recent?
I tend to associate him and Michael Crichton with the start of the genre. I can't point to anyone more recent, but I'd probably recognize the names due to time spent shelving in a mystery/thriller section.
Would Stieg Larsson's _Girl With the Dragon Tattoo_ trilogy count as a techno thriller? Lots of hacking and violence. But geez that's almost two decades old now!
Whoa.....
====
By September 2022, US intelligence reports deemed “exquisite” revealed a “deeply unnerving assessment” of Putin — that he was so desperate about battlefield losses that he might use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
Based on the alarming new intelligence reports, the White House believed there was a 50% chance Russia would use a tactical nuclear weapon — a striking assessment that had skyrocketed up from 5% and then 10%, Woodward reports.
“On all channels, get on the line with the Russians,” Biden instructed his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan. “Tell them what we will do in response,” he said, according to Woodward.
The book recounts a tense phone call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart in October 2022.
“If you did this, all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered,” Austin said to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Woodward. “This would isolate Russia on the world stage to a degree you Russians cannot fully appreciate.”
“I don’t take kindly to being threatened,” Shoigu responded.
“Mr. Minister,” Austin said, according to Woodward, “I am the leader of the most powerful military in the history of the world. I don’t make threats.”
Two days later, the Russians requested another call. This time, the Russian defense minister dramatically claimed the Ukrainians were planning to use a “dirty bomb” — a false story the US believed the Kremlin was pushing as a pretext to deploy a nuclear weapon.
“We don’t believe you,” Austin said firmly in response, according to Woodward. “We don’t see any indications of this, and the world will see through this.”
“Don’t do it,” he said to Shoigu.
“I understand,” Shoigu replied.
====
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/08/politics/bob-woodward-book-war-joe-biden-putin-netanyahu-trump/index.html
Haven't we always known intuitively that this is the reason the Biden administration wants Ukraine to fight Russia with one arm tied behind its back? Other commentators have expressed this idea. Their mistake has been that they see Putin as a leader of a nation-state motivated by nationalist impulses. They expected Putin would eventually realize that he's destroying his nation's economic and military capacity by continuing the war. But Putin is more like a mafia leader. Even though he's assassinated all the other pretenders to the throne, he can't show weakness. And like a mafia boss, he can't go into retirement. That would immediately put a target on his head. Russia can go down the tubes, but Putin has to keep trying. And with all the yes-men surrounding him, he may not realize how much things are deteriorating around him.
This doesn't really make sense. Putin wants to annex the industrial eastern parts of Ukraine and turn the western part into some sort of demilitarized buffer state between Russia and NATO. He would in effect be nuking the territory he wants to control, and the prevailing winds would blow the radiation into Russia anyway. I also don't think it would serve the interest of keeping NATO out at all; nothing is more likely to lead to foreign intervention than dropping a nuke.
Tactical nuclear weapons don't even work very well against enemy troops. They aren't concentrated enough in the theatre. It makes more sense if the nukes are trying to stop hundreds of Soviet divisions from pouring into western Europe over limited routes. The only real target in Ukraine would be Kiev. That wouldn't destroy the Ukrainian military, but it would destroy all the people that the Russians would need to negotiate a surrender with.
The Russians might try to look tough with their nuclear policy, but Ukraine has violated their red lines in the past. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine states that attacks on their nuclear detection or launch infrastructure can trigger nuclear retaliation. But Ukraine partially destroyed the over-the-horizon early warning radar in Armavir this May with a drone strike, and the Russians did nothing.
1. The proper and effective way to use what are generally called "tactical" nuclear weapons is to engage critical logistics and C3I (or whatever) targets. The bit where, ha ha, tanks are so tough and spread out that your fancy nuclear warhead only destroyed six of them, you silly fool who thought nuclear weapons could stop tanks, falls apart when you learn that the nuke didn't destroy any tanks but now all of the tanks aren't getting any more fuel, ammunition, or orders. Assuming the Russians are not *completely* incompetent, the modest use of tactical nuclear weapons would probably have given them a decisive advantage in Ukraine.
2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt on their original sites, starting weeks after the attacks. They were somewhat less healthy places to live than they had been, but not to an extent that would seriously concern a Russian, or anyone else whose risk tolerance has been recalibrated to wartime standards. Fallout does not render vast tracts of valuable land inhabitable for any great length of time.
Re: 1, a lot of the Ukrainian command/logistics is already very spread out and decentralized to mitigate conventional strikes from drones/bombs/missiles. And they don't really have local production of much besides drones, most of their supplies are shipped in from NATO neighbors. Nuking Poland or Romania is fully into WW3/MAD territory. I don't doubt that the Russians using tactical nukes against Ukraine would be devastating, but it isn't the same scenario as a typical Cold War era wargame.
Re: 2, see my comment below about grain exports. It's a major pillar of the Ukrainian economy and the public is hysterical about radiation far beyond the factual harms. I imagine the deployment of nuclear weapons there would destroy the export market. Maybe this isn't something Putin or the Duma care about very much, but it would be against their own interest if they want to occupy the land they are conquering (which presumably is the whole reason they are using nukes in the first place).
Also, depending on the time of year where they dropped the nuke, they'd risk fallout blowing back on their territory. I remember when Putin first rattled his nuclear saber (the first of many rattles), I checked the winds in Kyiv and they happened to be blowing towards Moscow. But for much of the year, they blow up towards Poland and the Baltic.
The nuclear strike was being considered specifically in view of the Kherson garrison being surrounded and cut off from supply in late October '22. There might have been adequate troop and armour concentrations west of Kherson for it to make tactical sense.
In the event, Sergei Surovikin, in a remarkable display of political sangfroid and military skill, surrendered Kherson and pulled out the 49th CAA in relatively good order (not remotely as good as the MoD claimed, but better than could have been expected).
Maybe? This would still contradict official Russian nuclear doctrine at the time. The equivalent of a division being cut off doesn't qualify as the sort of existential threat to the Russian state needed to invoke it. And this was an offensive operation, so it doesn't invoke the defensive aspect of the nuclear doctrine either.
It was most of an army, not a division. The Kherson garrison fluctuated between 30,000 and 70,000 men since the city fell to the Russians, though I grant you it was closer to the lower bound in October.
And a month earlier, as I'm sure you know, Russia had annexed the Kherson oblast de jure. Doctrinally, the Kherson garrison was defending Russian territory, as Russia saw it.
ETA: Which is not to say that the pollution concerns you bring up in your other replies are wrong. Kherson controls the North Crimean Canal, which supplies water to Crimea from the Kakhovka reservoir.
I must have got the timeline mixed up; Kherson being annexed at the time does make it plausible that Russia could invoke the nuclear doctrine. I still think it's unlikely for other reasons, but I have updated from the story being nonsense.
The fallout from a small number of "tactical" strikes would be pretty limited, I think. Probably not worth worrying about for someone who already had troops camping in Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I think the ship has sailed on annexing anything useful industrially, since the war has been so grindingly destructive that nothing you take by force will end up intact. The only real goal remaining is to claim enough territory to declare victory without it being a total embarrassment, and you can still do that even if the territory you seized is glowing slightly.
I agree that it would draw foreign intervention and be unlikely to end the war, but that's exactly what this phone call is signaling! I don't think it's fair to dismiss this news as "they would never do it" if one of the reasons they wouldn't do it is "the US explained why it would be a bad idea."
The exclusion zone mostly isn't dangerously radioactive; of course the coffin site is, and some other places like the red forest and equipment dumps from the liquidation effort. But people have been living there for decades now with only moderately higher background radiation. Of course there is also a big difference between irradiating some Russian troops and fallout blowing through Rostov.
The industrial infrastructure and urban agglomerations probably are pretty destroyed after the fighting. But a major part of the Ukrainian economy is grain export, and a nuclear strike would cripple that. Even if it was mostly safe to consume, no one would want to buy it on the market. I don't know how much this matters to the Russian command, but it would be against their own long term interests.
This last part I don't find credible. Putin isn't stupid or insane, I think he grasps that launching a nuclear strike would have enormous repercussions. Similarly, I don't think the Russian Minister of Defense needs America to tell him that it would be a bad idea. I don't doubt that the call happened or that the threat of American retaliation was made clear, but that doesn't mean the Russians couldn't figure that part out on their own.
I am continually in awe at how quickly the rationalizations in support of the current doctrine in Ukraine come pouring out in response to claims that go against the accuracy of the doctrine. It doesn't matter how reliable the countervailing information is. It seems nothing will force some of you guys reconsider the soundness of the current doctrine. The response is always more self-serving rationalizations to shore up confidence.
But to what end? This is not how one maintains an accurate view of the world. What good is served by maintaining the reality-distortion field for as long as possible?
Whose doctrine are you criticizing? Like Rothwed, I too have no idea what you mean.
I have no idea what this means.
I suspect someone here is trying to juice up the story to make elements of the Biden Administration (e.g. SecDef Austin and/or APNSA Sullivan) into the Voices of Wisdom and Prudence who negotiated a time of Great Peril and so Saved the World from Armageddon.
I think it likely that phone calls from Beijing to Moscow had rather more impact than those from Washington to Moscow, and I never assessed the probability of nuclear weapons use in Ukraine at higher than 20% in part because I was confident Beijing was making those phone calls.
I don't know why they would care about China more than the US. If Putin ends up using nuclear weapons, it will only be for one reason: to drag as many people as possible into the grave with him. Strategic considerations are irrelevant at that point.
Putin doesn't much care about the US, because the US has already done pretty much everything it is plausibly going to do to threaten his regime. Putin cares about China because Putin is absolutely dependent on China to keep the Russian economy from outright collapsing (and taking the Putin regime with it). And China is very much not in favor of a world where nuclear warfighting is in any way normalized, even less in favor of a world where China gets any of the blame for a nuclear war and the West starts talking about secondary sanctions.
Having Russia as a client state does benefit China, but almost certainly not enough to justify the cost or risk of opening that can of worms. If Xi tells Putin "no nukes or we're cutting you off", that's a credible and very substantial threat. And I have a hard time thinking of a good reason why Xi would *not* have long since made that phone call.
I don't often agree with John, but I think your analysis is spot on.
I think this is a bad misreading of Putin. He's not an egomaniac nor suicidal. He's a calculating autocrat who wants to gain power.
This is another reason to rate the chances of nuclear weapon use as very low.
He already has absolute power nationally. What he wants is international power, and more importantly, to bring back to life a Russian empire. If he fails in that... what's even the point? He would just be a king of nothing. If Russia is doomed to be an irrelevant, impoverished country, then there is no reason for it to continue existing. May as well put it out of its misery.
If all he cared about was maintaining local power, there are far less risky ways to do so. He could've cut his losses a long time ago. This is more than that.
Yes, he wants international power, but dropping nukes won't get him that. Having nukes gets him more of that than ever using them would.
If he could drop a nuke and have the West back down and let him get his way, I'm sure he would do that. Dropping a nuke so the West collectively takes him out doesn't help.
I do think that Putin would consider "Russia is much stronger than when I took over" to be a viable win condition. That he stood up to the West and Russia didn't get destroyed economically or militarily is already pretty good for bragging rights. He also will almost certainly exit the current war with more territory than he started with and a more demoralized and weakened Ukraine.
Nobody lives forever, and conquering the world was never on the table for Russia. I take Putin's end game to be territorial and power gains, which he has achieved. Russia may be a backwater compared to the West, but it's powerful and influential compared to say, Italy. It's more influential than France, Germany, or Britain as well, despite a smaller economy. I think Putin would say that he's winning, but if he were honest not winning by as much as he hoped.
Going nuclear would, for Putin, be a desperation move to forestall a defeat that would *cost* him a great deal of power internationally, and possibly domestically. Putin wouldn't "win" a nuclear war, but he might lose one by less than he would the alternate conventional war.
Also note that these are Vladimir Putin's potential losses we are talking about, not Russia's.
China is on his doorstep and doesn't give a rattling damn about how it is perceived by bleeding-heart liberals in the West or pesky things like "you can't do that, it's a crime against humanity" (see the allegations about how it sources a plentiful supply of donor organs if you want to pay for surgery and skip queues here in the West). If Premier Xi tells Putin "if you do this, we will not take it well", that's a more credible threat than some American blowing hard about "We are the biggest gorilla in the world".
I can see him testing the waters to see what he might get away with. That could be considered strategic. China’s take would matter to him.
Putin might have thought tactical nukes could be used in Ukraine without escalation to global thermonuclear war. Ukraine is after all not covered by the American nuclear umbrella. In which case the reaction of his patron and chief supplier would be highly relevant.
I had put up some posts objecting to the indefinite ban on LearnedHebrewHatesIP, but I no longer object to the ban. People have linked to some posts of his that were deeply out of line, and I get it. But I have also seem some contemptuous talk that seems unfounded and unfair — for instance, someone saying his apologies were fake, various people saying things along the lines of good riddance. I myself saw very little of his bad side, probably because I avoid threads that are at all political. And his good side was great. So here are my 3 most vivid memories of good encounters with him.
Some time in the first month after 10/7/23 some furious rando put up a post saying that Israelis thirst for the blood of Palestinian children. I posted some sort of objection, and LHHIP, who at that time called himself LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael, defended rando, basically saying that rando’s statement was at least metaphorically true. We then had a long, intense but civil exchange and finally a reached a point that hinged on *syntax,* oddly. He was saying that rando was talking about the Israeli military, I was saying that there was no reason to take rando to mean that. I then wrote a whole obsessive paragraph about syntax: under what circumstances and in what kind of sentences “the Israelis” would be taken as shorthand for “Israeli military,” and when native speakers would naturally take it to mean all Israeli citizens. There was a pause, and then he wrote back that he’d thought it over and yeah, I was right. That impressed me — that he’d be willing, when so furious about the Palestine/Israel situation, to think about such a dry matter, and then concede that I was right, and then concede that rando’s statement would normally be taken to apply to all Israelis, and that when taken that way it was obviously false and inflammatory.
Maybe 6 months ago I asked on here whether someone would give me a consult about future geopolitical matters for a novel I am writing. Nobody responded, and I thought about contacting LHHIP directly even though I had never spoken with him anywhere except here on the forum. I just had the feeling that he was the kind of person who might do it. I hesitated for a while, but then finally did, and he wrote back that he had actually been thinking about offering, and said he’d be happy to. He wrote long, thoughtful answers to my 3 questions about future alliances, hostilities and ways they might play out. In fact, the answers were *too* thoughtful and inventive. I’d have had to change the plot of my novel to accommodate them. So then, feeling awkward and sort of rude, I told him that, and asked for simpler answers that would fit with the basic storyline, and he, without complaint, wrote 3 new answers that this time were just I’d asked for.
Pretty recently we had a long exchange about AI, and questions it prompted for us, having to do with consciousness, and complexity -- for instance is evolution a dumb, in fact mindless, process, or is it then genius of a wordless universe? I think about stuff like that, and he could meet me there. Also sent me to a great paper.
I have also read many posts of his on a variety of subjects, and they seemed to me to stand out in their intelligence and fair-mindedness, even among this crew. But I rarely read political threads, and clearly it was on that subject that he really lost it, over and over. To his credit, he also apologized at length multiple times, and I am sure those apologies were real. Still, you can’t get away with losing it over and over, especially if losing it takes the form of actually arguing that we should assassinate Trump. So I withdraw my protest of his ban. But I do wish more people would speak up about his good side, which was very substantial, and also consider that, as Moon Moth wrote somewhere on this thread, he might have been struggling with a huge ball of anger roiling around his insides I don’t know a thing about his life, but his user name already tells part of the story. Seems like he put substantial effort into bridging the gap between his point of view — I assume he’s Palestinian — and the Israeli one; learned Hebrew as part of that effort; and somehow all that came to nothing. And who knows what he’s been through, or had loved ones go through. People with interior fractures like his are often trauma victims, and by “trauma” I don’t mean something like being poor and lonesome, I mean savage beatings by a parent, witnessing extreme violence, etc.
I think this is about more than just an individual person. His presence was very important for the epistemic health of this space this last year. (Which, otherwise, significantly more Jewish, and significantly less Arabic/Muslim than average. And the people most emotionally invested in Israel are, quite naturally, the best informed about it. He was actively pushing back against what would otherwise - and at times did - become an epistemic bubble, in a way most of us wouldn't be able to, while keeping the discussion civil and factually grounded. Well, usually, the banworthy post was... well, banworthy.)
Hmmm yes, it is a very jewish place, but also pretty liberal place. A jew from LA may be pro-Israeli in the sense that she is more invested in "Israeli jews won't just disappear", but is often very much not what come to the Israeli's mind when thinking about "pro israel"
This was my first thought as well. I'd wanted to write something like that, but a) I share his views on Israel's response to 10/7 so it would just look tribal; and b) I'm an infrequent commenter, and non-central on all axes except my gender.
If this is a sort of wake for LHHIP, then I'd like to share this comment of his which stuck with me, about functional programming:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-328/comment/55888266
I do think of it as a wake . . .
I was about to chime in to say you wrote a lovely eulogy for the guy...
I assume there's nothing stopping him from LHHIP coming back with a new username? I believe that's what Carateca/Trebuchet did (not that that worked out long-term).
If he similarly feels like the discussion here was interesting and valuable (and especially if he happens to read this commentary) then I'm all for it
Trebuchet? Huh. I actually had a horrid exchange with Trebuchet early on in my time here. I posted saying I was wondering whether my daughter and her boyfriend (both about 30, and planning to marry) would be better off in New Zealand or elsewhere. Described their work skills and personal tastes in lifestyle, hobbies etc, and asked for suggestions of places to move. For some reason this question infuriated Trebuchet. They asked for my reasons for wondering whether my daughter and her partner should move to another country, and I mentioned Jan6 , very high level of hostility between factions in US, disappearance of the middle class and the then-recent abortion ruling. Trebuchet fastened on the abortion issue, furiously informed me that many countries did not permit abortion (as though I did not know that), then went on a long gruesome riff about my apparent acceptance of abortion on demand. All I remember from it was that Trebuchet was talking about a plentitude of dead fetal grandchildren. WTF? I reported the post.
"disappearance of the middle class"
Ouch. That someone as smart, educated, and usually insightful as you believes that the middle class is disappearing is utterly depressing. (I almost understand Trebuchet's reaction.) Or maybe it is *because* (not despite) you are smart and educated that you believe that.
(Side note: for what it's worth, I disagree with most of the bans, especially LHHIP and Carateca.)
Politics and economics are areas of great ignorance for me, and always will be. Occasionally I try to improve myself, and read a book on some subject in that area, and the info just slides out of my head over the next year. It's like I have no mental hooks to hang it on. I don't mentally go over it, the way you do the info in books about things that deeply interest you. I'm interested in a lot of very concrete practical things and some very abstract things, but I am not wired to attend to, sort and store info from the middle realm. I shouldn't even have made a comment, but to be honest I have seen that stuff about the disappearing middle class in many many places, many of them not scuzzy, that I thought it was true -- possible to interpret in various ways, but not open to question. There must be some data that has persuaded a lot of people, though it may be that it is misinterpreted data over which a certain sort of thinker likes to wail.
disappearance of the middle class?
fraction of US population that’s middle
class has shrunk significantly in past
50 yrs. there are more people
who are rich or poor, fewer in the middle. fewer people are able to buy a house, not a fancy one just your basic modest house
From 1967 to 2022 the share of the population earning $35,000 or less (in 2022 dollars) dropped from 32% to 23%, while the share earning $100,000 or more increased from 13% to 37%.
https://x.com/cafreiman/status/1775189496021025051
50 years ago, the home ownership rate was 64.8%. Today, it is 65.6%.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> fraction of US population that’s middle class has shrunk significantly in past 50 yrs
Where have they gone?
I know the US tends to use a three-class classification (lower, middle, upper) rather than a four-class classification (lower, working, middle, upper). So where have all these middle class people from 1974 gone? I'm assuming you think they went to the lower class rather than to the upper? What fraction of people were lower class in 1974 versus today?
The current classifications seem to be the loss of "good union jobs" so people in manufacturing/heavy industry dropped down a class or took a reduction in their income and lifestyle; combine that with the Rust Belt and the children of those who used to work in those factory jobs now don't have any factory jobs, so are now lower class/working poor.
Then the children/grand-children of the middle class who went to college are now engaged in gig economy/the precariat jobs, so while they expected the same lifestyle as their parents, they can't achieve it.
So there's a section of the former middle class who have seen reduction in opportunities, income, lifestyle, etc. both at the traditionally working class end and the middle-middle end. They may technically still be counted as "middle class", but by comparison with the days of 1974, they haven't achieved what their parents/grandparents did; the 'permanent pensionable union job'/'a degree will get you a good white collar job' days are pretty much over (unless you're part of the knowledge economy, and AI may be threatening some of that, too).
I don't know Melvin. Maybe some went up and some went down. I am really not knowledgeable about these things, and it's possible I'm repeating an urban myth, except one that much of the news media has bought into anyhow. If you think I'm wrong I'm, not going to argue with you.
The good news is that wages at the bottom actually rose the fastest over the last few years, so there was some partial progress there. After decades of hearing about increasing inequality, it was very unusual to see.
Carateca was Trebuchet? I did not know that but it makes sense.
A little while ago, someone guessed, and he confirmed.
I think Trebuchet was a woman. Are you sure they were male?
No clue. I sort of assumed male, though. And it looks like in this thread I let my normal gender-neutral references lapse for carateca/trebuchet and LHHI.
I would be astounded if LHHIP was a woman. But Trebuchet -- there was something she said in an exchange with me. Can't remember whether said she was a woman, or something that strongly implied it. Trebuchet/whatever the other name was seemed to have affect that ranged from irritated to furious. That irritable, I'm-mad-about-SO-many things tone was just always there. But women can be dysphoric, smart and rude too! Just look at me! Not that I'm always grouchy and down, but I don't hesitate to go there.
First, my disclaimer: There are a lot of comments posted that I don't read, I accept Scott's right to be dictator here, and I agree that generally a low threshold for banning is needed to keep a piece of the internet from descending into garbage. I cannot and will not speak to whether someone deserves a ban or not.
That said, I agree that LHHI/IP demonstrated admirable qualities. I posted as much in reply to at least one of LHHI/IP's comments, but I haven't noticed other similar examples of an online partisan being open to an alternative perspective and making a real adjustment.
FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
> FWIW, my understanding is that LHHIP is Egyptian and (started) learning Hebrew to get access to the internal Israeli conversation.
Yeah. An atheist Egyptian, living in an Islamic country ruled by a secular-ish dictator. And the Gazan war must be especially galling because Egypt is right there, sharing a border, and yet the Egyptian government cooperates with Israel and the US, and unofficial corruption aids Hamas, leaving the Gazan civilians to just ... die.
What am I missing? It seemed to me that his fury at Israel must come from something more direct and immediate than what you describe -- something like having family and friends in Palestine.
Well, I'm a heartless bstrd with a lump of coal in place of wherever emotions come from who leans toward Israel, but even so, I feel bad for the kids in Gaza. It isn't hard for me to imagine someone with a couple degrees closer connection feeling rage at Israel.
That said, the emotion behind the anti-Trump post that drew the ban did surprise me, for someone without apparent direct connections to the US.
Yeah, I think the official death toll (from Hamas, not Israel, so probably not understated) is that > 1% of the population of Gaza has died in the war. That doesn't tell you who is right or wrong, but it does tell you that people with a lot of family/friends in Gaza are likely to know people who have died, and almost certain to know people who've been displaced from their homes, had their home or school wrecked, etc.
Maybe he lives in the US?
I seem to be a lot less shocked by his Trump posts than others, though I do see that they are bannable. Most people I know joked about the assassination attempts, saying things along the same lines as LHHIP's remarks -- "damn, so near and yet so far." I personally wish the man would drop dead. Assassinating him is a terrible idea, though, because it would further weaken the norm of lawful and peaceful transfer of power, which Trump himself put a big dent in. I think we would have something between a long period of riots, and outright civil war. It's odd that LHHIP didn't see that, but I think his thinking goes awry when he's furious.
I'm not shocked by the Trump posts. As you wrote, it is an understandable sentiment. I was just surprised that LHHIP felt it so strongly.
As someone quite in the thick of things (I'm the Rabbi who first created Hasbara as a sincere outreach organisation and left when powerful folk decided it would be more efficient as a propaganda organization, and I then moved to Egypt where I currently live in order to see what influence I might be able to have upon the conversation from here) and it seemed fairly obvious to me that he wasn't an actual Palestinian
(born or living in the area) but despite his sincere attempt to inform me about Egyptian anti-semitism and how careful I ought to be not to disclose my heritage, I didn't get the impression that he himself was living in Egypt. Possibly born in Egypt, but it just didn't seem like he was living here. I guess I was wrong.
I haven't been able to achieve the very large scale results that I was hoping for in Egypt so I might not be here much longer but if he (or someone else reading this) is currently in Egypt and would like to meet please stop by my page and let me know. If possible, it would be great to meet!
Actually you can email or whatsapp me directly as I shared them both in the following video I put up last week.
"Egypt's Only Rabbi Makes Dramatic Plea to Arabs: Help Me Bring Brotherhood to Mankind الحاخام المصري"
https://youtu.be/Zws85K7EkIg
I dunno. My first guess is that LHHIP is smart and passionate and intellectually curious and concerned with ethical behavior, but he's stuck with horrible institutions, and can't be fully open to strangers because of the atheism. And here's this online community full of people who'd be a good match, but most of them treat the nearby ongoing tragedy as a football for their own local politics, which might still be tolerable except that it's the politics of the global superpower that contributes to the tragedy.
Or at least, I imagine that's how I might feel. Maybe I'm just projecting. I wouldn't normally talk like this about someone else, not in public, but I suppose he's not coming back. :-(
As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government. It seems like normal human nature to take the worst things that the worst people in a group say, and judge the entire group by them. :-( But he got better, at least about that.
I don't know where the anger about Trump came from, which is why I started wondering whether the anger wasn't completely about Israel, but more about abstract injustice in the world. And bringing in the anarchism, the abuse of power by governments and rulers. But that's all just guesswork.
I DM’d him and he was responsive and friendly
<As for Israel specifically, it's not a monoculture, and there are some horrible people there, including high up in the government
I try not to even read the news about Israel and related matters. But my oldest and closest friend is married to an Israeli woman, and spends maybe a quarter of the year in Israel. His wife's family are all intellectuals and liberals, but Mark says people in the US don't fully get that there are factions in Israel that are sort of like the lowest kind of Trump supporters, real hate-filled morons, and they fucking hate the Palestinians,, and see nothing wrong with killing as many as possible. So yeah, it's not all Fiddler on the Roof over there.
I was living and intensely involved in Israel 20 years ago but have only been there was since (hosted by the Kahana Chai organization of all people) and have pointedly refused thus far to return since the start of the war that I have been pushing very very hard against.
Here's what I published (as rhe founding Rabbi of Hasbara) on October 10th last year.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
I acknowledged that within the context of world culture as it currently exists Israel has no choice but to plow ahead with no plan whatsoever until they've killed ≥ X multiple Arabs as Jews who were killed.
But that before they start doing so they should consider the alternate option of ME DOING MY THING.
Nobody likes to hear from someone who claims that he knows and can do better than the official machine in charge of a country and my lack of funds made it impossible for me to reach as wide an audience as would be necessary to turn ancient violent hatreds into empathy and friendship so despite my numerous (quite risky) efforts on every front, from contacting the mother of a hostage to attempting to deliver food baskets to the Israeli ambassador in Cairo on Purim https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY I have not succeeded.
Realizing that funding was the simple thing that waa missing I caved in and made a public call for funding in a video called: "Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
https://youtu.be/OR67EQNvc1k
where I excerpt from the article I published last year in the immediate aftermath of the massacre to point out my prediction has been proven accurate and that every day of murder (on all sides) makes it harder for me to eventually succeed so will some brave and ballsy wealthy person please drop a few hundred thousand dollars on me.
Of course to even reach the attention of people who can do so means that my video would need to be seen by tens of thousands of people, and, as YouTube is very much a pay-to-play for people whose content doesn't fit the algorithm's conception of a clearly defined demographic it only received 100 views in total, which obviously has nearly zero odds of reaching my target audience.
Which is a shame because the ratio of 👍 to views is higher than for any similarly sized video of mine indicating that if it only got more play it might have succeeded.
"Dear Jewish Philanthropist"
https://youtu.be/OR67EQNvc1k
Yeah, he was an interesting character. I got on his case early on, arguing that his “Hates Israel” name makes it impossible to take anything he says on the matter seriously. He defended it right up to moment when he agreed and changed it. That was… unusual… to say the least.
He also had interesting things to say about all kinds of tech matters.
Yeah, it’s like he had no middle ground between digging his heels in about his right to hate and fury, and being an unusually smart, fair minded guy. Even his username, either version of it, summarizes that doubleness: He went to the effort of *learning Hebrew•, presumably to improve his communication with Israelis and demonstrate his interest in their point of view. But now he hates them (or maybe just their military)
I think it's pretty common to have people who are sensible and careful thinkers in many areas in their lives, but who have other areas where they are so upset/committed/obsessed/whatever that they can't really have a decent conversation in those areas. LHIP could have a decent conversation on many topics, but not on all topics.
Well I think he originally just noticed that as an Arabic speaker he could learn Hebrew really quickly and perhaps do some good defeating The Nazis.
As I mentioned in the comment that started the whole discussion about his value and whether his ban should perhaps be more limited, I recognized his ever-so-rare desire to change his mind through seeking out information against his own beliefs.
He was still of the rabid assumption that Israelis were monsters when I wrote to him but it was obvious to me that as a genuine individualist free thinker his intense hatred was motivated in part by misunderstandings that could be rectified and which many of his subsequent posts show have indeed been rectified.
I don't read many Israel related posts here because as you know from my own Substack and YouTube I am an active third party opposed to the ENTIRE underpinning of what causes war in the first place.
So it never really mattered to me what LHHI had to say about the subject except for its demonstration of his maturing quality of loving Truth over Tribe.
I don't remember the first version of his name (maybe KnowsHebrew?), but when I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels), he changed his name.
> I asked about how much Hebrew he actually knew (not much, he has trouble with the lack of vowels)
That doesn't sound like a likely problem for an Egyptian to have with Hebrew...?
As the de facto Chief Rabbi of Egypt I can tell you that of all the Arabics, Egyptian Arabic is pronounced most similarly to Israeli Hebrew for historical reasons related to the closness of both the Jewish and Arab communities of Egypt and the Holy Land over the past few centuries.
The early version might have been LovesHebrewHatesIsrael. At least the parallelism makes some sense.
IIRC, it was LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael.
That sounds right.
The effort becomes a justification, once subjected to rationalization.
I said that I agreed he should be banned. What’s your point here. Is it that you are offended by someone having some sympathy for him?
I sought to explain the apparent contradiction.
Try not to stress conversations here that much, it's not that serious. The mighty gaze of Scott Alexander is one of a human being who also laughs and eats soup (I assume he sometimes eats soup, that seems like a regular human thing to do, and he is a regular human being).
All of the commenters are also regular human beings, like me. We all laugh and eat soup, these are regular human being things to do.
Yes, well I have a sense of humor too, and enjoy joking around here. But this particular event is actually pretty important to me, not because I think, like a little ninny, that Scott is god, but because someone I liked quite a lot has gotten kicked off, and in fact did things that merited that. I made a serious comment about how he was really good and really awful both at once, and you said something you didn't bother to formulate clearly. But it seemed like you meant that LHHIP's learning Hebrew allowed him to rationalize bad behavior. If that's what you really think then say it clearly. If it's not, but you just found it amusing to spray some random scorn and cynicism on some people who are distressed and talking seriously, that seems boorish to me, not lighthearted.
But many (I wouldn't be surprised if most) Americans don't eat soup! Many seem to have a childhood trauma caused by their parents feeding them soup instead of something else they wanted and view any offer of soup as a personal insult - to be dealt with by muttering (or thinking) the incantation "thin soup, thin soup" and pouring the soup down the sink in the full view of the person who put non-trivial effort into cooking it, to make sure the message sinks in.
But maybe the commenters here differ from Americans in general in that they all eat soup?
There's presumably a fair amount of people who have gone out of their way to learn Russian (and not just due to being forced to do so due to growing up in the Soviet Union or East Block in general) and who hate Russia, and also some who have studied Arabic despite hating various Arab systems.
I didn’t say learning
Hebrew qualified him for sainthood, just that it
summarized his doubleness. And I am not saying his doubleness should earn him the right not to be banned, either.
https://leighstein.substack.com/p/20000-readers-of-literary-fiction
Have you heard that there are only 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in the US?
It's a number that's been going around, but what's the evidence?
"The editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house recently told me that she believes there are about 20,000 serious and consistent readers of literary fiction in America and publishing any novel of quality is a matter of getting that book to them by any means necessary."
So there's no evidence, though this might be an educated guess.
How would you even find out? How would you define literary fiction? Should the number be viewed with alarm?
This is a discussion of marketing. It's actually about how many read (possibly just those who buy) literary fiction, and possibly just new literary fiction. I expect that literary fiction readers actually include a high proportion of people who are reading older books.
Just as a general thing, I think many people who say they like literary fiction actually like literary fiction. It's not just status-seeking.
In my experience about half the people who say they like literary fiction actually read it. It's not so much status-seeking as aspirational.
I'm sort of a doomer about literary fiction, for two reasons:
First, I think that although it's a worthy genre, and in theory the pinnacle of literature, it's also succumbed to the post-modern aesthetic in a way that's cut it off from its proper audience. I think there's sort of a progression that people can go through, where first they read fiction because it's about exciting things like rocketships and knights and romance and sex, and then they may grow to appreciate good writing and characterization, and at that point they're ready to take the next step to literary fiction. But it's gone off into its own tangled pocket universe, and become weird and self-referential and self-consciously elite, and that severs the intake path. And with the decline of reading overall, the intake path is important.
Second, it's been eaten by political correctness. It used to be a genre that eschewed "excitement and adventure and really wild things", as being the added sugar of literature. But now it seems that more and more of what gets called "literary fiction" is consciously written to push right-thinking politics and Take A Stand on Important Issues. And I think that is to adventure as high fructose corn syrup is to sugar.
So what these quotes make me wonder about is, how much of that audience is reading the books because they want to be seen to have read the books, because of what the status of "having read the books" will say about them?
There's something I call bad optimization. I think Scott calls it Moloch, and it's at least part of what people on the left call late stage capitalism. Or it's Goodhart.
After a while, a new and lively artistic movement gets simplified and stylized because it's easier to imitate superficial characteristics.
See also a passage from Perelandra-- on a paradisal ocean Venus, there are berries. Most of them are pleasant and wholesome like bread, but occasionally there's one with a red center that tastes wonderful. Ransome, a visiting man from earth, thinks that, on earth, they'd be bred to have exclusively red centers, and that wouldn't be as good.
I'm put in mind of a great quote from a review of a video game that I've never played:
> "Capitalism is a Faustian procedure. It is an excellent tool for creating wealth, inspiring innovation, and improving technology, but it also has a tendency to drain the soul from whatever it squeezes its tentacles into. After the initial flourish, the process of sucking out value for profit's sake begins. This principle applies to virtually any commodity you can name, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in art. Capitalism is the process by which Nirvana becomes Nickelback, journalism becomes gossip, The Simpsons becomes Zombie Simpsons, and meaningful art becomes meaningless crap.
> Art cannot sustain itself without capital. Art loses its value when too much capital is involved. And this is precisely what we're seeing in the video game industry now."
- "Pitchfork", at http://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=sr
So, if this is true, it seems like nonprofit/grant funded art should have more soul in it than market-funded art. I'm not so sure that's the case.
I think it's halfway. Both suffer from pressure to conform to institutional demands, especially when there's any type of scale involved. But when art goes on a market, or rather, an artist repeatedly faces market incentives, there's also a form of dumbing down that can happen - corners get cut, shortcuts get taken, less attention is paid, the demand for familiarity and consistency stifles innovation, and overall the quality declines.
The references in the quote are about popular music, journalism, TV, and video games, which are all things that involve teams of people and scale. An individual artist making unique art and selling it isn't necessarily affected, but it's an old story when a patron starts getting pushy for "more of the same". And the proverbial starving artist in a ghetto clearly has a lot less capital invested than anything involving a multi-million-dollar corporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
It's at least a good start, but I was tickled by this quote from John Updike.
"In an interview, John Updike lamented that "the category of 'literary fiction' has sprung up recently to torment people like me who just set out to write books, and if anybody wanted to read them, terrific, the more the merrier ... I'm a genre writer of a sort. I write literary fiction, which is like spy fiction or chick lit."[27] Likewise, on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike argued that this term, when applied to his work, greatly limited him and his expectations of what might come of his writing, so he does not really like it. He suggested that all his works are literary, simply because "they are written in words."[28]"
I will yet again recommend _How Fiction Works_ by James Wood. From what I read of it, it proposes that our ideas of literary fiction were invented something like a century or two ago. The ideas of detailed description and character development and realism are an ideal, possibly from Flaubert) and if you look at actual classics (Jane Austen who does little description, Melville who has a fascinating monomaniac), they don't follow the rules of literary fiction.
I get bogged down in the book because there are long examples from stories I would never read, but I value the ideas I got from it. If nothing else, remember that so much of our environment (like that there's such a thing as literary fiction) were invented by people.
> How would you even find out?
This is a ranking of literary magazines by Pushcart Prize winners: https://cliffordgarstang.com/2024-literary-magazine-ranking-fiction/
There are 163 literary magazines, but that list includes ~30 that are inactive. Those magazines are the main way that you advertise a novel to “serious literary readers” (I feel a little pretentious just typing that phrase). Out of the ~130 actively publishing, most of them have a few hundred subscribers. The big ones are in the thousands. But the Paris Review claims to have 100,000 on their list and that’s the biggest by far. I bet Ploughshares is only in the thousands and that’s an incredibly prestigious literary magazine. So if you use that for your census, I’d say 100k max, but many of those are going to be international. So somewhere in the five-figures sounds accurate.
> How would you define literary fiction?
The typical career for a literary writer is to publish a series of short stories, hopefully moving their way up that list, which is treated as near-canonical because of the prestige of the Pushcart. Once they have enough stories published in magazines at the top of the list (8 - 12), they’ll submit their collection to prizes that are organized by academic presses. If they win the prize, then their collection of short stories is published by the press. These usually sell a few hundred copies at most. If they sell a few thousand that’s considered wildly successful. If they went to a top MFA program, they can network their way to get connections at presses and get published without a prize as well. Once they have a book out, they’re eligible to apply for tenure-track professorships but those are competitive to get. To finally answer your question: “Literary fiction” is defined as whatever the editors for those magazine and the professors who run top MFA programs and the Pushcart Prize say it is.
To stick with novels for a moment, they typically won’t get an agent or be able to be considered by a literary press until they have a sufficient number of stories published at top journals and that’s when they’ll be able to get a top press to publish their novel. My point is that using those magazine subscribers is probably a reasonable way to get the ballpark figure.
> Should the number be viewed with alarm?
No. It’s a very intellectually incestuous process. It produces a lot of fiction that all sounds the same because it’s largely produced in MFA workshops where it comes out as if it was written by committee. Everyone says the same thing and all the stories blur together and the stories take no risks.
I'd never even heard of the Pushcart Prize, that's how off the radar I've dropped with lit-fic 😁
Seriously, the Catholic Church is one of the few organizations to maintain an intellectual establishment outside of the current one. You're probably better off reading Catholic writers.
Now here's an opinion that (as a Catholic myself) I'm not privy to. Who would you recommend? (I've only read Chesterton and Mary Doria Russell, oh and just found out R. A. Lafferty is Catholic)
It sounds like you have read quite a few of them.
Probably over a thousand authors in that space. There are some diamonds in the rough. Breece D’J Pancake. Anne Carson. Wells Tower, even though he’s kind of one-hit wonder. George Saunders. Anthony Doerr, although these days he famous and mainstream. But these days most of the authors doing interesting work need to do it pseudonymously, like Scott Alexander with Unsong before he was doxxed.
Well it’s good you have found some to your liking. It’s hard work sifting out the dross.
Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary? I am curious.
> Why is it you say that doing it pseudonymously is necessary?
Good question. If you don’t mind a longer answer, there seems to be some confusion in the thread over what exactly literary fiction is, but some strong opinions about it. I think a brief history of the novel might help clarify how we got into the current situation and answer your question about pseudonyms.
Every art form has a “high art” and “low art” distinction. Think about how four hundred years ago a wealthy patron might go to an opera while a poor person might go hear someone sing a bawdy song in a tavern. But this distinction didn't really exist for novels because until a couple hundred years ago, no one except the wealthy could read. So this distinction of “literary” versus “genre” fiction is a relatively new concept for novels compared with other art forms.
The latter half of the 19th century was dominated by what was now called Realism. In the early part of the 1800s, literacy rates were very low and printing was prohibitively expensive. The industrial revolution made printing much cheaper over the course of the century and literacy rates skyrocketed. You had the first Penny Press newspapers in the early 1800s. Novels at that time were largely produced in a serial format with a chapter released each week or month, often as part of a newspaper. This is how much of the novels were produced at the time. It also explains the length of so many novels of that period: If an author hooked an audience with a story, they would continue the story for as long as possible to make as much as money as they could. They were literally paid by the length, so of course they were long. Most of the authors writing novels were also journalists, like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
But there’s a reason why I bring this up. Because these novels were released in serial form, in order to get the audience to buy the next installment, they would want to end each chapter with a cliffhanger. They needed a strong plot in order to hook the audience and keep them coming back the following week. This was how novels consumed by both wealthy and working class readers were written.
But remember that printing continued to get cheaper over the course of the century. Then, in the early 20th century, you had the rise of the movement now known as Modernism. This was a broader philosophical and artistic movement, but the part that is relevant to novels is that the Modernist critique of Realist novels was that they weren’t actually very realistic. In particular, modernist authors, alleged that real life doesn't follow neatly structured plots. They argued that good art must be more realistic and eschew plot. You began to have authors like Hemingway and Faulkner who wrote novels with very limited plots. Around this same time you had the birth of genre magazines, like Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. These were largely referred to as pulp fiction because of the quality of the paper (A friend of mine collects them and has them preserved because they’re literally disintegrating).
Early genre fiction came from executions in the late 1700s and early 1800s, where vendors would go around executions selling pamphlets describing the crimes of the condemned, which were often exaggerated to make better stories. They gradually went from exaggerated accounts of real life crime to the murder mysteries we know today, and these were the earliest forms of what we now call the crime fiction genre. By the latter nineteenth century you had Dime Novels, which were some of the first mass produced books where you purchased the entire book at once.
But it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that buying the whole book at once was the common thing to do. This change in purchasing also changed the narrative structure. The authors weren’t forced to have such a strong plot. The combination of the Modernist critique of the Realist plot (saying that real life doesn’t actually follow a neatly structured plot) with the change in distribution dramatically changed the narrative structure. So finally, in the Modernist period we see novels have a clear bifurcation between their “High Art” and “Low Art” forms.
This distinction widened in the postwar period when we have the Postmodern critique of Modernism. To see a good example of this style, take a look at David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” [https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/1225/brief-interviews-with-hideous-men-david-foster-wallace]. (Also, to circle around to my previous post, note that it was published in The Paris Review). When done well, I enjoy Postmodern short stories, but not Postmodern novels. They’re fun for a few pages, but not for a few hundred pages, because there’s no plot.
Also, in the 1950s was the creation of the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. At the time someone pointed out that other art forms all have schools for their art, particularly in visual art for painters and sculptures. And music schools as well. But there were no schools for writers. The workshop was very successful and the MFA programs multiplied. I have mixed feelings about the work produced from these workshops. At times it can be very good. But often it feels like it was produced by committee and over the decades has become increasingly bland.
But there’s something else that changed. It created a professional path for people who do nothing but write and teach fiction. They don’t have to actually sell large amounts of fiction to be successful. They just have to get tenure. The writing they produce is successful if it wins awards from other writers, not if it sells a lot of copies. I mentioned that the Modernist period was the first clear bifurcation of High Art (literary) versus Low Art (genre fiction) but the Postmodernist period took that much farther. Hemingway still made his living purely as a writer. But most of the top Postmodernist writers make their living as professors who occasionally sell a few thousand copies of a book.
This brings us to today and to finally answer your question about pseudonyms. The hardliners say that genre fiction has terrible prose written for the half-literate and degrades the mind. But I think this misses that science fiction / fantasy can have allegories that make you think differently about society. Contemporary literary fiction emphasizes that stories must have a social justice message. The environment is very competitive because there are very few tenure track slots for every graduate. Writers attempt to cancel each other over anything they can find in their stories that are perceived as offensive. So people respond by writing stories that take no risks and are incredibly inoffensive. Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
There is nothing offensive there. No one can accuse you of writing a plot (I should note that plots are actually making a comeback but this has gotten way too long already for that tangent).
Consider this quote from Sherman Alexie, a social-justice oriented writer who is one of the top literary writers alive:
“I've been publishing books for 30 years. I'm close friends with approximately twenty writers. I'm casual friends with a few dozen writers. I'm professionally friendly with dozens of other writers. At least 80% of my close, casual, and professional writer friends are politically left of center and at least 80% of them have privately expressed fear about saying or writing the "wrong" thing. And we're talking about some big name writers whom you might assume are immune from such pressures. Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” [https://substack.com/profile/1727692-sherman-alexie/note/c-14880242]
The result of all this is that much of literary fiction feels lifeless. Increasingly, the interesting writing is coming from people sidestepping this self censorship.
[sorry if there are a lot of typos, I had to dictate this quickly]
From 1897 kind of addressing some of these issues;
Whatt would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?
No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,
Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon
In the vile hope of teasing out a smile
On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad
For breakfast every morning? Make my knees
callous, and cultivate a supple spine,-
Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine
That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns
of Mammon with my left hand, while my right
Too proud to know his partner's business
Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire
God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!
Shall I go leaping into ladies laps
And licking fingers?-or-to change form-
Navigating with madrigals for oars,
My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?
No thank you! Publish verses at my own
Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint
Of a small group of leterary souls
Who dine together every Tuesday? No
I thank you! Shall I labor night and day
To build a reputation on one song,
And never write another? Shall I find
True genius only among Geniuses,
Palpitate over little paragraphs,
And struggle to insinuate my name
In the columns of the Mercury?
No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid,
Love more to make a visit than a poem,
Seek introductions, favors, influences?-
No thank you! No, I thank you! And again
I thank you
That was a wonderful description, thank you for sharing!
There's just one thing:
> Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette.
> There is nothing offensive there.
That almost made me laugh out loud! :-) The other year I streamed a sci-fi movie that basically opens with the destruction of an entire planet of sapient beings, but of all the obligatory warnings to go up front, the only one was "depicts smoking".
Thanks for this. It’s very interesting to me. I appreciate your taking the time.
You know, ironically (or perhaps appropriately), they cancelled Sherman Alexie for 'sexual harassment' in 2018, whatever that means these days? It seems like he...made a few women uncomfortable?
This is why I always say if I decide to write anything I'm cultivating a right-wing audience!
"Currently, the standard story that is published over and over again in those magazines I listed above goes something like this: A person sits alone in a room. They think about a childhood tragedy. The tragedy involves a social justice moral message. Then they walk outside and smoke a cigarette."
The impression that comes to mind when I think of modern American literary fiction, in short story form, is: take a couple of de-racinated people, somewhere in the middle class, probably upper-middle or near to it. Have them travelling though the American landscape, describing the long stretches of road, the barren landscape (desert for choice but you can have acres of giant agricultural landscapes, or passing through decaying towns that once were hotspots of the glorious industrial past but are now shells). The journey doesn't matter much, the destination is uncertain, their purpose in going on the journey is ambiguous or unclear.
Have them stop along the way and stay at motels or cheap hotels. Describe the cheapness, the blandness, the uniformity where any hotel of the chain could be located anywhere but yet look identical to how this room looks.
The couple are, of course, dissatisfied. Maybe they're in their forties, maybe in their twenties. Childless (increasingly, formerly there might be a mention of one adult child who lives far away and is no longer part of their lives). He is unhappy (increasingly, it is she who is unhappy). With his/her life, career (if they have one), marriage (if that is what this relationship is), their partner.
Maybe he is having an affair (told from her point of view). Maybe he suspects she is, or wishes he was having one (told from his point of view). Don't have any such a thing as a definite ending, just that they set out the next morning (or will set out) on the remainder of the pointless, meaningless journey and at the end, they'll break up (maybe). Hint that she may ask for that divorce, but don't make it definite. Hint that he will leave her for that younger woman he may (or may not) be having the affair with.
And lard all this with anvil-heavy discussion about how this is a metaphor for the Modern American Condition. We all live like this now, Jake.
EDIT: Why are they driving instead of hopping on a plane to get where they're going fast? Yes, Jake, but then we couldn't have the Fine Writing descriptions of the barrenness of the featureless landscape, the tedium of the hours spent in the car, the pathetic fallacy where the exterior conditions are reflections of the interior lives, or lack thereof, of the couple in the dust, tedium, repetition, boredom, commodification, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
You may be allowed one (1) moment of natural beauty in the story, but watch it, buster: this is not there for you to intimate that maybe life is not always a heap of shit, but rather to show (a) once upon a time she (used to be he, but mostly is she now) had dreams, hopes, a vision of a better, higher life - but that's all gone now (b) to fool the reader with a momentary glimpse of optimism or, you know, beauty before you hit them with that anvil again about the bleak reality of the quotidian small lives the couple (and everyone they know, and society at large) is living in the prosperous yet desolate American milieu of today.
But cool it on the beauty, what do you think you are, writing to give joy in the use of language? Nah, bro, it's about Deepity.
I actually buy most of my stuff secondhand, to avoid giving money to left-wing publishing cartels. I'll even drive out of the city center to give money to the neckbeard with the giant pulp collection over the feminist yuppies. Though I'm kind of on the border between a literary and genre reader; I'll read litfic, but also bad Lovecraft pastiches.
Over in the SF field, Analog and Asimov's, two of the leading short-story magazines in the field, have roughly 15,000 subscribers each. While not all of those are in the US, and some are institutional subscriptions, having a subscription to either one is generally the mark of a very serious SF reader, though exceptions do exist. This leads me to suspect there are at least 10,000 serious SF readers in the US.
https://locusmag.com/2023/02/year-in-review-2022-magazine-summary/
Could the market for litfic be only twice that size? Sounds like an underestimate.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker, which I tend to think of as the very breeding pool of the litfic types, has 1.2 million subscribers.
https://mediamakersmeet.com/new-yorker-plans-double-paid-circulation-2-million/
I have trouble believing the market for litfic is only one sixtieth the size of the subscriber base of the New Yorker.
SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case. That may not be the sole intent, but it's usually a big part of the intent.
That strikes me as likely to have broader appeal for a style of fiction that disclaims "mere" entertainment, and instead seems intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.
That sort of elitism will coalesce into a fairly small bubble, and 20,000 feels about right to me. Two thousand in a core community that talks to one another about this stuff, and maybe ten times that who read in solitude on the fringes? Anything more than 2,000 would I think mean the core community doesn't feel elite enough, and I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it.
Science fiction, and mystery and romance and all the rest, are read for fun as light entertainment - and sometimes not so light, but the genre's numbers will be driven by the easy fun stuff.
God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular. I am amazed by the insight so many commentators here have into the motives of others, the elites…
Thank goodness for us common folk who can paint such a bright line between entertainment and all that other stuff.
> SF, and almost every other sort of genre fiction, is generally written with the intent of actually *entertaining* readers in the target audience, and anyone standing vaguely near the target audience just in case.
Moby Dick is adventure fiction ( a genre if you will), only times have changed, and now (apparently) it’s a long-winded parable that sullen high-schoolers are forced to pick through. Melville wrote because he needed to make a living. He definitely wanted to entertain people. He didn’t have many other big commercial successes, but that one struck a chord, and he had a potential audience of tv/movie/internet-free people who had to read if they wanted to be entertained. The rest is luck of the draw.
More importantly, what exactly is meant by being entertained, and how broad a brush can one use to put a line between it and what is “intended at marking the author and the readers as being part of the Artistic Elite with the intellectual chops to Actually Appreciate Great Art.”
Pretentiousness comes in many forms and they’re all ugly.
"God forbid anyone should write with intelligence, purpose, and style, only to have the misfortune of becoming popular."
That sounds like a pretty good description of a successful writer of genre fiction, for any non-"literary" genre.
I think "literary fiction" has become a category really only in the 20th century. Certainly, critics in the 19th century would have turned up their noses at "popular" novels which by our time have become Classic Literature.
But I also think there is a definite cleavage between "novels written for entertainment, even if well-written" and "self-consciously high-brow and apart from whatever is piled up on the bookstore Best Seller table".
Look at the current New York Times best seller list, I don't see anything on the fiction that counts as "literary fiction".
https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/NYTimesbestsellers
You have to look for that in the little magazines (Granta was the big name in British publishing), the heavyweight reviews by the big name critics in the likes of the Times Literary Supplement (if that's still going) etc. The prizewinners, though some of those can cross over to best-sellerdom (some 90s Booker Prize winners did so, for example Anita Brookner with "Hotel du Lac"). The kind of thing written by artists who go to Yaddo on a bursary to produce the next Great American Novel 😁
I think it's been twenty years or more since I last read literary fiction, because the stylisation of novels and short stories which crystallised into a particular set of themes and tropes just turned me off (I dubbed such things the Hampstead Adultery Novel).
Ursula Le Guin, may the heavens be her bed, had a wonderful tart take on the attitude:
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/on-serious-literature
"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."*
— Ruth Franklin
(Slate, 8 May 2007)
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understood the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
*NOTE: The rest of Ruth Franklin's review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union is quite thoughtful, generally positive, and not dismissive of his longing to destroy phony divisions between “genre” and “literature.” I just couldn't resist the all too familiar image of her first sentence."
Hah! Thx for this. Very amusing. I used to subscribe to Granta sometime in the 90’s. They published quite a few things I would not call fiction iirc.
The irony is that Ursula Le Guin's writing is better quality then much literary fiction.
Did you ever read "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt? I remember when it came out there were some "sidelong glances" at how she was violating the boundaries of literary fiction by adding too much excitement. I think some of her later books got a bit of the same treatment, but it died down, I suppose because standards changed, and because she was just that good.
I haven’t, I’m afraid. I kind of fell off the fiction bus a while back.
If you ever get back on, she's worthwhile. Writes about one book a decade, with presumably her fourth due any year now.
"I suspect it isn't terribly rewarding to read lit-fic if you've got no one to talk to about it"
I get that a lot of people are in fact snobs, and maybe having read the latest Ferrante or whatever is required to survive certain kinds of cocktail party in America. Fine.
But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic. Maybe it's because I'm actually bad at writing myself, and so the corresponding sense of awe is greater, but there are some scraps of prose out there that have given me as much aesthetic pleasure as anything else in life. And that's without any kind of background in the arts that might have value-primed me for this.
> But you're being way too cynical about the sheer pleasure of experiencing language performed at a very high level. Same with arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol rather than clever plot logic.
Those aren't special to literary fiction. That's just good writing. Good genre fiction will have that 𝗮𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 as having a plot. There's no reason you'd want to go without the plot.
In American Gods, arrangements of theme, metaphor, and symbol are very cleverly worked into the plot!
If you want linguistic virtuosity for its own sake, I think The 13 Clocks is the best example I know, though it's more of a fairy tale than a novel.
I like many genre novels. I agree without reservation that incredible writing does show up in many genre novels. Some physicists are also exceptionally good pure mathematicians. These added blessings are mostly incidental. Genre novelists are bound by genre conventions and their energies are, correctly and decorously, focused on delivering the usual genre payoffs.
The reason you might not want a plot, or to have a very weak plot (a guy wandering around Dublin; an adman trying to make his first feature; two cousins in love) or a very contrived, near-paceless plot, is that plot constrains. It interferes with the formal puzzles and symmetries and requires too many dead sentences whose only duty is to schlep the plot forward, weakening the overall enchantment.
On reflection, this is really a recasting of Anthony Burgess's old "A-type Novel vs B-type Novel" distinction from Re Joyce. And even back in 1965 he seemed to concede that the B-type novel, the kind focused on language, is severely on the wane. So maybe there's something to that 20,000 number after all.
+1
I would agree that Analog and Asimov's subscribers are serious sf readers, but there's so much other sf that the number of subscribers would be a very low floor for the number of sf readers.
Sure, but the bigger the number of serious SF readers, the less credible the claim that there are only 20,000 serious litfic readers becomes.
New Yorker also covers current events, and I'm willing to bet people have subscriptions to look fashionable in left-leaning upper-middle and upper-class milieus, as well as middle-class people with pretensions and working-class people who just think that stuff's cool.
If you subscribe it’s very inexpensive, has a great listing of things that are going on in town, and at least one cartoon that can make you chuckle. They’re ideal in the bathroom.
“Literary fiction” might exclude genre fiction like sf and fantasy, so maybe it’s plausible.
The National Booksellers Association tracks book sales (and they've been increasing over the past decade, BTW), but I can't find any data on literary fiction as a category. On the fiction side of things, depending on how you slice and dice your numbers, and depending on which source you use, "contemporary fiction" tracks third or fourth as a genre. I suspect that this editor may be talking about the type of literary fiction that English Lit academics read, though. Titles like _Lincoln in the Bardo_ come to mind. But that made the NYTimes bestseller list — and a rule of thumb is that sales have to be in the range of 5-10k copies a week to have a chance of hitting the list. That suggests there are more than 20k readers of literary fiction.
I feel like this number could vastly increase or decrease depending on how you define "serious and consistent reader" and "literary fiction". But if your use a relatively narrow definition of litfic and define the reader as "someone who is actively looking for newly published litfic books to read", then I guess the number is somewhat plausible.
According to this one Gematria site, 20,000 equals “Cabal Not Welcome in Heaven.”
This is now canon.
Is Anne Tyler in the literati? When I went back to university in the 1980s, an English professor compared her with Jane Austen. Yet lately, many folks we assume are literate don't know her work.
What does a woman have to do ? Stab her spouse with a Boy Scout knife (Mailer)? Commit suicide (Hemingway)? The popularitati elevated Alice Munro in public regard on her death, only to tear her down a few weeks later. She couldn't pass the Left's Political Correctness standard.
Both are writers of qualified substance, but I don't think they meet the definition of self-consciously Literary writers. In this 21st-century environment of cosplay posturing, I doubt either wants the mantle. It's a role vain men are more susceptible to. Most people who demand to be taken seriously don't have the goods.
I think the claim wrt Munro was that she was complicit in child abuse. I have no idea if this claim is true or not, but it's not quite the same as failing a political correctness standard.
I agree that it's not quite the same. But why bring up her alleged complicity in "protecting" an alleged abuser immediately after her death? Self-proclaimed 'progressives' never miss an opportunity to tear down a heroine, and if their accusations are mistaken, they don't apologize. Running roughshod over someone's reputation is all in a day's work. Munro should be held to account, certainly, but the timing of the Thought Police is performative and self-serving.
Ken Burns is doing a biography of DaVinci. I'm curious to see how he'll deal with the hero's homosexual pedophilia, and if the Burns team's examination of DaVinci's history will be as vigorous. Maybe we'll find out if Munro is no DaVinci.
First guess is lawsuits. The dead can't have a reputation to be sured over.
The cancellation mechanisms with all their pathologies and zeal for airbrushing people out of history are there, but the motives are a bit different.
Its a common trope that artists come in and out of fashion. The best you can hope for is to be in fashion at least once.
The literary world is mostly female now. Roth and Updike are long in the ground.
It's still full of vain people, but instead of professors sleeping with their students, it's yuppie women forcing their husband to accept polyamory. Whether you think this an improvement depends on who you are, I think.
I assume that publisher estimates this by "the number of serious works of literature our imprint sells". If they're only selling 20,000 books a year across all their authors, then that means there are only 20,000 serious readers, it couldn't possibly be that our stuff is boring or another publisher has the market cornered because they're one of the mega-imprints and we're an indie.
Eh, very few people are consistently reading books nowadays, and even fewer are bothering with the dreck that is modern litfic. I think the number is plausible; it's nothing more than an extremely niche hobby. But given how cheap it is to produce books compared to other media, it's probably still sustainable.
Except that sales of non-fiction and fiction in all formats (included print books) have been increasing over the past decade. There was a big bump during the COVID pandemic, but the trend is continuing.
Google the keywords: national booksellers association book sales increasing
Anecdata: other than Half-Priced Books we didn't have a bookstore in our town since Barnes and Noble shut its doors a decade ago. But a non-chain bookstore that sells new books (not used) opened in my neighborhood two years ago, and they seem to be doing rather well (according to the owner).
I got this graph:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/422595/print-book-sales-usa/
Increases until 2008. Steep decreases 2009 to 2012. Slow increases 2013 to 2019. Notable increases 2020 and 2021, and decreases in 2022 and 20023.
I'm seeing a post-2008 crash, with a slow recovery starting in 2013, and then a (probably temporary) spike in 2020-21, and probably a corresponding post-COVID return to the underlying trend in 22 and 23.
It should be the sum of book sales AND how many novels are checked out at public libraries. I hardly ever buy novels. I borrow them from the library instead, on the assumption that I will read it once and that will be enough. I'm much more likely to buy nonfiction books (plus a few novels by authors I really like that I know I will want to reread).
If "serious and consistent" means >1 book a year, and "literary fiction" is referring to new books in what is effectively a particular marketing category, that number actually seems plausible to me. I would have estimated <1 million for sure. I know people who read a lot, but I don't think I've ever met someone of that description..
It's a dumb number. I don't know whether it's dumb on purpose to make you click, or whether it's dumb by accident because you don't get to be the editor-in-chief of an independent publishing house by being good with numbers, but it's not worth thinking too deeply about.
The number wants you to engage with it. The number wants you to huff about it and talk about how implausibly small it is and what silly assumptions must have gone in, and how you are personally a serious and consistent reader of literary fiction but you only read out-of-copyright books on Project Gutenberg. Don't let the number have its way.
Acne is increasing everywhere in the world, except apparently my country of New Zealand.
Why? It is suggested that switching from requiring a specialist doctor (dermatologist) to only a nurse-practitioner (a nurse that can generally prescribe medicines) increased the rate of treatment. The medicine in question being isotretinoin.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529770/why-is-acne-decreasing-in-new-zealand
According to the article, what's increasing is people who visit a doctor or dermatologist about acne. We don't even know if acne itself is increasing in the rest of the world, nor whether it's decreasing in New Zealand, let alone whether the decrease is because of successful treatment. A better way to study the rate of acne would be to survey a random sample of the population and ask about the severity (if any) of their acne.
Here's my COVID update for epidemiological weeks 37-40 of 2024. Note: I skipped my last biweekly update for personal reasons. This will summarize the past month of COVID activity—plus some updates on H5N1 and some other pathogens of concern.
So far in 2024 COVID has dropped to 14th place in the top 15 causes of death—below septicemia and above nutritional deficiencies.
No sign of increased heart attacks due to Long COVID. And no sigh that the cancer rate is increasing due to Long COVID. In fact both causes of death are down approx 5% from pre-pandemic numbers. I suggest a likely explanation.
And H5N1 is killing dairy cows at much higher rate than expected. But this may be due to the recent heat wave in the West combined with the H5N1 infection.
On X...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1843415371434602589
On Threadreader...
https://t.co/hawwRInh4j
So I want to share with you all this wonderful creature that I recently learned about, so obscure that it doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect"). They look like this: https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/2/7/27efcc1e.jpg (The grub-like appendage isn't its head, that's its abdomen. Its "head", if you can even call it that, is on the opposite side.) These cute little fuzzy pearls are blind and completely incapable of moving around on their own. So how the hell do they survive? Well, they're exclusively found in the nests of a specific species of ant. The ants pick them up and attach them to the healthy roots of plants such as sugarcane and cogongrass, at which point the scale insect starts sucking the sap out of the roots. https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/antroom/imgs/9/f/9fd7414d.jpg Any excess nutrients are released out of the abdomen as honeydew, and the ants subsist entirely on this honeydew for their entire lives. ...Yes, these bugs somehow evolved into living taps for ants. (actually, they're even better than taps, since they also process the sap as well!) Oh yeah, and when a new queen is born and leaves the nest to start a new one, they bring with them a single pregnant scale insect with them so it can breed a new population of them for the new nest. https://www.nhk.jp/static/assets/images/newblogposting/ts/8M52YNKXZ4/8M52YNKXZ4-editor_06fe7c8398402c3e35a1c79b6a21a861.png
Seeing stuff like this really makes you wonder about the potential of bioengineering to revolutionize industry and agriculture. Self-sufficient machines of flesh, far more economical, adaptable, and robust than metal... Unfortunately, even if the technology is available, I'm pretty sure creating complex lifeforms is too difficult for humans to accomplish in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe AI will change that.
The ending remark in your note quite literally disturbed me. In regards to AI and Humans integrating, this is inevitable in my view, considering we are already in the process with mobile phones.
So we are the scale insect. nice. Good to know.
> They're called Eumyrmococcus smithii, or ari-no-takara-kaigaramushi in Japanese (literally "ant's treasure scale insect")
Good-ant-seed, for the non-Japanese version. Though the "seed" should probably be translated as "scale insect" too.
I harbor some suspicions that the "ant" root should be -myrmec- and not just -myrm-. This would produce benefits in etymological soundness and in the humor value of the word "eumyrmecococcus".
I learned while looking this up that the same root also refers to warts, apparently because warts are named after anthills.
That's really cool! I'd known about aphids, but this is even more so!
How do they reproduce? Do the ants carry them to their mates as well?
This is one of the most interesting and weird things I've read in a while, thank you!
Many aphids can reproduce asexually by parthenogenesis, effectively just making themselves pregnant. I don't know if it's the case for this species in particular, but I wouldn't be surprised.
I'm assuming so, yes. New queens seem to be able to tell which Eumyrmococcus are female and pregnant. The other ants can probably recognize the sex and fertility of them as well. (Though, how they do that is still unknown.) The ants also take the time to clean their Eumyrmococcuses. Cute!
This is what the robots did in the Matrix, except without the Matrix itself...
Super interesting, thanks for sharing
Here's a fun link: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_34,_Require_Certain_Participants_in_Medi-Cal_Rx_Program_to_Spend_98%25_of_Revenues_on_Patient_Care_Initiative_(2024)
It looks to me like the California Apartment Association got tired of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation using its money and influence to lobby against building housing, so now they're sponsoring a ballot measure to force them to not do that. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is of course opposing this amendment through their front group Housing Is A Human Right. This superficially healthcare related law that is really a proxy war for housing policy is perhaps the most California thing I have ever seen.
Why does the AIDS Healthcare foundation, which is presumably a foundation dedicated to Healthcare for AIDS patients, have a policy stance on housing at all? (I realize the answer may simply be "because California")
They might just need something to do. To what extent is there an AIDS-healthcare-related problem that they could help with if they redirected their efforts?
Seems like "because California" might be your best answer-
FWIW though I've been googling this myself too because it just seems weird, and if this article is accurate (https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/kcrw-features/prop34-aids-healthcare-foundation-rent-control), which it probably is since non-profits' tax info is made public every year, it seems like AHF just has a large bankroll.
"In recent years, AHF has spent more than $150 million on ballot initiatives – including rent control measures in 2018 and 2020. The nonprofit’s annual budget is about $2.5 billion. The vast majority of the nonprofit’s revenue comes from its network of 62 pharmacies – largely a result of that 340B drug discount program."
Actually, speaking of nonprofits making their tax info public, I just grabbed their most recent public 990, part of which included the following language on housing. So, at least in their words, this is why they're doing it:
SUSTAINABLE AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR THE HOMELESS AND LOWINCOME POPULATIONS. IN RESPONSE TO WIDESPREAD GENTRIFICATION AND RISING HOUSINGCOSTS, WHICH DISPLACES AHF PATIENTS THROUGHOUT CALIFORNIA, FLORIDA, AND ELSEWHERE, THE FOUNDATION HAS LAUNCHED THE HEALTHY HOUSING FOUNDATION (HHF) TO FULFILL ITS PUBLIC HEALTH MISSION. HHF PROVIDES DECENT HOUSING UNITS AT AN AFFORDABLE COST TO LOWINCOME PEOPLE, INCLUDING FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN AND THOSE PREVIOUSLY UNSHELTERED OR HOMELESS. AHF BELIEVES THAT A STABLE AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING SITUATION IS CRITICAL FOR INDIVIDUALS WITH CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS, INCLUDING HIV/AIDS.THE FOUNDATION ALSO CREATES AND IMPLEMENTS NEW PROGRAMS IN COMMUNITIES ACROSS THE U.S. AND ABROAD, AND EXPANDS DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE AND INFLUENCE OVER POLICY WITH THE AIM OF SAVING MORE LIVES.
Well, housing is pretty expensive in California. And the AIDs medical expenses can add up (especially in the end stages of life). This may be stereotyping a bit, but gay men tend to live in urban areas (SF and LA), where renting is a big deal. The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control. And now the California Apartment Association is taking their revenge for the temerity of the AHF to try to gore their real estate cash cow.s...
https://www.aidshealth.org/2023/11/ahf-files-to-halt-california-apartment-association-bogus-ballot-initiative/
> The AHF got an initiative on the 2024 ballot to allow communities to bring back rent control.
Not just 2024. They got rent control on the ballot in 2018 and 2020 too. The 2024 version is especially extreme and destructive though, to the point where it could potentially result in de-facto bans on renting entirely.
Extreme and destructive are loaded adjectives. Do you have links to some neutral economic analyses to support such dramatic language? Rent control was around for decades and decades in New York City and SF (and probably many other cities) without "destructive" effects (other than to the pockets of landlords). But we then had the dissolution of rent controls and horror stories about elderly and vulnerable tenants being displaced by drastic rent hikes.
I don't think we're going to agree on anything, since there's basically universal consensus in economics that NYC-style rent control is a disaster. This isn't something that the kind of people who read ACX would normally even dispute.
But for the sake of anyone else following along, the 2024 version is *even worse* than usual rent control precisely because the ballot measure does not contain any numbers. All it says is that the government cannot place *any restrictions at all* on local rent control measures.
This means that NIMBYist communities could say, cap rents at $1 in order to de-facto ban renting, and there's absolutely nothing anyone could do to stop them. Does anyone really think that the kind of city that declared itself a mountain lion sanctuary in an attempt to get out of their housing obligations would not pull stuff like this?
It's been my experience that whenever someone falls back on the consensus argument, they really haven't dug into the question. Dropping the consensus bomb in the middle of an argument is a sure sign that they'd prefer not to be challenged on the facts of their case. So, I suspect the consensus whereof you speak is a lot less consensed than you claimed. Never having investigated this subject myself, I decided to see what The Chat sez...
Me:
Is there a universal consensus that rent controls have negative consequences?
ChatGPT:
There is no universal consensus that rent controls always have negative consequences, but many economists and housing experts express significant concerns about their long-term effects. The debate around rent control policies involves complex trade-offs, with arguments both for and against them.
Arguments Against Rent Control:
Reduced Supply of Rental Housing: Critics argue that rent controls can discourage new housing construction and lead to a reduction in available rental units over time. Developers may find it less profitable to build new rental properties if they cannot charge market rates.
Maintenance and Quality Decline: Landlords may reduce spending on maintenance and property improvements because the cap on rent limits their ability to recoup these investments.
Inefficient Allocation: Rent-controlled units may be occupied by tenants who don’t need the reduced rent, preventing others in greater need from accessing affordable housing. Tenants may also stay in rent-controlled apartments for longer than they otherwise would, reducing housing mobility.
Black Markets: Rent control can sometimes lead to informal markets, where landlords demand under-the-table payments or tenants sublet apartments at higher, unregulated rates.
Distortion of Market Signals: By keeping rents artificially low, rent control may lead to an inefficient distribution of resources, as prices do not reflect actual supply and demand conditions in the housing market.
Arguments in Favor of Rent Control:
Protection from Rent Hikes: Supporters of rent control argue that it helps prevent displacement by protecting tenants from sudden rent increases, especially in cities with rapidly rising housing costs.
Stabilization of Communities: Rent control can help maintain community stability by allowing long-term residents to remain in their homes, preventing gentrification and the displacement of low-income and vulnerable populations.
Immediate Relief: In housing crises where rents are skyrocketing, rent control can offer immediate protection and relief to renters who might otherwise be forced out of their homes.
Social Equity: Proponents suggest that rent control can act as a tool for promoting social equity, ensuring that lower-income households have access to affordable housing in desirable urban areas.
Empirical Evidence and Mixed Results:
Empirical studies on rent control have produced mixed results. For example, studies from places like San Francisco and New York City, which have long-standing rent control policies, suggest some negative side effects, such as reduced housing supply. However, advocates argue that without rent control, these cities would face even worse affordability crises.
Recent Studies: A 2019 study on rent control in San Francisco found that it helped incumbent tenants but reduced the overall housing supply and increased rents in the uncontrolled sector, creating unintended consequences. However, another study might find that rent control provides necessary relief during housing shortages, helping to maintain socio-economic diversity in expensive urban areas.
In sum, while many economists tend to view rent controls skeptically due to concerns about long-term effects on housing supply and market efficiency, there is no universal agreement. The outcome of rent control policies depends on how they are designed and the context in which they are implemented.
What are people's best arguments against free immigration? I read Caplan's _Open Borders_ a while ago and generally agree with it, but it is obviously a piece intended to persuade and I don't have the expertise necessary to identify subtle flaws.
For the sake of avoiding a motte-and-bailey, I'll say that I believe both that immigration levels should be kept the same or increased and that (per Caplan's arguments) removing most if not all restrictions would be good long-term. However, my confidence in both of these positions is pretty low.
I think the Swedish experience provides the best argument. Sweden has not had free immigration but has had an unusually liberal immigration regime. The result has been an explosion in gang rapes, in organized crime, in gun homicides and so on. The situation has gotten so bad that Denmark (which has had open borders with Sweden since the 1950s) has imposed border controls to limit the spillover effects.
Pretty much the only reason that nations like e.g. the United States are appealing enough that large numbers of people want to immigrate to them, is that they are high-trust societies. Everything else is downstream of that, and not from the Magic Prosperity Rays that emanate from the American soil or whatever.
Unassimilated immigrants, degrade public trust. In part because so many of them come from low-trust societies, as that's where the gains from migration are greatest. But even immigrants from high-trust foreign nations will have different norms and customs for maintaining that trust, which do not translate nearly as well as mere words.
Immigrants who assimilate into the broader culture will generally add to the vitality and prosperity of a nation, even if they do still celebrate quaint ethnic holidays and eat exotic ethnic food. Strike that - *especially* if they eat exotic ethnic food, so long as some of them open restaurants the rest of us can eat at/
Wholly unassimilated immigrants, will degrade social trust in a way that makes pretty much everything worse. A modest population of not-yet-assimilated immigrants is a reasonable and necessary price to pay for the long-term benefits of immigration, but don't push it. Don't encourage, and probably don't allow, immigration at a rate faster than your society can reliably do assimilation. And if you are anywhere close to the limit, prioritize immigration from high-trust societies and of people who are most likely to assimilate,
If you feel bad about all the tired, poor, huddled masses in excess of your society's ability to assimilate, and you want to make sacrifices to help them, then pass the hat and set up a fund to help them build their own countries into something better.
I had a look through the other responses. Here's one that didn't come up.
Today, there's a lot of diversity between different countries. Everyone has a different political system in some way, a different blend of people, a different culture, differing supply chains, more internal than external trade, and so on. This is inefficient, but it increases the resilience of the system to shocks.
I haven't read Open Borders, but I bet Caplan's main arguments are for efficiency and morality. Efficiency is great! However, it comes at the cost of fault tolerance, and I would argue that abandoning fault tolerance is immoral. Check out this excellent wikipedia page for who produces what agricultural commodities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_producing_countries_of_agricultural_commodities. If social or political problems take down lentil production in Canada, then India and Australia might have a surplus, or Brazillian and USAian soybeans might be substituted. I bet that if every country reaches an equilibrium, they'll all have basically the same demographics, in which case social problems will spread in a similar way.
My idealism died during corona, I now believe you should dismantle systems in a order that prevents issues; its a problem that theres bans on herion, age limits of beer and the idea you need prove to some useless buecrate that you know to drive to drive on roads that shouldn't be "public". But I should probaly let drunk driving laws stand until after other evils are fixed.
The poor have many evils to navigate; income taxes, college debt not being written off in bankrupcy, zoning laws preventing housing. Yes, nation state boarders are stupid evils. But I dont understand how you can throw even more people into this mess and not have the poor suffer.
PC: You'll get lots of people coming in to get the welfare state.
Also, low-skill immigrants may not be as good a deal as previously anticipated.
Non-PC: They'll change the culture of the country. Also, it annoys nativist natives.
Frankly after watching Trump get elected that's enough reason for me.
> Also, it annoys nativist natives. Frankly after watching Trump get elected that's enough reason for me.
So, "high immigration" -> "nativist politics" - > Trump, and Trump is bad, therefore high immigration is bad? I love that chain of reasoning. :-)
You want the SAT-word version:
Excess immigration leads to populist politics with incompetent leaders who do great harm and increase corruption. At least, that's my experience in my lifetime. It kind of went the other way in the Gilded Age, with the corruption coming first, but you'll notice the Progressive Era also ended in immigration restriction shortly afterward. As Level 50 Lapras says, this has happened before, and immigration waves lead to backlashes and bans on immigration. I can't say that bothers me; seems kind of like homeostasis. Immigration rises, the natives get restless and decrease it, the remaining immigrants assimilate, we have a unitary country again in a few decades, with all the last wave of immigrants' kids complaining about the newcomers. :)
But, less rationally, I've never seen someone try to raise a mob to overthrow an election he lost in this country before in my lifetime, and I don't recall reading about it in the history books either. We're in a bad place, let's go back.
It's happened multiple times though. The late 19th century immigration wave led to a massive backlash and bans on immigration.
That comment was about me appreciating a somewhat absurd chain of "logic" that ends in the exact opposite place that conventional wisdom would expect. I happen to enjoy that stuff.
But to the object level, yes, I agree? We appear to be living through another period of backlash, and I don't like it.
It seems like a fairly normal political logic to me. The core reasoning is "this policy is too unpopular to work, so we should give up on it before it takes us down with it".
I agree that that isn't the approach actually being taken, and it's not necessarily correct, but I don't see anything unusual about the reasoning.
For one, if this is paired with a welfare state that the new immigrants are entitled to, the welfare state won't have enough resources for all.
This seems off base. Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Historically and currently, they are extremely low on the useless eater population (old people).
> Non-refugee Immigrants are going to be majority working age adults with a smattering of families that come in with their own resources or as a package with a bread winner.
Currently, that is the case. But you have to consider what would happen under a hypothetical "open borders" system instead.
Given how porus the border is, I think it won't change at all. The major difficulty for people who have productive potential but no money isn't getting into the states, it's getting to the states in the first place.
Then again, we won't know until we actually do it so ???
I was referring to the official refugee program, which is extremely selective.
If you're talking about illegal immigrants, there are filters there too, but the filters are different, mostly related to the risk and difficulty of sneaking into the country (including, as you alluded to, even reaching the border in the first place - walking through the Darien Gap isn't for the faint of heart).
That was my meaning, yeah.
I know allota dudes that got into a place somehow, and most of them are of the opinion that it gets easier the longer you are from where you are running from regardless of where you are running to, because if you are bothering to run the situation is not good to begin with.
What is here the difference between refugee and non refugee migrants? If you had open borders they would all be classified as migrants, and the majority would probably be young people from poor countries, exactly the people who right now are counted as refugees and have been shown to be a net fiscal loss in welfare states.
That said, I am myself troubled whether having a welfare state or open borders it would not be the most humane choice to choose open borders.
Because refugees don't want to be there, so there is less self selection, and I don;t want to make any WAGs cause I've never seen any data on refugees post ww2 that I think would generalize well.
EG, Vietnamese refugees post war were mondo hyper productive, but of course they were, only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing.
> only the creme de la creme got a spot on the helicopter, type of thing
In the case of the US, that's true of most refugees though. We only take in tiny numbers of official refugees (compared to the total number of refugees).
That's non obvious. Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in? Maybe you can make that case, but you're pulling out studies of expected productivity levels for immigrants, what they're putting into the real, productive economy, and what welfare state benefits they're expected to claim, all of which can of course be contested. It's not a simple proof.
>Why are we assuming the new immigrants are going to take more out of the welfare state than their productivity puts in?
Most countries in Europe have lots of data showing that non-EU immigrants take out (vastly) more than they put in. This Dutch study comes to mind (https://unherd.com/newsroom/dutch-study-immigration-costs-state-e17-billion-per-year/); non-Western immigrants cost The Netherlands on average $17 billion dollars per year, while Western immigrants net-benefit $1 billion.
I agree that immigrants are a net positive *now*. But that's because it's very hard to immigrate. If you open the floodgates, then people will in fact come here just for the welfare.
Well, I think if you take a nice European country (~5 million population, relatively high wages and reasonable welfare policy) and tell everyone in the world they can come there, I think that there will be millions of immigrants. Once there are more migrants than natives, I can imagine three outcomes
1) This country's culture and institutions become more similar to the countries of origin of the migrants (Afghanistan, Nigeria, etc)
2) Separation into mostly migrant underclass and mostly native elite with the latter living in gated communities and governing by undemocratic means (this can have different flavours: feudalism, millet system, apartheid)
3) Civil war or a lower-intensity conflict
What I don't find likely is 4) all the migrants adopting the culture and institutions of the destination country which made it attractive in the first place. If it were possible then adopting right laws would've immediately fixed a country like Iraq and there would've been no insurgency.
I absolutely believe in assimilation over time but it necessarily requires the natives (including the previous waves of migrants) to be a dominant majority and prevent concentrations of migrants preventing their assimilation.
That's why I think that it should be regulated, with some countries needing less of it. Btw I've myself migrated to a new country, so this is partially based on my own experiences.
I don't know if this happens in reality, but if a dominant factor in institution development is resources? E.g. nice European country has lots of land, and has access to lots of oil/wind power/whatever resources, and those are what enabled its niceness?
Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
> Then it's possible immigrants can assimilate and/or not damage the good institutions, because it was the lack of those same resources that made it impossible to fix a country like Iraq, even with good laws.
South Africa tends to undermine this idea.
Actually, all of sub-Saharan Africa severely undermines your main idea, because that appears to be just that natural resources are what determine a country's potential, and Africa is rich in those. It was conventional wisdom in the mid-20th century that Africa would shortly grow rich while South Korea stayed impoverished forever.
But South Africa started out with good infrastructure and institutions, and systematically trashed them.
That's fair. Perhaps path dependency? Once you *have* good institutions, strong resources can enable assimilation of large new populations?
The main example I'm thinking of is of course the US, over most of its history.
I would argue that assimilation is itself an institution, and that's what you need to be good if you want to assimilate large populations.
On a related note, the US has developed a strong official orthodoxy that assimilation is Bad, which is unlikely to promote any assimilation.
Is that a widespread belief? I think some corners of the left argue that but I think if polled "Do you think it's good to assimilate into the US" you'd get 60+% agreeing.
Or do you mean politicians are anti-assimilation? I haven't really heard much of that either
It might not just be what's in the ground, but also the ability to transport it. Africa is weak on convenient rivers and has a rather flat coastline and a lack of good bays.
The rivers seem fine and are historically important, supporting high volumes of trade in the manner you'd expect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Congobasinmap.png
I recall reading somewhere that Africa's great rivers are largely shallow and interrupted by rapids, making them poorly navigable, with the exception of the lower Nile
That's a very hypothetical hypothetical.
There are quite a few countries that have lots of land and lots of resources, and yet are, by and large, oppressive authoritarian hellholes - Saudi Arabia comes to mind. The only European country I can think of that qualifies as "lots of land and lots of resources" would be Norway, and the main reason that they are not like Saudi Arabia is that they have a fairly homogeneous, high-trust society - much like Sweden did before they imported Muslim immigrants en masse. (Emphasis on DID.)
Right - but I think "european" here is a stand in for "stable western democracy" and the one I was thinking of that's resource-rich is... the US.
There's a lot that's unknown about how good institutions develop, but we do have some case studies like East/West Germany and North/South Korea that rule out the most flippant "it's just resources" hypotheses.
Agree that it's definitely not ever JUST resources. But I think your short list of outcomes doesn't take into account the possibility that a large number of pople transplanted into a different environment could actually perform differently.
As an example - I believe 2 million Irish immigrants came to the US in a 10 year period around 1840, when the total US population was 17M. Ireland was going through a famine, in part due to agricultural practices. But the US survived that without turning into Ireland.
2 million added to 17 million is ~10%, so that's far from the "migrants outnumber natives" scenario. It did cause quite a lot of disturbances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_nativist_riots
Ok re-reading this thread I see that my response #1 to you is off-topic. The person I was responding to was talking about a scenario of massive migration due to open borders, not the current state of US immigration. I agree we don't have a historic example of what happens if the number of first-gen immigrants literally exceeds the number of 2nd+ generation population ("natives"). In those circumstances it's possible institutions would be disrupted.
1. Migrants don't outnumber the us today, far from it. They're only 13% of the us population.
2. The 2 million number is JUST from Ireland. Total immigration during that period was likely higher.
3. In any case, my point was about assimilation vs "making their new country like their old country". I think the Irish immigration example where large influxes did not make the US like Ireland; the fact that was a nativist backlash doesn't change that.
But absolutely the huge influx of Irish had a big negative reaction! (there's a reason there were common ethnic slurs against Irish people) But I think that reaction was incorrect then (in fact that wiki link says that the riots were based on misinformation about Bibles) and I think it's incorrect now.
Yeah, the problem is when too many people come at the same time, especially if they create ghettos that perpetuate parts of the culture they were originally running away from.
Maybe we could prevent the ghettos by having some kind of rule that there can be at most one immigrant family per street (or other unit of space that makes most sense locally). Something like, if you come to a new country, for the next 10 years you are in a database, and when you want to move somewhere, you ask the database keepers whether that street is available for you or not. Importantly, no one is telling you were you should live, no one is sending you away from the place you currently live at, they are just giving you a list of streets you cannot move to. After 10 years you are removed from the database and you can go wherever you want to (if you didn't assimilate until then, you are probably hopeless).
Denmark is trying to do something along these lines. I just checked Wikipedia and it turns out they started this policy in 1986 (!) with varying degrees of strictness and success. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Denmark#Geographic_dispersion
Singapore also comes to mind with their ethnic quotas in public housing.
The history of this program in Denmark and the rarity of such programs (at least I haven't heard about anything like it in the West) hints at the issues with it. These countries have laws and values that make it hard to establish and enforce rules like the one you described. Imagine someone coming to a new country and staying with their relatives. Now there are two families on the street, and enforcing the ban would most likely be pretty bad optics. Again, it's not *bad* that there are human rights defenders and human rights laws, this is what makes this country a nice and attractive place to live.
So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you need to take into account dynamic effects: the laws can be changed or not enforced if there is a constituency that benefits from it.
This was also a major policy of the Roman Empire, and it mattered. When the system broke down and tribes were allowed to stay together after admission, they organized and went marauding.
Yeah, I think there were some similarities but also major differences.
Like most of modern migrants, the German tribes coming to the Roman Empire didn't want to destroy it, they fled from various calamities, their leaders aspired to become and often became members of the Roman elite.
Still, I think that the notion that the movement of these tribes *caused* the disintegration of the Western Empire is not held by many historians nowadays. As long as the state capacity remained strong, as in the Eastern Empire, the incomers could cause troubles but were eventually made part of the system one way or another.
This was true of the Roman army, but not civilians.
If you joined the Roman army, it was absolutely mandatory to assimilate into the army's culture. Hiring barbarian armies without making them join the Roman army caused huge problems.
But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes; rural populations were (and still are) largely descended from whoever was there before the Romans.
> But for the general population, assimilation happened organically rather than being a policy. It certainly didn't involve splitting up tribes
Both of these sentences are false.
This all makes sense.
It's great if you want a permanent serf class. Free or unlimited immigration means anyone and everyone can come. American agriculture seems to rely heavily on migrant labour to be cheap during the harvesting season, then you can kick them back over the border until it's time for them to come back during the next harvest. (I don't know if anyone else shares the experience during the late 70s and early 80s of every damn act with a guitar in local talent shows singing "Deportees" until I was heartily sick of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportee_(Plane_Wreck_at_Los_Gatos)
(Ireland seemingly has a lot of Brazilians involved in the meat-processing industry, don't ask me how that started, so we can't look down our noses at anyone. But at the same time, we too were migrant labourers who were good for work during the season, then expected to go back home when not wanted).
Labour costs are thus (artificially) low, the migrants will live in slum conditions, and it's a great time to be a slumlord. Now if Caplan is happy to be a slumlord, then fine for him, but it's really enshrining "the major benefit from this is for The Sacred and Divine and Ineffable Economy, so having two-tier or more sets of 'this is a person with full rights, this is someone lower down the socio-economic rung, and these are the immigrant workers who don't even deserve hot water in the overcrowded hovels they inhabit*', and I'm fine with that because GDP! GDP! GDP!" as social structure.
(Maybe Caplan isn't saying this, I haven't read his book. Maybe he thinks everyone who comes to America will end up solidly middle-class in a profitable blue-collar trade and then their assimilated kids will be white-collar professionals who went to college).
*We had this sort of argument way back on here, and I got in trouble arguing with the guy saying 'if migrants are happy to work for buttons and live in a room with five other guys and no running water, why should we stop them?'
I think Caplan forgets how bad conditions used to be. There used to be tenements where you didn't have an entire family living in one room, you had several families living in a room, everyone taking one corner. If AI and the wonderful future of automation is coming, then the surplus low-skill/semi-skilled labour has nothing to do. I think manual work like construction and harvesting crops will remain, but even there automation is raising its head.
What happens then to all the workers that have no work? Let them remain in the country? Not feasible unless things *really* change so that money for all! is the magic fairy godmother AI waving its wand to create something out of nothing. Send them home after you've extracted the benefit of their labour, like the Gulf States?
What is Caplan's model of "let as many low-skilled manual workers come into the country as can physically get themselves here" and how that works out in reality? Low wages and slumlords, or "the magic of America makes everyone prosperous"? Because I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many Felipes from South America that work picked up on the corner for day labour in manual work does he know, and associate with, as distinct from "the kind of migrants I know are all my research students"?
You know, not that long ago we didn’t want the Irish here, and just look at Boston now
I definitely recognize the pattern, I used to work cleaning at a Danish hotel, everyone except me where either eastern european or African refugees.
But to give Caplan his due, all of my coworkers preferred being there instead of working in their home countries. The Easterners could save up considerable money (for their countries) by working one summer season. On couple was saving for the deposit of a house. They would have been worse of if they hadn't been able to migrate.
I know you don’t live in the US and I don’t know how they do things over there, but the USA already has a quasi-caste system with big parts of the economy dependent on foreign workers who are here illegally and theoretically could be deported, but also have lived here for decades and have kids, houses, opinions, etc.
You seem to be using the experiences of temporary seasonal workers as proof that permanent immigrants will have the same problems, but those seem like pretty different categories.
Are there a lot of native-born poor people in the US who are stuck living six to a room without running water? Whatever economic force is protecting them from such a fate, why wouldn't it protect immigrants as well? Are you just expecting that there will be so many immigrants that incomes for native and immigrant alike will plummet?
It doesn't do anything to solve the problems in the source country and is probably making them worse by draining talent. At the same time it decreases the general trust level in the recipient country, a key metric in ensuring an efficient economy and pleasant society. The adjustment period for new migrants can be very long, potentially even two generations.
Solving the problems in the source country first is a better strategy.
Argument-wise, what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?
My house is ~3000 square feet. The united states is 3.8 million square miles (ignoring multi-level buildings), equivalent to 105 million million square feet. I think something like 5% of US land is actually used for human living, so let's say 5 million million square feet.
On a per-space basis, letting one additional person live in my house is the equivalent of 1.7 billion people into the country. I think most people agree we shouldn't do either of those things.
This is the second response about it being a question of scale. Why do you think it's a question of scale? If a random person spends 5 uninvited seconds in your house per week, are you okay with it, because of the low impact?
I... guess? Because I'm often not at home and so the random 5 seconds per week is likely to be completely unnoticed and not affect my life? Which is pretty much how 1 million additional immigrants would feel in the US. I probably wouldn't notice.
Seriously, I'm struggling to see the analogy.
Is your point that you have a *sense* of ownership/attachment to the whole country similar to how I have a *sense* of ownership/attachment of my house? If so I think that's quite unusual - I'd imagine most people aren't as horrified about a murder happening in a small town 1000 miles away as you do in your town, let alone your house. Tribal attachment naturally weakens with scale and distance.
*my* point is that it's pointless to argue about a position no one understands. So far the difference between countries and homes are feelings, of ownership and scale. Are there principles to be drawn around them, or are we just chasing people's gut instincts? If most people are less horrified by murders far away, is it then alright to take actions that increase murders far away? I imagine most people say no. So what lines are we actually drawing?
I'm responding to your question: "what's the difference between letting people freely move into a country's borders and letting them freely move into an individual's house?"
The difference is two fold:
- Pragmatically, people in your home have much more impact on your life
- Emotionally, I think (and you seem to agree) that people care a lot more about their house boundary lines than their country's.
So I don't think the house analogy is a useful lens through which to talk about immigration. That's the extent of what I'm trying to say.
If you want to now have a conversation about principles, feel free - what principles would you start from, on the actual question of country-level immigration?
...or letting them freely move into a different city?
Yes. What's the difference?
It's interesting that sorting territories by how strongly people feel about them -- house, country, city -- is *not* the same as sorting them by size.
Most people don't care about someone moving from one city to another. It's perfectly legal, unless you are in Soviet Russia. House, I get it, the small scale is too personal. Also, you probably paid for it, so you own it.
The fact that people care more about letting strangers enter their state than about letting strangers enter their city, is in my opinion a result of successful propaganda. The kind that can convince you that people who live 1000 miles away from you in one direction are "just like you", but people who live 10 miles away from you in the opposite direction are dangerous strangers.
Well, I suppose it makes intuitive sense if you live somewhere near the geographical middle of your state. But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
> But if you live near the border, especially if you occasionally walk to the other side, the lie becomes transparent.
I dunno, I've been on several sides of West Virginia, and the prejudice is palpable. Maybe it's *because* of the lack of other differences, which requires exaggeration of the labels. But sadly enough, this kind of prejudice really does seem like human nature. :-(
i'd say that freely moving into another person's country is much worse than freely moving into someone's house, personally. My nationality is much more important to me than the building in which I happen to live, and rebuilding a nation-state is much more difficult than finding a new house.
What's the difference between the government building an army base and quartering soldiers in your house?
While it's obvious that allowing random people to enter your house is infringing on your property rights, it's not clear why the same would hold for access to the country as a whole. "The country" is not the property of an individual, nor is "citizenship," those are purely defined by the state.
Would you approve of Russia building an army base in California?
Would you approve of the US government building an army base in California?
Practically speaking one more person in the country will affect me a whole lot less than one more person in my house, as my house is a lot smaller
Maybe you can argue that in principle they are the same thing, I just don't find that all that important given the large practical difference
Are you saying we should allow exactly one more person into the country?
Less of this, please.
"Less of this, please."
Doesn't Yug have a point? You can't compare one person into the country vs one person into your house. The foreign born rate in the US is ~14%, and in places like Sweden ~20% or one in five.
In my family, one person in my house is equivalent to the foreign-born population in Sweden.
I don't think that any reasonable person could read YesNoMaybe's comment and think that they only wanted one person to be allowed into the country. Yug Gnirob is pretty clearly acting in bad faith here.
It's not just this comment either. All of Yug's comments in this thread are just as bad. For example, look here https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-350?r=izqzp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=71850493, where Yug completely ignored Beleester's point and changed the subject in a way that superficially looks like a comeback, hoping noone would notice the sleight of hand.
As for the question you brought up about population proportions, *that's not a point that Yug ever brought up*. It's possible that *you* have a point, but either way, Yug didn't.
Public education in California is already a wasteful black hole of funding and injecting more children from illegal immigrants exacerbates the problem.
I'm in favor of high-skilled immigration.
I guess the standard concern is that, if we got a bunch of low-skilled immigrants, they would mostly fail to get jobs, and go on welfare, and many of them would end up as criminals.
When you post "what are your best arguments against (low-skilled) immigration?" it sort of feels like you think it's my job to prove that low-skilled immigration is bad. I guess from my perspective I think it's Caplan's job to prove that it's good -- and I'd be more interested in case studies than in thought experiments. You can prove anything with thought experiments.
I was just reading https://mattlakeman.org/2024/03/30/notes-on-el-salvador/ (linked from the Milei article). I haven't read all of it, but there's a chapter in there about how a bunch of Salvadoran immigrants settled in Los Angeles and a startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs. This seems like a point of evidence that low-skilled immigration can sometimes have bad consequences.
>startling number of their children wound up in brutal street gangs.
What is a "startling number"? Because the pct of children who actually ended up being in "brutal street gangs" has to be very low; if it weren't, given the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who live in the LA metro area, the crime rate in Los Angeles would be vastly higher than it is.
You can find some good details in the linked article. Seems to be "hundreds of thousands" of immigrants and "tens of thousands" of gang members.
Many gang members were deported in 2005-2015, and I would guess that that has solved a lot of LA crime.
>"tens of thousands" of gang members.
Only if you take law enforcement estimates of gang membership seriously. For example, the LAPD claims that there were 38k gang members in the City of Los Angeles in 2005. https://www.laalmanac.com/crime/cr03v.php#google_vignette. If that is true, and if they are all "brutal," then why weren't there more murders? Either the numbers are inflated, or most "gang members" are hangers-on, at most. And it is definitely in part the latter (source: testimony I have read from LAPD and LASD gang experts in cases where I have helped defend gang members, including MS-13 members). And, plenty of gang members are also productive citizens most of the time -- it isn't a full-time job, for the vast majority. Most gang crime is committed by a tiny pct of members.
PS: As the article you link notes, Salvadoran gangs started as defense against predation by existing gangs. There is far less danger of that repeating itself now, when crime is much lower.
Caplan cites stats that show immigrants commit fewer crimes, but other people here have already pointed out a selection effect (the system filters out the criminal ones).
Middle eastern migrants commit crimes at about 3 times the levels of natives, controlled for age and gender. This seems to be what you would expect if you looked at the crime rates in their former countries.
BUT this higher rate is still lower than the american rate, so you might actually be able to lower US crime rates by importing more refugees. And this fact should also make us wary of putting too much weight on crime rates, an ordinary person in the US probably lives almost the same life as an European person, so if the main drawback of migration wad this change in crime it might be a deal worth taking.
I don't know specifically which stats Caplan refers to, but many papers on immigration and crime look at crime rates *controlled for education and/or income*. The new wave of stats does it implicitly, for example by looking at crime rates in locales (e.g. counties) that have a sudden increase in immigration.
The problems with that are:
1- The decrease in crime *rates* is due to the very high rates of the native (often black) population that is displaced. This is also the case when you control for education or income. Immigrants often don't even have a high-school degree and they are, almost by definition, poor. The corresponding native population is typically African-American and very prone to crime. Latinos maybe commit crime at 2 to 3x the rate of white non-immigrants while blacks do at maybe 5-8x, so there is "dilution".
2- The second and third generations may be (and in fact are) more prone to crime.
3- The rates may go down, but number of crimes still goes up.
These may or may not be a problem for you or Caplan. But the discussion about crime and immigration feels a bit disingenuous to me. *Of course* more immigration increase crime. Crime correlates with poverty and immigrants are typically poor. Sure, crime gets diluted or pushed to another neighborhood when they take over a locale, but that's not at all what is implied by Caplan and others.
I'm extremely skeptical of the kind of stats Caplan cites. Is it that immigrants themselves actually commit fewer crimes, or is it that victims *report* fewer crimes (either because they're likely to themselves be immigrants, and/or they're natives who who believe reporting the *crime* is futile, eg, hit-and-run car accidents in border states), and/or because the perpetrators of certain crimes are rarely identified, and/or the police subtly discourage or are overwhelmed by certain kinds of crime and don't factor in the states at all and/or crime stats are cherry-picked to deliberately leave out high-crime regions?
Insurance company stats are probably going to be accurate when it comes to property-related crimes, I'm guessing.
The best argument I've come across is this - rich countries are rich because of a set of very unique and fragile institutions/rules - they limit the power of govt, they protect property rights and encourage trade and competition, both internal and external. This is not a particularly stable equilibrium, it depends on a set of shared values that are very rare in both temporal and spatial distributions - rich countries are few in history, and few in the world today. Being reckless about inviting in people who do not have the shared cultural basis for this wealth is dangerous.
The people who are already there don't like it. If you can convince them, as Caplan attempts to do, fine. But there is a strong tendency in a lot of current governments to ignore the wishes of the public, and for defenders to act like it is a moral imperative to ignore the wishes of the public.
This could go very badly, and if they do, I'm going to blame the people who are creating the problem today.
Well, I'm a member of the public, not a government. We're agreed, I think, that governments generally shouldn't do wildly unpopular things. But that argument only works for governments, not people. "The citizenry doesn't want it" is a good argument for the government not doing something, but I am trying to decide if *I* want it.
Sure! I can't tell you the "correct" answer.
I lean towards simplifying the immigration process to make it easier to immigrate legally, and deporting everybody in the country illegally (they can try again, although any crimes committed while here would make the process harder / less likely to succeed). If given dictatorial power, I'd also impose a five year moratorium on -all- immigration, after the deportations, to give people time to calm down and get angry about something else.
Mostly this comes down to a hypothesis I have that the last five decades of economic growth have been slower than it could be because globalization has meant that the lowest-hanging economic fruit is in developing lagging economies - it is much harder for rich countries to get richer while poor countries exist. And one of the ways of subverting this, if you're strictly interested in improving your own country, is importing a bunch of poor people. I'd also pair it with economic development zones - areas with greatly reduced regulatory burdens, in particular labor laws / minimum wages.
Can I ask what you envisage first-world countries as looking like in an open-borders world?
Do you imagine it being "a bit like now, but browner and denser"? Or do you envisage it as "three billion desperately poor wretches living in massive shanty towns surrounding the ruins of what were once wealthy cities"? Do you imagine that, say, Nuremberg (to pick a random picturesque mid-sized city) would look more like Nuremberg or like Lagos?
If you envisage the first then I think we have a disagreement about likely outcomes. If you envisage the latter but think it's worthwhile due to fairness then we have a disagreement about morality.
Where are these three billion people coming from? The entire population of Nigeria is 218 million. The population of all of the Middle East is about 380 million, all of South America is 442 million, the population of all of Africa is about 1.37 billion.
Are you envisioning that, in an open borders world, third-world countries will be literally emptied down to the last man, woman and child? Or do you think things might reach an equilibrium somewhere below 3 billion migrants?
There's another 2.8 billion in India and China, another 700 million in South East Asia. Not all of them want to leave, but a lot will.
You're right, there might be an equilibrium somewhere, after all the nice parts of the world are just as ruined as the worst parts of the world. Note that the Third World is still pretty crap even after you remove 90% of the population, so the equilibrium will be a lot closer to the current level of Nigeria than the current level of Switzerland.
Speculatively, many of the former residents of the civilised world might find a way to go off and found their own city-states, escaping the ruins of their old countries.
Does his point change at all if only 1 billion people come to the US?
Are you using “Lagos” as a symbol of all that is wrong with the world, or are you talking about the bustling megacity itself? I can’t tell.
A bit of both? I'm talking about a vastly overpopulated urban area where the majority of people are desperately poor and living in vast shanty towns of makeshift dwellings on the outskirts. There's other cities like that in the world, but Lagos springs to mind.
Oh, yeah, I forgot: consent. Of the governed, sure, but the metaphors should suggest themselves to your mind anyway.
For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
A case could be made for choosing the one with the most severe punishments for nonbelievers or, similarly, the one that promises the greatest rewards for the faithful, but most religions are pretty strong on both counts.
Eventually, it seems inevitable that the free agent will want to narrow their choices to the ones that are most likely true. If our pilgrim instead picked one on vibes or convenience, and it turned out to be one of the countless false ones, that’d be a catastrophic outcome. Better to pick one that might feel wrong or uncomfortable, but is backed by genuine divine authority. Divinity is after all the meat of the sandwich. But what are its indicators? Internal consistency? Historical consistency? Predictive power? Compatibility with Occam’s Razor?
Edit: The free agent is not me. I’m old and already been through more religious adventures than most. Sorry for any confusion.
Have them read up on the perennial philosophy (ex. thru Aldous Huxley) and aim for the spiritual intuition that is the real core of most religions. No need to believe anyone's narratives literally, they're not meant for that - that saves them from the pain and the arbitrariness of having to choose one. If the core intuition fits, then you can feel right at home wherever it is being celebrated, no matter the form or ritual.
This sounds good, and is a practical perspective in many respects, but theologians do often insist that the narratives are truth. A religious follower eventually bumps into the ceiling (or floor) of this insistence the more dedicated they become in their faith (by definition their complete trust or confidence in something). And if one insists that nevertheless it doesn’t matter because religion is personal, this is completely at odds with the missionary aspects of at least Christianity, Islam and many other religions, though notably not Buddhism and Judaism.
I guess the practical answer to that is that what matters is the attitude of the group you're actually joining, not so much the theoretical creed of the wider religion. Abrahamic religions are theoretically exclusivistic at their root, but plenty of their followers and groups on the ground are not. I've personally met a Christian nun who is the leader of her congregation and who is qualified a Zen master at the same time... there's being open minded, and then there's that, and it's really inspiring to see how it makes 100% sense for her and her group. I've also seen plenty of Christian-Buddhists, Judeo-Buddhists, Buddhist-Hindus, Christian-Hindus, and even the odd Sufi-Buddhist, even though such combinations are theoretically impossible.
Note that plenty of Christian academic theologians have defended inclusivistic positions, and somehow they didn't get themselves excommunicated. The Indian religions are generally known for their inclusivism, but that never prevented some Buddhist groups from saying that the guys at the monastery over there didn't have the right view or practice for nirvana. It's really a question of who you associate with.
OTOH, if some group is actively participating in the missionary attempt to convert the whole world to their view, I don't think I'd want to join them in any case.
My impression of the real world is that you don't get atheists making calculations, you get people finding a good emotional fit with a religion.
That’s understandable, but the free agent isn’t an atheist. They are unaffiliated with a religion and open to accepting one. I don’t think the free agent’s behavior implies he thinks religion is bunk. What gave you that impression?
As an atheist: most of these are social clubs anyway. (Not really a criticism as most people need those and at least you get a prosocial peer group--a church is going to be better for you than those guys hanging out on the street corner smoking.) Find one that has people you like and join that one.
As a guy, one should choose a religion that has the best ratio of women to men. Even if he ends up in Hell, at least he will have some fun on the Earth.
Wonder which religion that would be?
Probably Wicca, but depending on the region, Christianity might also be a good choice.
It doesn't really make sense to pick any kind of religion at all unless you believe it, so I guess I'd just start reading religious texts until you believe one of them and then live in accordance to what you believe. But if you don't believe it then just find a good routine or life philosophy that you like and follow that. Adding in a spiritual aspect that you don't believe is true is just being false and then you live a lie, so it doesn't really matter how good of a life it leads to because the whole thing will be fake. It just sounds ridiculous to be half spiritual/religious/whatever. I hope this free agent ends up recognizing the truth.
I'm curious, what have you found in your many religious adventures?
Edit: In your many religious adventures you have most definitely heard about Jesus. What do you really know about him/why do you not believe that he's the truth?
At least what you (or the friend you are asking for) are looking for is truth, and not convenience or what will give them warm fuzzies.
I hear it’s a narrow path. My balance is poor and I’m easily distracted by roadside attractions. But there’s hope for our pilgrim.
> For someone looking to join their first religion, what would be the most objective way for them to choose? Based on what criteria?
The relevant criterion is "who do you want to form social connections with?".
I see. Why do you prefer the networking over finding true salvation and avoiding some brand of eternal misery?
Probably because the networking is real and the true salvation is fiction?
I thought you might have been asking the question in good faith.
I apologize for not assuming divinity is false.
Considering it is then, why does networking as “the relevant criterion” obviously outweigh ethical compatibility? Even if the free agent doesn’t believe in the possibility of divinity, which you’ve determined they don’t, they might reasonably favor the religion they think is most ethical.
Hot Take: religions are fan-fictions. This probably comes off as especially flippant toward theists. But conversely, it can also be looked at as especially reverent toward the value of fiction [0]. Because truth isn't just about accuracy, but also about ramifications of your behavior.
> Where religion comes into play, is when a community forms around the values promoted by the story. These shared values means it's easier to form a culture, which means it becomes easier for the members to reap the economies of scale from cooperative behavior. And this is why I've become more interested in literature as of late. The quality of your literary diet influences the quality of your value-system, which may also influence the quality of the community you find yourself in. Choose wisely.
So for me, shopping for a religion is a matter of shopping for a community which cultivates the sort of values you'd like to prioritize. So you can, to paraphrase Gandhi, "be the algorithm you want to see in the world".
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/the-descartography-of-mythopoesis
What is your pilgrim looking for? “Genuine divine authority” is hard to verify.
It sure is. But if our pilgrim can’t zero in on it, and one of the religions is actually backed by it as they all claim, he’s damned. Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
> Our pilgrim doesn’t want to be damned. And he doesn’t want to live at odds with the fundamental purpose of the universe, either.
You might want to look into Orthodox theology. They pretty much consider those two things to be equivalent, which means, in my idiosyncratic interpretation at least, that you can forget about the "damned" bit and simply (hah) aim toward alignment with the highest good. (And the Catholics explicitly accept Orthodox theology as a valid perspective on the same underlying reality that their theology attempts to describe. And a lot of Protestants tacitly accept the Catholic teachings, except where they explicitly diverge.)
In that case, I think being some flavor of Christian and trying hard to be genuinely righteous is the way to go:
That way, you get the seal of approval from Christianity and also might count as a “person of the book” in Islam and a “righteous gentile” in Judaism. It sounds simple, but it’s not.
I have thought of a simpler solution:
1) Worship the Norse pantheon.
2) Die in glorious battle.
You seem to think all religions are about salvation or punishment. That's very Abrahamic of you.
I agree. I’m overgeneralizing. But in regards to most theistic religions at least, reward and punishment do seem to play a key role.
Sorry for the late reply, but where I come from, the whole question of reward and punishment is a huge red herring and should be entirely discounted, for two reasons:
1. You can easily account for those in terms of cultural evolutionary incentives. Any group that adds talk of rewards and punishments to their story will likely have an edge over their neighbors in terms of gathering new recruits and keeping them, so any successful religion is likely to accrue these things like barnacles. And once you can account for the emergence of a belief in a way that doesn't require it to have any basis in reality, the voice of those proffering it loses all its authority.
2. More importantly, I want to argue that religious rewards and punishments are spiritually bankrupt. It basically amounts to bartering with the Deity, offering some of your attention and expecting it to massage your ego in return. If you're going to be a spiritual materialist, might as well drop all pretenses and just be a materialist.
I’m confused as to where exactly you stand. In regards to your posts in this thread, when there is an aspect of scripture that could be viewed as constrictive, manipulative or distasteful, you seem to indicate it doesn’t represent the true nature of the religion. Consequently, every claim god or his prophets or his trained representatives make (even in regards to god’s own existence) is thrown into doubt and our pilgrim is left to just follow his spiritual intuition, in violation of most religions’ doctrines. I respect your right to hold whatever view on religion you like, which clearly includes pluralism and the rejection of much scripture, but when you claim your approach is at the core of religion, I see little historical evidence or religious scholarship or teachings that support that. Perhaps that will change over time. You are free to believe it, and no doubt you are not alone as you’ve pointed to some people combing faiths that are mutually exclusive based on their scripture and the teachings of the majority of the churches’ leadership. But our pilgrim, as I stated, sees value in truth, sees that most religions’ claim to see this value as well, and since our pilgrim is without religion at the moment, he must rely on the secular tools that we all rely on to seek that out (evidence, reason, etc.).
We don't have any examples of confirmed true religions, so we're working with a data set with zero pieces of information. We thus start and end with our priors - we could use the principle of indifference to say that every religion is equally likely as the next.
So I wouldn't try to figure out which one is most likely to be true - I don't think you'll get too far.
Instead, just look at the data we do have. Every religious follower lives a life that can be observed - that gives us tons of data to use! Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
> Presumably you'd want to pick the religion that maximizes some utility function that takes lots of inputs for vibes, convenience, or whatever else is important to you. Then pick that religion - it's just as likely to be true as any other one.
Sounds good but I’m not sure about that last bit. Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny? Do stuff like verify its description of past events with multiple sources. Look for internal inconsistencies that could suggest a lack of authority or forthrightness. If it’s old and it predicted future outcomes, check to see if those outcomes came to pass as predicted. Consider the motive of the author(s) and their credentials, and weigh the arguments they make against what’s known to be true. Test any methodologies to see if their results are reproducible. Isn’t this how we usually assess written truth claims? Nobody wants their religion to be the one invented by a charlatan or a delusional prophet but by process of elimination, most (if not all) must be and surely it’s best for the free agent to critically look into how a doctrine holds up before they choose it.
It's not a bad idea, but I worry that divine truth is so far removed from secular truth as to be unrecognizable.
Internal consistency and predictive power are really, really good measurements for secular truth. But divine truth? It's totally possible (and maybe even expected) that God sometimes changes His mind. That what was permitted today is forbidden tomorrow. Or that seeming contradictions in scripture are actually divine mysteries beyond human comprehension.
I'm not totally convinced that humans are equipped to discover divine truths in the first place. After all, dogs probably will never learn calculus - they just aren't capable of understanding certain kinds of mathematical truth. Even assuming humans *can* learn divine truths, it's totally possible that such revelations haven't happened yet and won't happen in my lifetime - millions of intelligent humans lived and died without learning calculus because it hadn't been discovered yet. I know some calculus, but there are almost certainly mathematical truths that will be discovered long after I'm gone - I see no reason why I should be able to access the divine while there are still secular truths that elude me.
Regardless, I'm ultimately faced with one difficult question (the nature of divine truth) and one simpler question (what is a good life). I choose to assume that my efforts to solve the difficult question will be fruitless, and so I focus my efforts on the second question. By analogy, I'm giving up my quest for canine calculus and focusing instead on playing fetch and being a good boy.
I have a huge amount of respect for people who want to engage with the infinite - the same way I respect Newton and Leibniz for discovering calculus. But I'm not even a Newton or Leibniz, and I'm supposed to figure out who made the universe?
> Why can’t the free agent assess the claims of the faiths’ various doctrines (which are nearly all in the form of scripture) the same way we generally assess the claims of any other texts and then choose the text that holds up best to scrutiny?
Because "we don't have any examples of confirmed true religions" - in the thousands of years religions have existed, not a single one has shown itself to be as true as, say, heliocentrism or evolution. Some, indeed, claim that this is as expected - do not put your God to the test, you must ask for faith to be granted it, etc etc; we call testable, repeatable, verifiable miracles "science" and most people file them in a different file to "religion", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-vDhYTlCNw notwithstanding.
You can use the texts to /rule out/ religions, absolutely - if you find things in the text you cannot bring yourself to claim or live with, that religion is not for you. This process is necessary - but it's not sufficient; you're very unlikely indeed to end up with The One Text That Holds Up Best To Scrutiny at the end of it if rigorously followed; otherwise there would only be one widely followed religion in the world today. Once you've ruled out everything you possibly can, there is still a leap of faith to go - where there is not, we do not call that religion.
(edit: note also, incidentally, that the very concept of a set of scriptures that everyone agrees on that you can read and verify already massively narrows down your set of options; compare, e.g., east asian animistic religions, where the existence of the supernatural is widely accepted, and there are some very broadly specified parameters most agree on, but pretty much all detail is specific to your local circumstance / spirits / deities / environment and you will not be able to firmly pin down any testable specifics that are supposed to be universally true at all).
Why is this person looking to "join their first religion"? Usually you join with the community / activities because you've come to believe the claims, not the other way around. The best strategy is likely to pin down what, exactly, it is that the person is looking to get from the experience - unlike all the other questions, this should at least be one that, with some effort and introspection, it is possible to satisfyingly answer! - and try joining in with groups / activities that look like they will provide lots of those things.
Shotgun approach. Try everything, and when God starts putting his thumb on the scale, follow that one.
Assuming you're after divine truth. If you're just looking for a social club, then use social club standards.
If the Divine is unknowable, if the Spirit does not move you -- which religions seems to help you achieve the good life? Do you think that the good life is contemplation and contentedness? Buddhism. Is the good life helping others? Probably some flavour of Christianity, or maybe Sikhism. Does the good life come from living in a loving community? Take your pick, but consider one that would get you into a commune / kibbutz if you're willing to make that leap.
Don't know what the good life is? Neither do I, so I cannot help you. Read, talk, pray / meditate / think about it. Take solace in the fact that people have been documenting the difficulty of this task for at least 2,400 years.
Oh, and if you place a strong value on truth, be a deist or agnostic atheist until you find something else to be more truthful.
Up until a few hundred years ago, we humans thought the universe revolved around us, and that our world was what we see day to day, and divine entities cared about us individually and made things happen to suit us and their whims. Around 1600 Galileo, then Newton who was born the day Galileo died, showed us that we were just one of many worlds that went around the sun. About a hundred years ago Hubble and others showed us that we were just one world going around one star in a group of stars called a galaxy of which there were many galaxies. In the past 50 years or so we have come to the point where it seems the universe we live in may be infinite (or not, still TBD) but the observable universe extends about 10 to the 80th power km out and holds about 10 to the 50th power or so kg of mass. Much of what we see has been happening for billions of years at speeds up to the speed of light and power interchanges exceeding those we experience by up to around 48 orders of magnitude. Meanwhile, living entities like us (which includes animals and plants of all sizes down to microbial and viral entities) each comprise about Avogadro’s number of atoms (about 10 to the 23rd power) all interacting via electrodynamics several powers of the number of atoms of times at every instant of our existence to comprise our living interaction with the universe. And inside all of this, your mind seeks the Truth, which must somehow encompass, organize, understand, predict, and know it all from beginning to end. And somehow that seeking is driven by the same thing that every other living thing seeks as long as it lives. And sometimes you wonder what it is that you are seeking. If it is Truth, it must encompass all the above and yet somehow fit within your finite existence.
"...how much greater and more wonderful God is, then, that despite me being such an infinitesimal part of creation, He cares deeply and desires a direct, personal relationship!"
"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour."
I like the framing. I look forward to your post about choosing your second religion.
"That's me in the corner
That's me in the spot-light
Choosing my religion"
You could choose to attend different religious gatherings for different religions. See which ones feel the most welcoming to you, see which of these gatherings resonate with you the most. You could visit a service at a mosque, a synagogue, a cathedral, a buddhist temple, etc...
You could also pray about it, leaving your prayer open-ended, addressing "the divine".
A couple general ideas I'd add to this:
1. I think there's some value in both size and age when it comes to religion. Or, to be clearer about it, I think the smaller and newer you get, the more you risk falling into a cult-like community and/or something that feels like a LARP. So this would likely be an edge for the major world religions and for the larger/older denominations/sects within those major world religions.
2. There is practical value in having the same belief system as close relatives and close friends. It can make such relationships a lot smoother. So if there's already a religion that is predominant in your family, that would be an edge for that religion.
I'm not saying 1 or 2 or even both combined should be totally decisive factors, but they're probably worth considering.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. That seems really accommodating, but implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms. Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it. Because of this when a believer says that everybody can believe in whatever faith they choose, which all the major faiths expressly forbid, it seems disingenuous and patronizing. It makes that person appear either as if they don’t understand basic principles of their faith’s doctrine, or they choose to ignore it when it’s inconvenient, despite its explicit sanctity.
None of this is in judgment of you, obviously, because you didn’t identify with any particular religious doctrine. But I am surprised that most people who believe their god is the one true god won’t just come out and explain what convinced them of that god’s singular, consequential claim and compel other people to save themselves and join them since the stakes are so high.
"Each major religion asserts their specific doctrine applies to all people, not just the ones who are down with it"
this isn't true- a great many religions (probably the large majority) are ethnic religions that are for a particular ethnic group, and not only do they not actively seek out converts, they'd be kind of baffled by the concept.
You’re talking about the major ones? Because I was in your quote.
> implying it’s fine for everyone to come to different conclusions as to divine truth is at odds with the actual doctrine of nearly every major faith. None of them leave room for religious pluralism in their scripture, except maybe Buddhism in its classical forms.
There are non-major faiths that have room for religious pluralism. An argument could be made that such an attitude is desirable because the "we are the only truth" doctrine is hubris, elitist, and lacks epistemic humility.
I sometimes wonder how effective evangelism can be in our modern internet age. Actively evangelizing a religion in a modern 1st world nation is a bit like doing door-to-door sales in the age of amazon and ebay. I mean, if people want a particular good, it's never been easier to try to shop for it online. Likewise, if people are open to joining a religion, it's never been easier to read up on that religion and find what followers of that religion are saying online. When the early Christians evangelized the Christian faith in ancient Rome, for many it was something new that they genuinely never heard of before. Who in the west has never heard of Christianity? And Google is right there for anybody who wants to learn more about it.
I might regret this, but I'll come out and say that I am a Christian. It's clear that my position is a minority one here on Scott's blog, and I learned a long time ago to never get into online debates in places where the solid majority is against you. Simply reading the viewpoints and opinions of people with different beliefs and life experiences than yourself can often be highly informative and give you a greater sense of the world around you, and that's one of the reasons I'm on this blog.
I could say that you and your friend need Jesus, and I basically believe that, but saying that will probably just make you think I'm Ned Flanders given I get a strong materialist vibe from you, like I get from most people on this blog. So, what benefit is there in me doing that, for either you or your friend or me? In fact, this is why I have mixed feelings about writing this right now, since it will probably result in some people here just dismissing my opinion on any other topic based on their views of religious people.
But... yes, I would be completely failing to live in accordance with my faith if at this point I didn't put it out there. So there you go, choose to do with it what you want.
The advice I gave you before was sincere, to be clear. Within our natural life, there really are benefits to belonging to a religion that is the same as our friends and relatives. Newer/smaller religions often do seem cult-like and/or LARPy to me. And if you're going to join a religion, it really helps to be a member of a physical religious community that you find friendly and welcoming. Even many atheists here know that, it's why some try to replicate it through purely secular means.
I'll leave it at this. I hope your friend finds what they're looking for. Have a good day.
I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true, and that Moses, Buddha and Mohammed were enlightened beings the same as Jesus.
I find Christianity more powerful and more personally compelling because Jesus literally died for us - he believed so strongly in what he preached that he was willing to die for the truth.
But if someone is Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu I’m not interested in trying to convert them - I would rather them embody the tenets of their faith, which seem to me to be fundamentally similar to mine.
Hey Turtle, I encourage you to read the Gospels of Matthew and John in the Bible. I understand why you would believe what you're saying as a recent-ish convert, but it is important to know what Jesus actually said and who he is, as well as what he did for the world.
He makes it clear that he alone is the gateway to God and forgiveness of sins, and that we have to accept his sacrifice alone to pay the penalty for our sins (death) and as a result we owe our life to serving him and obeying him. He tells us that whoever is not with him is against him, and that those who love him do what he says. Those who don't do what he says do not love him.
What makes a Christian is someone who recognizes Jesus as the son of God and sees their own evil and imperfection, and then accepts the sacrifice that Jesus made and has faith in him that he purifies them and will take them to live with him for eternity. A Christian gives up his own life to follow and obey Jesus and out of love for God and his fellow man, shares the truth with others in obedience to God's command and in hopes that they will recognize the truth and be united with God and all His children.
Jesus says to do what he says, so that requires knowing what he says. So please, I urge you to read God's word and believe it. It may be more immediately helpful to start with the New Testament, but all of it is very important and it is so wonderful.
> I am Christian (fairly recent conversion) and believe that all religions are fundamentally true
...then, I am sorry, but you are not a (mainstream) Christian. Christianity is incompatible with those other religions; the Nicene Creed makes some very specific claims, as does the bible itself, and these are at odds with claims the other religions you list make. When you join a mainstream church, you will be required to affirm your agreement with some version of the Nicene creed on a regular basis as one of the terms of your membership.
If you have not already, you might like to investigate your local unitarian or quaker communities, as they hold to a smaller (and therefore less exclusive) set of core beliefs and are more tolerant of a wider range of views; though John 14:6 will still be hard to wrestle with.
Aside from Truth...
Is it growing? Are its members relatively happy and healthy? How has it dealt with the historical problems it faced? When it had to make tough decisions, how often did it come down on the side that you think is right? Nothing involving humans is perfect; does it recover from human-caused errors? What kind of things do you have to agree to do, and what are the reasons for them?
How much crazy stuff is there in the backstory that needs to be interpreted away? Is its global organizational model scalable? How do you feel about it participating in politics? It's going to have factions; are the factions you like ascendant or declining? After you've joined, is it OK to have a crisis of faith?
What happens if you leave?
I was part of a team advocating for a revision of SB 1308 [1], a California bill that would have prevented the use of far-UV [2] in California, as a side effect of banning ozone-producing indoor air cleaners. I'm seeing now that there's a measure on the Berkeley ballot [3] that mandates raising air standards in buildings owned or leased by the city to meet ASHRAE 241 [4] air quality requirements, but specifically NOT by using whole-room far-UV ("the City…shall not install any ultraviolet light disinfection technology in such a manner that the light will come into contact with human skin").
ASHRAE 241 is a solid standard, and it would be good for Berkeley to adopt it, so at first glance, I mostly want this to pass if it seems realistic for it to actually be upheld. However, it could be impractical to meet the standard without using germicidal UV, depending on the typical occupancy of the city-owned/leased buildings (of which I'm unsure). I just don't understand the antipathy toward germicidal UV here. Does anyone know how this measure was developed and why it excludes the use of whole-room far-UV? (Very possibly the authors of the language have never heard of far-UV and just want to guard against the use of carelessly installed upper-room germicidal UV.)
[1] astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333
[2] vox.com/the-highlight/23972651/ultraviolet-disinfection-germicide-far-uv
[3] acvote.alamedacountyca.gov/acvote-assets/02_election_information/PDFs/20241105/en/Measures/26%20-%20Measure%20HH%20-%20City%20of%20Berkeley%20-%20Indoor%20Air%20Quality.pdf
[4] drive.google.com/file/d/1kmDyJEkcCi0U-WV2YZDg-X7N2Sr4_6wC/view
I guess you had to ban LearningHebrewHatesIsrael but it's a shame.
First of all I get it. Not only was (new-name) LearnsHebrewHatesIP pro-assassination but (excepting his imagination of Yahweh's hell - source?) he sounded serious too. Not serious enough to do it himself of course but you know he kind of sounded like he really really wanted Trump dead.
(Unlike my own offering of simply giving Mencken a voice: https://ydydy.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-are-better-left-unsaid )
Even so, while I obviously agree that anyone who feels so strongly about something so silly as a president is making a very unfortunate error for themselves and their emotions, it should be fine to "wish" for whatever you like and to say so.
I support the ban because obviously that sort of talk ends up spiraling with back talk and eventually leads to a whole lot of hate among real people who can hear each other (rather than for Trump or dead-dude who can not) and actually cause a great deal of unhappiness even if it's just about what I regard as fighting over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
In addition, I think you had to do it not just for the good of anyone who might get caught up in it, but for the tone of the whole platform if that kind of thing is allowed.
And finally, considering how badly people behave on the internet that would not surprise me if his own colorful wishes ended up with bad people counting you personally as responsible for allowing it and not banning him for it, and using it as a cudgle against you who definitely doesn't deserve it (not that he would but he seems to be cool with whatever response might come from that comment).
At the same time, as you can see from the above I don't take it all that seriously and I think that you don't take it all that seriously either (other than for its potentially deleterious second-hand effects), so, while a ban makes a lot of sense (based at least on the criteria of the local snitches) I think he's also someone worth having around and that therefore perhaps has been for a shorter period I don't know what periods you usually use but I would think a week or a month if need be.
This isn't because I found that particular comment something that anyone in the world really needs to read but because I remember when he showed up shortly after October 7th last year. He was very angry and very violent but I realized that he was also sincere.
And sincere people can grow.
I wrote him at some length not expressly dealing with the accusations or hatreds or whatnot but pointing out that he seems to not have all the information or to have considered all the perspectives but would probably want to do so.
He seemed logic-based rather than team-based, *even if he was* shouting for the bloody murder of one particular team.
It's true that he's more colorful and passionate than most but (from the admittedly limited number of comments of his that I have read) he seems to be someone who actually cares. About people and about truth, and about checking his presumptions in his own head so that he can change them if rationality and heart recommend him doing so.
Anyhow, the commentariot here is a diverse bunch. But while I can't say that I've learned much information about the outside world from those comments of his that I've read, I do feel like I learned about him enough for him to distinguish himself here as a good bloke whose passion doesn't only fire outward, but also inward. In other words, a (loud but) humble fellow.
That's a rare quality.
It may be a quality more highly represented here than on the general internet, but even here it's rare.
He even went so far as to change his nom when he realized that Jews/Israelis aren't the devils he thought they were and that their enemies aren't quite so innocent as he had priorly felt.
That's an impressive thing. It's humility.
Anyway, he seemed like one of those few dudes on the internet who might turn into a publicly helpful high quality person given some time to explore and grow.
If this is an epitaph, so be it, but I liked him (even at his most genocidal against my own tribe and self) so I wish him well.
Yeah he was a valuable commenter and it’s a shame he’s banned
I don't think it's a bannable comment, period. It was obviously an expression of emotion, not a statement of LHHIP's actual views about the best strategy for those who strongly oppose Trump. He ends up by talking about how he can't stand the fucking Cheeto one second longer. That's not how people speaking up in favor or assassination as a strategy sound! Come on, it's an emotional rant.
Yeah, if Trump had died that day there would have been a civil war in America. Not something to wish for. I do believe that God saved him.
I don't think it would have been a civil war, not immediately. But it would have been enormously bad for American democracy. If you're up on late Republican Roman history, there's a tiny meme that "he's not either Caesar, he's Tiberius Gracchus", and that would have sealed it in.
Why would there have been civil war? I don't get that at all. What would be the two sides?
I don't think it would have happened, but the implication is that Trump's supporters would lose faith in the process itself. First they steal the election, and then they kill the candidate to make sure he can't win again. If they can do that to a wealthy former president, they can do it to anyone.
Whoever "they" are in this scenario, they would obviously control most or all possible candidates, regardless of party (they might cite Kamala being endorsed by pretty much Bush's entire leadership team), so they can't trust a Rubio or DeSantis either.
This is a group with strong independent streaks and lots of weapons, as well as a significant number of supporters in the rank and file military. If any non-majority in the US could fight or win a civil war, that's likely the one.
I cannot think of a comment that would be more bannable than calling for the assassination of a political candidate during an election.
First off, LHHIP's comment was not "calling for assassination", it was wishing that an already-happened assassination had succeeded. It is a subtle distinction, but relevant in that, for example, it was not a call to action like your comment implies.
Second, I don't know about ACX, but over on the sister site Data Secrets Lox, rightwingers can openly cheer on politically-motivated murder with no bans in sight: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11572.msg512555.html#msg512555
It's been months, but that reads to me like an absurd joke, given the absurd question that it answered. If it were serious, I would have issued a warning or a ban, depending on circumstances. Since it's joking, nowadays it's more likely to get a warning:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,12324.msg572810.html#msg572810
And left or right has nothing to do with it (as evidenced by the number of complaints we get from each side for being biased in the other direction).
Emotional rants have no place in this comment area. They are neither kind, nor necessary, and if you’re right this one wasn’t even true.
He surprised me with his sincerity and humility: I'd argue with him and would write him off as a troll, and then he'd write a mea culpa and ask the community for forgiveness. Certainly a remarkable fellow.
But I support the ban, and it's a long time coming. Quite frankly, he often came off as an unhinged and aggressive crank, because, well, he was one. A remarkable and surprisingly humble unhinged crank, but a crank nonetheless. He couldn't keep up the level of civility expected for this comment section, and if you don't pull weeds you don't have a garden (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/)
Yes, I agree. Your links to some of his really bad posts convinced me. I
put a post about now
supporting the ban, here: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-350?utm_source=direct&r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=71859288
I read most of his posts, even on threads I wasn't very interested in, and don't recall any that sounded unhinged, after the early era when he was incandescent with rage, and his name was LearnedHebrewHatesIsrael. When has he sounded unhinged recently?
He often wasn't unhinged, but when he was he was *really* unhinged. Also, seemed to have a particular hangup on killing Trump. Some receipts:
"Trump is to humans as shit is to food. He is refuse. The world would be better if everyone would shoot the likes of Trump."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-338?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=62235080
"Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough, and everybody who finds this sentiment so intolerable that it invites summary immediate dismissal is buckling under an immense amount of peer pressure."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63034035
"Trump in particular is a low-value human that absolutely no one is capable of missing if their life depended on it. He's the archetypical "Unsympathetic Victim" that gets killed by the sympathetic character in shows like CSI and NCIS and the audience forgives and even cheers for the sympathetic character....For all of those reasons and possibly more that I'm too lazy to articulate, I think that the rule "Killing is bad unless the target is in the exception list" and adding Trump and Trump-like insects as entries in the exceptions list is basically a good compromise. I think that "Acts like Trump" is a very good and unambiguous exception condition that would almost never harm a good person."
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63154954
"Killing Trump is not bad because it can be done surgically, with 0 casualties other than Trump (who, I argue, isn't a "casualty" at all). This reminds me: I have wrongly said that Trump's shooter did nothing wrong, I retract that. He did one major crime: he murdered an innocent man. That man was "collateral damage", to use the favorite word of Israel's defenders, but I would still have supported trialing the shooter on charges of murder, if he survived....In summary: Trump (and all politicians who directly or indirectly kill people) are valid targets of assassination because assassination by its very nature is surgical, in fact it's an often-presented alternative to wars like the one in Gaza. "
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/some-practical-considerations-before?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=63187830
Problem is the "the shooter did wrong in that he killed an innocent man". The kinds of views about Trump on display here (shit, less than human, should be shot) that I see online also encompass his supporters (and indeed, in these comments we get 'acting like Trump' is enough for someone to deserve having their brains blown out).
Those people would not think that man was innocent. If he went to a rally for Trump then he too deserved to die, because supporting Trump means you are as evil and less than human and shit and so forth as Trump.
I don't think anyone should die for going to a political rally, not even the loo-lahs who went to the Democratic convention soirée about how fabulosa they were for being Harris supporters:
https://www.wired.com/story/hotties-for-harris-influencers-dnc/
I have to say, I think that last comment you link to is high quality, when considered in full, and I only wish that we (well, you) hadn't had to go through the low quality parts of the previous comments to get to it. Replacing war with assassination of leaders is a classic if fringe position, especially among anarchists. And given that LHHI lives close to a current war, and is subject to a dictator, I can't particularly fault him for it. :-/
I suppose since I'm complimenting people, I shouldn't except those who are still here, so: you're great, thank you for being here, I hope you keep it up. :-) Despite the nice things I said about LHHI, I don't think I could have engaged with him the way you did there.
> "Trump's shooter did nothing wrong except not wielding the weapon accurately enough
This sadly seems pretty typical of internet commentary. I'm pretty sure I could dig up similar comments from rightwingers on DSL if I tried.
It’s pretty bad. America came a couple of inches from a civil war
It was false contrition - how many times did he issue the same fake apology, rake in all the respect for "changing his mind" then go straight back to the same murderous unhinged takes the next day?
Good riddance!
I believe there was only one major time when he apologized, changed his user name, and changed dramatically. What's *your* count of how many "fake apologies" he issued ?Can name some other times he did that? -- I'm not talking about something like, "sorry, I was a bit harsh" but a long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change?
I don't have the time to find all of them, but I'm aware of at least three "long, thoughtful-seeming post in which he apologized and vowed to change" that he put out. One was to me in particular! (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=fczlp&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50980216)
Spread light, not heat.
The heat keeps me warm in the long lonely nights of being single at home.
Is it possible to simulate quantum computing with (slower) regular computing?
If not, then does this mean the we-are-living-in-a-simulation hypothesis has to be wrong because quantum computing exists? Or maybe the computer simulating us is a quantum computer?
Yes, absolutely, but it's exponentially harder: the state of n entangled cubits requires 2^n complex numbers to track (clever tricks can reduce this, but not by much), and even if a gate only acts on two wires it can still have to perform a calculation using all those numbers.
Which means if (a) quantum computing works (b) we are in a universe simulated by a classical computer… then we can cause a big performance problem for whoever is running the simulation.
Kind of like those protests in massively mul
.. massively multi player games.
You'll also need a source of randomness for the important last step of "actually get a measurement", since the final quantum state basically acts as a probability distribution over N-bit strings. But otherwise yes, a quantum computer can be simulated by a Turing machine with the ability to call a random number generator at the end of the computation (at the cost of exponential time/space).
If this universe is a simulation, how can you use it to draw conclusions about what's possible in the external universe? I mean really, only 3 spacial dimensions and 1 time dimension? Once that's off the table what does your question even mean?
Thanks for this, I had an unconsidered assumption that the simulating computer was in a universe like ours. Which led me to think that the simulation hypothesis has infinitesimal odds of correctness because the simulating computer must be larger than our simulated universe, where larger doesn't mean length or volume but number of component pieces. E.g. - To simulate our universe at the level of detail of elementary particles (which is needed to give the substrate upon which our consciousness can arise as an emergent phenomenon) the simulating computer must consist of more elementary particles than the number of elementary particles in our universe. Which seems highly improbable. But in a different kind of universe that we cannot imagine, things could be different - their computers could be made of something different from our elementary particles. I think the concept that the simulator must be larger then the simulated would still be true, that's a part of computer science which is applied math, and I think math is independent of universes.
Oh there are ideas like having part of the server decide whether to combine some high-level parts of the simulation into low-level, so that instead of simulating (say) atoms of stars more than 1AU away from Earth, you just simulate "a star", editing telescope images as needed. It's also argued that some people are lightly simulated NPCs, which allows for near infinite contempt against anyone inconvenient to believers.
I'm not advocating for the simulation theory. It feels like utter bunk. Especially the "trillion-to-one odds against this being the first world" hypothesis.
But I can't prove it.
There's a trend over the last few years of trying to reshore industrialization. So far the focus is on chips (which makes sense, since they're both a critical security need and something America was a world leader on at one point and so plausibly could be again), and ships and anything government infrastructure related (including trains, dredges, steel and buses) which is understandable (the government can much more easily enforce buy america through government programs) but altogether a terrible idea (America has never been especially good at building them and the subsidies and restrictions that exist can't possibly get it to even make a serious attempt, just harm our infrastructure).
What other areas are an especially good idea to be focuses of reshoring industry (given that America can't be a global manufacturing hub for literally everything and does actually need to pick)? And what focuses have been suggested that are especially terrible ones?
I don't think any of these are a good idea, but if I was going to prop up one industry I'd prop up raw materials refining. Oils, metals, gases, pretty much everything. It could be mined anywhere but all refined products would be subject to tariffs.
Why that one? It actually seems like not a very good one for the US, which has an advantage on higher value parts of the production chain? (Specifically steel is one of those things the US has never been good at and offshored to Japan as early as it could).
There exists only one country powerful enough to not sell to the US.
China has a deep hold on refined metals and so when subsidising an industry that is the one I'd pick. By contrast leading edge microprocessors are mostly made in Taiwan, Korea, and the US. Why is it so necessary for the US to make the very best chips in the US instead of Taiwan? Being one year behind Taiwan doesn't seem to pose any national security risk to me.
But when China refines 95% of the world's rare earth elements or 80% of its cobalt? That's a supply chain security risk. (Don't quote me on the exact figures, going off old memory here.)
Rare earth elements specifically makes sense, yeah. (Other forms of refinement are more common in US allies and would make less sense)
Drug production. I mean medicinal ones, especially generics. According to a 2014 study, about 40% of generic drugs in the US have only one manufacturer. This has likely become worse since then. Supply chain failures for basic drugs have already become much more common.
Here are some charts: https://qualitymatters.usp.org/geographic-concentration-pharmaceutical-manufacturing
And an article arguing in favor or reshoring: https://theconversation.com/blame-capitalism-why-hundreds-of-decades-old-yet-vital-drugs-are-nearly-impossible-to-find-206848
Solar panels and wind turbines. America's rise to a preeminent global superpower also coincided with American preeminence in fossil fuel production. If America had been dependent on other countries for such fuels (e.g. Germany or Japan), the world might have been totally different.
We already lost to China on solar panels -
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-how-us-lost-solar-power-race-to-china/
Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
Not only do you get to sell the robots, you also get to sell everything else, because the most convenient place to set up the everything-else factories is right next to the robot factories.
I know that robots have been used in manufacturing for decades, but I think they're due for a big step function increase. At some point we get the GPT-3 of robots, which turns them from hyper-specialised tools for use in narrow circumstances into tools that you can use for pretty much any basic manufacturing task. And you really want that to happen in your country, not in China.
Also solar panels, to power all the everything factories.
> Robots. As manufacturing becomes more and more robot-based and less dependent on human wages, you want to be the place where all the robots are being manufactured.
That's a great one. GOOG definitely jumped the gun by a decade when acquiring Boston Dynamics. Now Hyundai has them, and is explicitly using them to carve out a niche in automation robotics.
Somebody needs to tell NVIDIA to stop open sourcing their Eureka code, too.
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/eureka-robotics-research/
I agree on solar, but China literally manufacturers 90% of the world's solar panels, and it's a steep climb from here, especially with our environmental laws.
Cars - plenty of good cars are manufactured in fully developed countries, including all the arguably best ones.
We still manufacture Teslas and Corvettes and whatever domestically, and used to manufacture all the cars sold in America domestically (40's). We're down to about 45% with offshoring and "American" brands being manufactured in Mexico.
And don't cars have absolutely huge trickle-down effects in first, second, and third string parts suppliers and domestic jobs? Isn't that why we bailed the Big 3 out?
If "45%" was enough to bail out the Big 3, how much more domestic jobs and GDP would result in bringing the 55% back? Seems like a win.
But is there evidence we get either strong strategic benefits from it (I think not, since most of the offshored parts are in allied countries) or good bang for your buck job wise (I think not so much since there's a pretty good split now, though not very confident about that). The question isn't just "do we get jobs back with arbitrary cost" but "do we get good jobs and valuable production in return for our cost". Cars seem fairly replacement level on that front - not an especially terrible idea, but also not the most efficient way to turn government subsidies to jobs and domestic production.
It seems a good tradeoff to me - the 45% represents 4-5M jobs across primary manufacturing and first, second, third string suppliers, so bringing back another 45% would bring back 4-5M jobs. That's a solid 3% of the total workforce, and they're all "good, honest manufacturing jobs" that could revitalize Rust Belt towns and whatever.
But as to strategic benefits, yeah, I think we should be doubling and tripling down on chip fabs, large transformer and electrical plant manufacturing (while machete-ing regulation that prevents expansion and new builds with abandon), solar panel production, and so on.
From a strategic standpoint, we should also definitely stop wasting our country's finest minds in eyeball / attention mines and finance. The amount of brainpower that goes into online ads has to be the biggest waste of intellectual horsepower ever known, and they're *really bad at it* on top of it. But the scale of GOOG and FB is enough they're still trillion dollar companies while being really bad at serving relevant ads.
But all those Phd's and brilliant people wasting their talents to create more CDO's and irrelevant ads should be working in cybersecurity and preventing corporate espionage or something actually strategically useful.
If I were in charge, I'd be offering TSMC employees FAANG and OpenAI style compensation packages to incentivize as many of them to come over as possible and start building new factories yesterday, and I'd be "national security lettering" like 10-20% of FAAMG workforces to go do something actually useful instead, but that's all pretty pie in the sky.
But I think jobs-wise, all those things combined would barely move the needle - maybe 20% as much as the cars thing.
We'd be gaining automotive jobs and losing other jobs. Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job. And the principle of comparative advantage says that the trade of sacrificing other jobs to gain automotive jobs will make us net poorer. Seems like a loss.
> Mexico sells us cars so that they can buy other stuff from us, if we stop buying cars from them, they won't have money to buy the other stuff, and some of the people who make the other stuff will be out of a job.
I don't think that's true. The biggest categories of Mexico's US-origin imports are electrical machinery and equipment, computers, vehicles, oil, plastics, and agriculture.
Most of those are probably at an efficient frontier in terms of US labor-hours going into them vs automation, and the marginal change from Mexico buying less (which tops out at 20-100B per category) is unlikely to result in a substantial reduction of jobs versus the overall production volumes.
In other words, if Mexico buys less corn or soybeans, it's not going to affect jobs because "farming" is basically fully automated and <2% of US jobs are farmers, and because Mexico is buying <1% of our overall farming output.
Same with oil, computers, etc.
I mean yes, I get what the theory of comparative advantage says, I'm just pointing out in the actual empirical world, I doubt we'd see these effects. The gap between theory and practice in economics can be noticeably wide due to regulations, social and business dynamics, etc.
Versus there's 4-5M automotive jobs in the US, considering direct manufacturing and first, second, and third tier suppliers, and that's at the current 45% US-origin manufacturing. I would personally bet on adding 5M manufacturing jobs to the US being more net positive empirically than Mexico buying a little less oil, agricultural products, and computers.
If you think poorer-but-with-more-jobs is a good trade, why not undo automation? Ban tractors and farming machinery etc. That will also add jobs (while impoverishing us) same as autarky will.
Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
But you know, we'd probably have a Terror or Revolution if we went that route.
I think there's always a tradeoff between aggregate social qualiity of life and economic productivity, and although those 5M jobs would in some sense be "welfare" because it's not the strictly maximally-economically optimal thing to do, I think the amount of "GDP and good jobs in the US for average people" tradeoff is fine and probably net positive overall vs the "some corporations / stockholders will make 0.5% more annually."
And just imagine the political capital from whoever did this! "I brought back 5M jobs to the US, good manufacturing jobs, revitalizing entire Rust Belt towns, etc." I mean, whichever side did it would cement a good chunk of those votes for the next 10-20 years, I'm surprised it's not in the Overton Window of stuff being discussed.
>> Sure, and if enrichening us is the main goal, let's eliminate all social welfare, eliminate corporate and capital gains taxes, get rid of most regulation, etc. GDP will go up noticeably, along with Gini index and whatever.
Your terms are acceptable.
What's the logic here? We've made bad decisions in the past, so we must make more bad decisions in the future?
Boeing used to be able to build excellent jets until they outsourced everything. Now they will either reshore or fail.
"Reshoring" refers to bringing industrialization back from other countries. Boeing's largest and now-most-infamous outside supplier has been Spirit AeroSystems. That company, which was previously Boeing's own division before being spun off in 2005, is headquartered in Wichita and was doing virtually all of its Boeing assembly within the US. Boeing is now retaking control of Spirit Aero and its work, having agreed this summer on reacquiring all of those US operations.
Boeing in 2017 had off-shored the detailed-design and operational control of the extremely-complex manufacturing of its planes to software from a French company called Dassault Systèmes. As Boeing planes lately began falling apart and failing to fly safely, Congresscritters and others have seized upon that Dassault decision as "the problem". An awkward fact however is that Boeing's primary competitor, Airbus, made the exact same change to the same software from the same company, Dassault. AirBus planes however are not having anywhere near the problems that Boeing planes now are.
If I recall correctly, Peter Zeihan thought our best move (not that we have to do much moving about it, he thought it would happen naturally) would be to take the light industry we offshored to China and move it to Mexico. Mexico has cheap labor, a large population, is not a geopolitical threat, and is right next door.
Just two this week: "Fairness for Harris"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/fairness-for-harris in which I mildly disagree with Noah Smith for his too relaxed attitude to Harris's too relaxed attituded to deficits.
and "Interest Rate Targeting"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/interest-rate-targeting in which I think Sumner is confusing (probably not himself confused) about the difference between interest rates as an instrument of policy vs a target of policy.
Comments welcome.
Why does the brain age so much slower than the rest of the body? Physical decline (eg. muscle loss) is near-universal amongst the elderly, but many elderly people seem roughly as sharp as they've always been, with relatively little cognitive decline - for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68. Even if he had exceptional ability, no athletes are still competitive at 68 (except in less physical sports like archery)
<quote> for example, Korchnoi was still in the top 30 chess players worldwide at age 68.</quote>
I question this is a good example, as it is comparing Korchnoi to opponents, not to his younger brain.
Additionally it may be an extreme outlier. How do most elite players ability relate to their age?
I'd challenge the idea that the rest of the body ages faster than the brain just because of the distribution of top performers in chess vs physical sports. First off, the brain isn't just a doing organ, it's a learning organ--if we were teaching everybody involved a new game the advantages of youth would be more obvious. Don't kids tend to dominate in video games? I don't think it's just because their little fingers are faster. Or the phenomenon where younger people are responsible for more groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics, cognitively demanding domains where you benefit less from experience than you do in chess, I'd think. Second, there are more organs in the body than those relevant for sports, and moreover one of the sports-relevant organs is actually the brain--one reason for decline is sports performance with age is slower reaction times, which is a brain (and rest of the nervous system) thing. Third, is either of these things even a good proxy for something like 'rate of aging'?
To me the interesting angle is more like, why don't we seem to lose cognitive skills faster as we age? Apparently you can damage a lot of neural tissue before symptoms of a neurodegenerative problem (Alzheimer's, say, I'm generalizing but we're all implicating cortical tissue, which has this property) are obvious. As @pangsofmacha said below, cognitive development requires neural pruning for optimization, so more isn't necessarily better, but brain tissue is metabolically expensive so we must be netting other benefits from neurons we don't strictly "seem to need" to get (what we perceive to be) the cognitive job done. Redundancy enabling longevity might be part of the answer.
I don’t have time to look up references right now, so I’ll just state it as I remember: muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age. Ultrasonic scans of 70 y.o. active triathletes show no signs of muscle loss. There are other aspects of physical decline, such as arthritis, but one can maintain the muscle mass well into old age.
> muscle loss is primarily related to inactivity, not age.
Yeah, I second this. Hunter Gatherers are about 5x more active than Westerners.
If you study Hunter Gatherers vs Western sedentaries, older hunter gatherer women and men in their 60-70’s in general are on par with Westerners in their 40-50’s.
There’s no decline in walking speed among Hadza women as they age (whereas Western women go from 3 feet per second at under 50yo to 2fps by the time they’re over 60.)
Grip strength remains notably higher in both hunter gatherer men and women into their 70’s relative to Westerners, and more.
I think that's the case, because I've run with a lot of people over 70, and many of them are still in very good shape. They might be the lucky few, but I suspect it's more a lifetime of being active that does it.
The stats seem to show that significant decline is universal; eg. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Senior-and-Master-World-Record-Performance-100m-run-and-Long-Jump-of-male-and-female_tbl1_334901609
I suspect these 70+ year old runners started from a higher baseline or didn't realise their (decreasing with age) potential in their youth. Regarding the study mentioned above, without seeing it I'm skeptical - was the study comparing them to the average, or to their younger selves?
I think in general power decreases more significantly with age than endurance.
I'm not sure looking at world records is the best way to judge decline. I wouldn't dispute that absolute peak levels decline with age, but very few people ever reach that level at any age. It's actually quite extraordinary to me that any 70 year old can run 100m in 12.8s - which would outpace many 18 year olds.
Found it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22030953/
Comparison to peers. Obviously couldn’t directly compare to younger selves :)
Clarification - by study mentioned above I meant the ultrasound scans mentioned by 1123581321
This is a really interesting question. Here’s a few ideas that might be relevant, all off the top of my head, so I haven’t double checked them.
- there is less cell turnover in the brain than most other organs which may affect rate of aging.
- the brain is metabolically different than most other organs, and it seems plausible that it’s metabolic demands continue to be (relatively) adequately met later in life, whereas the same may not be true for other parts of the body eg. skeletal muscle.
- “something-something brain plasticity”, it’s an easy idea to mock because it’s been hijacked by pop psychology, but the ability of the brain to compensate for injuries, adapt, and “rewire“ to some limited extent may help explain it’s robustness.
- just based on what I know about evolutionary theory and genetics I’m not a big fan of group selection and related theories, but that said, it doesn’t seem crazy to think it’s an advantage for our species to have mentally sharp grandmothers and grandfathers. I’m not exactly sure how the actual genetic/mechanistic part would work, but the concept seems reasonable.
There is some research going on about synaptic pruning that occurs at puberty and at menopause .
I’d speculate that activities showing less decline with age are those that benefit most from experience.
I don’t know that there’s a definition of tissue aging that incorporates brain and body that shows the brain generally ages more slowly than the body. I would expect a priori that different tissue material properties change at different rates in different tissues. There are evolutionary theory reasons to expect that the impact of different aging trajectories for these properties on reproductive fitness will be similar no matter which you look at. But success in sport, chess, etc. isn’t identical to reproductive fitness, of course.
This is likely because the plasticity of learning means the brain is more sensitive to homeostatic feedback. Both brain and body persist for much longer than dead organic tissue because both are open to feedback processes that resist entropic decline. However, this is (relatively) slow in the case of non-cortical tissue due to the feedback mechanisms being coarser and less sensitive. Learning, however, requires highly sensitive on-the-fly re-weighting of neural connections, so any decline in function can be detected and compensated. (When I notice that I'm getting hazy on something I know, I relearn it––and familiarity means I do so efficiently.) So while the brain likely physically declines at the same rate, the cognitive pathways can be 're-routed' before they are lost. Of course, there will eventually come a point where they can't, and this is when permanent cognitive decline sets in.
Does the ability to 're-rout' cognitive pathways not decline much with age? Or is it that it starts from a high enough baseline that the decline has little effect -i.e. that people start with more than they need
I think the answer is yes. Synaptic pruning actively removes extra cortical structure in childhood and makes cognition more effective. This obviously isn't the same as age-related cognitive decline, but it certainly shows that "more is better" doesn't hold true for cortical connectivity. That said, the ability to 're-route' probably does decline a little with age, and it may well be that the skills best preserved are those that have been reinforced by repetition. (Cue elderly stats professor who can to maximum likelihood estimation in her sleep, but does no better than age-related controls on everything else.)
To follow up on the discussion of homeless people, drug addiction, mental health, institutionalization, and "housing first", here's a video about how the current policies are playing out. I am informed that it is accurate.
https://youtu.be/yTNyQVWX5nU
"Behind Closed Doors" by V Ginny Burton
(It's 49 minutes; there's also a 30-minute version that edits out the less vital stuff. But I like context.)
Good documentary - one thing that struck me:
Around the 29:26 mark, one man she is interviewing says that housing first "sucks" because "they say they'll have this and this and this, they say they'll help you, but only they'll only help you to a certain point" and at 30:19 it's corroborated by staff that there's a period around the 25th of each month where the population has run out of money, and thus is out of drugs, and people begin to sober up and ask for help, but there are no resources to help them: "They want help. I tried, but there was no bed space, I couldn't get people any kind of treatment... I couldn't find bed space, I didn't know where to put them... If I could get them a bed somewhere... there [were] no beds... every month it was the same thing."
Then a few minutes later at 37:49, the program contrasts a housing first model for a model that begins with arrest, which seems to be presented favorably because arrest forces a state of sobriety after which people can be helped. The host interviews a police officer who describes how "it was awesome to see these women, former convicts, get up on stage and tell their story, and every single one of them attributed their success to having been arrested and then being led towards a personal accountability perspective... I would like people to think, and consider, that the most compassionate thing we could do would be to interrupt that cycle of addiction and then provide real meaningful care for those people without the opportunity to go back" and the host agrees "during incarceration, during that separated time, separation, services, and accountability."
That seems to imply that the question isn't one of housing first vs arrest first, but so much as it's one of resources and support services, and whether there is sufficient funding to make those available. Housing first is critiqued for promising but not delivering on support services, while arrest is offered as valuable because it can connect people "separation, services, and accountability." So it seems like the "services" part is the key, which would mean either approach can be effective if it can route someone to support services, and both will be ineffective insofar as there are no support services at the end of the bridge.
And I'm very skeptical that local governments would actually be willing to pay for those kinds of services, so it seems like while we may be debating whether arrest-first or housing-first creates better outcomes, practically speaking what we're choosing between is concentrating the ills of poverty into a single toxic space, or running those ills through a revolving door.
Can someone steel man the case for seed oil for an anti-scientism prospective?
Food science is one of the more publicly corrupt; my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers; and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
Id have to look up meme but butter steps to make is 1. shake cream; while seed oils are gaint walls-o-text with many many scary chemicals.
But Im worried that picking up a butter-based diet maybe an overcorrection
"and health outcomes are getting worse not better so unlike say physics making better computer chips, I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker."
It is interesting to me that at a time when we have more food science than ever before, we also have a lot of obesity, and not much sign of people being healthier on the basis of what we eat. At least, I personally haven't seen much evidence of food science resulting in a healthier populace.
Perhaps this is down to people simply not following up-to-date food science? Still, if this is the case, I find it a bit weird that I haven't heard of much food education efforts by the government or health authorities, especially given increasing weight issues throughout the population.
I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact. I'd genuinely be curious to hear from strong supporters of food science on why we're not reaping as much obvious benefit from food science as we are from computer science or physics or chemistry.
>>I see no evidence of food science not making everyone sicker.
>I haven't studied food science in detail...curious
When I last looked into it its a bunch of population studies making dubious and reductionist assumptions; while your stomach is a bioreactor that evolves over your life time. I expect that your need a micro boime test, adding some strains, and only then a standard diet can exist.
Unlike skincolor its unlikely you get half your mircoboime from your father, so I dont even understand how its possible to detect diet requirements based on race
> I haven't studied food science in detail, but just from looking at the world around me, I don't get an impression that it's had much positive impact.
I've been friends with a few food scientists over the years, and food science is fully adversarial, at least in regards to general health and well being.
The things being optimized are creating superstimuli with tastiness and "morishness" where people want more, because those are the things that sells more units, and selling more units is what the companies employing food scientists want to do.
It's not that they WANT to make their customers fat and unhealthy, that's just a side effect of the tastiness and morishness right now. When we get to a point we can legitimately create truly biologically-neutral taste-conveying "food," I'm sure they'll pivot to those.
I see. Thanks a lot for the reply! It does explain a lot.
Why in particular should oils derived from squeezing seeds be bad, but oils derived from squeezing fruits (or a cow's tits) be good? Why not the other way around?
Telos. Fruits and milk want to be consumed. Seeds do not. So, a priori it makes sense that the first two would be more likely to be helpful to their consumer than the latter, due to evolution.
Milk does not want to be consumed by humans
Yeah, but it wants to be consumed by a large mammal, which is pretty close. A human is much closer to a calf than a canola seedling.
Or, maybe seeds want to be consumed by humans, so that they can be cultivated in large numbers?
Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy? Why or why not? If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> Do you think meta-analyses of seed oil studies are trustworthy?
No, probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests and the flip flopping on if a food is considered healthy each decade. The food pyramid story is public knowledge and there just is a "sugar lobby".
> If not, what kind of study would convince you?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
Im pretty sure nothing worth a damn exists in food science with it all being delayed, slow effects over large populations and no proper experiments
Assuming your unwilling to burn the university to the ground just yet, I suggest at least sounding like experimental history:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/there-are-no-statistics-in-the-kingdom
> probably would even assign it a negative weight with big obvious conflict of interests
Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
> study
>> my trust of experts is close to that of flat-earthers
I didn't ask you to trust experts. If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like? If it showed you that seed oils aren't bad, would you then believe that seed oils aren't bad?
> Can you tell me what these conflicts of interest are? Do you actually have evidence of them, or are you just alleging that they exist?
The americain government is onto its 5th food pyramid, Im treating it as given prior that *at least* the 1st one was corrupt.
"In April 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) halted publication of its Eating Right Pyramid, due to objections raised by meat and dairy lobbying groups concerning the guide’s display of their products." -wikipedia
> If you designed a study yourself and conducted it yourself, what would it look like?
Take samples of mirco boimes of non urbanized populations with low modernization in their diet, mad science up some pills with stains of bacteria that are high in the non-modern groups that eat a specific food like 90% seal fat in the winter, give them to people with food sensitivity's; see if their digestion improves.
My strategy: Don't worry about any particular food stuff. Fall back on heuristics so old they came from our evolutionary environment - find the healthiest and most physically vital person or people you can, and eat what they eat, and avoid what they avoid.
That meme is horsefeathers, or at least severely overstated. You can make most seed oils by grinding up seeds and squeezing and filtering the oil out of the mash. Some you can just let the mash settle and pour the oil off the top, like with natural-style peanut butter. Industrially produced seed oils do get postprocessed for various reasons, but it isn't essential to seed oils.
Yes, I would add “cold-pressed” to my description above if I could edit it, although I’m not sure how important that is vs. for example buying better meat.
Aren't most seed oils extracted with hexane which is rarely fully removed?
Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing.
"Rarely fully removed" is technically true, but "fully" is doing a lot of work there. One of the reasons hexane is the chosen solvent is because it has a very low boiling point (155ºF or 68ºC) so you can distill it out of the finished product efficiently. The EU's limit for hexane residue is 1 ppm. The FDA does not have a specific limit, but in practice most oil on the market seems to be much less than EU's limit. I don't have any particular insight into whether the EU's limit is appropriately set.
My original point was the issue, if there is one, is with processing rather than inherent to the source. Hexane gets used because it's more efficient, not because it's strictly necessary. They can make hexane-free seed oils, but you usually only see it in premium varieties of oil like olive or grapeseed, not stuff like canola or soybean.
Excuse me, Erica.
I've been noticing you knowing practically everything.
Are you just very good at super quickly looking things up, or what's your secret?
I am very good at super quickly looking things up. For this particular question, I did a few google searches on variations of "hexane contents of food oils", "hexane residue canola oil", and the like. I pulled most of the info on my reply from a combination of wikipedia articles (hexane, canola oil), FDA and EPA explainers about hexane in food oil, a few journal articles about hexane residue testing and alternatives to hexane, and an article on the use hexane in oil extraction from a company (Anderson International) that makes equipment for high-yield mechanical extraction of seed oils. I also poked around on some grocery shopping websites to see what I could find in terms of oils labelled "cold pressed" or otherwise indicating mechanical extraction without solvents; I already know about cold-pressed olive oil because I have some in my kitchen, and I found cold-pressed grapeseed oil, but I didn't find canola, soybean, etc in a few minutes of looking (closest I found was "organic", which is pretty close to meaningless).
It helps that I have pretty strong concept-level background knowledge of a wide range of things (product of a good memory, inconsistently-managed ADHD, and good luck in the lottery of fascinations), which helps me quickly skim for and recognize important information and fit it together into a coherent conclusion. It also makes it easier to concoct good search terms.
In this particular case, one useful area of background info is that my father is a chemical engineer/salesman by trade. Most of his career has focused on silica gel and molecular sieves, but he's also worked in industrial food processing, and I've picked up a fair amount listening to him talk about work. I didn't remember specifics until being prompted by the articles I was skimming, but once prompted I realized that I had a 3/4 forgotten framework of understanding that I was able to fit pieces of info into.
For the bit about Republican bloggers hating IRV in another thread of this post, that was about 3/4 from memory. I looked up details, like exactly how many rounds the NYC Democratic Primary went in 2021, who the candidates were running against LePage in 2010 and 2014, and the exact vote totals. But the overall sequence of events and the complaints people had about them I mostly remembered from reading various political blogs at the time. It had stuck in my mind particularly because I generally favor voting system reform and I though the complaints I was hearing were interesting but not entirely fair.
On topics where I don't know where to start looking things up productively, or don't have enough background knowledge to synthesize looked-up info constructively, I usually try to stay quiet. By picking my battles thus, I (hopefully) come off as more knowledgable than I actually am.
:-D
"Hexane is used as a solvent in large-scale commercial extraction of some oils, especially canola, corn, and soybean oil. It's used because you can get a lot more oil out of a given quantity of raw ingredients with a solvent than via cold-pressing."
I remain astounded by what the hell Americans do to food. I buy rapeseed (canola) oil from a local supermarket which is its own-brand stuff, and that manages to be cold-pressed (which I only learned now by looking it up after reading the above). It's €3.29 for 500 ml, that comes (at current exchange rates) to $3.61 in American money. I don't know if that's considered expensive or not, or what the cheapest American processed seed oils go for.
EDIT: Quick looking up online, Walmart sells Crisco canola oil for $3.28/16 fl oz, which is around 473 ml. Its own-brand "Great Value" canola oil retails at $4.33/48 fl oz, which is around 1.5 litres. So the equivalent from my grocery would be $10.83, more or less.
So yes, somewhat more expensive, but according to one online blog, Crisco do use hexane extraction (can't find out if Walmart do, but at that price I'm guessing "yes").
But yeah, any American grocery stuff which is on sale over here (some of it has crossed the Atlantic) seems - to my untutored view - to be *full* of sugar and chemicals to a degree that equivalent mass-market processed foods here aren't. Of course, some things don't have local equivalents, so that's why I'm trying American products, but goodness me. The things the great American pubic willingly consumes! 😃
I've been to England briefly and visited the "American" sections of a few grocery stores and, while I wouldn't by any means claim that our food is generally healthy, it seems like only the most sugary things make it over there. Like pop tarts.
Here's what I've noticed you can get in one place but not the other:
US
- Alfredo sauce
UK
- Marrowfat peas
- Jaffa cookies
- Digestives
Is the rancidity of raw seed oils over stated?
That's one of the reasons for postprocessing, but it varies by the type of oil and isn't a problem unique to seed oil. Butter, for instance, goes rancid quite a bit faster than raw peanut oil.
Cubed butter seems to be exactly what I expect, are these labels wrong/lying?
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Sweet-Cream-Salted-Butter-Twin-Pack-16-oz-2-Count/24269854?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1600&from=/search
The difference is that we accept that butter goes rancid quickly. That's why butter comes in small refrigerated packages while cooking oils are sold in larger bottles on unrefrigerated shelves, even though most households go through butter a lot faster than cooking oil.
An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods. Maybe something like that the oils in seeds were eaten by hunter-gatherers for millions of years, and seeds are good for you because plants generate whole plants with seeds to start with, and the oil helps with that. The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed, packed full of nutrients.
Note no citations supporting any of this, as I'm making it up as I go along. Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
> Best not to use this paragraph in your argument!
Its me, Im antiscience
> An anti-science perspective can't be convinced by science, so one must use other methods.
Thats pretty reductionist.
> The oil is the concentrated good part of the seed
This is the weakest link in your argument, fiber is in theory important and im pretty sure you cant grow plants in seed oils.
I don't understand why you would ask for a steel-manned anti-science argument from rationalists, who are supposed to do rational things, like use science-based evidence.
This is the "post-rationalist" threads, and theres a shortage of intelligent *and* open conversation on the current internet
Dynomight's written about it arguing the case against is fairly weak and I found his takes reasonable at the time, though I haven't looked into the matter myself. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DHkkL2GxhxoceLzua/thoughts-on-seed-oil
Sadly while theres some distrust of experts, he doesn't actually come to a strong conclusion; its all just a big mess of reasons to be confused and he seems to trust science much more then me.
Outcomes have stopped getting worse due to semaglutides.
I think you may lack even a basic understanding of anyone anti-science
The data isnt even in yet, but I predict that the long term health of the bone-lost drugs will not be great; and would attempt to lose weight with nicotine and high doses of caffeine before this decades pill.
They are highly correlated with ultraprocessed foods, which is by itself a reason to avoid them. Beyond that, there is no need to get high levels of omega-6 PUFAs in the diet; the 0.5-1.5%% of calories that were obtained in more primitive societies is adequate (compare to 8-10% in the SAD diet currently).
My assumption for a long time has been they are, on net, neutral or slightly harmful (60% chance), or at least moderately harmful (20% chance). However, some of the mechanisms by which they are harmful requires chronic exposure, while the literature exonnerating them relies on either low-duration RCTs or on longer term observational studies where I'm not convinced confounding effects are suitably accounted for.
In terms of mechanisms, the fear is they oxidized easily and can cause inflammation if you don't offset with enough omega-3. OTOH l, there are indications omega-6 PUFAs may lower inflammation by other mechanisms.
So I'm very skeptical about them but I very much agree based on my limited reading that there isn't any smoking gun proving they are harmful.
Is there a simple causal mechanism for how it interacts with inflammation your aware of?
It seems nothing is too simple about this, but when I was looking into it, vaguely recall that a metabolic product of omega-6 PUFAs are lipoxins that can modulate the immune system away from inflammatory pathways.
It's not exactly anti-scientism, but I wrote a bit about this before at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/ . I don't think you can really do this in an anti-scientism way - your prior on any given nutrient being bad is low, you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying, and I think this leaves you open to accusations of selective credulity.
> you have to introduce some science and evidence in order to even start worrying,
Didnt the ancient greeks care about which foods caused increased ratios of black/yellow bile? Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
I think every culture has comments on food. Its hard to process what they say and apply it outside their narrow focus, but Id expect an opinion from everyone.
I didn't mean you literally couldn't worry, I meant that without any science you should assume your worries are groundless (as were the Greeks' worries about bile and so on)
If an ancient greek asserts that you should apply virtue ethics to food, you should eat enough to feel full but not eat too much and your a gluten, is that a "groundless" assertion with zero predictive power?
I think you're using modern scientific foresight to pick out one specific ancient Greek belief that makes sense to you, whereas at the time that would look no better or worse than other ones like "don't eat black bile" or whatever.
I also think things like "don't eat more than your body wants" are very different from "this one specific nutrient which tastes as good as any other nutrient is evil".
>Or the bible describe the cleanliness of food?
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_animal
You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that. I do think there are better options out there (olive, and avocado for high heat) but I am dubious that seed oils are particularly toxic.
> You can just get seed oils by themselves, and I highly recommend doing that.
What do you suppose this does?
> olive
Olive oil from a "oh my god what the hell chemical fake food nonsense is this" would get a pass as its in old diets and has some short step processes.
You said seed oils have “many scary chemicals in them” and I was responding to that. My understanding is that seed oils are often associated with ultra processed foods, and that’s why they get a bad rap.
Seed oils by themselves are ultraprocessed, if McDonalds is ultra processed, they probably add some ~~sawdust~~ soy flour to the meat sure; and theres some emulsifying salt in the cheese, but the real consern is the 10 step process of the rape seeds.
I'm not especially a fan of the UPF thing but my understanding is that seed oils count as Nova level 2, where 1 is unprocessed and 4 is ultra processed
I have no idea what a nova level is, but I instantly distrust it with that single suggestion.
a quick google sreach says rapeseed processing includes "Solvent extraction using hexane", wikipedia say "In industry, hexanes are used in the formulation of glues for shoes, leather products, and roofing."
I feel whoever they are are lying using the same old tricks
Until very recently life expectancies were going up.
Mostly on the child death side, not the not being fat side
Life expectancies in the western world increased significantly from adult as well as childhood starting ages. For example in England+Wales from 1850 to 2000, life expectancy for a 20-year-old increased from 60 to 82. For a 40-year-old the increase was from 67 to 84.
The reduction in childhood death during that period has of course been even greater, making it the largest single factor in the overall increase in life expectancy at birth. That change is among humanity's greatest achievements, and improvement in childhood nutrition is very much one of the elements of it. It is far from being the only such improvement though.
Starting from earlier than 1850 the changes in rates of young-adult death are even more startling, something that everyone who's done serious family-tree research for any length of time learns from the data that we assemble from records. My 17th/18th century ancestral households had _far_ higher rates of young-adult death than my 20th century ones. The causes when noted in the records are largely infectious diseases, accidents, childbirth for women and war for men, with the order of those varying a bit across specific locales/time periods. (For women childbirth is a strong #1 throughout the 17th-19th centuries everywhere that I have ancestors.)
It would take extreme evidence to convince me that general health isnt in decline; "kinetic" deaths(keep blood on the inside and cleanish) are declining with clean running water and wealth, this is related to war, childbrith and being born; and I view this a low hanging fruit; slower causes of death seem mixed and confusing and its not even a "conspiracy theory" to talk about the theory of conspiracy of corruption around the food pyramids .
Thought I'd ask one more time:
I'm a mid thirties secular jew moving from Canada to NYC next week. If anyone can host me for post yom Kippur - breaking of the fast meal (or knows of a secular group event to attend), id love to be included. You can learn more about me at danfrank.ca.
Daniel 🤘mm🤘 frank at Gmail (but with no emojis)
Robi runs the NYC ACX meetups. Try emailing him: robirahman94[at]gmail[dot]com
I'm involved with the Philly group, so I personally can't help you. But the NYC group is pretty great. Someone should be able to host you.
What is the open thread thumbnail?
The camera is supposed to be looking through the opening in a spool of thread, such that you can see the background behind it.
And here I was seeing a keyhole!
Is the background supposed to be a chess piece? That's what I always thought.
I see a lake with mountains reflected in it.
OH lol I can see that now. To be honest, the thread looks more like colored spackle or toothpaste or something. Not that it's that important. I've always wondered what it was supposed to be, though. Mystery solved :D
Huh. Is this a stock image?
EDIT: I tried using Google Lens. Most of the search results are either for this very blog, for r/slatestarcodex, or for vaguely similar-shaped blue things with holes, which is unsurprising.
AI art.
It is my impression that the public attitude to improving voting methods over FPTP ranges from complete disinterest to something like "Huh, neat." But has anyone considered advocating for better voting systems as a potential way to mitigate existential risk?
Government bodies have access to the most powerful tools available to mankind and their policies dictate how we deal with existential threats like AI regulation, climate change, use of nuclear weapons etc. Systems like FPTP seem to promote governments that represent the more extreme views of a population who are more likely to enact extreme and catastrophic policies.
If voting systems that benefitted more centrist politicians (approval, etc.) were commonplace globally, would this not reduce the risk of extreme policies?
FPTP is already uncommon globally, at least in developed countries.
Hi, I'm a voting nerd that is actively opposed to moving away from FPTP. People underestimate the importance of simplicity and legibility.
Yeah, I make this point often, and people just don't seem to want to nerd hard enough to discuss it
Star voting is my choice, mostly for simplicity and understandability, and second for their evidence that it performs well under tactical voting: https://www.starvoting.org/
One (weak) anecdote against it is that platforms like YouTube and Netflix switched from star voting to approval voting, presumably because it works better in practice.
YouTube and Netflix don’t have the task of coming up with a single winner.
A major advantage of score voting is that in a polarized election it still allows a 3rd candidate to meaningfully participate.
For example, imagine that 51% of the people vote:
Triden 5/5, Bump 0/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
And 49% vote:
Triden 0/5, Bump 5/5, Shaked Koplewitz 3/5
Then the vote reveals that this Shaked Koplewitz guy is not that bad in the mind of the average voter. Pure score voting would let him win, STAR would still give the win to Triden which I don’t think is right.
In that very artificial situation I think you're right.
But then all the Triden voters are going to look at that result and say "Silly me! If only a few percent of us had given Koplewitz a 0/5 instead of a 3/5 then Triden would have won, I'm not going to make that mistake again". And pretty soon everyone is either voting 0/5 or 5/5 on all candidates... just like they used to on youtube videos.
But why would Triden voters be that unhappy with Koplewitz, who’s presumably some kind of centrist candidate that’s acceptable to both sides?
I think you missed “STAR would still give the win to Triden”.
STAR does not have that weakness you are describing.
It might not have the problem Melvin describes, but I don’t think it’s a problem at all. In my example, who do you think should win?
Sadly, improved voting systems seem to be well on their way to becoming a partisan issue, with Republicans aligning firmly against them.
As far as I know, this starts with Maine adopting IRV by ballot measure in 2016. The incumbent governor at the time, Paul LePage, was a Tea Party Republican who had won in 2010 and 2014 with pluralities (37% and 48% respectively) and had less than 40% approval rating at the time. In both elections, there had been a strong third-party showing by Eliot Cutler (36% in 2010 and 8.5% in 2014), a Democrat running as an Independent, and Democrats blamed LePage's victories on the Democratic vote being split between Cutler and the respective Democratic nominees in both elections. Partisans of both sides saw the measure as a way of changing the rules to keep someone like LePage from winning future elections.
Then there was the 2021 NYC Democratic Primary for mayor. The voting took over a month to process, since it took eight rounds to get to a result and there wasn't a suitably streamlined process in place for counting IRV ballots. The eventual winner, Eric Adams, had plurality support in every round's results, often by substantial margins, but he only won the final round by less than 1%. I remember Republican bloggers at the time (many of whom at least partially bought into Trump's claims about the 2020 election being stolen) complaining that the counting process was opaque and could hide fraud. They also picked up and echoed some complaints by supporters of Adams's opponents about the very narrow margin in the final round.
Then there was the 2022 Alaska special election, where there was an IRV final round between one Democrat (Mary Peltola) and two Republicans (Nick Begich and Sarah Palin). Peltola has a plurality (39.7%) in the first round and won the second round count by about 3%, but Republicans objected that 60% of voters had voted for a Republican candidate and Peltola's margin of victory (about 5k votes) was more than covered by the 15k voters who voted only for Begich and left their second choice blank, and thus abstained from the second round between Peltola and Palin. I've heard two theories underlying these complaints: that some Begich supporters failed to cast a second-choice vote by mistake and in a traditional non-instant runoff election would have voted for Palin, and that the sequence of elimination in IRV is not robust, and Begich (who finished behind Palin by a relatively narrow but nontrivial margin) would very likely have won the second round had Palin been eliminated instead.
Observing this has made me update a bit against IRV (which still think is an improvement over single-round plurality voting (*)) and Condorcet (my traditional first-choice preference) in favor of a system where the counting process is more legible, such as approval voting or Borda count, despite their known flaws.
Tangentially, MAGA Republicans (and Tea Party Republicans before them) opposing IRV seems to weigh towards your main thesis, that improved voting systems incline results away from extremism relative to the current system of two-round plurality elections where the first round is either separate partisan primaries or a top-two "jungle" primary. I.e. that the reform is being most intensely opposed by supporters of extreme candidates who have been winning some elections under the old system.
(*) I strongly object to referring to the current US system as "First Past the Post" because it does a terrible job of describing the system. The key defining feature is that there's no "post" of a specific level of support that a candidate needs to reach to win, by contrast to something like IRV where the first candidate to reach 50% support during the elimination process wins.
In a two-party system, any change to the election procedure will benefit one party more than the other, so there’s going to be a lot of friction to make any kind of change.
Yes, and Institute for Election Science occasionally gets some EA money. I think less than it used to, because many people's timelines have gotten too short for things that only pay off after long political campaigns.
That argument is made all the time, among those who are interested, at places like ACX.
However,
-- many citizens of OECD nations nowadays have a lot of accumulated threat fatigue. For decades now voters have been hearing and reading about X and Y and Z and ten more things that are each an existential threat etc etc. It all runs together for a lot of people now and they mostly tune it out. Many of them don't even vote and this is one key reason they don't. So appeals based on existential threats, particularly regarding relatively arcane things like voting systems, aren't going to ring those folks' bells anymore.
-- meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians. Those convinced that immigration is now the existential threat to their nation/society/culture/racial group _want_ to elect people who will enact extreme responses to it. Ditto those who are obsessed with climate, or who've drunk the woke Koolaid, or who are card-carrying Libertarians, etc etc. For them the urgent objective is to get their own specific fellow obsessives into political power. "Benefitting more centrist politicians" sounds to them like "watering everything down and never dealing with the REAL PROBLEM!!"
The first group outnumbers the second, but the second group is more likely to show up and vote. They don't want fewer extreme views winning elections unless of course it is others' extreme views. Rather they focus on winning the battle, getting their extreme views into office and others' out.
> meanwhile citizens who have become fully animated by a particular existential threat don't want voting systems that would benefit more centrist politicians.
Oh, I like this theory. :-)
Most people have *zero* knowledge of a single way the structure of a system effects its outcomes, gerry-manning is a mere tip of the iceberg yet people treat it as if its wildly complicated math.
Go beyond mere advocacy of a single position, look for it everywhere; consider it always.
How big of a change was jury selection to american justice?
How much did the halving rate of bitcoin effect its price? With hindight what would you have picked, for what goals?
In ancient china mentioning someones name in a suicide note caused the state to investigate your treatment of them, how would this effect every socail interaction?
If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
I agree, charting out all downstream effects is likely impossible. But is the chain of *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)* perhaps likely, or at least plausible? Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Why do you assume that 'centrist' = better?
> If I understand correctly, your implication is that government systems are too complex to reliable predict what effect a better voting system would have on their policy.
No, nor should you give up on impossible (knowledge) tasks
> *better voting system -> more centrist politicians -> more centrists policies -> lower p(doom)*
> Could you come up with a hypothetical counterfactual outcome?
Well, yes; Im anti-centerist.
A boring, polite politics, makes for boring polite people in power, ai doom increases as we sleep walk into many problems.
In case anyone missed the news, the prediction market site Kalshi now has election markets that Americans are legally allowed to trade on:
https://kalshi.com/markets/pres/presidential-elections
Here's an article on the court case:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-federal-court-upholds-ruling-letting-kalshiex-list-election-betting-contracts-2024-10-02/
Interactive Brokers has election markets now as well: https://forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com/eventtrader/#/markets
Saw an ad that made me laugh this morning, and it has the advantage of being for FIRE, which is a great organization, so I'm sharing it here since it doubles as entertaining and getting their name out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O67dGv5kIOU&t=115s
Perfect.
That was a breath of fresh air, thanks.
At first I thought you meant an ad for Financial Independence/Retire Early.
Anyway, the ad did make me laugh too. This is what "free speech" actually means in politics - "I get to say whatever I want, and the other side is forced to shut up".
When this commercial first dropped, I saw numerous non-partisan political science-y types noting this is a much better model of the average voter's political beliefs than a "centrist" voter model (who picks the median position between the two sides).
Great
Nothing threatens our flat earth like... climate change!
I'm not sure the Carateca ban was warranted. The one linked comment seems to follow this pattern:
Person A: Kill all the Blacks!
Person B: You're evil for saying that. Your sick attitude has led to so much suffering, and the world would be better without you and your ilk.
Person C: "Sick" is ableist. And your whole comment is ad hominem.
Moderator D: C has a good point. B deserves a ban. Maybe we'll ban A too, for unrelated reasons.
User Carateca said that the user he was talking to (LearnsHebrewHatesIsrael/IP) didn't care about pogroms of Jews by Muslims. That's "ad hominem," but a fair comment about a user who spent a year denying or apologizing for pogroms of Jews by Muslims, denying elements of them, while regularly both-sidesing them and justifying them, often based on complete fabrications.
E.g. a week after the October 7 massacre, said user was still insisting (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-297/comment/41837470) there was no evidence Hamas killed children, after the identities of various children they killed (and kidnapped) had already been published, while also insisting that if Israel is justified in airstrikes that have civilian casualties, then Hamas is also justified in killing children.
While also casually referencing the fact the Israel wants to genocide all Arabs (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-299/comment/42483520).
Insisting he doesn't support Hamas, but pushing back on calling them terrorists, and insisting that they're no different from "West Bank settlers" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-301/comment/43412429).
And then continuing for a year in that pattern.