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."
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.
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.
(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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
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.
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.).
Sorry, are you saying that those are things that could hypothetically happen, or have I missed a bunch more companies becoming politically-coded already?
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:
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
> 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.
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).
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):
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.
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
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%:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
>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'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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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"... )
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'
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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...
>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
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 😁
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
"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).
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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!
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
(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%.)
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.
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.
There’s a heavy overlap between classical and metal. Scratch that, most/best metal is pretty much Vivaldi on steroids.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is why the USA is a constitutional republic, not a direct democracy.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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."
I think the claim is that people are shoplifting to fund their drug addiction, not that they are shoplifting the drugs themselves.
So California voters, where are you landing in Prop 36? I am still undecided.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.