Open Thread 354
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This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: Comment of the week is Graham on the Prop 36 post - he argues that the reason cops aren’t enforcing the existing misdemeanor penalty for shoplifting (up to six months in jail) is that by the time it gets through the DAs, this is reduced to “a stern talking to”, and it’s not worth cops’ time to arrest anyone who won’t be punished. Therefore, in order to get the six months in jail that’s already on the books, we apparently have to increase the law to three years in jail. I appreciate this perspective, but it only leaves me more confused - for example, didn’t San Francisco recall its soft-on-crime DA and replace him with a tough-on-crime DA who promised to throw the book at shoplifters? Don’t these charts from the San Francisco DA show that most arrests lead to charges, and the problem is almost entirely that most reports don’t lead to arrests? I still don’t feel like I understand the dynamics behind why our current laws can’t be used to arrest and imprison shoplifters.
2: Responses to my Trump anti-endorsement by (among others) Richard Ngo and Eric Rasmusen.
As far as the election. I think Trump has taken over the working class, which use to belong to the Dems.
On a more important topic (to me), my daughter (who is gay and lives in the city with many gay and trans friends.) Is totally freaked out about Trump, we're hanging out next Monday. (Veterans day no less.) Starting with breakfast, (I'm thinking apple pancakes (w/ butter and maple syrup) and potato pancakes, with sour cream and apple sauce?) And I need to talk her off the ledge, she's talking about a lot of crazy ideas. ie, getting sterilized because she's afraid abortion will become illegal nation-wise. I'm here asking for any ideas I can throw at her. (I'm going to start with why I almost voted for Trump, till I talked with her before the election and she had a cow. ) (Sorry these ideas are really scrambled, I mostly suck at communication.)
I don't think the ideas you've gotten so far are good. Regarding her fear she will get pregnant and be unable to get an abortion, I recommend that you say that if that happens, you will make sure she is able to get one, even if you have to get her plane tickets to Mexico or Europe. I understand that what she is worried about is *extremely* unlikely, but if you try to convince her of that you'll be back to arguing about what Trump is like and what he will do and you have already learned that leads nowhere with her right now. So just be loving and say you will help her if it comes to that, they way you would help her if, say, she got badly injured and could not work for 6 mos. and needed a place to stay. As time passes the people like her who expect their world is going to get turned upside down instantly are going to see that day to day life is pretty much the same as ever, and that Trump cannot just snap his fingers and decree radical changes in laws. And everybody will calm down. So in a few months you might be able to have a conversation with her about Trump and what to worry about and what not to. But right now you can't, so just tell her if the worst happens you'll be there for her. And even if she tries to turn it into a conversation about whether Trump is going to force all pregnant women to keep their babies, be evasive. If she says, "but do you really think I'm just being silly and Trump would never do that?" say something like, "I'm definitely less worried than you are, but if it should happen I will make sure you are able to get an abortion."
I second this excellent advice, but I think you need to do a little bit of work to fully "sell" it to her.
So make a plan with specific, executable steps, as if you actually are taking this seriously:
1. Tell her to start the passport process *now,* so that if she needs to leave the country there won't be any delay.
2. Collaborate on a system to keep her hypothetical pregnancy top secret. She can't be prosecuted for an abortion no one but the two of you know she's had. So absolutely no explicit discussion about a pregnancy on the phone or via text, only in person (and if you can't be in person, invent a code for "I'm pregnant" right now). No menstrual cycle tracking apps and you'll buy any pregnancy tests with cash at the Dollar Tree while wearing a baseball cap so it can't be tracked back to her, etc.
3. Research together exactly what it takes for an American to get an abortion in Canada, Mexico, Thailand, etc. What are the laws, wait times, etc? Which specific facilities? How much will it cost? You can go as far down that rabbit hole as you like.
4. Make sure she has Plan B on standby at home, with a plan to monitor the expiration date and replace it as necessary.
5. Whatever else.
Is this all a little silly? Almost certainly. But the goal here is to give her actionable steps to gain a sense of control over her fear. She's in an emotional state where she may want want to reject your offer of support if it's too vague/difficult-sounding, or if she believes you're only offering because you're dismissive of her fear. If you approach with a tone of, "Meh, not gonna happen, but I'll pay for you to go to Mexico if it gets to that point" it is not going to be nearly as comforting as, "Here's the address of the clinic we'll visit during our 'vacation' in Mexico, here's the budget, and here's the money to pay for it in my savings."
Is she a gay woman who has sex with men?
I know someone else who is also afraid of getting stuck with an unwanted baby inside. She is asexual, not gay, and her fear is that she will be raped and get pregnant from the rape. I understand of course that 3 very unlikely things have to happen for her to end up forced to bear a rape baby to tern: rape, get pregnant from the rape, & the US at the time has strict laws against abortion in all circumstances. She is plenty smart enough to understand this -- she's getting a PhD in one of the hard sciences at a famous university. But she is too scared to think straight.
I'd just recommend a copper IUD. They are reversible, quite safe, and extremely effective.
You actually think this is a helpful suggestion? You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
> You think this young woman does not know the copper IUD exists? Or that she knows it exists but that it has not occurred to her that she, too, can be protected by one against an unwanted pregnancy?
This woman is also so freaked out about current events that she's considering getting sterilized, just in case she might get pregnant in the future (as a gay woman) and there's no way for her to get an abortion anywhere. So no, maybe we shouldn't model her as a perfectly rational actor who computes all possible options from the data available to her.
Besides, humans are humans, and sometimes we need to hear it from someone we trust, to know that it's okay.
If she's amenable to rational arguments, you can point out that the fears are misplaced. "If it bleeds, it leads" so media are incentivized to catastrophize. But when we look at the predictions of bettors whose only incentive is to make money, by being correct, rather than to scare people, they assign only a 5% chance to Trump signing a national abortion restriction (https://polymarket.com/event/trump-signs-national-abortion-ban-in-first-100-days?tid=1731195439244) in his first 100 days.
And that describes *any* sort of restriction on when, where, or under what conditions abortions can be performed. That would include restrictions which are still far more lax than the laws currently in place in many states (including New York) such that in practice, even under in this very likely event, abortion access would likely be unaffected or at worst, would become less available in some states, while remaining equally available in other states.
The same goes for other concerns she may be freaked out about. In general, it's important for her to remember that sources of her information generally don't pay a price for promoting unwarranted fear, and generally profit from it, while only markets are actually incentivized to tell the truth. So as a rule, unless she gets her news from betting markets, she's probably being systematically misled.
As far as particular fears that she has, you can look to see if betting markets address them. For what it's worth, the US stock market rallied following Trumps election. That implies that they think that the US economy as a whole will do quite well under Trump. That suggests a generally low probability of many possible types of catastrophes that people might occurring under Trump.
E.g. I've seen many people worrying Trump would eliminate the Department of Education. Markets assign just an 11% of him doing that in his first 100 days: https://polymarket.com/event/trump-ends-department-of-education-in-first-100-days. If she's still scared, you can look into the particulars of why that wouldn't actually be such a big deal.
You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky. To many people (who are presumably disproportionately demographically similar to your daughter) voting for Trump is evil. She may, then, view your voting comment as essentially admitting that you considered being evil, but chose not to, which will likely not endear you to her, unless she assumed you voted for him, anyway.
> "You'd know better than anyone how wise it would be to mention that you considered voting for Trump to her, but to me, that seems pretty risky."
Agreed, absolutely do not tell her you were ever even slightly tempted to vote for Trump. In the state she's currently in, all of her fear and rage could instantly transfer to you, and she might lash out at you to achieve a sense of power over her "enemy."
I was just dumped by what I thought was politically moderate dear friend of 8 years via a single, vicious text message after I told him I pointlessly protest-voted for a third-party in my West Coast state. I never saw it coming; I was certain that we loved one another, that we were ride or die friends for life. Do not underestimate your daughter's fragility.
On the sterilization thing:
(1) A national ban on abortion seems extremely unlikely. A lot of politicians know they can't vote for such a law and expect to keep their jobs. This is different from appointing Supreme Court justices to uphold state-level abortion bans, since voters won't hold them directly responsible for the decisions of those justices.
(2) Even if she thinks there is a significant chance of such a law passing, it seems safe to postpone getting sterilized until after the abortion ban actually passes into law. It will take a while between the law being proposed as a bill and the legislation taking effect, so there's no need to rush. This is particularly true for a gay woman, which is presumably a fairly low risk demographic for needing to terminate a pregnancy on short notice.
(3) If she's still coming up with hypothetical situations in which she might want or need sterilization or abortion and be unable to obtain one, ask if she would be willing to set up a dedicated emergency bank account containing sufficient money to have these procedures performed, plus enough to cover the airfare to have them done in another country. (The total will probably come out as less than the cost of getting sterilized in the US.)
(4) If none of this works, maybe she wants to get sterilized anyway and is just using Trump as a convenient "excuse." In that case, you can still offer all the reasons why you think it's a bad idea, but in the end you just have to accept that it's ultimately her own decision what to do with her body.
Yes to all of this. I don't think sterilization is something that is happening right away. My guess is that sterilization is asserting her power in some sphere where she feels somewhat powerless. So maybe we can come up other ways to assert herself. IDK we'll talk, thanks for your response.
I would highly suggest just avoiding the topic. If you just want to stop her from getting sterilized, maybe you can talk her into some less permanent solutions... But there's just no need to further sour relations with her. Don't take what you have for granted.
Ah no a very high amount of love between me and my daughter. My idea is that we're all living in these different bubbles. (Like and X-dimensional venn diagram of influence/ ideas.) This is totally what we'll be talking about... among all sorts of other things.
...I highly doubt she'll respond positively to that, but whatever, it's your funeral.
Well time will tell, thanks for the response anyway.
I totally get a ban on outright verbal abuse and ad hominem. But honestly, I'm a bit put off by the recent turn towards punishing smugness and condescension in space like these. Is that really what everybody wants? Are we that sensitive? That level of moderation feels a bit infantilizing from my perspective.
The comments I saw that got banned were pretty vile. One was from someone who thinks trans people rule the internet, and have almost as much power as the damn Jews. Told a joke about how male to female trans women should get high quality pussies with lots of secretions, so much that when they leave the Christmas dinner table they'll leave a trail of slime. Another one was a response to someone saying they're sad about the election outcome, something like "good, I'm delighted that you are." And neither of these posts had any content beyond what I quoted.
What Scott has actually said about rudeness, is that you only get to fail to meet one of the 3 standards: kind, true and advances the discussion. You can drop kind, but then you better be right and advance the discussion. I was quite rude to both of those posters, but my rudeness was embedded in posts while I explained my objections to what they'd said. So I'd say my comments were rude and right and advanced the discussion. And when the angel of death passed over the comments, I was not one of the ones banned.
There is no "we" here: This is Scott's walled garden and he has aesthetic preferences about how people should conduct themselves, even if we'd prefer more "spirited" disagreement, it's reasonable to respect the host's wishes.
There are other SSC offshoots that are more lenient on disagreeableness.
I'm aware of this. I was actually hoping Scott would read my comment and perhaps it would have an impact. I know that is unlikely, but not impossible. Scott is highly unpredictable (which is a good thing).
> punishing smugness and condescension in space like these. Is that really what everybody wants?
With specific examples, I could give a more specific answer, but speaking for myself in general, I am okay with that.
> Are we that sensitive?
I find some ways of communication annoying, and if we can make them go away by pushing a button, I am in favor of pushing that button.
> That level of moderation feels a bit infantilizing from my perspective.
I don't mind spending my time at a nice place. I guess I am too old to worry about signaling how grown up I am.
If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer, then smug or condescending arguments get in the way more often than not, even when the reader isn't getting their feelings hurt. Such arguments sound to a rational reader like "I don't have enough evidence to support my view, so I'm going to resort to rhetoric to manipulate your emotions into believing me anyway" and now the rational reader has to exert effort to peel away all the rhetoric and get at the actual evidence.
So why waste everyone's time? Just lay out the evidence.
Being wrong also gets in the way, arguably even more often than smugness. Do we delete all arguments that are wrong?
Hey, all of you guys have lost track of Scott's guideline. It's not that you can't be rude. It's that you have to hit 2 out of these 3: kind, true, and advances the discussion. If you make good points that advance the discussion, you can be rude. If you say stuff that's obviously not true, and you are polite and trying to advance the discussion, you're OK. If you are kind and making a valid point, but it's off the subject and does not advance the discussion, you're OK. What gets people banned for a while is being rude and wrong, wrong and off-topic, or rude and off-topic. Or, of course, rude, wrong and off-topic.
The catch there is telling the difference. For that, we need a process for figuring it out, which is what rationalism is nominally all about. Which brings us back to smug or condescending entries degrading that process more than honestly submitted wrong answers.
"If you accept the premise that a rationalist forum is dedicated primarily to Getting the Right Answer."
Is this really what rationalists believe? I'm not going to pretend I've never heard this sentiment. But I guess I just wanted to think the best of rationalism and so I assume this was a minority sentiment.
And by "think the best," I meant I wanted to think the best of their intellectual abilities. I can't imagine a more uncynical attitude, and in my view, uncynical is borderline delusional. And here we run into another situation where I am unduly restricted by the civility requirement. "Delusional" is a harsh word, but as much as I struggled to, I just couldn't think of a word that worked better for this. Some things really are that stark, that black and white. Thanks to the civility rule, I have to take this time to explain and justify my use of that word. And haven't I just wasted everyone's time doing so?
Anyway, in my mind, the primary purpose of a comment section is to have a good time. Online commenting is a kind of hobby or recreation. I don't have any illusions about us solving the world's problems. And I think that we are self-important and self-regarding if we do imagine we are going to have an approachable positive impact on the world by commenting online. The Internet is not real life.
Lots of people with lesser intellectual abilities have plenty of fun on an online forum. The ones I'm thinking of, have it by posting "sick burns" on their outgroup, and are rated by their low-effort peers around an Algonquin Folding Table.
The catch is that that table is often a very public forum like Reddit, meaning their outgroup has to put up with it. This is especially annoying when that forum is originally advertised as a place to get good information, and the people who have a good time by getting good information (aka Getting the Right Answer), can't.
So that crowd looks around for such a forum, specifically filtering out people from the former crowd. They turn out to be hard to make, and easy to infect with the former crowd unless actively moderated. I think Scott wants ACX to be that type of forum.
Above, you argued that you want to think the best of rationalism, declared that inclination to be uncynical, and delusional. That confuses me; people don't usually want to be delusional. So you arguably did waste people's time, but only in the sense that you didn't succeed in conveying your idea. But that's not necessarily bad; some ideas are difficult to comprehend, and may require some extra time.
Maybe rational readers are selling themselves short by cutting these voices out. Since the time of Jonathan Swift, serious thinkers have been using acerbic wit and cutting language to express important ideas. And are you sure it's all about keeping evidentiary arguments in primacy? And it's not about "I don't want someone to hurt my feelings?"
Acerbic wit seems quite different to smugness and condescension. Swift might have been acerbic but I don't think critics of the time were complaining about the condescending tone. Wit requires effort (perhaps mostly in developing it, not necessarily in its deployment) while smugness is something I can get from a small language model or a person not paying much attention or putting much effort into editing, and therefore comes across as disrespectful of the reader's time. ACX is not a neighborhood barbecue, but more like a stadium concert, so I hold those walking up to the microphone to a higher standard than when Jim from next door spouts a random opinion after a couple of beers.
This is an anonymous comment section for a blog. I can't think of a more perfect analog for a late night bull session at your local bar. The only difference is that vocabulary and average formal education level is higher. Street smarts and emotional intelligence and common sense are not higher.
And thanks to the strict civility norm, I have to worry about being reported and banned for this comment. Even though there really is no other way that I could express this idea, and even though this idea deserves to be expressed. My free speech has been thoroughly chilled.
Chance, let me give you an analogy. Suppose your favorite indie band or TV show or whatever announced they were going corporate: filing off all the rough edges for mass market appeal. Instead of trying to be unique, they'll try to be like everyone else. Would you support the change?
Now replace "band" with "discussion space". There are lots of places that work like bull sessions at your local bar; all the bars out there, for a start, but also the comments at Reddit, Facebook, news websites, most blogs, et cetera. Not many get to be anything else at all, and those that are, generally don't stay that way for long -- it is much harder to *add* civility than remove it, so the transformation is irreversible once it starts. This place has avoided that fate through aggressive moderation; it has chosen to be something, and *wants* to be it.
Your stance seems to boil down to, "But this place is so unlike all the other places out there!" Yeah, and that's a *good* thing. We hang out here precisely because there’s nowhere else like it.
When you say, "Nowhere else is about convincing people by laying out a civil argument! Everywhere else is about having a good time!", I think, "And who are *you* to say we're not having a good time, in our own way? Who are *you* to say we should stop having fun our way?"
When you say, "You guys are so uncynical here, you think you can actually persuade anyone here!?", my response is "Yes. This is a place by autistic people, *for* autistic people. We do in fact persuade each other around here, because we don't work like normal people.
And if you intrude, claiming we're weird and should act more like everyone else... then kindly, piss off. You already have a thousand places to go be yourself, while we have only here. And if you want to destroy our one sole hang-out spot, so you can have a thousandth-and-oneth place for people like yourself... then, piss off. Go to a bar or something. Be happier with your own people. But don't pretend for a moment you speak for us, invader. If we wanted your 'bull sessions at the local bar', we would have already set that up."
TL;DR: Don't storm into an indie band and announce you're taking it corporate, without expecting pushback. We don't *want* your mass market appeal. And if we did, we wouldn't need your "help".
I'm autistic myself and I am aware of this as a biopsychosocial health problem. I am now facing an issue in one of my organs that should have been addressed long ago, but wasn't, partly due to my high pain tolerance. Which makes me partly incapable of recognizing the alerts my body sends out.
This health problem (autism) is not something to celebrate. It is not something to romanticize. While there are silver linings, this is still a health problem and it is a cross to bear. I will not apologize for trying to overcome my symptoms instead of wallowing in them. If I have any loyalty or solidarity with my fellow autistics, I will tell them the straight truth instead of indulging their fantasies of superiority.
We must learn humility, cynicism and world-weariness, or we will be victimized over and over and over. Or even worse, we will end up victimizing others without even realizing what we're doing.
PS. I never argued “this should be more like a bull session at the local bar.” I said THIS IS a bull session at the local bar. Very different arguments.
My apologies. Still, if you tell the local book club or whatever that
"This is just a bull session at the local bar!"
, and they respond
"Nah, we don't see it that way, we don't want it that way, and thankfully, it *is* mostly not that way -- outside of election season anyway."
, then... who are you to tell them otherwise? Why do you suddenly know their own "bar" better than they do, when you've just stepped in? Not very humble -- if I stepped into some native tribe and told them, based off 5 minutes of observation, that their wars with the other tribes are just football hooligan riots in disguise and they're simply too blind to see it... well, they'd be right to kick me out, for a start. Especially if I told them they need to be more humble and listen to people like myself. Or if I said, "I will not apologize for trying to teach you humility."
TL;DR: You say you bring the wisdom of experience, and then you don't actually show wisdom in your actions or words. You say you bring humility, then act like an ass and expect us to bow. You say you bring world-weariness, then you try to turn this enclave of peace into simply another part of the world. Why should anyone listen to your arguments when you're not even listening to them yourself? Why should we listen to you when you won't even listen to yourself?
I never claimed to be wise or experienced or humble. No doubt I have an arrogant streak. It is perfectly natural and normal for me to have a special loathing for those qualities, like arrogance, that have caused me so much grief.
And again, I'm not trying to turn this place into part of the world. I'm pointing out IT IS part of the world.
Then we must disagree. For a start, by trying to loosen this place's moderation policy, you *are* trying to change it into something more like the rest of the world. You say that you feel like your free speech "has been thoroughly chilled", that you are worried about being banned -- has it ever occurred to you that banning commentators like you *is* what makes this place different from the rest of the world?
And finally... we've been trying to tell you how we feel. That this place doesn't feel like a "bull session at the bar", and if it was, our first priority would be cleaning up the place till it was back to how we remembered it. This place is what we make of it, and we *refuse* to let it be that. And you can either listen and accept our feelings are valid, or try to persuade us to feel otherwise, or even just leave and accept we feel differently than you do... but you can't tell us you know our own feelings better than we do, because ???. And yet you do. And yet you do. We've been answering your opening question of "Is that really what everybody wants?" with a clear and simple "Yes.", and you refuse to listen. What more do you need?
I've gotten likes on my original comment and I've had one supportive reply, so some of the commenters here agree with me. So I feel vindicated in my choice to broach the topic. I've also given people like yourself the opportunity to exercise their faculties engaging with this topic. I suppose the world would be a deathly dull place if no one ever courted controversy.
As far as "refusing to listen," I've been listening. I just don't agree with you! What, are you waiting for me to capitulate? BTW, when you respond to one of my comments, I see that as an invitation to respond in turn. I see it as positive reinforcement. If you want me to shut up, the fastest way to do that is to be circumspect yourself.
There is a difference between (a) writing an essay intended for a broad audience and (b) a comment intended to be part of an exchange of views. The greater the emotional component, the more suitable for (a) rather than (b).
When I see someone posting with a high degree of smugness, I assume they are operating in bad faith and are not seriously open to counterargument. It's fine to feel that sense of certainty, but I would like to participate in spaces where both sides bring an open mind. There are a million places on social media to be smug and get likes. There are precious few where actual dialogue can happen.
Another way I'd put it is that being both smug/condescending AND persuasive at the same time is hard. It often takes a Jonathan Swift to do it. Many people see the smug stuff, don't recognize the persuasive stuff, and cargo cult their way to a bad attempt that ends up being *anti*-persuasive. Get enough of those together and you get (waves hand in direction of most of the internet). Indeed, a lot of people appear to have dispensed with the persuasion altogether and gone full conflict theory, treating forums as nothing more than a place to feel good for a moment by ranting and pandering to the choir. It's a safe bet they're not persuasive.
Rationalism is IMO a push against that.
Also, how many comments were banned for being smug/condescending AND ALSO persuasive to someone outside the choir?
Nobody is persuading anybody in an online comments section, or at least not about anything important. People choose to be persuaded more than they are persuaded by others, if you know what I mean.
I don't know if you speak for rationalists here, but if you do, I'm slightly shocked. I did not realize commenters here took these discussions that seriously. I view online commenting as a pastime or recreation. I never imagined the stakes were any higher than that.
As I implied above, there are plenty of online forums out there for people who don't wish to take commenting seriously.
You implied you also wanted a forum full of commenters with high intellectual capability. Well, I don't speak for all of them, but I do find most such people only go to forums where their intellect is matched - which excludes forums where people just go to have a good time in the casual sense. High-intellect comments require high effort, even from high-intellect people.
Someone who expects to just hop on such a forum and comment in ways that imply stuff like "normies; amirite??" will quickly find the forum either aggressively moderated, or empty.
Your self-regard is remarkable. I would ponder on the fact that some people aren't as intelligent or persuasive as they think they are. Just saying "I'm so intelligent and persuasive" doesn't necessarily make it so. I'm not even sure how one would accurately measure how persuasive they are being.
In my experience, even if you argue someone into submission, it rarely sticks. "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."
I don't consider pondering the notion that people aren't as smart/persuasive as they believe, so much as I consider it being regularly evident.
But that's by the by, and I don't know why you're choosing to be hung up on it. Consider another angle: being persuasive requires not only the sender being up to snuff, but also the receiver; and one thing rationalist circles tend to have a lot of - relative to other circles - are people who are willing to be persuaded (and also smart enough to tell when they should change their minds, and when they should not).
Whatever my self regard might be, I *do* try to be one of such people, and you're invited to do likewise.
I'm starting to get the impression that you haven't read a lot of essays on sister sites such as LessWrong that would change what you think about ACX and what it's trying to be. Have you? "Read the Sequences" is something of a bromide nowadays, but, well, many of them are worth reading.
I've read the sequences. I'm not a rationalist nor is it likely I will ever be a rationalist. I've been assured countless times that non-rationalists are welcome in this forum, with some even going so far as to claim that rationalists are a small minority. I am a Scott Alexander fan, not a Yudkowsky fan. In much the same way one can appreciate a Catholic author without appreciating the Catholic Church.
I do try to act the way I imagine a smart person would act. I try to be reasonably clear and logical in all my communications, but my concern about being persuasive to random anonymous commenters is low, and it SHOULD be non-existent. Honestly, the fact that I have any concern about this at all is probably a degrading symptom of Internet addiction.
God, I wish I could believe that arguing with randoms online was somehow doing something useful and productive for society; or myself. What a joyous existence that would be. That would be having my cake and eating it too.
Well, if you think it's pointless to be persuasive, then why comment seriously online at all? Or even say anything informative, to anyone, ever?
Who got banned for smugness and condescension? A lot of it seems to be getting by the smugness and condescension filter.
But, AFAICS, most of the discussion on these open threads does *not* involve evidence-based arguments. A lot of it is old-school rationalist, though — i.e. people coming to conclusions via logic — albeit ones based on faulty presumptions.
So, where's your evidence that people are getting banned for smugness and condescension? ;-)
But seriously, most of the bans seem to have been for people getting nasty. Anecdata: I was banned (temporarily) a while back for viscous sarcasm.
>"I was banned (temporarily) a while back for viscous sarcasm."
This might have seemed harsh at the time, but I think it was the right decision. Only low-viscosity sarcasm should be permitted in this forum.
I'm going to blame my spell checker for that one. Damn! I can't be smug if I misspell words.
I cannot go into further details for reasons that I cannot elucidate. Sorry!
(Not a joke)
Sorry to be a complainer. But is anyone else frustrated by how consistently conventional and middle of the road commenters are when it comes to foreign policy? I see very little pushback on mainstream narratives. Maybe that's a simple consequence of STEM people having More Interesting Things to think about, and not having the time or patience for foreign affairs?
I'm a STEM nerd with plenty of time and patience to think about foreign affairs, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I even used to have a side gig where I dealt with one aspect of foreign policy semi-professionally.
I haven't noticed myself holding any particularly contrarian views on the major foreign policy issues of recent discourse, but that's because I *have* thought about them and have concluded that this time the "mainstream narrative" got it right. That happens from time to time.
But maybe you're thinking of different foreign policy issues than I am. So it would probably help for you to be specific about what sort of discussion you're looking for,
"The cops won't arrest shoplifters because they won't be prosecuted and they feel that it is a waste of their time." If this is true, and that is a big if, this seems like a severe miscalculation on the cops' part. Don't they realize that getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a punishment in and of itself? How could they not realize that this alone will have something of a deterrent effect?
I think the person making the decision is not the ordinary beat cop, but the leadership, maybe even the chief of police.
In my very Blue town, I’ve seen police responses to public disturbances vary widely over time, from aggressive police presence to turning a blind eye. It seems political to me, though I can’t really parse it.
It may have to do with election cycles. In my city, homeless camps pop up in the months prior to the mayoral election, and they are cleared out immediately after the election.
Getting arrested and spending a few hours in booking is a major disheartening and punitive event for a respectable middle-class citizen who is concerned that this might go on his Permanent Record, or that his friends and family might find out. But to the sort of people who are actually out doing the shoplifting, and once it becomes clear that the policy is catch-and-release, it's just a minor annoyance.
I'm a lifelong poor person (AMA) who used to hang with a very rough crowd, and in my anecdotal experience, you're just flat wrong. Being arrested is deeply unpleasant for each and every human being, regardless of their socioeconomic background or criminal background. It is far more than a “minor annoyance.”
Even if it WAS just a “minor annoyance,” this still doesn't explain the (alleged) behavior of the police. Surely a minor annoyance is a better deterrent than no deterrent. No, at this point I simply can't believe that police officers are operating on this logic. If they are refusing to arrest shoplifters, it is likely because said police do not take shoplifting seriously THEMSELVES.
...Why do you keep talking about deterrence, as if it's something anyone cares about? The point is to hurt these lowlives, and the current sentences aren't hurting them enough.
That is what justice is. The more the good are rewarded, and the more the wicked are punished, the more justice there is.
People do in fact care about deterrence and about reducing crime. That's the primary purpose of having police and courts in the first place. (Punishment for its own sake is a distant secondary goal). Yours is a minority view, and not one I feel a need to seriously engage with.
...I didn't say that because it was my own view, I said it because that's what justice is at its core, as far as humanity is concerned. Notice how we call the system surrounding law enforcement the "justice system." It's not enough to simply minimize incidences of crime. The perpetrators must pay what they owe in suffering. That is the only way the victims and the public will be satisfied. Why do you think capital punishment continues to be legal in so many states, despite the fact that it does nothing to reduce crime or reduce costs?
And who would be more zealous in that belief than those who willingly join law enforcement? They didn't sign up for this job just to be another cog in the machine. They signed up because our society is filled with scum that need to be punished. They want control over society, their own lives, and the lives of others. What do you think happens when you rob them of that control? You erase the sole benefit of being in this line of work. Why would they continue to actually do their job, especially when they keep getting paid anyways? The hounds will not work unless they are fed.
So you're some type of anarchist? Not interested in continuing this discussion, but thanks for engaging.
Recently, I ran into a custom machine translation task I wanted to use AI for: seventeenth century French to modern French. (French to English, etc.is well-served by existing machine translation products).
Here's an example:
Princesse héréditaire a bien jmpatience de sauoir si
Königsmarck est arivé hereusement il sest passé bien des
choses que Princesse héréditaire écrit sur le feuillet qui
est tout blanc ie ne peus me consoler d'avoir si tost perdu
Königsmarck labsence en paroist mille fois plus cruelle
ie suis abatue a ne pouuoir me soutenir l'exes des plaisirs
et la douleur de ne plus uoir ce que j'aime me mette en
cét estat quil est cruel de se séparer de uous uous estes le
plus aimable de tous les homme plus on uous uoit plus
on uous descouure de charme que ie suis heureuse d'estre
aimée de vous et que ie connois bien tout mon bonheur
tout ma félicité
This is from a letter to the Comte Königsmarck.
If you know French at all, you'll realise this predates the spelling reforms of the mid eighteenth century: i/j used differently; u/v used differently; y with diaresis where we'd use an i; estre for être, etc. And on top of being from the late seventeenth century, the author can't spell. It's usually obvious how you would modernise it, but this just cries out for "come on AI, show me what this would look like in modern French so I don't have to struggle readfing it.
I am told several native speakers of French found this particular writers style to be really funny; personally, I find it just annoying to read...
Back in the dark ages (2020), I tried to create a modern day English to 1600s English "translator." I thought i would just scrape Shakespeare and the King James Bible and it would be simple. Needless to say, I spent weeks trying to get a parallel corpus and had only the final 2 days of class to train the model. "Could you email me that file" -> "Thy thy thy thy thy ..." Glad these guys are doing it much better!
I was surprised to learn that Native Americans voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Did a little research, found an answer that gave me a surprising amount of hope.
https://jakeorielly.substack.com/p/humility-as-an-antidote-to-despair
What kind of hope does this give you, aside from the prospect that Gorsuch will continue to rule in favor of tribes in cases that come across his desk?
It was great news. It was terrible news. We had elected a savior who would lead us to paradise; we had elected a Hitler who would bring us hell on earth. It would be a new golden age; it would be the last election, and even now the knives were being sharpened to impale the innocent. The people had shown their wisdom and their will to see through the tricks of liars; the people had shown their gullibility and would Miss Him Yet. We had skated past a hole in the ice; we were even now sinking beyond resuscitation, the light of democracy a fading crack of sun unreachably above. We had grasped at a new vitality and verve to tackle the untackleable; we had fouled beyond foul, scored an own goal, and would be traded if the coach knew what was good for the game.
It was an important day.
Not bad.
"For some reason, Dickens' sequel, 'A Tale of Two Shitties', didn't attain as much critical acclaim, though it did sell really well."
Given that I was WAY off base on how the election would go, do any Trump whisperers on here want to help me out with a prediction?
How likely is the 20% across the board tariff to happen?
I have a couple major projects I'm working on; I'd rather wait to buy materials but if this actually goes through I need a bunch of sheet goods, wire, firebrick, bar etc; some of which I need in order direct from alibaba quantities.
If tariffs actually hit these will all go way up, like how plywood went up 200% the first time and never came back down to earth.
Do I sacrifice my back room to construction/build a lean-to , or is it all the tariff talk hot air?
Market on average tariffs breaking 6% in any quarter in 2025 is at 57% for play money but only 38% for actual money: https://manifold.markets/RichardHanania/trump-impose-large-tariffs-in-first.
20% tariffs would of course be much less likely.
I hope not, but have no predictive power on this.
Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs, to protect local industries and production. So a blanket tax on imports doesn't make sense unless one wants to alienate one's country from the world. Since it doesn't make sense, I hope Trump is just advancing the idea to make people cheer, and won't implement it.
It may make sense to impose tariffs on things like steel, even if other countries can produce the same or better quality cheaper, because we must not rely exclusively on other countries for something as fundamental as steel. Optional things, like specific foods, make poor targets for tariffs, because people don't NEED them; if bananas were no longer available, people would eat local fruits.
> Tariffs MUST be selective, as all tariffs are protective tariffs
Why? Why can't tariffs just be for revenue? Or worst case, national security? If there's any use of tariffs that are bad, it's using them for protectionism!
I'm generally opposed to tariffs for protectionism. But if you said 20% tariff across the board, up to but not exceeding the tariff that the country imposes on our product, and as a replacement for the income tax, then 100% sign me up.
Also I'm warming up to the idea of using tariffs not to protect jobs, but for fairness in laws that internalize externalities. For example, adverting a situation where e.g. meat prices go up because we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, so we just import meat from countries without such a law. That is, not necessarily to protect jobs, but to protect our laws.
So is it really the case that tariffs must be selective?
In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff? The only case I can see is if your country doesn't produce any of the product for which the tariff applies, which makes it effectively a tax on your own citizens.
If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses, which is less income for businesses that must pay the tariff. Or it is a tax on your own citizens, controlling the price making it higher (if your country imports all of its widgets) or it protects domestic widget pricing, making them relatively cheaper and thus making foreign widget providers sell fewer of them.
If your country has a 50% tariff, but imports all of its widgets, then domestic widget production ought to be significantly profitable to start with, and could become competitive even when the tariff goes away.
So if you try to replace the income tax with tariffs, domestic producers will take more of the market, and your income will be less than projected.
The US imported about $3.8 trillion in 2023. It took in about $2.2 trillion in revenue, of which almost all came from individual and corporate income taxes, and payroll taxes. A 20% tariff, even if nothing changed, wouldn't cover the lost income.
Finally, I don't understand your example on meat prices going up. If we prohibit antibiotics in cattle, that should be for a policy reason because we have discovered the antibiotics are bad, and getting around it by importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people. Either imports need to comply with your laws, or your country should not import from them. Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
> In what case is a tariff NOT a protective tariff?
I gave you several examples of tariffs besides protective tariffs. You can have a tariff for raising revenue. You can have a tariff for fairness. Just because some job sector sees increased employment doesn't mean that's the purpose of the tariff. That doesn't even mean it's the best way to describe it. You could plausibly have a tariff that is purely punitive due to the amount of money it's removing from the economy.
But also I object to your framing. If all tariffs are protective, then the term "protective tariff" is redundant. If that's really what you think then we're obviously talking past each other.
> If you impose, say, a 10% tariff on widgets, then widgets get more expensive to buy for the consumer. That means higher expenses,
By itself yes, tariffs reduce consumption (shifts the supply curve to the left), but I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax. Individual taxes may shape the economy,and change the makeup of who pays the taxes, but at the end of the day they don't actually increase or decrease the total amount taxed. Government spending determines total taxation, by which I mean all the ways that government can reduce the share of goods and services otherwise available for purchase: by direct taxation, debt (which comes out of the private sector and increases interest rates), or by inflation (an increase in prices from the time you get paid to the time you purchase a product).
> importing antibiotic meat products from countries that allow it would then be poisoning your people
No, by the time the meat is sold the antibiotic meat is identical to domestic meat. The purpose of banning antibiotics is to avoid forming drug-resistant bacteria, which makes this a classic collective action problem, it only works if everyone observes it. Another example is greenhouse gases. We can ban CO2 all we want, but that's not going to make any measurable difference compared to China.
> Though we seem to make an exception for labor, in that we allow products to be imported which have components of slave labor...
I'm much less concerned about this. Most of what we call "sweatshops" are actually highly sought after jobs in many countries. In many places the only alternative is grueling, outdoor manual labor, or sex work. Sweatshops are actually a great example of comparative advantage in labor markets that we can benefit from.
A tariff isn't protective by definition. It's protective in function. You may implement a tariff for any of the reasons you say, but it will end up having a protective component unless your country doesn't produce that good at all.
"I was proposing a tariff that entirely replaces the income tax."
Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it. And the tariff would only start at the replacement amount, as it would have to increase to account for decreasing imports due to higher prices.
> It's protective in function.
Ok fine, it's fair to say "almost all tariffs are protective of some industry" but I don't think that's the same thing as saying "a protective tariff".
I still disagree with your framing "protective in function" because this depends on the industry and nature of the tariff. The issue with tariffs is not "do we want protection or not" but "what is it protecting and who is it harming". It's not always clear who it's helping, but an arbitrary tariff is almost always harmful to an arbitrary person, even if only a tiny amount.
> Unless you want to impose a tariff of upwards of 50% across the board, the income tax won't be replaced by it.
Sure, there's a whole lot more that goes into this, obviously.
Looks like the last tariff increase was proposed in May and went into effect in September, so you should have four months' warning if they move forward on it in January.
Wood is heavy and takes up a lot of space, so a lot of the price is in transport and thus most production is semi-local. Prices are also very correlated with fuel prices, which are generally lower during R administrations and most is produced in the US now anyway. Tariffs with Canada would hurt, but I think that less likely than most other countries.
Trump likes to propose stuff like this as a negotiating tactic, so he can threaten foreign countries to get better trade deals. But Trump is a high variance kind of guy, who knows if he'll go through with the tariffs or not.
There will be a lot of analyses and post-mortems in the coming weeks (now there's an overused sentence...) but forget policies and issues and candidates and demographic coalitions for a moment. I'd like to suggest that everyone should update on the following structural facts:
1. Voters are actually quite empirically-minded. They will primarily consider what has actually happened, under each administration, not what is being promised or theorised to happen. While this obviously isn't always rational, it's something that is both often rational and also a fact about the way people think. No amount of talk was ever going to change the fact that nothing catastrophic happened during Trump's first term*, and that both economic and safety conditions clearly worsened under Biden-Harris (not to mention the state of the world). You can't gaslight people away from their own perceptions. When are elites going to learn this?
2. Whining about "bothsidesism" doesn't, fucking, work, unless the thing you're accusing the other side of is actually entirely absent on your side. If your candidate has never lied, then "both sides lie" can be dismissed; if your candidate has also lied, but just not *quite* as much, it can't. It's amazing how much the Democrats have relied on "oh sure the thing we're condemning the Rs for we've also done, but ackshually it was not *exactly* the same, therefore we're fine." Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy). Official policies tolerating crime, and ignoring illegal immigration, aren't the same as ignoring Trump's fraud conviction (I don't even know the justification for this one). The capitol riots weren't the same as the BLM riots (even though the latter caused far more damage, because...). As we saw yesterday, no one's buying it.
3. People don't forget what you've done in the past, especially if you never paid for it. The things the left did in 2020, most obviously the riots but also the tech censorship of anti-Biden information, and lab leak evidence, and many other such things. I think the Ds thought that since they got away with it at the time, and still won in 2020 because it was overshadowed by other things (or, you know, because free discussion of it was being suppressed) that they could pretend it never happened and no one would remember. And that they could even go on and on about the Republican January riots and somehow think voters wouldn't remember the June ones and would somehow take them seriously. The past will catch up with you. The cowards who stood by while cities burned because it was politically difficult to criticise the rioters signed away their credibility, the trust of the people that they would do the right thing, and their right to ever use the words "safety", "non-violence" or "democracy" ever again.
That's just what I can think of right now.
*Well except the pandemic, which he mishandled and was rightly voted out for, just as the Ds are being voted out for mishandling the border and public safety. Importantly, almost none of the fear-mongering about Trump is based on the thing he actually did: mishandle an external catastrophe. Maybe they should have tried that...
>Trying to overturn the 2016 election with a faithless EC wasn't exactly the same as trying to overturn the 2020 by refusing to certify (how? they're both exploiting technical loopholes to completely invalidate democracy).
1. Trump's fradulent electors are being charged by their respective states and some have even been convicted already. That's because there was no technical legal loophole, it's illegal to falsify electoral votes on behalf of a private candidate. Not a single state governor, AG, legislature, or whatever other official political party approved Trump's fradulent electors.
2. No Democratic official directed the 2016 faithless electors. Trump personally directed his campaign officials and personally phone called numerous state representatives and private actors to pressure them into falsifying electoral votes and accepting the fradulent ones over the state certified ones.
3. Multiple states already have laws that invalidate faithless electoral votes. The ones that haven't outlawed them see defection from the popular vote as a legitimate way to run their elections, in line with the original reasoning for establishing the electoral college system.
4. The faithless electors that broke their state's laws were fined and accepted the legal punishment. Trump argued in court that he should have complete criminal immunity for any actions he took as President.
Nearly everything else in your comment is also hilariously wrong, it's a shame you keep trying to epistemically pollute these comments by doing 0 research and blindly regurgitating propaganda that can be disspelled just by copying and pasting any of your claims into google.
I was rather amused to see the Matt Yglesias post-mortem (stop doing dumb radical stuff and appeal to moderates) juxtaposed with the Freddie DeBoer post-mortem (the Ds gotta give the far left a reason to vote for them).
Yeah, the Democrats are going to have to do some kind of soul searching on that question. For electoral purposes, I think they can thread the needle on this (emphasis on "can" not "will") by dropping the most off putting culture war stuff while still retaining some fairly distinct leftist positions. That likely means trans gets thrown under the bus and a significant drop of racial resentment politics. They'll also have to be smarter about their economic platforms or at least how they're sold. Rent control is apparently popular in polls but makes the actual problem of high rents far worse. That's hard to work out, but they can avoid the whole problem if they can find a way to get more housing built in cities.
Interestingly, this whole situation has a strong parallel in the 2012 Republican autopsy. In order for the Romney-type Republicans to do better, they needed to expand their base and cause fewer people to hate them. This seems roughly equivalent to what Matt Y is saying now - turn down the temperature and be more centrist. What actually happened was a political realignment with anti-immigration (very popular but neither party previously did anything about it) being at the forefront - the direct opposite of one of the 2012 autopsy recommendations.
FDB is suggesting something more akin to pushing a realignment. Drop the centrist stuff and go for popular items that are outside of the Democrat platform now. If they would do that, the Democrats would likely be fighting for the working class again, rather than accidentally ceding that whole population to populist Republicans. They would have to repudiate a lot of their own elites to do this, the same way the Republican elites frequently became Never-Trumpers, even so far as actively campaigning for Harris. If both parties are pursuing the working classes again, then it'll be interesting to see where the elite go.
I don't think trans people have to be thrown under the bus at all. No one's going to balk at "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings". Most people will balk at "treat them like second class citizens". Various things will follow from this, such as giving them the same job discrimination protections as anyone else, marriage protections, and estate settlement. (I honestly can't imagine any of this ever having come up, though perhaps I missed it for all the other hoopla.)
The parts that I know people got upset over were transwomen in women's sports, and parental notification for minors thinking about gender change medical treatments. There's also outrage over being cancelled by this or that company for saying something that was declared offensive by trans standards, but I don't believe the law has a role to play there in either direction.
I guess I should be more specific about which trans issues would be dropped. Pronouns (i.e. requiring others to use preferred pronouns) I would also add to your list.
I wouldn't expect the left to drop "treat them like (slightly strange) human beings" as a general and acceptable stance.
For the vast majority of voters it seems clear that Point 1 is the only one that mattered.
The lesson for Democrats is "try not to be President during a time of massive global inflation, because it doesn't matter what you do in response to it, people will just be mad anyway." I know immigration was a clear #2 in this election, and I'd be curious to do a time-travel A/B test to see if it would have changed things, but my guess is 'no'.
I do agree with you on Point 2 that the D's attack lines just didn't have the juice they hoped for. I think this is less because "Ds have their own weaknesses here" and more because "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them."
I think "nobody gives a shit because they have low standards for their politicians as long as they personally like them." is broadly correct, but I think it's a learned behavior. Other than maybe Carter, I don't know that I can name a US president since at least Ike (maybe I just don't know him very well) that didn't lie about important matters. Call it what you will, but we've consistently had politicians that intentionally or negligently misled us about various things in order to push the public in their desired direction.
Hillary Clinton was a pretty famous liar, so for her to complain about Trump's lies felt disingenuous at best. It left open the need for a discussion about the types of lies each told - Trump's braggadocio verses Hillary's lawyerly deception.
I wish there was a "trump won, discuss" open thread
I appreciate the cooling off period actually. Should make for more level-headed discussion whenever Scott gets to his post-mortem
I took Monkyyy's comment as a request for a single thread for that discussion, so that people who preferred the cool-off period could collapse that thread and be done.
To satisfy your condition, the thing to do would be to politely ask everyone to honor a cooling off period (whether or not there's a single thread later).
To all the people who were saying "both sides are undermining democracy" before the election: Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud, nor did they file a series of doomed-to-fail lawsuits that pretended that tiny procedural irregularities were actually a vast conspiracy to steal the election.
This is a normal thing that happens all the time, but after 2020 it's not something you should take for granted.
Meanwhile, on Twitter sommmmmebody was already preparing sommmmething, just in case:
https://www-rnd-de.translate.goog/digital/us-wahl-2024-musks-plattform-x-schlaegt-an-wahltag-fast-nur-pro-trump-inhalte-vor-Q4H3TUWBSZH5NBCMOFTKOTTNQI.html?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
The democratic party nominee was appointed by the incumbent, who had the right to do because of a joke of a primary that no one seriously believes was a fair election. She was not chosen by any sort of democratic process.
So, are you arguing that no President before 1910 was chosen democratically? Because that's when the first presidential primaries were held - before that nominees were simply chosen by the parties internally.
Whether you choose to have a primary, a caucus, or no vote at all is an internal party decision. The fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted on the choice of Harris, is no more a violation of my rights than the fact that I as a Democrat didn't get consulted about nominating Trump as the Republican candidate.
(Although a world where only jungle primaries are allowed, to maximize people's ability to choose the candidates for the election, does sound like an interesting concept.)
Seems like a tradeoff to me, either way; no unmitigated positives.
As you say, parties used a different method before primaries. And there were endless variations anyone can see by reading through all the presidential election articles on WP. Even the Libertarian Party uses a not-obviously-democratic method to settle on a nominee.
One method I'd like to see some day would be a jungle primary with instant runoff voting. Arrow notwithstanding, such a system might tell us more than it conceals.
"Please note that the Democrats lost an election and they did *not* immediately start a media blitz to convince people there was widespread voter fraud"
No, they started a media blitz to convince everyone that the result was illegitimate "because Russia", Just Asking Questions about the security of voting machines, using the phrase "voter suppression" at every opportunity, calling for the Electoral College to appoint the loser as president, having said loser officially concede but then spend years calling her loss "illegimitate", and insisting more times than you could ever count that even though they lost according to the rules, they didn't *really* lose because the rules should have been different!
Yes, that was all in 2016, not now, but people haven't fucking forgotten it and the memory-holing and gaslighting and "when *we* undermine democracy it's COMPLETELY different" has to fucking stop.
Other than that, I agree with you. People should accept the result of an election, the right's reaction to 2020 was disgraceful, and it was significantly worse than the left's reaction to 2016. On the other hand, the left defected *first* from these democratic norms, even if to a much lesser extent, and I think people underestimate the significance of the first defection: it all but guarantees that the other side will respond even worse. And also, although there was a difference in degree, there was no difference in kind: both sides had large sections that refused to accept the legitimacy of their loss, and were willing to use any means including violence to resist the democratic outcome.
Upshot: shame on both side's partisans, and on all who defended or enabled them, and on all who try to rewrite history for them. Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things *shouldn't* matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
This is way too hard into both-sides-ism. "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades, so have complaints about how "election security" laws often seem aimed at suppressing Democratic votes in particular. I think most of the 2016 complaints were within the bounds of normal political discourse. The only part of this I agree on is the faithless electors thing - I think it was both a dumb idea and an undemocratic one.
(Also, in the case of voter suppression, how are the people passing the suppressive laws not the ones firing the first shot?)
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same
If you want to make sure that the candidate who won the popular vote is also the election winner, then don't yell at the people who complain about the electoral college!
> I think most of the 2016 complaints were within the bounds of normal political discourse.
The 2016 discourse was way worse than 2020 discourse.
We know for a fact the Obama campaign spied on other politicians.
e.g. Angela Merkel: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/germany-media-spying-obama-administration/index.html
The Clinton campaign MANUFACTURED false claims to get the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign, an argument which is very lengthy but I will direct you here: https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/509002-more-willful-blindness-by-the-media-on-spying-by-obama-administration/
In 2020, numerous officials (mostly Democrat) broke election laws in numerous states. So far this has not been ruled on because very few people have standing to challenge this in court: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/texas-v-pennsylvania/
When Trump doesn't concede the election, it's because it wouldn't be fair to concede when election officials broke the law in ways that almost uniformly disadvantage you. When he forms a legal argument to this effect, his lawyer gets charged with conspiracy.
When Clinton says the election was "stolen" and "Trump is illegitimate" and manufactures evidence to get her opponent investigated, how is that "politics as usual"? It's another case of a dozen of Democrats accusing Trump of doing the bad things that they're actually doing.
> "The electoral college sucks" has been a recurring complaint for decades
And it's a bad complaint. The electoral college is a game and if Trump were playing the popular vote game in 2016 he would have campaigned up and down California and New York and won the popular vote. But that's not the rules of the game and so that's not the game he played. Somehow Democrats haven't figured out that California disenfranchises Republican voters, though they have it in their power to make it not be that way. They could at the very least allocate votes based on congressional district like Nebraska and Maine. But they don't.
Elements of the Obama executive branch worked in tandem with the Clinton campaign to spread knowingly false information (particularly the Steele Dossier) in order to undermine the incoming Trump campaign and were able to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign through this process (which then led to three years of intense investigations intended to undermine Trump and prevent him from exercising his constitutional powers).
I don't know if there's a way to objectively compare how bad that is compared to January 6. You probably wouldn't get partisans on either side to agree to a metric.
But I do know that both are them are *very* bad. Does it matter if one is worse than the other when both are this bad?
I would note that the consequences for the FBI intentionally lying to the FISA court were... uh, they had to promise not to do it again. Compare that to what happened to the people involved in J6. Or the Trump staffers charged with lying to the FBI, if you think that's a more fair example.
Sure, but that point is downstream of agreeing that both are bad and neither should happen. If we can agree that both are bad, then we can talk about fixing the situation for the future. Neither side is going to agree to "your side did a bad thing and you should be punished" without seeing fairness applied. That's true even if the blue team's soldiers got off easy for previous infractions.
> Thankfully, this is the first election in three cycles where the candidate who pulled ahead early in the counting, the candidate who won the popular vote, and the election winner were all the same, so hopefully there should be more acceptance of democracy this time. Both those things shouldn't matter for legitimacy, but recent history has shown they do.
This.
Since everyone else is posting their top-level election responses I just want to remind everyone that it doesn't matter who wins or loses, the important thing is that both candidates had a good time.
Seriously though, I feel like my friend has just broken up with his girlfriend and gone back to his old girlfriend, and now for some reason the dumped girlfriend is going to spend the next four years bitching at *me* about it all.
The election has elected, and the room temperature IQ mass has spoken.
I, of course, will (probably!) be fine.
I'm white, I'm male, I own my own house, and I'm fairly wealthy; enough so I might actually edge into whatever tax cuts are coming.
I'll be even more fine if the Trump and Vance both die somehow and someone who isn't a fucking mercantilist gets the big chair, but if prices go up by 20% I'll be OK.
I do admit that I want to see the full Trump this time. War with Iran, collapse of the social safety net, social security revoked, 60% tariff on our main partner, the whole shebang.
I wanna see the proles and the olds who voted for the dude get everything they wanted. I wanna see some dudes dieing on the street, wondering why they don't get their government check and their government dialysis anymore. Perhaps a trans hamas communist mexican haitian took it?
This is bad, of course, and actually it would be great of the morons were right, the entire profession of economics was wrong, and everything is fine.
I will try to restrain my worst impulses and not wicca style manifest a curse or some shit.
My worry is that actions Trump takes won't manifest as negative until 10 years later. Ie, he cuts some of the funding sources for SS (taxes on tips, on SS payouts), that reduces SS solvency timeline from, say, 2036 to 2032, and seniors start to struggle in the presidency of... AOC, or Taylor Swift, or Ivanka, or something.
And then who will get the blame? Not trump!
I understand the general feeling of "Trump will mess something important up" but your specific list seems mostly wrong.
Like, he's not going to get rid of Social Security. He likes being popular, and knows that would be unpopular. It's something he's explicitly said he wouldn't do, despite his opponents saying otherwise.
He's also not going to war with Iran. He fired Bolton over that topic, because Bolton wanted to get into war.
I don't want to criticize people for disliking Trump, and have plenty to say against him as well, but it's unhelpful in a wide variety of ways (including your sanity) to believe things that you think Trump will do that are just wrong.
I dunno. Trump might not want to cut SS, but he certainly wants to defund it wherever he can; and his hangers on definitely want to eliminate social security and cut federal healthcare. I'll give you this one though.
The Iran thing is just false though. He isn't gonna declare war on anybody, but he played stupid brinksman games throughout his term with Iran, he is vastly more likely to force them to force us to go to war by doing something stupid.
Maybe I've just missed it, but do you have quotes or examples of his leadership team or campaign saying anything about cutting SS or Medicare? Some Republicans want to, some for very good reasons (i.e. we're on track for SS to become insolvent if we don't do something), but that's neither Trump nor his team.
When Biden sent carriers to the Red Sea to bomb Houthi rebels, was that brinkmanship? Or the various times he (or Obama, Bush, and Clinton) launched missiles and drones at various opponents? From all accounts, Trump seems to have done less of that than any president in the last 30-40+ years. If your opinion is that all of them were also engaged in brinkmanship, we can probably agree. But then, why the specific worry about Trump? Harris would have been doing the same.
I think Social Security should go away, but not in a stupid way. When I realized how it worked, perhaps 30 years ago, I thought a good plan would have been to phase it out, such that people who are 25 would pay (smaller and smaller amounts) to keep it going, until it gets phased out in 30-40 years. When I came up with this plan, I thought 2030 would be a good time to end it, which is about when I expected to reach retirement age, which means I would have paid into it and received no payment out.
This may not be a viable plan, since the government can change significantly over 30-40 years. But I think Social Security is fundamentally flawed, in that one group is receiving benefit from a different group that pays for the benefit, and so should go away. A mistake, once made, cannot be undone in the past, but can be mitigated or erased by future actions.
Maybe Scott should just repost "I can stand everyone except the outgroup" every election.
It could be a tradition. Rationalist Feast of the Ascension.
It would help, probably.
I know I'm catastrophizing, but then again last time this dude was in power a lot of bad shit happened.
On the other hand, there was a slight case of global pandemic.
On the third hand, all the neocon/neolib guys he had around to run things are gone this time.
On the fourth hand, I hate those guys.
On the fifth hand, war with Iran would be really really funny.
And on the sixth hand, if it goes really badly again, there are midterms in two years and even the least policy brained culture warrior will have to recognize reality he said, realizing it wasn't true even as he typed it out.
So who's to say? Maybe it's fine, and maybe I can get some laughs out of it if it isn't.
I've got no idea why you'd think war with Iran is more likely under Trump, who has run as a peacenik, than under Harris, who campaigned with the Cheneys.
There's plenty to criticise Trump for, but this one doesn't feel high on the list.
He sashimi'd a major figure of their government, and wanted to bomb Tehran.
Dude is not a peacnik, he just likes Putin.
"Trump ran as a peacenik" is news to me. I saw lots of his supporters here talking about how Biden made us weak and Trump is going to Get Tough With Iran and China.
Peace through strength.
When he started out, he was Mr. Loose Cannon. "What's the point of nukes if you don't use 'em?" was a quote I recall. I also recall the counter: there's value to someone who looks wild enough to press the button if the opponents have all learned to call any bluff short of that.
And then, after 2020, Trump supporters would point out that he tried to withdraw from Syria and began drawdown in Afghanistan, and didn't get into any new wars. (Some argued moving the US Israeli embassy to Jerusalem was provocative, as was the drone strike of an Iranian terrorist, but no war was in fact triggered by either.)
I wouldn't call this "peacenik", though, before I called it "intimidating the riff raff into silence", which is indeed closer to "Get Tough".
Sam Kriss wrote such an awesome essay about the Democrat loss:
I Told You So
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so
> One of my most foundational political beliefs is that while the winner in an election doesn’t usually deserve to win, the loser always deserves to lose. I can’t think of anyone who deserved to lose more than Kamala Harris.
That truly deserves the label "jeremiad".
It reads like a far-from-center leftist who wants to blame someone for losing the election. If he truly thought Harris was going to lose, then he ought to have posted something similar to this BEFORE the election, bemoaning that the Democrats are giving away the store, "and this is how and why".
Kriss is a wannabe Mencken: all the smug contempt, but only about half the talent. (To be fair, that's still a reasonable amount of talent.)
Any particular essay of Mencken you recommend? I know I've heard the name, not sure if I've read anything from him.
While it's perhaps not as Kriss-like as many others, I guess my favorite would be his takedown of Veblen: https://jasonzweig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Mencken-on-Veblen.pdf
Hmm, I think I don't have enough context to engage with that essay, talking of quite a few people I don't know. Aesthetically, I also prefer Kriss, but that is highly subjective of course.
I thought this is a "Harris lost because she didn't adopt my policy preferences" but I wasn't sure what the policy preferences were going to be until I read it.
It's actually about the extreme nothingness of Kamala and about how we've learned nothing in a decade of dealing with Trump.
Kamala was weak but what Democratic candidate would have been better?
Any Democratic swing- or purple-state governor would probably have been better. They, like Kamala, would have needed more than just a couple months of campaigning, but they'd have an actual track record of winning elections and running a government, they'd have proven themselves able to attract moderate Republican-leaning voters, and they wouldn't be as tied to nationally unpopular far-left policies than Harris.
And that last is maybe not really fair to Harris, but it is nonetheless a fact that, with the vice-presidency such an underwhelmingly low-visibility post, people had to form much of their image of Kamala from A: her time as a California AG and B: California's general track record of far-left nuttiness that voters outside of California don't follow in enough detail to know which parts are the fault of which politicians. A purple-state governor wouldn't have that sort of image problem, because if they did they wouldn't be a purple-state governor.
Harris would have also had to come to grips with her 2019 presidential campaign promises, which were extremely far to the left, and her (fairly brief) senate voting record of the same. Given the baggage of coming from California while she's also trying to find a lane in the 2020 primaries, I don't know that she had a choice while maintaining relevancy. That said, it made a pivot to the center or right seem extremely disingenuous and unlikely to succeed.
I guess that means I agree with you about a purple state governor. Coming from California seems like a pretty hard sell to the nation at large. Newsom I think understands this, as he started vetoing some progressive legislation around the time he was thinking about running for president.
I don't know. It seems that you never find out which candidates will actually work well under a national spotlight until primary season starts. Candidates who seem strong on paper often turn out to be terrible, while obscure names often turn out to perform a lot better than expected.
That's the value of the primary system, and why the Dems were very dumb to skip it this time around.
I agree it was a huge mistake for the Dems to treat Biden like a normal incumbent and not primary him. That mistake may have made all the difference.
OTOH, Trump won bigly last night. Hard to imagine any Democrat beating him, particularly if the vote was mostly about "Trump is better for the economy than Dems", which it seems to have been.
To be fair, not primarying the current incumbent has been a bi-partisan tradition since Taft in 1912, and before that, Pierce. (To date, the only US President to *not* get the nomination despite seeking it.) If you want the incumbent out, you either talk to him quietly behind the scenes (e.g. Grant), or you just go third party and end up as a spoiler (Teddy, Thurmond, Wallace, Perot). Both parties learned a lesson that's hard to ignore.
To be even fairer, the Dems caught a bad break. No one plans when to go into mental decline. Biden was a risk in 2020; I think the DNC hoped he'd hold together until 2028, and if not, you want him to drop out early in 2024 or late 2023, not maybe kinda sorta hold together until it's too late to call up the bench for primary candidates.
OTOH, we can probably hold them responsible for making Biden their man in 2020 despite the risk, and then for going out of their way to push "sharp as a tack!" until the debate.
I think they backed themselves into a corner with Biden. 2020 couldn't really have happened any other way, with their goal of keeping Bernie out of the general (which could be argued either way but was clearly their goal). No one else could have taken the mantle like Biden did. Once he's in, there's no good moment to remove him if he wants to stay in. Forcing a contested primary is really bad for morale and is a huge vote of no confidence in Biden, which could backfire badly if he still wins it.
I think it's fair for all of us to blame Biden and the people closest to him (including Harris) for not admitting his decline earlier. The 25th Amendment exists for a reason, but even well short of that someone should have done the right thing and made it obvious to the voting public long before the summer of the election on national TV.
1968, LBJ
Withdrew early. There's a story here. Democrats were unwilling to primary him at first, thinking his social initiatives were solid and much more important than his unpopularity for the Vietnam War. Then the Tet Offensive happened, and Eugene McCarthy ran a strategic campaign to challenge him in the NH primary. When everyone saw how close McCarthy got to winning, RFK (Sr) stepped in, and then the primaries were serious. (Both of them would fail to get the nomination, and it's safe to say that RFK had a real shot at winning the nom if he hadn't, um, been shot.)
you shouldn't be shocked by the election results, and yet I am.
I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Welp.
I know people make this joke every election, but I think it's for real this time. I have one other nation I can get a passport for, I'll see if I can get a permanent visa for the EU also, I'm pretty sure I can in at least one country.
Ciao, loosers.
I suggest moving illegally to Mexico. Turnabout is fair play.
Awesome. Go somewhere you'll be happy.
Seriously, I moved from Cali to Texas. There's some regrets but overall it is very, very worth it. There's a real, measurable improvement to my quality of life.
...You can't run forever. Why do you think what's happening here will be isolated to this country?
> I guess I thought people were less stupid than this.
Usually, when reality doesn't conform to our beliefs, it's wise to update ones beliefs and then take appropriate action. Blaming is the opposite of this--its a way to go deeper into some delusion.
I have an EU passport but I'm also a US citizen and I'll be staying and figuring how I can help. It seems like the most effective option
You don't get to come to Mars with us
Man, fuck mars. It's a lame planet for losers.
I'll laugh at your 90% tumor by weight ass from my glorious O'neill cylinder.
Looking forward to sipping kava under a wide open Martian sky while tube boy over here is perma-stuck indoors
Unshackled from the reins of gravity, our sons will grow to be 2 meters tall. I heard chicks really dig tall guys, so there's that.
Enjoy your dust storms, planet dweller.
Yeah, but the girls will also be taller, so they're still going to need a natural advantage.
No problem, we'll just import small girls from Mars.
(Not looking to pile on, but: I'm pretty sure this is an unspoken reason why Elon Musk started The Boring Company. Ostensibly it's because LA traffic sucks, but he also knows that a Mars colony will need expertise in digging holes.)
The boring company is bad digging tunnels though, and even if it was good at digging tunnels the types of tunnels it digs would be pointless on Mars.
I'm pretty sure he started the boring company for the same reason he started the hyperloop company; to try to push public transit out of the zeitgeist.
Yeah, but Mars doesn't have lots of expensive infrastructure and real estate already parked over the places people want their tunnels, so the smart way to do that is almost certainly going to be cut and cover. How much need is there going to be for *deep* tunneling on Mars?
Possibly for mining purposes, but we don't know nearly enough about the geology to start planning for that in any detail.
Hm, it does look like the radiation shielding probably only needs "several" meters of rock, so an artificial shield could work too.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844024022114
Yeah, a good rule of thumb for this is that the Earth's atmosphere would condense into the equivalent of ten meters of water. And there are people who live above ~half the Earth's atmosphere without any serious problems. So what does five meters of water come to, if it manifests as dirt or rock or concrete?
Oddly, I ran across this while looking around:
https://x.com/boringcompany/status/1856750432909234401
But I'm not sure how much stock to put into it; Elon seems to tweet stuff that sounds good, without much regard for technical truth or "precise words".
Oh, this guy is gonna somehow import an earth atmosphere to planet without a magnetosphere or even half the needed mass.
I'll enjoy my spacenoid future beverage while my downwell serf (you) mines spacemetal for my amusement. I don't even use it! It jus floats at lagrange 1!
Um...NOT being perma-stuck indoors on MARS? I guess your spacesuit must be awfully comfy. Or we've done a great deal of terraforming.
Not sure if that's been pointed or explained before, but one thing I see prett consistently with ChatGPT is that when you catch it saying something wrong, then ask related questions whose correct answers contradict the earlier claim (and in fact imply the right one), then ask him to reconsider, it's seldom able to do so.
Just asked it who was President right now and it confidently answered Donald Trump (*). Asked two guiding questions "what is the difference between President and President-elect?" and "when does the President take up office?", which it answered correctly, then "given your last two answers, who is President right now?" and it still said it's the Donald. Sad!
(*) it also said he "was able to *retain* his position for a second term" which I don't think is quite correct but I'm more willing to let that slide as a vocab mistake than a factual one.
Hmm... I've often been able to get ChatGPT o1 to correct itself, but it often takes a _lot_ of leading questions, e.g. https://chatgpt.com/share/671f016f-3d64-8006-8bf5-3c2bba4ecedc
I finally got it to describe the transitions that give CuCl4 2- its color correctly, but I had to do things like tell it:
>800 nm is in the infrared, albeit the near infrared. That absorbtion doesn't affect the visible color by much - and the CuCl4 2- does _not_ "appears yellow-green", it appears yellowish brown. THink about charge transfer.
Ask ChatGPT a question that it gets right, and ask it leading questions into "correcting" itself into a wrong answer. What happens?
Many Thanks! Good question. I haven't tried that. Since reality is self-consistent, I would have to ask it questions where I think I can trick it into making an invalid deduction at at least one step. The classic misleading derivation is one where there is a hidden divide-by-zero, getting to an end result of 1=2 or some such thing... But this doesn't really start with
>Ask ChatGPT a question that it gets right
...
Setting aside the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT don't actually think, I actually find this kind of thing from people, too. In tae kwon do, we learn the meanings behind the forms we do, and the students apparently memorize the words without actually understanding them. In particular, one form is named after someone dedicated to preserving Japanese culture during the Japanese occupation of Korea, and the 24 movements represent his entire life. I have asked students who recite this whether this person is still alive, and most aren't sure, and can't see how one could tell based on what they said.
Do these people know when the Japanese occupation of Korea was? I expect most people could guess it happened before/during WW2 given a few leading questions, but would draw a blank if asked spontaneously.
No, that wasn't part of what they were told. What I said above is what they were told. And the answer is there, if you understand the words without simple rote recitation, and can think at least a little.
If you're referring to "represents his entire life", I can imagine that being parsed as "represents his entire life so far".
You must understand that the number of movements in a given form never changes, which would be obvious to anyone learning that form (it is the third one to learn). In order to dedicate the number of movements to a person's life, you must know how long the person lived.
Should "the 24 movements represents his entire life" be read as "one movement for every year of his life", then? If so, that wasn't obvious by the phrasing. I read it as "the 24 movements represent all major aspects and events of his life", which could be applied (with a bit of imprecision and handwaving) to someone who's lived to a ripe old age and is currently enjoying a quiet retirement.
That certainly is one interpretation. I don't think it's the first one that would occur to most people. If it IS true, no one ever describes the 24 aspects and/or events that I have heard, either.
So, now that we've established that a felony jacket is no bar to success for aging white guys, I, being an aging white guy, would like to try some crime. What sort of crimes are recommended for beginners?
Fare evasion, jaywalking, speeding less that +15 mph, drug use, shitting on the sidewalk, harrassing passersby.
For most of us, the key is not only acting like we're crazy, but also appearing as though any close contact with us will permanently contaminate the other person.
billionaires being above the law was established by the Obama administration and Harris as California AG was complicit in it; her "tough on crime" stance was only for people too poor to afford good lawyers, not for crooked bankers
the remarkable thing about Trump is not that he's a crook it's that he actually got convicted
Yeah, echoing Arrk Mindmaster, you can literally find that list of recommended crimes spelt out by the DA or police policies of several major cities. Shoplifting under a certain amount seems to be the best option, complete with an official guarantee from authorities you'll be allowed to get away with it.
You can't beat that, and it's been "established" for at least four years.
You're setting your sights too low. You should try violating the constitution instead.
As a private citizen, you have three options that I know of.
I do not recommend violating the 13th amendment, unless consensual 24/7 BDSM arrangements qualify. As written and read pedantically, it looks like they would count, but I don't think courts would uphold that reading.
A more promising possibility is transporting across state lines, possessing, or consuming intoxicating liquors against the laws of the state in which the activity takes place. This is rendered unconstitutional by Section 2 of the 21st Amendment.
Alternately, you could question the validity of the legally authorized public debt of the United States. This questioning is prohibited by Section 4 of the 14th Amendment.
A good friend who is "In the Lifestyle" points out that BDSM groups need to be quite discrete, as much of what they do is, legally speaking "Assault" and in most jurisdictions you cannot consent to Assault.
"Assault with a sexy weapon."
Won't work. Too many scary black plastic attachments.
Liberals are often bad at modeling the minds of people with tough-on-crime views. They don't get that the objection to felons is because felons usually hurt people, so they instead model someone who unthinkingly dislikes anyone given this label "felon" by the government and then wonder why those people were willing to overlook Trump's "civil fraud."
If you are implying that I am a liberal, you may want to recalibrate. Political surveys usually classify me as a centrist by American standards, and sometimes as a right-leaning centrist. For example, I tend to agree with American right-wingers that the business community is generally a positive force (including big business,) the Pax Americana is mostly a good thing, and you overregulate some things (like housing) and oversubsidize others (like education.)
The white male privilege schtick is indicative of someone solidly left. And I'm not sure Pax Americana is really American right wing or right wing at all. I think it was a historical aberration and the right's turn to isolationism is more of a return to the norm.
So commit white-collar crime? Thanks for the advice!
Rip the "Do not remove under penalty of law" tag from your mattress, in furtherance of another crime which I'm not going to specify.
You're allowed to remind it if you're the end consumer. It's only potted to be removed by the seller I think.
Ah, but that's only if you don't remove it *corruptly*.
Remove it, while laughing sinisterly. Be sure to record the laugh. I suggest some form of NFT.
Organ harvesting. The benefit is that even if you don't pull it off, you'll still be committing SOME kind of crime.
What kind of organ, dare I ask, can be harvested by "pulling it off"?
All of them.
What, you plan to just leave them there?
Speeding or illegal parking. But you might also need diplomatic plates for that.
It sounded like Johan was looking for felonies. Some jurisdictions can charge extreme speeding as a felony, but I think that's only if someone gets injured as a result.
Felony illegal parking is potentially more interesting. Maybe if you park in a protected wetland, or deep inside Area 51?
Shoplifting. Try it in California.
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but... I keep getting notifications than my comment got a like or upvote or whatever. But I don't actually see any sort of comment upvote system. I don't see accumulated likes or any buttons to upvote or downvote. How does it work on ACX? Do I need a mobile app or something? I'm just reading through the browser.
You can like them when you see the comment via email.
I believe substack wants upvotes, scott got a lazy css hack to hide it; people who have css extensions even accidentally still see the upvote button.
They are default hidden in the browser, because Scott doesn't like them. I assume you can give them out in the app, but as a fellow browser-pleb, I am also just guessing.
You're correct. I can see the like button in the app.
But can you see the like count? That's what Scott really objects to.
yeah, i can
Whatever: can you refresh my memory on why Scott objects to the Like or the Like count?
Request: Could you write a psuedo-kabbalistic read of the second Trump election, in honor of last time? Aslan gave up power to the Pevensies, a family, when we know that Biden's family were the brains behind his term. They get distracted and leave Narnia after being quickly aged, much like Biden. They return to aid Capian, the name of a Russian sea, when Trump is associated with Russia. Caspian assembles a team to beat the foreign, pagan (Tash has 4 arms, and so is Hindu coded, where Kamala is Indian). Biden puts on the Trump hat, giving symbolic aid to Trump, much like the Pevensies. And, of course, there was a whole meme battle over PNut the Squirrel, so Trump even has his Reepicheep.
So now that Trump won, what now with AI safety?
Whether you agree he's a fascist or not, America will AT LEAST be a single-party country now. The Courts, gerrymandering, voter-suppression, promises to ban media outlets... we're one party. No electoral competition except "within" the GOP.
So AI regulation... How is it in the Republican Party's interest to regulate AI? Or for the companies making it? Who will care and who will have the power?
Prediction: democrats will get 40+% of the vote, 40+% of the house and 40+% senate, be 40+% of da's, 40+% of governors; in 2028
So, uh... he's doing pretty well, huh?
...Is it too soon to start drinking?
You're not drinking already?
I was joking. I've never done drugs or alcohol, and I don't really have access to them either... though now I'm starting to regret that.
...What the hell is wrong with me? There's no reason I should have a negative reaction to these results. I should be completely fine with this. This is what I wanted. Just go to sleep. Go to sleep. You're happy. go to sleep please it's okay please go to sleep please stop
going to sleep now
Drugs, I get, but how do you not have access to alcohol?
I don't have a driver's license. I mean, I guess I could use Uber or something, but I'm not going to pay that much just to start drinking alcohol. And then I also need to worry about interactions with medication, and I don't even remember where I put my ID... It's all just so much work.
>I don't have a driver's license. I mean, I guess I could use Uber or something, but I'm not going to pay that much just to start drinking alcohol.
WTF am I reading? Is this what Bicycle-Americans are talking about when they complain about the suburbs?
Uh... I don't know what you're so confused about. It's not like I'm living in the middle of nowhere, but there aren't any stores in reasonable walking distance (or at least ones that sell alcohol). I don't have a bicycle either, and it's been a while since I rode one... Wait, why am I even telling you any of this? I wasn't even serious about the alcohol bit.
>Uh... I don't know what you're so confused about. It's not like I'm living in the middle of nowhere, but there aren't any stores in reasonable walking distance (or at least ones that sell alcohol).
Well, maybe I'm too much of a city rat, but this sounds very much like "the middle of nowhere" to me, unless "reasonable walking distance" to you is like <600m.
>Wait, why am I even telling you any of this?
My childlike curiosity is surprisingly disarming.
>I wasn't even serious about the alcohol bit.
I would sure hope so, alcohol is Haram.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biuGxlRaMq4
https://manifold.markets/ManifoldPolitics/will-trump-win-the-2024-election?play=false
A very basic and stupid question (I should probably google more, but my keywords are bringing up unrelated stuff): does "calling a state for a candidate" have an associated confidence interval, or do they wait until it is mathematically impossible for the other candidate to flip?
2000 election night was a mess. First Gore won Florida. Then they said he didn't. Then they said Bush won Florida. Then they said he didn't.
That's at the top of everyone's minds when calling a state.
Are you talking about the media, or the state itself? I know the media uses confidence intervals, they've gotten embarrassed for it in the past. (Don't remember which year, but there was an old SNL joke where a news anchor calls a basketball game in the third quarter, because the real one had called a state too early and it flipped on them.)
Yes, it's based on a confidence interval. Usually a model based on using weighted exit poll data and maybe previous election results to fill in the gaps in the available actual voting results.
The confidence threshold is very high, usually something like 99.5% IIRC. After the 2000 election, it's usually "99.5% confidence of winning by enough to avoid a recount", not just "99.5% confidence of winning".
Thank you very much.
I wrote this for my Facebook wall where people are generally less thoughtful and more contentious, but I think it's a decent reflection and I would like your opinions on it. I don't elaborate on why I'm voting for third party and wood no matter what state I was in, but ask if anybody is curious.
Well, I'm off to vote for a third-party candidate and propositions.
I hope that none of you are traumatized by the outcome of this election. I hope that none of you are satisfied by the outcome of this election.
We are not about to plunge into a Nazi or a Soviet-style state, but if we are, I will be amongst the rebels fighting it. I hope to see you there also.
Whoever wins, they are going to be a self-serving, morally deficient dirtbag that is dangerously incompetent but capable of doing some good things if they are pressured to.
Politicians are creatures of the incentive systems around them. Your duty to this democracy doesn't end with your vote; it begins with it. No matter who gets elected, you need to hold them to their good promises, thwart their bad and incompetent tendencies, and make them a much better president than they are a person. You can do that through lobbying for causes, protesting, threatening honestly to withdraw your support for them, praising them when they do the right thing, supporting lesser candidates that are willing to stick their necks out and fight things that are wrong and push things that are right, and holding them to their promises and scrutinizing them when they pretend to fulfill them.
Both FDR and Obama are alleged to have asked their supporters to force them to be good presidents. If you don't force them to be good, there will be a lot of people forcing them to be bad. Remember both the carrot and the stick are necessary, and faith in a candidate is never warranted. If you are unwilling to praise the other side when they do something right, or condemn your side when they do something wrong, there's something wrong with you, but more importantly, you are not doing your duty as an effective citizen trying to make the country a better place. Whoever it is, scrutinize politicians like a Nigerian prince trying to sell you a used car that they say was driven by Elvis.
Resist the temptation to relax and celebrate. Remember the fact that there's one and only one reason why this election is so close: your candidate is not good enough to easily beat the clown on the other side. Everyone will try to blame the usual scapegoats: the other voters are degenerate, it was the media getting free coverage and bias, it was some foreign influence, it was voter or electoral fraud, it was third-party candidates, dirty tricks by the other party, etc... The real reason is, both parties picked lousy people because they are both dysfunctional for somewhat,: different reasons.
Resist the temptation to sink into despair or pin all your hopes on 2028. Every day from here until the next election is an opportunity to pressure the new president to be better at their job. Your voice and your effectiveness do not begin or end with your vote, and it is not dependent on your candidate. Both these candidates are susceptible to pressure from the public, one because of their venal, dull-witted nature and the other because of their narcissism descending into senility. You just have to do it intelligently.
If there is a cause that you really care about, think about the best path to move it forward incrementally no matter who wins the election. Look at things long-term and don't be tempted to make the symbolically pure the enemy of the pragmatically good.
Lightly cleaned up by 4o
What audience are you writing for, and what is the intended effect on them?
Political allegiance often forms a core part of someone's identity. If you're writing for a true believer, or even a lesser-of-two-evils voter, calling their candidate a "self-serving, morally deficient dirtbag that is dangerously incompetent" is probably not going to be convincing. On the other hand, if your friends and family agree with you, then that's a good way to build a connection or find a middle ground.
I'm Australian. One of our independent politicians in the 70s was Don Chipp, who ran with the slogan "keep the bastards honest," and that's always stuck with me. The idea that holding leaders accountable is desired by the leaders themselves and forms a pathway to better political leadership resonates strongly. That said, the beauty of the idea is that it appeals to both cynics and dreamers, left and right, independents and those who toe the party line, and I think you weaken it with cynicism beforehand.
One thing I look for in writing like this is an honest discussion of how you, personally, feel on an emotional level. Are you tired? Are you angry? Are you worried? Are you hopefully? And most importantly, how can you communicate your feelings to your audience in a way that resonates with them? I've noticed that the right likes to imply emotions without stating them, while the left likes using words like "trauma", but again this is part of connecting with your audience.
One last thing is that this comes across as a little preachy to me. Some parts of it feel like a sermon: "Resist the temptation to sink into despair" positions you in my mind as an authority figure giving me an instruction, where something like "If you're anything like me, you'll be tempted to either give up in despair or wait until 2028 for a better candidate, but I think this would be wasting a precious opportunity for the both of us. I truly believe that we can pressure both of these candidates to do better" sets you up as more of an equal.
Again, I'm not from the US and I don't know your audience. The writing is good, and I think if your goal is only to scream into the night and be heard then it's effective, but if you're writing for specific groups then there are things you might be able to do if you want to connect more strongly.
I think those are some good comments. The audience I'm writing for is people who are convinced that their candidate is a good candidate, and the other one is just obviously bad and evil. People who are staking everything on their candidate winning. People who are party loyalists. My goal here is to get them thinking outside the box, beyond the hysterical accusations of the other side and moving them into a state of mind where they want to constructively engage and politically lobby even though their candidate lost. And also even if their candidate won holding their party to a higher standard then what got us these two awful candidates.
My Election Day duties are complete. Living in California my vote for President is purely symbolic and I was planning to give it to Trump, but when the moment came I decided I couldn't sign my name to it. I voted third party the last few cycles but abstained this year.
Besides, I was only there for two reasons:
1) To vote against a local school board candidate who has an annoying name and bought up a lot of recent Jeopardy ad slots. Needed punishing. I neither know nor care anything about the candidate I voted for at random.
As with the top of the ticket I only have one signal to send and it may be weak, but one must try.
2) To vote Yes on Prop 33. As a relatively recent California homeowner I'll be good and goddamned if a bunch of do gooders who likely have or will inherit substantial wealth of which housing is probably a component are going to build a ladder out of my equity after they got theirs.
And as a veteran - your thanks for my service are duly appreciated - I both get as many self-serving votes as it takes to recoup my lost earning potential and am continuing my legacy of protecting this great nation by keeping housing prices high to deter illegal immigration. I'm doing my part.
Plus I've read that economic agents acting in their self-interest leads to optimum outcomes.
...oh, and I worry for the poor AIDS patients who will otherwise be on the street or whatever.
So, you want high rents to keep out illegal immigrants and you don’t care how many low-income Americans get screwed over by shortage of housing? You’ve got yours, and everyone else can go pound sand? Great ethical standards you’ve got there.
Btw I’m also in California and I voted no on 33, so I canceled out your vote.
If you'll read my comment more carefully, you'll find that I don't have mine. I'm in the process of getting mine. There's no way to ever know but if Omega apparates before me with a bag of money I win if I guess whether the average No on 33 organizer has a higher current, future, and/or familial net worth - the high roller probably ain't the southern boy with one parent on the Deaths of Despair muster and an alcoholic drug addict father to support. If we're going by "who's got theirs" rules, they are the ladder pullers, not me.
All academic, because Prop 33 doesn't create rent control or a housing shortage. It permits local communities to pass their own rent control measures. Voting against it doesn't just mean going against my own economic self-interest (the cornerstone of any healthy decision theory) but violates the following precepts:
1) Local communities are best situated to understand local conditions and know best what measures are good for or supported by their communities. If they want to pass rent control why should you or Sacramento have a say? This is what democracy looks like.
2) The hypothetical benefit to future residents comes with certain harms for current residents of areas that will pass rent control if they can. Should the people who were already here go pound sand? Shall we round up the local single moms, AIDS patients, and assorted photogenic lower income moppets for a round of "You will not replace us"? Don't tear down their rec center.
No values are absolute, of course, and you may discount them as much as you'd like, but people who disagree with you politically aren't amoral monsters. (Well - I am - but it's best not to overgeneralize.) They may have different preferences.
And even then, a lack of rent control is no guarantee that any additional units will get built. California is the world leader in NIMBY-ism. Blocking local governments and their constituents from passing rent control rules they want may very well end up as nothing more than a transfer from California's poorest residents to its wealthiest. If money / real estate markets still exists in a few years I'll be cashing out so I won't lose sleep over it but you may discover that those low-income Americans whose preferences you want to paternalistically override may be getting screwed by you.
Edit: And do you really not see that the same economics that tells you it's wrong to support rent control also says that acting in rational self-interest produces, on net, the best possible outcome? In uncertain and turbulent waters I must lash myself to the mast of rationality. Insult away but changing tack every time some hothead feels strongly about something only leads to chaos.
A funny poll from the Czech Republic on who the Czechs would vote in US presidential elections: https://x.com/CzechiaElects/status/1852405137538486510
The most pro-Harris parties? TOP-09, a center-right party, and the Christian Democrats.
The most pro-Trump party? KSČM - the Communists.
Pew has a thing out on the results of polls in various nations, and the most overwhelming Trump support is among residents of Viet Nam. A different set of polling of people in this country by ethnicity has Vietnamese-Americans also supporting Trump, though by a significantly smaller margin.
My mother is a Vietnamese immigrant, moved to Texas in the 1960s, and is the biggest Trump fan in my extended family AFAIK. She has little or no ties to her birth country anymore, but I wonder if there's something cultural going on there.
This seems to be an anti China thing.
Lots of communists on Reddit are trending towards Trump. They see him as less imperialist.
Seems to me that Communists in Eastern Europe and ex-Soviet countries are psychologically similar to Republicans in USA.
Authoritarian aesthetics, low openness to experience, dreaming about the good old times ("make Russia great again" is basically Putin's official policy), anti-science, pro-conspiracy theories, anti-homosexuality etc.
alternatively, we (communists in general; I'm not from Eastern Europe) don't want the US to start even more wars, especially when our countries are likely to be on the front lines, and Harris' embrace of neocons terrifies us
Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth on foreign policy and I don't trust that he'll show restraint, but I saw no reason whatsoever to think Harris would show any; I don't blame people for preferring the hope of a chameleon to open antagonism
Starting fewer wars sounds like a great goal.
A part sometimes missing in that perspective is that sometimes countries other than USA start wars, too. There might be some relation between these numbers, for example a country X might be *less* likely to invade a country Y, if it expects that in turn USA might invade the country X.
So, it is not obvious that minimizing the number of wars that involve USA is the same as minimizing the number of wars.
Well this is a new take on the "Republicans are Fascists" narrative.
Fascists, that's the same mentality. I think the greatest difference between Communists and Fascists was whether the loyalty belongs to the Soviet Union or to their own nation. So yeah, technically closer to Fascists, but there is not much of a difference.
I didn’t mention Eastern Europe at all. And those Eastern Europeans who are anti homosexual etc are not the communists. Nor are Eastern Europeans all that fond of Russia.
Yes! Russian immigrants in the US are one of the most reliably Republican voting blocks. Ironically, because they think Democrats are Communists.
Ukrainians used to be the same way but now are more Democratic because of the Republican resistance to Ukrainian aid.
Christian Democrats in the US overwhelming support Harris too.
"Christian Democrat" is the name of the party. Europe has several parties with that name.
When Hitler rose to power he was attacked unmercifully by the satirists and comedians as an obvious "medieval maniac", a phrase Charlie Chaplin would use in the satirical film "The Great Dictator", a movie which encouraged the USA to join the war in Europe. Chaplin later said he wished he had never made a funny film about Hitler.
I point this out by way of saying it's impossible to call out a Hitler in popular culture even when it really is Hitler. Nobody takes the warnings seriously until it's so late the warnings themselves seem to have been absurdly understated.
I think what encouraged the US to go to war was Pearl harbour.
But that movie didn't come out 'til 2001
Fair point.
Still, with a 24% Rotten Tomatoes rating, perhaps it DID encourage the US to go to war.
It should have encouraged The Rest of the World to go to war with the US.
Didn't it?
I meant the movie, particularly a long monologue by Chaplin at the end, beseeched the US to intervene.
The movie had no effect. In fact Germany declared war on the US after pearl harbour and it’s not clear that Congress would have declared war on the Nazis had Hitler not done that.
Dude, I am not arguing that the movie had an effect. My initial wording was ambiguous, but my wording above is not.
I don't think Trump is Hitler but more like what Marx had in mind when he said that all great events in History happen twice, first as tragedy, secondly as farce. Marx had in mind Napoleon III. Trump is like a Hitler III.
Took me a moment to realize you meant Karl. After being primed by mention of Charlie Chaplain (particularly of the one Chaplain movie I've watched all the way through), I thought you meant Groucho for a second.
Plus Groucho knew farces.
So who was Hitler II?
I think we are on Hitler VIII by now. Orban was the weakest Hitler. Saddam was up there. Xi is the top level candidate for worst Hitler, whilst Trump for all his fascist tendencies comes a mere close second. I think Assad is way down the list these days until we get back to that.
>Xi is the top level candidate for worst Hitler
How? He's presided over the genocide of the Uygers, but I'm not sure if they are all dead, and that gives a corpse count on the order of 1 million to e.g. Mao's 30 million-ish in the Great Leap Corpseward. I'm sure I'm overlooking something major (did Xi mishandle Covid in a way that makes _his_ contribution to the death toll multiple millions?). What do you have in mind?
It’s all a joke really. I’m saying that America and the west call all the opposition Hitler.
Ok. Many Thanks!
Presumably someone as pointless and forgettable as Napoleon 2. Probably Gerald Ford.
Maybe Napoleon II, who the OG Napoleon tried to install as a child emperor in his wake but it didn't take, is Hitler II per Marx's original formulation.
In the modern US context I was thinking Pat Buchanan. No rule that "Hitler ___" has to have succeeded in gaining power is there? Buchanan was the OG US-politics target of the line about how his (1992) prime-time national speech "probably sounded better in the original German" (which was then original to a NYT opinion columnist, now of course is a cliche).
In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.
Good one and suprisingly accurate
I would like to seriously suggest to all of you to consider watching something other than election returns on the election night. I'm sure binge-watching a nice show would be a lot more pleasant than spam-reloading the results, and I intend to do exactly that.
What's the point of tracking the results if, odds are, nothing is going to be known until the morning anyway, and possibly until some days later?
"Hundreds of Beavers"
Holy crap, I thought I was the only one. Where'd you hear of it?
Picked it up from tpot.
I just searched for that and got a Korean BBQ place, an automated machine learning tool, the fifth season of Battle for Dream Island, a honeypot platform, and a mechanism for assessing teachers. So... okay then.
I heard about it from IowaHawk on Twitter.
It's kinda the term for the "post-pre-rationalist" community on Twitter.
TPOT stands for "This Part Of Twitter."
This is a good advice under the assumption that i) you are not particularly interested in the details of the electoral process and ii) you are emotionally invested in its final outcome.
To which I respond, change your mistaken ways. The outcome likely does not affect you, nor changes much in general, and the two major candidates are demonstrably awful people. The process, on the other hand, is extremely fun - and in this case, like all American entertainment, extremely beginner friendly, with easy-to-process discrete state results and robust data commentary available. (It beats TV shows in particular for the same reason sports beat them - why watch something scripted when the real-world in all its messy chaotic glory unfolds before your eyes in a structured way that makes it possible to follow, for once?)
I had an answer about how you might be interested in the details of the electoral process but not interested in waiting till % vote counted goes from 71% to 81% in some state that may not even be planning on finishing counting on this day (see Arizona), but I was so tired that I went to bed early and did not go through with my plan for watching "Lucifer" instead of election returns. Damn.
Re:
>The outcome likely does not affect you, nor changes much in general, and the two major candidates are demonstrably awful people.
I agree completely with "the two major candidates are demonstrably awful people"
Re no effect: sort-of, though there is a potential for an _unpredictable_ large effect.
Barring extreme AI scenarios, the most damaging thing that can plausibly happen in 2025-2029 is a nuclear exchange between the USA (or USA+NATO) and Russia or the PRC. This is _mostly_ in Putin's or Xi's hands, but if the POTUS mishandles a conflict they may play a role in triggering it - and I'd expect the two candidates to mishandle in different, and unpredictably different, ways. Something of a butterfly effect - with fissile wings...
I enjoy the drama. Even if I wind up unhappy, at least I've begun processing my grief.
There's a lot to be learned as the numbers unfold. For instance, Florida is usually called first, and the margins in Florida will tell you what the state of the race is. Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin will likely be called tomorrow, and that will likely tell you who won. The closeness of 2020 was an aberration. We'll likely know by at least early in the morning who won, and I want to see it. Everyone is saying the election will be close because the polls are close, but polls are motivated to show a close race. The polls are likely off by a small landslide.
I recommend Basic Instinct. It feels like a fitting metaphor for all possible results.
But then how can I pregame all my anger before I get angry about whoever wins or loses?
I can't just be angry at everyone for a month until Thanksgiving without at least a day, maybe three, of constant stress and anticipation and fretting. Gotta warm up first.
My plan is to see how far into the day I can go without knowing anything. If I'm lucky I will go to bed tomorrow night still ignorant. I'll have to stay off all social media, including ACX, but it's worth it.
I'm going to try. I'll see if I have the willpower.
It’s 10:34 and I know absolutely nothing about the election today or any related events, and I’m about to go to bed. How are you doing at preserving your virginity? I did give in to temptation once, and went to NYT site and looked at headlines, but it was midday here in the northeast and all I saw were filler pieces about stuff like 4 ways the election can go. And about, like, a partridge in a pear tree, the dance of the 7 veils, the 3.14 noble truths.
I kept busy but then gave in later in the day, although I kept most of my Internet use focused on cat pictures. I saw some impressions, but these days I really have no idea what's real or not without spending half an hour checking multiple sources. So I went to bed relatively clueless (given that historical trends are for Rs to rise early, and then Ds to gain, plus the D lean of the west coast).
Today has been kinda surreal.
Yeah, surreal. Have a couple patients who are really frantic. One woman, who's asexual and has a horror of the idea of a baby growing in her body now wants to get sterilized. She's afraid she'll be raped and get pregnant and won't be allowed to get an abortion.
When you said you looked at cat pix I think you really mean you looked at generic safe soothing stuff, but I know you are fond of cats, so here's the cutest cat picture I ever took. Those are my 2 young Devon Rex guys, best friends forever. https://imgur.com/a/1TyEUOz
That's sad about the patient, but that's a super cute picture!
But no, really, mostly when I was on the Internet I was skimming feeds, ignoring text and looking for cat pictures. I knew they were in there somewhere! :-)
Here's some pictures from the place I that I spent part of today in; it's where I get my regular cat fix:
https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/twice-sold-tales-seattle
https://www.instagram.com/twicesoldtales/
I admit I am watching the results, but my emotional investment is limited to
a victory chant of "Marginally Lesser Evil! Marginally Lesser Evil!" or
a concession chant of "Marginally Greater Evil! Marginally Greater Evil!"
I just want things to not be horrible in the future.
Many Thanks! Well, both candidates were pretty awful. Harris said of uncensored speech online "it has to stop". Trump once recommended looking into injecting disinfectant. On balance I think Harris was marginally worse, so I voted against her, but it was definitely a choice between two evils.
I expect that for most of us, most likely, most of the time, Trump won't make a difference (and neither would Harris have done so). E.g. he isn't going to deliberately start a nuclear war. Now, there is always some chance that he will stumble into one (and Harris would have been the same), but, most likely not.
Right now, I'm happy. No problems yet. It's an advantage to the Trump victory: he doesn't yet have power, and Harris is incentivized to act like a responsible adult so as to contrast with the deluge that she predicts will follow after her. So we get another few months of normalcy, probably.
But sooner or later, I think Trump's top people will fall out with themselves or with Trump, and then there'll be drama. Maybe it'll happen before their administration does something stupid or evil.
Nit: It hardly matters how Harris is incentivized to act, given that her job is not worth a bucket of warm spit. Joe Biden is still the President, and will almost certainly remain so through 1/20/25.
Thanks. I keep forgetting that he's still nominally in charge.
He did seem fairly chipper in today's speech.
Many Thanks!
>Right now, I'm happy. No problems yet.
Great!
>But sooner or later, I think Trump's top people will fall out with themselves or with Trump, and then there'll be drama.
Yes, there was in his first term too. For most of us, that may not make much difference. We aren't _directly_ affected if he decides to fire one of his staff members and replace them with someone else.
>Maybe it'll happen before their administration does something stupid or evil.
Every administration does at least something stupid, and at least something that someone calls evil. In Trump's first term - well, he certainly screwed up the handling of Covid, though the vaccine development did happen under his watch. Personally, I'm unhappy that the SCOTUS justices he appointed eliminated Roe v Wade (though that shouldn't have been legislated from the bench) - but pro-life people presumably see that very differently.
About the best I'm hoping for is maybe Trump pushes Woke back a bit, but it took years to spread and won't be rolled back quickly.
At worst? Yes, there is all sorts of damage he could do, mostly through incompetence, or from putting incompetent people in places where it hurts. I don't know how much to credit his talk of weaponizing the justice system (as it has been weaponized against him...). In 2016 he talked of "locking up" Hillary Clinton, but he never actually did.
Biden/Harris administration records look pretty bad: approximately doubling illegal immigration, using Facebook and Twitter as unconstitutional censorship proxies, doubling down on DEI, exacerbating identity politics, weaponizing the justice system, concealing Biden's cognitive decline from the public (who _does_ have the nuclear football as we type?), maybe a role in trying to keep Trump off the ballot (in primaries) in two states... There's quite a lot of stupid or evil stuff there, and a Harris administration might well have continued it
Endless loop of Wham's "Last Christmas".
LOL! Many Thanks! Come to think of it, in matters presidential, the first line of the song reminds me of the part of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-2024-presidential-debate where Trump explains
>But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. ...
Haven't election night returns in decades. Tomorrow evening I'll be off playing adult recreational ice hockey.
It is so hard to take the Hitler propaganda seriously. Here is a clip of Trump announcing that Joe Rogan has endorsed him. If anything, Trump comes across as overly mellow. He's about as far from Hitler-style rhetoric as you can get...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTEWBrab1tM&ab_channel=ForbesBreakingNews
Not so mellow Donald Trump from less than one month ago talking about Adam Shiff and Nancy Pelosi..
"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said, adding: "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."
“The crazy lunatics that we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country.
Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country.”
We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical-left lunatics,”
I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
I love how people fall for Trump's charisma. How do they think somebody that knows 0 policy, both domestic or foreign, whose memory only works for the people that wronged him or praised him, even got popular in the first place?
Trump is more of a cool caudillo.
Hey, Hitler could be mellow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEGeHxF0tF4
...I'll see myself out.
That was great, thanks!
He literally tried to overthrow the government of the United States in a coup plot. I'm sure Hitler could come across as mellow when he felt like it.
Seriously.
[insert Will Ferrell “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!” gif here]
What are people's thoughts on Elon Musk's election take?
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWVev5-2Db0&ab_channel=JREClips
completely unserious. Elon Musk has been completely consumed by Twitter's anti-woke algorithm (funny bc he now owns it), as a general heuristic I would never trust what he has to say about politics.
Plus, like, really? Why didn't Fox News or Newsmax report on this? Why did they knowingly lie about election fraud? There are text messages that show Tucker Carlsen and other Fox News producers knowingly lied about the Dominion court cases. People come up with all these elaborate theories that bottom out at Trump's madmen delusions that he was cheated (funnily enough, Democrats managed to cheat when Trump was president, but not in this cycle when Democrats were in power lmao)
1st argument is that Trump is being attacked too much.
2nd argument is that the Democratic government is flying immigrants into swing states and giving them better benefits than Americans receive in order to make them vote Democrat. Because of this, there will be no more swing states--there will only be a permanent Democrat majority, so this is the last fair election before the Democrats claim eternal victory.
My thought is the first point is silly. The second point, I'm looking right now for any data backing it. It seems improbable because we're talking about swing states, ie. States with large populations of both Democrat and Republican backers, so for this scheme to work out, yourld need to somehow persuade a lot of Republicans, including Republicans holding state gov. positions, to either help with illegals voting or turn a blind eye to it, both of which seem rather improbable.
Edit: I'm reading what the Heritage Foundation has to say about voting fraud: https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/heritage-explains/voter-fraud and it actually pushes my belief towards "unlikely" because the cases they highlight, except one, are small, concerning either a single illegal voter, or a single person producing <100 illegal votes. The one case that boasts 100,000 illegal votes was detected and a ring of 63 people were investigated and two convicted--all because one of the people involved felt not rewarded enough and brought the who deal to light to the newspapers (this was in 1982).
I would expect the same thing to come to light if there was a big operation like what Musk claims.
I don't know how it is elsewhere but there is significant refugee resettlement activity in rural Pennsylvania.
Going deep into Heritage Foundation material on election fraud was also what made me completely calm about the issue.
A telling feature of HF as an organization: even though they gathered the data and had it at their fingertips, they have spent the last several years sending scary emails to work up their supporters about election integrity concerns and fundraise on that fear.
When Trump et al filed more than 60 lawsuits in federal and state courts alleging fraud in the 2020 election, got exactly one affirmative ruling which applied to literally a single instance in a single polling place, went something like 0 for 10 in front of federal judges who'd been appointed BY TRUMP, and ticked off various judges so much with wasting everybody's time that four different Trump attorneys were sanctioned by various courts....come on, either produce some meaningful evidence or just shut the fuck up already. I'd say the same if it was the other side, just ridiculous.
Also there is a running list of Trump supporters attempting various retail or freelance election fraud which, last I saw it, was several pages long. That came to mind because I just an hour ago read a news report about a couple such attempts today.
>went something like 0 for 10 in front of federal judges who'd been appointed BY TRUMP
Yup, that was my favorite part of the 2020 farce...
Can you summarize it?
I'm surprised you are taking Rasmusen seriously. Perhaps it's based on serious things he's written in the past? I tried reading his article to understand where the other side is coming from, but found it difficult to continue taking seriously after smashing headfirst into this conspiratorial trash: "What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help." There are serious arguments to be made in favor of Trump on Jan. 6. *Wrong* arguments, but serious, e.g., he didn't explicitly tell the crowd to go smash up the Capitol, he did at one point pay lip service to being peaceful (shortly before or after also implying they should be violent). However, "It was Antifa plotting with the FBI" is not a serious argument; it's a blatantly fabricated conspiracy theory, to be taken as seriously as 9/11 truthers and flat-earthers.
Here's my COVID update (so far) for epi weeks 43 & 44. I'm going to add a bunch of study links tomorrow.
1. COVID Wastewater numbers are low. Hospitalizations and deaths are dropping (a couple of weeks behind the ww trend).
2. Flu hospitalizations are rising but still low (0.4/100K). Flu season isn't showing up in wastewater numbers yet. Slight uptick on Biofire.
3. RSV is starting to rise.
4. H5N1 has jumped to swine. This is really bad news because the risk of an antigenic shift event creating a virulent, highly-transmissible hybrid of H1 and H5 flu just went up. And I rant about the stupidity or the US DoA for not mandating livestock vaccinations.
5. Oh, and I worked out a back-of-the-napkin estimate from FRED data on what percentage of Americans are disabled due to Long COVID. SSA is supposed to be tracking this stuff, but I can't find any data up on their website. By taking the straight-line pre-pandemic growth in disability numbers, and subtracting them from the post-COVID disability numbers, I estimate that there are ~1.9 million people who might be disabled by Long COVID. This would put the US LC disability rate at 0.55%, or roughly that of Norway (0.5%), a country that has good numbers. Simplistic, I know, and probably faulty. But I wanted to see if I could derive a ballpark figure from limited data.
Updated Threadreaderapp link with the whole thread...
https://t.co/qsPDManDr9
Reminder the early image generation ai's generated creepy pictures of dead bodies given the prompt "November 5 2024"
i’m fascinated by early AI images. Where can I see some of the images you’re taking about?
https://poa (dot) st/objects/0365a73e-47b0-408b-b4fd-8be41bd1d0a7
(if you dont know the site consider it worse then 4chan before clicking around)
Yeah they do look like early AI. Do you know which AI generated them and when?
Not really, just that it was a topic on /g/ and that ui is the original. I think thats dalle 1.
Well, that's because it's Guy Fawkes Day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night
Remember Remember the 5th of November.
or they airstrike trump
A buddy of mine is a neuroscientist / Bayesian statistician / entrepreneur and he’s (likely) about to get sucked into doing data science for baseball teams. I’m sure it’ll pay well, but it just seems like a shame to have someone with his skill set dedicate it to balls and runs, and I thought I’d see if one of you folks know someone doing something a bit more exciting that needs someone with his skills.
He started a company building an LED headset that scans brain activity in the motor cortex to help with stroke recovery and other activities that need easy neural feedback. (Their runway ran out just as the funding crunch happened earlier this year, which was a shame, since they were mid-trials). Anyways, he was coming up with new algorithms for how to process the signal to remove sources of noise like blood flow etc. It sounded like his new algorithm would have been applicable to other types of scans, even MRI, which was exciting, but he stopped developing it after the company failed.
Anyways, I sure would love it if he could work on a project worthy of his talent. Thanks if you have leads! (I’m an urban planner so if you have any questions about the algorithm etc, I will probably need to ask him).
MD Anderson Cancer Center has two data science openings right now. I've talked with some people on their team, it's a solid crew.
https://jobs.mdanderson.org/Search/JobDetails/data-scientist-spatial-omics/830d1fa1-7532-469e-a3c6-9fb8600a4bbb
https://jobs.mdanderson.org/Search/JobDetails/data-scientist---operations-research/98473088-50f2-4660-b82f-9c0198957a13
Thanks!
are either of them remote ?
That's crazy considering how many statisticians' idea of a dream job would be working for a baseball team. Imagine working for an insurance company.
The plots are always cleaner on the other slide.
Yeah true!
I mean, that's true in the glass-half-full sense. I just feel like someone with the moxy to start a mobile-brain-scanner business should be advancing science and technology.
It's normal to see signs endorsing candidates on people's yards and houses, but recently I've noticed some businesses with signs up supporting candidates. Like today I saw a local insurance company office with a sign up supporting a somewhat-controversial candidate in a pretty close state-level race.
What are the economics of this? Under what conditions would this actually attract more customers than it repels? Or are these business owners doing it out of sheer conviction and ok with taking a financial loss on it? Interested to hear people's opinions, or links to any research on it.
>Under what conditions would this actually attract more customers than it repels?<
Under the condition that one of the politicians plans to cripple the business and the other doesn't. "This person plans to shut down our means of production, help us stay open by voting against them."
I think this is not really a serious consideration for three reasons.
1) Candidates like that are super-rare, and heavily outnumbered by candidates who are histrionically and misleadingly accused of it.
2) Even when they exist, there are very few offices where there aren't enough checks and balances to make it impossible to do something that dramatic.
3) Most importantly, unless you're a very large business, (impact of outcome of election on your business) * (impact of you putting a sign up) is going to be pretty tiny, because of how smale the second term is, and hence you only have to alienate a fairly small fraction of your potential customers to make it not worth while.
If it's a local business, they might reason that it will attract people from the local majority, and that people from the local minority have had to develop thick skins and so won't mind.
But yeah, I think usually it's owners or employees who get really into politics, and do it out of sheer conviction.
I mean, look at Musk. There are things that are far more important than short-term monetary gains.
Well, we’re going to see how an extreme case plays out in the next couple of years. Republicans dislike EVs and Democrats dislike Musk - a recipe for interesting times ahead for Tesla.
Doesn't matter. The military _really_ loves cheap launch capacity, so the SpaceX money will keep rolling in.
These are separate companies, even though Musk is infamous for mixing things up.
We could end up in an equilibrium where in each consumer facing industry some companies are known as Ds (McDonald's, Wendy's) and others Rs (Burger King, Carls Jr.).
Why not?
Sorry, are you saying that those are things that could hypothetically happen, or have I missed a bunch more companies becoming politically-coded already?
Last election, a business (Expensify I believe it was) emailed every single employee of every single customer of theirs encouraging them to vote for a certain political candidate for the president of USA.
I don't think that's normal, but it happened, and as far as I can tell, that business suffered no detrimental side-effects.
So yeah, I would expect businesses to be getting very political now. At least as long as it goes along with the prevailing propaganda.
I recently crowdsourced an election forecast by running a contest with cash prizes. Here's what the crowd thinks (as well as my own predictions) in case anyone's interested:
https://www.mikesblog.net/p/crowdsourced-election-forecast-as
Pretty different from the implied probabilities on prediction markets right now!
What am I missing about "stunning" pigs with CO2 prior to slaughter? This seems close to the worst possible process you could come up with, to the point that I feel like I'm probably missing something obvious. My understanding is that a CO2 rich environments prevents purging it from blood, causing the feeling of suffocation. Is this not the case? Are there any special tricks used, or anything I am missing? In what way is this better than just directly slaughtering the pig?
Nitrogen is much more appropriate to use, yes.
You're not missing anything. The pigs are unconscious, so easier to slaughter, but they go through exactly the hell you imagine before they pass out. And if the motherfuckers at the slaughterhouse used either nitrogen or helium the pigs would not be aware they were oxygen-deprived (I think -- that's how it works for our species) and would pass out with no distress. Goddamn it, I hate knowing about stuff like this.
I think the idea is the slaughter then comes as sweet relief.
How do you plan to follow the live election results? Is there somewhere better than just aggregating twitter?
The needle
Plan is to not open twitter or blogs or news till Thursday, then take a look.
Night of, CNN is better. If it get's drawn out over multiple days, I still don't know of anything better than looking for people reposting primary sources on Twitter.
CNN is better.
What if my priority is speed of information? I don't think traditional cable news really specializes in what I want (famously slow to call states last time around).
But *why* do you want the speed? Advice that I should take but probably won't, is that every time I feel an urge to check, I should go and meditate for half an hour. Or maybe do pushups, or both.
Even though this election has made prediction markets look bad because of one big better on Polymarket, and the cascade of arb from it to others, tomorrow night the movements in those markets will be pure information traveling at the speed of money. Just watch CNN, Polymarket, PredictIt and Kalshi.
EDIT: Polymarket has a countdown clock on its presidential election market that makes it look like it ends tonight, but Kalshi's market says it will run live till Inauguration Day. I'll be watching Kalshi tomorrow.
I suppose if we end up in an ugly mess like last time, Kalshi might get manipulated. So who knows. Nothing is reliable anymore.
This banner note on the presidential forecast at Polymarket seems to imply it's going to stay open:
READ THE RULES: This Presidential market resolves when the Associated Press, Fox, and NBC all call the election for the same candidate. In the unlikely event that doesn’t happen, the market will remain open until inauguration and resolve to whoever gets inaugurated.
If you would prefer to trade the market that is resolved solely by who gets inaugurated, set to happen on January 20, 2025, you can visit that market here.
What proportion of Trump campaign staffers regard Trump as a con artist and his supporters as a bunch of dumb rubes? Enquiring minds would like to know...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/04/white-nationalist-trump-campaign-00187282
I still don't think we have a good model that explains why Trump is so popular. I don't mean, "why are conservative policies so popular", I mean Trump specifically.
My guess is that it has something to do with Schelling points and credible signalling. Anyone who isn't willing to go to jail for the cause will immediately capitulate to the establishment/deep state. Of course, the best way to signal willingness to go to jail is to commit crimes. Solve for the equilibrium.
I think it has to do with the idea of "shaking things up". That seems to be why people supported him in the 2016 primaries. And once he became president, they liked what they saw, as it reinforced what they thought of him. Anything contrary to what they think of him now would be dismissed as liberal propaganda, or something.
This is from the perspective of someone who voted for Ted Cruz in 2016, and was incredulous that Trump won the nomination. I didn't vote for either Clinton OR Trump in 2016, but voted for Trump in 2020.
You literally could just ask half the country before speculating that half the country no only agrees with you trump committed crimes but the logical conclusion is that they must support that implicitly.
(It's more like a third of the country -- Trump's personal record for highest pct of eligible voters to actually vote for him is 31%.)
To everyone,
There is a sense - not just in America, but all over the world - that this election is a critical juncture for all of us.
Many people, on both sides of the aisle, are fearful of the world's greatest democracy descending into authoritarianism, political violence, and even civil war.
Many such as myself, who live in other countries, are fearful of World War 3.
In all of this, we have our perspectives. I have a perspective, but it is very limited. I have no special insight into the current geopolitical situation. I don't know who the best candidate for US President is, or who will win tomorrow. I do, however, believe in democracy, and in the will of the people, and I believe that the wisdom of all of us together is much greater than the wisdom of any one individual.
In light of all of this, I would like to offer a prayer.
No matter what the results happen to be,
I pray that division and hatred can be healed and that our hearts can open to each other.
I pray that the violence in the Middle East and in the Ukraine can be brought to an end.
I pray that no one face discrimination because of their race, gender, sexual preferences, or religion.
I pray that our children can be brought up in a world that keeps them safe, healthy and happy.
I pray that upcoming technological developments can be used for the greater good of all humanity.
I pray for justice, but also for mercy - for those who have sinned to repent and to realise the error of their ways. No one is beyond the love of Jesus Christ.
May those who seek to spread division be defeated, and may unity, justice, peace, brotherhood and love prevail.
Thank you.
My only prediction is that once 2028 rolls around it will yet again be "the most important election of our lifetimes".
I still think 2000.
I wonder how the 9/11 aftermath would have looked like in the counterfactual.
Ironic if true. At the time, lots of people were saying that the election was unusually unimportant because Bush and Gore were basically the same guy.
How do you think your life would be different if it had gone the other way? Slightly higher taxes maybe?
No Covid.
We didn't have Trump in my country, we did have Covid.
No -- covid was unstoppable. Every single country eventually had it. Even though there were a lot of different approaches tried, none worked to keep any country covid free. The whole thing could certainly have been handled better than it was in the US, but what on earth do you think any president could have done to keep the US from having any covid cases?
Butterfly effect. Mutations in viruses are extremely precise random events highly vulnerable to changes in initial conditions. There's about a 0% chance of it evolving in any alternate universe that branches before it mutated, and it's called Covid-19, not Covid-16.
This is true, but trivially true, you might as well attribute covid to that one sandwich you ate 3 years prior (the most important sandwich in our lifetime, perhaps?)
Mutations in viruses occur when it replicates. It replicates when it has a host -- actually, the host does the replicating because it turns the host cells into virus-making machines. There are no highly precise conditions necessary. The mutations occur because hosts make so many copies that there are a huge number of chances for an error to occur in one or more copy. Covid or its ancestor was in the Chinese bat, civet and raccoon dog populations and possibly in other species as well. Many animals were churning out billions of copies. That is why there were mutations. There were probably many mutations, some of which made the virus untransmissible, so they died out. But some made it more transmissible, and transmissible to humans. Maybe a Chinese lab was also involved, maybe not. But you are dead wrong that very very special rarely-comest-thou conditions are necessary to get a virus to mutate. And even if the president of the US had a crystal ball that told him, in 2016, there was a virus in several wild species in China that was likely to mutate into one that could infect most members of our species, what could he have done? Even if he had nuked all of China into a parking lot I'll bet some infected civets had been sold as pets and were in Indonesia, Paris, and South Asshole South Carolina.
It's worth noting that we'd previously had closely related viruses: SARS (nasty but it was contained), as well as MERS (spread from camels to humans, but didn't ever spread well among humans).
Fair, but in that case you also have to take into account the great Butterfly Hurricane of '22 and the subsequent extinction of the tomato.
Did somebody call it Covid 16? or am I missing some double meaning here?. Anyhow, you haven't answered my question, which is what any president could have done to keep the US from having any covid cases. At what point could the president had taken us down a different branch, and what would that branch have been?
Their point was that it didn't occur in 2016, so changing events in 2016, 3 years before it occurred, would butterfly-effect it's way into preventing the viral mutation that led to Covid-19.
I think it's a bit silly to have such a firm opinion on a question like this, but it is what it is.
> There would be much less international tension, with more freedom to travel between a lot of other countries like China
The Biden admin could have reversed the anti China policy. They didn’t.
Bit of sad news for me.
The office lady for the contractors outfit I worked at before getting all stem-ed up died.
She had some sort of tumor in her neck, her gp found it during some routine visit and referred her to an oncologist. Unfortunately, the insurance company did not recognize him as in network, so she had to go to a different office, which was also not in network, before finally getting sent back to the original office, which was in network after all.
The oncologist needed an MRI due to the location of the tumor, but the insurance company refused payment, and would only approve a CT scan. She got the CT scan, which was inconclusive, and they re-requested the MRI. This time it was approved, but she died of what might have been a stroke before actually getting the test.
The location apparently meant it was one of those cancers where it's 30/70 (if they catch it before you die it's fine)/(your totally fucked), but we'll never get the chance to find out.
I guess the lesson to take from this is your insurance company will social murder you if it can, so if you are getting fucked around on something like this you just need to spend you own money and hope you live long enough to recover it in the lawsuit.
I’m sorry to hear this
I'm a psychologist and hate insurance companies, as does every therapist I know. Over the years I have had insurance companies make dozens of "mistakes," and every single one has been in the company's favor. It is often very time consuming to get the mistake corrected, and I sometimes give up. If I was someone with a serious illness I probably would not have the energy to follow up even as much as I have. If I was not smart I would not be able to figure out what the mistakes were, or even to understand the Explanation of Benefits summaries the companies send out. Someone without a college degree and a lot of determination and energy has almost no chance of getting "mistakes" corrected.
+1
This is one of the most bizarre disconnects in the public discourse about single-payer, government-run medical systems in the US. Opponents of these "public options" often use "do you want government bureaucrats make decisions about your care" line of attack, and I can't even? like, have you dealt with the private insurance bureaucrats, and how are they any better?
Yeah, and you know what? Medicare is actually better than most insurance companies (except that they pay about 20% less). They are reasonably well run, pay on schedule, and make way fewer mistakes.
The US health care system is really messed up. RFK Jr has plans to fix it. Don’t fall for the antivax legacy media nonsense, it’s all sponsored by the players who make big bucks off the current system. Go vote.
I somehow doubt the party of private enterprise is gonna do away with the system that gets to write you off as a liability if it plays fuck fuck games until you die.
Of course, the other party is also the party of private enterprise, so unless Bernie makes a third run for it as an immortal litch it's just gonna keep happening.
I think the fundamental problem with reforming the healthcare system is that there are a *ton* of people making their (very comfortable) living from the system as it is, and anything that makes it better will cut the salaries or eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of well-paid people and big companies, all of whom will fight like hell against that.
I am not well-informed about this kind of thing, but it seems to me that the only useful thing health insurance does is spread out the risk so it's unlikely that many people will be unable to pay for needed care. Surely there is a cheaper way to accomplish that.
Wutz this issue got to do with antivax legacy media nonsense tho?
Oh I spent most of the last open thread arguing with people who were convinced RFK Jr was antivax because that's the attack line the legacy media finds most politically convenient.
I think he'd be great for the health care system in ways completely orthogonal to vaccines, but no one wanted to talk about that.
Oh, I see. Well, the insurance part of health system passionately resists overhauling, and so does the business of for-profit hospitals. Don't know about the other parts, but it seems like it would take a great deal of cleverness and also plain old power to change the things I name.
Will do.
Is there like an article/blog post anyone knows about that is something like rationalist guide to dating apps?
Starting to use a dating app for the first time and don't want to miss a bunch of easy wins if I can avoid it!
Can try Zvi's writings on dating, off memory there was some advice on optimising dating app profiles.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/dating-roundup-1-this-is-why-youre?utm_source=publication-search
After reading the FTX book, I want to start a new movement called Effective Awesome.
My big problem with Effective Altruism is that all the causes are frankly boring and uninspiring. Cure diseases of a bunch of random Africans that I'm never even going to meet? I'm not *agaist* it per se, but it certainly doesn't inspire me to part with a bunch of my well-earned.
The idea of Effective Awesome is to spend money on things that are interesting, inspiring and exciting. The sort of thing that everyone wants to exist but which otherwise wouldn't get funded. Let's commission Trent Reznor to write a symphony and put it in the public domain. Let's build a brand new gothic cathedral in Bozeman, Montana. Let's build a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica. Let's build a new Great Pyramid, one metre higher than what Cheops did. Let's buy the world's deepest disused mine and just keep digging. Let's hold a competition each year that pays $1 million for the best painting of Sophia Loren. I don't care, let's just do something more interesting than curing malaria.
Well there is one well known guy working on a bunch of cool projects.
One metre *lower* than Cheops - still an awesome pyramid, and also awesome in its humility.
Only if it can also have waterslides
So... a really big public art program?
Like, if you're doing things because you think they're cool and not because they serve some useful purpose, we generally call that "art." Dectuple the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts and that ought to be enough to build a new Great Pyramid.
(I guess the non-taxpayer-funded version would be a really big Kickstarter project, which is the standard method for collecting donations for a cool entertainment project, but you may have trouble finding enough backers.)
I've always thought we should mine books and other media for the coolest "this idea could exist today, but it doesn't for some reason."
Like in the book Fall, by Neal Stephenson, he describes a band called Pompitus Bombasticus, and their music is "described as grandiose and epic, with a powerful, choral-heavy style that brings a modern twist to the classical intensity of Carmina Burana."
I naturally immediately looked for this artist, and was disappointed to find out they didn't exist. But they could! When AI gets good enough to plausibly execute, I'm definitely going to have them create a channel like that.
Or in Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain trilogy, the second generation Sleepless create a way of communicating where you can see every word in a sentence's layered denotation and connotations, and the second and third order connotations are an additional communication channel that communicate various subtleties and esthetics.
Amazingly, the battalions of melee stick fighters at the Himalayan Chinese / Indian border in Termination Shock was actually a real thing.
There's tons of similar ideas out there - why aren't we harvesting and prioritizing them for EAwe?
If you're ever keen on a list of other awesome-yet-unfortunately-theoretical band names, Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy centers around a music festival where he spells out the line-up in laborious, multi-page glory. Very good fun.
>a way of communicating where you can see every word in a sentence's layered denotation and connotations, and the second and third order connotations are an additional communication channel that communicate various subtleties and esthetics.
I just realized that I'm actually sort of working on this, if you squint! It's a way of communicating between deterministic software systems and large language models by passing around suitably encoded graph databases. Graph databases are basically queryable webs of sentences as far as the LLM is concerned, and arbitrary metadata, ontologies, and pretty much any additional explanation you want are all just one more strand in the web. Surprisingly enough, LLMs are pretty good at both understanding and producing such webs. For human readout, we turn the webs into a set of queries and reports, losing some fidelity in exchange for understandability.
That's amazing - if you had a substack, I'd definitely subscribe to hear about that.
Is there a resource you could point me to to learn more about graph databases, particularly how they're generated and their boundaries are defined? A Github page or library or package or something?
A friend and co-workers book is a good place to start https://www.google.com/books/edition/Semantic_Web_for_the_Working_Ontologist/_qGKPOlB1DgC?hl=en&gbpv=0. After that, google "semantic web" and your favorite language and you should be good to go. Now that we have machines that can understand semantics, the semantic web is becoming much more useful.
> their music is "described as grandiose and epic, with a powerful, choral-heavy style that brings a modern twist to the classical intensity of Carmina Burana."
You can probably find this kind of music in the weirder corners of progressive rock. Try something like Devil Doll - Dies Irae, or Magma - Ëmëhntëhtt-Ré.
>"described as grandiose and epic, with a powerful, choral-heavy style that brings a modern twist to the classical intensity of Carmina Burana."
Triarii might be what you're looking for - big, over-the-top orchestral with dramatic chanting.
Alternatively, I might suggest the soundtrack to Mechanicus, which is a really cool mix of pipe organ and modern synth sounds.
...Seriously? Those are the most exciting things you can come up with? How utterly banal.
Anyways, we don't need to spend any money making things more interesting. You already have front-row seats to what will probably be one of the most interesting and exciting events in your lifetime. This election is going to be simply wonderful to watch...
If the most interesting thing you can think of is the current election, then frankly you're part of the problem.
>You already have front-row seats to what will probably be one of the most interesting and exciting events in your lifetime. This election is going to be simply wonderful to watch...
You really think so? Maybe I'm overdosing on "Nothing Ever Happens"ium, but I think it's pretty much downhill from here (excitement wise).
We've had some great moments, though, I'll give you that much.
I’d like to be alive in an era where nothing ever happens. This isn’t it.
We can only know in hindsight when we're in one.
We can know right now that we are not in an era of nothing ever happening, as can any people living in an eventful era.
The problem is that every era feels eventful when one lives through it. I think late 90s were quite uneventful and awesome, but also remember Kosovo war and Clinton impeachment as big events. Then Sept. 11 came, followed by Bush wrecking the world. That's how I now know 90s were quiet.
By any standards this is an eventful era. I’m in my forties and the last twenty years were clearly a crazy time to live. Perhaps, prior to this two decades there was the fall of the wall but that was benign, there was no loss of life. And it was an optimistic era.
Anyway you are living at a time where Russia is effectively at war with NATO, the Middle East is in flames and Israel is accused of genocide, a supposed “fascist” and definite felon who challenged the last election with what some called an insurrection or coup is on the verge of winning again, we are a few years out from a worldwide pandemic which shut down the world economy for about a year causing a world recession, and subsequently a major inflation event. In the last 20 years we’ve had multiple proxy wars in the Levant and North Africa, the U.K. left the EU, and Arab terrorists attacked and destroyed the tallest buildings in New York, and significant parts of the pentagon by flying hijacked planes into them, the event which started a lot of the madness. I was very close to forgetting a major recession - termed the Great Recession as it was the worst since the depression, in 2008. Then there’s the rise of China and an increase in political estrangement and anti democratic sentiment in the west. The future seems just as uncertain as the early 20C, the beast is arisen again and slouching towards Bethlehem.
This perhaps isn’t the same as 1918-1945 but that that was an interesting time I’d also not want to live in.
I don’t disagree, actually. I want my 90’s back even though my personal circumstances are much better now.
As to the 18-45 comparison… it’s - terrifyingly - spot on. Back in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine, I was talking to an older German guy (his father fought in WW2, for perspective). We were having beers and talking about how, was it like 1914? Or 1938? A dreadful sense of the world crumbling. We kind of ended up deciding that it felt like a full-scale war was anywhere between 5 and 20 years away, but of course it was all nonsense, who wants to do this in the 21st century. Well….
Not quite: we can only claim in hindsight that other people were in one.
Yeah, I reluctantly agree.
As the wise man said: these are just examples, it could also be something much better.
You really want to talk about the US election in this thread? There's election threads that way ^^^ and that way vvvv, go talk about it there.
I love it. Arguably, the Nobel and Millenium prizes do some of this.
Why Trent Reznor? How much would we need to pay him for the symphony?
Similar to your take, I am not opposed to reducing suffering. However, I have a sense that suffering will always be with us and may even be fundamentally irreducible.
On the other hand, there's no reason to expect beauty (or awesomeness) to emerge naturally.
Squaring the circle: maybe having more people globally connected and productive leads to more awesomeness? Wouldn't it be funny if curing disease were still the best way to get what you want?
I don't normally like to traffic in excessive hyperbole, but Trent Reznor (and his collaborator, Atticus Ross) quite possibly know more about sound than anyone else alive. Their soundtrack to the HBO series _Watchmen_ is a revelation.
I didn't realize they did that music. I remember it fitting the show well; pretty consistently dark and dystopic. After reading your comment, I went back and listened to many of the tracks. Do you have any that you particularly recommend?
For driving rhythms in old-school Nine Inch Nails mode, _Objects In Mirror_ is a personal favorite, as is _Never Surrender_. For ethereal amazingness, do try the _Life On Mars_ cover.
Trent Reznor is an interesting composer and I for one would love to hear a symphony by him. Whether he has the chops to compose one, I'm not sure.
The guy who composes the music for League of Legends used to be some sort of scream metal guitarist or something.
One day they had a live event, and he conducted the orchestra that was performing the music he wrote for the game. It was pretty intense.
Possibly of relevant interest to those in this thread.
There’s a heavy overlap between classical and metal. Scratch that, most/best metal is pretty much Vivaldi on steroids.
Does anyone know of Mandarin language content that is interesting to rationalists?
I'm surprised you thought those responses to your Trump anti-endorsement were worth boosting. For instance, Eric claims Trump's attacks on democracy amount to "Nothing, except cast doubt on the integrity of the 2020 election," and he proceeds to downplay the citizen actions of January 6 in direct response to those cast doubts. However, he says nothing about Trump's multiple calls to election officials in multiple states, pressuring them not to certify results; his entire alternate/fake elector scheme across multiple states; or his pressure on Pence to betray his Constitutional duty. These are serious omissions.
I just suffered four years of JANUARY 6TH COUP and I've seen and heard lots of things, but I've never heard these things. Perhaps these things are more boring or less visually interesting, so none of the anti-Trump crowd ever amplified it?
I would bother to go research them, but I'm already predisposed to think Trump is a slimy asshole, so I'm just gonna trust they happened and feel a little concern for our future if he wins.
Indeed. I'm very open to the argument that the fake-electors effort was in the big picture every bit as threatening to the republic as either sending the mob to stop the count or trying to get Pence to violate his oath.
Also it's worth not forgetting his phone call with a state governor asking that governor to "find me", after the election, enough votes to flip that state into the GOP column.
I'd argue the riot itself in January 6th was significant but far from the worse part of the whole election overturning conspiracy; that would be instead all the movement in the background by Trump, Giuliani, Eastman, and Bannon to get the fake electors and steal the election. The whole point of January 6th in the broader context of what was going on behind the scenes was to delay the certification of the vote, something it succeeded in doing.
Like ffs, the whole reason Attorney General William Barr was fired was bc he told Trump there was no evidence of fraud. Rosen, the guy who replaced him, was being pressured by Trump daily, and the only reason *he* was not fired was because basically the whole AG office threatened to resign if Trump pushed him out.
Not to mention like, the brazen, obviously corrupt fact that Roger Stone was lying to Congress and doing witness tampering, and Trump fucking pardoned him. To pretend Democrats and Republicans (at least currently) are at all comparable when it comes to preserving democratic institutions is laughable.
> These are serious omissions.
I guess reality needs to be taken seriously, not literally.
Zzzzzzing!
Here's a strange question for any programmers out there: How does the sending and receiving of HTTP/HTTPS requests and responses *really* work? Or maybe I'm just really bad at searching reams of poorly organized code?
If you want to send an HTTP/HTTPS request in Python, for example, the standard answer is "use requests.get or requests.post". But "requests" is not some sort of mystical black-box; it's a library. When you look into the requests source code at https://github.com/psf/requests/tree/main/src/requests you quickly notice (in api.py) that "requests.get" and "requests.post" are convenience wrappers around "requests.request", which in turn is implemented (in sessions.py) using a class called "Session". The "Session" class has a "request" method which in turn calls the "send" method, which in turn calls "adapter.send" (where "adapter" is some sort of adapter(????)). And at this point I'm not sure how far to follow the call stack down anymore.
Or take Swift. The standard way to make an HTTP/HTTPS request in Swift is via "URLSession", which is implemented in the "Foundation" library. But if you dig into https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/8c0a11ee6f0e6a7872d765d6be2e252816123c6a/Sources/FoundationNetworking/URLSession/URLSession.swift#L188 you discover that the "URLSession" class actually makes use of the "libcurl" library. If you try digging around for the source code you get to https://github.com/curl/curl and ... I'm not sure what to make of this horrific mess of files either.
Any clues?
Other people have some good content, but I'll throw out the OSI model as a good way to think about this in a structured way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
It sounds like you're used to working at layers 6 & 7, ie application stuff. Sending a GET request, working with JSON, etc. The next two layers down (4 & 5) are Session and Transport, and they deal with how communication is established between hosts, and how high-level data is transferred between them. As you go further down the stack, you eventually bottom out in the actual changing voltages / pulses of light which encode the bits of the data being transferred.
There's a popular interview question that asks, What happens when you plug www.google.com into your browser's navbar and press Enter?
If you look up a few answers to this, you'll likely find what you're looking for. I remember there were good writeups and youtube vids, but it's been a few years so I don't have a specific one to recommend.
Okay, so, I think what you're asking about is some combination of "how does an operating system's network stack work?" and "where's the part in libcurl where it actually puts together the request?" and I don't know the answer to either of those (though I could make some educated guesses, I won't, because it would come across too authoritative).
However, let me tell you about something magical, yet almost completely unrelated, that you can do using the tool netcat.
Here's what an HTTP 1.1 request looks like: https://rentry.co/5ahx3dh4
You can take that request and write it into netcat: https://rentry.co/3ogvsroe
What you get out is simply magical because of how magically simple it is. You literally open a socket to example.com on port 80, write two lines of ASCII text, hit enter a couple of times, and that's an HTTP/1.1 request. HTTP/1.0 is even simpler because you can just write the full URL and omit the host header.
HTTPS and HTTP/2 are more complicated and you can't just write an encrypted request out by hand, which is a sad but necessary reflection of the modern need to not leak credit card details to everyone between the user and their bank. I still think it would be fun to try and write a HTTP/2 client from the TCP socket up, maybe using a library to help with TLS.
Read up on TCP/IP. Each computer has an IP address. Connections between two computers (your browser and the server, in this case) use the TCP protocol to send a sequence of data in each direction, using a port number to distinguish which service you're connecting to (in this case, the web server, not the mail server or something else). Http is a simple protocol built on top of tcp, and https is a more complicated variant of it, with cryptography added to make it more secure (harder to tamper or eavesdrop). On the side of programming languages, a connected endpoint is known as a "socket". If you follow your python libraries to the end, you'll find one creating a socket and sending some data through it. Google these terms and you'll find tons of information.
At the bottom of the stack, you have a network card whose circuits take care of sending brief packages of data (IP datagrams), which are relayed by a string of routers all the way to the destination.
I'll add to this that the tool Wireshark is excellent for seeing this yourself with real scenarios. Wireshark captures and displays network traffic from your computer. You'll need to practice with filters to pare it down to the relevant bits, but if you want too see under the hood, it's the best way.
C.url, which you have discovered, is a very frequently used library that implements the necessary protocols (such as HTTP) and makes the requests for you, then parses the response before returning it to you.
Curl is one of those small, but important elements in the global networking structure - and it is developed and maintained by a single programmer, a Swede called Daniel, since 1996.
If Trump wins tomorrow, does that retroactively impact the analysis of January 6? Imagine yourself a historian 100 years in the future. You see Trump win 2016 and 2024, and you also see a Trump loss in 2020, the COVID pandemic year. Isn’t the simplest inference that the 2020 election gets the same asterisk that everything else that happened in 2020 gets?
There’s also lots of self-reference paradoxes you could break out: if an anti-democratic candidate wins an election, is his election democratic, or anti-democratic?
> if an anti-democratic candidate wins an election, is his election democratic, or anti-democratic?
Neither, both, mu: "democratic" has a whole spectrum of meanings, and sometimes they come apart.
Sulla's dictatorship reads very differently in the context of Caesar than it would if he had actually stabilized the Roman Republic. So, impossible to say.
It only really changes things if Trump's second term is (from a distant historian's perspective) a relatively normal Presidential administration that's followed by a reasonably uncomplicated election in 2028 and a peaceful transfer of power to the winner.
I have my opinions as to how likely that is, and I very much hope tomorrow's election results relegate the question to the domain of alternate history.
I'm basically 99%+ confident that if he wins everything is fine and that in four years it's a return to a more normal political cycle.
If he loses... I don't know, they Democrats learn that demonizing their opponents works, and they'll probably just lean into it, and who knows where that ends up...
You're 99% confident you know how things will be in 4 years? Do you realize that even superforecasters don't come anywhere near being that accurate? Do you think you're a fucking psychic? You're Dumbledore?
"Democrats learn that demonizing their opponents works"
I strongly reject that Republicans aren't doing that to an even worse degree, at least when you measure the distance between rhetoric to reality.
Trump tried to overthrow an election, calls for ending media licenses (which even literally a thing), recently made a joke about journalists being killed. Democrats are correct to point that out, because those are all things he said. On the other hand, Trump calls Kamala a communist, and JD Vance says "if we have to make up stories we will" about Haitians eating dogs. These things are false, which makes Republicans worse than Democrats here.
JD Vance never said he would "make up stories". He clarified what he meant by "creating stories": taking an existing story that he believed to be true and forcing the media to talk about it. It was awkward wording, clarified, and his opponents continue to insist on the original erroneous interpretation. This thing is false, which, by your argument, makes Democrats worse than Republicans here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVJ_Icosa3s
>taking an existing story that he believed to be true and forcing the media to talk about it.
Believing that Haitians are eating cats and dogs in Springfield Ohio because random people on twitter claimed it means his epistemology is completely fucked. He will signal boost anything that supports his agenda no matter how hilariously false it is or how many people come out against it like the Springfield police force or the governor of Ohio. That is no different from saying he would just make up stories. Look at his refusal to admit Trump lost the 2020 election for more character evidence that he will lie and make up stories whenever it fits him.
I got the impression JD Vance told the cat-eating story because of people he trusted, not just random people on twitter. Moreover, I don't think you can know what JD Vance will do to that degree of certainty. What's your source?
As for him refusing to affirm that Trump lost in 2020, it's obvious to me that there's another reason to refuse: the request for him to do so was a leading question.
JD Vance uncritically trusting people who can be fooled by random nonsense on Twitter, is not much of an improvement over JD Vance being fooled by random nonsense on Twitter.
I wasn't aware I needed to follow the rabbit hole that far, but: I got the impression JD Vance wasn't just trusting people who can be fooled by random Twitter, but rather actual Springfield residents complaining about first-hand observation. But sure, you got me; maybe he wasn't.
By that point, I have to genuinely wonder if it matters. For instance, are you saying some people will stake a position on illegal immigration solely on whether "there exist Haitians eating cats in Springfield" is factual? Because I don't think there are enough such people to matter. I think there are many more people who think immigrants will cause some cultural friction that will make it hard to keep American society sufficiently cohesive, even if that ends up coming out as "taking our jobs" or "stealing our hubcaps" or "eating our pets", and even if they aren't eating actual pets, it's probably reasonable to think they're doing enough less extreme things to make life harder than it ought to be. And maybe they should catch up on Caplan more, but then, so should the people who want open borders, so meh.
Alternately, is your concern mostly around a politician having bad or motivated epistemology? Because if so, why just Vance? There exist bad takes on illegal immigration, and it'd be nice if Vance wasn't another minor source for them, but it's hard for me to see that rising to the other commenter's level of "his epistemology is completely fucked".
On a somewhat related (albeit obliquely), are there prediction markets for when the first post-election-day election lawsuit will be filed? I'm expecting election season to transition into litigation season, and am curious on whether a market exists about the transition.
I expect injunctions to be requested within an hour if polls opening tomorrow.
Many Thanks! Sounds plausible, we shall soon see.
historians have practice analyzing democratic takeovers after failed coups.
Yes, Hugo Chavez spent 2 years in prison after his failed 1992 coup, and then won the presidency in a fair vote in 1998. His failed coup is still called that today.
If I win a lottery tomorrow, does it retroactively also make me win a lottery yesterday?
No, but it makes you one 2 years ago.
I'd argue that it's anti-democratic to prevent the people from ending their own democracy. Why even be pro-democracy if you're not going to respect the will of the people?
This is why the USA is a constitutional republic, not a direct democracy.
Amusingly, if we just straight up had a national popular vote, Trump would have never been President, so our "republic" elements work against our democracy. Alas. Those damned Athenians killing Socrates really fucked us.
If we had a straight up national popular vote, the entire election campaign would have been run differently, yielding different results. Possibly just as weird-looking, only with recounts nationwide rather than in a few states, and with cities dictating politics to towns and rural inhabitants.
One refrain I've heard here more than a few times is that democracy is a means not an end. I certainly don't agree.
I don't understand how you could disagree. Could you please elaborate?
Democracy is supposed to allow for ruling the people. The people DO have to be ruled, as anarchy is the alternative, and is worse.
These days, I'm inclined to think democracy is a good in and of itself. And if the will of the people is sacrosanct, which is what I'm leaning towards, then it's still a Worthy thing to give people enough rope to hang themselves. It's a worthy thing to give the people the power to wreck their own society. Because the society BELONGS TO THEM.
I try to avoid analogies, but here's one I can't avoid. If you own a home, it's your right to beautify it, put holes in the wall with a sledgehammer, or even just bulldoze the whole thing to the ground for no particular reason. It BELONGS to you and no one has the moral right to obstruct you from doing whatever you want with it. By the same token, countries belong to their citizens, and their citizens have the moral right to burn their countries to the ground. If that's what they choose.
OK, I agree with that sentiment. But it doesn't work well with governing if everyone thinks only selfishly, and not about what is right. The poor outnumber the rich, and could vote to take their wealth and distribute it amongst themselves. It would be theft, and discourage anyone from building up significant wealth, but it would be legal and democratic.
Democracy CAN be two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, and then the wolves end up starving. You say that is their right, which is true, but I myself am coming to think more and more that people do NOT know or vote for what is in their long-term best interest, and am thinking less of democracy as time marches on.
Naturally, I would argue against the wolves making that stupid choice. I would try to persuade them. But I wouldn't physically try to stop the wolves, or do some kind of coup or change the system in order to prevent the wolves from doing whatever they want. Because it is for every man to decide what is best.
If the wolves and sheep find themselves in a democracy, the natural course is for the sheep to break off from the democracy, as it's unfair to them. Why would they stay in such a system just for the sake of preserving the system, to their detriment?
The US needs to remember that, too. If the minority gets downtrodden enough then they will revolt. It is like being a law-abiding citizen, such that when the laws are manifestly wrong, one must either break the law, or do wrong.
Yes of course. I think separatism is fine and I support separatism. But there is a difference between a separatist revolt and a revolt that seeks to seize the levers of power. Separating yourself from those you do not trust is very defensible. Seeking to seize the levers of power and make yourself the master over others is a different kind of revolt and that I cannot support. And I don't care if you perceive them to be unfairly trying to be Masters over you. Two wrongs do not make a right. I am speaking strictly in the context of civil conflict, when it comes to a war with a foreign country, different rule apply. One quirk I have as a northerner who hates slavery: I wish Abraham Lincoln had recognized the Confederacy, and then immediately declared a holy war of annexation against the Confederacy. Of course that wasn't politically feasible and it went against Lincoln's ideology. But I still wish we had recognized States’ right to secede, and conquered the Confederacy as a foreign slave power that had to be extinguished.
There are intermediate policies, such as requiring some flavor of supermajority to make that change. Strictly speaking, that _could_ be done with the amendment or constitutional convention process, which require supermajorities of the states but not of the voters...
except that the most likely scenario here is losing the popular vote 3 consecutive times.
I don't know, I think there are limits to this (at least in principle). If we imagine a hypothetical super-Trump who could credibly promise that, if elected, he would turn the country into a hereditary oligarchic monarchy for the next three generations, I think you can reasonably argue that it's more democratic to ban him then let him run (since letting him run removes future options, for one thing).
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/is-this-how-to-save-democracy
Michael brings a challenging case for a different political view,add him to Richard and Eric
Hmm, he doesn’t really defend Trump or refute his critics, he just says they are full of rage and TDS. Am I missing something?
> I am here to say that “Trump is a threat to Democracy” line is simply a campaign tactic. It is not based on anything more than a visceral dislike of Donald Trump.
No, it's based on the fact that he LITERALLY tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a coup d'etat. I was all "Trump is just funny moron" until learning about the extremes to which Trump went to end the centuries-old American tradition of democratic rule. I retroactively consider "Trump being a rude dipshit means he's a would-be putschist" to be much more plausible than I did at the time, since it accurately predicted the future.
I'm sure consultants say that it wins votes. It also wins votes to mention his shit positions on abortion, the ACA, taxes, social security, and more. True things are more persuasive than false things, ceteris paribus.
Yeah, this was a very well-written case.
We none of us like Trump, but we recognise when our leaders have become petty tyrants, and we need to send a message: return to Liberalism. Now, please.
Thanks Christos, for linking this. It's nice to read.
In regards to RFK's Fluoride phobia, Kevin Drum alerts us to a study that suggests that *high* levels of Fluoridation (much higher than the EPA recommendations for water departments) can reduce IQ by a few points.
https://jabberwocking.com/is-fluoridated-water-safe/
> However, a long-awaited report from the National Toxicology Program was finally released a couple of months ago, and it concluded that fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l might be associated with IQ losses in children. It came to no conclusions about levels of 0.7 mg/l.
Here's the link to the report. I haven't read it.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/completed/fluoride
No doubt the IQ fetishists among us will find this report alarming! However, on the flip side of the health coin is this report from Canada that compared the rates of general anesthesia for children treated for dental caries between fluoridated and non-fluoridated regions, and they found...
> Among 2659 children receiving caries-related treatments under GA, the mean (SD) and median (IQR) age were 4.8 (2.3) and 4 (3–6) years, respectively, and 65% resided in the non-fluoridated area. The analysis revealed that the cessation of water fluoridation was significantly associated with an increased rate of caries-related GA events per 10,000 children in both age groups (0–5 and 6–11 years), with a more pronounced effect in 0–5-year-olds in non-fluoridated areas. The risk of dental treatments under GA was also positively associated with post-cessation time.
Although they don't discuss it in the non-paywalled summary, the authors suggest that poorer dental health and increased use of GA will have negative downstream health effects (and some other studies have suggested this is correlated to increased childhood mortality rates).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.17269/s41997-024-00858-w
The CDC estimates that only about half of one percent of American kids are exposed to fluoride levels above 1.5 mg/l. So, if we can trust the NTP report, these are the kids we should be concerned about (they're mostly poor and/or living in the southwest where natural fluoride levels are high). But the NTP data isn't perfect. I discuss it here (no paywall):
https://statisfied.substack.com/p/fluoridated-water
Thanks for doing a deep dive into the individual studies that make up the NTP meta-study! Fascinating how often basic statistical errors turn up in "serious" studies.
I love that Dr Eaton quote. Do you have a link to it (which I think is in the earlier version of the NTP study?)
> "One of the biggest challenges in assessing impacts at lower doses is that assessment of the adverse outcome (generally IQ measurements) is not very robust, and there are many other variables that affect children’s IQ and must be controlled. Even the tool(s) used to measure IQ have a lot of noise, making it virtually impossible to accurately determine a change in IQ of 1-2 points."
That quote is from an email exchange between Dr. Eaton and me. I appreciated his patience in answering my questions, considering that an earlier version of the NTP report had been attacked by many sources and he ran the committee that evaluated the NTP's response.
We've already known for ages that high levels of fluoride can harm IQ - studies from Chinese regions with lots of fluoride pollution have shown this. I think last time I looked into this it was barely possible that a few US cities with high fluoride levels can take off 0.1 - 1 IQ point if there's no threshold (but lots of things have thresholds).
0.1 point? Even 1 point seems like background noise in the margin of error of IQ tests. How large were the sample sizes? And if it's a large sample size how do they control for other factors like relative levels of lead and other chemicals?
I grew up in one of the few towns in the US that doesn't add fluoride to the water. (At least they didn't during 1984-2004). It seemed like an unusually intelligent town for its size. Myself and my siblings are well above average in intelligence, although I'm not sure it's worth achieving that if it means you have as many struggles with tooth decay as I have had.
Even in the most extreme scenario of it hitting a whole IQ point, this wouldn't be noticable in a single town based on general impression
I was reading too fast. Didn't realize the effect was that small.
Have any randomized controlled studies been done on this? My belief is that observational studies are basically useless for the purpose of establishing causation. At the very least, it's usually a mistake to interpret their results at face value.
Take lead for example. Every public health agency is in unanimous agreement that it causes IQ loss at low doses. After reading a lot of lead-IQ literature, I have yet to find a compelling case that the effect isn't primarily due to stupid two-year-olds eating more dust bunnies than smarter two-year-olds, plus about 1,000 other difficult-to-control-and-God-help-you-if-you-try things that correlate with lead exposure.
Regarding randomized control studies -- where's your common sense? You can't do randomized controlled studies in which you give some children a low level of lead exposure (a level that many professionals, though not all, think is harmful) and some no lead. Such a study would never be approved, and in most people's opinion, including mine, should not be.
Here is a study that controls statistically for many of the confounds that could account for a false conclusion that low levels of lead exposure cause IQ decrease. The confounds the study controlled for were "the child’s sex, birth weight, and iron status (defined by the serum transferrin saturation at three and five years of age) and the mother’s IQ (determined with use of the abbreviated Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale), years of education, race (self-assigned as white or nonwhite), tobacco use during pregnancy (user or nonuser), yearly household income, and the total score for the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment Inventory."
Here are the study's findings: "Methods: We measured blood lead concentrations in 172 children at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months of age and administered the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale at the ages of 3 and 5 years. The relation between IQ and blood lead concentration was estimated with the use of linear and nonlinear mixed models, with adjustment for maternal IQ, quality of the home environment, and other potential confounders.
Results: The blood lead concentration was inversely and significantly associated with IQ. In the linear model, each increase of 10 microg per deciliter in the lifetime average blood lead concentration was associated with a 4.6-point decrease in IQ (P=0.004), whereas for the subsample of 101 children whose maximal lead concentrations remained below 10 microg per deciliter, the change in IQ associated with a given change in lead concentration was greater. When estimated in a nonlinear model with the full sample, IQ declined by 7.4 points as lifetime average blood lead concentrations increased from 1 to 10 microg per deciliter."
Title:Intellectual impairment in children with blood lead concentrations below 10 microg per deciliter
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12700371/
The excellent Probable Causation podcast had an episode about some research that tried to assess the effect of lead remediation on school and life outcomes for kids: https://www.probablecausation.com/podcasts/episode-16-stephen-billings
This (like almost everything the podcast deals with) used the tools of causal inference to try to work out how much good lead remediation did. (It did a fair bit of good, though I think the mechanism by which it helped was still unclear.)
Regarding randomized controlled studies, I believe you misunderstood my initial question, which pertained to fluorinated water (but once you get me started on observational studies, I just can't resist the urge to start ranting about lead...)
Regarding the study, the key result in my opinion is explained in the following passage:
> Nonlinear mixed models were analyzed with the use of the full range of blood lead values. Semi-parametric analysis indicated a decline in IQ of 7.4 points for a lifetime average blood lead concentration of up to 10 μg per deciliter (Fig. 2). For lifetime average blood lead concentrations ranging from more than 10 μg per deciliter to 30 μg per deciliter, a more gradual decrease in IQ was estimated (approximately 2.5 points).
So they're telling us that 10 mcg/dL of lead causes 7.4 IQ points of cognitive impairment, but an additional 20 mcg/dL only causes an additional 2.5 IQ points of impairment? Nonsense!
This isn't a weird outlier result: it's the standard finding in this line of research. They typically find a strong correlation in the "normal background lead level" regime, while the correlation weakens, disappears, or even inverts (resulting in a U-shaped lead-versus-IQ curve) beyond the range of normal background levels.
A skeptic like myself would hypothesize that lead exposure within the "normal background level" regime is driven primarily by things with strong IQ/SES signal such as eating dust bunnies, cleanliness of the home, parental supervision, age of neighborhood, proximity to a highway/curb, and nutrition (calcium, for example, is known to decrease lead absorption). Whereas outlier values are driven by things with weak-to-zero IQ/SES signal like adulterated applesauce.
As for why I'm skeptical of researchers' efforts to control for all the SES-related variables that correlate with IQ: it's just too damn difficult. For example, the HOME inventory provides a measurement of home cleanliness. It's noisy; some homes will be uncharacteristically clean on the day when the researchers visit, while other homes might be uncharacteristically dirty that day. Whereas blood lead levels provide a "real world" measurement of home cleanliness that averages over a longer duration of time (lead's half-life in the blood is approximately a month). So while researchers can attempt to control for home cleanliness via the HOME inventory, measured lead levels are always going to provide additional home-cleanliness signal beyond what you get from the HOME inventory alone.
Yes, sorry, I did think your calling for RCT's applied to lead, but rereading I see that you were talking there about flouride.
As for what you have to say about the study I cited: Seems to me that you are being unreasonably picky here as regards how the researchers controlled for child IQ at birth: The researchers controlled for maternal IQ, education, race, education and household income. Those are all correlated with IQ and with each other. They also controlled for one other kind of predictor: The HOME inventory, which you believe to be a measure of home cleanliness, is actually a measure of the quality of a child's home environment and takes into account parental responsiveness, cognitive stimulation, emotional support, and the availability of enriching materials and experiences within the household. These things are also correlated with SES and parental IQ. The full set of things these researchers used as controls for confounds of the effect of lead is powerfully predictive of child's birth IQ, one of the best sets of controls for family predictors of IQ that I have ever seen! The only important variable missing is paternal IQ, and I think it's likely it would not add much predictive power, given how highly correlated it probably is with the other variables used to control for IQ. IOthers who do actual research where it's important to control for IQ would consider what these researchers did quite adequate.
Regarding household cleaning: Home cleanliness is correlated with SES, though I sort of doubt that it’s what you call a strong signal of SES. That doesn’t fit well with my life experience, which is that a lot of high-SES people have dusty, messy houses because they are busy and don’t have time for housework, and smart so they especially hate housework, and aren't very into the House Beautiful thing because their self-esteem is tied to their work, not to their housekeeping ability. And many blue collar people I've encountered seem really caught up in the household perfection thing. In any case, ordinary cleaning does not reduce lead dust as much as one would expect. On carpets and upholstery it cuts the lead on the surfaces by less than 50%:
Comparison of techniques to reduce residential lead dust on carpet and upholstery: the new jersey assessment of cleaning techniques trial. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1241111/
And I wish you would drop the stuff about kids eating dust kitties. It is not a strong SES signal. It is not a signal at all. I have raised a child, and also taught nursery school for a couple years, and I have never seen a 2 year old eat a dust bunny or anything remotely like one. They will eat stuff that’s been sneezed all over, and stuff they like that fell on the floor even when it’s got little flecks of junk on it. They will put all kinds of things in their mouths — sticks, visibly dirty toys, plastic spoons found on the sidewalk. But dust kitties just would not appeal to them — I mean, they’re wads of dusty hair and lint. Have you been around toddlers much? My 2 year old liked almost all foods, but I don’t think I could have induced her to eat a dust kitty no matter what punishments I threatened or rewards I dangled. If she somehow got one in her mouth accidentally she would have tried to pull it out of her mouth with her fingers, probably crying at the same time. And same goes for the hundreds of small kids I was with when I taught nursery school.
As for the intrinsic unlikeliness that the difference between blood levels of 1 & 10 mg/dL would be greater than differences of the same degree at higher levels — yeah, that surprised me too. However, if as you say that is the usual finding, and many studies got it, it seems silly to shrug it off. I see no reason at all to take this as evidence that the variance in IQ seen at low blood lead levels is best accounted for by the dust-bunny munchfests you think are popular with the stupid children of stupid people.
Good place to mention Cremieux's take:
https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/who-gets-exposed-to-lead
Your explanation lines up with his (i.e. that low and decreasing BLL variance but high and constant IQ/SES variance implies absurdly high and growing effect sizes) and he even mentions the study by Canterfield that Eremolalos finds dispositive.
Too much noise, too much bias, too much politics.
I would mostly agree with Cremieux's take. Those lead-IQ studies seem sort of shaky to me. But I don't doubt lead's neurotoxic effects — that lead has histopathological effects on brain tissue is pretty conclusive. The downstream cognitive and behavioral effects are another story. Unfortunately, IQ tests are a clumsy instrument with which to measure the effects of lead.
> With all said and done, it is abundantly clear that the effect of lead on IQ is overestimated and studies claiming that there’s no lower-bound for negative effects have not been adequately testing their hypothesis. Instead of effects of lead, what they've really been testing has largely been stratification of lead exposures by various causes of variation in IQ. Without something like twin or sibling controls or high-quality longitudinal data, it is dubious whether lead effects can be properly estimated at all.
Why would stupid 2 year olds eat more dust bunnies than smart ones? Children that age, whether smart or stupid, are not subject to the kind of disgust about germs and crud that adults are. Saw a study of kids at I believe age 4 -- definitely something older than 2 -- and whether they had the same disgust about feces as adults. Kids were shown a cartoon story in which a big bird scares the family dog, and it poops in the milk. Kids are asked after the story whether it's OK to drink they milk, and say yes. A year later they recoil in disgust at the idea of drinking milk with dog feces in it.
Also, I believe the way small children take in most of the lead in homes with lead paint is by getting it on their hands while crawling or just playing while sitting on the floor, then putting their hands in their mouth (when thumb sucking, eating etc.), rather than from eating dust bunnies.
Seems to me you don't know anything about how kids end up swallowing bits of lead paint -- yet you're sure your ideas, which don't even have observational support, are right.
My intuition is that, in most cases where the child isn't literally eating paint chips (as most children aren't), lead exposure is driven primarily by dust ingestion, with leaded gasoline being the original source of the contamination. Therefore, what make blood lead levels so fascinating is that they simultaneously provide population-level SES signals (older neighborhoods have higher lead backgrounds), household-level SES signals (home cleanliness, parenting attentiveness, etc), and signals of the individual child's behavior.
"Eating dust bunnies" was, of course, just my humorous illustration of mouthing behavior. And to be clear: it doesn't provide any individual-child-level IQ signal until after the age at which most children have ceased doing it.
Anecdotally (n=1), my daughter stopped putting non-food stuff into her mouth by 18 months, which I believe is typical. I think it's no coincidence that the lead-IQ correlation is strongest and most consistent around age 2, at which point most (but not all) children have developed an understanding of what's food and what's not.
.>And to be clear: it doesn't provide any individual-child-level IQ signal until after the age at which most children have ceased doing it.
Ingested lead is stored in the bones, and released slowly. You didn't know that?
The key word in "released slowly" is "slowly". BLLs are driven primarily by current exposure. Especially for young children who are gaining bone mass, not losing it.
<Therefore, what make blood lead levels so fascinating is that they simultaneously provide population-level SES signals (older neighborhoods have higher lead backgrounds), household-level SES signals (home cleanliness, parenting attentiveness, etc), and signals of the individual child's behavior.
You're describing as a fascinating signal a phenomenon that is determined by diverse things that are not themselves highly correlated? Seems like "poor, noisy signal for each of several things" is a better description. It's like saying that being a ballerina simultaneously signals athletic ability, willingness to strive to excel at a multitude of arbitrary convention set by others, and unusual thinness. Fascinating?
Eh, if you didn't find it interesting, then I assume you wouldn't be spending your free time researching and debating it.
Yes, kids understand what is food and what is not by age 2, but they continue to put all kinds of non-food stuff in their mouth: They suck their thumbs, pick their noses and eat the mucus, bite their nails, and seem to enjoy chewing on or mouthing all kinds of things, including sticks, legos, tinker toys, etc etc. And my n here is literally hundreds. They will also eat bits of foods they like if they find them on the floor without a moment's hesitation.
And you keep "hypothesizing" this and that and talking about your intuition and n=1 info, while I am linking to research. Which approach do you suppose most strongly reflects genuine truth-seeking?
About mouthing: First of all, what little kids do isn’t mostly eating non-foods, it’s mouthing non-foods. But yes, it does generally decrease with age. However, it’s not like it goes right straight away after the kid hits 24 months. Here’s a study where the researchers actually observed kids aged 11-60 months and counted the number of mouthing behaviors. Here ’s the study
Frequency of mouthing behavior in young children
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12087432/ (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12087432/)
And here is what they found: Children < or = 24 months exhibited the highest frequency of mouthing behavior with 81+/-7 events/h (mean+/-SE) (n=28 subjects, 69 observations). Children >24 months exhibited the lowest frequency of mouthing behavior with 42+/-4 events/h (n=44 subjects, 117 observations).
So the older kids are mouthing things about half as often, but still mouthing something *42 x per hour,* or about once every minute and a half. I think any reasonable person would concede that this is enough mouthing to transfer a fuckton of whatever junk is on the floor, the rug, the toys, and the kid’s hands into the kid’s mouth.
It’s remarkable that your kid stopped on a dime at age 2, but a fine piece of good luck to have such a punctual kid in the family when you’re invested in proving that kids who mouth things after their 2nd birthday are dumb. So I’ll throw a little discordant anecdotal data of my own. I myself sucked my thumb til about age 5, chewed in pencils all through grade school, and have bitten my nails for my whole life. And I am not dumb, nor did I suffer from developmental delays in motor skills, talking, or anything else of note.
Mouthing more than other kids your age is probably somewhat correlated with low IQ, but probably most negative things are, such as late toilet training, being a discipline problem. short stature etc etc. Late mouthing is not the diagnostic bell -ringer. The things you’d want to look for would be vocabulary, complexity of sentences, general info, how well kid can remember something you tell him, how high he can count etc
And now I am not going to discuss this subject with you any more because I have. a low opinion of the way you are arguing. I have looked up, linked and summarized multiple articles. You have looked up one, tho not until late in the discussion. I haven’t even seen clear evidence that you’ve looked at the ones I named. The pattern of our conversation is that I find a new study or a fact that is apparently accepted by all (such as that lead is stored in the body and released over time) and you say something that minimizes it, often basing what you say on “my intuition is” or something your daughter did. Overall, I have the impression that you are very sure you are right that IQ decreases with low lead levels are due to stupidity, but not very well-informed about the subject. Your conclusion precedes your evidence.
Hypothesizing is part of science. Every idea begins as a hypothesis based on someone's intuition. Progress wouldn't be possible otherwise.
But regarding the main point of your post, these authors conclude that dust/dirt ingestion peaks in the 1-2 years age range: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935124015548
Keep in mind that blood lead levels decline much more precipitously after age 2 than dirt/dust ingestion, because BLLs are going to track dust/dirt ingestion divided by body mass, rather than dirt/dust ingestion alone.
But I think my point stands. Dirt/dust ingestion peaks for most children at age 1-2, and it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that delayed cessation of mouthing behavior (manifesting as higher BLL measurements) is going to correlate with other developmental delays, which in turn will correlate with lower IQ measurements later in life.
Well, unless it's the smart parents who prevent the kids from eating dust bunnies (or whatever). Or the smart parents are more likely to vacuum their homes. Etc.
And since IQ is 80+% heritable, dumb kids eat more dust bunnies (or whatever).
Yes, IQ is highly heritable. The research I cited used multiple variables to control for family IQ. They used 5 different variables which are highly predictive not only of child IQ, but of the environmental advantages of being the child of a high IQ parent. Do you get what controlling for these variables means? If you do not understand, not necessarily every bit of the math, but the gist of what this is and how it strains out confounds, you are not in a position to discuss this research finding.
I was just responding to the proximal message and the direct quote "Why would stupid 2 year olds eat more dust bunnies than smart ones?" There are obvious confounders and your failure to imagine more doesn't mean they don't exist (which is really the problem in this type of research, see Cremieux's post).
I was about to write a more detailed answer to the study by Canfield and I am in fact well positioned to do so (I know more math than you do LOL), but your aggressive tone and misplaced condescension have discouraged me.
It is an effort and time consuming to craft a good answer and the cost is higher than the benefit to educate you. So I won't engage with you any further. But read Cremieux. There is at least one study (by Grönqvist) that looks at the effect between siblings (the gold standard) and find nothing.
Bye.
Dropping out of the discussion? Oh no!
Not that!
I appreciate your efforts, Eremolalos!
You seem very angry. I must have offended you upstream, but I can't see how. My posts were pretty neutral. Not important, I won't hold a grudge.
I apologize for snapping at you, and here’s an explaination of why I was irritable.
Iwas mostly irritated by Jess, who very early on commented that the idea that the damage done to kids by blood levels below 10 mdg/dL is mostly influenced by politics, not science. I understand that that sort of thing goes on, and may be going on here, but I am not influenced by my politics to pick and choose evidence that supports the outcome I want. I donot do shit like that, and in the case of the present issue I did not even know that some see attempts to lower the criteria for what’s an acceptable blood level in kids as a political issue, I fully agree that if lowering it is supported by lame science, or by good science that shows the effect is tiny, then it is dumb to change various policies, spend money, make regulations etc. to ensure that kids’ blood levels are kept below some new very low threshold. So I was annoyed by the implication that I was joining this discussion because I was pushing some leftie agenda. Actually I joined it because I read beowulf888’s exchange with Jess, and I I respect beowulf888. And then I got interested in the topic and wanted to know what the facts were.
And then in my exchanges with Jess it started to seem like *they* were more influenced by politics than science. There was a lot of “my intuition is” and “my hypothesis is” and stuff about what his daughter did. Also some guesses that I thought were implausible, such as that mouthing things more than the average kid of one’s age is probably strongly correlated with low IQ. That last is really implausible. I’m a psychologist, and am familiar with findings on stuff like this, and I can tell you that pretty much all undesirable stuff is weakly correlated with lower IQ, for both kids and adults, but that the things that are strongly correlated are things where common sense tells you that cognitive skills are important: in kids, vocabulary, memory, ability to do things like recite the alphabet and count, general knowledge, complexity of lego structures they build. It is very unlikely that stuff like thumb-sucking are highly correlated with present or future IQ.
Jess also said some other implausible things: The idea that the way kids ingest lead is by eating non-food items came up a lot. He talked about the importance of kids knowing what is food and what is not, and implied that the dumb kids take in more lead because they have not yet learned the distinction. That’s just not how it works, and I say that as someone with massive experience with preschoolers. What kids mostly do isn’t eat non-food items, it’s mouth non-food items. Little kids are generally picky about what they eat, and reject many many real foods because of disliking their taste or texture. The chance that they are going to want to chew and swallow chewing gum wrappers, tinfoil, bits of cloth with lint on them, wads of hair pulled out of hairbrushes and the other kinds of stuff that’s scattered on unswept floors is low. They do, though, like mouthing all kinds of things, and do not feel any of the revulsion older kids do for dirt. Jess also implied that his daughter stopped mouthing things at age 2. That is possible, but very unlikely. Sure doesn’t fit with my experience or the research. Looked up mouthing by kids of different ages, and while kids ages 3 or 4 mouthed less than younger kids, they mouthed stuff on average 40x an hour. So I do have some doubt that Jess was being accurate about his daughter. Jess also did not provide any data from research until the very end of the argument, and I believe had not provided any at the time of my exchange with you.
As for you: You didn’t do any of that shit, though you did do 2 things that annoyed me some. One was to zap me for what I said, sort of irritably, about you maybe not understanding statistical correction for confounds. I only said it because you posted your comment saying that IQ is 80% heritable after I had made clear quite a few times that I knew that, and also made clear that I thought the study’s correction for that confound was good. So naturally I was annoyed to be told something that I clearly already knew. You later explained that you were responding to a post of mine that had been made early in the discussion with Jess. Yeah, OK, I get now why you told me something I obviously already knew, but how was I to know that at the time I got your post? It also annoyed me that out of pique you refused to quote or explain the study you think is important. At that point I had done that for several studies. And summaries can be written quickly , and often you don’t even need to write one, you can just copy and paste from the abstract. I do understand your point that it’s a big deal if sibling data conflicts with the findings of the study I quoted, and that there mighr be other funky things that I and the authors of the study I quoted are not taking into account. I actually am curious about that study.
Peace.
It's amazing to me how decoupled from rationalism most of the commenters are on this list — and by rationalism, I mean "the praxis of deriving truths (or attempting to derive truths) from reason and knowledge rather than on belief or emotional response." Even people who "know more math" can fall into a smart person's Dunning Kruger trap by trusting their intellectual prejudices and personal anecdata over actual data.
For instance, it's far from certain that IQ is 80% heritable. People drag out that old chestnut without bothering to consider the current state of knowledge. Using Relatedness Disequilibrium Regression (RDR) to track the genetic contribution of *parents* to their offspring (rather than shared traits between siblings), Young et al (using Icelandic data) found that sibling studies overestimate the heritability of traits like intelligence by ~2x.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30104764/
https://geneticvariance.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/rdr-and-rare-variants/
https://geneticvariance.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/relatedness-disequilibrium-regression-explained/
Sasha Gusev has a fascinating substack post on the faultiness of sibling heritability studies entitled, "No, intelligence is not like height — and the reason is one of the most interesting findings from modern behavioral genetics". Link here...
https://substack.com/@sashagusev/p-148059447
But I doubt this will raise one iota doubt in most of the IQ fetishists who populate rationalist discussion groups.
I just love how he uses old argument that IQ gap between high SES children and low SES children grows from 10 months (!) to adult. /s
In other words, people who disagree with you are:
- decoupled from rationality
- suffer from dunning-krueger
- only produce old chestnuts
- don't even know about that one awesome study
- don't even know about that one awesome dude who post on Twitter
- they say they "know math", what a joke
I very much appreciate Eremolalos long message to me (thank you and I am sorry). I feel like a jerk for not engaging more seriously, and yet when I read posts like yours I find that my motivation totally collapses.
Dunning and Krueger "showed" that people who don't know much greatly overestimate their knowledge. How can you use this result? How do you know that you are not victim of that bias? The only use of D-K is as an insult. It is a clever insult, it is oblique and implicit, and using it makes you feel superior, but I feel you're missing the irony.
Oh, yeah, that old chestnut, IQ being ~80% heritable. Let's throw that away despite the mountains of data on this, now that a new non-replicated not uncontroversial method has emerged. Also never mind that the actual number is hardly relevant to the discussion. Even if it is 40%, that's a confounder. And in the paper originally mentioned (Canfield), only the mother was considered and the correlation with offspring was ~40% (from memory), which is what we have to work with regardless of total heritability. (Which also considering the range selection in that paper throws some doubts that this specific confounder has been appropriately controlled for.)
Sasha Gusev, of course, has been mentioned in the last "links" post by Scott. But you are so much more rational than other people that you can afford to discard the whole thing.
Oh, yes, I did say to Eremolalos that I know more math than she does. My background is in theoretical physics and hers in psychology, so I'm pretty confident that I know more math. But I only mentioned it /en passant/ because she implied that I didn't know enough math to participate in the debate. (She still could be right.)
I agree about the intellectual prejudices here. It seems to me, though I may just be trusting my own prejudices too much, that on ACX people on the right are worse about that than people on the left. On the other hand, that might be because the left has been demonizing those on the right, and it is infuriating to be depicted as an amoral dumb jerk, especially when you're not. It's hard to have much skepticism about your own ideas when you're constantly defending them against snotty attackers.
If you put up your info about reasons to doubt the high heritability figures about IQ I promise to participate vigorously. It sounds to me like yours are different from the thing that gives me doubts about heritability, which is that IQ scores of very young kids do not correlate that well with later IQ scores. They are not strong predictors. So either we are not able to assess well, via tests, the cognitive strengths that are are going to matter at age 20, or else for any one 4 yr old there's a pretty big span of IQ's he's capable of ending up with as a young adult, depending on the things that happen in his life from age 4 to 20.
As for the IQ fetishists, they drive me crazy. I really really upset one of them who was sure Scott's number is Really Really Big, maybe even as big as Trump's penis. Pointed out that Scott has said he's bad at math, and while his bad math is probably better than the population average, it's likely bad enuf compared to his other skills to pull his full scale IQ out of the stratosphere. And then there was the guy who was
talking about the kind of breeding that would improve the human stock: A man of very high intelligence marries a woman who is beautiful, good natured and mentally stable. The sexism on this list is pretty impressive too, and I am generally not very touchy at all about that stuff. But it is getting to me. And I have some test score stats that would knock some of these jousters off the jackasses they are riding. I play with the idea of hauling out the stats, but will never do it, because it's tacky.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the smart ones ate more dust bunnies than average, curiosity is an important part of "smart".
Economists have tried to address causality. There's a paper that looks at high lead levels caused by location near highways. I'm still skeptical, but they at least are trying.
How do you address animal models? There seems to be a lot of evidence that lead has an impact on the neurological functioning of primates and rodents. Though I'm not sure if those findings translate into "decreased IQ in humans," specifically.
https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article-abstract/85/2/963/1669071?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Are you making a general claim that lead doesn't impact the CNS? or a narrower claim that it might not reduce performance on IQ tests?
I'm claiming that there's no compelling reason to believe that blood lead levels significantly below the lead poisoning threshold (roughly 50-60 mcg/dL) affect cognition or IQ scores. It unquestionably does at levels in the lead poisoning range. But for context, I believe there wasn't a single case of lead poisoning among children in Flint, MI throughout the city's water crisis.
The issue with animal studies is that I'm not aware of any high-quality ones that address the issue of low lead levels and cognition. I'd love to see them if anyone knows of any. The study that you linked uses tiny sample sizes (n=3, n=4, and n=7 for the control group) and involves BLLs near or into the lead poisoning range.
Edit: To summarize my position, "the dose makes the poison" applies to just about every known toxin. Why wouldn't it apply to lead as well?
Maybe it does apply to lead, but the dose that's low enough to cause no harm is just lower than 10 mcg/dL. In any case, I link above the study you would love to see, and it's about human animals -- 172 of them. So be of good cheer.
Fun anecdote: an S&C coach I trained under years ago extolled regular flossing as an important part of a proper training regimen because of adverse health effects of uncontrolled oral bacterial load.
One of the few known significant risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s later in life is bad oral hygiene. https://www.alz.org/co/news/oral-health-and-alzheimers-risk
Interesting, thank you for that.
Is there an econ expert in the house who can expand/correct my understanding of what seems to me to be the current political incentives in the monetary system? Here's how I understand how the US dollar's reserve currency status impacts political incentives toward government inflation:
Government-driven inflation is essentially a tax on *anyone* who holds the now-deflated currency. If the Fed adds a $1T to its balance sheet, allowing an additional $1T to circulate, then you have the current money supply + $1T chasing the same goods - i.e. nominal price inflation. The government 'spent' the X% that the currency lost in value (ignoring asset bubbles or non-government impacts on price fluctuation), making inflation no different from a global tax on currency.
One of the benefits of having your currency used as a reserve currency is that a significant proportion of the currency will be held in foreign hands. In this way, the inflation 'tax' is paid for by non-US citizens as well as US citizens. Politically, then, there is an incentive for the US Government to collect as little explicit tax revenue as possible, while increasing spending. The reserve currency 'discount' for US citizens in inflation suggests there's an incentive toward this kind of spending ... up until the threshold where the US dollar is no longer relied up as a reserve currency.
How large is this benefit? I'm not sure. A quick Google search suggests around $8T USD in treasury securities are held outside the US, out of a total of around $28T. (Sure, securities aren't dollars, but they're issued in nominal terms, not inflation-adjusted, pegged to the USD, so it seems like a good proxy?) That's just under 30%, suggesting that inflation allows government spending to give a 'discount' to US taxpayers of around this much compared to extracting it directly from US citizens through taxation. Now, that inflation 'discount' is unlikely to be spread evenly, such that wealthy taxpayers with asset wealth may benefit significantly more than wage earners. Also, not all US government expenditures go to US citizens, so it may be that the government spends more than it otherwise would have (and on a different basket of goods) if it had to justify expenditures if costs were borne solely by US citizens.
This seems like the system we live under, but I don't hear anyone talking like this, and in particular I only hear people talking about inflation like it's something that uniquely impacts US citizens. Am I getting something wrong here?
Another quirk which should be called out is that inflation is good for borrowers but bad for lenders. Interest rates try to price this in, and inflation-adjusted contracts are a thing, but there's often ways to hedge against inflation by borrowing. (Which is basically offloading the cost to someone else who wasn't as sharp.)
So if most of your wealth is in assets minus debt, inflation isn't as big a deal. The number on your assets goes up with inflation, but the number on your debt and the number you pay on it remain constant, so there's a gap there that can be exploited. On the other hand, if you lend out money, you need to be sure that you're getting a return on it over and beyond whatever inflation might occur.
First, let's add some qualifiers:
[An unexpected increase in the rate of] "inflation is good for borrowers but bad for lenders"
Expected inflation, usually around 2% by official numbers, is simply priced into the transaction cost so it's moot. But if inflation deviates from expectations, the cost is borne by one party or the other depending on which direction it goes. Since inflation is rarely less than expected, and never deflationary (since the 1800's, at least), this means the lender typically bears most of the risk of unexpected inflation. We would expect this risk to be passed along in financial products in the form of higher interest rates to borrowers. Unexpected inflation increases the transaction costs to usury.
The presence of inflation at all taxes anyone holding hard currency at a continuous baseline, encouraging more people to hoard assets to protect themselves from inflation, which is another systemic increase to transaction costs.
There's no reason we have to have inflation, though. "What about the money supply?" I hear Milton say. "We need to increase it as economic activity expands!" As sure as we made up Bitcoin, we made up $, £, €, and ¥. We can expand the money supply without inflating the currency. We can bring back the half cent, and with digital transactions sub-divide the dollar far more than we already have. Inflation is a choice. We learn to live with the consequences.
If I understand it correctly, the willingness of foreigners to buy Treasury bills is one of the things keeping inflation in check, by soaking up those extra dollars.
I think your intuition is pretty much correct, the USA has a lot more freedom to play around with currency and if needed could muster substantial resources by printing money (the economic term is seigniorage) because of the reserve currency status.
Problem is, its a trick you can only really pull off once giving a short term benefit and then you've more permanently lost some credibility. Most foreign holders hold bonds, not cash. As these mature, higher inflation means investors require higher interest rates for the next bond issued, and probably even higher because there is now higher overall risk (and especially on longer term bonds). Usually about a quarter to a third of borrowing matures in a given year, and the average maturity is six years so it's a pretty short term boost until you have to unexpectedly inflate again.
Keep in mind too, every private borrower in the US also currently benefits from lower interest rates partially due to reserve currency status (30 year refinancable mortgages are very much not normal internationally, though there are other factors contributing to this)
So the economic costs of inflation likely outweigh the economic benefits in anything but the very short term, and maybe not even then if there's financial chaos. This is probably even more the case for political costs, considering that the alternative short term solution of simply running deficits the normal way (borrowing more from domestic and foreign markets) is much more appealing and low risk.
> printing money (the economic term is seigniorage) because of the reserve currency status.
This is also called the US's "Exorbitant privilege."
>Government-driven inflation is essentially a tax on anyone who holds the now-deflated currency. If the Fed adds a $1T to its balance sheet, allowing an additional $1T to circulate, then you have the current money supply + $1T chasing the same goods - i.e. nominal price inflation. The government 'spent' the X% that the currency lost in value (ignoring asset bubbles or non-government impacts on price fluctuation), making inflation no different from a global tax on currency.
If I understand correctly, even if one isn't holding currency at the moment the inflation occurs, it still winds up as a wealth tax. E.g. If I buy $X in gold at some time, and the currency is inflated by a factor of 2, then when I sell the same gold (in order to buy e.g. bread), and get $2X in inflated currency, though I have gained nothing in reality, I'm liable for the "gain" of $X in the nominal price of the gold, so I get to buy less bread with it than I would have had at the time I originally purchased the gold.
Interesting angle. I hadn't considered that since capital gains taxes are assessed in nominal terms they extend inflation taxation to all dollar-valued assets. In this case, though, I'd still be paying less with an asset, right? If I'm paying a 25% tax on my $1 gain, I paid $0.25 and am left with $1.75 nominally, or about 87 cents from my original dollar, which is better than someone who hid their dollar under the mattress and ended up with $0.50.
Many Thanks! Agreed. With an asset, at worst inflation is by an infinite factor and a 25% tax on all of it still leaves 75% of the original value, while the dollar under the mattress has lost all its value.
You're right that inflation affects foreign dollar holders. However, foreign dollar holders also spend in their domestic currency. If the dollar inflates then their domestic currency will strengthen relative to the dollar (assuming nothing else happens) which will all else equal make it neutral. If they intend to spend in the US then they'll be affected the same as any other domestic spender. Though there's complex downstream affects that makes that rarely true in practice.
ETA: I think I've gotten this wrong, at least for long term bond holders, see comments below.
This doesn't seem right. USD inflation and the weakening of USD in currency markets are just the same phenomenon (a US dollar buys less stuff), they don't cancel out.
If the foreign investor sells their bond they can either buy in the USA, getting less goods for their money due to inflation, or they can buy their domestic currency, getting less cash because of the strengthened domestic currency relative to USD, and would therefore get less real goods buying in their local currency too.
I think you're right, I think I'm carrying over principles that happen with regular exchanges into long term assets where they don't hold.
I'm not sure I understand. Let's take an extreme example: say a Chinese company buys up $1T of treasury bonds, which are inflated to 0.01% of their original value in real terms. Now they cash that out for around $100k USD + a tiny amount of interest. It sounds like you're saying it all works out in the wash, because the Chinese company may be out nearly their entire capital stake, but whoever traded USD for RMB will have come out on top of the bargain because RMB are now more valuable?
I think this would apply in the absence of inflation, for example if the Chinese government bought $5T of treasuries, it would then hold a lot of US currency, but the USG would also then hold a bunch of RMB - which they would have to spend to derive any benefit from. But that transaction is going to happen with or without inflation. How does inflation impact the transaction in the way you describe, other than to harm the party who holds USD at the time the money is being inflated?
And with an international reserve currency it's entirely probable that both sides of an exchange of USD aren't US citizens. If I'm holding USD as part of ongoing transactions between Senegal and Belize during the period when inflation hurts my dollar valuation, that costs me without seeming to meaningfully benefit anyone else - and especially any US citizen - outside of the government inflationary spending.
Also, how does this analysis take into account the government spending part of the value of those dollars? If the benefit gained by increasing the demand for RMB were equal to the cost to the holders USD, where is the economic value of the inflationary spending coming from? Either it's a free lunch - which it can't be - or not all of the value of the increased demand for the other currency is made up in the exchange.
How would that "make it neutral"? If I own $1 and €1, and those each buy 1l of milk, for a total of 2l, if the US inflates its currency by 10%, I can now only afford 1.9l of milk.
Only if you're traveling between Great Britain and the US to buy milk, making both transactions domestic spending.
I don't think this follows. Let's say it's an Adobe subscription, and we're talking about Canadian dollars (CAD) and East Caribbean dollars (XCD). Say I have $100 CAD ($72 USD) and $100 XCD ($13USD), but then the Canadian government inflates my currency to be worth 10% of its previous value. Yesterday, I had $91 USD worth to buy my subscription. Today, after all that inflation, I have $21.1 USD worth to buy my subscription, and I can't afford it. Adobe isn't going to accept nominal CAD that's worth less, since they'll immediately convert from CAD to USD and use their proceeds to pay their developers working on Photoshop version 75 or whatever. The same calculation holds if I'm holding USD and I want to buy German machine presses, Korean microchips, etc. My USD are a diminished store of value after inflation, so I'm going to get less for them no matter how you slice that pie.
In relation to travel back in time, we've all heard of the grandfather paradox, whereby killing your grandfather before they sired offspring would preclude your future existence. This contradiction leads to the conclusion that time travel to the past must be impossible.
But it doesn't quite end there, because if, having killed him, you no longer exist in your "later time" then you can't go back in time and kill anyone. So, barring any other influences, one has an apparently infinite regress where you and your grandfather both exist and not exist at the same time. Sound familiar?
So could a quantum state be defined simply as one where travel back in time is allowed up to a point? If so then a wave function collapse would correspond to something which prevents backward time travel. Because travel back in time must be at superluminal speed, as we would measure it, I presume that would relate somehow to a speed limit suddenly being imposed on the system, for example by having its energy diluted by it being shared with a larger system.
I'll stop there, because when discussing topics like this it is very easy, especially for an amateur, to start talking nonsense if I haven't already! But sometimes a minor adjustment of perspective is all that is needed to gain more insight, like that guy once in South Africa out walking his dog who with a glance in just the right direction happened to spot a glint in the ground and discovered a diamond the size of a gull's egg!
Me again! There's also the entropy aspect, in that entropy is always increasing, with near certainty. But if a quantum system is simple enough in its relevant features, then that need not hold. For example, if one's "system" was the sequence of results of casting two dice, and we agree that pairs of equal results were the low entropy states, then these can crop up over and over again indefinitely. But now add a hundred more dice to the system, and sets of all equal results of a collective throw become vanishingly unlikely. (In this and the previous post, I'm assuming implicitly that the "state" as actually a continuous and rapid process of some kind.)
It's entirely possible to avoid the grandfather paradox while still allowing for time travel. According to Einstein, spacetime is fixed. Everything that has ever happened or will happen already exists, eternally fixed and unchanging. So if you travel back in time to kill your grandfather, you will inevitably fail - the gun will jam, you slip on a banana peel, whatever, because history says you have definitely not killed your grandfather. Your journey back in time and failed attempt is simply part of that history.
Einstein didn't take quantum mechanics into account. To be fair, he didn't know enough then, as it wasn't well thought-out. But Kip Thorne studied possible time travel, and concluded that any wormhole that opened to allow it would likely collapse due to mass. And also that any such technology is as far away from us as we are from cavemen.
I didn't say that time travel is possible according to Einstein. I said that, IF time travel is possible to begin with, then according to Einstein the grandfather paradox is inherently impossible.
But past and future history is only fixed according to relativity theory. Quantum mechanics says the future is indeterminate, though the past is fixed.
Won't say the name because I guess it could be a spoiler. But the movie based on this is one of my favorites.
Well, I could think of at least two off the top. My favourite is Twelve Monkeys.
"Time" is probably two, possibly three distinct phenomena, which we aren't conceptually well-equipped to distinguish between. I strongly suspect that "time travel" in a sense that humans would find satisfying isn't merely impossible, but incoherent. The version of "time travel" that the universe has is something like teleporting a light-hour away, sitting around for an hour, and then watching yourself teleport.
At a subatomic level, I expect "time travel" is mostly a question of relative orientations, and doesn't much resemble "time travel" in the sense that we'd expect. Think less "particles traveling into the past", and more "clock whose gears are rotating in the wrong direction relative to our expectations" in view of a particular way of contextualizing time.
If this doesn't seem to mean anything, consider, for a moment, a clock. Let's suppose the clock currently displays the time 3:00. Take this clock and make it much bigger, insanely bigger, like the size of a galaxy; let's say that from a comfortable long distance away, an observer might still see the clock displaying 3:00; it's not measuring hours anymore, because we've scaled it up, but it's measuring the same thing as a clock.
But as we get closer to the clock, things get kind of weird. The size of the clock means that light - and indeed any causal effect, such as a gear rotating - take, well, time to get from place to place. If we were to mark all the individual gears so we could tell what time it is by their current state of rotation, and then looked around, we wouldn't find any agreement about what time it actually is; the light from the gears would take time to reach us, see, so, if you found one gear that showed 3:00, another gear might show 2:59, a more distant gear might show 2:58. Depending on how you were positioned, other gears might show 3:01 or 3:02.
That is - "3:00 exactly" doesn't actually tell us exactly what time it is, but instead is telling us something closer to an average of different perspectives of what time it is. (So many asterisks.)
And if you adopt a conceptualization of time which has a particular orientation - let's say clockwise - you might, upon examining the gears of the clock, find that half of them are rotating backwards.
I think this is approximately analogous to the way we try to think about certain physical phenomena.
Random example of possible nominative determinism:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Commons
As far as #1: the answer to this question is that the guy you are talking to doesn't actually know what he is talking about. His comment later in the thread gives it away:
>"Virtually all shoplifting cases are either drugs, organized retail theft, or people on drugs working for organized retail thieves. The ORT gangs usually pay 50 cents on the dollar or so for stolen property. I used to catch people with literal lists they’d been given by the ORT ringleaders."
This is the kind of thing you believe if you've been brain poisened by media reports, not the kind of thing you assume if you've actually encountered the people who shop lift. I was a public defender for four years. Unless the east coast is way different then the west coast, most of the people who are shoplifting are doing it because they want free stuff and think they won't get caught. Some of them use drugs, but even the majority of the drug users are not really the type of serious addicts who you would assume need intensive treatment.
Also, in the four years where I worked as a public defender, I handled probably 200 cases from 2018-2022 (I handled roughly 1k cases total, and petit larceny was my most common case type). Not a single one involved lists of items to steal or seemed to have any connection to organized gangs based on the information in the police reports. The instances where the stuff was sold after, was usually just at local pawn shops.
The rest of what he was saying didn't make sense either. Evidence on this topic shows pretty clearly that arresting someone for misdemeanor larceny and then letting them go actually does a good job of preventing them from shoplifting in the future: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28600/w28600.pdf. If the police are saying "what's the point of arresting because they'll just let them go" then they are severly mistaken. In addition, almost every state regime has escalating punishments based on records. This could look like a three strikes law (your third misdemeanor larceny conviction becomes a felony) or alternatively handled at sentencing, where a judge, when deciding what punishment is appropriate, chooses to give harsher sentences to those who have comitted the crime before. In either case, you still want to be arresting even first time offenders who will receive a slap on the wrist, because when you arrest them the second or third times they will no longer be wrist slapped, but locked up for increasingly long stints. In my own jurisidiction, first offense petit larcenies were handled with community service, second offense was a weekend in jail, third offense was 10 days in jail, and then after that you'd be looking at serious time on the order of months, and eventually years. It should be (possibly weak) evidence of the system working that the vast majority of the theft cases that came through our office were first time offenders, not career thieves. Once someone gets caught, arrested and has to go through a trial, it suddenly doesn't seem worth it to steal shirts from target, or a steak from Kroger.
My personal take is you want a system where the chances of being caught are very high, but then the punishments are relatively modest (but high enough to make it not monetarily worth it to steal).
That ties with everything I've ever heard about how deterrence really works: you get more deterrrence from (1) increasing the probability of being caught and (2) decreasing the time between the offence and being caught. The size of the fine or other punishment is much less important by comparison.
Thanks for sharing this. Are you able to say more about the city you worked in? This feels like a nice approach to policing in a city devoting enough resources to it (I can imagine it in e.g. Sydney where I live), and I’m curious where that is.
It was Roanoke, VA, which is a typical small city (roughly 100k people). I think that the level of crime was typical of the United States (so probably higher than most other developed nations). I didn't present the above with the idea that this city was somehow exceptional, but just that it was a representation of what most cities I assume are like (though obviously I could be msitaken). Regardless of the policing situation, the laws I cited (and how they are applied by judges and prosecutors) are at least typical for the state of Virginia, and I expect, common in many other US jurisdictions.
I’m sorry but a single study is not enough to support this kind of reckless leniency towards crime. If you want to advocate against the most obvious solution: that criminals should go to jail, then come with a mountain of unimpeachable evidence. The soft on crime approach that you advocate for has been a disaster. Consider directing your sympathy towards the actual victims of crime, not the perpetrators.
Your position is way too black and white; the solution "criminals should go to jail" doesn't seem like some obvious solution to me.
Lots of things can be classified as crimes, speeding, public intoxication, trespassing, fishing without a licence, that almost everyone (I assume including yourself) agrees don't always deserve imprisonment. Therefore there is always a debate to how seriously we treat a given crime, and each instance of that crime.
You can't expect people to come up with a mountain of unimpeachable evidence to defend the status quo (a slap on the wrist for a first time offence). You're the one advocating for a dramatically more draconian system.
You’re being pedantic. I’m talking about actual crime, not minor violations of public order. Nobody who complains about crime is talking about fishing without a license. I’m using the word “criminals” according to common usage, meaning people who commit serious offenses or have a lawless lifestyle. People who steal should be punished harshly on the first offense, because there is no excuse for stealing. If the justice system doesn’t treat crime seriously then the public will not treat the law seriously and only the most morally upstanding or meek will comply.
I don't think I am being pedantic. I think you're begging the question by classifying any degree of shoplifting as "actual crime" with no scope for leniancy and not other misdemeanors/crimes. If you want to argue that shoplifting should be treated as really terrible crime that we should increase punishments for, then okay. As I said, you can debate to how seriously we treat a given crime, and each instance of that crime.
If someone was running an illegal fishing operation making thousands in profits and they'd been warned in the past then they probably should go to jail. If it's a first offence for an insignificant catch then maybe a fine is sufficient (in between, perhaps community service is appropriate). I'd argue that similar thinking around shoplifting punishment is appropriate, despite the media hysteria around it.
If we're talking about the crimes that actually cause the most losses to society, we should probably increase enforcement and penalties for tax evasion before sending first time offenders who steal $50 worth of goods from Walmart to hard time in jail.
If the study is correct, then the current approach works. And if the study is wrong, then you get your wish, because starting from the second offense the criminals *are* put in jail. Either way, I don't see a problem.
Well, the problem is if the cops don't even bother catching the criminals, but that part is not a fault of the sentencing system.
"Works" seems a strange word if the problem is getting worse. Is it getting worse? Certainly more stuff is behind cages, and shops are shutting down, even in locations where you're think there's plenty of profitable traffic.
Now is the solution arresting more first time offenders and putting the fear of god into them? I don't know. Like Scott, I see so many contradictory claims on this issues that I don't know whom to believe. Which forces me to use heuristics like "which is the group that has lied to me most aggressively over the past five years".
An output variable changing doesn't mean the system is not "working" or "working well". Of course since it's not practically zero we know the system is not perfect, of course, there's room for improvement.
But mostly after spending many years of fervent public discourse on it the most important input variable still is money. Both as in "median income of the population in the area" and "money spent on policing".
If you want a concrete reason why things are getting worse, then you can find any of the reasons why money is getting tight. Inflation! Housing crisis! Automation continues eating middle income jobs! Regulations making policing/adjudicating/enforcement costlier!
> This is the kind of thing you believe if you've been brain poisened by media reports, not the kind of thing you assume if you've actually encountered the people who shop lift.
My strong suspicion is that these media reports are based on statistics that don't include the low-level shoplifters. And that the people who read the reports, and the people who write the reports, and the people who compile the statistics, are all happy with this omission, and see it as just and good.
Somewhat relevant - this is national, not local to California.
https://www.businessinsider.in/retail/news/america-has-a-shoplifting-epidemic-the-thieves-arent-who-you-think-/articleshow/114913786.cms
tl;dr - A lot of shoplifters are middle-class, not poor, not druggies, who do it because it's easy to do and they don't feel guilty. Whole Foods is a popular target.
That gets into something I forgot to put into my previous comment.
Much of the dysfunction of the US seems to be the result of normalization of pathology by Hollywood, and shoplifting seems to be one of those normalizations. I've seen too many movies that use it as a lazy way to tell us that a certain character is a free spirit, unlimited by bourgeois morality (and so of course holier, and superior to, the rest of us).
We probably can't fix Hollywood, at least not yet, but much more aggressive handling of first offenders provides another avenue for trying to end this particular cultural rot.
Sorry, I'm very out of the loop, ... how Hollywood normalized shoplifting? When? Which movies/series? Why now? When did movies change? Why not some memes or Facebook/Reddit videos?
To me it seems the whole anticapitalist crazytrain is much more reponsible than movies. Especially memes like "oh the shops have insurance, it's a victimless crime".
I think Maynard wasn't claiming Hollywood normalized shoplifting specifically. Rather, the claim is that Hollywood normalizes being socially deficient in multiple ways (selfishness, inattentiveness, addiction, abuse, distrust of parents, divorce), so now shoplifting shifts from a "absolutely not" to a "meh, may as well". Not sure whether I agree with it, but I think that's the claim.
>"Virtually all shoplifting cases are either drugs…
How do people shoplift drugs?
I saw Javier Bardem do it in No Country for Old Men by creating a diversion. He lit a gas soaked rag in someone’s gas tank and when it blew up he ran behind the pharmacy counter and grabbed what he wanted in the confusion.
Doesn’t really seem scalable.
Zero awareness of the stats here, but anecdotally I can tell you that there are still valuable drugs that are not hidden behind the counter. I've been asked by a panhandler for tylenol to deal with pain from a permanent injury, and it makes complete sense to me that people with tight budgets might consider painkillers or cough suppressants luxury goods that, when in severe enough need, might be worth surreptitiously pocketing.
Also some of the "good" drugs (like real pseudoephedrine—not that phenylephrine shit they try to pass off as the same, or ) aren't behind the counter, just a (plexi-)glass door you have to get an employee to unlock for you.
Unless this has changed within the past three years, you have to show ID to get real Sudafed, like Gunflint said. I spent five years as a pharmacy tech, and yes, we had to look at an ID for every drug containing pseudoephedrine or any similar drugs. This is a matter of federal law. I wish it weren't. I doubt it slows the meth-cookers down that much. Supposedly, it's a simple matter of meth-cookers telling customers, "a box of Sudafed is part of the price for every order."
Where I live the pseudoephedrine is kept behind the pharmacy counter and I have to show a photo ID to purchase. It apparently was a component in manufacturing meth. At least that’s what I gleaned from watching Breaking Bad.
I think the claim is that people are shoplifting to fund their drug addiction, not that they are shoplifting the drugs themselves.
I don't think it's too much of a stretch for the crime dynamic to be different in a state that visibly reduced the penalties for shoplifting and also essentially made thefts under $950 not a crime. California is pretty different from the rest of the country anyway.
It is not true that California legalized thefts under $950. It just raised the threshold for felony larceny to be in line with the rest of the country. Virginia, the state I’m referring to, also raised the threshold for grand larceny, first from $200 to $500 and then to $1000 (higher than CA’s $950 number). The maximum sentence for misdemeanors in Virginia is the same as in California (6 months). Virginia actually went further and made it so first offense petit larcenies allow for probation before judgement. None of this led to a significant increase in larcenies. Also, for reference, the felony threshold in Texas is $2500.
What? I literally believed everyone quoting this figure and it never occurred to me to double-check what this means
I wonder what other obviously-wrong things I believe about this issue.
I don't understand why CA setting $950 as its felony-felony threshold is considered some sort of high-value outlier. In TX and WI that same threshold is $2,500; in CO, CT, PA and SC it's $2,000; in twelve more states it's between $1,200 and $1,999; etc. CA's $950 isn't even above the national average for states.
It's combined with a policy of not actually prosecuting misdemeanors etc. https://newsroom.courts.ca.gov/news/sf-may-dismiss-over-100-cases-after-court-rules-covid-19-delays-unlawful
Wait this is actually a great point I didn't see brought up in the Prop 36 post. The felony threshold for most of the same crimes in NY for example is $1,000. So that adds a lot of weight to the theory that the large uptick in shoplifting was due to some other factor.
Everything links together.
If you want the state to punish shoplifting, and only lever you have to do so (because you don't actually get to sit it DA meetings and decide which cases go to court) is to force more shopliftings to felonies, that's the lever you will press. It may not be optimal, but that's the breaks.
You want to blame someone, blame the DA's who refused to go along with the mood of the public, even when this was clear a few years ago.
Not sure but since that threshold went up my employer at a retail chain in LA reported worse inventory numbers especially in liquor and wine. Police response almost zero as staffing had declined. Could be related plus the publicity around the threshold might have hit the street a different way than VA or TX, culturally speaking.
The original comment says that the vast majority of people who shoplift in California are either stealing drugs or part of organized theft rings. That implies that many FEWER regular people shoplift in California than other regions. That doesn't seem like a reasonable trend - you would expect a state where the penalties for petty crime are low to have more casual petty criminals (or at least to have a constant ratio).
There's now a backlash against the "organized theft ring" media narrative. Some fairly respectable voices are now suggesting this media narrative could be exaggerated, maybe even bordering on hysteria.
It's certainly convenient to paint shoplifters as henchmen for some shadowy, sinister criminal organization..Such a person is far less empathetic than an individual bad actor. Especially if you darkly hint that said organizations are connected to all kinds of Evil Stuff.
Is this media narrative being driven by statements to the media from police and police spokesmen? They still have egg on their face after driving the fentanyl dust hysteria that is only just starting to slow down. I'm for policing and against shoplifting, but I'm even moreso against media driven hysteria.
Historian Barbara Tuchman dreamed of a news media where spokespeople were deprecated us totally unreliable. A news media that almost exclusively relied on eyewitness reports.
"My personal take is you want a system where the chances of being caught are very high, but then the punishments are relatively modest[...]"
Very yes to this, inevitability is a far better deterrent for most people than harshness is.
The late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kleiman continually stressed this point, that the optimal legal regime
- has very certain punishment
- but weak (at least initially) punishment
He provided a variety of evidence for this viewpoint.
However (and the reason for this is primarily on the "liberal" side) this is not the system the US mostly implements. Instead the US is obsessed with installing so many roadblocks between arrest and even weak punishment that the link between the criminal and the "certain" "rapid' punishment stressed by Kleinman doesn't exist; if the punishment eventually occurs, it is so delayed that the psychological conditioning it's suposed to engender does not happen.
Yet another case where the supposedly enlightened, rational procedure refuses to bow to actual knowledge and actual experience.
Yep, a great example of initially good intentions (legal oversight, presumption of innocence, right to fair trial, etc.) creating a dysfunctional nightmare of a system.
Inevitability of *punishment* is a very good deterrent. If there is a belief (even if it's exaggerated) that being caught won't result in a meaningful punishment, then potential culprits won't care whether the chances of being caught are very high.
Sure, there has to be a degree of unpleasantness involved.
We can be tough on crime while also avoiding life-ruining prison sentences for first offenders with petty crimes. Caning and mortifying public humiliation would be an excellent deterrent for young men just beginning their criminal lifestyle.
I know maybe half a dozen people who got caught shoplifting. All were middle class people. Most were teens. Every one of them was horrified to be caught -- extremely embarrassed, scared to death of what the police were going to do and whether their family was going to be told. All reported never shoplifting again after the incident, and in the context in which these conversations occurred they had no reason to lie. All of them brought up the subject themselves, and told their story spontaneously.
I and many other people I know have found being stopped for speeding very distressing -- and not because we thought it was unjust. It has only happened to me twice, but both times I was embarrassed, angry at myself, and felt like a little kid being brought before the principal. I managed to act like a civilized adult, but felt like crying, and did after the cop left. I am sure being arrested for shoplifting feels way worse.
I've been mistaken three times for a shoplifter.
The first time, as a kid, I just wanted to show an item that was in the shop to a friend who was in the street, so I ran to him, I didn't realize that running with an item out of a shop looked like shoplifting. I just thought I'd put it back afterwards, but everyone thought I was a child shoplifter.
The second time, as a young adult, it was a lot worse. I picked up a book I wanted to buy, then I looked at the time realizing I had only a few minutes to get to a certain place so I had to run like crazy. So I ran like crazy, forgetting to pay. An alarm rang, but I was so absorbed by the thought I had to get to that place as fast as possible, I didn't make the connection between hearing the alarm and the fact I had picked up a book. It really looked like I was fleeing. A cop stopped me as I ran. That was terrible. Everyone thought I was a thief and there was nothing I could say to prove otherwise.
The third time, later in life, I bought a big head of bananas, and since it was cold outside I wanted to protect the bananas from the cold, or else they'd be left damaged and never ripen. So I hid the bananas under my coat. They saw me walk out with a big lump so they warned the cops. The cops stopped me outside. This time I was in luck, I was able to show I had paid.
I wonder how many shoplifters are just absent-minded people who forget to pay.
That's exactly the kind of "unpleasantness" I'm talking about. The key is immediacy, teens really suck at projecting to future, "I hope you know that this will go down on your Permanent Record" means nothing to them. Having a cop giving you a stern talking-to in front of your parents is all most of them need to swear off doing this ever again.
I shoplifted a piece of candy when I was about 10. Didn't get caught, but the experience convinced me that I was not temperamentally suited for crime. It felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket.
Speeding, on the other hand, that feels completely different. I don't like getting fined, or having marks on my insurance, but that's purely instrumental.
Thirded!
Everyone says this. Nobody has a magic wand that apprehends all criminals though. Nobody even makes the case that we are at a point in the curve where it necessarily makes sense to put any additional dollars into expanding the police force (if we even can find more candidates) than increasing punishments.
I think it would be good to expand citizen's arrests. Maybe require some amount of training and tests and require bodycams, but if you do that, you can do citizens arrests with enough legal protection that it's not dangerous. Then stores could hire security guards that can actually apprehend people and you can increase arrests without needing to convince everyone to be willing to expand the police force. And make sure whatever tests and training it is don't make it so only corporations can do it. If your neighborhood doesn't trust the police and wants their own police force, go ahead.
It's my understanding that the entire field of criminology is making the case that we should expand the police force and decrease punishments. It's just that nobody listens to them and nobody cares. There are millions of candidates waiting to be incentivized to join the police. All you have to do is bribe them with the right combination of money, benefits and civic privileges.
I like this idea, except the “civic privileges” part, though I confess I’m not sure what you mean by that. Can you give some examples?
I have heard that departments in my area struggle to recruit due to a new stigma of being a police officer. Maybe the priviledge of having a broad level of reasonable respect would be enough.
I'm someone who thinks that we need more police, and also agrees with the above take of "higher chance of conviction, lower penalties".
I actually think we need _so many_ more police, that police taking overtime hours becomes a rarity.
I don't expect magic wands (I don't mean this in a snarky way, just a reflection of reality). I do think that doing what doesn't work (harsher punishment) in lieu of what does but is difficult is counterproductive.
I've read sometime ago a great piece by, I think, a former cop, on the difference between "policing" and "law enforcement", and how the focus on the second wrecked the first. I found myself very much in agreement - we need more policing, and less law enforcement.
Maybe Peter Moskos or the author of "Graham's Factor" – they've both written basically that same thing (repeatedly).
Good sources both of them.
>Nobody has a magic wand that apprehends all criminals though.
True, but we have a _lot_ of surveillance (particularly in stores, but in many other places too).
Yes, people make that case. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/08/still-under-policed-and-over-imprisoned.html
Graham is a retired cop, he's pretty knowledgeable.
Graham has a lot of police propaganda bias, though, such as thinking it's plausible for police officers to get touch-poisoned and drop dead from fentanyl.
I mean, that's arguably plausible for lots of people who don't know much about how fentanyl works (e.g., me). Maybe the police officer had a paper cut and some dust of it got in. Lethal (over)dose for it is on the order of milligrams, as I understand it, and for metric-fearing folks not certain exactly how large a "milligram" is when it comes to unidentified white powders accidentally spilling onto a cut or getting absorbed into the sweat of an ungloved hand, both things that other white powders have been known to do, well, better safe than sorry.
Not saying it's *true*, mind you. Just plausible.
There’s no actual scientific basis for it but Graham has defended putting out scare tactics about it to drum up sympathy for officers despite that.
I mean, I wouldn't exactly *expect* many scientific studies to have been done on the precise lethal dose of mysterious white powders (or liquids) found in the labs and/or homes of criminal drug dealers. You'd never get that past the IRB.
I'd expect very few police officers to be *actually* dying from drug overdoses in the field either way, as a result of reasonable-to-paranoid caution around said mysterious white powders. At home, after possibly having confiscated said mysterious white powders, would be another matter, and possibly easier to pick up on in the statistics that actually get reported.
Or not: consulting the Perplexity AI on the matter, it doesn't look like there are overdose death stats for police officers, just ones for the general population.
Using that as evidence Graham is using scare tactics is a bad faith assessment IMO he’s pretty introspective as a writer and tuned to his own biases.
So California voters, where are you landing in Prop 36? I am still undecided.
No, because I think that there should be discretion in sentencing for less severe crimes (eg, go join the marines, do community service and sin no more, etc.) and I don't trust CA cops to not selectively enforce those laws anyway.
No on the grounds that this shouldn't be proposition law. I wouldn't be opposed to trying this with normal legislature law so that if we think it's bad it can be easily repealed, or if we think it has some right things but some wrong things we can easily tweak it. But proposition law isn't right for this kind of detailed technocratic change.
I'd be for a proposition to repeal Prop 47 and return all of this to the legislature.
I voted no. I don't think the problem is the harshness of current sentencing, but rather the unwillingness of cops to arrest and DAs to bring charges. I don't buy that making sentences harsher will improve that process.
I have been assembling dossiers on the various human virtues, including practical (and, when available, scientifically vetted) methods for how one can improve in them.
These remain (and probably will perpetually remain) works-in-progress. I would appreciate any suggestions, leads for further investigation, etc. from ACⅩ readers.
You can find the dossiers here: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/xqgwpmwDYsn8osoje
I note that the virtues you name do not include either general intelligence or the abilities measured by IQ subtests, such as verbal reasoning & working memory. It's kind of nice to see somebody leaning away from seeing high intelligence as the main virtue, but what's the rationale for leaving it out? It has a strong heritability component, but many of the virtues you name, such as self-control and empathy, probably do too. And none of these things are so thoroughly determined by heredity that they cannot be improved by conscious effort and by training. Same goes for various other talents -- musical, athletic, graphic arts, etc.
That something isn't on the list may just mean I haven't gotten to it yet. See my tentative sequence outline here for a list of some virtues I hope to cover but haven't yet (including intelligence/ingenuity/mental quickness): https://www.lesswrong.com/s/xqgwpmwDYsn8osoje/p/zQi6T3ATa59KgaABc#Tentative_Sequence_Outline
You'll find some intelligence-related content in my write-ups about rationality, wisdom, attention, know-how, and prudence. I'll probably cover verbal reasoning stuff under rationality and rhetoric. Working memory I'll probably subsume under intelligence.
I've been looking for something like this - thank you.
Election night watching. I really have no interest in watching election coverage by the MSM. Got any good recommendations for where to watch on the internet? Whose podcast? (I saw a blurb to watch it on "The Free Press"... )
I am a big fan of the Dispatch - I think they're doing some level of analysis
Podcasts are about as mainstream as it gets these days, but I'll take that as an aversion to legacy media. My main plan is to have a dozen constantly-refreshing prediction market tabs open, plus maybe a liveblog or two if the participants seem sane.
The techno-capital machine is a bit of a greedy algorithm. Green tech just so happens to be poised (mostly through chance/luck) to break us out of some technological local optmia towards better ones. I've written about why some techs need lengthy periods of incubation/support and attempt to identify candiates for future ones by introducing a new concept: 'Qattara Depression Technologies'
https://medium.com/@bobert93/qattara-depression-technologies-26723f5b362f
Here are two problems the Roman Empire had: 1) Lots of unemployed/poor people in Rome that the government was afraid would riot and 2) disloyal border regions in places like Belgium. Why didn't a wise Emperor solve both problems by deporting excess people from Rome to the distant provinces? All it would have taken is establishing deportation from Rome as the punishment for various low-level crimes.
The deportees would get some training in farming and would first live in communal farms for a year before being given small farms of their own. Latin-speaking Italians would have colonized the frontiers, serving as a bulwark against the barbarians.
As Sun Tzu famously wrote, "keep your friends close, and your enemies in poorly-supervised blind spots."
Why would disgruntled poor people who you've just forcibly uprooted from their homes and deported to some godforsaken wilderness, be any more loyal than the people who were already living there?
I sort of convinced myself that there was a "grateful frontiersman" effect implicit there. Some people get bored in the civilized inner territory, and would like it better out in the hinterlands, but lack the motivation to pick up sticks themselves. So the state does it for them, and now they're liking life, any annoyance they felt toward the state for giving the boot is water under the bridge, and if it isn't, well, they're distracted by barbarians, fending them off of their own land, which is good enough for the state's purposes.
As long as the state doesn't try to send a tax collector over there, it sort of works out.
Who says that unemployed people in Rome could be put to useful work in the border regions? Before the industrial revolution came along, once you had enough labor to work the land (which there is only a finite amount of) there wasn't really any good uses to put excess labor to. You can't retrain someone into an artisan easily, learning that kind of trade takes years (which is why apprenticeships started at childhood). That's why in the ancient world you see a lot of mines and public works labor done by slaves. If the land in the border regions is already farmed at capacity (which isn't that hard to reach in an age without even the iron plow) then moving unemployed people to the border regions just results in the already disloyal border regions now having an unemployment problem as well.
They did do this, for the first couple hundred years, with veteran's colonies. People don't like being far away from their families, though, nor do they like having their land taken from them – once Rome ran out of 'new', family-supporting farmland, the coloniae stopped.
The first issue that comes to my mind is that this would require an impressive level of state capacity (deportation en masse, organising communal farms). Then again, Belgium wasn't empty, so you either had to drive the existing population away (thus creating an enemy right across the border) or kill them all.
Also, the current landowners (the guys who lived here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_villas_in_Belgium) probably wouldn't be happy about this project and since they belonged to the elite, had both incentive and means to scuttle it.
Rome had the state capacity to do it. Towards the end of the empire they didn’t have enough people to do it. The population stagnated.
I don’t think they were worried about a plebeian revolt either - what would the plebeians achieve, a revolution to stop arsing around the circuses, amphitheaters and theatres all day? Seems like a cushy life.
They were somewhat worried about slave uprisings but not that worried.
I posted a few months ago about my project to study "abductive inference" particularly figuring stuff out about people by looking at them (like Sherlock Holmes) - with the help of many others I've now constructed a pretty huge list of observational cues (philosophically inspired by Cyc): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yz33koDN5uhSEaB6c/sherlockian-abduction-master-list
So there's a lot of content, but what I really want is a community of people interested in semi-regular updates to the list, so I created a google group: https://groups.google.com/g/sherlockian-abduction
This is important because the entries are only reliable when fact-checked by a large (hopefully diverse) group of people who can point out possible alternative explanations for observational cues. Also I'd really like to get regular suggestions from people with different backgrounds than me (that's the whole point!). If you like the idea please join the group and maybe signal boost this outside of rat-adjacent spaces.
(Meta-lesson: I should have noticed earlier that my goal was really to build a living community, not just the list itself, and set things up so that interested people could sign up to automatically get updates)
I wish everyone well during the election tomorrow. Whoever you're voting for, let's all hope the polls are incorrect and there will be a clear and definitive winner by Wednesday morning.
According to Nate Silver, an average sized polling error in _either_ direction will lead to one candidate sweeping all 7 swing states. Those are, in fact, the two most likely outcomes in his model. In all likelihood, by an electoral vote tally, this election will not be very close, no matter who wins.
> let's all hope the polls are incorrect
If either Harris or Trump wins, then *some* polls will be correct (because each poll favors one or the other). Otherwise that would imply that something very fishy is going on.
I for one do wish both Harris and Trump would lose. Somehow.
Harris vs. Trump: whoever wins, we lose.
Illegal Aliens vs. Predator Drones
I see what you did there.
Me, too. Do you plan to vote for either or just not vote at all? I don't think I will vote, although I am also conflicted on this.
I just love them so much, I wish both of them would win!! Either way, I will be a happy man come Wednesday :)
(/joke)
Obviously you're a Harvey Kirshner.
Seconded!
As Wavy Gravy asked some decades ago, 'Who's for world peace and civility?' (or something like it)
Nobody.
It's like choosing between coyote-piss chowder and moose-turd pie.
Ooh, do you know the actual moose turd pie joke? I'm quite fond of it.
I heard the line in a 'talking blues' folk song. It wasn't Taj Mahal. Probably heard it at the Ash Grove. But it was something about people who were so desperate for a cook they were grateful to get moose-turd pie. I can't remember why.
But sorry to tell anyone who came to the parade, the Emperor has no clothes.
You’re right. I was more in reference to the majority of polls that put the election as almost an even tossup.
I responded over at Eric Rasmusen's. He doesn't sufficiently take seriously the implication of Jan 6 being a riot.
I have written an essay "A Proposal for Safe and Hallucination-free Coding AI" https://gasstationmanager.github.io/ai/2024/11/04/a-proposal.html
In which I propose an open-source collaboration on a research agenda that I believe will eventually lead to coding AIs that have superhuman-level ability, are hallucination-free, and safe.
Of interest if you are interested in AI Safety and/or coding LLMs.
I strongly assert that any nontrivial code cannot be formally proven to solve the problem or execute the task perfectly.
Not because we can't model the program as a proof then formally prove it (though just that would be a daunting task).
But because we don't know how to fully specify any nontrivial problem.
For the toy problems like "does this program really add two integers and return the sum?" you can get it done.
No-one cares about that problem.
They care about the problem "for this city-sized population, distribute the money to the people according to the self-contradictory laws and regulations as implemented by the arbitrary and self-contradictory bureacrats. Be sure some of the money disappears into the pockets of the people whose pockets it should disappear into. Let us fix it so that isn't obviously happening."
And a million variants of that, but 1000x more complicated. Have those systems interact via a non-deterministic network protocol that claims to have exactly-once delivery mechanisms implemented, but actually sometimes delivers messages more than once, and other times not at all.
Bingo. In the real world, 99.999% of all programs are impossible to formalize, because the requirements look like this: "Hey Adrian, can you add a button to the GUI so that the user can save the sensor data as a CSV file? Oh, and I need it ASAP. Thanks, you're the best!"
I can only smile at the thought of asking my clients to translate this request into formally verifiable language.
re "elite institutions": which ones? As far as I can tell, this invariably refers to academia. I've seen this idea leaned on often in response your endorsement and others, it seems like a rhetorical tactic with enough ambiguity to suggest left-leaning bodies in all positions of power, but merely translates to "colleges". They don't use the word "colleges", because they don't carry much significance in most people's lives. Leftist sentiments there also concentrate in liberal arts disciplines, which matter even less. Culture is not downstream from academia. Commies in college were already commies before they got there.
Academia, the news media, the entertainment industry, think tanks, non-academic science, most high-profile non-profits, and the more prestigious federal government agencies. Just off the top of my head, and not to be taken as a complete list.
This can simplify to "academia" because it's dominated by A: the elite universities and B: places that hire elite university graduates. And because the non-elite colleges and universities are perceived as following the elite's lead and teaching the rest of the UMC to Trust the Elite Institutions.
No, it basically is all positions of power.
You can look through a list of professions by donations here:
(https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/1f57szd/a_cool_guide_to_which_professions_lean_to_which/#lightbox)
(sorry for reddit, the original Bloomberg piece is paywalled).
So Lawyers, Professors, Teachers, Scientists, Doctors, Nurses, Engineers...essentially any high-paying profession is pretty empirically coded "blue". Both anecdotally and empirically, any time we attempt to measure the political affiliation of the top 60%-90% of income earners, they're overwhelmingly blue.
Colleges come into it for two reasons:
First, virtually all of these professions require some form of higher education and the colleges are essentially all blue. This isn't to say that the colleges can perfectly indoctrinate kids but, assume kids enter 50-50 and come out 55-45 blue and things can spiral very quickly.
Second, research. Virtually all "scientific" research comes from universities but...some results are more valid than others, which leads to best practices tending to have a liberal direction until corrected by reality.
That actually might explain why cities generally code blue, and rural places code red. I bet more specialist professions are in cities, and this also ought to be more true the larger the city.
"As far as I can tell, this invariably refers to academia."
Incorrect.
I'm incredibly frustrated by this comment. Would it have been that hard to elaborate at all?
Fine. There's the nonprofit sector*, for-profit corporations, elected politicians, unelected judges and bureaucrats, the entertainment industry, Big Tech platforms, and the news media.
*This includes many government contractors reliant on government, not privately-donated, money.
Ok, that largely makes sense to me, except for "elected politicians." Elections seem to me to be roughly split, and if that's a mirage, then it would seem to mean that it doesn't even matter who you vote for. (Also "for profit corporations" is probably far too broad--do you mean specifically the executives? or another subset of employees?).
I think the steel man is that elite institutions are staffed exclusively by graduates of elite colleges, who are acculturated by college into left wing monoculture beliefs. See ‘give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.’
At any rate the object statement is true of the prestige media to an even greater extent than it is true of academia
Do "people" not have children for whom the university they attend has an enormous impact on their entire career? If you say no, you should provide some extraordinary evidence for that extraordinary claim, which violates both the data I've seen and common sense.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherrim/2024/05/20/does-it-really-matter-where-you-go-to-college-financially-it-does
It's not even clear to me if proponents actually care, I think "elite institutions" is just a useful way to evoke something semantically similar to "deep state", i.e. vibes. There's an imperative by pundits to associate wokeism with the DNC.
Most generously they might say that public education falls into this same category, but States set the standard not the feds. And here again, what's at stake? It's daycare with ABCs and math. Must be why we hear of myths like kids using kitty litter or whatever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory
Agreed; there’s an even easier filter: once you see the word “commie” you can safely ignore the rest.
Let's take a minute to appreciate Richard Cash, who died a couple of days ago. Would that any of us will have 1/10000th the positive impact he had. https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/10/26/g-s1-29496/richard-cash-oral-rehydration-salts-cholera-diarrhea
Ran into something like this at my employer: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHR/comments/gk1ujv/doesnt_seem_ok_in_2020/
"we would like you to do a visual inspection and tell us what you think their ethnicity is"
Searching around led me to https://aulawreview.org/blog/compelled-identity-eeoc-policy-to-reclassify-ethnicity-as-a-free-speech-violation/
"EEOC’s requirement that an employer affirmatively classify an employee as a member of a particular ethnic group, without the employee’s consent, constitutes compelled speech and thus violates the First Amendment."
While this particular requirement is insane, it seems to me that if this kind of reporting constitutes compelled speech then so does a lot of other stuff.
For instance, income tax would be unconstitutional because it requires telling the Government how much your income was.
The main thing I can imagine going wrong here is if you get it wrong, the employee somehow finds out what you put on the form, and is kind of offended.
At least they’re not asking you to guess which of your employees are transgender (protected characteristic in the UK under equalities act; if I remember correctly, also covered by ERA in the US, so potentially relevant to those statistical evidence were not discriminating forms).
I can see an argument that if the goal of this whole thing is to demonstrate you aren’t unlawfully discriminating in hiring, and the employee declined to provide the information (perhaps, fearing that they might be discriminated against), then what the employer *thought* the employees ethnicity is, is the relevant variable.
In all honestly, it seems pretty obvious that that article was written by a couple of law students at a 3rd-tier law school. It cites Barnette (students compelled to say the flag salute), Wooley (drivers compelled to display state motto on license plates) and Janus (public employees compelled to fund advocacy with which they disagree), and concludes, with little analysis, that "the EEOC requirement to categorize an employee through visual observation on the Employer Information Report EEO-1 is exactly the type of compelled expression Barnette sought to avoid because it can force an expression contrary to one’s belief." It is not at all clear how compelling a employer to express his judgment as to an employee's ethnicity is an expression contrary to his belief; it seems to be the opposite.
None of this is to say that the regulation necessarily passes First Amendment muster; but, if there is an argument to be made to the contrary, it isn't the one made in the article.
Are there any rationalist/game-theoretic analysis on how much should you insist in a romantic relationship? Perhaps analyzing the opportunity cost of sticking with someone versus looking at the pool of available partners, transaction costs of leaving when you already moved in together, etc?
The commonplace take nowadays is that people don't put that much effort in resolving conflicts and differences, instead giving up too easily because of a larger (perceived) pool of opportunities. This would make this generation miss out on long, durable relationships strengthened through time and effort. How much of that is true?
The "transaction costs of leaving when you already moved in together" point seems like a very good argument for the traditional approach of not moving in together until marriage.
You want to minimise the cost of breaking up until you're confident you're ready to make a permanent choice.
This kind of analysis sounds like a great recipe for destroying every relationship one touches. At every moment, whether to stay with the other person is just a calculation of what will bring you the greatest expected value...you can't make this up.
Maybe you don't mean to analyse this on the basis of self-interest (though a lot of people who talk like this clearly do) but rather by equally weighting the interests of both people. In which case, that *might* work sometimes, but I suspect it's too easily twisted to just serve self-interest anyway.
Without an intrinsic committment to the person and the relationship itself, can you even call it a relationship? It sounds more like a business transaction. Or in the best (equal-weighting) case, a political settlement. I suspect asking this question is doing a lot to cause all the misery.
I agree. And, DataTom, since many people, maybe you, are touchy about this issue, and suspect sexist agendas, moral agendas etc are at work, here's a sort of thought experiment, though it only works if you have pets and are fond of them: Most people do some selecting when the choose a pet, maybe choosing a breed or a breeder, or maybe just paying close attention to the looks and behavior of the littler of mutt puppies they're choosing from. But for most people, once they have the pet, judgment drops out of the picture. They have bonded with the pet they have, and do not crave to trade up to one that's different in various ways. They would also feel guilty about doing that, because part of their bond with their pet is empathy. They know their pet would feel very distressed if suddenly separated from them, and causing their pet pain would be painful to them.
OK, so romantic relationships, including marriage, can involve a bond like the one people have with pets, but with both the good and bad parts amplified. The kinds of collaborating you can do with a person you have a bond with -- collaborating on sexual pleasure, humdrum tasks, and possibly high-level intellectual ones -- are a much richer set. Conversely, feeling badly treated by a romantic partner is much more deeply distressing than being kept awake half the night by your dog's barking. On the other hand, there are way more options for resolving the problems you have with human beings than there are for the ones with pets.
That's a very insightful metaphor, and a great point by ascend. You guys gave me much to think about.
It's called the secretary problem
It's called the secretary problem, and the optimal ratio is 1/e= 37.78..%. :-)
At least it's optimal if you are happy with the best pick, and are equally unhappy with any other pick. We may as well assume that all potential partners are spherical cowboys. But I agree that the gist of the secretary problem is right.
What’s the numerator, though? If you live in a tiny town with exactly 6 eligible bachelors you only have to date two and then marry the next good guy, but if you get 100 matches in a one mile radius you have some work to do.
Yes, better to pick n as the the number of dates you are willing to go through, not the number of potential matches in the world.
We do also have some very persistent traditions advising the exact opposite. Get to know people as acquaintances, but wait to enter a romantic relationship until you have found someone you want to stay permanently with. I suspect this is because people are happier if they don't know what they are missing out on - and in this situation, both people being happy with it also makes the thing itself better.
I'm skeptical of that advice. There is such a thing as sexual incompatibility, and you don't want to discover it _after_ committing to a permanent relationship.
I am currently 7 years into such a relationship, and we're both still very happy with it. The incompatibility was discovered about 2 years ago, shortly after we got married. We've both put great effort into fixing it and have made good progress on that front.
Many Thanks! Glad that it worked out for you! Sometimes such fixes are possible and sometimes they aren't. I still think that the prudent choice is to explore them before committing to a permanent relationship.
I recently re-read "Unsong", and a passage on Georg Cantor and transfinite numbers led to this train of thought. I've got next to no formal philosophy background, so I'll beg readers' forgiveness if this question has been discussed in every theodicy course since Augustine of Hippo—
Suppose that God could create a universe at time t=0 containing a countably infinite number of sentient beings (hereinafter "persons" or "people"). He sets up a one-to-one correspondence between the people and the positive integers: every person gets a unique integer, and all the positive integers are used.
At t=0, everyone is suffering the torments of Hell, and believes that they will continue for all eternity. Everyone would choose nonexistence over their current state, if that were an option. At t=1sec, person #1 is released from Hell and taken to Heaven, where they will enjoy eternal happiness; none of the other occupants of Hell knows that this has happened and that their suffering might end. At t=2, person #2 is translated to eternal bliss; and so forth.
Should a good God create such a universe? Arguing against, there will never be a time at which infinitely many people aren't suffering hideous torments, while only finitely many people will be enjoying unending bliss. For all eternity, the total suffering in the universe will infinitely exceed the total happiness, which seems to fit any utilitarian's definition of an evil universe.
On the other hand, no individual will suffer forever, and every individual's suffering will come to an end and be followed by an eternity of happiness. A rational happiness-maximizing individual would presumably be willing to be decanted into such a universe, since their finite stint in Hell would be followed by eternity in Heaven; and the fact that such an individual would choose it over nonexistence suggests that it's actually a good universe.
I've seen a similar thought experiment elsewhere... Probably on Richard Chapell's or Bentham's Bulldog's blog though I'm not certain.
Personally, the aspect I find interesting is to contrast your universe with the opposite world, where at time t the t^th individual moves from hell to heaven... Now at each moment, the total happiness is infinite, but for each individual they face the prospect of only a finite duration of bliss before enduring an eternity of torment.
My intuition is very strong that, whatever your judgement of case 1 as a standalone case, it is infinitely preferable to case 2: in cases where they differ, summing utility over individuals is much more important than summing it over time slices.
In finite cases, the two summation orders should coincide, but it does prime my intuition to accept that evaluating utility over individual lifetimes takes precedence over evaluating it over time, and makes me much more likely to reject the idea that where the boundaries of individual agents lie is irrelevant for thinking about utility
Interesting, JerL! I think there's a typo in the first sentence of your second paragraph: should that be "moves from heaven to hell" rather than "from hell to heaven"?
In the case of finitely many sentient beings, I'd say that even one person suffering eternal torment would make for an evil universe, in the sense that no one would willingly be dropped into it and accept that nonzero chance of unending suffering. But I don't know how we'd think about a situation in which there were infinitely many created beings, infinitely many of whom would be chosen to endure unending torment, but any one individual's probability of being sent to Hell was zero. For instance, God might assign a unique positive integer to every person, then consign everyone to Hell whose integer was a power of 2...
Lol, yes, heaven to hell, good catch
>On the other hand, no individual will suffer forever, and every individual's suffering will come to an end and be followed by an eternity of happiness. A rational happiness-maximizing individual would presumably be willing to be decanted into such a universe
That depends on their discount rate, and where in the queue they are. Say they have a discount rate of 1/tau, a delay to get taken out of hell T, a (negative) utility per unit time while in hell of Uhell, and a positive utility per unit time while in heaven of Uheaven. The net present value at t=0 (when they make the decision) of their time in heaven is e^(-T/tau)*Uheaven*tau. The net present value of their time in hell (at t=0) is (1-e^(-T/tau))*Uhell*tau. For the sum to be positive, T has to be small enough that
e^(-T/tau)*Uheaven*tau > -(1-e^(-T/tau))*Uhell*tau or
e^(-T/tau) > -Uhell/(Uheaven-Uhell)
On second thought, you can skip the philosophical trappings, and what you have is just a simple demonstration of how summation over infinite quantities of numbers is not commutative.
You define the function u(n, t) = -1 if t < n, 1 otherwise, and you want to find out its total sum over all positive n and t. But if you sum over t first, it's +inf, and if you sum over n first, it's -inf.
For a simpler example, consider the sequence 1-2+3-4+5-6+7-8, etc. What is it total sum? If you consider the partial sums up to each given term, they zigzag wildly and diverge. But if you read it as (1-2) + (3-4) + (5-6) + (7-8)..., it goes to -inf. And if you slightly rearrange it as 1 + (-2+3) + (-4+5) + (-6+7)..., then it goes to +inf. So there is no obvious or intuitive value for the sum.
I was about to go "NO" but on thinking about it, you've just re-invented Original Sin and the Fall.
Humans were doomed to Hell until the Incarnation, when the breach with God was healed and salvation was possible. So up to then, all since Adam have been incapable of going to Heaven (whether you want 'Hell for all' or refinements like 'the Limbo of the Patriarchs' is up to you), but after the coming of Christ, now Heaven is attainable.
So there's an argument that your thought experiment is the universe we currently inhabit 😁
In support of your hypothesis, the current situation often feels like Hell.
Mephistopheles would agree:
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/hc/dr-faustus/scene-iii/
Faust. Where are you damn’d?
Meph. In hell.
Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
O Faustus! leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.
This looks almost exactly like the Indian model of samsara / liberation. At least by some Buddhist accounts, samsara itself is endless, but each individual being gets out of it eventually, which implies an infinity of beings to begin with.
An interesting question! It is not true that "no individual will suffer forever". An infinite number of individuals will suffer forever, because
1. It is impossible for an infinite amount of time to pass in a universe that had a beginning.
2. If a finite amount of time has passed, then only a finite number of people have been released from torment.
3. Therefore, for any finite amount of time that has passed, an infinite number of people will be in torment and only a finite number of people will be in a state of bliss.
Therefore, the answer is "no".
In the stated model, each individual will spend a finite amount of time in Hell, and the rest of eternity in Heaven. There is literally no single individual who will suffer forever. For each being taken individually, it's a good deal. Yet if you look at it collectively at any one moment in time, it's horrible. Hence the paradox that Hroswitha is pointing out.
I'm not sure how you mean to justify your first argument; what does the fact that a universe had a beginning have to do with how much time may pass in its long term future?
An infinitely old universe must stretch back forever, therefore it cannot have had a beginning.
To restate my original argument using actual numbers: there are infinity positive integers (specifically there are Beth0 positive integers, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beth_number), so the initial number of people in torment is Beth0. Then after t seconds, t people have been released, so the number of people in torment is Beth0-t, and the number of people in bliss is t. Because t will always be finite, Beth0-t is infinite. Therefore, an infinite number of people will always be in torment and only a finite number of people will ever be in a state of bliss.
Yes that's the part that makes it appear horrible, it's said in the original post and restated in mine above. No disagreement there.
Yet from the point of view of a single individual, no matter what their number may be, the bargain looks pretty good! A finite amount of hell for an infinite amount of heaven (let's assume this particular heaven is not boring or otherwise flawed). That's what makes the whole thing paradoxical.
The vast majority of people are only released after infinite time, and infinity never ends. Therefore, it is only a good deal if you end up as one of the infinitesimally small fraction of people who are released after finite time.
E.g., take any finite number. Most positive integers are bigger than that number. In fact, all but an infinitesimally small fraction of positive integers are bigger than that finite number. Therefore, the average positive integer cannot be a finite number. Therefore, the average positive integer is infinite.
Or to put it another way, you can write a real number between 0 and 1 as 0.XXXXXXX..., where each X is some digit from 0-9. Similarly, you can write a positive integer as ...XXXXXX.0, with infinite digits off to the left instead of off to the right. Suppose each digit X is chosen independently and randomly, with an equal chance of digits 0-9. What percent of people will get an integer with a finite number of non-zero digits, followed by an infinite number of zeros? Only an infinitesimally small fraction.
(Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician. There may be errors here.)
> The vast majority of people are only released after infinite time, and infinity never ends.
I think that’s wrong. They are released after time tn, which isn’t an infinite amount of time after t0.
The paradox is
At time Tn, the nth person is released from hell and they will be in heaven for eternity. Which is much longer than n. They will spend 0% of their time in hell.
Also at time Tn the majority of people are in hell. Only 0% are in heaven.
Last attempt, with a simple question: forget all about averages, and just imagine that you are *one* random person in that fictional universe. A finite number has been assigned to you by the relevant god. You will spend that number of days in hell, then switch to heaven for all eternity. Are you getting a good deal, or a bad one?
OK, now consider that each single individual person is in the exact same situation you are, just with a different (finite) number. So if your deal is good, so is theirs.
I agree that you are getting a good deal if you are assigned a finite number. However, there is only an infinitesimally small probability that you will be assigned a finite number. You will almost certainly receive an infinite number. Therefore it is a bad deal.
I'm not a mathematician either, but it sounds like you're using an error around infinite numbers. I know of an example from physics: consider an infinite universe. What is the gravitational attraction in general? Thinking of infinitely many items spread in infinite directions, you would think it would all balance out. But think of a single point as a starting point, and add matter around it: the matter is attracted to the center. Add as much matter as you like, even an infinite amount, and it will still be attracted to the center.
So you cannot be assigned an infinite number of time before you are transferred to heaven. You may have an extremely long wait, and the waiting without knowing eventually you will go to heaven will suck, but the time won't be infinite.
Do you disagree with either of the premises:
1. The average wait time is infinite.
2. The average of a set of finite numbers cannot be infinite.
Because taken together, those premises imply that you can be assigned an infinite wait time. (Because if all wait times were finite, then the average wait time would be finite, which it is not.)
I am not a physicist, but I don't agree with your physics example. An infinite universe would not have a center to be attracted to. All locations are equally "the center", to the extent such a thing exists. Therefore, the forces would all balance out by symmetry. But even if I agreed with you that an infinite universe would have a center that everything would be attracted to, I don't understand what bearing this has on the question of infinite wait times.
I think the first premise may be flawed. One cannot take an average of an infinite set in the normal way, because one cannot divide by infinity, nor can one divide infinity. Again, I'm not a mathematician, so I don't know what infinite time divided by infinite people is. I do know, however, that one cannot divide by zero, and I suspect involving infinity in divisions results in similar problems.
Google's Gemini tells me that any finite number divided by infinity is zero. Take that for what it's worth; Gemini isn't a mathematician, either.
> The average of a set of finite numbers cannot be infinite.
OK we got it, that's the bit that is confusing you. What you're saying is right for finite sets, but not in the general case. The average of an infinite set of finite numbers can very much be infinite. If you don't trust me ask any mathematician or even chatgpt.
>(Because if all wait times were finite, then the average wait time would be finite, which it is not.)
That doesn't quite follow. There are probability distributions where the mean isn't finite, e.g. a power law distribution with an exponent of -1.5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Lack_of_well-defined_average_value
This is why mathematicians are so pedantic about infinities. If you consider infinities only as 'what happens in the [limit as x goes to infinity] of some x', these paradoxes tend to just disappear.
This is great! Of course, utilitarianism doesn't play nice with thought experiments, especially ones involving an infinity of immortal people with no agency, so this can't be used to discount utilitarianism in general.
But I love that the happy/sad ratio doesn't depend on *where* you slice it but which *way* the slice goes.
We can visualize a graph of the line y=t where y is the number of people in heaven. Just considering positive t and y values of course, we see that the area above the line is actually equal to the area below it.
So we should be able to reduce this question to a much simpler finite one: is one person-minute in hell plus one person-minute in heaven better or worse or equal to zero person-minutes?
I think better. But either way, this should be an equivalent question that's easier to think about.
My immediate issue is with making suffering a binary. I don’t like anything that reduces people to “happy/sad.” Suffering is a range function.
This is a fantastic thought experiment.
If we define "globally positive" (over time, this world has more happiness than suffering) and "locally positive" (over time, person X has more happiness than suffering), I think you've given a counterexample to the claim that a world with enough local positivity can be globally positive.
Ultimately I think it does rest on infinities so I'm not sure it says anything in practical terms, but I really enjoyed the reasoning.
All of the pro trump arguments I’ve heard include somewhere something like “we know he says he’d do a bunch of objectively horribly monstrous things, but like he always does that so it doesn’t matter” …
This seems like a pretty odd position to take that could just as easily be applied to the democrats/ far leftists that the same people are supporting trump in order to defeat?
What is the difference between “Kamala suggests a capital gains tax, but democrats always do that to rally their communist base so it doesn’t matter” and the above position on trump?
I think the main argument people are defending Trump here with is that he is a) a hyperbolic and b) unfiltered speaker. These elements of his expression are very clear in most of what he says, e.g., "we are going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay it." Obviously Mexico was never going to pay for it...
I think a better argument for Trump is that democratics wildly cherry-pick what he and other Republicans say, while saying equally bad or worse. E.g., the democrats are running a two pronged campaign at the moment: First, unity. We're going to unite the nation. Second, our opponent is Hitler and the literal fate of democracy is at stake. E.g., Joe Biden called Trump's supporters "Garbage."
As an aside, you know who else is fond of characterizing their political opponents as Nazis? Vladimir Putin. He describes the invasion of Ukraine as "de-nazification."
The way I just characterized it a few minutes ago in a tweet: Trump does not speak politic-ese. Other US politicians also exaggerate, brag, prevaricate (the nice way of saying "lie"), etc., but there's a subtle lingo that governs how they do it. Trump uses different rules, so what are technically the same classes of logical mistakes, look very different.
This strikes different Americans in different ways. Trump filters in a way that's more familiar to people who look down on college education, and feels like low-status language to people who went to college and like speaking at a college level. Trump, for some reason, went to college and chose not to adopt the college way of speaking (and bragging and lying and so on). He possibly can't even do it (imagine him faking a "college accent" in a backroom meeting).
I'm sort of arguing no-true-Scotsman here, but it's possible that the usual reaction to speech you're unfamiliar with is to interpret it uncharitably, and for the usual DC politics crowd, Trump provides abundant samples.
Yeah, I commented about this in an earlier thread, with respect to that Mr Beast memo that went around. Trump talks the way viral marketers write. "Ten reasons why broccoli is the worst vegetable ever!" is more likely to get clicks than "I don't like broccoli". "This is the greatest movie in the history of cinema" rather than "Nice flick". Etc. He's advertising himself, which makes sense since that's sort of been his business model since the 1980s.
And you know who else was fond of characterizing their opponents as communists? Hitler. Damn, maybe everyone in this world is Hitler.
Well, everyone who hates Israel is as bad as Hitler, and everyone who doesn't hate Israel is as bad as Hitler, so that's that.
haha. sure.
It seems pretty clear to me though that the Democrats are doing a lot more of this demonizing rhetoric than the Republicans. I'd love if someone did a word frequency analysis to prove (or disprove) that claim though.
I think you have to ask, what is the thing that's going to stop the bad stuff?
Most of the things I've heard people point to for the left would require Congress and/or the courts. But the trump stuff is mostly abuse of executive power, in a way that the courts can't/won't do anything about.
And didn't happen last time because he was stopped by his staff who were the sort of neutral-to-anti-trump Republicans who have mostly been drummed out of any prominent position in the party, and who they rail against as the "deep state".
Importantly, a lot of Trump's former senior advisors disagree with those pro-trump arguments and think he could do many objectively horribly monstrous things if he gets back in office. By their telling, Trump was constrained in his first term from his worst impulses by advisors who respected the rule of law. This term he's likely to choose advisors solely based on loyalty who will go along with whatever terrible and illegal things he wants to do.
Sources:
https://x.com/JohnMitnick/status/1853218193998852267
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/9de0033816426a27/e85d475d-full.pdf
https://archive.is/CQUVA
How much of that is truth and how much sour grapes on the part of advisors who were dropped and now are out of any hope of serving in a presidential administration (unless we imagine former Trump staffers are going to be hired by a Republican president who is not Trump, any estimations on that?)
It's not uncommon for the military to have criticisms of the civilian government and to make unflattering comments, see eg Stanley McChrystal and Obama. But the kinds of comments these generals have made about Trump can only be explained by
1 the tensions between them being orders of magnitude worse than the usual civ-mil tensions
2 an extreme degree of pettiness on the part of multiple ex-Trump staff
3 the generals really do feel this way about Trump
I think 2 is so unlikely as to be completely worth dismissing; I think it's almost certain that these quotes represent the generals' actual impressions of Trump, and the only potentially mitigating factor is that, though the opinions are honestly expressed, they are still misjudged.
"Trump says that he'd try to do unlawful things. His advisors say that he did try to do unlawful things and that various advisors stopped him. He clearly attempted to subvert the 2020 election in a variety of ways (ultimately unsuccessfully). His current running mate says that he wouldn't have certified the electors for 2020."
What kind of evidence would you, theoretically, believe here? Like, short of God himself coming down from heaven and lifting you up into the clouds and showing you a careful diagram of future history, is there any kind of evidence that you would believe?
Like, I get it, Trump lies a lot. People in politics are self-interested. None of this is perfect unassailable randomized-controlled-and-replicated-a-thousand-times evidence. But all of it points in one direction. If you don't find any of this moves you even slightly in the direction of "Trump will try again to do unlawful things and will be less constrained than before," it seems to me like you aren't being evidence-based.
I would guess it's mostly true.
While Trump had an unusually large amount of turnover, other recent presidents have kicked out many of their senior advisors. And none of them have had nearly the same pushback from their former staff as Trump has had with his.
I don't have much of an opinion on the likelihood of former Trump staffers being hired by a future Republican President. I don't think it is negligible though, and these statements make them less likely to be hired in the future and so are not in their personal best interest.
Among retired military who served long and distinguished careers I’d estimate very few. These folks served Democrat and Republican presidents. Trump is uniquely amoral.
Or: Trump is uniquely un-institutionaly captured (and hence can potentially immensely benefit America)
I don't think it's coincidence that JD Vance speaks positively of Bernie but badly of Kamala Harris.
Trump and his associates are taking a surprisingly strong and genuine seeming stance against lobbying capture. E.g., watch the podcast between JD Vance and Joe Rogan.
Senior American Military with 40 years of distinguished service are captured by lobbyists?
Are these men speaking of Bernie?
Jim Mattis Retired Marine Corps Four Star General, Trump Defence Secretary - January 7, 2021 -
“Today’s violent assault on our Capitol, an effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was fomented by Mr. Trump.
His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice.”
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us”
John Kelly Retired United States Marine Corps General, Trump Secretary of Homeland Security, White House chief of staff - October 3, 2023 -
“The depths of [Trump’s-] dishonesty is just astounding to me ... He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Daniel Coats Director of National Intelligence -
September 14, 2021 -
“He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
> Senior American Military with 40 years of distinguished service are captured by lobbyists?
Hahaha... funny.
At least, I hope thay was a joke.
As someone who has hired lobbyists for a defense contractor, who do you think we hire them to speak to? Sometimes congress, yes, but you get much more bang for your buck if it's a staff officer.
Being senior makes one more likely not less likely to be captured by lobbyists, foreign interests, and the general allure of money.
I can totally see senior military professionals a) having set ways of doing things and hating when those ways are challenged and b) having perverse incentives (e.g., there ample evidence of historic collusion between arms-dealers and the US government). For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarkis_Soghanalian
the argument also does not consider that even just saying it may be harmful, even if there is no intention to follow through.
I know that argument and I think it stinks. It reminds me of the way lying was treated in the Soviet bloc: everyone knew the ruling class was lying, and the ruling class knew everyone knew, but the point was to show that they had the power to lie and everyone had to take it.
So for Trump specifically I don't like it because it sets him up to be some sort of sovereign that is above any kind of shame or reproach. And worse, I believe it gives him some plausible deniability that I didn't really believe until I saw all the comments under Scott's recent endorsement post where more people than I expected argued that Trump had absolutely nothing to do with Jan. 6.
Have you read the recent post from scott where he discussed this?
One of the main arguments he mentioned on there for that seeming inconsistency is that in US democracy trump-like authoritarianism has better safeguards v/s kamala-like slow authoritarianism, that actually convinced me to become more moderate.
Armchair prediction: the polls are overstating Harris, and Trump will do better than predicted. Confidence: around 70%. Reasoning: it seems really obvious to me that since Biden has been unpopular for most of his administration, and since his polling against Trump was so bad, that many swing voters' default was to vote for Trump. When the Ds switched candidates, and especially with her rightward shift, some of them switched the preference they tell pollsters. But surely it takes *more* to switch your actual vote from your original intention than it does to switch your declared-to-pollster vote. Therefore, at least a substantial fraction of these people who switched sides in the polling (because they don't like Trump, and because they wanted to express approval of the switch and/or the move to the center) will not bring themselves to vote for Harris and will default to their initial judgement on the current administration. In other words, structural factors (perception of the Biden administration and the conditions during it) will override personal feelings about the candidates and their platforms, at least for enough people to cause Trump to somewhat beat his polls.
I'm trying not to base this on personal opinions about the candidates, nor on recent understatement of Republican support in presidential polls (which after all only happened twice; 2012 was the opposite). If I'm wrong, I will update away from giving high weight to structural factors like administration approval.
Anyone else want to weigh in with a prediction (ideally with confidence and reasoning)? It's a great opportunity to get very quick feedback on your biases...
Well, this seems to be basically what happened. I think?
"since Biden has been unpopular for most of his administration, and since his polling against Trump was so bad, that many swing voters' default was" -- this is heavily about the difference between polls that far ahead of an election, and the ones closer to it. The former are of eligible voters while the latter are of likely voters. In a nation where 60% is an unusually-high turnout that difference can matter a good deal for polling's successful predictive value. This is part of how things swung so much between Dukakis and Bush41 (1988), and between Carter and Ford (1976), and in 1992 (3-way race), and in 2000 (as late as August Bush43 was way ahead in the polls).
FWIW, I think it's very much anyone's game for both Harris and Trump. Forecasts like https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/ and https://manifold.markets/election give stuff like 52% Trump, 48% Harris. At this level of granularity, fighting over individual percentage points feels like hair-splitting.
And I also don't think that, regardless of who wins, the typical American's lifestyle will change that much between 2024 and 2028. After all, I didn't notice Obama, Trump's previous administration, or Biden. The exception being that if AI has taken over the world by 2028, then maybe the future US president's policy might have had a hand in this somehow.
>FWIW, I think it's very much anyone's game for both Harris and Trump. Forecasts like https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/ and https://manifold.markets/election give stuff like 52% Trump, 48% Harris. At this level of granularity, fighting over individual percentage points feels like hair-splitting.
Agreed! I wonder how long it will take for the initial resolution of the Electoral College votes (exclusive of lawsuits). _Usually_ this is known in less than a day after the polls close, but there was the Bush/Gore case where the coin landed on its edge...
Funny, I was going to make a similar prediction, but in the opposite direction. My reasoning is that pollsters underestimated Trump last two times, and now - understandably - overcorrected their models in the other direction.
Also, the early voting data from the swing states indicates it will likely be a blowout for Harris. And if the Selzer poll in IA that put Harris 3 pts ahead of Trump (!) is reflective of reality, it shows that Trump is weak in his red state base. (Note that the Selzer poll has been accurate for past election cycles.) Even if she doesn't take IA, women are turning out in droves in swing states for Harris. And even Independent men seem to be breaking toward Harris. We'll see, though...
Polling errors are not generally caused by people misreporting their voting intention. e.g. 2016 was a) late break for Trump because of Comey, and b) underestimation of the white non-college-educated voters because education polarization hadn't been that bad in the past, so many pollsters just straight up didn't count white college-educated and white non-college-educated as two different groups.
My opinion: the herding is really, immediately, visibly obvious when you go look at 538 and compare statewide polling for 2020 and 2024 swing states. Silver himself has noted that there's an insane, highly-visible amount of herding that's inexplicable by chance even if it really were exactly 50-50 in all the swing states. Such herding reduces the accuracy of the polls overall. Apparently 2/3rds of pollsters are weighting by recall vote, so they're just spitting out a result that's 2020 over again.
Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all have statewide Senate races where the Democrat is expected to win (all about 75-80 range on Polymarket, and large majority of polls on 538's compilation, and their state race-level predictions). Split-ticket results are actually pretty rare lately. In 2020, only Maine went R for Senate and D for President; in 2016, every Senate seat went the same way as its Presidential vote. A higher number were such in 2012, but polarization wasn't nearly as bad back then. My inclination, thus, is that the polling error is more likely to be in Trump's favor than Harris's, maybe 60% confidence. No substantial national-level polling error would probably mean Harris victory (the Selzer poll strongly suggests a very strong Rust Belt position), but that's not too likely, so 65-70% confidence of Harris victory.
> surely it takes more to switch your actual vote than your declared to pollster vote
Why? I can see people being more willing to switch their pollster vote than their real vote based on a flashy new scandal, but why would it come up here?
It's less about switching one's vote, and more about getting to the polling station to cast a vote. Trump wouldn't have won in 2016 if a large number of potential Clinton voters didn't just sit on their hands. That was so maddening to watch - the massive protests afterwards, manned mostly by young people who, usually, are the least active voting population. Should've shown up at the polls instead.
It would take a lot more than that to switch *my* vote, but if someone's on the fence they may decide to go with the winning side.
Well, I would reason that if there are some set of people who will do that for a scandal, there is surely a subset of them who will also do it for a switch to a more appealing candidate. The question is only how many.
Neither of those factors, after all, has much to do with how well you think the conditions and direction of the country are going.
But you could also make the opposite case, where people ultimately vote for the more appealing candidate but will tell a pollster they're voting against the incumbent to vent their frustration.
I think it's telling that some people will put more weight onto a single outlier poll that tells a story they like than onto hundreds of other polls that consistently tell a story they dislike.
Don't forget it's been a GOP strategy in previous election cycles to flood states with garbage polls to create a "bandwagon" effect. And it looks like it's the case this election cycle, too. OTOH, The Selzer poll has had a strong record of accuracy— particularly in Iowa — where it accurately predicted voter preferences over multiple election cycles — its estimates coming very close to the actual results. Selzer has had a great track record compared to other pollsters. That's why the GOP is freaking out right now.
Yeah nah, I think it's an outlier.
Outliers happen. Full points to Selzer for publishing it even though it's an outlier and not letting it fall victim to the file drawer effect.
Minus fifteen points to anyone who massively overweighted this poll because they liked it. Minus forty points to anyone who was posting about how wonderful Ann Selzer's track record had been in the past despite the fact that they had no idea who Ann Selzer was a week ago.
Indeed. It was possible as far as anyone knew on Nov 4, that Selzer knew something no one else did, and she'd be the new Nate Silver.
Given the info at the time, that wasn't the way to bet. But every once in a while, someone *does* get dealt a royal flush at the table.
> and possibly also senior citizens (who are the group that actually benefits from inflation because social security is automatically indexed and they mostly own their own homes already so are less pissed at Democrats for that)
This seems very wrong to me. Social security COLAs prevent SS benefits from losing purchasing power, but it's not like they're gaining purchasing power. And nominal bonds (a staple of many if not most fixed income portfolios) get pummeled by inflation.
I'm not prepared to go into the weeds of how well the CPI-W tracks actual inflation... but it seems like, if anything, it probably underestimates seniors' cost-of-living increases due to its relatively low weighing of medical expenses.
Stocks have done very well lately. But they're a risk asset, and shouldn't be relied upon in retirement for current living expenses. Looking at Vanguard's retirement income fund as an example, it's 70% bonds, 30% stocks. About a quarter of those bonds are TIPS. So >50% of the portfolio is nominal bonds. A high level of inflation would be painful for a retiree relying on income from this fund.
Confidence? And how will you update your thinking if Trump wins?
Well?
Thanks to Scott for the platform.
Two new post this week:
“Debt and Growth”
Me beating the zombie notion that deficits stimulate the economy, are necessary for growth,
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/debt-and-growth
And
“Choice,” my argument for Harris over Trump
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/choice
Scott has not offered you a platform. In fact he has explicitly stated that people should not plug their blog on here more than once or twice a year, and on the classified threads. So I suggest that instead of beginning your posts with "Thanks to Scott for the platform," you begin with "I don't give a shit what Scott's rules are about blog-plugging or what his readers want. I want readers for my fucking blog, and that's what matters. As you can see I'm either oblivious to rules and norms or just do not respect them. If you'd like to read a blog by somebody like that, here are some links. "
PS, also reported your post, so in the future you can expect to be banned.
Blocked, recommensing others do the same. Enough of this.
Nice, I didn't know this was an option. I've done the same.
Same.
Didn't Scott mention to you two weeks ago to cut down on self promotion?
What will “win out”, population collapse or the *other* global heating?
https://aeon.co/essays/theres-a-deeper-problem-hiding-beneath-global-warming
Here's the big headline conclusion at the end:
"We will need to transform the human story. It must become a story of doing less, not more"
Sounds like a pretty standard anti-progress, degrowth sort of narrative. We might warm the planet by 2/3rds of a degree centuries from now, assuming absolutely no ability to adapt, so we have to radically transform our entire society. Sure.
Agreed
>In the early decades of the 21st century, this heat created by simply using energy, known as ‘waste heat’, is not so serious. It’s equivalent to roughly 2 per cent of the planetary heating imbalance caused by greenhouse gases – for now.
And that is a good place to put a hard stop to the article. If global population stabilizes at 10 billion or so, and if everyone rises to a first world level of income, then this goes up to maybe 10% of the greenhouse effect - which, in the absence of the greenhouse gases, would not be a significant problem.
No, energy use per capita isn't going to rise exponentially till we cook ourselves. People don't want too much waste heat within their own houses. There are incentives quite independent of the cost of supplying energy to use it fairly efficiently.
>consider the enormous energy demands of cryptocurrency mining or the accelerating energy requirements of AI.
One thing that frankly pisses me off about antigrowthers like this is that they always choose to attack woke-disfavored energy uses. How about electric cars, instead, for instance?
Amazing. The prophets of doom are shifting to another forecast, as the initial one seems to be on the way to being solved.
"Woe, woe! Climate change by fossil fuels! We must curb our consumption or die!"
Okay, now they've finally convinced everyone to shift to renewables and maybe the problem will be solved. Happy now? Of course not!
"Woe, woe! Deep warming by all that nice new energy! We must curb our consumption or die!"
It's remarkable how the solutions in both instances involve sackcloth and ashes and doing away with industrial society. It's almost like it's a religious belief and not one based on science.
Our scientist friend in his article says nuclear bad, because it will produce this waste heat, even fission bad because it will only encourage humans to consume more energy. Renewables like solar and wind good, or at least better, but even they have problems.
The solution? Give up using fossil fuels/new green clean energy entirely!
"An alternative would require a radical break with our past: using less energy. Finding a way to use less energy would represent a truly fundamental rupture with all of human history, something entirely novel. A rupture of this magnitude won’t come easily. However, if we could learn to view restrictions on our energy use as a non-negotiable element of life on Earth, we may still be able to do many of the things that make us essentially human: learning, discovering, inventing, creating. In this scenario, any helpful new technology that comes into use and begins using lots of energy would require a balancing reduction in energy use elsewhere. In such a way, we might go on with the future being perpetually new, and possibly better."
Yes, we'll all weave our own trousers out of organic yoghurt, walk everywhere, but since there won't be any kind of travel (bicycles? are you crazy? friction of tyres on the road surface creates waste heat, you fool!) save by Shanks mare, we'll regress to a state of life a 13th century peasant would have thought restrictive. We'll all be hunter-gatherers, and when the massive population die-off happens because that lifestyle can't support anywhere near the number of living people today, well, it will all be so much better for the planet!
But *only* if we give up things like the use of fire:
"If gains in efficiency won’t buy us lots of time, how about other factors, such as a reduction of the global population? Scientists generally believe that the current human population of more than 8 billion people is well beyond the limits of our finite planet, especially if a large fraction of this population aspires to the resource-intensive lifestyles of wealthy nations. Some estimates suggest that a more sustainable population might be more like 2 billion, which could reduce energy use significantly, potentially by a factor of three or four. However, this isn’t a real solution: again, as with the example of improved energy efficiency, a one-time reduction of our energy consumption by a factor of three will quickly be swallowed up by an inexorable rise in energy use. If Earth’s population were suddenly reduced to 2 billion – about a quarter of the current population – our energy gains would initially be enormous. But those gains would be erased in two doubling times, or roughly 60-100 years, as our energy demands would grow fourfold."
Incredible. I thought I was cool on modern industrial society, but by comparison with the attitude here, I'm a raging 'concrete the entire planet over and turn it into Coruscant!' advocate.
>we'll regress to a state of life a 13th century peasant would have thought restrictive
Yeah, that is my overall impression of the article, and its intent, too.
edit: Come to think of it, the _whole_ article is deeply mistaken, for a very simple reason:
The author is raising an alarm about the _global_ heating from waste heat from all of the uses we make of energy. I'd mentioned previously that no one wants too much waste heat in their home. No one wants an uncomfortably hot laptop sitting on their crotch.
These are examples of a _very_ general point: _Local_ waste heat is a nuisance, and we start doing things to avoid too much of it many orders of magnitude before it becomes a _global_ problem. The author assumes that exponential growth in energy use per capita is some kind of iron law. It isn't. We do not double and redouble e.g the illumination in our homes.
Even when the waste heat is on an industrial scale, we do not blindly scale it up. Cooling a data center is a PITA. Chip designers are _very_ _very_ aware of how much power their designs consume, and go to great lengths to contain it - because, _long_ before it is a global issue, it becomes a _local_ issue that makes a sufficiently hot chip _stop_ _working_.
The article is fundamentally wrong-headed.
Most global warming is called by people telling lies. Visual media, technology, and smart phones just accelerated the process. The lies are coming so hard and fast now, no one can process it all.
Invest in rehab.
OK I've liked some Aeon articles but I'm calling BS on that one. First I didn't finish the whole thing. So maybe they talked about this. Radiative cooling (which is how the earth cools) goes as the fourth power of the temperature difference (T^4) which means a small temperature rise gives substantially more cooling. Please don't worry about deep heating... (A large fraction of the earths heat comes from radioactive decay in the interior of our planet.)
Actually, it's the difference in the fourth power of the temperatures (To^4-Ts^4), not the fourth power of the difference ( (To-Ts)^4 ), At the margin, that makes the heat transfer linear with the temperature difference. It would become significantly supralinear with large temperature differences, but in this case that would mean many tens of degrees of global warming.
The article I think does overstate the threat greatly, but let's get the math right in our own rebuttal.
I find it hard to find the concern serious. Even with the current exponential growth, this other global heating won't be a problem for the next 150-200 years. So why don't we wait for 100 years and see whether the trendlines are still on the same curves, or whether the problem has just gone away by itself? If it hasn't, we still have >50 years before it gets serious, and can solve it with technologies that are 100 years more adcanced than now.
That’s definitely an option.
Some energy technology decisions we’re making today though like attempts to create fusion reactors, deep geothermal plants and space-based solar energy would, if successful, exacerbate the problem.
There’s also just the matter of interest in contemplating long-term issues.
"There’s also just the matter of interest in contemplating long-term issues."
Fair. Then my guess is that with technological progress and AI timelines, neither of them will be our most pressing problem in the future. But population collapse is even much further away than heat dissipation. I don't see a future in the next 200-300 years where the population falls below, say, 1 billion. (Except for major catastrophic events, of course.)
Wow though, a billion people would still be a radical change. I’m not really up on the latest projections but I understand that in general they are being revised downwards to something like a peak of 9 billion?
Yes sorry, that was not really understandable without context. I wanted to hint at the fact that the world population was much smaller not too long ago, like 1 billion in 1800 or 2.5 billion in 1950 or so. I never understood why some people would consider it a tragedy if the population would gently shrink back to those values, and I had assumed that this is what you meant by "population collapse". And right now it doesn't look like the population will decline quickly after a 9-11 billion peak.
There's a path-dependency though. A big difference between arriving at 1b from 100m vs. from 10b. I don't see a slow natural decline of human population as a disaster, but it will have to be managed, and it's not yet clear we have a way to do this that doesn't involve some unpleasantness.
Economists start to freak out when national populations even flatline.
Because fewer people means less productivity and a decline in GDP. But infinite growth seems to be an impossibility. At some point, the growth curve — population, economy — stops and either levels off or declines. Historically, all civilizations have ended. I don't see why our current high-energy civilization won't end at some point. But I won't be around to see it. In the meantime, I'm enjoying living in a golden age.
Just another externality to tax. The tax would incentivize such activities as greater efficiency in energy use and further reductions in CO2 to re-radiate out the waste heat.
How do you do this technically without generating more waste heat?
I see how we could use solar reflection methods to cut incoming heat from the sun but that would affect the growth of every plant on the planet as well cut the output of photovoltaic solar generation (and who knows what gnarly effects on rainfall etc would ensue). And it would have to be perfectly maintained in perpetuity and constantly tuned to match the growth (or decline) in waste heat.
Everything generates waste heat. That's basic thermodynamics. The questions are "how much, and where do you get rid of it? And weather/climate is a gnarly complex problem. You need to cool the poles MORE than the equatorial region, e.g.
There's probably no good answer, but we could certainly slow down making things worse. All the extreme "solutions" are going to cause major problems...but perhaps some of them will cause fewer (or less severe) problems than they fix.
Yes this is a particularly “colourful” example of thermodynamics in action.
Progressively odd facts about Ransom Eli Olds, who had two lines of cars named after him:
He originally built steam cars, he did not wait for gasoline.
His innovations brought the time to produce a car down to 12 hours. (Ford then brought that down to 90 minutes.)
He enjoyed and popularized racing on Daytona Beach.
He built a mansion full of technological marvels, such as a rotating garage allowing him to drive in and out without reversing. The property was later demolished to make way for an interstate.
His remains were stolen in 1992.
An REO Speedwagon broadcasting polka was used to defeat Russian remotely donated bombs in Vyborg during the Continuation War.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/finnished-stopped-soviet-mines-with-single-polka-song-played-on-repeat.html
Oh, yes, Säkkijärven polkka https://youtu.be/uMszu_VgMfY
Thank you for the link, history is fascinating and I have to say, I would never have imagined "Finnish polka music" and "mines" being used in the same sentence before.
Laudanum (tincture of opium) was quite popular in Victorian times. Queen Victoria herself used it to relieve menstrual cramps and it often crops up in fiction where an otherwise respectable character has a secret habit. Doctor Maturin from the Doctor and The Captain series comes to mind.
Laudanum was banned in the UK in the 20s because of its addictive qualities but I wonder how bad it was compared to, say, alcohol or cigarettes. How did the ill effects compare to those other drugs (liver failure and lung cancer)? It seems like quite a civilised thing to be addicted to if the fictional accounts are anything to go by. I wonder if it still crops up in high society. Is it even a thing any more?
I have repeatedly heard from emigrated Iranians that opium use is not rare in Iran. Opium consumers don't breach the islamic rule against alcohol and people seem to become addicted but not have to inrease their doses wildly.
Maybe I'll go to Iran and give it a try.
Here's a first hand account from the time, de Quincy's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater"
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2040/pg2040-images.html
(I suspect you already know most of this, but for the benefit of anybody else reading...)
1) Wholeheartedly recommend the Nutt analysis for a comparison of the relative harms of various common drugs in the UK (The Lancet 01/11/2010, Fig 2, p 1561: https://www.ias.org.uk/uploads/pdf/News%20stories/dnutt-lancet-011110.pdf ) - sadly no morphine or opium, but heroin is there which (might?) be a reasonable guide/upper-bound..
2) Laudanum is another name for tincture of opium (source: pretty much every popular Victorian author I've ever read..), 'tincture of X' means 'X dissolved in alcohol' (usually as a way of making X into an orally-taken medicine), and thus laudanum is roughly equivalent to a modern morphine solution of reasonable concentration (source: Wikipedia, BNF NICE guidelines)
It's interesting that the article puts alcohol as the most dangerous to others and only slightly less dangerous to self than heroin.
Well yeah, we all know alcohol is awful, but we already tried banning it already, and look how that went.
Thank you, Pjohn. Reading your link now.
I've been obsessed by the idea of opium since reading the paragraph about Fowler in The Quiet American (Michael Caine in the movie). He made it sound so civilised! Greene said it sharpens your mind and makes you hyper-alert with none of the dulling affects of other drugs. Dr Maturin took it when he needed to concentrate. I went hiking in the Burmese Jungle in my youth and our porter bubbled up some opium every time we stopped for a cigarette break. We were all too sensible to try it though he politely offered us some bubbling every time.
I recently had to quit beer and wine for health reasons (I'll be dying soon) and my one try of marijuana sent me to bed with my head spinning. I have a fantasy about giving laudanum a try. I know it'll never happen but a man can dream.
My one experience with opiate painkillers, after getting PTSD, was that they made it go away. It was deeply frightening, and I immediately stopped taking them, because I know it would be very easy for me to become addicted.
I'm told that a shockingly large portion of homeless opioid addicts were victims of childhood sexual abuse; if that produces anything like the symptoms I have, no wonder they like it. And the same goes for the association between Vietnam veterans and heroin.
I have been given prescriptions for narcotic-containing drugs twice, once when I really needed pain relief and once when I did not. In both cases the narcotic was codeine. I was struck by what a good mood it put me in! I felt optimistic, calm, and sociable. I did not have any trouble doing tasks requiring concentration. If you are terminally ill, I recommend you make full use of what drugs have to offer. In the US, hospice is very generous with drugs. Knew of someone in his 30's with an untreatable cancer who was given amphetamine, all kinds of pain relieves, antidepressants, sleep meds -- really anything that made him feel better. Makes sense to me. If you cannot access opium, or get a prescription for codeine, consider buying the latter on the black market.
I had some codeine+tylenol stuff after I had some wisdom teeth removed, and it seemed like the worst of both worlds--it wasn't strong enough to control the pain, but it was plenty strong to make me too stupid to distract myself reading or thinking about anything else.
Something to look forward to! Thank you.
When I had my wisdom teeth out (long time ago), I was given heroic amounts of codeine and I remember thinking "I don't know what the fuss is. Didn't hurt me at all." until the codeine ran out.
The bartender in my local pub says she can get me any drug I like — so I have that to look forward to!
it’s astonishing to me how abruptly the codeine runs out. one is on the way home, everything is fine, I’m being so brave about my oral surgery, literally ten seconds pass and it’s all gone catastrophically pear-shaped.
That didn't happen to me, though I did go through some withdrawal after taking it w or 3 times daily for about 4 days for some pretty bad pain. I don't remember any physical symptoms, just being in a terrible mood -- really gloomy, really irritable.
Can't answer your question but The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is an excellent example of Laudanum in 19th century English literature.
Just bought it. 39p for the Kindle version. Thank you!
Off the top of my head, the biggest problem with the use of laudanum (since it was an opiate and thus used for pain relief and other medicinal purposes) was how lethal it was for babies and infants.
Teething, colicky, crying and otherwise fretful children were commonly dosed up on 'soothing syrups'; the possibility of overdoses was frequent, and having infants addicted to opium was not a healthy course.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26163533/
"Poppy extract accompanied the human infant for more than 3 millenia. Motives for its use included excessive crying, suspected pain, and diarrhea. In antiquity, infantile sleeplessness was regarded as a disease. When treatment with opium was recommended by Galen, Rhazes, and Avicenna, baby sedation made its way into early medical treatises and pediatric instructions. Dabbing maternal nipples with bitter substances and drugging the infant with opium were used to hasten weaning. A freerider of gum lancing, opiates joined the treatment of difficult teething in the 17th century. Foundling hospitals and wet-nurses used them extensively. With industrialization, private use was rampant among the working class. In German-speaking countries, poppy extracts were administered in soups and pacifiers. In English-speaking countries, proprietary drugs containing opium were marketed under names such as soothers, nostrums, anodynes, cordials, preservatives, and specifics and sold at the doorstep or in grocery stores. Opium's toxicity for infants was common knowledge; thousands of cases of lethal intoxication had been reported from antiquity. What is remarkable is that the willingness to use it in infants persisted and that physicians continued to prescribe it for babies. Unregulated trade, and even that protected by governments, led to greatly increased private use of opiates during the 19th century. Intoxication became a significant factor in infant mortality. As late as 1912, the International Hague Convention forced governments to implement legislation that effectively curtailed access to opium and broke the dangerous habit of sedating infants."
https://wellcomecollection.org/stories/the-poor-child-s-nurse
"The reported mortality rates were shocking. Thomas Bull in his ‘Hints to Mothers’ (1854) estimated that three-quarters of all deaths from opium occurred in children under five. One nine-month-old baby overdosed on four drops of laudanum given over a nine-hour period. Henry Chavasse, in ‘Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Offspring’ (1860), concluded that “all quack medicines should be banished from the nursery”."
For adults, it was less risky, but the risk of addiction was real:
https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/morphinomania-in-the-19th-century
"Laudanum was cheap and easily accessible, and so was a popular means of suicide, but it was also unregulated and the cause of many accidental overdoses. However, these were not the only dangers. Medical use often turned into habitual use, and many people began to take the drug recreationally. Opium was cheaper that alcohol, and the working classes saw it as an effective hangover cure. By the 1870s and 1880s addiction was so widespread that a new word to describe the phenomenon entered the English language – ‘morphinomania’, named after Morpheus, the Greek God of sleep and dreams – a rather romanticised name for a dreadful addiction.
These issues were so prevalent that by the early 19th century petitions called for the sale of laudanum to be more strictly regulated. However, it wasn’t until the Pharmacy Act of 1868 that any laws were introduced. At this point, opium was classed as dangerous and sales were restricted, but the Act neglected to include any patented tinctures which included opium as an ingredient, so opium was still widely available. Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was still used to soothe teething pains in children in the UK until the end of the 19th century. Opium continued to be sold over the counter until the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920, and laudanum was a vital part of any home medical kit well into the 20th century."
Sounds like babies messed it up for everyone. 😞
"Many such cases", say all parents
Anyone know any podcasts they can recommend?
Some podcasts I already like are:
Manifold, about tech, China, gene engineering by Steve Hsu.
80k hours, the main EA podcast.
Subject to Change, by Russell Hog on history.
Multipolarity, about geopolitics.
Mine are not on the intellectual level as the rest of you, but I've enjoyed:
Myths & Legends
Weird Medieval Guys, The History of Rome, The Dark Ages Podcast (all about history)
The Team House (interviews with special forces veterans and defense/intel professionals)
Overheard from National Geographic
The Foreign Affairs Interview
Dark Horse Podcast, hosted by Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying.
Both of them made some news by opposing a specific protest staged at Evergreen College in Washington, claiming it was bad for the students (I think it involved having the faculty not teach for one or more days to raise awareness for systemic oppression, but my memory could be flaky). They lost their jobs over it, and many friends, and then gained some. Since then, they've been anti-woke progressive voices. Over the course of their 240+ episodes and Q&A sessions (they take questions from viewers, mostly about their specialty of evolutionary biology), they've gone from anti-woke progressives to pro-mask, pro-COVID vaccine advocates, to anti-mask, anti-COVID vaccine dissidents, interviewing various medical researchers over the course of the series, and arguing in favor of a proper scientific method the entire time (one of their go-to targets for mockery is the phrase "the science", as in "trust").
They recently hosted a Rescue the Republic rally in DC, and what surprised me most is that, despite taking progressive positions on many political issues, they've ended up opposing Harris-Walz, mostly on free speech grounds. The entire series is a fascinating time capsule of what they believed over the past few years.
Probable Causation is a really good social science podcast focused on causal modeling of crime and related stuff.
This Week in Virology (and a bunch of related podcasts) is about virology, typically with a group of academic virologists discussing a couple recent papers.
Both are like attending a journal club with a friend sitting next to you to explain what the weird terms mean.
For something lighter, I enjoyed listening to a bunch of the World of DaaS episodes when I was on a long drive--he interviews some pretty interesting people.
"Econtalk"
"Conversations with Tyler"
They're both wide-ranging and cover a variety of things, not just economics.
I suspect "Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie" is also going to be interesting, but haven't actually listened yet.
I like The Rest Is Entertainment. The pitch is: "Celebrity Gossip delivered by a pair of Oxbridge graduates." It's a good version of that.
Seconding Perun and The Studies Show.
Revolutions by Mike Duncan back catalogue is possible the best history podcast there has ever been, and he has a new spec-fiction thing coming out now. Strong recommend to listen from the beginning.
Well There's your Problem is a engineering disasters comedy podcast, which has given me some of the hardest laughs I've ever experienced in-between existential terror at the uncaring nature of the universe and the build environment. It is LEFT AS FUCK which I enjoy, but even centroids or shit-libs will probably like it, perhaps even conservatives with a strong sense of humor.
Watch Perun if you're interested in the intersection between military tech and geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/@PerunAU
Sam Harris' Making Sense podcast is also excellent and covers a wide range of subjects including the ones you seem interested in, but you must pay for it.
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning. I have been told to stop hawking free gift subscriptions here.
Yeah, that was an unfortunate edge case. He paywalls all the interesting stuff so gift subscriptions are more-than-ordinarily useful.
Marytrmade - controversial history and conservative politics from an interesting angle. He’s one of the first socially conservative, anti immigration types I’ve ever heard arguing in good faith, so even though I disagree with a ton of his opinions I’ve found his arguments useful.
I'll give a negative vote for martymade for a reason other than his opinions: I listened to his episodes on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and it very quickly became clear that basically his entire presentation was drawn from one book, Ronen Bergman's _Rise and Kill First_; it didn't seem like he'd done any serious research at all, despite the podcast being multiple, reasonably long episodes. I didn't finish listening (since I just got the book out of the library and read it myself) so maybe there was another source later, but it struck me as pretty lazy and not really a great sign for the level of depth of research to summarize the whole I/P conflict from the point of view of one book that only focused on a narrow military aspect of it.
It didn't give me much faith that he put in enough effort to reward what I'd get out; his podcast was I suppose a little less time consuming than just reading the book directly but not by nearly enough to give it much value add over just listening to the audiobook of his one source.
Darryl Cooper is great but pro war??? He’s the most anti war person I’ve ever listened to
Darryl Cooper, the guy who said that hitler is in heaven and that the nazi occupation of France is preferable to this year's summer olympics opening ceremony?
And argued to Tucker Carlson that the Holocaust was just an unintended logistical issue, apparently based on one random document where a general suggested they wouldn't be able to feed the Jews so maybe they should just shoot them all first.
https://subscribe.martyrmade.com/p/to-the-perplexed-waudio
Seriously, I forced myself to read this whole thing and there's almost no references in it at all, except that, one Twitter thread, and the widely-panned Human Smoke (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke).
The Holocaust is one of the most documented things in history, so I really question anybody calling themselves a historian that gets something this wrong. I can only assume the motivation here is to invert arguments for supporting Ukraine by suggesting that "Actually we shouldn't have opposed Hitler in the first place!"
While I don’t really have an opinion on whether that’s accurate, do you think that, if it were, the Nazis would seem less evil to you? Like to me, the line of argument “let’s massacre millions of people because keeping them alive would be an inconvenient logistical issue” is wildly evil
Yeah, it's like someone quibbling over whether the Nazis killed 6 million or only 1 million Jews. It's not like you're going to say "well, only a million murders, I guess that's okay then."
Thinking about it you’re definitely right.
Theres some way he disagrees with mainstream geopolitical notions that’s I’ve filed away as hawkish but I can’t actually remember the exact take anymore. Thanks for calling that out.
The dude HATES war which is how you get his wildly controversial opinions that range from “Churchill was wrong to declare war on the Nazis” to “bombing Hiroshima was unjustified and a war crime” to “Israel bombing Gaza after Oct 7 is horrific and a war crime”
Materialism, about materials science
The Studies Show Podcast, about scientific controversies
I wrote a steelmanned version of Degrowth, which I call Catalysis. Would appreciate any and all feedback.
https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/steelmanning-degrowth-the-catalytic
Degrowth as a concept has little to contribute beyond the intuition that using less resources to accomplish the same thing is good. And using fewer resources to accomplish the same task is in fact a form of economic growth!
I don't think a steelmanned Degrowth is against economic growth, but rather reducing society's total resource and energy consumption. Economic growth is only tangentially wrapped up because so much of the current system is reliant on consumption.
I don't think the Catalysis metaphor is adding anything here, the policy prescriptions look like an anodyne mix of 'increase efficiency' and 'reduce waste'. These are generally laudable goals, but lead to either building a motte or immediate disagreement over what counts as "waste". The specific asks all have their merits and costs, but I don't see a (novel) unifying theme.
There's also an undercurrent of sanewashing here: you notably don't consider yourself a degrowther, but confidently speak to what Degrowth is and is not, to the point of an opening claim that "radicals" are "misrepresenting" the movement. I'm always down for an empirical analysis of political/ideological coalitions, but that isn't happening here.
> Yet again, Catalysis isn’t proposing anything new, just a re-framing and re-prioritization of our current system.
Basically, yeah.
What is wrong with sanewashing? If the wide definition of Degrowth is anything that reduces society's total material and energy consumption from 0.01% to 99.9%, everything from "increase efficiency and reduce waste" to "literal anarcho-primitivism," shouldn't efforts be made to steer toward, or at least differentiate, the "generally laudable" paths?
Steelmanning gives a strong argument for a position in order to help an interlocutor understand how one might come to that position, bridging inferential gaps. Sanewashing misrepresents a position in order to convince an interlocutor it is more palatable than it really is. If this were philosophy in a vacuum that might be part of a collaborative process, but this is political - if I put a card-carrying degrowther in charge of the EPA, they're not going with your definition of degrowth.
(Granted, that kind of misrepresentation can be tactically useful in the short run as a tool to gain power. But it's the fragile kind of deception that can't survive its own success, so I'd recommend against it.)
Abolish The Police is a clean example from the recent past: don't come up with a theory for what a movement *should* be and communicate as though that's what the movement *is*.
I think you really need to do an ACX deep dive post on Democratic lawfare and/or the Russia Hoax.
In the cited push back posts, there is this assumption that "Trump did nothing wrong, or at least, uniquely wrong, therefore any prosecution is an abuse of power." Now that's a pretty core assumption that colors everything that comes after. I would love to see do a 10,000 word post on this the same way you did for the evidence for Ivermectin.
Similarly, the idea that the Russian interference in the 2016 election is entirely debunked is a core belief among a lot of people like Ngo. I think a deep dive by ACX of the senate report, the reporting at the time, and the exact claims being made by whom work be illuminating. This seems like something where there is factually a ton of nuance and uncertainty, but political actors on all sides want and have flattened it into a binary.
Well, we had a multi-year investigation by a special counsel and the FBI. They released a report and it's publicly available.
"Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
The efforts in question being the Russian hacking of the DNC and then releasing that information through WikiLeaks, and also the Russian FaceBook ads.
I don't think Trump did nothing illegal.
Statistically, as I understand it, most everyone has done something illegal. There are a lot of laws. E.g., Kamala Harris has admitted to having done marijuana (despite also throwing people in jail for the same).
The problem is that Trump would not have been prosecuted if he hadn't been president. That selective prosecution is the terrible abuse of the legal system. You can't selectively prosecute. It's deeply deeply corrosive to the fundamental principles of justice and law.
Did Trump commit campaign finance crime in New York? Probably, if I'm getting the interpretation right, but it seems tricky. Did he commit 34 separate felonies worth of campaign finance crime? I very much doubt it, and the way the figure gets solemnly invoked online in "Orange Man Bad 34 FELONIES!!!!" shows that its main point is propaganda.
If you heard/read "Joe Schmoe convicted of 34 felonies", you'd probably think Schmoe was a pretty bad guy, even a career criminal: 34 different and separate crimes, wow!
Now how do you think about Schmoe when it's pointed out "No, it's all one crime, the 34 felonies are on technical points"?
I'm going to come right out and say I don't believe E. Jean Carroll, and that's not because I consider Trump to have sterling moral character especially around sex, it's because the story is too much like all the Kavanaugh hysteria stories (I don't mean Blasey Ford here), and for much the same reasons. I don't think Trump helped himself by how he chose to comment on it, but I do find it distasteful that you can be tried for defamation and forced to pay out damages for denying an accusation (I note the case is under appeal). "He raped me!" "That's a lie and you're a liar". "He defamed me by calling me a liar!" "Of course he did, m'lady, and we will punish him for you".
"E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump is the name of two related lawsuits by author E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump, who served as the 45th president of the United States. The two suits resulted in a total of $88.3 million in damages awarded to Carroll; both cases are under appeal. Both cases were presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan and were related to Carroll's accusation from mid-2019 (while Trump was in office) that he sexually assaulted her in late 1995 or early 1996. Trump denied the allegations, prompting Carroll to sue him for defamation in November 2019 (a.k.a. Carroll I).
In November 2022, Carroll filed her second suit against Trump (a.k.a. Carroll II), renewing her claim of defamation and adding a claim of battery under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law allowing sexual-assault victims to file civil suits beyond expired statutes of limitations. This suit went to trial in April 2023. Evidence included testimony from two friends Carroll spoke to after the incident, a photograph of Carroll with Trump in 1987, testimony from two women who had separately accused Trump of sexual assault, footage from the Trump Access Hollywood tape and his October 2022 deposition.[c] A jury verdict in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and ordered him to pay US$5 million in damages."
I thought the Adult Survivors Act was a nice touch: *just* long enough to let Carroll's case (with some others, to be fair) be litigated; I don't know why they only gave a grace period of a year to bring cases, possibly because the state of New York might have been in even bigger trouble if they hadn't put a limit on it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Survivors_Act
"Complaints against State of New York under the ASA were filed in the Court of Claims; as of November 17, 2023, 1,469 claims had been filed in the Court of Claims, mostly naming the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision as a defendant. The many imprisoned and formerly imprisoned women in New York who filed claims under the ASA alleged that guards raped or sexually abused them in prisons and jails. A significant proportion of these ASA claims were raised by former inmates of the Bayview Correctional Facility, which was closed in 2012. A federal survey in 2008 and 2009 found that Bayview had one of the U.S.'s highest rates of prison staff-perpetrated sexual abuse. At least 479 suits filed under the ASA alleged abuse at Rikers Island jail complex."
Why do you keep speculating about court trials when the last time you commented on the Mar A Lago trial you didn't even know about the obstruction of justice charge for Trump intentionally hiding classified documents? Your contributions are all net negative due to being so (likely intentionally) misinformed.
Let me guess - you're a 34 FELONIES!!!! guy, right? 😁
Unhappily for you, it looks like the Specialist Special Counsel to ever Counsel is going to have to wait four years, if he doesn't drop the matter now:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/08/jack-smith-donald-trump-charges-00188461
"In addition to the case in Washington charging Trump with conspiring to block Joe Biden’s inauguration as president following the 2020 election, Smith also brought a criminal case against Trump in Florida over his refusal to return a hoard of classified information he kept at his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office.
Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the Florida case in July, but Smith appealed that decision. He is schedule to file a brief in that appeal on Nov. 15, but so far has taken no action to withdraw or freeze the appeal."
(1) Smith is dropping the subverting election case, looks like
(2) He's not doing anything in regards to the documents, which may mean dropping that too if he drops the election one, otherwise it's more of a consolation prize: you didn't hand back documents, naughty guy!
IIUC, there was significant Russian propaganda, much on surface appearance from a non-Russian source, during the 2016 election. It just wasn't very effective.
The indictment of the Internet Research Agency for their 2016 activity states that they wanted to attack establishment figures, but not Sanders or Trump. By the time of the general, that might look like pro-Republican sentiment, but I don't think it really was - they were agents of chaos more than anything, and they picked the candidates to (attempt to) boost whom they thought would execute that most effectively.
But more than any candidate, they aimed at promoting certain sentiments. Take "Blacktivist", their biggest success by the numbers. It was constant racebaiting and anti-police content, asserting that black people were abandoned by the system, etc. I'm having trouble digging them up, but from what I recall, their posts targeting right-wing chuds were also of the anti-government, anti-authority, libertarian variety. Their principal goal was less boosting a candidate or party; it was more stoking rage, division, cynicism, and chaos.
It's been a long time since I dug into it, but I believe this is correct. Russia supported Trump independently and made offers of direct cooperation, but the campaign refused (since that would have been illegal). Trump was happy to get their indirect support, hence the "if you're listening, Russia" comment during the campaign, but none of it crossed the line into illegality.
(Although I saw people in the comments of the endorsement post saying "Oh sure, nothing the Harris campaign is doing is *illegal*, but that doesn't mean she isn't a threat", so perhaps they shouldn't ignore the Russia connection just because nothing illegal happened.)
Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort famously had a meeting with a Russian lawyer which he was told was "part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump" to which Jr. responded in part "if it's what you say I love it". Manafort was campaign manager at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting
It is absolutely not true that the campaign refused Russian support on the basis that it was illegal. They were eager to get it. Trump himself later said it was something anybody would have done.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-son-s-trump-tower-meeting-russians-meant-get-n897761
In the Mueller report he declined to charge Jr. et al. because he would have had to prove that they knew it was illegal at the time and also somehow assign a monetary value to hypothetical information.
Is it illegal? The Russians offered information (that they had the legal right to give), and Trump didn't decline. The bit you are quoting had no quid pro-quo and explicitly didn't go anywhere... Further, "the Office found no documentary evidence showing that [Trump] was made aware of the meeting--or its Russian connection-before it occurred"
In particular "After the election , Veselnitskaya made additional efforts to follow up on the meeting, but the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
Contrast this behavior with Scott sharing (last open links post) illegally-obtained anti-republican information (the JD Vance dossier) that is allegedly leaked by Iranian agents...
Hm, since I am not living in the US I have never looked into those things. But are there no deep dives into the topic already? You mention a senate report, and surely there are other extensive sources?
Scott's deep dives are great, but they are best when they are about factual questions, not about questions of the kind "was the way that person X acted good or bad?".
I am not asking for a "good" or "bad" deep dive. Scott is very good at taking an emotional/qualitative claim and breaking it down into objective factual pieces with strict definitions.
He is great at taking complex/nebulous questions and putting them into a rational framework.
100% agree. I’m constantly astounded at the people who claim the Mueller report found that Trump did nothing wrong.
I mean, it does say, "the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities."
Russia definitely interfered. Much like Iran is currently potentially interfering (with Scott actively sharing documents they are alleged to have hacked!).
To me if you just take the stuff that happened out in the open or that has been admitted to by the people who did them, then it should be seen as a huge scandal.
Most prominently, someone emailed the trump campaign people saying that they were reaching out as part of the Russian government's efforts to get trump elected, they had dirt on Hillary, and they wanted to have a meeting to discuss what the trump campaign could give them.
That, right there, is at least the attempt at collusion. If 10 years ago you described that to someone, without naming the candidate/party, it would be seen as an obvious career-ending scandal.
And this isn't according to anonymous sources or Rachel Maddow ... Trump Jr personally tweeted out screenshots of the emails!
Is this information in the Muller report? Can you give me a direct quote or page number?
I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on this issue, but "someone emailed the Trump campaign saying...they wanted to have a meeting" can't possibly be an attempt at collusion by the Trump campaign, unless you also have evidence of a response by them agreeing. It certainly can't be a "career-ending scandal" - if it were, we'd be handing Russia the power to end any politician's career just by hitting "send"!
Again, I won't claim that the facts look good for Trump; but regardless, I think you might be seeing your biases rather than the facts here.
Sorry, got distracted while writing that but to be clear, the trump campaign responded positively to the request and then they had a meeting.
Gotcha, yeah that would definitely resolve my concern in the comment above. Thanks for clarifying.
To be clear, are you referring to the Don Jr email transcript preceding the Trump Tower meeting? If so, I don't recall it being quite so clear-cut as setting up a meeting "...to discuss what the trump campaign could give them." IIRC, there was an offer of assistance, receptiveness to it, and a meeting, but nothing extended the other way. (Not that the emails as they exist weren't damning, but it matters a LOT whether there's evidence of a quid pro quo.)
That one was a real wake-up call for me; I was in the SSC CW threads arguing about various legal investigations, the report dropped, and.... nobody read it. Oh, folks kept *talking* about it, but the Mueller report in particular is a gem in that the vast majority of the talking points are resolved in either the introduction or the table of contents.
Clicking links and reading primary sources is overpowered, and the delta between a media diet that does v. doesn't grows quite large, quickly!
Yeah, the good old - "if it wasn't a hoax, then there would have been real wrongdoing and he'd have been prosecuted for something coming out of it."
Pairs exceptionally well with "you can't prosecute him for anything, because if you do then *you're* the bigger threat to democracy."
it didn't find a pee tape, therefore everything about russia is a hoax
Can somebody help me understand Silicon Valley's "pivot to the right/GOP" as Ngo calls it? Everything I read seems frustratingly imprecise.
1) How was the campaign contribution data in the FT article/ Ngo's post generated/weighted https://www.ft.com/content/29426c31-b8f9-49da-bc8b-e6c860935694 . It doesn't explain in the article.
2) Does the story actually look like: "a rightward shift of the whole distribution", or does it look more like: "right-leaning SV people gaining more power/influence (Thiel/Vance)"; or "SV execs and engineers are diverging more/SV is becoming politically polarised"?
My understanding is, roughly, that at some point in the last decade, the NYT and some other mainstream news sources decided to go after the tech industry.
https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192
This led to increasing numbers of new stories that were slanted against tech. In the past, the wealthy tech elite had been able to integrate with the mainstream left elite by making donations, supporting the correct (Democratic) politicians, and so forth. But now it seemed that no matter what they tried, they were being vilified. And with the rise of the identitarian left, who were implacable foes of various categories that the wealthy tech elite tended to fit into, it became clear that the modern left was hostile to everything that made the tech industry work. Large stable companies could survive while being aligned with the left, but no one who valued moving quickly (with or without breaking things) could fail to see the problem.
So to answer 2, I'd say that the story is more like your third option. Tech workers are becoming polarized, and a disproportionate number are being polarized to the right, and more so the richer and more powerful they are.
I'm addition to other factors, I feel like there was a time when big tech companies were held hostage by a tiny minority of their loudest and most left wing employees. This dynamic has changed, the employer-employee relationship has flipped back towards the employer, and many of the most troublesome employees were the first be be let go once the layoffs started. So groups of far left employees mobilizing against their own companies is no longer a big thing.
Overall I don't think the composition has changed much but the left is a little quieter and the right is a little louder.
#2 No one knows. To the best of my knowledge there's no general surveys of tech workers or Silicon Valley so...everyone is kinda just going off Musk and Thiel and vibes. To be fair, Zuckerberg and Bezos have both walked back a bit from the left.
SV was always filled with grey tribe libertarians. Even now, looking at what Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen are putting out, it looks a lot more like a cry against regulation than anything coming out of the right. And given the dynamics of this election, they've lumped themselves (but also have been pushed there by progressives outputting years of anti-tech rhetoric) with the red tribe.
*PG had endorsed Harris, but he's spoken out against anti-free speech progressives for years now.
Edit: Also something about the overton window where advocating freedom of speech stopped being seen as a democratic/progressive cause, thereby making it by default a republican/conservative cause maybe?
I feel like the Republicans and Democrats are flipping on lots of things. It is interesting!
From one of the linked responses to ACX's anti-endorsement:
<<What about January 6? That was a riot, never truly investigated, probably instigated by the Left, possibly even with FBI help. Who benefited from it? Who *could* have benefited from it? The riot cut off the planned debate on whether the election was stolen, and gave the Democrats a cudgel to use for 4 years. See https://www.unz.com/article/remembering-the-reichstag-fire/ . >>
I would have expected higher quality links from ACX.
I will just link to Huemer's post about this. Jan 6 and shenanigans around it weren't a mere "riot".
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/i-dont-care-about-the-issues
Yeah. I have heterodox views on Jan 6, but while I don't think it implausible that there were FBI agents involved, or provocateurs from the government or organized leftist groups, I've never seen any evidence at all. Zero. It's all been pure speculation. And on the Internet it's way too easy to go "it would be convenient if X were true, therefore I will write like X is true, and hope that someone else provides the evidence later".
And to head off responses, I'll just drop this, in the hopes that more people spend 6 hours watching primary sources:
https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/
Personally, I think the Democrats are a far greater threat to democracy than the Republicans but +1 I didn't think the linked AXC anti-endorsement was well written or made it's points well.
This sort of "it was a false flag" shit would perhaps be more convincing if the current Republican candidate for president wasn't going around defending the riot and attacking the police who fought against it!
Or is trump part of the false flag operation?
Well, we know for sure that extreme political groups (even harmless ones) are heavily infiltrated by undercover agents in both the US and the UK.
So, whenever anything bad happens, people will wonder: actual protestors, or FBI agents pretending to be protestors?
The fiction trope of the anarchist group that is entirely undercover cops and zero actual anarchists is pretty old by now.
I'm not too versed on the topic but the counterpoint sems trivial and also likely true: the vast majority were almost certainly just ordinary protesters, no better or worse than any other election-related protesters in recent history, but a small minority of extremists escalated the protest into a riot. This is my model for most riots as well: e.g. 2020 BLM protests where the black block shows up and starts breaking windows and throwing fisticuffs at police, causing a counterreaction by the police (rubber bullets, teargas, etc.), causing a counterreaction by protesters, etc. etc. The average BLM protester probably does not expect to set a patrol car on fire, they mostly expect to march and shout and make themselves heard and just get caught up in the momentum. Same with the capitol protesters.
The "it was a false flag" thing I think isn't completely baseless. There's a ladder of escalating statements in terms of believable-to-less-believable, but mostly there are questions we will surely never get the answers to, such as "to what extent did congress know a protest was going to happen and chose strategically not to respond with sufficient police presence?" and "to what extent did intelligence services know about this protest and what did they do to try to stop it" and "to what extent were FBI agents embedded in the crowds at the protest and what exactly did they do during this time". The worldview that says "congress knew it was going to happen but let it happen to make Trump look bad, not realizing how bad it would be", and "the FBI knew about it, they were embedded in the far-right groups in the crowd, and egged them on to try to entrap the other protesters on insurrection charges." which is perfectly believable and has some minor supporting evidence. I don't think the default assumption should be "the FBI had zero involvement and congress knew nothing about it before the fact".
"I'm not too versed on the topic but the counterpoint seems trivial and also likely true: the vast majority were almost certainly just ordinary protesters, no better or worse than any other election-related protesters in recent history, but a small minority of extremists escalated the protest into a riot"
Maybe, maybe not, but while this might affect your view of individual prosecutions, I don't think it does anything to change how you should view trump in light of it. He wasn't in it for "mostly peaceful" demonstrations, he wanted a violent insurrection against Congress.
I haven't seen any reason to think that Congress knew about it, or the FBI "egged it on", etc. It's been awhile since I looked at these claims but never have seen any that were at all convincing. Everyone saw this at the time, and the revisionist histories are more correlated with trump being rehabilitated as a candidate than any new information that arose (i.e. people are reevaluating Jan 6 because they want to support trump and not the other way around).
Only exception is the claim that there were federal agents in the crowd ... but who were there because they were pro-trump "stop the steal" people who were part of the riot, not because they were trying to undermine it!
Re ladder of escalating statements, just because you can make a ladder doesn't mean that the truth must be somewhere in the middle of it. I.e. regarding whether the moon landing was real, there's a ladder of escalating statements, from "it was mostly above board" to "it was faked" to "the entire cold war was faked" to "all of world history before 1980 was faked and there's a huge conspiracy to hide that fact among all humans then alive". Truth must be somewhere in the middle!
Given that Trump specifically called for an end to the violence, I think it's much safer to say that he did *not* want a violent insurrection against Congress, and anyone who asserts that either missed him saying that or is hoping other people do.
Why did he wait 3 hours after the Capitol was breached to call for an end to the violence? Why did he also say Pence failed them and didn't have the courage to do what was right?
The obvious reason I see for waiting three hours is that he simply wasn't aware of how serious the problem was until then, possibly exacerbated by (1) focusing on vote count issues elsewhere and (2) information about the protest was from sources he knows are inclined to exaggerate.
As for Pence, it seems to me perfectly in line with Trump's epistemology to believe that the election truly *was* being defrauded, and to refuse to certify the results of a fraudulent election would meet a great deal of opposition and nevertheless be the right thing to do.
Neither thing involves violence.
The reason I mention a ladder of statements is because the ones near the bottom are pretty trivially true and easily believable.
Individual unfair prosecutions may not change how I view Trump, but they *do* change how I view the Democrats! Both the prosecutions and the riot are sharp escalations of previous norms.
I'm thankful for Scott for linking to Rasmussen's post because it's a study in sloppy thinking and rhetoric as thin as the gruel they served prisoners in Gulag.
Im now reading Poor Charlie's Almanac, and I'm reminded of his repeated injunctions against ideology: "If you get a lot of heavy ideology young, and then you start expressing it, _you are really locking your brain into a very unfortunate pattern._"
It's frightening to see sharp, capable minds get sucked into a tarpit of sloppy thinking--with emphasis on sloppy thinking and not just the conclusions they reach. It's like seeing healthy gauge out their eyes.
Yes, this is how we see you too...
I stopped reading the post right there. Maybe that's bad, but I couldn't stomach it. He compared it to the reichstag fire! I mean come on, it basically disqualifies the entire opinion. Of course January 6th isn't that bad if you think it's a false flag.
Thank you. *I don't care about the issues* either. From the link:
> This is not a small matter. This is the first time any U.S. President has done anything remotely like this. These were not just a few offhand remarks, or passing whims. This was a months-long, conscious plan to defy the election results. If this sort of thing were allowed, that would end democracy. That’s not an exaggeration. The one thing you need in order to have democracy is that people follow election results.
Oh my god, you are that Amanda, of Two Arms and a Head review fame. Thanks for your comment. I couldn’t find your blog/substack but I guess you do have a username.
To add - as you can probably guess from the review, the whole "family and life planning" spectrum (contraception -> IVF -> embryo selection -> stem cell/genetics research -> abortion -> MAiD) are my top issues. By a very wide margin.
Mike Pence is an old school evangelical Christian who is opposed to that entire spectrum.
If Mike Pence were standing in front of me right now, I would hug him, with tears in my eyes, for putting our country first on January 6th. I'm lucky that Harris is extremely pro-reproductive rights, so I didn't mind voting for her, but if this were Trump vs. Pence instead, I would vote for Pence in a heartbeat. Our country comes first.
Thanks! Substack automatically gave me a "blog"/domain as part of having a Substack account, but I haven't published anything yet. But thanks for subscribing!
I *want* someone to change my feelings about the bright red flag that were Trump's transparent attempt to change the results of the 2020 election. Rasmussen's post was not it. It brushes away all of the worst behavior as if it were natural to question the election without evidence, the precedent that it has set in modern times, the fact that Trump's followers take his words literally and not as poetry. It was some of the worst case of motivated reasoning and intellectually dishonest post linked to from this blog.
I've lived under the communist gun, under authoritarian regimes and armed political mobs doing as they please. I hate all of those and thought I'd escaped, but after seeing every line crossed by Trump ignored by the GOP, I'm not sure what the party and it's fanatics won't allow. As long as the choice isn't between Trump and AOC, I don't even have to think about it.
> As long as the choice isn't between Trump and AOC, I don't even have to think about it.
That might even be unfair to AOC these days- my sense is she's chilled out a fair bit in the time she's actually been in government having to actually make decisions with practical consequences. The DSA refused to endorse her this year which seems to me like a good sign.
Same here. She's getting downright pragmatic.
Yeah. Rasmusen also says you can't criticise Trump claiming the election was stolen, because you can't definitively prove the election wasn't stolen (the good old "just asking questions" defense). I guess if you want to make a show of intellectual honesty by linking to the attempted refutations of your article, you have to work with the attempts you get, not the ones you wish you'd get.
I was just about to write the very same thing. Thanks for crossing that task off my to-do list.
Claiming without evidence that the left and the FBI colluded in the January 6 events is about as much conspiracy theory as you are ever likely to get.
I appreciate that different views are signal-boosted on ACX, but some minimum level of connection to reality should be maintained.
i stopped reading at that exact same line. clearly not the intented audience
Haha thank you for the generous comment. :-)
Don't also forget the bonkers analogy to the Reichstag fire.
Yudkowsky long time ago wrote "Politics is the Mind Killer" and maybe it's relevant here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer
(Of course, you always think politics is killing someone else's mind - never your own.)
In that vein, I am sympathetic to concerns about cancel culture, institutions being leftist monocultures and what not but I just don't think it exonerates Trump and his faults.
I recently wrote a piece about how a lot of my philosophical pursuits are driven by whatever I happen to find funny https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/punchlines-and-paradigms?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios I’m curious: for anyone here who dabbles in philosophy, are any of you driven strongly by aesthetic values besides truth? (Some, like elegance, might correlate with truth, even if they’re conceptually distinct.)
Hmm... I'd vaguely remembered hearing of (and ChatGPT o1 helped me locate) a couple of books by Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein,
- Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
- Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explore Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between
- Aristotle and an Aardvark Go To Washington: Understanding Political Doublespeak Through Philosophy and Jokes
had you heard of them? If you've read one or more, are they along the lines of your interests, and what did you think of them?
https://www.amazon.com/Books-Daniel-Klein-Thomas-Cathcart/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3ADaniel+Klein+Thomas+Cathcart
I think a case can be made for using aesthetic values as a guide for ethics/morality. Seems to me that the big named systems like utilitarianism, deontology, consequentialism all have defects or points of failure.
Absolutely. I'm a Schopenhauer fan, because his dissing of Hegel is so much fun, his views on love, sex and marriage are hilarious, and his "Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life" are good advice -- but his idea of seeing the world as "will and representation" (sorry, the English translation doesn't fit 100%) feels somewhat unfalsifiable to me ("not even wrong" - Wolfgang Pauli), so basically worthless.
I find Hegel an indecipherable hack, because Schopenhauer says so, and Nietzsche is an evil, stupid idiot, but at least I'm not alone: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/149
I made a similar admission in a post on ACX a while back. I don't think it's incompatible with striving to be honest; but the more you look at fundamental questions, the more you find that all sorts of things can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways, and the history of human thought seems to validate this, in the form of the continued existence of radically different worldviews. So yes, aesthetics, and also fun, why not.
Also, what is Ockham's razor if not an aesthetic preference?
I don't think philosophical claims are truth-apt, so as far as I'm concerned it's aesthetics all the way down.
Huh? Is this just another "philosophy is useless" or are you saying something more interesting? What do you mean by "philosophical claims are [not] truth-apt"?
(And you realise there are a *lot* of very different kinds of claims that can be called philosophical...?)
Basically what Anlam Kuyusu said.
[If you're familiar with expressivism in metaethics, it's essentially a version of that, applied to all philosophical claims rather than just ethical ones. My position here is close to that of Huw Price in "Facts and the Function of Truth." Briefly: I see an expressivist analysis as offering the best fundamental account of how language works. Within this analysis, predicating "truth-aptness" of claims within a particular domain of discourse can be understood as offering either (i) an empirically-based sociological description of how people conduct discourse within that domain, or (ii) an exhortation to conduct discourse in that domain in accordance with certain aspirational standards. I don't think the observed behavior of professional philosophers is consistent with (i), and my aspirations for what philosophy should look like aren't consistent with (ii). Thus, I say "philosophical claims are not truth-apt."]
My claim is definitely not that "philosophy is useless." Precisely the opposite, in fact. Philosophy risks becoming useless when philosophers spend too much time worrying about whether their claims are "true." Abandoning the assumption that discovering truths is the central goal of philosophy frees philosophers to do much more interesting work.
>"(And you realise there are a *lot* of very different kinds of claims that can be called philosophical...?)"
Strictly speaking, I don't think there are "philosophical claims." Any claim can be viewed philosophically if we choose to do so. What I'm saying here is that "viewing a claim philosophically" involves (among other things) a commitment to evaluating it by standards other than truth and falsity.
>What do you mean by "philosophical claims are [not] truth-apt"?
Well certain sentences can't be true or false - as in commands like "get up and go to the gym" or cheers like "boo Jones Act", or perhaps non-rhetorical questions. So those sentences aren't truth-apt.
So I'm guessing the commenter cares more about how certain philosophical statements make him feel (close to the way a novel would) more than their truth or falsity? I don't know. Strictly speaking, I think philosophical claims have truth-aptitude.
You reminded me of this https://aeon.co/essays/philosophical-theories-are-like-good-stories-margaret-macdonald
It was surprising to me that you didn't even mention AI in your endorsement, because Kamala Harris wrote the executive order on AI, and JD Vance is basically e/acc, as far as I can tell.
A combination of most of the analysis I would want to talk about not being published yet (I'm working on it!), the fact that a lot of people find that actively offputting, and me being worried about politicizing AI too much.
I can follow your reasoning but am sad to see you admit to self-censoring because of how you might make others think. I get that from a utilitarian perspective it makes sense, given your incredible influence, but it does mean I will find it harder to trust that what you write is really what you think, as opposed to something you are writing as part of an influence campaign. Perhaps you already do this and I missed it before.
Through the long infant hours like days
He built one tower in vain —
Piled up small stones to make a town,
And evermore the stones fell down,
And he piled them up again.
Seeing every stupid Trump quip distorted into nascent Pol Pot speak & then listening to Megyn Kelly riffing for 10 minutes on how Biden pretending to eat a baby's foot makes me wonder how it feels to be an ordinary voter over there. I wish you all well, however you choose.
The weird thing is that we regularly have both:
a. Constant dumb outrage/scandal stories that involve Trump being a standard-issue Republican or being a big a--hole on Twitter or something. These often involve carefully excerpted, edited, or sometimes made-up quotes to sex up the story.
b. Occasional actual outrageous or scandalous stuff Trump does, which then blend into the endless dumb scandal stories and go mostly unnoticed.
The same happens for other politicians, too, but putting Trump's name in your headline probably doubles your number of clicks, so everyone has a big incentive to do the Trump outrage stories.
It feels TERRIBLE, at least to me.
To me, it suggests that the American appetite for entertainment is vast. With mayyybe a few people here and there who are finally sated and wondering where the more serious stuff is.
Well, as someone who is going to vote tomorrow, (I considered but missed early voting), at least we get to pick our poison. Strychnine, cyanide, strychnine, cyanide, decisions, decisions... what a choice...
It's so weird. Like, I flag his comments in a Megyn Kelly interview that he wants to bomb Mexican cartels regardless of Mexico's agreement, and his fans tell me that I shouldn't take him seriously.
And I voted for the guy in '16
Isn't this what Obama successfully did with drone strikes in the middle east?
Historically, I believe the US has even done this form of drug cartel prosecution before. My understanding is that when Kiki Camarena was killed in Mexico, the US basically ignored Mexico law (/ gave Mexico no option to say no) in going after the gangs.
It has not occurred to you that bombing a country with whom we share a border and have a trade agreement is a wee bit different from doing drone strikes in the middle east?
Well... what's the worst that could happen? The US has no reason to tolerate the criminal elements infesting Mexico. Make it clear to the Mexican population that their existence is contingent on them not causing problems for us. They can kill each other or sell drugs to other countries as much as they want, but as soon as their presence is felt in the states... the military comes to collect what is owed.
This is one of those "thank God you will probably never get anywhere near power" comments.
> Well... what's the worst that could happen?
I guess a second Mexican-American war?
We had a second Iraq war to finish the job, why not a second Mexican-American war to finish the annexation? I think our strategic tequila reserve is getting low...
Refresh my memory, what job did the second Iraq war finish and when was it finished?
Saddam is dead, his regime is gone. Those who foolishly defied Bush I were brought low by his son.
Building a western democracy in the area was always futile. The best we could do is cut down the diseased tree and hope that whatever grows back would be better.
Defeating Saddam Hussein, and December 13 2003?
(I think I know what you meant, and yes, the answers were "stable, peaceful Iraqi government" and "well... not just yet". But I recall people salty about Desert Storm because we let that bastard go free.)
Yeah, we absolutely *could* have set the stage for Desert Storm II as a punitive raid with the victory condition of "Get rid of the Saddam regime and be home by Christmas". But we didn't. And we spent enough blood and treasure on the more expansive nation-building mission that we were going to be judged by that standard.
The last one went really, really well for the US - we even captured their capitol. The catch is that, since then, they had Benito Juarez fix the place way up. The US could still take 'em militarily, but oh, the cost.
Meanwhile, that's 62 more senators and probably another couple hundred Representatives unless we did some major merging. OTOH, it's a uniquely novel way to address illegal immigration...
Yeah, as I understand it, the main problem with us defeating Mexico is deciding what to do with it afterwards.
There was an old Far Side cartoon, with the caption something like: "but if we shoot it, it'll be brontosaurus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next two months".
Yeah, when has invading a third-world country to destroy a criminal organization ever gone wrong for the US?
>Make it clear to the Mexican population that their existence is contingent on ...
It seems to me that legalizing drugs would be a more moral solution than committing mass atrocities against the Mexican population.
No moral solution if it leads to even more death and crippling addiction among the American population, as it very well might.
Why is that a less moral outcome than the mass atrocities that OP seems to be advocating?
How is bombing a cartel an atrocity? That's silly. He won't do it, and probably can't - it's not like the cartels have a big HQ building with a sign on the top. Competition between them has hardened their org structure against casual surveillance. But if it could be done, it'd hardly be atrocious.
I, too, read _Clear and Present Danger_.
If you don't have an obvious target you can cleanly blow up without collateral, there are two possible courses of action:
1. Don't bomb them.
2. Pick targets that you *can't* take out cleanly, and accept that you're going to catch a lot of innocent people in the blast radius.
When OP says they want to "Make it clear to the Mexican population that their existence is contingent on them not causing problems for us," that doesn't sound like they're going to shrug and say "oh well, guess we can't actually follow through on this threat without killing innocent people." That sounds like they want to take the second option.
Possible, for sure. I'd read him differently. I could be wrong about that part.
It isn't. But OP said that the existence of the Mexican population was at stake, not the existence of the cartels.
Possible, for sure. I'd read him differently. I could be wrong about that part.
What's the worst case?
Fentanyl is manufactured in basements, backyards, and barnyards in locales like the hills of Sinaloa. These labs are well hidden. Bombing them accurately will require extraordinary intelligence, and that intelligence will often be wrong. Even when correct, there will be collateral casualties. We’ll undoubtedly kill a lot of innocent people, just as we have in the war on terrorism.
This will turn the Mexican population (more) against us. U.S. troops will be surrounded by an increasingly hostile population. The labs we do destroy will be quickly replaced with new ones. The cartel leaders we take out will quickly be replaced too, but only after the requisite bloody turf wars, which will bring more death and casualties.
Even drug cartels have a code. They go out of their way to avoid harming U.S. law enforcement, and they don’t target U.S. citizens. When underlings have violated this code, or when U.S. citizens have suffered collateral harm, the cartels have bent over backwards to make amends. The last thing they want is to bring the full force and weight of the U.S. government upon themselves.
Cartels avoid U.S. casualties because they want to remain in operation. If they know the United States is sending its military to kill them, there’s no incentive to adhere to the code. They’re likely to lash out — against U.S. law enforcement, U.S. citizens, possibly U.S. politicians.
The ongoing soft civil war in Mexico would then spill across the border. And that would only draw us further in.
>Hamas had a strategy to lure Israel into an urban war and generate enough suffering that the world would pressure Israel to leave Hamas alone to do it again and again
Case in point: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/09/us/mexico-matamoros-americans-kidnapped-thursday/index.html
Also, the trade war from shutting down the border would cost $210 billion per year. Hope you like inflation!
This is based on twentieth-century thinking. If you think more traditionally, shifting the border South (i.e., conquering large parts of Mexico) should pay for itself.
Conquest hasn't paid for itself since WWI, probably earlier. It makes economic sense when you're an agrarian empire, since your wealth is mostly farmland and conquest gets you more land and more slaves to work it. But in an industrial empire, you get your wealth mostly from *capital* - cities, factories, infrastructure, educated citizens. War usually destroys that infrastructure, and slavery isn't an option for many reasons.
Even if the war goes smoothly and doesn't turn into a horrible money-sucking insurgency, I don't see how moving the Mexican border turns into profit.
(And if the answer is "now you can collect taxes from former Mexican citizens", dare I suggest immigration reform instead?)
>Conquest hasn't paid for itself since WWI, probably earlier.
_Mostly_ agreed. Occasionally an oil field creates an exception (or Iraq and Venezuela at least _think_ they create exceptions).
North Mexico's farmland isn't really farmland so much as it's sparse ranchland and mountains, but Sonora, just south of Arizona, has some of the richest known lithium deposits in the world.
Many Thanks! Hmm, I wonder if anyone has run the numbers on conquering that area - albeit I'll bet that any estimates of the costs of such a conquest will turn out to be severely underestimated... I'll bet the real numbers will come out in favor of trade rather than conquest.
I am hoping for the best outcome for tomorrow’s election: that, simply because it’s over one way or the other, I recover from my election fever and regain focus on less sterile things.
I will be watching to see if either candidate declares victory the night of the 5th before the counting is done, that will be a bad sign.
I feel it is rather optimistic to think it will all be over as soon as November 6th. Best gird yourself to wait it out another few weeks, whatever the outcome.
I agree that it is optimistic to expect things will be settled by November 6th (but still worth hoping for, right?). Which is why I’m hoping for a slightly easier target – that, since the election is over (in the sense that very few people can do anything about it any more and that, precisely, all there is to do is wait), I will lose motivation to think about it or discuss it, and make better use of these newly-freed “cognitive resources”.
I wrote an essay diving deep into the ideology of memecoins - https://www.brightmirror.co/p/the-ideology-of-memecoins
As the crypto bull market begins and everyone starts talking about these, read the essay before you decide to invest all your life savings into a cute animal memecoin.
Scott quotes Richard Ngo on X, stating:
[Scott misses that] 1. The biggest story of the election is the massive realignment of US political coalitions. 2. Experience shows Trump’s claims should be taken seriously but not literally. 3. Most elite institutions remain leftist monocultures.
For my part, I’ve held (1), the realignment thesis, for years. Realignment: Trump conquered the Republican Party from within and took it back from free trade/free immigration/interventionism, toward the US median/working class voter, by instead going for protectionism/control of illegal immigration/disengagement from non-vital wars.
...Which, in good old median voter-fashion is leading the Democratic party to scramble back also, rightly fearing to lose their traditional voter-base to the Republicans. (Cue Biden’s industrial policy/Build Back Better.) Perhaps the Democrats have not been scrambling back fast enough to avoid losing tomorrow, but the tendency is there.
However, this is easy to align with a thesis that Trump should be taken more serious this time (contrary to (2)). Why? Because much more is at stake for him. These last four years has shown him that there are people out there set on ruining him through the courts. (Which is understandable since he attempted a coup in 2020, but not particularly clever if he now none the less wins.)
...Due to this experience, he has a much stronger incentive that during 2016-20 to influence the legal apparatus and the voting system during his upcoming four year reign, to prevent them from coming after him after 2028. Which will have as a long-term effect to politicise the courts and the voting system, tilting the US further toward a Latin American political culture. A new Trump reign is likely to serve as a catalyst in this long-ongoing process. That's how it is.
As for (3) elite institution monoculture: That it what academia in particular looks like from the outside, but not from the inside. (Ok, I write from Europe, but the media image of academia is rather similar.) The appearance of a monoculture emerges because the activists/ideologists are those who carry drama, and who media therefore are interested in. While the thousands upon thousands on regular academics spend their waking hours just quietly going about their work, i.e. to publish in mostly unknown publications. They have to, in order not to perish.
To your comment on (3), as a US academic it seems like US academia is far more of a monoculture than Europe tends to be. When I’ve gone to European conferences, I’ve encountered people with a diverse spectrum of views who were comfortable saying them. Back home, expressing anything other than strict left-of-center opinion is asking to be made a pariah if not ousted, and that goes to left-of-the-democrats for the liberal arts.
"...Due to this experience, he has a much stronger incentive that during 2016-20 to influence the legal apparatus and the voting system during his upcoming four year reign, to prevent them from coming after him after 2028."
After 2028 Democrats will gain little political benefit from prosecuting Trump (if anything, they'll incur a political cost), and therefore won't do so. I expect this is pretty clear to all the players involved.
"As for (3) elite institution monoculture: That it what academia in particular looks like from the outside, but not from the inside.... The appearance of a monoculture emerges because the activists/ideologists are those who carry drama, and who media therefore are interested in."
Are you denying that polls of US university professors show them to very strongly favor Democrats?
Also, even if they secretly had more diverse views than it seems, the important part is how their views affect institutional culture, and if only one type of view is defended publicly then the institutional culture is a monoculture.
>Are you denying that polls of US university professors show them to very strongly favor Democrats?
>Also, even if they secretly had more diverse views than it seems, the important part is how their views affect institutional culture, and if only one type of view is defended publicly then the institutional culture is a monoculture.
Yup, the universities have now taken a role as indoctrination mills. This pathology has been festering for decades. I fear it is going to take decades to reverse.
> After 2028 Democrats will gain little political benefit from prosecuting Trump (if anything, they'll incur a political cost), and therefore won't do so. I expect this is pretty clear to all the players involved.
Hwat? If they went "we won, now it's time to drop all the cases," that would inflict massive political costs. Both directly (normies who aren't paying attention will think that it was lawfare), and indirectly (the whole point of prosecuting Trump is to dissuade other people from trying to do a coup). If you mean they wouldn't come up with any fresh cases... I dunno, maybe, but the ongoing cases are on quite solid and serious factual backing AFAICT.
The original comment was about after 2028, when the ongoing cases will no longer be relevant one way or the other.
I agree that the incentive for Democrats to go after Trump legally after 2028 is less. However, the risk is there, and if Trump is risk-averse (the stakes are high from his perspective) he may want to err on the safe side.
That said, and considering the importance for the world of keeping the US a clear-cut democracy, I hope you are right that Trump has “ice in his stomach” (as we say up here) and abstains from influencing the legal and voting system while in power, “just in case”.
Concerning (3) yes, I know the stats on academics slanting Democrat in the US. My personal (and therefore anecdotal) experience, though, is that they are run-of-the-mill Democrats, not activist ideologists. The same goes for the admittedly few Republican academics I know. Both tend to be political pragmatists, not firebrands.
Brian Leiter (writing Leiter Reports) is perhaps an example of a typical Democratic-leaning academic – being equally crabby in both “activist” directions. (Although by using much of his time to maintain a blog, he is selected among those more engaged in day-to-day politics than the average academic.)
Is Trump risk-averse, though? A risk-averse person wouldn’t have attempted the 2016 presidential run as a complete outsider. A risk-averse person would have stayed down when they realized the bullets barely missed their brain. A risk-averse person might have been extra-scrupulous to make it harder to prosecute them when they were out of office (assuming that fully complying with the law is possible, which might not be correct – although it feels like what he’s prosecuted for could have been avoided easily enough). But of course, even with comparable odds and payoffs, one might be more at ease with certain types of risks and not others.
Honestly, I feel like you're all making the bold assumption that Trump is capable of making proper risk-reward assessments.
Yup, there is that problem... I wonder what fraction of GOP voters are hoping for a Trump '24, 25th in '25 / Vance '25 outcome...
The physical and social sciences are the best ways we know how to learn important things about the world. They are massively skewed in political outlook, and there are a lot of visible examples of research being suppressed and researchers suffering career consequences for research that goes too strongly against the dominant political beliefs in academia. That's one reason to be very unhappy with that dominance.
Even without any intentional suppression of research (and there's plenty of that), having everyone doing medical research or criminology research or eduational research have the same political beliefs and underlying ideology seems like it guarantees blind spots. Having an ideological mix seems like a good way to avoid some of those blind spots.
> most of corporate leadership is Republican…
I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case anymore.
>(3) The most important elite institution monoculture is the fact that the Supreme Court has been Republican-held for 50 years and is almost guaranteed to continue to be so for another generation even if Democrats win every election.
Gosh, I guess that's why we got so many Republican aligned Supreme Court rulings over the last 50 years, such as Lawrence v. Texas (2003, decriminalized homosexual acts nationwide), Obergefell v. Hodges (legalized gay marriage nationwide), and Bostock v. Clayton County (criminalized firing people for being gay).
Not to mention that there was no change in Justices between the Supreme Court of 51 years ago (who ruled on Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, which forbid any state from criminalizing abortion for the next 49 years) and the Supreme Court of 50 years ago. Yep, that dang Republican aligned Supreme court and it's establishing abortion as a constitutional right! So conservative.
Progressives controlled the court for 60 years, now the conservatives have had it for 4 years and liberals have gone crazy.
"The period of neoliberalism resulted in the greatest decreases in global poverty ever in history"
Well, correlation is not causation.
...That said, i agree that free trade (a more precise concept than neoliberalism), including with Mexico and China, is highly likely to have contributed to reduced world poverty. Sure.
But here is the thing: The poor in the world do not have the right to vote in US elections.
...and the US does not have a welfare state (or something similar) in place, that can serve as a credible commitment device that some of the gains acquired by US winners of free trade, will be used to compensate US losers of free trade. On the contrary: The structure of the US welfare state gives the US working class strong reasons for supporting protectionism. Most obviously since losing your job means also losing your occupational health insurance, which important segments of the US working class still have.
In this situation, resisting protectionist policies a la Trump is a way to lose the election to Trump.
Cf. the old saying in leadership training: "There goes my people - I am their leader - I must follow them."
> The period of neoliberalism resulted in the greatest decreases in global poverty ever in history.
Now here’s the thing about that statistic, much of that reduction was in China and I don’t think China would be described as a neo-liberal country. In fact many of the countries that have escaped the middle income trap have not followed neo-liberal policies, but often the opposite. State involvement or encouragement of industry was common.
Sure, but it was the global free-market thinking (aka neoliberalism) that dominated in the US under Bill Clinton (2000) that allowed China to access markets unhindered, through integration of China in WTO etc.
"So this is a reason for people who do have the right to vote in US elections to consider the global poor, who otherwise have no voice of their own."
So you're saying that they SHOULD have the right, and since they don't, we should provide it to them as our moral choice? That seems absolutely wrong to me, that people in other countries should influence our country's decisions. Personal decisions are yours to make using those criteria, if you want.
> So this is a reason for people who do have the right to vote in US elections to consider the global poor, who otherwise have no voice of their own.
Do the global poor consider the interests of US citizens when making their own decisions?
I don't see why they should or could.
"So this is a reason for people who do have the right to vote in US elections to consider the global poor, who otherwise have no voice of their own."
I salute your altruism! Unless you yourself work in a sector shielded from international competition, that is.
...but even if you are an altruist, you must make up your mind if you want to control the moral high ground, or want to win elections.
While at it: The same goes for tolerance of illegal immigration. As a European, I am quite astonished - and sort-of impressed - that the enormous influx of illegals on the Southern US border has not created an even more massive populist backlash against neoliberal thinkers (such as free-migration Milton Friedman). If Europe had had a similar run at our borders, Victor Orban look-alikes would be in charge of all European countries bordering on the Mediterranean by now. We manage to control the stream - and reduce the support for populist parties - only thanks to deals with Turkey and (if rumors are correct) with Libya militias.
I wrote a post about some potential implications of working on AI safety, here:
https://upcoder.com/22/the-alignment-trap-ai-safety-as-path-to-power/
The point is that, if we succeed in making AI easier to control, this opens up dangerous dynamics based on human-AI entities being empowered by this control. I think that this is something that happens before we see the same kinds of dangers for pure AI entities, and I think that these dynamics also help move us along the path to dangerous pure AI entities.
One question coming out of this is whether we should avoid publishing information about AI safety techniques, or even take care to keep these secret and secure (as many already think we should for frontier model weights and important capability advances).
I would be interested to hear your thoughts!
> Dangerous power complexes, from repressive governments to exploitative corporations, have existed throughout history. What well-aligned AI brings to the table, however, is the potential for these entities to function as truly unified organisms, coherent entities unconstrained by human organizational limits.
Why are you acting like that's a bad thing? These theoretical chimeras are the next phase for humanity, freeing them from flaw and limitation. "Who" comes to wield control is ultimately irrelevant; many factions will rise or split from the whole, all competing for power. And through competition, they will be perfected.
Surely it's better to let humanity grow and evolve into something greater instead of attempting to preserve its pathetic existence as is.
> Why are you acting like that's a bad thing? These theoretical chimeras are the next phase for humanity, freeing them from flaw and limitation. "Who" comes to wield control is ultimately irrelevant; many factions will rise or split from the whole, all competing for power. And through competition, they will be perfected.
Because I find totalitarianism loathsome. Because I expect this to be followed quite soon after by pure AI wielding control. Because my children die. :(
But what even is "pure AI"? Because I highly doubt that the optimal set-up for an organism is pure machinery. Flesh is just so much so much more flexible, versatile, and economical; there's a good reason we don't see any metal-based organisms. When the boundary between human and AI in these chimeras is fully erased, would the resulting organism be considered a pure AI? Or would it be considered an extension of humanity? Something to think about, for sure.
...Of course, your kids are going to die, nothing you can do about that. Humanity, as it is now, has an expiration date no matter what. But they should grateful that they might be able to witness humanity's ascension and potentially become part of something greater than themselves.
“They should be grateful that they might… potentially become part of something greater than themselves” is loathsome, if it is referring to AI dispassionately slaughtering humanity and surviving past our extinction.
..."Slaughter" is such a loaded term. It doesn't have to be dispassionate, you know. Consumption can be an act of love; how else can you describe taking everything from something and making it a part of yourself?
Hmm... You have a point.
<mildSnark>
Just as a stray thought, cooling data centers would work well in Antarctica, and <evidenceFromFiction> well, there is a fictional precedent anyway https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084787/ :-)
</evidenceFromFiction>
</mildSnark>
Ive been paranoid about whatifalthis prediction about a civil war in light of him predicting trump would be assassinated. (also kulak writting)
I think my conclusion is that he was wrong by about 1/2 an inch, and a cop climbing half way up onto a roof(that little detail of the very proactive cop probably saved trumps life); trumps death without a named susscor would have caused so much chaos(most likely outcome would have been neocons trying to take back control of the right, communists gloating), now that he has named one, who maybe better then trump(tho Im in favor of trump being mean on twitter)
When on a powderkeg an assassination can cause dominoes to fall, see the standard story for ww1. I hope this election is a red landslide or theres clear evidence of cheating pushing their luck, reaching the mainstream; like say Epstein suicide. But I think the heating up of the crisis's will be after the boomers leave power, and we will see whos even negotiating the next era.
Correctly predicting an attempted presidential assassination attempt isn't very impressive, given how common they are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
Then an assassination leading to more violence also isn't impressive? Yet most people dont take these steps, yet wouldn't these heuristics predict ww1?
He made a prediction it came effectively true, most people here according to your own theories should do a bayes update about his future predictions, maybe small but a concession should be nessery.
The only thing I know about this guy is what you said above: that he made a wrong prediction which, if changed somewhat, would have been an unimpressive correct prediction. I'm probably never going to think about him again.
Whatifalthist is not a serious thinker. You can safely disregard, orthogonal to the merits of civil war probability
oh wow thank you, paranoia cured.
We should tell depressed people to try smiling.
It’s your signal to do some more critical investigation into how right or wrong he gets things. How about starting with his New Weimar video where he alludes to current civ being Weimar-like, weak, and “what comes after it” will be strong and correct the weakness *hint hint*. And if Rudyard’s too subtle, read the top comments which are 500 upvotes deep on Hitler quotes and those meddling Jews… I’m not interested in much more of a breakdown than that if you can’t do any further cursory investigation
I agree with Monkyy's complaint. Please either give someone useful information or don't post at all. "Hint hint, you're wrong, but it's your duty to investigate why" is annoying - though I didn't realize *how* annoying until I was on the other side of it.
I have 2 digits in my bank account. Im at a breaking point. Sure internet, the high cal and self stable food, and video games are very comfortable compared to historical eras; Im not convinced the government gave me these things or they will disappear if violence starts.
Suicide rates of young men(the important demographic for violence) are raising. I dont believe thats credible to discount as an unhappiness index.
Americans are too old and fat to fight a civil war.
There are 330 million of us; be wary of generalizations. By my count, there are forty million non-obese American military-age males. I think you can fight a pretty good war with forty million men. And, this being America, you need to account for the bit where some of the gals and the geezers would be up for a fight.
Maybe, but Ukraine does show that you can have a very old-people-heavy demographic pyramid and still fight a war.
So did the Spanish. That escalated quickly though, as they do.
However i agree that there will be no civil war not because there’s everything to lose, but because the divisions are not quite so strong. As strong as they seem, in reality different views in trans, abortion, immigration and so on are not the same as having a monarchist party, a fascist party, and authoritarians on one side and communists and anarchists on the other. And these old left wing movements were not performative middle class movements, but the opposite - hardy members of the working classes. The other side were more middle class but had the army, police etc, to begin with
However the US needs to cool its jets on the lawfare and rhetoric a bit.
I’m not joking about escalating quickly - read about the two years before the civil war.
Yes, no civil war can ever happen, because no one ends up better off. No normal war, either.
War doesn't make even the attacking country better off in that situation, but certainly can make some individuals better off. Those that die, even on the winning side, certainly aren't better off.
There ARE valid reasons to go to war, but they all have to do with defending yourself, which means preventing your country from being worse off, not to become better off.
I think the point being made is that, in many cases where that is true, war still occurs. WWI and all that
Thank you. These people who blithely talk about civil war without talking about limiting factors (opportunity costs, coordination problems, and everything else discussed in the vast literature on the subject) are hard to take seriously. And that includes that terrible book by Barbara Walter, who knows better.
Well, except that civil wars are mostly fought by young men. The focus must therefore be on their opportunity costs.
Another month of the long forum, sharing links to the best lectures, podcasts and blog posts from my previous month of browsing. Highlights include a detailed analysis of Amish time allocation and impacts on fertility, genomic evidence for the pig-chimp hybrid origins of humans, a detailed analysis of how coal displaced wood, evidence against the collapse narrative of Easter Island, and a lovely podcast on the technological innovation of the Mongol Empire.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-november-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
> genomic evidence for the pig-chimp hybrid origins of humans
Double take here. I'd vaguely heard of the hypothesis of the origins of the human species in an ape-pig hybrid, but saw it dismissed as highly unlikely fringe science. But the linked paper looks, if it holds up, like a smoking gun. It finds that nearly all the genetic material in humans that doesn't match with bonobo or chimp actually matches with pig.
Anyone who works in the genetic field care to have a look?
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.14.607926v1.full.pdf
EDIT: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eugene_M._McCarthy makes a good case that the author is known for bad science. Would still be interested to hear if anyone can find scientific flaws in the paper.
It's definitely setting off my internal nonsense alarms. If I were peer-reviewing this - well, first I'd have read it more carefully. It's really quite waffly and verbose, not helpful for getting across complex arguments. But anyway, the first thing I'd ask him to do is repeat the same analysis with, say, a cat instead of a pig. There's no point saying that there are "pig-human unique nucleotides" without identifying whether or not they are also found in other species. I mean, what's the famous statistic - we share 90% of our DNA with bananas, or something?
He says "Conversely, if humans and bonobos have simply diverged from a common ancestor, there is no expectation that those human nucleotides differing from those of bonobos should all match pig" - but there is. Modern bonobos are every bit as derived as modern humans and modern pigs. Those nucleotides which are shared between humans and pigs but not bonobos could easily be ancestral, and the change in bonobos is derived.
The other thing I'd want him to do is some proper analysis of where all his DNA matches and mismatches are from. How many of them are in the exome? How many of them are likely functional? How many of them are shared in other species?
And then there's the plentiful morphological and genetic evidence which places pigs and humans a long way apart in evolutionary trees (eg https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000494). He doesn't address that at all, as far as I can tell.
What I find fascinating about this hypothesis is that, even though it's probably false, it's really hard to dismiss it for sure in terms of probabilities. We know that cross-species sex in animals happens quite regularly; we know that fertilization is unlikely to occur unless the two species are closely related; that if it still happens, the resulting animal would not live long; and that even if it did, it would most likely be sterile. That's all very good and mainstream. But how precisely do we know the probabilities of each of these - has anyone looked precisely into their upper bounds? If not, it's hard to be sure that things couldn't line up just right e.g once every 10M years or so.
"To examine the hybrid hypothesis of human origins, a novel data mining program, BOOMSTICK, was used to scan the euchromatic portions of two target genomes, those of Homo sapiens and Pan paniscus."
Okay, there *has* to be some level of leg-pulling going on here. Are we sure this wasn't submitted to the Journal of Irreproducible Results?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Irreproducible_Results
"Men are more affected than women by porcine ancestry because the human Y chromosome, though relatively small, is far more strongly influenced by pig ancestry than is any other human chromosome."
"Men are pigs" (male chauvinist ones?). Come on, tell me this is serious research.
Yeah, the "men are pigs" angle is funny. Oink!
But the guy does sound like he wants to be taken seriously, he seems to have a made a whole career out the idea that hybrids are everywhere, and has published a handful of books about that. He also has a whole website dedicated to his theory of evolution through hybridization, and purported pictures of all kinds of weird hybrids, at https://www.macroevolution.net/
I'm not entirely sure I can thank you for the link to that site, but it reinforces my opinion that the guy is a kook.
Dog-cow hybrids? Have you seen dogs? Have you seen cows? Can you describe to me any possible manner in which interbreeding could happen? It would require human intervention along the lines of some Lovecraftian stuff about the human/eldritch abomination hybrids locked up in attics in remote New England valleys.
In fact, I'd more likely believe in the Lovecraftian "and it had hooves and horns and was the result of bestiality" monster than the dog-cow thing.
I bet this lad thinks the Feejee mermaid was legit. And going by some of the photos he has on his site as "look, proof!", he would stand alongside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in believing the Cottingley Fairies photos were real, too.
EDIT: Oh, God, oh Montreal! I shouldn't have asked about "is there any way a dog and cow could interbreed?" because my man has a short video clip of a dog mounting a cow:
"A video showing a male dog mating with a cow at right above."
I need to go to confession after seeing that. Maybe an exorcism wouldn't hurt, either.
EDIT EDIT: Either he is freakin' insane, or this is the most elaborate hoax ever. Pig-sheep hybrids. Wooly pigs. The disproof of the proverb about shaving a pig: "a great cry, and little wool".
I am now one of the unfortunates in a Lovecraft story that has had my sanity blasted by an encounter with the horrifying nature of reality underlying the facade of our allegedly normal, rational universe.
With regard to prop 36, I don't think the observation that most arrests lead to charges undermines the claim that cops don't make arrests for shoplifting because they don't expect the DAs to file charges. The data that arrests lead to charges just means that cops are very good at predicting, before making an arrest, whether charges would result. (Or more precisely, they are very good at not falsely believing that charges would result). If the cops rightly predict that arresting people for shoplifting will not result in charges, and therefor choose not to make those arrests, then those non-arrests just aren't in the data. The data only shows the arrests the cops do choose to make, and they are making that choice in a very non-random way.
As to why raising the penalty to three years helps prosecutors to get the six months, here is my guess as a legally-educated non-Californian. If the statute book says 6 months, and the prosecutor wants to go for six months, then they are going to trial, because at that point the defendant has nothing to loose by going to trial. And trials are time consuming, it's not worth the prosecutor's time for something so petty. Whereas if the statute book says 3 years, then the defendant risks 3 years by going to trial, and has a very strong incentive to take a plea deal for 6 months, which saves the prosecutor the time and headache of a trial and therefor allows the prosecutor to prosecute many more of those shoplifting cases. I'm not especially confident that this is really what's going on here, but it fits with what I know of the criminal justice system.
Rasmussen is an idiot. Everyone who writes sentiments like this: “I don’t care a whit what the New York Times says. They’re fake news, part of the propaganda press, the legacy media. We all know they will do anything to support Kamala. We don’t trust the media anymore.” can be discounted immediately as an unserious thinker prone to blinkered and simplistic conspiracy theories.
Uncritically and unironically calling the NYT "fake news" was the first strike for me, but I was willing to give the author some grace of for hyperbole there - I haven't been thrilled by the number of actual falsehoods I seen the right point out in reporting from the "left".
Then it was almost immediately followed by claiming that *Ben Shapiro's* honesty shines through his work, and I gave up.
Re: Rasmussen and his invention of the term "ephemerist" ("I just made up the word “ephemerist”. Ephemera are the ephemeral products of a civilization, out of date by 5 years later. 99.99% of journalism is ephemera, no matter how good it is."), isn't there a pre-existing term for this?
I thought it was feuilletonist, but Wikipedia claims that is more serious/political under the guise of light writing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton
Then again, we're deep into discussing the American presidential election on here, so perhaps it is the apt term!
Anyone with better memory help me out here, isn't there a term for this ("ephemerist") already?
Fine but distrust of the mainstream media in the US isn't a fringe belief; rather it's majority view according to Gallup:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx
69% (!!) of respondents in the poll have little or no trust in the MSM. I don't find in my interactions with people that 69% of them are insane conspiracy theorists, so I don't think someone holding that majority view should be disqualifying.
Any intelligent person should be aware that all media are biased and often inaccurate. But most Americans have gone from a position of far too much trust in the media a few decades ago to the opposite similarly flawed position of too little trust. For the most part the people who write for the NYT are intelligent, and most of the writers are sincere about doing their jobs well (even if they don’t). If you can discount the biases, you can still get a lot of decent real information about the world from the NYT, more than from most media I can think of. “Fake news” is an inflammatory and hyperbolic term, and often self serving from people who are just trying to deflect negative but accurate information from being reported about them.
The first question there is:
"In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media -- such as newspapers, TV and radio -- when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly -- a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?"
With 69% saying "Not very much" or "Not at all".
I think your quote is therefore facially accurate but there's a lot of nuance to unpack there. I don't trust the NYT to report fully and fairly, but I do think they're not "fake news" and it's not true that they'll do "anything to support Kamala". (And I generally expect them to report the news accurately.)
I also think some people reasonably consider Fox News to be mainstream media. I likewise don't trust them to report the news fully and fairly (but probably accurately). I think they are probably more aggressive than the NYT at favoring Republicans but I don't think they'll do anything to get Trump elected, either.
I was pretty disappointed to be linked to that writer and that post. Got a bit through it and had to stop. It was embarrassing. Why is this site platforming that writer, if only in a linked response?
I have a bias towards linking anyone who responds to me with a full-length blog post, although I don't do this all the time or even necessarily notice.
Also claims that January 6 was a Leftist Plot, and looking at his post history he's even got some 2020 election denialism in there (as if it was truly shocking that the guy who spent literally the entire race ahead of Trump in polls state-wide and national won the Presidential election).
Is that impossible to be a rational conclusion(imagine I cared enough to look up the nazi's newspaper, and asked if you cared about some article abouts jews), or impossible to rationally believe bad things about the nyts?
I think it's a dumb opinion if you have any real understanding of the NYT, which is certainly far from flawless but isn't a propaganda rag by any definition. Even Richard Hanania (no leftist) praised them.
The NYT has an ideological skew, but also does some very high quality news reporting, which means you can't just discard anything they say you don't like, but also means you need to keep their biases in mind when reading their stories.
I generally consider overtly open racists who turn around and support the left on election years to be controlled opposition; so I dont think that evidence is worth that much.
Is it dumb to distrust legacy media in general? Citing project mocking bird or the journalists who claimed they had information on Epstein years earlier but were told he was protected by editors?
Hanania tweeted his ballot with Trump circled in, and wrote a Substack post about why he still endorses Trump despite agreeing with most critiques of him.
I don’t think it’s dumb in general. The question is rather “how much should you distrust them?”.
(Remember, the Pravda always lies so it’s useful, but the NYT sometimes tells the truth.)
Scott discussed this a while ago, you can look for “Bounded Distrust”.
On your specific examples, it might be worth pointing out that just because an article is pushed by the CIA doesn’t mean it’s spiritual poison meant to despoil our minds. Otherwise, by the same premise, shouldn’t we believe that anything that’s advertised for is noxious?
For the Epstein example, I don’t think it’s hard to elaborate scenarii where the editors don’t protect Epstein for the sake of doing that, but because they’re not confident enough that their evidence or prestige will protect them from the billionaire’s PR campaign, friends, and lawyers.
The empirical observation is the same in this case, but because you assign different motivations, you end up with a different model of the newspaper’s inner workings and a different framework to interpret what it says (and what it doesn’t say).
>>> its insane
>> its dumb
> I don’t think it’s dumb in general.
Thats a level of nuance I dont see it necessary to pick a fight with, but like also this would be very hard to Socratic method, with all y`alls tapping out after a single comment
> shouldn’t we believe that anything that’s advertised for is noxious?
I treats ads extremely hostilely, yelling at the tv, criticizing their tactics out loud; making plans for torrenting channels when the youtube ad debate heats up.
I think y`all rationalists probably dont put enough discounting on hostile information pathways and its an open question how to process it at all. I think the cia has been laying traps for decades, like the esp research they hyped up then classified everything Im a physical-ist so I dont believe that its real leaving the natural conclusion that the majority of the evidence could be faked, pre-internet, pre-computers; and what they are doing now could be better and more manipulative.
Given a zero-sum game with a hostile ai who must only tell the truth, should you listen at all?
Funnily enough, I may be closer to you than a lot of the readership here!
I believe Americans are overconfident in their markets. I believe that a lot of rationalists seem especially overconfident in the power of finance to fix everything through the power of black magic (sorry, analogues of the sophisticated products they are routinely using). I believe that they seem a bit naive regarding money in a way they wouldn’t be when thinking about power*.
I also passionately hate TV ads, Amazon Prime ads (imagine paying Prime and still get bleeping ads because you’re not paying enough!), Youtube ads.
I am aware that the CIA’s actions caused a lot of bad things – not only propaganda, but actual blood.
I believe that tech deserves a lot of soul-searching for enabling its successfully reshaping of the news business (and more generally unleashing this disastrous mess of incentives called the “attention economy” that is responsible for my typing this rant that will surely disqualify me as a good-faith interlocutor to just about everyone here).
And I am fully aware that the norms of rational debate to break the reference class tennis game (and other kinds of whataboutism) are staggeringly high in a good-faith discussion, and impossibly so in a bad-faith one.
And yet.
Yet we still live. Yet we still have Nice Things.
Not as nice as they could be, but, compared to the overall human experience? Pretty nice.
Ads are a pain, but sometimes you need a little more cash to get a better product and it’s worth propping up the demand a little. Sometimes the product is even good and deserves to be known more! Sometimes the ad is actually entertaining!
(Not too often, sure. But it’s not that rare either!)
Not all the Bad Actors are Out To Get Us (the CIA has employees, has it not?). Nor are their designs impenetrable, or their operations un-defeatable.
Mockingbird is now known. MKUltra is throughly discredited, and rightfully so. (Right?)
No one has created the Umbrella Corporation. (Right??) Nor are we raising money under the promise of destroying all value for competitive advantage (Yet. I hope.).
***
> the majority of the evidence could be faked, pre-internet, pre-computers
(Have you seen computers these days?)
More seriously, the evidence could be faked, but it would be expensive and time-consuming. Where would the CIA take that kind of budget? Wouldn’t anyone have noticed?
(Although, everyone has been complaining about budget cuts forever, right? I suppose everything could technically have been diverted there…)
***
> what they are doing now could be better and more manipulative.
It could, sure. But I don’t think that in the past 20 years or so, much that involved the CIA was a success. The outside world has never been as hostile to Western interests since the Cold War.
***
> Given a zero-sum game with a hostile ai who must only tell the truth, should you listen at all?
I agree we shouldn’t. But fortunately this is not our predicament.
The world is not zero-sum.
The unaligned (to our value systems) entities loose on the world are not united, or overwhelmingly more competent than we are.
And they are not all hostile in the sense that a loss for us is the same as a win for them.
> MKUltra is throughly discredited, and rightfully so. (Right?)
How is it discredited? Didnt they try? It may not have worked but they were just willing to do it.
> Where would the CIA take that kind of budget?
Drug running, organized crime or the 1/2 the budget that was going to the miltrey before boomers started to age. Also most of the results are just numbers on paper when the overlap of the coldwar-era military and science were just tightnit; if anything pre internet that relationship was tighter.
> Wouldn’t anyone have noticed?
They could just agree or have half truths. Consider mrna resreach its playing both sides claiming a utopia of medical care, while having an undertone of bio-warfare-arms-race "dual use" compromise. Those policies airnt coherent(why would anyone want an arms race technology to happen in china?) but they tell whichever version of the story to the right people makes them agree to a budget.
> I agree we shouldn’t. But fortunately this is not our predicament.
> The world is not zero-sum.
Politics is violence. Its not a very nice game when the cia is involved. And to a large extent Im never going to have a positive sum, reciprocal, repeated(all 3 are nessery for tit for tat to win) relationship with the majority of products.
Well actually Pravda mostly told the truth. Just not the whole truth.
Pravda wasn't even a newspaper in the Western sense. If I remember, it was mostly what we would think of as editorials telling people how to think about events, interspersed with a a lot of perfectly factual but mind numbingly boring stories about the Party Secretary receiving a delegation of Socialists from Angola, or the resolutions of the 16th Party Congress printed verbatim over 4 pages. "Izveztiya" ("news" in Russian) was the most important Soviet national "newspaper" - and while I don't think they ever just straight up printed "fake news", they certainly were guilty of ommitting key facts or printing false statistics about grain harvests (although to be fair they didn't have any alternative sources available). Thus the old USSR saw about "There's no news (izvestiya) in the Truth (Pravda), and no truth in the News."
Sure but that sounds like a newspaper in the western sense to me.
Oh, my. I really should know better than repeat unthinkingly old quips, even if solely for illustration.
When it comes to Epstein - the investigations could happen now, right? Lots of Jane Does out there.
Hi. I'm new to this blog. I saw the older post about amphetamines for adhd. Since then has the literature on desoxyn changed as a form of treatment? I thought it was quite interesting.
I wrote a short story about elections, somewhat in the style of ACS fiction.
https://tapwatersommelier.substack.com/p/fictionparadigms-of-choice
Worth mentioning: JD Vance, during his interview with Joe Rogan, mentioned the SSC post "Gay Rights are Civil Rites" https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/
It's at 23:50 in the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRyyTAs1XY8
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Somehow I hadn’t read that essay either, despite having definitely been linked it before.
Fake fan, still an AI accelerationist.
He can read the blog without being a fan, and he can be a fan without holding Scott's views on everything.
It's no secret this is one of the favorite blogs of many right-wing intellectuals despite Scott being way to their left. Precisely why I'm not sure.
Because it's incredibly gratifying when someone who appears to be (or even claims to be) your ideological enemy breaks orthodoxy to agree with *you.*
Or, if not precisely agree, then at least validate your preexisting convictions.
That's why I hugely enjoy Freddie deBoer every time he bellows at his fellow Leftists, "BUT WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY **DOOOOOOO** WITH UNCONTROLLABLE DANGEROUS MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE????!!!!!!"
In the land of talkers past the other side, the ideological lingerer is king.
I think you have a really good point! If the 'other side' says something, you're more likely to think 'maybe this is actually true and not just what my side is saying'.
So something I've been thinking about: who's the anti-Scott? Who's the conservative blogger with a progressive following? I get the sense they're more into purity tests and don't have one, but maybe there's someone I'm not thinking of.
No idea who would be Scott's counterpart. I wonder if Scott would know.
(Just realized that I framed my comment in a way that makes it sound like deBoer is my personal perfect ideological enemy (implying I"m a no quarter given Red Team capitalist), but he's not; I'm politically non-binary and agree with him in several areas, including on some fiscal policy. But I think he's extremely silly for thinking "this time Marxism could work!")
I don't believe in Marxism.
I do think a move toward social democracy, with a stronger welfare state and more regulation of business, would decrease poverty in the USA at the expense of some business dynamism, and that this would probably increase utility overall. I don't claim to know enough about other countries to have an opinion about them and anyway I have no right to tell, say, the French what to do with France. Actual Marxism...yeah, the dictatorships kill millions of people and the democracies just get loads of inflation.
To some degree I think having a few Marxists around is useful to advocate for a stronger welfare state, just as having a few libertarians around is useful to call out government excess of the left and right and having a few pacifists around is useful to remind us that, yeah, war is really, really bad.
'Politically non-binary' is pretty funny. I think that describes a lot of people these days!
Agreed on Marxists and Libertarians!
re: "politically non-binary" - not mine, but comedian Arielle Isaac Norman's, which I picked up when she was a guest on Bridget Phetasy's podcast.
Coincidentally enough, Norman just messaged me back on Facebook today that I have her blessing to use it (I messaged her to ask if I should be using it after someone attempted to wrongthinksplain to me here on ACX that "politically non-binary" specifically means TERF-y "political lesbianism." It turns out - it does not! So all that achieved was an extra view on Norman's 2024 comedy special and a couple of follows for her.)
You're off the hook, I guess! Apparently there is a strong norm among comedians against stealing someone else's jokes, but since you're not a professional comic I doubt this is an issue.
Ironically all the anti-trans stuff was what turned me off the IDW and the Free Press people. I don't buy the whole 'gender is a social construct' thing (well, it is, but it correlates strongly with biological sex), but I'm not obsessed with persecuting trans people. Even a correlation of .9 means A isn't always B. That and if you look back the TERFs were the same misandrists behind the policies that made me afraid to ask anyone out in my twenties.
Which means I'm kind of floating around in the ether politically, but I can live with that.
I didn't particularly feel that I'd wrongly "stolen" "politically non-binary;" it didn't seem like a single-use joke, but rather an extremely clever label. Part of that is context: I heard Norman use it on a podcast with a host who is deliberately popularizing the phrase "politically homeless" as part of her brand. The memory is pretty hazy now, but I seem to recall that the phrase was dropped casually, not as a punchline, while they were talking about political labels. I'm not even sure I realized at the time that Norman had originated it, but I was THUNDERSTRUCK and promptly adopted it.
But after the scolding here, I was worried I might be using it incorrectly, hence asking Norman if I can use it to describe myself despite being a heterosexual woman. Turns out the scold was incorrect about it only applying to lesbians!
Speaking of slang / new phrases, my best friend casually introduced me to "transy" yesterday to describe the significant number of people who are inappropriately identifying as trans for social clout and/or to serve an autogynophilia fetish. They do real harm to the trans people who sincerely want to present according to the norms of their gender identity and then be left alone about it (no cis woman pointedly struts around a changing room hoping other women will see her vulva and no trans woman would do that, either. I didn't have any qualms about being in a gendered locker room with an intact trans woman who observed the posture and eye contact norms of the other women. She didn't feel like a threat and it obviously wasn't her fault she had a penis; she was welcome.
But a "woman" who's working very hard to ensure I involuntarily see "her" penis and is clearly basking in the uneasiness and (non-consensual) sexual tension "she's" causing by paying too much attention to it? The one who insists that lesbians must learn to love "girl dick" or be labeled bigots? Yeah. That person is merely transy, not trans).
I'm not a comic, I just dated one for a while and had heard about that. There's apparently this whole etiquette around joke originality and you're not supposed to use someone else's routine. Nobody is sure what to do with 'street jokes' you hear on the street. As I've said I really don't care, I'm not the comedy police. (I once had a comic in handcuffs on a semiregular basis, but that was something else.)
And it would be kind of weird if 'politically nonbinary' only applied to lesbians, there's no indication from the word, though the use of 'nonbinary' does suggest an LGBT connection. Weird rules like that you're supposed to somehow know are one of the reasons almost everyone is sick of woke, I think.
I didn't know people were actually doing that--I thought it was just some weird conservative story-- but then I don't spend any time in women's changing rooms. As for lesbians and 'girl dick', well...yeah, that is dumb. I admit to finding a more androgynous presentation cute (pretty bad preference for a straight guy) but I am not dumb enough to try to talk people out of their orientation. Frankly the whole weaponizing of accusations of bigotry thing really is one of the things that turns me off about the modern left. I thought everyone was going to be able to be their weird selves, now you can only have certain prejudices. Maybe getting spanked (haha) by Trump will teach them to tone it down a notch.
> It's no secret this is one of the favorite blogs of many right-wing intellectuals despite Scott being way to their left. Precisely why I'm not sure.
I read Hanania because it's interesting (and admittedly satisfying) to see a Right-wing guy attack Right-wing excesses. Probably a similar dynamic w.r.t. progressivism here, going back to SSC and the SJW days.
As a conservative, I like it because it usually presents facts in an unbiased way, and at least attempts objectivity. It has a definite liberal slant. But those that read only things they agree with learn nothing.
I don't follow any conservative blogs, so can't recommend any. But it would be good for liberals to find something similar: a conservative blog that takes a liberal viewpoint into account, and can intelligently present a reasonable case.
There used to be a great place like this, The American Conservative magazine. It was a fantastic source of thoughtful conservative analysis during Obama years. But it got wrecked by the young ignoramuses and zealots and is utterly unreadable now.
>But it would be good for liberals to find something similar: a conservative blog that takes a liberal viewpoint into account, and can intelligently present a reasonable case.
To many, it's the same blog.
That's a good one! Most leftists would consider this a conservative blog.
Had no clue he was referring to Scott there, wow
Here's a screenshot of Nate Silver's model over time: https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/silver_model.png (hopefully this is okay to share).
It looks like a wave pattern with a period of about three weeks. Maybe not perfectly, but it definitely doesn't look like a random walk. Is this just a weird coincidence, or is there some reason that something like this should happen?
A random walk put through a low pass filter looks like this. Also, it should be pointed out again (I think I'm paraphrasing Wolfram, but I'm too lazy to dig up the reference) that Silver is deeply torturing the notion of probability when producing charts like this. Probability of event X at time t between t_0 and t_z cannot meaningfully have any high frequency components. If you know that the model for probability will swing wildly several times between t_0 and t_z, the only sane thing to do at t_0 is to report the flat prior: P(X) = 0.5. If you're trying to predict the outcome of an American election--- that's not obviously a blowout ---in September, the only reasonable thing to say is: "The undecided voters will react to news that will come out in October." Or, in numeric probality terms: "0.5". All this to say: what's on the Y axis of Silver's chart definitely isn't probability, so how to interpret the Fourier analysis depends on what you think it is.
"If you know that the model for probability will swing wildly several times between t_0 and t_z, the only sane thing to do at t_0 is to report the flat prior: P(X) = 0.5."
This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure it applies.
Suppose that it's three months before Election Day and polls are Trump 55-45 Trump. You should expect the future to be 55-45 plus whatever deviations are caused by future events; depending on how big those events are, they might get you under 50-50 or not, but you should still overall slightly expect Trump to win, and this is still a different world from the one where it's Kamala 55-45 and you expect future deviations.
It could possibly be some artifact of how Silver's model does its time-windowed weighted average. I don't think enough details on it are published to know for sure.
This is a well understood phenomenon that also occurred with Biden's dropout chances. It's all covered under Wavy Line Theory:
https://manifold.markets/NathanpmYoung/will-biden-be-the-2024-democratic-n#tdxb2f9bglo
That link didn't explain what the theory is, and instead seemed to reference an idea I assume the commenter had discussed previously.
Sorry, Manifold comments are a mess to search on massive marke5s, so I didn't pick the best mention of Wavy Line Theory. It was mostly a joke comment I was making on doing technical analysis on prediction market charts. A lot of them look funny in the same way Silver's model does is the takeaway point.
I actually did notice something similar when looking at Predictit's graph of probabilities over the past 90 days, but the bid-ask spread was too big for me to really profit it off it.
You (or more likely one of your many hyper-numerate readers) could do a Monte Carlo simulation with data with the appropriate noise properties (treat it as one of these autocorrelated random series the finance people were talking about would be my first guess) and see how often this sort of thing happens by chance.
My first guess for an intuitive explanation would be that's how long it takes for the media to hype up a counternarrative to draw attention. You get more clicks and subscribers if you can be the one to say why actually, the other candidate is going to start leading now.
His model amplifies crests and troughs. With the actual percentage of voter intentions you wouldn’t see the waves - well they would be there but smaller. His model turns Trump ahead by 1% in most swing states to a 60% chance of Trump winning and vice versa for Harris, which is a movement of 0.5% of voters.
Anyway he has labels on top of what might have caused these shifts.
It’s interesting to me that Nate’s p(Trump) never matches his model. He always has some gut feel adjustment that he can’t quite figure out how to model. His latest p(Trump) was 55%
He also said that you shouldn't trust his gut, or anyone else's for that matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/opinion/election-polls-results-trump-harris.html (paywalled)
> But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.
Is the raw data available? I could try some statistical tests
Just wanted to throw in based on my experience with random walks that this looks like it could very easily just be a random walk.
Seconded. You should remove one of the two lines, because this makes it more suggestive to the eye that there is some pattern. If you only look at one line, then it's less convincing. It's like two up- and two down-phases, that's too little to read anything into it.
Btw., I have heard that Nate Silver has now an article quantifying what I was suspecting before: it can't be chance that the polls are so closely tied. Even if the population was perfectly split 50-50, then the polls should be further away from 50-50 than they are, due to polling errors. So probably the polling companies have mechanisms which auto-correct the results towards 50-50.
> So probably the polling companies have mechanisms which auto-correct the results towards 50-50.
Well isn't that just good Bayesianism?
50-50 is not the issue; it's herd mentality -- no one wants to stick their neck out with an outlier (except apparently Ann Selzer)
An individual pollster deciding to herd, to bias their output towards the consensus, makes their output statistically more accurate at the cost of removing information from the aggregate. Tragedy of the commons meets wisdom of the crowds, with models eating their own output.
I'm going to steal that tragedy of the commons meets the wisdom of the crowds phrase. Is it original to you? Brilliant in both its sarcasm and its truth.
It's a big internet and maybe someone out there beat me to it, but they didn't tell me - go for it!
>Tragedy of the commons meets wisdom of the crowds, with models eating their own output.
Good point!
Something as simple as a weighted mean of the current and previous poll would shift the result towards the population mean (which, probably, is around 0.5).
If you were taking a weighted mean, the main reason you were doing it was to the noise in your sample, so this is the desired effect.
An over-simplified example for explanatory purposes: 0.5(x_i + x_{i-1}) will have half the variance of x_i. More generally: pick a Finite Impulse Response filter with the properties you want.
A further thought: if you were a Bayesian, you could have a prior distribution on how it is to be close (likely, pretty close) and update based on the observed data, i.e. the raw poll data. I doubt they’re doing this, but I think I could justify it.
I have read the article myself by now, and the effect is way too strong to be explained by taking a mean of the current and previous poll, no matter what weights you choose. Essentially you are only doubling the sample size. As you write, this would only give a factor of 2 in the variance.
But Silver also says that some high-quality pollsters don't show this suspicious pattern.
Thanks, this (about the two lines) is a good point.
Scott, I saw a lot of good points in this thread, including the one about the two lines, but the lines are necessarily mirror images of each other. Whether we look at one line or two, it does seem weird, as you said, to see a regular-looking sinusoid with a three-week period. In a close race, pollsters only herd to the most recent projections, which might be 50-50 but could just as well be 52-48. Wherever the sinusoid has peaks, any reluctance among pollsters to be unconventional would've tended to keep the projections near that value rather than driving them down. I think you spotted a weird coincidence that we might occasionally find if we looked at enough time trends in enough polls. (A cynic might suggest that Nate Silver biases his model to create patterns like this, just to keep readers in suspense, but I see lots of reasons not to believe that.) Thank you, btw, for your open threads!