Open Thread 355
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This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe here. Also:
1: New subscribers-only post, Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims, about when you should vote for a worse candidate to punish a better candidate.
2: Comments on things related to last week’s Polymarket post: Michael Wiebe argues that Theo the French whale’s contrarian polling take was based on a simple misunderstanding of how to read polls (I stand by my claim that a single success demonstrates almost nothing about the trustworthiness of the underlying process). And Alex Tabarrok says more about why this was a big victory for prediction markets.
3: More responses to responses on the California shoplifting policing situation, this time from a former public defender. I continue to be confused where in the system the decision not to arrest shoplifters is happening and why, and continue to welcome more informed analysis of this.
4: I think of the Open Thread as a place for asking questions, proposing ideas, and having semi-structured discussion. If you’re going to do something else, don’t do it regularly, and try to be at least kind of coy about it. In particular, don’t advertise your blog more than once every six months, and try to frame it as discussion (“here’s an issue I’ve been thinking about, here’s a paragraph of so of analysis, you can read my blog for more”) and not just a raw link. Same if you’re going to drop what is basically a whole blog post as an OT comment.
5: I’ll post the AI Art Turing Test results either this week or next, sorry for the delay.
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What's the best steelman for still broadly supporting the Left when you know about IQ research?
I feel like the Left's blank slatism (and Inquisition-like enforcement of it) undermines so many of its positions and basically makes everything they try to argue for insane. But I also think it's possible that I'm exaggerating how much this is actually a problem, especially relative to the other side's issues, just because it leaves a bitter taste emotionally in my mouth and feels more intellectually "treacherous" coming from the seemingly more intellectual half of the spectrum.
I haven't ever identified as a conservative but I want to see if someone has a good reason to why I'm exaggerating how much this actually matters (that isn't just denying IQ research, because like, I know a ton about it, and I don't think the denials are going to work haha)
Particularly in countries like ours with a two-party system, you're stuck deciding whether basket A or basket B is worse. Believing Basket B is worse doesn't mean you support everything in basket A.
Say you believe that mean IQ differs across human populations for reasons that are at least partially genetic. You can still believe that, to take some popular left-leaning causes:
-Inequality between groups or individuals (or both!) is excessive, and redistribution is necessary. In fact, if there's a genetic component, it lessens the moral culpability of the poor for their state.
-People should be able to form unions, both idealistically as a matter of human autonomy and pragmatically as a method of lessening the power gap between the working and capitalist classes.
-The government should support childcare to allow women (or whichever parent takes care of the kids) to participate fully in the workforce.
-Abortion rights are an important aspect of self-determination and should be supported.
-Humans have a right to free movement and borders should not be closed.
-Humans have a right to self-determination that includes gender identity and the government should respect that.
-Global climate change is a danger to humanity and needs aggressive action, even at the cost of limiting economic freedom or decreasing GDP.
-Even if human groups differ by mean intelligence, that doesn't necessarily mean they differ in human rights, so things like racism are still a concern.
Any of these might make you side with a leftist or liberal party.
Let's say we find out that certain ethnic groups have lower or higher average intelligence from genetic circumstances. How should this change policy? My opinion is _not at all_, since everything should still be based on the _individual_.
Well, the catch is most humans are tribal, and if one race would be disproportionately taking the welfare it'll eat away at support for it. (How much this had to do with the history of the American South in our particular case I don't know.) I think this is part of what was motivating the left at least in the 60s-90s, though they now seem to treat the underlying equality as an article of faith.
Not sure that it matters whether the *reason* for this overrepresentation is genetic, social, cultural, or something else?
Ask a leftist. My theory of mind isn't quite that good. My impression is social/cultural can be changed so supports their program, genetic can't so can't be true, but while I live among them I'm not really one and avoid discussing this stuff for obvious reasons.
> In fact, if there's a genetic component, it lessens the moral culpability of the poor for their state.
This seems key to the point you're making. In fact I'm confident that there was a Scottpost about this, but I cannot seem to find it. If anyone can link it, I appreciate.
Before we go down this path, I'd love to hear what misconceptions you have about IQ.
For starters, notice that some problems introduced to debate by taking IQ seriously would already exist even in a world *without* IQ differences. Because people also differ in character traits, preferences, hobbies, specific skills, etc.
Essentially, the problem is that we have a (Left-coded) value of "equality", but it is very difficult to define what exactly that means in the world where people are different.
Leftists are familiar with the quote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread." But the same principle applies to many things other than wealth. The law, it its majestic equality, makes both extraverted and introverted children socialize at schools. But the extraverts love it, and the introverts hate it and sometimes get bullied. And the law, it its majestic equality, makes both the average and the gifted children learn according to the same curriculum. (Along with children with various learning dysfunctions, yay inclusion!) But the gifted children are bored in the classes, and they are denied the opportunity to learn according to *their* abilities.
The Left often uses the heuristic of "equality of outcome" to evaluate whether a situation seems fair to them. But again, this completely fails in a world where people are different (and not only by IQ). If one person prefers vanilla ice cream, and another person prefers chocolate ice cream, and you allow both of them to take as much as they want from any ice cream they want... well, that won't look well for you, if someone decides to measure the "disparate impact" on the consumption of chocolate ice cream, and accuses you of being anti- whatever trait the first person has.
...so, to salvage something from the traditional Left program, you need to take a step back and think about what were you trying to achieve in the first place, before you lost sight of the original goal and substituted it by "equality" which you later substituted by "sameness".
To me it seems that the general idea is something like "people should not suffer needlessly", and its positive version "people should flourish", as much as possible given the limited resources; plus the intuition that, as a first approximation, human happiness is proportional to the *logarithm* of wealth, therefore redistribution can increase total happiness.
This needs to be balanced by the need to keep the economy running, because if the economy collapses, it will be pretty bad for everyone. The economy depends on cooperation of millions of people, so you better not take away their incentives (e.g. by excessive taxation or regulation), because then the people may give up on doing the useful things. Or you will have to point guns at them to keep them working, which also dramatically reduces human happiness.
So we could e.g. have... let's call it Enlightenment-coded educational system, where each child is given optimal education, whether coming from a rich or poor family, etc. And this education could be entirely paid by taxes, at least the elementary and grammar schools. But it could also recognize that different children advance at different speed, or have different specific talents, and could allow different children to take different classes, based on their abilities alone.
We might even taboo the word IQ (and perhaps we should, to make people calm down), as long as we accept that (a) in each specific subject, some kids are faster and some kids are slower, and both options should be made available for everyone; and (b) each child is allowed to choose faster classes in as many subject as they can handle, as opposed to having some kind of artificial limit such as only being allowed to choose one specialization and take faster classes only in that.
(The IQ hypothesis is basically that some kids will always have to choose the slower classes, and some kids will be able to choose all the faster classes, and that you can quite reliably recognize this already at the age of six, and it doesn't change significantly during the lifetime.)
You might want to read/ask JayMan or Razib Khan who are left-wing and accept IQ inequality.
Average left accepts that even if IQ is real, effect of genes on IQ is small and IQ determined culturally, evolution takes millions of years.
And it doesn't matter because AGI is cooming soon (okay, this is not about what average leftist thinks).
I think it might be better to ask "what's the best steelman for /not/ supporting the left when you know about IQ research?"
All success is due to either 1) effort or 2) luck. This is absolutely not to say that intelligence and skills don't matter - they matter immensely. Rather, it's to say that being intelligent and having skills is, tautologically, due to either effort (working hard to learn something that doesn't come naturally) or luck (good genes or good educational opportunities), just like all other contributing factors.
If you believe that success is mostly due to effort, that might lead you towards the right-wing position that progressive taxation and a social safety net are bad, because the rich have earned their money by working for it.
But if you believe that luck (of which good genes are a part) is an important factor, and that lots of people stay poor despite working super hard, then that's a strong argument for redistribution to help the needy.
This, incidentally, is why despite strongly supporting the thing referred to as "meritocracy", I dislike the word - rewarding doing things well is super important, because otherwise your society won't thrive, but it should be called "abilitocracy" - in my book a stupid person who works hard all their life is more meritorious than someone lucky enough to be born with good genes and good educational opportunities, and who is hence far more able, but who doesn't work as hard - I'd still rather the latter got the job, but I don't want to rub salt in the wound by pretending that they're more deserving.
The right wing argument is not about relative effect of effort vs nested luck, it's about that the skilled might work less or move to another country if taxed highly.
To an individual their own genes are luck, but history doesn't start at their conception and a child can only get genes from ones their parents have and it's deterministic. With prenatal screening (for embryo abnormalities and PGS) there is less luck.
Imagine two women, one conceived a baby from career criminal, smoked during pregnancy and bought premium wine. The other conceived from good guy, didn't smoke and bought books. This is non-random, especially smoking.
>n my book a stupid person who works hard all their life is more meritorious than someone lucky
which is because they maxxed dice roll for "conscientiuosness" and someone instilled work ethic in them? It's luck all the way down. (Also people can have bad health conditions preventing hard work for days even if they concentrate for a few hours)
> The right wing argument is not about relative effect of effort vs nested luck, it's about that the skilled might work less or move to another country if taxed highly.
This is steel-manning. There absolutely are right-wingers who advance that argument, and I think it deserves to be taken seriously, but there are also a lot of right-wingers who regularly argue that taxing the rich is inherently wrong because they've earned their money and deserve to keep it, without reference to the economic impact, and it's that argument that I am trying to dismantle.
Yes, there certainly right-wingers who advance past that, but most of them aren't against taxes, just about the amount of it. How does luck (a lot of which is not really luck) justify non-flat taxing?
Did you skip other parts of my comment?
Yes, obviously it's all genes and therefore luck, but why should that matter? If we proved that the universe is entirely deterministic and therefore free will doesn't exist, would you be against any distribution of resources that wasn't equal? Of course not, ultimately we all agree that some people are more valuable than others. The reason for this being the case is irrelevant. We have a social hierarchy because that it is ultimately more efficient than the alternatives; we've tried pure democracy and communism, and they simply do not work well enough.
Like I said, I'm /not/ against unequal distribution of resources; I'm not even against distribution of resources in ways other than fairly rewarding the effort people make.
What I /am/ against is claiming that distribution that distribution of resources that doesn't reward effort is fair or just, rather than being an unfairness that is sadly necessary because, as you say, the alternative doesn't work well - the injury is justifiable, but the insult is not.
Also, I think "some people are more valuable than others" is ambiguous enough to be neither true nor false, and is the kind of deeply unpleasant statement that shouldn't be made unless it's both true and necessary. Some of the things it gestures at are unquestionably true - some people's labour has much greater financial value than others; some people would be missed much more than others if they were hit by a bus - but if you're trying to use "I am stating harsh truths" as a justification for saying something then I think it behoves you to get in as much truth and as little harshness as possible, and "some people are more valuable than others" doesn't do that.
...Our obsession with justice is exactly what got us into this mess. Of course, if the populace can be convinced that inequality is just, that's killing two birds with one stone. And the next administration is set to do exactly that.
Why pretend that your idea of justice is objectively true? Justice, just like morality, is completely subjective. The people have made their choice on what justice looks like, and you have no standing to object to that. The poor, the weak, and the unwanted will face judgement. Your appeal to morality will accomplish nothing.
"IQ differences exist" does not imply "and therefore, I should support the guy who rants about immigrants poisoning the blood of our country." Trump is not raising some sort of sober point about dysgenics or immigrant birth rates, he's just being a fascist.
The blank-slatists, while inaccurate, are much closer to what I would consider "american values" than anything out of the Right in recent years.
The OP isnt talking about Trump. And if Trump talked about dysgenics rather than immigration, he'd would get called fascist a lot more
Does "still broadly supporting the Left" not include "voting Democrat"?
Also, I don't understand what you mean by your second sentence. Trump did talk about immigrants having bad genes, and he did get called a fascist for it, so what's the hypothetical here?
I asked OP what he meant and he didn’t respond, so it’s anyone’s guess.
What does this question have with the thread? It's not about USA and not about Trump.
The hypothetical is yours "Trump is not raising some sort of sober point about dysgenics or immigrant birth rates"
Dysgenics is not about immigrants but about fertility patterns
A lot of posters here are in the USA.
If IQ differences were the reason for all inequality this still wouldn’t be a reason to oppose lessoning inequality.
Helping people unto itself would still be good
Analyzing questions like hiring, immigration, birth rates, etc would have to change
I don't think that last part is true. You just need to base decisions on the individual rather than what groups he or she belongs to, and that's good practice *anyway*.
Yeah, but blank slatism seems to be a gateway drug to:
1. attributing differences in outcomes between individuals to some sort of systemic bias that needs to be corrected
2. overlooking observable consequences to group-policies related to immigration, etc because the arguments needed to articulate why these consequences might happen would touch on extremely offensive claims (even if ideally you could just have a direct measurement for traits without group policies, even trying to argue for direct measurements gets attacked because of disparate impacts on groups)
I think recognizing IQ differences and how important they are in life outcomes makes a case for a lot of traditional left-wing policies. To the extent your wealth and my poverty comes down to you working harder or making better choices, it's pretty easy to justify the difference in our wealth; to the extent if comes down to you being born smarter because your grandparents were smarter + the genetic and developmental dice rolls came out in your favor, it's a lot harder to justify on moral grounds. (You might still justify it pragmatically, but not morally.)
The Bell Curve was mostly about how IQ differences affected life outcomes. It would be shocking if IQ score didn't predict success in school, since that's what it IQ scores were designed to do. But it's surprising and unsettling that IQ score predicts (correlates with) stuff like life expectancy, disability claims, probability of bad life outcomes like spending time in prison, being divorced, or having kids out of wedlock. As best anyone can tell, IQ is mainly determined by genes, developmental noise, and early childhood environment--none of these are things you can control.
The more your life trajectory is determined by random crap outside your control, the stronger the moral argument for safety net programs. A model of the world that has a big chunk of life success be driven by IQ is one in which those programs are easier to argue for.
Notably, Paige Harden is an IQ researcher who advocates for mostly left/progressive politics, and Freddie DeBoer wrote a book largely about differences in intellectual ability between people, and is also a dedicated socialist who supports a lot of old left stuff.
Race/IQ correlations are the other place where you might think IQ research undermines left-wing ideas, but mainly that undermines a fairly small part of those ideas--affirmative action, disparate impact, etc. You can have the worldview of Steve Sailer wrt race and IQ and still support a minimum wage, extensive regulation of the economy, a carbon emission tax, etc.
Yeah I think that's a good steelman, and thanks for the sources. I guess the main "blind spots" that have to be watched out for are:
1. Edge case mass migration scenarios (like what the European migrant criss from a decade ago could've become)
2. Effects on birth rate trends (which would be devastating but maybe we aren't going to be baseline biological humans for long enough anyway)
3. Just generally being at the mercy to the fact that if you pretend this variable doesn't exist and are zealous about certain things, you will inevitably come to strange conclusions and nobody is allowed to cleanly say why you're wrong, so you have to just sort of hope that society just moderates that by using other variables to triangulate or something
Yeah, I think not knowing or not being able to talk about important bits of reality like IQ research is in general bad--it leads to bad policies. And there are definitely places where this shows up in the US--basically all public discourse on education in the US is infected with a rather aggressive ignorance of basic facts wrt IQ, which is why you get stuff like NCLB and the idea that by raising standards for teachers you can basically make every student college material, as well as idiocy like wanting to eliminate advanced math classes to reduce inequality, and the assumption that when a magnet program is 45/45/10 Asian, white, and black, this is evidence of racism.
I think you’ll have to unpack this a little bit more: it’s not clear how you think IQ research discredits the Left, so it’s hard to respond.
Trump has named three of his own personal defense attorneys to top management posts in the Justice Department.
Well, points for clarity I guess.
Yeah, I'm semi-excited about Trump's cabinet. I would like to hope he could turn the other cheek. But I'd bet he's going to want to lawfare someone on the other side. which sucks, but I'm not going to hold it against him.
Do you have any other reasons to find Matt Gaetz et al exciting, aside from "they'll attack Trump's enemies"?
Sarah Isgur on The Dispatch/Advisory Opinions gave reasons for supporting MG as AG. I would summarize her arguments, but I found them so unconvincing that I doubt I can represent them fairly. You're invited to form your own opinion here:
https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/the-trump-picks-so-far/
We live in interesting times.
I'm hoping it's a trick and now that Matt Gaetz has resigned from his old position they'll pull the rug out from under him.
A few more links on Avian flu.
1. The teenager up in BC who has been hospitalized with HPAI, and who is in critical condition is infected with a strain of A(H5) found in wild birds (clade 2.3.4.4b, genotype D1.1)—this is not the strain that is circulating in cattle in the US.
https://www.statnews.com/2024/11/13/bird-flu-canada-teenager-infected-different-strain-than-dairy-cattle/
I don't think they've published the full sequence, though. Statement from the Public Health Agency of Canada
https://t.co/ebQedla6qc
2. An excellent article in Science discussing what sort of mutations would be required to trigger a pandemic in humans. It runs down some of the genetic changes that could make A(H5) more transmissible and immune evasive in humans.
https://www.science.org/content/article/bad-worse-avian-flu-must-change-trigger-human-pandemic
The A(H5) clades that infect birds use feces-contaminated water as a vector for transmission, and those strains infect the birds' guts. These strains are not adapted to infecting lung tissue. So, that's why it's difficult for humans to catch it from birds. But not discussed in the article is that the strains that are capable of inter-mammal transmission can spread via respiratory transmission or fomites.
My favorite quote is from one of the scientists who performed that GoF experiment in ferrets to make A(H5) more transmissible.
"That feat prompted restrictions on such 'gain of function' experiments, which has hampered research, says Mathilde Richard, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center, where some of that work was done. 'I do think that this has really, really slowed down our knowledge.'" I think this is a good example of scientific hubris. Although I'm certain that SARS-CoV-2 is not an escape from a lab GoF experiment, other pathogens have escaped from BSL-3 facilities.
3. And Adam Kucharski delves into the ins-and-outs of how we'd estimate the overall fatality rate (IFR) of A(H5) avian strains in humans.
https://kucharski.substack.com/p/how-fatal-is-h5n1-influenza
ACXLW Meetup 79: Revisiting "Rules for Rulers" by CGP Grey and "Game Theory of Michigan Muslims" by Scott Alexander
Date: Saturday, November 16, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Due to high interest and a desire for deeper exploration, we are revisiting our previous topics for this week's meetup. Join us as we delve further into the intricate dynamics of political power and strategic decision-making.
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: "Rules for Rulers" by CGP Grey
Videos:
Rules for Rulers
How to Rig an Election
Transcripts: Reformatted Transcripts
Enhanced Summary:
Foundations of Political Power: The videos are based on "The Dictator's Handbook" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. They dissect the mechanics of how rulers—whether dictators or democratically elected leaders—acquire, maintain, and lose power.
Three Fundamental Rules:
Secure the Support of Key Individuals: Rulers must identify and win over those who control essential resources, institutions, or influence.
Control the Nation's Wealth: By managing the treasury, rulers can reward key supporters and ensure their loyalty.
Minimize the Number of Essential Supporters: Fewer key supporters mean fewer people to satisfy, simplifying the maintenance of power.
Application Across Governance Systems: While the rules are universal, their application varies between dictatorships and democracies. In dictatorships, power is concentrated, leading to potential abuses and neglect of the populace. In democracies, the need to satisfy a larger base can lead to policies that improve citizens' lives but may also result in systemic inefficiencies or corruption.
Dynastic Power and Succession: The sequel video explores why rulers often place family members in positions of power. This practice can provide continuity and stability but also poses risks of nepotism and potential internal betrayal.
Manipulation of Systems: The content examines how rulers may exploit legal systems, elections, and public policies to entrench their power, often at the expense of democratic principles and societal welfare.
Improved Discussion Questions:
a) Universal Dynamics of Power: How do the three rules for rulers help explain historical and contemporary political events across different countries? Can you identify real-world examples where these rules are evident?
b) Moral Implications of Power Strategies: Is it possible for leaders to follow these rules without compromising ethical standards? How can societies encourage leaders to prioritize the common good while recognizing the realities of political power?
c) The Role of Institutions: How do strong institutions and checks and balances mitigate the negative effects of these power dynamics? What mechanisms can be implemented to prevent the abuse of power by those in leadership positions?
d) Family Influence and Political Stability: In what ways does involving family in governance strengthen or weaken a political system? Are there alternatives to dynastic succession that can provide the same level of stability?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: "Game Theory of Michigan Muslims" by Scott Alexander
Text: Game Theory of Michigan Muslims
Enhanced Summary:
Strategic Voting as Political Leverage: The article discusses a group of Michigan Muslims contemplating voting for a candidate whose policies oppose their interests to signal their dissatisfaction with their traditional party's stance on critical issues, specifically regarding foreign policy in the Middle East.
Applying Game Theory to Politics: By using the Ultimatum Game as an analogy, the article examines the strategic considerations behind voting decisions. In the Ultimatum Game, one player proposes a division of resources, and the other can accept or reject it. The analogy highlights the tension between immediate self-interest and long-term strategic positioning.
Decision Theories Explored:
Causal Decision Theory (CDT): Suggests that actions should be based solely on their immediate consequences.
Logical Decision Theory (LDT): Proposes that agents should consider the logical implications of their actions, including how they influence others' expectations and future behaviors.
Potential Consequences of Strategic Defection: The article explores whether voting against one's immediate interests can effectively pressure a political party to change its policies or if it risks marginalizing the group further.
Coalition Dynamics and Loyalty: The piece delves into how political parties balance the needs of various constituencies and what happens when a group attempts to leverage its support in ways that may undermine coalition unity.
Improved Discussion Questions:
a) Effectiveness of Strategic Defection: Can minority groups effectively influence major political parties by threatening to withdraw their support? What historical examples support or refute this strategy?
b) Game Theory Limitations in Real Politics: How well does the Ultimatum Game capture the complexities of electoral politics and voter behavior? What factors in real-world politics complicate this analogy?
c) Ethics and Long-Term Consequences: Is it ethically defensible for a group to vote for a candidate whose policies may harm them or others to achieve a strategic objective? What are the potential long-term impacts on democratic processes and trust in political systems?
d) Alternatives to Voting Defection: What other methods can minority groups employ to make their voices heard and influence policy without resorting to voting against their interests?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
Tumblr poll "Which of my recent single use verification codes is the most fuckable?" is a poll between 10 different (ostensibly randomly generated) 6-digit numbers. It has 50% of answers (n>100,000) on agreed on one option. I don't know if whatever kind of kiki-bouba number feeling going on here can be decomposed, but I'm amused.
https://www.tumblr.com/kawaiite-mage/767046387305185280/which-of-my-recent-single-use-verification-codes?
(screenshot: https://ibb.co/ZJ4t0Xd )
May non-Tumblr-users have a screenshot?
mea culpa
https://ibb.co/ZJ4t0Xd
It starts with "007" and thus is associated with James Bond.
I've tried to figure out what happened in Amsterdam. Here is my approximation. I'm curious about more details and more accuracy if anyone has them.
Maccabi Tel Aviv, an Israeli football (soccer) team and their fans behaved like assholes in Amsterdam. They seem to have interrupted a minute of silence for Valencia. The only explanation I've seen is from Al Jazeera which says that Spain has recognized Palestine.
They (I'm assuming fans rather than team members) took down a Palestinian flag hanging from someone's window. I've heard about multiple flags being taken down and damage to houses, but I don't think that was verified.
They were also doing anti-Palestinian chants.
Eventually a mob formed and physically attacked fans. 10 were injured, and 5 of them were hospitalized, but were not severely injured. One person was claiming he wasn't Jewish, but he was attacked anyway. 2 people disappeared, possibly just out of contact because their cell phones were taken. I *think* they showed up, but I'm not sure.
The Israeli government considered sending military planes to evacuate people, but settled for sending two El Al planes.
I've heard that the attack on the fans was organized in advance by Arab taxi drivers, so I'm not sure whether the fans behaving better in Amsterdam would have made that much difference.
Terms like pogrom and Kristallnacht were used. They strike me as excessive, but I don't know what appropriate language would be.
> Terms like pogrom and Kristallnacht were used. They strike me as excessive, but I don't know what appropriate language would be.
Pogrom seems like a reasonable language for anything that self-describes itself as a "jew hunt", source for that: https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/calls-for-jew-hunt-preceded-attacks-in-amsterdam-e3311e21
One report about a “Jew hunt” isn’t much proof. There are considerable Jewish communities in Amsterdam. Why then did the locals have to wait for a group of football hooligans to engage in “pogroms”.
Clearly the instigators were, by most accounts, the Israeli fans. I strongly suggest not attacking people in another country, chasing locals down the road, seizing flags and booing a minutes silence for drowned Europeans, when in civilised Europe.
And if Israeli soccer teams fear anti semitism in European competitions then there’s a solution - Israel is not it Europe and it doesn’t have to be in European competitions. Admittedly the football mobs of Israel might fare worse as they bring their hooliganism to whatever Middle Eastern city they should be playing in but that seems the optimal solution to the problem.
How, then, would you distinguish it from a hate crime?
A pogrom 1) is going to be aimed at Jewish people in general, esp local Jewish people and institutions; 2) is going have local government support or acquiescense in some way. https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/260
The link you provided doesn't match what you said. Here's the exact wording:
> In general usage, a pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group; it usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities
That clearly says that government support is not a requirement since its only "usually" part of a pogrom. So in answer to your question all pogrom's are hate crimes, but not all hate crimes are an "outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group"
Edit: I believe you are misconstruing the link. It says govt SUPPORT is "usual" but that govt PASSIVITY is present at a minimum. Which is what I said: "local government support or acquiescense in some way."
>So in answer to your question all pogrom's are hate crimes, but not all hate crimes are an "outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group"
The issue is not whether pogroms are hate crimes or whether hate crimes are pogroms. It is whether thus particular incident is better described as a hate crime or a pogrom.
If it is a anti-Jewish pogrom, it is the first in history in which synagogue were not targeted, homes and businesses of Jewish residents were not targeted, etc. I would also not that it does not seem to qualify as "mass" violence.
The main point is that referring to it as a logrom is a pure appeal to emotion.
A pogrom is a mob event, possibly planned, possibly spontaneous. A hate crime can kill a lot of people (Tree of Life, for instance, and the anti-immigrant shooter in Texas in 2019), but those single-shooter incidents weren't reasonably called pogroms.
But many, if not most, hate crimes are group events. Also possibly planned and possibly spontaneous. The point is that the mere fact that someone described it as a "Jew hunt" does not make it a pogrom. A lot more is needed.
A "hunt" is, in common English usage at least, a group event and usually planned. "Hunting" (verb) can be used to describe a solitary and spontaneous activity, like going out into the woods alone with a bow and arrow and the intention of shooting dinner, but the resulting activity is rarely described as a "hunt" (noun). Think classic English fox hunt, or African safari, for typical uses.
Of course, there could be translation errors involved here; that sort of nuance may not cross the language barrier.
This is weird. I got email notifications for three replies (one of them pointing out that I'd said hockey team, I've corrected my comment). It seems strange that all three of them have disappeared.
I DMd you. Perhaps the notifications were from that.
Oops that was probably me and my two edits (to add links). I'm seeing the reply up, though, weird! Maybe try a different browser or device if it's still not showing?
Not an expert, but some clarifications per my understanding:
* football/soccer, not hockey. Football hooliganism is a perenial cultural feature, annoyance, sign of moral decay, or pipeline to right wing radicalism, depending on who you ask.
* Day before the match, some Maccabi fans took a Palestinian flag off a building, burned it, chanted "fuck you Palestine," and vandalized a taxi. A taxi driver was assaulted, but the details are unconfirmed. There's a video of some Maccabi fans setting off flares and chanting "Ole, ole, let the IDF win, and fuck the Arabs" to a football tune.
* A group of taxi drivers gathered to confront a large gathering of Maccabi fans, and police dispersed them and escorted the fans away.
* A pro-Palestine protest (Amsterdam has a lot of these) planned for during the match was officially canceled, but people showed up anyway.
* After the match, there was a lot of yelling and fighting in the streets. Some people went looking for fights. Maccabi fans grabbed a bunch of pipes and planks from a construction site and went around chanting. People on scooters went around attacking people in Maccabi colors. Not narratively linear cause-and-effect, but decentralized hooliganism.
* The Dutch right wing is blaming the Amsterdam Moroccan community.
* 5 people hospitalized, 20-30 injured, 62 arrested, 4 Dutch nationals still in custody.
* Everybody is accounted for, and investigation is ongoing.
EDIT 1: some sources
Local news before: https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/binnenland/artikel/5479291/hooligans-van-maccabi-tel-aviv-amsterdam-slaags-met
Al Jazeera explainer: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/10/israeli-football-fans-pro-palestinians-attacked-in-amsterdam-what-we-know
Guardian explainer: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/11/what-happened-amsterdam-israeli-football-fans
EDIT 2: actually the current Wikipedia write up is very detailed https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=November_2024_Amsterdam_attacks&oldid=1257380676
Thanks. It still doesn't explain the other two comments.
This just sounds like a fairly normal occurrence in any football game where there is existing enmity between the teams supporters. Any time English fans travel to European games there is almost always violence. This is one of the key reasons many of the 'fans' travel in the first place - they just love a good fight.
The fact that it was Israeli fans is really of no great consequence in the larger setting of football violence.
It's not standard football violence, since Ajax fans were pretty much uninvolved, but yeah. The general hooliganism and fight-picking associated with football ultras is imo important context, both for why/how the fans were behaving, and for why the locals got fed up with it, but this wasn't just ultras going at each other.
Sorry if I'm late to this, but... I think I found the most fucked up use of AI so far. Not fucked up in an ethical way (though uh, it doesn't seem like they got Microsoft's permission to do this), but just... everything else.
It's called Oasis, and it's a video generation AI that streams a fully playable instance of Minecraft without using any of its code. And amazingly, it actually kinda works. The buttons mostly do what you expect them to do, you can explore and mine and even open your inventory and craft. ...But the emphasis is on "kinda". If you've played any Minecraft at all, you'll find it is an absolute nightmare to play in the most literal sense.
The most obvious problem is the complete lack of object permanence; looking away from anything for even a moment will cause it to morph into something different. The worst part is that if you look down, it tries to predict the surrounding environment from the blocks that are visible, creating landscapes that should simply not exist. And problems only start there; sinking into the ground without warning as the world melts under you, sudden walls of tall grass that obscure everything, cursed amalgamations of creatures that morph in and out of existence... I've never done psychedelics before, but I'm assuming this is what a bad trip feels like.
But what fills me with dread isn't the fact that it's broken, it's the fact that it works at all. How the hell is it doing this? How is it keeping track of these 3d spaces relatively consistently as long as I keep looking at it? How does it know that certain tools mine certain blocks faster? I think I know the answer, but... *sigh* I don't know what to feel about this.
Anyways, if you want to feel a wave of existential dread, here's the link to the demo. It's free! (But you can only play it on Chrome.) https://oasis.decart.ai/starting-point And if you can't use the site for whatever reason, here's the technical report. https://oasis-model.github.io/
LSD: Dream Emulator 2 is gonna be absolutely lit
By next year it should have developed enough to have a special Ayahuasca mode to one-shot your consciousness
"The most obvious problem is the complete lack of object permanence; looking away from anything for even a moment will cause it to morph into something different"
That seems remarkably dreamlike, but dreams are arguably an association system which is just somewhat more sophisticated than AI.
Here's a different theory of why things morph in dreams. You know how when you wake up and try to remember a dream, it's hard? You have trouble being clear about settings, what the point of this or that event was, what that one character looked like? I think that *while you're dreaming* you are similarly impaired regarding the dream events you are experiencing: You quickly lose track of what you were doing a little earlier in the dream and why, of what the setting was like, of how you got to be in a different setting, of who the guy was you were talking to. And yet the expectation that things will stay what they are is still there, and the expectation that they will make sense, so the dreaming mind can't just shrug and say, "oh well, I can't remember what it looked last time I looked out the window and it doesn't matter if none of this fits together." So it puts up a made-up scene for the next look out the window, and sort of defines it as the scene that's been there all along, and declares it to be a meaningful development from what was happening before. . In other words, the dreaming mind confabulates, like people with a memory disorder. All this is consistent with other evidence that the dreaming mind is sort of dumb and confused. Most people find they can't really read anything in their dreams. In my dreams I try, but it's hard to see -- or I can't find the spot where I was reading before -- or what I read makes no sense. You can't do real math or real reasoning in a dream. You can't remember real events from your waking life.
> I think that *while you're dreaming* you are similarly impaired regarding the dream events you are experiencing
Can confirm. Today I had a dream where something happened, and when I tried to explain it to other people in the dream, I just couldn't remember the important events, the same way I can't remember them after I wake up.
The setting was of a time loop, something like Groundhog Day, where I tried to escape from... some kind of magic school, I guess... and got killed at various points, and then restarted and tried a different thing. At some point I got allies, and I was like: "okay, now I need to tell them about the time loop, and explain what happened in the previous runs, and then we will plan something smart together", only to realize that I actually don't remember the previous runs and can't even make a coherent story out of something that happened like 5 subjective minutes ago. That was extremely frustrating, and then I woke up.
> Most people find they can't really read anything in their dreams.
A repeating thing in my dreams is that I write down someone's phone number on a paper, but then the digits start changing in front of my eyes as I try to read them, in a way similar to how LLMs try to recreate texts.
Haha yeah, that’s the stuff of dreams. One of the most obvious way we’re impaired is that we don’t realize while we’re dreaming that what’s going on keeps mutating and we can’t even remember the recent dream events. We’re engaged, we take it seriously. Sometimes when my alarm
goes off I think, “but I can’t stop what I’m
doing now ! I have to mix all the popcorn into the house paint (or whatever)!”
I have remembered real events from my waking life in a dream. I have also remembered a previous dream in a subsequent dream. Dreaming is weird.
Human brain is obviously more sophisticated, sure, but these AIs are working with way more hardware and data than we are. I sure as hell can't visualize Minecraft in my head that accurately, and I played a ton of it back in the day.
It's like if you put fusion-powered engine on a wooden wagon; sure, that'll obviously crash and burn, but what happens when you eventually learn how to build a proper rocket? It wouldn't necessarily be a FOOM scenario... but humanity still isn't going to deal with it well.
I am not sure but I think this model uses less compute for inference than human brain;
As for cannot vuisualize; do you have aphantasia?
Came here looking for commentary on FBI raiding the home of Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan. Initial thoughts?
Initial thought; wait, he lives in the United States, how the hell did he get away with betting on the election?
...Well, apparently he didn't.
Jokes aside, I'm sure the FBI's looking for dirt on Polymarket, not Coplan himself. Surely he wasn't stupid enough to bet on the election... right?
> I'm sure the FBI's looking for dirt on Polymarket
They're investigating money laundering.
One would hope not, but one would also think he wouldn't be dumb enough to run a gambling site on US soil.
So secondary impression is, the FBI had to wait until the market closed and money actually changed hands, the same way they do with prostitution or murder-for-hire, and it only looks political because it can't not look political.
But yeah, wouldn't surprise me if Trump bailed them out because they said nice things about him.
But polymarket has settled non-election bets before. Maybe they just wanted to wait for after the election to avoid the appearance of interference
Does it even matter? What the current administration does now is completely irrelevant, considering they're going to be replaced in a few months anyways. I don't see how it could be political retribution though, since it's not like Polymarket directly contributed to Trump's win... and even if it was retribution, it would still be completely pointless because of the aforementioned regime change. They probably are genuinely trying to convict him for intentionally circumventing US gambling regulations. ...Though, I don't know why they're even bothering at this point.
Is Substack cutting off replies, I see a lot of unfinished comments.
Go to your browser settings and clear the cache. Never had to do that on any other website, this place is a fucking mess.
For me, the problem generally goes away when I reload the page.
Theoretical question: What is the opposite of effective altruism? What would be the word for wanting to decrease the human utility function as much as possible? Effective misanthropy? Effective maltruism?
Effective Villainy
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/ev
Effective Malevolence
Management Training...!
Effective malice?
Solipsism.
A different opposite would be "futile altruism".
He was asking for an opposite, not an alternative name.
True, but I think 'futile altruism' is a nice word for EA to use if they need an attack word for some reason. I mean, what's the alternative? Going on vibes?
Whatever it is, it's perhaps poorly defined because the big barriers to causing mass harm are legal rather than financial, so instead of asking "What's the most harm I can do with X amount of money" you're stuck asking "What's the most harm I can do with X amount of money and Y amount of tolerance for being caught and punished?"
(I came up with some examples for various values of X and Y but the tiny possibility of giving some weirdo an idea isn't worth it.)
Fuck 'em Syndrome
Ineffective egotism.
I have just noticed that the wikipedia entry for Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1944)
starts off with how it is not to be confused with Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978).
Well, yes, of course. Completely different, wouldnt want to get them mixed up.
This is like the bit in Monty Python's Life of Brian with The Judean People's Front vs. the People's Front of Judea, isn't it...
[Yes, I aatually do some of the context and how they're different. Still, People's Front of Judea].
I mean, that's the entire point of the joke in 'Life of Brian'. It specifically jokes about splintered communist parties and their mutual hostility.
I was actually trying to remember which of the various Communist splinter groups was the extremely anti-semitic one, but kind of lost heart in finding out. (See also, Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism), and The Horseshoe Theory of Politics)
Anyone know why The Horseshoe Theory of Politics is so heavily criticized in the wiki-sphere? The article and its associated Talk page are remarkably heavy-handed, much more so than my experience talking to people who study political science.
Because the only people who are really motivated to write about the subject are the far left, who are offended by the comparison with the far right. (The far right are in theory offended too but they have less cultural power and different battles to fight.)
It's easy to see why the extremes look similar to the people in the middle, but far apart to the people on the extremes; it's just that different people care about different things. If you're counting legs then snakes and spiders are very different, but if you're deciding whether you're happy to share a sleeping bag with them then they seem much more similar.
I think the concept has at least _some_ explanative power, but its typical use in the popular discourse is sloppy and of negative value. I'd speculate the Wiki pushback/emphasis on limited academic support is for this or similar reasons.
Basically, the horseshoe theory looks at all of politics from the standpoint of basic liberalism - democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, all that - and notices that both communism and fascism have it in common that they do indeed lack that basic liberalism, and there is a certain sort of an "anti-liberal" personality that can easily flitter from one non-liberal ideology to another or construct boutique ideologies sharing features from both a la Dugin's thought.
However, this still very much obscures that these are completely different ideologies, built on different bases and with different worldviews, and the absence of a certain, admittedly otherwise omnipresent (in the West) ideological feature - the basic liberalism that a normal Western person takes for granted, the water we swim in - does not yet mean we can ignore this difference to the least.
Both Nazis and Communists living under those forms of government had similar observations to make about the similarities between liberalism and communism, and liberalism and fascism, respectively (although they used terms like “bourgeois”, “capitalist,” “Jewish financiers”, etc). Maybe the dominant mode always sees a horseshoe stretching out to either side…
Does it happen often? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Mahler is a prominent example.
There were a number of cases in the original fascist/Nazi-era. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Doriot. Or, hell, Mussolini.
From my perspective, Occam's razor suggests that we should go with Circle Theory of Politics instead. There is no reason to believe that the two ends of the horseshoe are not connected.
But I guess the masters of the wiki would hate this theory even more.
I used to love Manifold, but the recent push to constantly ask me to redeem sweepstakes, get sweepstakes, changing the market category to sweepstakes-only in search daily, etc. has been VERY annoying as a European who can't even participate in it.
Even if I was American and could, I'd probably be annoyed by all the pushing, but if they don't even allow me to use it what's the point of constantly hindering my experience by doing so?
I can understand the frustration. Manifold, as a product experience, is a strange mix of professional and amateur. Part of the problem is the constraint of not having a clear revenue and profit model. My interpretation of the sweepstake mis-steps is in that context.
Overall, though, I'm hoping they can settle into a sustainable path and we, users, can focus on the markets and forecasting.
A Pew survey last month found that 72% of registered voters believed Kamala Harris would accept a Trump victory, while only 24% believed Trump would do the same if he lost.
What are the chances the next Republican presidential candidate who loses will unambiguously concede and agree to a peaceful transfer of power? And do most Republicans still expect Democrats to do this as Harris just did?
It could strengthen the country (and grow Republican Party voter rolls and favorability) if Republicans simply reaffirmed support for the practice now and re-established it with their next presidential loss.
If you disagree, and think both sides should just abandon the practice and deny election losses going forward, could you explain why?
There's been a number of Republican candidates that have disputed the results for non-presidential elections. The highest profile one I can think of is Kari Lake's 2022 loss in the election for Arizona Governor which she was still disputing as of last week: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/arizona-court-of-appeals-rejects-kari-lakes-2022-election-contest-again/
I don't think any of those efforts have been successful (definitely not in terms of changing election results). Trump's election denial was "successful" only in the sense he was able to get sizable popular opinion on board with his claims. But thats the issue for any candidate going forward: Trump is uniquely able to create devotion among a sizable portion of the public. I doubt any candidate in the near future from either party will be as skilled in that department as Trump.
There are and have been other politicians that have had that same persuasive skills as trump but mostly in lower level roles like city council or sheriff etc. Former DC mayor Marion Berry was one. He went to jail for drug and prostitution charges while Mayor but was able to be reelected as mayor after his release from prison and served as a city councilor after losing the mayorship. He had devoted followers among the cities black population which served as his base and largely view his arrest as racial/political persecution. But his persuasive abilities wouldn't have scaled to higher office as they relied on characteristics unique to DC. Thats likely true of any other politicians that could try the trump tactic. They just wont have a universal devotion needed to make the election denial stick.
Manifold market on this question: https://manifold.markets/JRR/if-the-republican-candidate-loses-t
Is there a market for the Democrat as well?
I think it depends a lot on what you consider to be "accept[ing] a...victory." Many people say that Hillary Clinton accepted Trump's victory in 2016, but she and/or people around her did a lot of things to actively work against Trump and his administration, including pushing the entirely made up Steele Dossier into the DOJ and media in order to start a three year investigation. Did she "accept" his win? If so, then the chances of either side accepting the other's win is really really high. We just set the bar super low.
Definitionally, we can say that Trump accepted Biden's win as well, because he didn't take up arms or some other obvious refusal. Saying the words "Biden didn't really win" may or may not mean he didn't accept it in practice. Hillary had a formal concession speech and from there on repeatedly said that Trump wasn't a legitimate president. What does that mean in terms of "accepting" an election?
I’m talking about the tradition of a formal concession speech shortly after the election (unless the margin of victory is razor-thin and the result isn’t clear like 2000 when concession didn’t take place till December). We can put aside agreeing to a peaceful transfer of power prior to the result.
If you didn’t need to be forcibly removed from the White House but didn’t publicly concede, that doesn’t count as concession here.
Under these circumstances, and in line with general consensus, Hilary’s concession speech counted as conceding. Harris’s did, too. Trump didn’t make one.
Given this definition, do you think the next Republican presidential candidate who loses will concede? Do you think candidates should, or do you think both sides should abandon the practice?
That feels like an intentionally contrived definition. If Trump doesn't give a concession speech but doesn't do anything to hurt his successor, that's worse to you than someone who gives a concession speech but then spends years trying to tear down their opponent? By this I mean using institutional power, not just saying negative things about them.
That doesn't seem like a useful definition. Or putting tradition over substance.
I'll answer your question - I do think that a non-Trump Republican will most likely concede formally if they lose a future presidential election. Kari Lake doesn't come off well, and ultimately Trump didn't either, by continuing to deny it. If, beyond all sanity, someone like Donald Trump Jr. is the nominee, then I don't have much hope he would concede, but I also don't think he has a chance at being nominated. DeSantis, Vance, or the other real potentials I think would all formally concede.
Why would Vance conceed when he was chosen as VP because he says he would refuse to certify an election where Trump loses?
Genuine thanks for your answer.
I define concession in American presidential politics as making a concession speech because I feel it’s the most common definition and publicly conceding helps maintain civic order and preserve peace through a significant transition that goes on for months.
I'm inclined to agree with Mr. Doolittle here; a concession speech is basically arbitrary. I see your point that it maintains civic order and peace, but I think you need to inspect why it does that, and in so doing, you'll discover that it will fail in exactly the cases we're seeing today.
To lay it out: a concession speech serves as a signal that a candidate will no longer question the election results, vacate the office if incumbent, and will bear the same relation to the winner that any citizen (even one with major political influence) has borne toward any winner from an opposition party in past instances where the nation returned to stability. In other words, it's a statement of commitment to the aforesaid set of behaviors. That means that if that candidate does *not* commit to those behaviors, it wasn't really a concession. And it'd be foolish to insist that the speech overrode the failed commitment on definitional terms. See what I'm saying?
Part of actually conceding, then, means a candidate doesn't then grouse about how the winner didn't truly win on the merits, but rather because of fraud, collusion with a foreign power, and so on. I read Doolittle's contention above as Clinton having given a speech, but then failing to commit to the implications of such a speech. That just invalidates the speech.
Somewhat random related note: saw noted on Twitter that the last Democrat to give a concession speech *on Election night* was Dukakis. Thought that was mildly interesting.
I think the amount of time that elapses between election night and concession speech is more a function of margin of victory than party affiliation. All Democratic party losses in the years you single out have been close. The Republican losses have not.
Edit: I mistook your post as being from another poster and so responded incorrectly. I removed the incorrect part. Sorry for any confusion.
I get your point, but I’m talking about concession speeches because the speech is a neat unit that can be more objectively measured and agreed upon than a subjective, varying criteria for what constitutes the essence of presidential concession. The speech is an imperfect measure, but it’s broadly understood and the failure of a candidate to make such a simple yet beneficial gesture is concerning to many voters.
> the failure of a candidate to make such a simple yet beneficial gesture is concerning to many voters
...But Trump still won in a landslide, so clearly they're a minority and thus their opinion doesn't matter.
Donald J. Trump has never won any election in anything that comes close to being a "landslide". He hasn't even managed to get 50% of the popular vote.
Yes, he swept the "swing states" this time. The *definition* of "swing state" is one that either side can win even in a very close election. And they aren't statistically independent. If you *only* sweep the swing states, that's not a landslide, that's just slightly less close than the very very very close sort of election.
Oh, I agree, it's a measurable and broadly understood thing. It's just that - well, you know Goodhart, I'm guessing. The speech is a proxy for what people really care about. And it was a good proxy, too - until about 2016.
So now fewer people care about it, and if you're still concerned, you'll have to take that up with Hillary Clinton.
I see. Since you contend Hilary Clinton destroyed the tradition, should both sides follow Trump’s example and just abandon it?
Maybe, but not for the reason you seem to be implying. I've no desire for candidates to just declare eternal conflict and escalate their rhetoric until their claim is either accepted or rejected with ever greater energy until violence is the only resort left. But at the same time, I'm compelled to recognize that a concession speech is no longer the bind it once was, so if a candidate gives one, people can't rely on it.
One way around that is to establish a new tradition. It could be anything. Harvard makes really good actors wear a mop on their heads and ride a tiny tricycle around on a stage, and I have no idea why, but I recognize they take it seriously in some way. Maybe that's the way. Whatever it is, it has to break from the broken concession speech tradition somehow; having something other than a speech can help, but I'm not certain it's required.
What *will* be required is a slow rebuild of trust. A candidate makes a commitment, and credible (not just lip service), and then visibly sticks to it. Result: the people trust that tradition *slightly* more. Then the next candidate does the same thing; people trust it slightly more. Maybe in a generation or so, we're back to pre-2000 reliability.
(If we're spitballing traditions, a very grandiose one would be the loser accepting a position on the winner's cabinet, and performing non-token duties in support.)
Inviting the incoming president to the White House shortly after the election seems like a decent tradition that signals pretty hard. Have the incoming transition team invited too, and give them access to everything they need.
Dropping all (at least federal) charges against them also seems like a really good signal! Not sure that generalizes beyond this year though.
...Why would it be in the interests GOP to start supporting democracy at this point? Right now, they have a pretty clear path to monopolizing power without even starting a civil war. As you said, only 24% believed Trump would concede the election, and he won easily anyways. They have zero incentive to make any concessions.
Is it your earnest and genuine opinion that the GOP are in the process of removing democracy from the American system and that this was the last election citizens will ever vote in? Is that your real position?
Yes. Vance runs in 2028 as the Republican nominee on a Vance/Trump ticket or with President Trump's full endorsement. It's been 3.5 years since Trump instituted his Schedule F Executive Order that allows him to fire nonpartisan federal bureaucrats that stood in his way in 2020. Trump starts beating his drum about election fraud again and directs his loyalist DoJ to send out a letter to swing states https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/21/read-the-never-issued-trump-order-that-would-have-seized-voting-machines-527572 that confiscates the "fraudulent" votes that would tip the election. Vance wins because of this.
Or, Trump appoints more fraudulent electors like he did in 2020. Since Vance will be Vice President and reside over the certification of electoral votes, and because he's already said he would certify Trump's fraudulent slates of electors in 2020, he will certify Trump's fraudulent electoral votes that are all for Vance over the Democrat nominee in 2028. And if you say that the Electoral Count Act was amended to clarify that the VP only has a procedural role - we can't even get Republicans to agree with Democrats that taking FEMA won't result in their homes getting repossessed by the federal government, that Haitians aren't eating cats and dogs in Ohio, that Trump should be prosecuted for his initial attempt in trying to break the ECA and have his VP decertify legitimate electoral votes, that Trump should be prosecuted for showing off classified documents at his private estate and directing people to obstruct the investigation by hiding the documents - Republicans definitely will not side with Democrats on their interpretation of procedural rules with the result of an election at stake (especially because most Republican voters https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-illegitimate/index.html are so stupid they still think the 2020 election was stolen).
There is no incentive for Republicans to continue playing by democratic rules, because Trump will pardon every Republican involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election, because Republicans in general won't hold Trump accountable for anything he does, and they are so delusional they think Democrats are the ones actually trying to steal elections.
Obviously they shouldn't get rid of the vote! You still have to keep up appearances. But right now the GOP is in a really good position to ensure that they maintain power for the foreseeable future, and they would be stupid not to at least try. After all, what's even the point of a democracy if the wrong people keep getting elected and ruin everything? Not taking action would practically be immoral!
There are five main power centres in the US: Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington DC, and the news media (which doesn't have a convenient geographical synecdoche, sad!)
Washington DC is the only one that the Democrats don't permanently control at this point. And you're worried about the Republicans?
Wall street is a lot less democrat controlled than you think. E.g. Ken Griffin is the biggest single republican donor.
I understand your point, and it was (seemingly) very true not that long ago. But at this point...
Silicon Valley has arguably never been more empowered in Washington than it is now. And it's a Republican President doing it. Sure, your average coder in Silicon Valley is probably still very left-leaning, but what matters most is what the billionaires/owners think and do. I could imagine the actual power players of Silicon Valley gradually shifting to the Republican party, with Musk/Thiel/Bezos leading the way (don't forget that Bezos refused to let the Washington Post endorse Harris).
Hollywood and the mainstream news media are in decline. Your average zoomer male likely cares way more about anime/manga than they do Hollywood these days, seriously. And if celebrity endorsements were truly powerful, we'd have President-Elect Harris now. Harris had plenty of big names endorsing her and joining her for rallies. As for the mainstream news media, Joe Rogan and similar independent podcasters are more important than they are now. And this isn't even a right vs. left thing, it's a generational thing. Look at the demographic breakdowns for ratings for the alphabet networks. Younger generations are barely watching, it's basically only boomers that watch in great numbers.
Whether what I wrote is good or bad will depend on each person's perspective. But It all seems true to me, anyway.
...Worried? Do I sound like I'm worried? I'm cheering you guys on! It's every man's right to fight and kill for what they believe. I'm just here to enjoy the show, that's all.
I completely think that's exclusively a Trump thing and will stop once he's gone. So the chance of the next non-Trump candidate conceding gets 99%.
Given that 28% of those polled thought even Harris wouldn’t accept a Trump victory, and Trump’s claim of winning 2020 hasn’t been refuted by the Republican leaders likeliest to run in 2028, I must admit I’m surprised someone would be 99% certain the next Republican to lose would readily concede.
They haven't refuted it because Trump is still the head of the party, but he's gone in 2028. Even if they wanted to, none of them have the charisma to pull that shit off on their own.
What do you think about my letter to Francis Fukuyama in response to his letter to Elon Musk. Do my suggestions sound good to you? Here’s an excerpt.
Dear Mr. Fukuyma,
The next time you write a letter to Elon, could you please mention the Constitution? It would be great if more people read it, and ever better if more people understood it, especially the Bill of Rights and Amendments 11-27.
For starters, how about suggesting that Elon post one amendment per day on X?
Next, how about suggesting that Elon create a game that tests X users’ understanding of the Constitution. Top performers might receive a CyberTruck in the color of their choice. Or even better yet, recognition, prestige and gratification of doing well on a comprehensive examination of the Constitution.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-francis-fukuyama
Apologies for not understanding the context, but why don't you write those suggestions to Musk directly?
What would you suggest as the best way to communicate these ideas to him?
He replies to people on X all the time.
I wrote him an email and posted it on my Substack. See below. Thanks again.
Good to know, thank you. I'll think about posting something there, but I'm not sure I want the attention from people on X.
Good idea. Do you know his email address?
e@x.com
Interesting. I wonder if he does derivatives trading using the same contact.
I know I'm doing the uncool thing by asking for the joke to be (partially) explained, but is there someplace where "e@x" is the syntax for $e^x$?
Dear Mr. Musk,
I wanted to bring your attention to a letter that I wrote to Francis Fukuyama earlier in the week. Here it is.
In a nutshell, I say in that letter, that I believe that one of the best things you can do for our country (and the world) is to start a competition, announced on X, that encourages people to make suggestions for improving the Constitution. Winners of the competition would receive various kinds of awards, especially the esteem of knowing that their suggestions are truly worthy of esteem. Less meaningful, but still desirable awards might include: a beautiful CyberTruck, a Tesla, or simply a Premium X subscription. See my letter for some conceptual details on how this game might work.
You might start with the First Amendment - my personal favorite. How can we improve it? Step one would be for people to read it and understand it. It might take a while for people to simply understand it. I’ve been thinking about the First Amendment for a few years now and I’m still learning....
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151602901?source=queue&autoPlay=false
Thanks. Maybe I'll send something to him.
Is there a publicly available Banlist for ACX?
So Adblock means I never saw any political ads until after the election. I've since seen three for Kamala Harris, all of which were absurdly bad, and it leads me to the question, were there any GOOD ads from the Harris campaign, or is it really the case that I would have already expected Trump to win the popular vote if I wasn't using Adblock?
I haven't seen any US political adds, but the fact that Harris lost more than twice as much ground compared to Biden in non-swing as swing states makes me think that her focussed campaigning was probably quite effective, and that she lost for other reasons.
As a thinking person, I thought all of the political ads I saw during the campaign were awful, no matter which party or which candidate, full of half-truths, half-lies, outright lies, and emotional appeals with nothing at all about policy.
In general, campaigns do two major types of appeals to two different target audiences, neither of which tend to be sophisticated and informed consumers of political information. Audience 1 is people who will very likely vote for you if they vote but have a high chance of not voting unless you poke at them. Audience 2 is people who are genuinely on the fence as to how they're going to vote, or who are leaning towards one candidate but very weakly so.
If you take an active interest in public policy (and not just following political news like it's sports), then it would take a lot of effort for candidates to reach and persuade you, and to the extent they do this it's a long-term effort in terms of building track records over the course of their careers or at least consistently signaling (via interviews, speeches, the issues section on their websites) what sorts of policies they'd advance in office over the course of the entire campaign. The one-minute ads contain the sorts of appeals that you can stuff into one minute and possibly persuade someone who hasn't really been paying attention, and they're terrible because the target audience is unlikely to be persuadable by any logical argument you can fit into a one-minute ad but might listen to an emotional appeal.
As a side note, it's tempting as a policy nerd to look down on people who aren't really paying much attention to policy. And while some people no doubt do deserve to be looked down upon to some extent, people who don't follow politics and policy closely because they're focused on their families, jobs, friends, hobbies, etc absolutely do not deserve scorn for living their own lives and not sharing our interests. There's anonymous quote I came across a while back that's stuck with me on the subject:
>The mistake political junkies always make is wildly overestimating how much detail normal folks have about politics and government. (Not a criticism of normal folks. They are sane. We are not.)
1. I am constantly impressed by how much you know about so many things, and how you can explain them very well.
2. If someone isn't actively doing anything about policy, but just knows a lot about it, the way thatz other people know a lot about model trains, then they need to understand that they have a hobby and nothing else.
1. Thank you very much.
2. I mostly agree, and confess that I would currently place myself in that category. I used to be actively involved in politics (which is a big part of how I know about the logic of how ads are targeted), and I still take an active interest in understanding policy, but I'm currently "retired" from volunteering and advocacy and have no firm plans to un-retire.
Oh, me too, at least until very recently when I started getting involved in local politics. But before that, I followed politics and policy topics fairly closely, and I constantly need to remind myself that this does not make me a better person than someone whose interests are less “lofty”
Evidence actually points to her ads being good, weirdly enough - she did better compared to baseline in battleground states (which she flooded with ads) than safe states (which don't get many).
(Although it's also possible trump's ads were just even worse than hers)
I wonder about that. I think we're seeing a political realignment, and that Trump's gains in traditionally blue areas are more evidence of that switch. If the Democrats were the party of the working class, and got significant support in traditional blue areas from workers, then if workers are switching to Republicans we should in fact see blue areas turning red (or going from solid blue to either less solid blue or purple). A quick Google says that about 35% of NYC residents make less than $50,000 a year while only 25% make $150,000 or more. Or another metric to look at, 60% of NYC residents do not have a college degree. If the realignment is along class lines, this does not bode well for Democrat's long term voting prospects.
None of this means her ads were ineffective, but I think it's worth considering that Trump has managed to start a process where we can't take for granted the traditional blue/red dichotomies. If I'm right, then the Republicans have a potentially huge advantage right now. Most traditional Republican constituencies have very little reason to go to the Democrats even if the Republicans aren't ideal for them (religion, family) and the ones that do may have a lot of money, but not a lot of voters (business, free trade - this was something the Republicans were frustrated by as well - having the money doesn't mean you win if you can't get your large groups of voters out there).
(I believe you they were actively off-putting to you and probably would be to me, but I guess they worked on the average swing voter, at least a little?)
'If you already thought she needed to justify her bad previous policies, and the bad record of her administration, the ads offered no substance or persuasion' - does that answer your question?
Eh, that's a different question. I'm not asking if they're informative or substantial, I'm asking if any of them managed to put her in a positive light; the three I've seen were actively insulting to the audience and could be described as "worse than nothing".
I don't know if it was literally worse than nothing, because so much of her "campaign" was basically nothing, but I commented multiple times here on how completely incompetently her campaign was run.
Trump's campaign wasn't great, but it did at least achieve a baseline level of competence. There were multiple opportunities that the campaign missed
All this talk about Trump and Israel got me thinking: Trump pushing Israel to just go all out on Gaza could be a really good play for securing power. Think about it, what's the inevitable consequence of Trump being indirectly responsible for some massive atrocity in Gaza? Obviously that'll cause massive protests... massive protests that are populated almost exclusively with left-leaning people. And those protests will inevitably end up devolving into riots, which will justify the police and military rounding all the protesters up and charging them with felonies. (He could also declare martial law to make this process easier.) And in 48 states, incarcerated felons legally cannot vote. In 10 states, felons lose the ability to vote even after their sentence is over. https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights Not to mention all the centrists that'll be radicalized by seeing all the destruction these rioters will bring. If he times it right, it could be enough to significantly shift the mid-terms in his favor.
Practicality says you can't charge enough people in a protest with felonies to outweigh the amount of outrage you generate aggressively charging people with felonies for protesting; even if that protest was a riot.
Based on this thinking, J6 - worth prosecuting or not? Did the heavy-handed response generate outrage against Democrats or the government?
Yes, because it was an capital I insurrection, and in my experience the people who were radicalized against D's by j6 prosecutions would vote for Satan(R) if he was running against St. Paul(D).
As for my personal opinion: Call me a statist, but if break your way into the Capitol, White house, or supreme court, I think you should be hung until dead.
Every single individual who actually set foot in the capitol on J6 should be executed. Even if they were on my side, I would still expect punishment at least socially equivalent to death; you can't just let people try to smash holes in the hull of the boat because they don't like the course; and people who hate the course so much they want to sink the ship should be prepared to die.
EDIT: Forgot to specify, J6 was very small as protests go. Maybe several orders of magnitude smaller the the BLM protests/riots.
Given that Jews seem to break more reliably for Democrats than Muslims do, this seems the other way around. Trump should commit troops to assist Hamas.
>Obviously that'll cause massive protests... massive protests that are populated almost exclusively with left-leaning people. And those protests will inevitably end up devolving into riots
Given that the overwhelming majority of protests populated almost exclusively with left-leaning people don't devolve into riots, this seems like a bit of a gamble.
(The overwhelming majority of protests populated almost exclusively with right-leaning people also don't devolve into riots, but we'll worry about that when someone suggests that the Democrats actually steal a Presidential election as a power play.)
Generally speaking the most likely left-wing protests to devolve into rioting are ones taking place due to police brutality or other problems with the police, since those are the ones where the protesters have the least reason to obey the police and the organizers feel the least responsibility for making sure that the police doesn't get disobeyed. Other types of left-wing protests have a relatively low change of evolving into rioting in general. Israel/Palestine does not, of course, involve the (local) police as an issue, unless you want to make some rather far-reaching conjunctures.
Very doubtful that pro-Palestinian riots would be anywhere near as big as, say, the BLM protests. The pro-Palestinian lobby just isn't that big in the grand scheme of things. Outside of a ridiculously extreme situation, like Trump literally goes on TV and says "we are directly funding the construction of concentration camps in Gaza and are working on a plan to exterminate every last Palestinian," you aren't going to get nationwide riots, and even if you did, you almost certainly wouldn't get enough felony convictions to meaningfully change an election.
(And if you did do something that extreme, the protesters are unlikely to be uniformly Democratic voters.)
The margin of victory in Pennsylvania this year 140,000 votes. January 6th got 1,400 charges (not convictions) over 4 years, and proving someone stormed the capitol building is a hell of a lot easier than proving they did something violent in a peaceful-protest-turned-riot. There is no way you manage to get hundreds of thousands of felony convictions out of a riot without a serious miscarriage of justice.
At trial, no, but you could probably get that many plea bargains for no time served though, and if you just want them to lose voting privileges, that'll do.
Even the number who were *charged* is 2 orders of magnitude too small. Heck, even the number *attending the protest* is probably too small. BLM protests in Minneapolis (ground zero for the protests, on a subject that draws a lot more attention than Palestine), were estimated in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands.
The only way you get hundreds of thousands of felony charges is some sort of extremely broad "round up literally everyone who was anywhere near the protest and accuse them of violent crimes without evidence" approach. Or as I put it, a serious miscarriage of justice.
(More of a miscarriage than this scenario is already, I mean. The whole idea is evil from start to finish, I'm just pointing out that it also wouldn't work out numerically.)
Reminds me of passing within eyesight of the _largest_ anti-Israel demonstration during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was almost comically small, literally my 12-year-old's next youth hockey game will have as many people in attendance.
This is making at least two assumptions I think are wrong - that Israel is held back from doing atrocities in Gaza by US pressure and would do them if the US pushed it, and that anti-israel riots are dependent on and proportionate to facts in the ground in Gaza.
I remember reading a study on shoplifting and what precipitates people to doing it. As someone had already mentioned, gangs rarely do this and it's usually done solo, because the reward to risk ratio isn't attractive. What drives people is the high they get after stealing something (kleptomania I think it's called?), so a lot of them do it compulsively. You can see this in play when some guy steals something as miniscule as a can of redbull, or a bag of candy.
This could explain why the system isn't putting much resource into pursuing these cases. But a lot of the times, it's not even reported by the store staff themselves .
>As someone had already mentioned, gangs rarely do this and it's usually done solo, because the reward to risk ratio isn't attractive
If you accept this framing, then obviously changing the incentives will change the behaviour: If the consequences for shoplifting are diminished, then the risk-reward profile improves for potential shoplifters, making it more attractive and, therefore, more common.
I agree with this, but there's two ways to impact the risk-reward profile in the direction that you want. The first is to just jack up punishments for the people you catch. To a certain extent you can imagine this as effective (if you're facing years and years in prison maybe fewer people take the risk), but I think there's a lot that cuts against this. First of all, there is a general human feeling that the punishment should be proportionate to the crime, and when we're talking about less than $1k in stolen stuff, a punishment of years in prison seems pretty disproportionate (both from the persepctive of what's fair, and the cost to taxpayers of incarcerating someone for that time). Therefore it's going to be tough to get that passed legislatively and is also going to be tough to get judges to impose. Even if you instituted something like mandatory minimums to take away discretion from judges, you still have prosecutors who could cut deals and have defendants plea to lesser charges. Additionally, I think there is good reason to believe that there is a limit to how much anyone comitting a theft is considering the negative consequences if they get caught. It's not a careful Beysian calculus of risk reward, it's mostly them just thinking "what are the chances I get caught" without considering the next step of "if I do get caught, how bad will it be." Maybe there is evidence to the contrary, but my model of how these people think is that they aren't seriously impacted by marginal changes in how serious the punishments are.
The better way to change the risk reward calculation which I think might actually impact behavior though is addressing that first concern of "what are the chances I get caught." Unlike harsh punishments, there really are good reasons to believe that higher chances of getting caught can impact the risk profiles of perspective theives. First, in a low catch-rate regime, a thief is unlikely to be caught the first couple times they steal, and so are going to obviously get in more theft before facing any consequences. It's also likely that people who steal have other people in their social network who steal, and they are probably basing their risk-benefit calculus on whether those other people tend to get away with their thefts or tend to get arrested for them.
Now it's easier to say "let's just catch more thieves" but obviously actually doing this is hard, and there's a reason why politicians will often just default to the relatively easier policy change of increasing punishments, even though this also has it's own costs and is less likely to be effective.
A decade ago on the old blog, this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/13/getting-a-therapist/ about finding at therapist was posted. I would be interested in Scott's (or other peoples') contemporary recommendations for mental health professionals in the bay area or other rationalist hubs.
The OCD unit at McLean Hospital offers really good, active inpatient treatment for OCD. The unit's the work of the IOCDF, international OCD foundation, which has a very helpful web site, iocdf.org. You can search the site by location to find people with expertise in CBT for OCD. If you have another kind of anxiety disorder (phobia, panic attacks, social anxiety, public speaking anxiety . . .) most of the therapists listing themselves there would be a good choice for that, too.
https://psychiatlist.astralcodexten.com/
Is the Iranian revolution the root cause of 80% of the badness in the Middle East? When I squint I can kind of see a counterfactual Pahlavi Iran doing a South Korea and gradually democratizing. If Iran was free, prosperous and western-aligned in 2024 then it seems like the rest of the region would be a lot more stable. Iran seems like the only major power who has a geographical position to project power into the rest of the Middle East (maybe Turkey as well?). A secular Iran would decrease the Sunni-Shia tension that drives much of the conflict (or maybe this is just wishful thinking, the conflict is too old to never boil over?). What do you guys think?
I'm also looking for links about the geopolitics of the Iranian revolution in general.
Checkout the book Ghost Wars by Steve Coll. It's a very long and thorough book on this exact subject. The focus is more on Afghanistan and the lead up to 9/11 but it talks about Iran and other events in the region. I am not knowledgable enough on this subject to say if the book is "correct" but it does give you lots of things to do follow up research on.
Mostly yes, but a middle east without Iran still would have various forms of instability (e.g. Iran isn't really involved in turkey vs the Kurds and only partly involved in ISIS). So a middle east with a stable Iran would look like that smbc comic with the alternate history where WW2 didn't happen but the depression stretched into the 1940s and people think that was the worst disaster in history.
Not even close - it wasn't that long ago that the Israelis were selling weapons to the Iranians so that Reagan could give the money to the Contras.
Saddam Hussein was the big source of instability in the Middle East. He invaded Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in the 1990s and wouldn't submit to weapons inspections in the 2000s. Getting rid of Saddam was supposed to solve the problem, but we just moved on to the next target.
We'll do the same thing once the mullahs are gone. My guess is that Egypt will eventually undergo a similar revolution as Iran did - the old pro-U.S. autocracy is pushed out in favor of a new anti-U.S. theocracy. Almost happened under Mohammed Morsi.
No, the cause is decades of outside meddling to secure oil resources for the world's superpowers, whether those were the British, the French, the Americans or the Soviets. The Iranian revolution is only a symptom of that meddling, if it hadn't happened we'd be pointing at some other event today.
Why would it be necessary to meddle in local politics to secure oil resources? Surely the local rulers, if left to their own devices, would be happy to sell oil to whoever's paying.
If anything surely the meddling was aimed at denying oil to someone else rather than securing it for yourself?
They were happy to do the selling, but it turns out that you can only wring so much blood from local workers before they say, "hey what the fuck I'm doing 70 hours a week in the fields and I can't afford meat on sunday, let's burn this shit down".
How does "foreign meddling" change that? Iranian oil field workers aren't suddenly going to start working 80 hours a week because meddling foreigners tell them to. Really, if that's the outcome you want, it's their own local leaders who are most likely to deliver it and doesn't require "meddling" to make it so, just money.
So why doesn’t this happen in North Dakota or Norway or Saudi Arabia or Russia or Indonesia?
Because you don't get corvee labored to work under foreign bosses, who export 99% of the revenue t except for the one percent they use to fund the degenerate hedonist autocrat that oppresses you.
Under capitalism, you get to keep maybe up to 10% of the revenue, which we have arrived at as the minimum to keep the fucking proles from killing their supervisors ad nationalising.
"outside meddling" can explain both stability and instability, more detail is needed.
Well I would suggest consulting a good history of the Middle East. The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan is a good one that puts the modern issues in a wider context, though I'm sure there are others. Anything dealing with the aftermath of the Ottoman collapse, the subsequent efforts by Britain to secure oil rights, the role of the United States in disrupting those efforts (particularly in how they relate to Saudi Arabia, Iran and the British/Soviet invasion of Iran), the various crises, coups and revolutions in Iran and why they happened would do a lot to inform you. Essentially, though, the problems in Middle East go much further back than the Iranian revolution.
I've read Frankopan, and it's interesting, but starkly deficient in that he treats Iran as just a stage on which Western great powers act, and doesn't give Iranians any agency. Surely at least part of Iranian history is due to choices that key Iranians made? You wouldn't realize it from Frankopan.
"Ah, but Iran created *the West*, so in the end the Iranians always had agency!"
Sincerely,
-Ali Ansari
Is the game plan essentially for Elon Musk to performatively try to “fix” government and then eventually throw up his hands and say dang it this thing is unfixable we need to just bring down the cathedral?
https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
> In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”
He built Paypal (internet), Tesla (sustainable energy), and SpaceX (space exploration). He's missing AI and genetics. That's 3 out of 5.
Back when Elon bought twitter, there was speculation that he was playing 4D chess. But given the college list shown above, my limited knowledge of his twitter activity, and Scott's review of his biography, I get the impression that he really was trying to save Free Speech. My image of him is that of an honest idealist who's willing to say uncomfortable things out loud. Generally, he says crazy shit, and then he makes it happen.
Therefore, (my priors are weak, but) if he wanted to go full Burzum, I'd expect him to say so openly.
Usually when people like MarkG ask questions like this about Musk, they're not really do so in good faith. It's admirable of you to engage so charitably.
Helped start OpenAI and X.AI
Huh. I knew he had promoted OpenAI, but I wasn't aware he had helped start it. I knew about X.AI, but I hear about it so little I forgot about it.
I’d like to see him implement some kind of dashboard metrics based governance and an audit office that is adversarial to the other departments.
You mean like Inspectors General?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Inspector_General_(United_States)
Read through that and I always knew it existed but it’s one of those things where fine level details matter. What specific powers does the investigator have? Who resolves disputes? What incentives does he have to find wrongdoing and what incentives does the executive have to push back? I would trust Musk to fine tune that well.
then I also think all the pay for those departments at the leadership level should be performance based. I bet that helps a lot.
I think that could be good. I am personally not a believer that a lifetime spent in corporate environments where you get a constant stream of meaningful feedback from your customers and competitors is very applicable to an environment where feedback is much more limited (mostly every 2-4 years). So I think CEOs generally have an entirely unfounded expectation that fixing government is a simple matter of “let’s just stop acting like idiots.” But Musk is obviously a talented builder with genuine vision for what benefits mankind. I think it may be especially good to have him there at the dawn of the age of AI. But I also think it may just be bullshit posturing intending to make a pivot to “burn it all down” seem more justified. Anyway, fingers crossed and I guess we will see. I’m like an actual Democrat true believer so I was pretty opposed but am strangely hopeful because I do think some real disruption COULD be good. I just wish the disruption were being conducted by people who weren’t so fond of trumpeting their own “darkness” - IDW, Dark Enlightenment, Dark MAGA … it’s a bit off putting even for open minded people on the other side.
Lots of KPI’s you could get outside of an election. Wait times, life spans, rates of crime, etc.
I don’t understand why we don’t have a bounty system for disease treatment where the government owns the patent for any treatment that meets certain bench marks. Then assign the highest values to the costliest diseases with the requirements such that costs will go down. Those are the systems a good boss would put in place.
Elon Musk largely views compliance as "waste". My guess is that he'll quickly hone in on the Administrative Procedure Act as the problem with government. That should be a pretty easy sell to conservatives - the APA is behind most of the horror stories of government bureaucracy.
The most famous example is how the FDA spent 12 years (1959-1971) proposing and finalizing a rule about what percentage of peanut butter needed to come from peanuts (90%, anything less is just peanut spread). In that same period of time, NASA landed on the moon.
So calling it waste is a bit of a misnomer, but cutting the bureaucracy seems like an appealing target for conservatives with a President who is ineligible for re-elections.
Government waste is like cancer. It's easy to identify, but hard to cut out without damaging something important.
It's even harder than cancer, because the organ is actively resisting your attempts to cut it out. It's the Washington Monument strategy -- if you try to cut a department's budget then instead of getting rid of their most useless projects they will get rid of their most popular and high-profile projects to create public uproar.
Yeah my guess is he will make a couple of hand-wavy efforts at “if I was in charge I would simply …” type solutions and then after none of that works (ideally accompanied by some liberal protesting of the attempts) declare it all beyond saving.
Man, we can dream, can't we??
Talk about the best of both worlds. Either Mr. "I can tackle the 'reference standard' for hard problems, rocket science, and make it 40x cheaper" actually fixes stuff and claws some state capacity back, or the whole thing gets burned down. Win / win in my book.
If he can't fix it, it's unsalvageable and *should* be brought down.
"If he can't fix it, it's unsalvageable and *should* be brought down."
Elon Musk is not omnicompetent. *Nobody* is omnicompetent. And so "[X] has done superlative things in one field, therefore if he can't solve this problem in a completely different field then the problem is insoluible!", is pure bogosity. As is placing any one man on a pedestal as the Omnicompetent Hero What Can Fix Anything Fixable.
If you want to see the administrative state fixed, or even just see if it can be fixed, you need someone with demonstrated competence in state administration or something very similar.
> Elon Musk is not omnicompetent. *Nobody* is omnicompetent.
This is true, but in a trivial way. "Competence" is like most traits, it varies between individuals, and can be ranked hierarchically. If you look at the diversity of industries and the difficulty of the problems Musk has successfully tackled, he's probably the number one person you WOULD select as being at the top of a "competent to solve large, complex problems" or "competent to envision and build better organizations from the ground up" hierarchy. I'm sure his name would be high, if not the highest, on those two characteristics if we surveyed ACX readers.
> If you want to see the administrative state fixed, or even just see if it can be fixed, you need someone with demonstrated competence in state administration or something very similar.
Sadly, these people don't exist. There's also decent reasons they will be scarce - organizations act and think first within the framework of the organization. They will essentially NEVER come up with the idea "maybe this organization shouldn't exist AT ALL."
They will also have all the cultural and organizational inertia any large organization has - the shibboleths and sacred cows and unspoken "this is the way things are done." But what if those things are fundamentally antithetical to actually solving the problems they are supposed to solve? State capacity in general, and many administrative domains in particular, certainly seem to have been monotonically decreasing in terms of capability and ability to solve problems.
I honestly believe that real value can be driven by having a talented outsider look at organizations in the administrative state and deciding if they should exist at all in their current form, deciding if they should be significantly restructured, and so on, because I think that's our best chance at improving state capacity overall.
And if it's unimprovable, then it probably should go on the chopping block, because it's just a machine to turn money into waste and bureaucracy and defunct-organization perpetuation, with minimal positive real-world impact.
Competence isn't a single quantity that can be put in a line. Instead, it's a bunch of different attributes plus knowledge and experience that combine to make someone very good at some set of hard things. Elon Musk is very good at starting and running tech companies. If you told him to take command of an aircraft carrier, or take over coaching the Warriors for Steve Kerr, or to direct the Boston Philharmonic, he almost certainly would fail at those things, since they all require a whole lot of expertise and experience he doesn't have, and they might require a different mix of talents than he has. Nor is it likely you could take the guy commanding the USS Ronald Reagan or the guy conducting the Boston Philharmonic and tell him to go found a tech company and have much success.
To significantly cut the budget or restructure government departments is going to require a lot of skills and knowledge that I don't think Musk has.
> Elon Musk is very good at starting and running tech companies. If you told him to take command of an aircraft carrier, or take over coaching the Warriors for Steve Kerr, or to direct the Boston Philharmonic, he almost certainly would fail at those things
I think this is a bit of sleight of hand, because you are specifically choosing domains where a deep well of specific expertise and skills matter.
However, companies and government agencies do not have those specific expertise and skill requirements - both of them are primarily about marshalling the talents and efforts of a group of people towards larger goals.
Have you noticed that when executives play musical chairs, they often do it across divisions in the company, across companies, even across industries? This is because marshalling groups of people to accomplish larger goals is a more general sort of skill that can apply across those things, and you don't need decades of coaching or symphony conducting to excel at it.
Building new organizations from the ground up, or overhauling and improving existing organizations IS the thing Musk is an expert at. And that's in theory the skill set he's going to be leveraging in his DOGE role.
If the test of a system’s viability is whether Elon Musk personally is capable of fixing it, that alone seems like a serious enough design flaw to warrant ending it. Given how Twitter has gone though, I’d guess there’s a bit of a delta between Elon Musk and “best fixer of things in the world.”
Elon cut 80% of the twitter workforce, and twitter continued to work just fine.
If he could achieve the same thing for the US Federal Government then that would be a win.
Did it?
Because it seems to only work for porn, crypto shills and bots now.
I used to actually read threads and trending, now I just use it as a shitty rss feed.
It works great for me!
What do you mean by "ending it"? The US government has problems but it's still better than actual full-on anarchy, so in practice it depends what replaces it.
I agree. I was referring to the political views of Curtis Yarvin, which I believe have influenced Musk. Yarvin believes the system is irredeemable and needs to be replaced. There is an enthusiasm for collapse in his views that takes it for granted that the short term hardships will be worth the long term everything is awesome. Better to read him directly. I get put off by all the “darkness” fetishization and will not represent it well.
Where did you read that Musk's views were influenced by Yarvin's?
I didn’t! I said that I believed that they were but I do not have direct evidence of that! But the indirect evidence is pretty plentiful actually. I would just be copying and pasting ChatGPT here, so I’d recommend asking your favorite AI directly. Long and short of it is that they are connected through Thiel, to whom they are both close, and Musk’s political statements repeat and mirror Nrx positions - but those views are also increasingly common in sv generally so it is hard to say whether Musk is absorbing ambient Yarvinism or getting it direct from the source. That’s all I “know” and I have no direct knowledge.
I'd be interested in hearing the answer to this, too. I've heard that Vance/Bannon/Thiel are familiar with Yarvin, but this is the first I've heard of Musk being familiar. Granted, I wouldn't be too surprised either way.
In general, it's worth noting that independence movements that succeed (like in America, Israel, arguably Singapore, etc) are the ones that put the work towards building institutions and governance first and get rid of the existing system second, while the ones that try to do it the other way (like the Arab Spring) invariably collapse.
> If the test of a system’s viability is whether Elon Musk personally is capable of fixing it, that alone seems like a serious enough design flaw to warrant ending it.
Completely agree.
The biggest problem is he's already completely polarized, and is essentially the libertarian dream-czar, so he's not going to be convincing anyone on the margins that "yes, this thing really does deserve to be burned down," because they already felt that way to start with, or hated him to start with.
I'm not sure how you could convince more traditional blues of it, to be honest. "We've been firing an infinite money cannon at it for decades, and everything keeps getting worse" is what we're ALREADY doing, and the only solution they'll countenance is to make the infinite money cannon higher throughput.
The question becomes whether the people we're talking about are ideologically captured. Outside of those who for personal or professional reasons *need* to believe that, I think most people are convincible otherwise.
Simply letting people know that we already tried spending more money on a problem and the problem either didn't get better or actively got worse is a good primer for them to change their minds. Spending more money helping is a good heuristic, it should work. But if it doesn't, then most people can drop the heuristic pretty easily.
How much should I be worried about "microplastics"?
I keep seeing updates about how scientists have found microplastics in basically everything, but (1) it never says how much, and (2) I have seen zero updates saying microplastics are actually connected to any problem.
I guess there's a line that goes "nobody knows what causes obesity, nobody knows what microplastics causes, therefore microplastics causes obesity"?
It basically depends upon how much stock you put in correlation. That, and uncertainty.
Whenever I hear breathless reports that e.g. microplastics are 'everywhere' I respond by looking up, noticing that not everyone around me is dying, and concluding that microplastics can't be that bad. If they're everywhere and they're terrible then it'd show up in all-cause mortality, and AFAIK there aren't any giant unexplained recent increases in that.
A lot of people around us are getting sick and dying for reasons we can't explain.
Overall, excess mortality has fallen below pre-COVID rates (bpth in gross numbers and normalized numbers). This is probably due to COVID harvesting the weak and infirm before the actuarial tables would predict. Per capita, deaths due to cancers have been falling for the past 20 years (though the raw numbers of cancer deaths are up due to population growth over that time period). There's been no post-COVID increase in mortality due to cancers, Alzheimer's, strokes, coronaries, or pneumonia, and COVID-19 is on track this year to end up in 14th place on the CDC's 15 most common causes of death list.
Most deaths are explainable. MDs may misassign a cause of death or the contributing causes of death on death certificates, AFAIK there's no unidentified scourge killing people right now.
This is a very narrow way of looking at things. We do not know exactly why why cancer is expressed in certain people, and not expressed in other people with identical risk factors. Nor can we fully explain the evolving differences in cancer rates between different demographics. Or a cross various geographic zones. This is true for many other diseases. This is part of what we mean when we talk about “unexplained deaths.” Unexplained doesn't just mean “totally mysterious, we know absolutely nothing.” It also means “deaths that are not adequately explained.”
Yet, you haven't provided any studies that support your claim that there has been a rise in unexplained deaths.
There are unexplained trends in mortality. For instance, cancer in young adults has risen even though the overall mortality rate for cancer has dropped steadily over the past 20 years. Various post hoc explanations have been proposed to explain this trend—increase in obesity rates, eating more ultra-processed food, environmental carcinogens, yadda yadda yadda. Cancer deaths in 15-39 year-olds are now >30% of the current totals. And they've risen from a low of 12% in 1995. But if one zooms out, That 1995 low followed a period when cancer deaths for 15-39 year-olds peaked at 25% in the early late 80s and early 90s. There's nothing mysterious about the reason these people are dying, but the trend predates the pandemic. And any explanation would need to account for the peak previous to this one.
I never claimed there was a rise in unexplained deaths. You must be confusing me for someone else. Somehow you think you're debating someone about the COVID vaccine? Who are you arguing with? I've done my standard "be as vague as you can" to avoid easy characterization of my views. But you're barging right into there like I'm Mike Lindell or something
And I find The following sentences to be a mass of contradictions.
"Various post hoc explanations have been proposed to explain this trend—increase in obesity rates, eating more ultra-processed food, environmental carcinogens, yadda yadda yadda"
"There's nothing mysterious about the reason these people are dying, but the trend predates the pandemic. And any explanation would need to account for the peak previous to this one."
Various post-hoc explanations" are the very STUFF of mystery! "Yadda, yadda yadda" is this signpost for hand waving. I'm reminded of people who say "the building of the pyramids was not a mystery, we pretty much know how it was done," when we know no such thing. We have a number of competing theories, which means there is a mystery there.
Again, you are litigating on very narrow readings of the words mysterious and unexplained. I've noted that unexplained does not necessarily mean not wholly explained, it can mean not adequately explained. And if you think the process whereby carcinogens lead to tumors is adequately explained... It sure isn't. Until the medical community can explain IN DETAIL, why two people with equal risk factors and equal exposure to carcinogens have completely different oncological outcomes, then cancer deaths are not adequately explained.
Maybe this is a generational thing? How old are you? 40 here, and oncology will still getting its sea legs when I was born. There was a big focus on the mysterious nature of tumor growth and tumor malignancy.
Because the percentage of our population over 65 is higher now, when I age-adjusted the current percentages to 1990 demographics, the current peak in 15-39 cancer deaths is still slightly lower than the one in the late 80s - early 90s.
There’s people dying these days that never died before.
It’s cuz of the cool graveyards. People
are dying to get in.
> A lot of people around us are getting sick and dying for reasons we can't explain.
This is pretty much all from "diseases of civilization" (obesity, metabolic syndrome, Alzheimers, etc), which hunter gatherers don't get at all, and which sedentary moderns do get because they're 5x more sedentary than HG and eat terribly.
Diseases of civilization:
https://imgur.com/ibBvEQ2
You can mostly avoid them if you exercise and eat better. To see that even moderns with microplastics can be impacted, I refer you to the fact that exercise alone can drive a 4x all cause mortality difference for first worlders vs wholly sedentary first worlders.
Dan Lieberman is the guy who's popularized the diseases of civilization idea, my review of his Exercised is here if you want to read more and see if reading the book yourself is worth it: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/dan-liebermans-exercised-review?r=17hw9h
We can't fully explain the processes by which diseases of civilization manifest themselves. Nor is there a hard and fast line between diseases of civilization and general diseases. There is mystery here that you seem to want to gloss over.
> We can't fully explain the processes by which diseases of civilization manifest themselves. Nor is there a hard and fast line between diseases of civilization and general diseases.
You're right, but I think this is mainly because biology is hard, and one of the most difficult things to get clean reads on.
But to the extent we do have data and signal, exercise vs being sedentary is an absolutely massive signal by the standards of biology. For example, smoking itself has a hazard ratio of 2.8 vs non-smokers. Being sedentary vs exercising regularly has a hazard ratio of 3-4!
Not many people disbelieve that smoking is bad for you, but the awareness that being sedentary is just as bad, if not worse, is far less prevalent.
But hundreds of large-scale interventions have been tried to increase exercise and physical activity in general populations - the very strongest can get ~5 minutes more a day, and most are way less than that. It's actually a much harder problem than reducing smoking in the aggregate, because it's fighting against millions of years of hominin evolution where conserving your energy was strongly adaptive.
I wonder why OCD is considered a civilization-only disease. Also, hammer toes sounds like one of those 'shitty superpowers'.
> I wonder why OCD is considered a civilization-only disease.
Or depression, or anxiety, right?
I assume it's along the lines of "you don't have time for that crap when you've got to go out and find food for yourself and your family every day if you want to eat," but definitely a bit counter intuitive.
I think another big factor may be that hunter gatherers are literally living the lifestyle our brains and bodies were adapted for over the last ~2M years of hominin evolution.
You go out and move your body in the sun every day, surrounded by your friends, family, and tribe. No traffic, no sitting, no screens, no overbearing bosses, no crowding or seething throngs of anonymous people you don't know. Probably makes a difference.
On "hammer toes," I've personally always thought "athlete's foot" sounded the same way - I'm reminded of the famous "shoeless" football kickers.
I personally think depression was less evident in premodern societies because there were more socially acceptable ways to passively aggressively throw your life away. In other words, if you were so depressed you didn't give a damn about living or dying, you could go on crusade or join some frontier war or if you were a hunter-gatherer, go on risky raids. Or you could possibly just engage in a bunch of duels. There were plenty of socially acceptable ways to put your life on the line, and if you did these things enough you would be dead.
> I personally think depression was less evident in premodern societies because there were more socially acceptable ways to passively aggressively throw your life away.
Whew. Dark, but credible.
You're right though, I can think of a lot of ways HG societies could moderate depressive tendencies. Like the Tyranny of the Cousins, where if you don't fit in, have a difficult personality, etc, you're a lot more likely to get banished or accused of witchcraft and murdered. Then every time anthropologists look at HG societies: "wow, everyone is happy, depression is unknown, everyone seems totally in line with their cultural institutions," but it's because of a massive hidden selection mechanism.
Or just close calls with death in general - HG males had a roughly 1/3 lifetime chance of dying by violence. Females is less attested, but if you read Yanoama about Helena Valero (parents killed, kidnapped and raised in HG tribes from age 11, had 3 kids and made it back to civilization and wrote a book) or similar stories, she was running for her life and fearing death for her or her children many times. This probably works two ways - in the way you pointed out, where if their will to live is at a low point, they just give up and die, but for others in a way that reinforces their will to live and zest for life by making them actually make a choice and fight for it.
Link to CDC statistics showing unexplained rise in deaths which mirror the distribution of microplastics in any way, please.
That's because there are none. See my response above.
The statistics don't exist until they are gathered. There's nothing wrong with speculating about which statistics may be gathered in the future. In fact, I think it's a sign of healthy intellectual curiosity. It was healthy and good for the ancient Greeks to logically reason that atoms existed, even if they couldn't prove it at the time.
Ok so your speculative histrionic hypothesis is valid precisely because there's no evidence to support it? Interesting.
>There's nothing wrong with speculating about which statistics may be gathered in the future.
Sure, and there's nothing wrong with utterly dismissing speculative histrionic hypotheses until supporting evidence is found.
Do you really think "maybe we shouldn't be eating plastic" is histrionic? I think most people would agree it's a pretty reasonable and middle of the road view. Whether they feel strongly about the issue or not.
No but that's not how health and diet scares are typically framed. Yeah, maybe it's bad. Maybe it's not. Given that it's apparently ubiquitous then the epidemiology would suggest that it's not. Of course that's not definitive but call me when you have something that has nonzero actionable information.
I thought one of the huge benefits of the ACX comment section was that we are are into Big, Bold Ideas. Into things like predicting the future. God forbid we will ever become so hidebound that our discourse gets hemmed in by what is or is not “actionable.’
It a nice community because the big, bold predictions are typically made by smart, well-informed people.
Predict away, just don't get your undies in a bunch when someone points out that the odds of your prediction being correct are very very low.
If anyone is getting their undies in a bunch, it's you, as evidenced by the use of your word “histrionic.”
Calm down.
Fun fact: they COULD basically prove it.
"Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways... their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight... It originates with the atoms which move of themselves [i.e., spontaneously]. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible."
Lucretius, "On the Nature of Things", c. 60 BC.
Ancient Roman, not Greek, but that's a pretty good description of Brownian motion.
You shouldn't worry because there's nothing you can do about anyways, and everyone is getting screwed equally, meaning you're not being put at a comparative disadvantage.
I mean, there actually are some things I could do.
For example, I currently mostly drink from plastic water bottles, because the convenience means that I drink more water in total, and dehydration is bad.
I could switch to tap water and paper cups, if I believed that water from plastic bottles made up a large fraction of my microplastic intake (maybe??) and if I believed that this was a greater health risk than the dehydration caused by sometimes not having water on hand (doubtful?).
There are foods I could eat more of or less of, if I knew that they had more or less microplastics.
I use glass Tupperware and refillable glass water bottles, although I don't know either makes a measurable difference in long term health.
I do want to know plastic quantity in foods.
...I care about my absolute disadvantage too, for the same reason I prefer to live in better and more modern world in general.
New avatar?
Yup, I ended up switching because I was becoming unhappy with my old one, along with... other reasons. New one is from the music video/album art for Nevermore. (great song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLK1XwxlEQI ) Fun fact: the art is by Temmie Chang, who is the main artist for Undertale!
There are at least some studies that show certain plastics (PVC, generally plastics with phthalates) to be endocrine disruptors and/or carcinogenic. It is not known how much micro-plastic in your bloodstream / balls / placenta / brain actually matters. We simply don't know. But it's not just a "bad things exist, so does plastic, therefore plastic is bad" situation. It is, as it were, turning the fucking frogs gay.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749116304791
So, how much should you be worried? Well, it's probably pointless to worry, because you can't possibly avoid micro-plastic. But yeah, it's probably bad for you.
Thanks for the link.
I do think it could be valuable to worry a little bit, because there are things I could do to increase or decrease my microplastic intake. If, y'know, we were measuring that.
For you ACXers in the Boston/Cambridge area: here is a meetup that I'm running that might interest you if you like open-source, eccentric software projects.
RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/urbit-new-england-group/events/304074558
New England Urbit Meetup in Somerville on 11/16/24
Saturday, November 16, 2024
1:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST
Aeronaut Brewing Company (Pub and Workspace–1.7 miles away from MIT)
14 Tyler Street · Somerville, MA
Urbit OS is a completely new, open-source, carefully architected software stack: a VM, programming language, and kernel designed to run software for an individual. Perhaps you have heard of it? Urbit OS is a program that runs on almost any cloud server, most laptops and many phones: anything with Unix and an internet connection. The main thing to understand about our ‘overlay OS’, as we call it, is that the foundation is a single, simple function. This function is the Urbit OS virtual machine. We call it ‘Nock’. The entire Urbit OS system compiles down to Nock, and Nock is just 33 lines of code.
Anyone interested in web3, full stack development, and functional programming are welcome to attend this open-ended and casual meeting. Though there are no planned topics, conversations will cover programming, happenings in the Urbit community, and wider cultural interests.
If necessary, there will be on-boarding assistance to help newcomers join the Urbit network, so feel free to bring a device and/or a friend! The host will have packets that explain the Urbit OS and network in detail. Plus, there will be tacos and chocolate for sale next to our meeting
Learn more about Urbit: urbit.org
Obtain an Urbit ID: urbit.org/get-started
Food for thought if you're a programmer: A Perspective on Lisp and Hoon (https://urbit.org/blog/hoon-4-lispers)
I plan on coming!
(It's actually my 21st birthday! I've never been inside a bar before.)
Hey, I’m a day late but belated happy 21st!
If you imbibed a little too much in celebration just tune in to WYYY-109, ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band,’ to relax and drink plenty of water!
great!
While it might make sense to budget out your entire family in advance of having children, it is probably not the most rational way to look at it. Standard decision theoretic rationality breaks down when you make choices that alter your preferences in hard-to-predict ways. Having children didn't really start effecting my preferences until the second child came, and this week with the new third child I can tell my preferences and self-concept have changed a lot.
There are many ways children can change a person. You might start out your marriage wanting a big family of 5 kids, but when number 2 is very difficult settle for "duty to society" and have three. Or perhaps you panned on having one child but found that the one really wanted a friend so you have a second, by that time the older one is actively asking for a sister to play with, and she's really cute, the light of your life, and you can afford it and life is good and bright, so you go for a third. Alternatively, maybe you have fertility problems and can never have the kids you want (in the way you originally wanted), so you change your preferences. These all sound like shallow descriptions, but there is a lot of internal change that occurs with big life changes. The utility function can change!
I agree. Becoming a parent is such a huge change that you can't really grasp what it's like until you've experienced it. I say have one, see what life with kids is like, and then decide on what to do next.
> I say have one, see what life with kids is like
...and if you discover it's not your thing, sucks to be you I guess; that's your next 18 years now.
Hey Sebastian, did you meant to post this as a top-level comment rather than as a reply to Jon Simon at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-355/comment/76716596?
Yes. Unfortunately on mobile app I can't copy-paste the comment to the proper spot.
I just spoke with someone Jewish who is worried that antisemitism will increase during a Trump presidency. I believe the upshot of his worries is that Trump will be more openly pro-Israel than our govt has been so far -- more generous in selling weapons, expressing no disapproval etc. Then, when Israel greatly steps up the level of destruction in Gaza (something speaker believes is going to happen soon), rage at Israel will be visited upon American Jews by non-Jewish US citizens.
Can anyone recommend an article, website or other source of trustworthy information and/or sound thinking about this matter?
I understand that this is a hot topic, and I am asking people who want to air their personal views to do so in a separate thread. To be blunt, I do not want to know what you think and feel about this issue, no matter how well thought out you believe your ideas are. I want to know good places to go for info and thoughtful, low-affect articles. Yes, yes, I know, people can disagree about what info sources are smart and balanced, but that's OK. I will settle for a list of sources.
in
Thanks A. While it’s not exactly what I had in mind (I’ve given up on that anyhow) it actually is helpful. The person I spoke to was worried that Trump’s attitude toward Israel would embolden it to do more and bigger strikes (I don’t know whether that’s true) and then more of those in the US who passionately object to what Israel is doing would become actively antisemitic (also don’t know whether that’s true). But it seems like Trump’s attitude about campus strikes etc. will be pushing things in the opposite direction.
I think this might not be entirely what you're looking for, but The Free Press just ran an article "Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion?" (https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-presidency-may-cost-columbia) about Columbia professors being worried that Trump administration would pull government funding from Columbia if Columbia doesn't start cracking down on antisemitic conduct.
I view this as a very good sign. From looking at what happened at Dartmouth, it seems that it doesn't take all that much for a university to reduce such bad behavior to zero, and the election of Trump seems to have given universities an incentive to do so.
I don't have time to find references, so sorry about this (I'm doing my best to act in good faith here, but I just really don't have the time right now) - but I'm under the impression that such behavior, at least on campuses, is mostly not spontaneous, but well-organized. If Trump administration does its best to pull not only university funding, but all other sneaky funding given to leftist organizations that enable such activity, then I think we can expect the amount of antisemitic behavior, not only on campuses but also elsewhere, to go down.
Sorry if that's not exactly what you asked for.
I think I stated clearly what I wanted in the original post, and then as I responded to various people I have clarified it further. If it’s not clear now, I give up. It seems to me that some people did not even read the initial post in its entirety, but just skimmed it and saw some key words and then started spouting opinions, apparently not having registered that I asked for links and not opinions. Others wanted to make the case that it was somehow senseless to ask for links to smart, fair-minded takes on the subject. Others complained that it was unreasonable ask for links and not opinions. And the last person for some reason took me to be asking for data on expected number of murders of Jews in US antisemitic attacks.
So just treat my question as a wild card. Post about whatever shit you want. Put up some limericks about butt sex, or maybe a list of the top 10 arguments that Jews are narcissistic assholes, or a recipe for roasted vegetables.
There once was a man named Mozart,
Who wrote a song called "Lick My Arse".
But his publishers claimed,
That the name should be lame.
Now the title is sadly less tart.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leck_mich_im_Arsch
I understand where your question is coming from, and that you're asking (I think) for facts not opinions. That's something people on ACX should be able to rigidly separate.
On the other hand, I think this is a difficult request to make on a controversial topic without very carefully watching your tone. I also understand why some people think your request obnoxious. It's all about the tone, and I don't think you intend this but your question is phrased in a way that can *sound* like you're largely endorsing your friend's opinions and implicit value judgements. Phrases like "expressing no disapproval" and "greatly steps up the level of destruction in Gaza" don't *directly* imply an anti-Israel perspective, but they are consistent with such a perspective and vaguely suggest it. Asking factual questions in a way that suggests a possible value judgement, taking no action to disavow that suspected value judgement, and then insistently denanding that nobody respond with any discussion of the value judgements involved in this topic, is going to make a lot of people angry.
I would suggest something like the following phrasing to make your request. I don't claim this is objectively better or would get a better reaction, just that it *might*:
"I just spoke with someone Jewish who is worried that antisemitism will increase during a Trump presidency. Here is his argument, which I'm taking no position on: [his argument in quotes]. I'd like to leave aside all value judgements and opinions about this topic and just ask for factual evidence about the causal connection between developments in the Israel-Gaza conflict and the indicidence of antisemitism in the US. Whether you believe Israel is 100% in the right, 100% in the wrong, or anything in between, is there evidence about this causal connection that can be accepted by everyone regardless of their opinions? Please don't derail this discussion by giving your opinions on the topic, please only provide factual evidence that is entirely neutral with respect to opinions on the conflict."
I think explicitly disavowing that you're taking any value position, as well as being clear that you want evidence that is value-neutral, are necessary to get constructive factual discourse on a controversial topic. (It may still not be sufficient of course). The reality is that there are a lot of "questions" posed on the internet that are blatantly or subtly premised on partisan value judgements, everything from "given that the US has now elected a racist dictactor, what's to stop the government setting up concentration camps for non-white people? Just a factual question!" to "given that the US condones war crimes in Gaza, what's to stop them condoning war crimes elsewhere?" It's fine for people to make comments like this, but not fine to pretend they're anything less than purely partisan opinions and any more "factual" than any other partisan opinion. And it may not be *fair* that because of these kinds of comments, those of us wanting genuine factual discussion have to wrap our questions in a dozen qualifers and carefully avoid any hint of a judgemental or provocative tone, but it is, I think, understandable.
I don’t think the problem was that I was not circumspect enough in phrasing my question. If that had been it, I would have gotten complaints that my question already assumed some stuff that not all think is true. Looks to me like what I made people
mad was my request that they post links only. There were several complaints about that. One person referred to what I had done as forbidding people to post their views. That’s a fine example of the kind of dumb, self-inflammatory thinking that makes it impossible for people to discuss truly hot topics. I am obviously not forbidding anyone to post their views on the thread I started. I have no power to forbid people
to do anything on ACX. What I did was ask people not to post opinions about the issue in the thread I’d started, explain my reasons, and remind them of an easy alternative — they could start their own about the exact same topic. But it made things simple to tweak the truth so that I am an asshole making a power grab and they are the bold, brave freethinking people who speak truth to power. Some
other people insisted that what I was asking was meaningless and unanswerable. That’s just false. It’s only true if you take my question to mean “give me pure facts, nothing but things that can be measured quantifiably and verified, yes that’s what I want even though I am asking a question about the future.” I later said a bunch of stuff to counter that idea, including saying that ideally I’d like a Scott -style source. With that clarification there are just no for grounds saying my request makes no sense. All that just seems to me like pure unthinking oppositionality and I do not respect it all.
You posted something enormously provocative and told people they weren't allowed to reply to it (except with one very specific thing which probably doesn't exist).
People don't like being riled up in the first paragraph and then told they're not allowed to respond in the second.
In other news, Casablanca is by far the worst movie ever made due to the blatant homosexual propaganda throughout. Please only reply with recipes for mango coconut cake.
Mango Coconut Cake Recipe with a Touch of Casablanca Subtext
Ingredients:
For the cake:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
½ cup butter, softened (think of it as Rick—smooth, but hard to pin down)
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs (there’s a little tension here—each egg representing an emotional choice, like Ilsa’s heart divided between two men)
½ cup whole milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup fresh mango puree (fresh, vibrant, and full of zest—like the fiery passion of Casablanca’s unresolved loves)
For the mango coconut glaze:
½ cup mango puree
1 cup powdered sugar
½ cup shredded coconut
2 tablespoons coconut milk (smooth and exotic, much like the whispered glances between Rick and Louis)
For garnish:
A few fresh mango slices (carefully placed, like a furtive touch or a glance across the room)
Toasted coconut flakes (symbolic of the fleeting beauty of Casablanca’s moments of warmth, fragile and ephemeral)
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease and flour two 8-inch round cake pans, or line with parchment paper. This is the foundation of the cake, the beginning of a journey that, much like Rick and Ilsa’s, will be layered with complexity.
Prepare the dry ingredients: In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and shredded coconut. The coconut in this recipe is key—its tropical essence mirrors the longing glances shared between Rick and Louis, both part of a greater whole that never fully materializes.
Cream the butter and sugar: In a large bowl, beat together the softened butter and sugar until light and fluffy. As you do this, imagine Rick’s baritone voice, smooth yet sharp, like the way the sugar dissolves into butter—something seductive, something deep, with an edge.
Add the eggs: One by one, beat in the eggs, ensuring each one is fully incorporated. Each egg symbolizes a decision, a choice—much like Ilsa’s struggle between Rick and Victor Laszlo. It’s never just one or the other—it’s about what they mean to each other.
Blend in the mango puree: Add the mango puree and vanilla extract, stirring until smooth. Mango, bright and unmistakable, much like the passion that simmers under the surface between Rick and Louis. It’s sweet, yet it speaks of something more complex.
Combine the dry and wet ingredients: Gradually add the dry mixture to the wet ingredients, alternating with milk. Begin and end with the dry ingredients. The batter should be smooth, but with just a hint of resistance—like a relationship that teases yet never fully submits.
Bake the cakes: Divide the batter evenly between the two pans, smoothing the tops. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. While the cakes are baking, consider the delicate dance of love, betrayal, and longing that’s the core of Casablanca. Like a cake rising in the oven, emotions can build, then fall—each layer part of a greater whole.
Make the glaze: In a small bowl, whisk together the mango puree, powdered sugar, and coconut milk. The glaze should be smooth but thick enough to cling to the cake—a little like the way Casablanca’s characters hold on to their feelings, never quite letting go.
Assemble the cake: Once the cakes have cooled, place one layer on a serving platter. Spread a thin layer of glaze over the top, followed by a sprinkling of shredded coconut. Place the second cake layer on top and drizzle the remaining glaze over the entire cake. Finish by garnishing with fresh mango slices and toasted coconut flakes—delicate and vibrant, just like the love story that never was, yet always will be.
Serve and enjoy: Cut the cake and serve with a knowing glance, like the one Rick gives Louis in the final moments of Casablanca. There's a sense of unresolved yearning in every bite, a sweetness that comes with the realization that some things are better left unsaid—and yet, we all know what was felt.
Just as Casablanca never fully resolves its tensions, this cake too remains a delightful mystery of flavor and texture, layered with complexity. The mango and coconut together evoke a tropical escape, while the underlying richness mirrors the emotional depth between characters whose love is spoken only through gestures, not words.
Enjoy—just like Rick and Louis, you might find yourself thinking, “We’ll always have cake.”
A guy who was kissing some butt Had a nose with a prominent jut. When the boss squeezed his cheeks, The whole office heard shrieks, ‘Cause the guy is now stuck in a rut.
>Can anyone recommend an article, website or other source of trustworthy information and/or sound thinking about this matter?
Are you asking for information re the causes of hate crime?
You are looking for increases in anti semitism in the US after Israel attacks Gaza? I’m sure the ADl has articles on this.
Do you mean ADL, Anti-Defamation League?
Yes.
Where’d you get the idea I was asking about the chance of antisemitism-motivated murders of Jews? Just re-read my post to see if something suggested I was asking about murder. Nope, I asked about rage at Israel being visited on American Jews. Obviously rage can be expressed in many ways, eg cartoons, editorials, online rants, vandalism etc., plus yes, of course, murder. The idea of murdering Jews, and the opposite side of that coin, the idea of Jews narcissistically fretting about being murdered because of their super-special identity? Those both came from inside your own head. Perhaps a some little chats with a professional of some kind would improve your ability to distinguish between someone else’s thoughts and questions about antisemitism and your own ugly ruminations on the subject.
I have found https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/gaza/ reasonably helpful but they only post infrequently.
Thank you!
> rage at Israel will be visited upon American Jews by non-Jewish US citizens
But if Trump is extremely pro-Israel and indirectly responsible for the destruction of Gaza in this scenario, wouldn't he just sic the military on the anti-Israel protesters?
Please anomie, I asked people not to post their views about this topic on this thread. My post is a request for *links* to sources that the respondent believes are accurate and fair-minded. The topic is doubly hot -- it's about both Trump and Israel. If people post views other people who disagree are going to post arguments against those views, and soon it will be another angry debate. Would you consider deleting your response and and reposting it as a separate thread?
Where would we look for an objective measure of antisemitism in America? Are there some good polls[1] or something that we could use to get a hard number? That would let us at least judge what is happening in the US wrt antisemitism, what happened over the last 8 years, etc.
[1] It's not clear how well polls work anymore thanks to the phone-spam-deluge-induced very low response rates--what other sources of information might we find?
Anti-Defamation League. If you google "US antisemitism" various other sites pop up too giving stats. I'm not able to judge how thorough or fair-minded any of them are, but I'm sure there are people who can comment knowledgeably on that. I'm not necessarily looking for raw data, just a smart, thoughtful commenter like Scott whose goal is to be accurate.
You're characterizing the ADL as "fair-minded"?!
No,I very little about ADL. When I said I knew next to nothing about how thorough or fair-minded any of the sites giving stats were, I was talking about all the sources I'd found via google, including ADL, which I already knew of and which of course was one of the things that showed up on the google.
Ah, fair enough. I might have misread your comment. I thought you were only questioning the "various other sites" that pop up, implicitly endorsing the first one you listed.
I don't know what you're expecting... You're not going to find any objective information on something that hasn't happened yet, especially when that thing is so polarizing. Frankly, I don't even know what kind of information you're looking for. Yes, if Isreal goes full warcrime in Gaza, sentiment against Jews will get worse. If they don't do that, it won't. What more do you want? Are you trying to convince this person that this won't be the case? Or do you want to know what Trump will do? Because right now we have absolutely no idea, and anybody who claims they know is just speculating.
I feel like the biggest outburst of antisemitic rage happened right after Oct 7, before Israel did anything in response.
Israeli/Jewish strength seems like a bigger predictor of antisemitism, not the level of war crimes committed in Gaza. There's not much left to destroy in Gaza, also?
Israel has won pretty decisively.
I guess what we should be worried is attacking Iran's nuclear program or annexation of Gaza/West Bank?
Not to be totally obnoxious, but I asked for information sources, and asked people NOT to do what you just did, which is post their views about this matter. Your post is not a bit inflammatory, but there will be people who disagree with your takes, and some of them will disagree angrily, and then we are off and running.
So what you want is for him to write that somewhere else (or find the same thing written by someone else) and link to that? How would that help?
I think all you people complaining about my request are mostly annoyed because I asked 2 people not to post their views. You're irritated by anything that's even a 5th cousin of censorship. I tell you what, Shankar, how about if you go ahead and post every fucking opinion you have about Israel, antisemitism, & Trump's impact on both right here on this thread. Please lead with the most inflammatory parts of what you think, and be sure to include harsh witty criticism of opposing views. If there are people who post here whose opinions you know and disagree with, actually call them out by username.
Sure. Um. What, exactly, do you consider 'evidence' on this matter?
Or, alternatively, is the goal to persuade your friend to be less worried, or to determine the truth?
Are you looking for evidence that Israel won't significantly increase civilian casualties, that if they do there won't be a surge of random violence targeting Jews in the U.S.
Can you sort of, point in the direction of the factual, in theory observable metric or claim we could focus in on?
I'm not asking for evidence. I'm asking for online posts or articles or data summaries on this topic that people believe are trustworthy, balanced and non-polemical. I want *links,* not sentences or paragraphs.
This is just putting non-evidence through an authority bias laundering machine.
Also an effort filter plus a Brown M&Ms test which, uh, seems to have "worked" in this instance.
Did it? The poster has expressed frustration multiple times in this thread.
Hence the quotes. That's the problem with filters: either someone's gotta clean 'em, or they're getting clogged - either way, you're still dealing with the crud. You'd typically have a bot do it at scale, but the crud often resents getting filtered and works around it.
More specifically, the massive oversupply of hot takes is why plenty of fora ban I/P as a topic in particular. Even among an already-selected audience aggressive controls are necessary to get anything useful out of it, and Eremolalos walked into a minefield by overestimating the crowd.
Actually, the minefield wasn't I/P, it was the controls I proposed. Asking for links not opinions seems like a good way to protect the thread from degenerating into a flame war. And it's just silly to suggest that people's freedom to speak their mind was suppressed. Any of the irritated people could have started an all-comments-welcome thread right next time mine about the exact question. Or people could have posted links to their favorite polemcis. And of course I had no power to prevent people's posting opinions. anyway. I'm not even sure the people objecting to my request that they not post their views had much to say on the subject. None of them did.
Minefield is probably the wrong metaphor, I should have stuck to the economic or fluid descriptors. I/P generates both increased quantity and lowered quality of discourse, not surprising the thread gets filled with venting spleens. IMO, if you'd asked for links on a less enflamed topic you'd get a few folks that missed the point, but mostly less traffic in general and little to no pushback.
I think asking specifically for links is a pretty canny way to filter out chaff, sure. On something like Twitter this thread would provide some great fodder to supplement a block list, but that's more awkward on Substack for a few reasons...
In some fields, that's how ALL evidence is generated.
Ideally I would like to see some Scott-style thinking. I think some people are better than others at telling the difference between what's pretty sure and what's speculation and what's highly biased, and sorting and assembling the mess into a reasonable take plus some predictions, along with how much confidence to have in each. Presumably one reason you are here is that you, too, believe that. Also seems likely to me that you, too, search for thinkers like that when you are trying to understand what's really going on in a domain where you do not have enough expertise to just start with the tangled mass of lies, speculation and geniune info and figure it all out on your own. No doubt even the people trying their hardest to give an accurate read also misjudge some things, but if you read several of them you end up way clearer about whatever the situation is.
I'm sure there are many people publishing their takes on Trump + current events in Israel, current events in Israel + antisemitism & Trump + antisemitism. Some are better than others. I'd like links to the better ones.
I find Scott excellent at breaking down implicit social norms into explicit terms; he's top-tier at this.
I'm not really here for beliefs? I have my own, and changing your mind is a privileged operation.
Yes but how does your not being here for beliefs relate to my post? Are you saying you would not have wanted what I asked for, links to posts or whatever by someone who is knowledgeable and making an effort to be fair-minded. I am quite willing to hear beliefs from people like that. Beliefs from several people like that are even better. Then I'll ruminate about it all and come to my own conclusions.
Got it. I read a lot on the topic of Israel, but don't have anything useful on this specific topic unfortunately. Hopefully someone else does.
4. I agree with the former part about blog post promotion. One needs to have some nuance or coyness about it. Otoh, I think people should be free to drop what are essentially giant blog posts in the comments. Naval Gazing was great fun back in the day, and I'm glad he moved on to his own platform, but without those posts back in the day, we never would have connected. On the other hand most big blog posts are bad. Maybe the rule should be it has to be long technical analysis!
I've just finished reading the Michael Lewis book on FTX (which was a surprisingly good read) and I've changed my mind on an old discussion topic: to what extent is it fair to blame the sins of FTX on Effective Altruism and adjacent movements?
If you'd asked me a while ago I'd have said that we need to distinguish between Effective Altruism the idea (which is perfectly sound and reasonable) and Effective Altruism the movement (which is full of flawed people) and blame the latter but not the former.
But now I'm coming around to the idea that it's not a coincidence that the former attracted the latter -- it is in the nature of EA the idea to attract the sort of flawed people that make up EA the movement. Blithely, the sort of people who assume they're too smart for conventional ethics tend to be the sort of people who assume they're too smart for conventional bookkeeping standards.
I think nerds in general are susceptible to being nerdsniped by weird ideas. Being an epistemic pioneer necessarily implies being a weirdo. Just comes with the territory.
https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/dismembering-the-mystique-of-meta (consequentialism is ethics without guardrails)
https://paulgraham.com/disc.html (newton was a nutcase)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-344/comment/66758157 (more on newton)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aHaqgTNnFzD7NGLMx/reason-as-memetic-immune-disorder (autists have no memetic antibodies against crazy ideas)
My baseline assumption is that nonprofits love a generous donor and are sometimes too slow to vet the donors and consider reputational damage. The MIT Media Lab took money from Jeff Epstein and tried to conceal it, for example.
Do you get that ACX is full of flawed people too? As is pretty much any organization you can name? Who knows, maybe you're one of the flawed. I sure as hell am.
I'd say blame isn't warranted, though judging them for the company they keep is. When televangelists all got caught with their literal pants down in the 80's it caused people to look askance at giant megachurches and I think that was appropriate. It was a feeling of "so this is the kind of behavior that people who spew your rhetoric engage in." In my view that's exactly how people should respond to SBF. SBF acted foolishly and one should therefore suspect EA of being equally foolish. Which in my view it 100% is.
Every person I have known reasonably well has flaws, so writing off every association of humans as soon as even one flawed member is identified seems to lead to self-imposed exile, or to avoiding deeper personal connection lest a flaw is found. I prefer accepting that people are flawed and not acting like a misanthrope.
I'd say a 9 billion dollar fraud goes beyond flawed, and I'd say that the ideological structure of that fraud has concerning parallels with EA ideology.
From what I can tell SBF was a greedy guy who found an idealistic cover story, kind of like popes who hid behind religion to line their pockets and build gorgeous palaces. EA seems much more full of nerdier versions of the vegans who insist on informing you of that fact than it does of crooked techies.
You should read the book -- it's a great read. I'm pretty sure you won't come away thinking SBF was a greedy guy. Seems to me he was sort of an autistic savant -- able to do extraordinary mental feats in a limited domain, uniformed and lacking in basic skills in most other domains. As for greedy -- jeez, SBF sounds like he had way *less* than the average amount of interest in luxuries or social status. He was pretty anhedonic -- very little gave him pleasure. I'm not even sure he exactly enjoyed gaming -- sounds more like it was a soothing distraction.
I think an alternate way of thinking about this is that people who voluntarily subject themselves to stricter-than-usual morality might voluntarily subject themselves to stricter-than-usual bookkeeppiinngg. I think EA has both types of people.
Bbookkeeppiinngg? Or just audit? The problem at FTX seemed to be lack of any audit feedback or enforcement by the major partners, which would have created incentives to keep some books and maybe some walls between different entities. Instead there was a reliance on some vague notion that declaring oneself to be EA would naturally lead to punctilious adherence to The Way. Or even worse, that the EA figleaf was good enough to allow FTX to draw all the attention while the stablecoinsters were doing the real hustle.
EA has attracted Scott. Do you have the impression he thinks he's too smart for conventional bookkeeping standards? For instance do you have the impression he believes that he's so smart he it's OK to cheat on parts of the contract Substack has for bloggers with paid subscribers? My impression is that Scott is *more* scrupulous than average about adhering to agreements and promises. If there are a bunch of little ways to keep a bit more of the money that comes in from from paid Substack subscribers by fibbing about this and that, I'd guess Scott does less of that stuff than most Substack bloggers who make significant money from subscribers.
I read the book too, and I don’t think it tells you enough about EA's to make a judgment like that. There’s very little in it about EA's who were not in SBF’s company. As for EA's who did work in the company — Lewis describes a point midway in the company’s brief history when many of the original EA's working for SBF left because they disapproved of something they found out SBF was doing. I believe it was more than half of the SBF EA's. And it seems as though most of SBF’s later employees, random people hired by SBF, had no connection at all with EA.
As for the core group — EA's who were part of the company from the beginning to the end — my take is not that they were entitled and considered themselves above the law, but that many had that autism lite thing that some smart people have. They were naive, overly influenced by abstract ideas such as the basic EA logic, and under-influenced by common sense and basic information about how the world works. They were poor judges of people, and so not able to see the abundant evidence the SBF was a bad bet.
I have no idea how scrupulous Scott is and neither do you.
That's not true, actually. I have seen Scott think out loud in writing about many topics, and it is very evident that he pushes himself hard to figure out what's really true -- not what view's good for building an entertaining or impressive post around, not what's fashionable, not what he hopes is true. You don't get that impression with many writers. It's not that I think people who don't sound like Scott are lying dirtbags -- but I get the feeling that questions about "is this valid" don't loom nearly as large in their mind. I've also seen Scott on here talking about rules of civllity, and enforcement of them, and carrying through on things he'd said he'd do. Same scrupulous quality comes through, and we all get to see whether he in factcarries through. Mostly he does. When he doesn't he acknowledges it, apologizes and explains.. Also, the home page of ACX offers links to 3 things: About, Archive, and Mistakes. How many other blogs can you name that have a link to a list of inaccuracies? Scott's goes back to 2013.
Scott's blog posts are too narrow of a data set to allow us to determine his overall scrupulosity. All that we can determine is that he is relatively scrupulous AS A BLOGGER.
Of course, this is true to an extent of every human being. I just don't think you can accurately judge a person scrupulosity unless you live or work with them closely. Barring some huge, anomalous clue like a heinous felony conviction..
In my experience you can tell a fair amount about people's thinking and personal style from smallish samples, such as posts on here.
I guess I misunderstood what you meant by scrupulosity. I thought you were using that word in an all-encompassing way that included morality.
If you're just talking about someone's thinking style or personal style, sure, Scott is scrupulous in those matters. I cannot judge his overall morals. Furthermore, I feel that as an argument tactic, it was slightly cheap for you to bring Scott into the discussion at all. Since this is the comments section on Scott's blog, bringing Scott into the debate, as you have, puts anyone who wants to disagree with you at a severe disadvantage.
Scott's fine with criticism so long as the writer explains their reasons for thinking he's wrong. I posted earlier this week that I thought his take on Michigan Mormons was totally wrongheaded. People feel free to say stuff like that in every comments section. Scott donated a kidney this year, and many people objected to that as foolish or a bad use of resources, & I think there were some who saw it as a pointless grand gesture.
I don't see it as a pointless gesture but neither do I see it as incontrovertible evidence of scrupulosity. For all we know, it could be the act of a guilty man trying to atone for some past wrong. I am not singling out Scott here. The same thing applies to everybody who donates the kidney. Or join the monastery or devotes their lives to philanthropy, or does anything unusually intense like that.
You missed the point. It's not that donating a kidney is incontrovertible evidence of scrupulosity, it's that people's feeling free to criticize Scott for an important personal choice is excellent evidence that it is safe to express your views about Scott here. I am not placing you at a disadvantage by calling Scott scrupulous. If you want to speculate about ways he might be unscrupulous, or argue that something he's doing now is unscrupulous, you are in no danger.
I didn't say you were putting me at a disadvantage by calling Scott scrupulous. I said you were putting people with reservations about EA at a disadvantage by bringing Scott into the discussion in the first place
I am uninformed on the issue, but I would like to point out that Scott is a single (and decidedly non-random) data point. So, he has next to no bearing on whether or not the EA movement attracts or consists of a certain kind of people (presumably, nobody here was assuming the universal quantifier).
Doesn't this same argument apply to any conversation linking SBF and EA?
I think so. Though, as I've said, I'm quite uninformed on the issue, so I don't know to what degree the conversations are of the type "the EA movement attracted SBF, so it's bad" (which I think is unsound) vs. e.g. "the EA movement somehow allowed SBF to commit his acts, so it's bad" (the truth of which I have no idea about). Hope my position is clear now :)
Yes, he is only one data point. On the other hand,
(1) he is a data point we have a lot of information about, so we can extract more data from this point than we could from a data point where we know only they are + for EA and - for financial sloppiness and cheating.
(2) If someone is saying that EA and disregard of laws and conventions regarding handling of money are 2 sides of the same coin, then even a single case of an EA who adheres scrupulously to a financial contract is a substantial point against that view.
Re shoplifting, I dont’t think that anyone has mentioned the reluctance of large chains to permit their employees to apprehend shoplifters. https://www.ktvu.com/news/judge-rules-in-favor-of-a-safeway-worker-who-was-fired-after-trying-to-stop-a-shoplifter
Note that in California., a police officer cannot make a warrantless arrest for a misdemeanor unless he witnesses it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=836&lawCode=PEN
He can, however, take someone into custody when a shopkeeper has made a citzen’s arrest
I had to have my bags checked in a shop recently (due to horrible floor design; not in US) and my visceral reaction was not pretty. I was quite ready to test if citizens arrest hold in my country. My relationship with the store would have been completely damaged.
The situation was instantly defused by the shop lady who pushed the button which opened the door. After that I was perfectly happy to chat and wait for the security guy, and I even got a warranty tip out of the interaction.
Retail chains are unfortunately right not to apprehend shoppers. They are not police,and should never ever become police. Fucks up prettty much everything.
It's a liability issue. Why would any retailer try to apprehend thieves when they could be sued for millions of dollars in civil court? US law generally frowns on the use of force to defend property, so any company doing so is going to take on a huge risk.
Yes, I know. I was not opining on whether the stores' policy is sound.
Retail workers don’t get paid nearly enough to be asked to do this. Managers are already spread thin and even if this became their responsibility, they don’t cover nearly enough ground to actually catch people in the act. When dealing with shoplifters you’re dealing with volatile, potentially anti social people who are risky to intervene with. Companies put these rules in place to prevent their employees from getting hurt bc the liability is huge.
> Retail workers don’t get paid nearly enough to be asked to do this.
Retail workers frequently try to do this in direct violation of store policy. They'd do it more if it wasn't a firing offense. It's not exactly a ridiculous ask.
If the employees had guns, even if the store policy was to not use them under any circumstances, I think shoplifting would significantly drop and people would be much nicer
Cheaper alternative: torture one shoplifter per week on a platform mid-store. Draws people into the store and I don't think any are going to shoplift while the screaming's going on, amIrite? For the remainder of the week the blood-spattered platform powerfully deters shoplifting by reminding people that if you steal you later squeal.
In the third world stores sometimes have a whiteboard near the entrance where they hang pictures of shoplifters caught on camera.
The information is not exactly actionable, the pictures aren't even that good, but seeing their blurry picture in the wall of shame might still deter shoplifters from coming back to the store in a "you know what you did" sort of way.
people would just steal the guns
I can entertain the idea of arming teachers but there is 0 feasible way to arm retail workers lol. It’s just not realistic for a million different reasons.
I had a somewhat nutty evangelical christian teacher when I was in middle school. He used to say, "the US guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion." Kinda glad he didn't have a gun.
A surprising number of my coworkers do go around armed - not with guns (lol @ CA CC laws), but many of us have mace, knives, tasers, or...other accoutrements. Not sure it does anything deterrence-wise though. A non-visible weapon that you'd get in huge trouble for even displaying, let alone actually using, isn't good for much more than peace of mind. Even back when there was more of a look-the-other-way attitude towards employing "shopkeeper's privilege", the best deterrents were your typical big and/or tall guys who could convincingly threaten to mix it up, and occasionally did so. (And yeah, it almost always has to be a guy for the Real Bad Ones, which already disqualifies about half of your potential in-house security.)
Like I know it's not actually a stable or good equilibrium, but some of my fondest memories are of managers decking crackheads who'd come in and try to steal shit while mouthing off about their invulnerability. The current status quo is so...humiliating.
What type of retail do you work in where all of your coworkers are carrying weapons? Lol… I think we just need to be tough on crime and shoplifting takes care of itself. The worst offenders for shoplifting basically run organized crime rings of resale goods. Crack down on those hard. For many others shoplifting is just one of many petty criminal past times they enjoy. There needs to be a general feeling that there are consequences for breaking the law, and you won’t get away with it. Take the people breaking into cars, stealing packages, and doing strong arm robberies off the street and there will be way less shoplifting.
Your friendly neighborhood grocery store!
Yeah, we've had the organized rings hit our parent mall at least a couple times this year. Walk in with a bag, scoop up jewelry and cosmetics, make like a guillotine. I'm sometimes surprised these businesses are still open (although now with armed guards posted, which was never a thing in the past). Other big raids have made the national news elsewhere in SF as well. The CA DA's newsletter regularly includes mention of busting up organized retail theft rings too...they blame the ease of resale, whether that's street hustling or Facebook Marketplace (why that site specifically?). Sometimes as part of the greater anti-tech jeremiad, which I'm sour on, but am at least in agreement that many marketplaces have become a lot less useful due to the amount of stolen and counterfeit crap clogging up the SEO.
Power law for criminality is indeed part of why I take it seriously. The same way that enforcing traffic laws or fare collection tends to also pick up outstanding warrants for more serious crimes (and a surprising number of illegal guns)...there's this desire to carve out a separate magisteria for shoplifting, as some sort of low-stakes thrillseeking with no correlation to "real" crime. Just like jaywalking, which was also foolishly decriminalized here, with predictable results. But I just don't buy it. "If a man is willing to lie once, he is willing to lie again and again...if you see one rat, a dozen more are nearby"
Yes, I know. I was not opining on whether the stores' policy is sound.
What employee would want to risk getting stabbed to do this?
The kind of employee that doesn't have better options for employment. ...So, most retail workers. Of course, as long as unemployment is a viable option for survival, employers don't have enough leverage to force employees to risk their lives for the sake of company assets.
Ok so this hypothetical employee is like “Hmm should I just stand here and watch and get paid OR should I get paid the same amount and also risk getting stabbed by a crackhead.” Hmm.
I can understand stores not wanting to make their employees confront shoplifters and risk injury (or use excessive force), but I can also get behind people defending their property within reason. I did see a sign at one store saying that employees would use force to restrain shoplifters, but it was just that one. Perhaps a good middle ground would be having employees sign a waiver stating they are not required to physically restrain shoplifters, but if they choose to do so, it will be at their own risk. The store will not be liable for injuries sustained by the employee, but it will ALSO not fire the employee for attempting a citizen's arrest as long as: They do not strike the suspect (with hands, feet, or any kind of weapon), they do not choke the suspect or hold them by the neck (no "sleeper hold", no knee on the neck), they do not use or even draw a firearm on the suspect (possible exception if the suspect draws a weapon first).
Alternatively, a business that has the time and money could have its employees be "certified" to restrain suspects. They could get a self-defense expert to come in and teach a class on basic restraining and self-defense techniques. If you haven't taken the class, then you are not authorized by the business to restrain a shoplifting suspect, and must do no more than follow them and get their license plate or physical description.
Even if we remove all the liability laws, at the end of the day managers don't want to see their employees hurt while trying to apprehend a criminal. It's a very dangerous job and we have the police do it for good reason.
Ask any person with a black belt in martial arts, they'll all tell you that trying to fight someone in public is a huge gamble and that your first instinct should be to run away if at all possible. I personally dislike shoplifting but I would also hate to see a store worker getting hurt trying to stop it.
What about another customer, who has no relationship to the store but who's also attempting a citizen's arrest? (happened in Canada)
If one is attacked in public, it may not always be feasible to run away. What if you're not alone, and your friend is weaker than you or slower? I can imagine several plausible scenarios in which I'd have no choice (or desire) to anything other than defend myself/others.
I'll have to disagree with the black belts. First instincts should not be to run away, but to keep a clear head and control any panicking. A cool head is more valuable in a pinch than any prior strategy.
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Did Trump do better among Asian women than Asian men? CNN has Asian men voting 55-37 for Harris/Trump, while Asian women voted 54-42 for Harris/Trump. Though the sample size was small, the same pattern was also seen in CNN's 2020 exit poll.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/20
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/21
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results/20
https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results/21
Question: does the "Asian" category include "South Asian," or simply "East Asian?" That could have some cultural bearing on the results.
The US default is generally that unless explicitly specified otherwise, `Asian' in any dataset includes all of East, Southeast, South and Central Asia, but not West or North Asia.
Meanwhile in conversation `Asian' frequently refers exclusively to East Asia, but surveys are presumably using the `dataset' rather than the `conversational' definition.
If anything it probably means the gender gap is smaller, possibly due to educational polarization dominating (they both went for Harris after all).
I can come up with all kinds of fun politically incorrect counterfactuals, but those numbers are pretty close. Trump doesn't exactly fit your typical image of WMAF relationships.
Methodologically, it isn't clear that anything aside from electoral college results and vote margins in competitive states provide interpretable information. I understand that, intuitively, people want to ascribe some significance to other votes, like the national popular vote or the shift toward R in non-marginal states. However, in the vast majority of states where the marginal impact of a POTUS vote is 0, what do those votes really mean? The candidates did not pursue those votes and the voters knew that they didn't change the outcome. That makes it hard to really anchor the votes to anything specific.
As far as I'm concerned, absolutely the most surprising thing discovered after the election was that in SC (at least in the 6th district) people had trouble figuring out how to vote split ticket:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/11/06/dem_rep_clyburn_a_lot_of_african-americans_in_my_district_split_their_ticket_wanted_to_vote_for_trump.html
What on earth? I can't seem to find a sample SC ballot online. Can anyone tell me what the ballots looked like, or what else this was about - was this about voting machines? (I'm professionally interested in this - it seems like something I better know about.)
Alexander Turok already explains this in his comment, but I figured I'd chip in my anecdote too. In Missouri, I accidentally voted straight ticket the first election I was able to vote. They had electronic voting where pushing a single early on-screen (confusingly labeled) button caused you to vote straight-ticket without asking for confirmation. I wised up for later ones, but the first time someone uses that machine is going to be a pretty significant fraction of all votes cast using it.
Ouch. Thank you very much!
I know this is a long shot, but do you by any chance remember which manufacturer made that machine?
No luck, sorry. This was a decade ago and while it significantly bothered me it didn't drive me to have a vendetta against them such that I might still remember.
Thank you for replying.
"As far as I'm concerned, absolutely the most surprising thing discovered after the election was that in SC (at least in the 6th district) people had trouble figuring out how to vote split ticket:"
So I work in an admin role for a US federal organization and I have a new employee working for me being trained; we have found that to be effective, this employee needs training material down to the level of "printouts with lots of screenshots of Outlook with callout arrows labeled 'Click this button' ". If given that level of support, this employee can produce work with only a moderate amount of rework needed.
I could definitely see this employee, if he or she wanted to split their ticket, struggling to understand how to navigate digital screens on their own.
Thank you for this example! I'm sure there are quite a few people who, like your employee, can mostly follow printed directions but have trouble navigating a digital system (and, having seen a lot of really bad GUI designs and a lot of bad behavior of such systems, I'm fairly confident that most of the time it's not their fault but the fault of the developers, and that every task can be made more complicated by adding computers). That seems like a pretty good reason, among others, to have paper ballots, rather than voting machines.
(Random example on the usability of digital apps. Just yesterday I spent about half an hour trying to login into a system, only to get greeted on every attempt (different web browsers, different configurations, different login names) by the following, in a tiny font: "Oops... sorry, an error has occurred Error executing child request for handler System.Web.Mvc.HttpHandlerUtil+ServerExecuteHttpHandlerWrapper'. " Apparently, by this the system meant "You have the wrong password, you idiot". I did eventually get through, which was a great improvement from the previous system, which wouldn't let me login for 3 months by claiming it would send me an e-mail to get me authenticated and not sending the said e-mail. In the end it turned out that in order to get it to send that e-mail I was supposed to guess that I need to delete all web browser cookies. This is the world in which we are supposed to trust software to do the right thing and to get everyone to do things digitally rather than on paper.)
I'm in South Carolina, and this was the first time I've voted in an election here (my late wife and I moved here in 2020, after the election that year).
I found the voting machines pretty straightforward. There were on-screen choices, which seemed easy enough (and which would have made it easy for me to split a ticket, if I'd been so inclined). The only confusing aspect was that, to complete voting, there were instructions to "review one's choices" then finalize them. The screens had a "prev" virtual button, which I initially used used to review - but then didn't see a "finalize" option. It turned out that the review had to be done with a separate button, not the "prev" button.
The machine accepted a blank ballot, on which it then prints a final, human-readable set of choices.
This printed ballot is then scanned into a separate machine (and, I assume, retained for re-examination in the event of a recount).
Thank you very much for detailing this. I hate seeing all the confusing buttons - this is a very common user interface fail, and is especially bad when the button you need is for some reason hidden because you didn't do something you were supposed to.
I suppose the straight-ticket voting is why they couldn't just give voters paper ballots instead of having them to fumble, trying to figure out what their voting machine is asking them to do. What a mess.
Many Thanks!
South Carolina appears to have straight-ticket voting:
https://horrydemocrats.org/straight-party-voting-south-carolina/
We have straight ticket voting in Michigan but I’ve never used it. I prefer to look at all the elections and bubble in each one.
They may have electronic voting down south but in the north I’ve only used paper ballots.
Thank you. Do you get one kind of ballot for straight ticket voting and another for split ticket voting, or are both of these options on the same ballot?
That explains a lot. Thank you very much.
So I suppose this means that D candidates get a bonus in D-leaning districts, and R candidates get a bonus in R-leaning districts, because it takes more effort to not vote the straight ticket - and some people may not even realize there's another option. I wonder if election forecasters are accounting for this.
Yes, that is one of the options on the first screen. It is easy enough to go through the candidates individually, screen by screen, though (which is what I did).
...I don't know you how keep missing the actual point of justice, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised seeing as you're missing the point of charity as well. Do you think people back in the day were performing gruesome executions because they had empirical studies proving that those actions reduced crime? No, they did it because seeing bad things happen to bad people is incredibly satisfying. It doesn't matter if there's evidence that the certainty of punishment is more effective than severity for deterrence, because that's not the point. Enforcement of order is orthogonal to justice. And what the people (especially police) actually want is justice.
We all agree that shoplifters are very bad people, don't we? Do you really feel that a slap on the wrist is an appropriate punishment for that? The egos of the populace are free to rationalize, but the heart wants what it wants, and it wants sin to be paid in suffering.
You say "seeing bad things happen to bad people is incredibly satisfying" as though this were an obvious, universally shared value. Perhaps I am unusual but seeing bad things happen to people is horrible for me, even if they are awful people I intensely dislike.
"No, they did it because seeing bad things happen to bad people is incredibly satisfying."
Personally, during occasional times of experiencing extreme emotions (predominantly hatred), I find the thought of punishing people who I view as having personally wronged me to be incredibly satisfying. But I'm pretty sure that if I saw punishment actually being carried out and happening, it wouldn't be satisfying at all; it would be repulsive, abhorrent, and I'd be full of objections and anger.
We'd have to determine if we get net utility from individuals (like you) having satisfaction from seeing someone punished + individuals being met with preferred outcomes due to deterrence (personally I care about deterring anything I view as harmful) + the negative utility of someone suffering due to the punishment + the negative utility from other people (like me) seeing that person being punished and disliking it.
(That is, if utilitarianism is something you get behind.)
1. I think it's obnoxious that you describe your theory of justice as "the actual point of justice" and accuse everyone else with a different theory of "missing it". Just say you disagree!
2. I'm totally on board with being very harsh on evildoers. Suppose you steal a pack of toothpaste from the local supermarket - isn't six months in jail enough comically-overdone completely-out-of-proportion hyperpunishment for anybody?
I imagine being sentenced to six months in jail tomorrow. I would lose my medical practice, since patients can't just put their treatment on hold for six months and would all find different doctors (plus it would be humiliating to tell them I couldn't see them because I was in jail). I would miss my children's first steps and first words; for all I know, they would have completely forgotten about me by the time I got back. My wife would have some kind of childcare crisis and possibly have to move back in with her family, who absolutely don't have enough room for three extra people in their house and would hold it against her forever. I personally have a decent amount of savings, but if I didn't, I might lose my house after six months of zero income. While in the prison, I would have a decent chance of being raped or beaten. If in summer, I might be in 110 degrees jail cells without air conditioning all day, without any Internet access or even a decent TV, and with a potentially violent criminal as a 24-7 roommate. By the time I got out, I'd have to beg my wife's forgiveness, deal with my children thinking of me as a stranger and being afraid of me, and try to pick up the remnants of my life and race against time to get a new job (with a criminal record!) before losing my house / car / etc.
(if you're going to argue that I'm a normal person but most prisoners are losers who don't have any of these social connections or responsibilities, I think you're wrong - about half of prisoners have children under 18, and 60% had jobs before being imprisoned.)
I'm not saying this to argue against prison or say nobody should be punished at all. I'm saying six months in prison for shoplifting ALREADY IS the high-suffering option for people who enjoy watching cruelty against people who deserve it.
3. My uncle (middle-class Jew from NYC) used to shoplift candy as a tween. My great-grandmother caught him once, yelled at him, possibly beat him (I don't know the details) and he never did it again. He's now a millionaire with a beautiful family who lives in the suburbs and is well-liked by everyone in his community. I don't think either he or society would have been well-served by putting him in jail for 10 years at a cost of > $1 million. I don't know what percent of shoplifters are more like my uncle vs. more like psychopath career criminals who can never be rehabilitated, but it doesn't seem obvious that the latter far outnumber the former.
4. I'm mostly atheist, but I have enough lingering agnostic in me that I don't want to say "any violation, no matter how slight, opens you up to unlimited punishment, for as long as it amuses the authorities to punish you" anywhere that there's any chance that God might listen and judge me by the same standard. I am fine with some kind of proportionate punishment or even somewhat-above-proportionate punishment - I admit that there's no objective standard for what this is, but I feel like we can agree on the extremes.
My internal watchdog on this is that the punishment has to be a gift to the perpetrator, as viewed by some higher dimensional version of themselves that would want you to enact whatever the punishment is you conceive.
Although that leaves all kinds of wiggle room for interpretation so my watchdog on that is that whatever the answer is I should find it very inconvenient.
Agree to some extent that sometimes the framing of law enforcement around reducing the economic costs of crime through deterrence isn't appropriate. If someone is murdered, thinking more directly about justice seems more appropriate, I think you can tie yourself in knots trying to justify it in terms of deterence / public safety.
But I don't really see why you'd include shoplifting in that category though? Morally it strikes me as similar to something like vandalism, illegal fishing, tax fraud, supplying liquor or weed to underage people - an immoral, yet common crime that often isn't that big of a deal individually, but we need enforcement to maintain societal norms against it.
I don't want some guy who steals a pair of sneakers to "suffer". I want a society where everyone observes the social norm not to steal (and pay taxes, not drive under the influence etc, etc), and perceives the social or legal risks of flouting that norm to not be worth it. If a slap on the wrist is sufficient to do that, great. If not, maybe greater punishment is part of the answer.
and where everyone in that society can obtain sneakers if they need them
“We all agree that shoplifters are very bad people, don't we?”
Do we? Seems very simplistic. Reality is never that neat. Does being desperate make someone bad? Does having to make a choice between two evils make someone bad? Whatever happened to “love the sinner, hate the sin”?
He could have avoided some trouble by saying “we all agree shoplifting is very bad, don’t we?”
…but then the argument that bad things should happen to shoplifters because “seeing bad things happen to bad people is incredibly satisfying” wouldn’t flow. So no, not without equivocating he couldn’t have.
Seeing bad behavior get punished is probably healthy for a society, even if the deterrence effect is debatable. It makes people who follow the rules *not* feel like suckers for doing so. It's basically good for social morale for people to feel that bad behavior does not go unpunished.
Also, a lot of people simply find it dispiriting to walk into a store and see many of the products on sale being locked up behind glass. It feels dystopian, whether it is or not.
"We all agree shoplifters are very bad people don't we"
No. The shoplifters I have known were kind, dedicated and gave quite a bit of time and money. They just held the current order of property rights to be an unjust and unsupported imposition, a view I largely agree with.
Are they typical? No, but I find nothing intrinsically indicative of a vicious character in shoplifting.
It's not necessarily true but I'm willing to bet there's a strong correlation between shoplifting and other anti social behavior. The idea that thieves are mostly social justice advocates is not plausible.
Shoplifters I have known: a good number of teenagers, all middle class or upper middle class, stealing on a dare, or because their friends did it, mostly small things like candy & makeup. One retired nurse in her 60's, broke and with a bad, disabling psychiatric disorder who stole drops for dry eyes in the drugstore because she could not afford them. One smart middle-aged woman from a wealthy background who was chaotic, entitled, unemployed and broke, was quite good at stealing smallish clothing items from high end stores. Had a professional thief boyfriend who helped her.
"and gave quite a bit of time and money." Then why are they shoplifting? If they have quite a bit of money to give, then they shouldn't be shoplifting. It's *less* excusable for them to be doing it than it is for the very poor who might genuinely need to.
Widespread shoplifting is harmful, and should not be casually excused. It makes society less high-trust which has many negative effects.
It's not that they reject a high trust society, it's that they think society is fundamentally structurally corrupt, and the existing distribution of property must be dismantled. From that point of view, saying that shoplifting is bad because it makes society less high trust has limited moral weight. It's like saying "Freeing slaves by sneaking into their masters properties and letting them out is immoral because it reduces social trust". True, maybe, and even regrettable- but the overwhelming priority is to reconstitute society as a society with fundamentally different rules- and the struggle over that transition is likely to reduce trust.
Perhaps an argument should be made that even though certain laws are extremely unjust they should be obeyed nevertheless unless:
1. They are being disobeyed as a form of civil disobedience.
2. They are being disobeyed due to great need.
But I think it’s pretty understandable why people would think that they have the right to violate laws that they perceive as great injustices against them. Of course, they could be wrong about that, but this is a different argument.
The form of this argument seems flawed. (I should know better than to argue with a philosopher, but here goes anyway.) Why is shoplifting a useful act in helping to bring about fundamental social change? I could understand perhaps instituting a denial of service attack against a key pillar of the current arrangements, but as far as I can tell isolated individual acts do mostly just undermine social trust and make it more difficult to build momentum for massive change. If anything, widespread minor acts of rebellion shifts society to become more accepting of authoritarian arrangements and violent reaction to movements trying to enact major changes. This way lies dystopia not a glorious new dawn.
You keep posting as if Justice were a simple self-evident thing and not something that humans have been talking and arguing about for millennia. It’s a big old straw man.
I think you overestimate the moral sense of crowds and underestimate their bloodlust. I’m sure that for any one of us, for any given year (perhaps even less), you can find an action that will make a crowd cheer at their painful (and showy) execution.
They didn't have empirical studies proving ginger was healthy 1000 years ago either, they still ate it because they had good intuition that it was helpful in getting the outcomes they wanted, not because it was incredibly satisfying to chew ginger
> We all agree that shoplifters are very bad people, don't we?
Self check-outs make the distinction between shoplifters and non-shoplifters difficult to draw. I think most people can agree that "smash and grab" shoplifters should have the book thrown at them. But I also assume that most self-checkout users have, at some point, paid for five oranges when they've actually taken six. Or frustratedly just throw something in the bag after it fails to scan for the fifth time. And surely, chains that adopt self-checkouts assume that people will do this and factor that into their cost-benefit analysis, no?
Literally three hours ago, I walked up to a open self-service checkout terminal and touched the screen. It said something like, "Please place the frozen pizza in the bagging area." Since I didn't have a frozen pizza on me at the time, I hit another button, and it asked me to pay $17. After a few moments of puzzlement, I called an attendant over. The attendant had just gotten there and was staring at the screen when a young lady ran up from beyond the terminals, said "Sorry, that was me", and whipped out her phone to pay.
I can only imagine the expression on her face walking out of the store when her neurons warned her, "Hey, something in that recent sequence of events isn't consistent with prior experiences...."
So, sample size of one honest person. Two, if you count me, but self-reporting on these matters is not very reliable.
The self-checkout usually has a 'need assistance' button that you're supposed to use when items don't scan (or when they're marked down). Just taking the thing anyway is theft, if you're that frustrated then leave it behind.
...that said, I did get called out once at the grocery store because I completely forgot the "pay the bill" part at self-checkout and had to walk across the store again to go pay for things.
Yeah, no, I don't steal from the self-checkout. Theft is theft. Didn't someone teach you as a kid that stealing is wrong?
It's not that hard to accidentally take something without paying it with self checkout. Like if you have soda/water on the bottom of the cart and you forget to scan it. That's probably the majority of retail theft.
If you took it by accident, it's not theft. Theft requires intent.
To reliably differentiate between the two would require a mind-reading device.
I don’t need a mind reading device to read my own mind and you don’t need one to read yours. If I take something with no intent, I am not a thief. If you take something with it you are, to which I would ask again: didn’t your father teach you not to steal?
Corporations aren't people. The corporate decision to switch to self checkouts is, of course, based on the assumption that there are enough suckers to subsidize the moochers and then some. A grocery chain that gets the analysis wrong will be out-competed by one that gets it right. One could in principle (although I personally wouldn't) use consequentialist reasoning to argue that being a moocher is more virtuous, as it moves society in the direction of cashiers being able to keep their jobs.
To say that stealing from a person is wrong but stealing from a large number of people simultaneously is fine is an interesting moral standpoint, for sure. The idea that "They expect that some people will be thieves, therefore it's okay to steal from them" is similarly remarkable.
*shrug*
Not remarkable at all, really. I'd say this old SSC post best describes how I think about morality: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/
If you're the sort of person who pickpockets strangers on the street, then you probably need more morality. But if you're concerned with the theoretical effect that stealing $15 of produce might have on the hundreds or thousands of shareholders that it's distributed across, then you've internalized the whole morality thing too deeply and you could probably use some Nietzsche.
This is the central problem of utilitarianism: while the idea is noble, in practice it lets people excuse their evil behavior as long as they can assemble an argument that "It's not doing any real harm." "I can steal, because the shareholders are only losing an infinitesimal amount of utility." "I can lie, because telling the truth would do more harm than good." "I can take a bribe, because nobody will know and nobody will get hurt."
Is it fine to burn down the grocery store as well, because it's insured ("They plan for some stores to burn down") and the overall financial impact will be spread across thousands? Is it okay to embezzle from the store ("Not too much of course! Just a few thousand over the course of a year, nobody will miss it") because the harm will be spread over hundreds of thousands?
Stealing is not wrong because it hurts people (though, of course, it does). It's wrong because you took something that didn't belong to you. You had no right to it, you had not earned it, you did not deserve it, but you took it anyway because you wanted it. Greed justifies your theft, not utilitarianism. That's just a convenient cover for why it's okay for you to be greedy.
Not surprising, as ACX readers skew toward higher-income people who think a lot about morality, relative to the general public.
They can afford to.
I’m glad I recommended you the Count of Monte-Cristo rather than Les Misérables.
(Yes, I know this is absolutely not the same situation as the one Jean Valjean faces. But I couldn’t resist the quip, sorry.)
“10 years! 10 years, for forgetting to scan one loaf of bread!”
> But I also assume that most self-checkout users have, at some point, paid for five oranges when they've actually taken six. Or frustratedly just throw something in the bag after it fails to scan for the fifth time.
Umm, I think you're telling on yourself here. No, I have never done anything like that.
Hey, underpaid nihilists have to feed their families. A free avocado or two for a vanishingly small chance of an embarrassing interaction isn't a terrible risk-adjusted return.
This would be an interesting ACX survey question.
I don't understand how anyone can think risking arrest for a few bucks saved is worth it.
You risk arrest every time you step out of your house. For example, you could unexpectedly experience an absence seizure which causes you to unknowingly commit a hit-and-run. This baseline arrest risk is extremely low.
While it's theoretically possible that you could get arrested for miscounting your tomatoes at the self-checkout, this doesn't really stand out from the arrest-risk noise floor. The realistic worst-case-scenario is an awkward but polite encounter with an employee. Even that is vanishingly unlikely with some basic common sense--e.g., never steal high-cost items, always steal a low fraction of your overall purchase, and of course, put the stolen items at the bottom of your bags.
It might be an effective way to make concrete (and cross-check) the abstract question about preference between contractualism or consequentialism.
Well that's the point of morality, isn't it? Doing the right thing even when the risk adjusted return of doing so is negative for you personally?
Hey Anomie, I think you posted this as a top-level comment when you meant to post it as a reply to someone else.
Can someone give more context for the Michael Wiebe tweet linked? All I’m seeing (maybe because I’m not on that platform and do not wish to be there) is some numbers without any explanations pertaining to the 2020 election.
A video showed up, of someone claiming to be the French whale, giving this explanation of why he thought the polls were wrong:
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1853818243003125934
That's an incorrect interpretation of the polls, I wrote basically the same thing as Michael Wiebe when I saw it:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1853913854524444690
Basically, pollsters go out and contact about 1,000 people. They get responses from various people in different demographics: men, women, Republicans, Democrats, independents, various age groups, etc.
In this case, they got more responses from Democrats than Republicans. So there's some bias in how they contacted people or who picked up the phone. Those raw polling numbers would not predict the results of the election.
To guess what the actual election result will be, they create a weighted electorate -- they guessed what the percentage of women and men and Republicans and Democrats and Independents will be, in the election, and they scale up their responses to fit those percentages. So, they assume that the Republicans they did not reach will vote for Trump and Harris in the same percentages as the Republicans they did reach.
The weighted polls can still fail to predict the result in several ways -- the turnout in each group can be different than what they expect, and it's also possible that the voters they do not reach are more partisan than the voters that they did reach.
But the polls are not "obviously wrong" in the way that the video clip suggests.
I should note that I don't know for sure if that video was actually the French whale talking, or whether there was something more to his argument than just what was said in that video.
> https://x.com/tgof137/status/1853913854524444690
>> They polled a bunch of people and got more responses from 2020 Biden voters than Trump voters (41% vs 37%)
>> But then they weigh those to model what they think the 2024 electorate will be (42% vs 41%).
Tricky. Isn't it common for people to falsely report that they voted for the winner of a past election? How do they know they actually got 41% Biden voters?
People may misreport prior votes. Some people also misreport who they will vote for, and some change their minds between polling and voting. These all contribute to the poll's margin of error.
As far as the weighting process goes, I suspect they create a weighted electorate based on some other factors, like people's stated party registration, not based on their 2020 vote.
Creating the weighted balance of likely electors seems complicated, in general, since you could weight by gender, race, college education, party registration, or other factors, and your weighted electorate would be slightly different in each case.
I suppose that the correlations from one of those categories to another are stable enough that it usually works out -- like maybe you model the electorate to be 42% Democrat and 41% Republican and the prior votes for Biden/Trump line up with roughly the same percentages.
I see, thank you for the overview. I wonder how much we should believe this is actually the whale – aren’t traders (or bankers, even the French ones) trained so that they are reasonably competent with numbers (whether money or statistics) and able to be quiet (to avoid breaching SEC-like regulations)?
the tweet thread is
a response to a tweet that has some video report/interview from a media outlet apparently calld "visegrad24" .. which claims that the polls lied (!)
this is the video https://x.com/visegrad24/status/1853810791100608569 ... text is
"""
THE NYT/SIENA POLL SKEWS IN FAVOUR OF KAMALA HARRIS
We asked the mysterious French trader what makes him so confident in a Trump win that he bet $40 million on it.
He showed us the math that proves pollsters play with data to mislead the electorate.
"""
the texts of the tweet are
1/
"I'm probably the only one who computed it"
— French whale
And he did it wrong too: he divides by 1010, but the total respondents for '2020 vote' is 431+349+180 = 960.
Anyway, the discrepancy is explained by weighting.
2/
The raw percentages are:
2020 Biden voters: 431/960 = 44.9%
2020 Trump voters: 349/960 = 36.4%
With weighting (and rounding):
Biden: 42%
Trump: 40%
This is consistent with their stats on unweighted and weighted partisanship:
[image, which is a screencap from the NYT poll, showing self-reported partisanship of the poll responders]
3/
So they oversampled Dems and undersampled Reps, and weighting partly but not fully closes the gap.
Source:
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/03/us/elections/times-siena-north-carolina-poll-crosstabs.html
4/
Since this is blowing up, I'll add more details.
Theo thinks the NYT poll for North Carolina (showing Harris +2) is badly skewed.
He focuses on the '2020 vote' cross-tab (first table, scroll all the way to the right):
[two more images]
5/
He compares 'Number of respondents' to 'Percentage of total electorate' and finds a discrepancy.
NYT reports their sample is 42% Biden_2020 voters and 40% Trump_2020 voters.
Theo's numbers are different:
[showing screencap from the visegrad24 video, where the denominator is 1010]
6/
As mentioned above, due to non-responses, the total in this category isn't 1010, it's 960; so Theo is dividing by the wrong number.
That is, 50 people in the survey didn't provide info on their 2020 vote.
7/
Theo concludes from this discrepancy that the NYT numbers for 'Percentage of total electorate' are "fake".
It doesn't occur to him that they could be weighting. But if you scroll down, they have a long methods section.
[image of long text from NYT about methodology about weighting]
I see, thank you for reproducing the thread!
I recently became a parent, and one surprising anecdote I've heard multiple times now is how many parents have 3-4 kids just because they really wanted one of them to be a particular sex, and kept trying in hopes that they'd get one. Personally I can't imagine not having decided in advance how many children you were going to have given how large a time/money sink each one is, but given that this seemingly isn't an uncommon practice, I wonder how much it juices fertility rates. If everyone could pick the sex in advance, maybe we'd be down at 1.2 TFR instead of 1.7.
Any TFR result below 3 is hardly "juicing," no?
It's all relative. South Korea would kill for even a 1.2 TFR.
My smug side is chuckling at the idea of an increased birthrate, cancelled out by the deaths requisite for its increase...
But point taken. Anything that results in 3-4 kids per parent is probably a good thing, at this stage.
> Personally I can't imagine not having decided in advance how many children you were going to have given how large a time/money sink each one is
If you feel overstrained by the amount of time/money you're putting into each of your children, you can just lower that amount.
If your point of view is "I recently became a parent", I suggest that you might not have all that good a grasp of how much time/money children require.
It's probably not that they're saying "we really need a (boy/girl)", it's more that they're saying "we are unsure about whether we want a second / third / fourth child, but we really want a (boy/girl) so we'll try for another one".
Unless they're from a super conservative background and aiming for a boy (to keep on the family name etc),. But super conservative people tend to also be in favour of having many children, so they probably wouldn't stop just because child one or two is a boy.
> Personally I can't imagine not having decided in advance how many children you were going to have given how large a time/money sink each one is [...]
but usually people are wwwwwaay off in these estimates, so it makes sense that they then either update on it or then make more wild guesses and end up with more kids, but then it turns out fine. (and so on.)
Congrats
Thank you! 😁
They could, but I don't think that's in most people's Overton windows.
Why are people so worried about Trump's second presidency "destroying democracy", given that his first term was fairly uneventful? Yes, there was January 6th, but it could be best described as a security failure at the Congress building, rather than something akin to the Reichstag fire of 1933. The Jan 6th "coup" didn't have support from any serious group in government and even Trump himself was at best ambivalent towards it, rather than being the mastermind behind the Capitol breach.
Is there any plausible/likely scenario by which his second Trump would be a serious threat to American democracy? Yes, he can pass many dumb laws (such as the tariffs), but I don't see a way for him to manage a complete coup and turn America into an autocracy. The last serious challenge to American democracy was in 1865. Even during World War II elections kept running as scheduled, despite the obvious temptation to pause them until the end of the war. If the bombing of Pearl Harbor wasn't enough to suspend voting, how could a second Trump term realistically pull it off?
>Trump himself was at best ambivalent towards it, rather than being the mastermind behind the Capitol breach.
This is in stark contrast to everything that DoJ and Whitehouse workers said about the event. It is plainly contradicted by the Eastman memos. What sort of insider info do you have that you think Trump wasn't the one who advertised the Jan 6th event and let leash the mob on the Capitol as part of his ongoing pressure campaign on Pence to decertify the results of the 2020 election and certify Trump's fraudulent electoral votes?
"Why are people so worried about Trump's second presidency "destroying democracy", given that his first term was fairly uneventful?"
Because the fact that it didn't cause an obvious break in the system at a first try doesn't mean it was ok and the system is safe. Consider: "why are people worried about smoking at a munitions depot, I smoked there yesterday and it was fairly uneventful". Yes, doing really dangerous things doesn't always result in catastrophes, but it doesn't mean we should stop worrying and have a bonfire at a gas station.
Hi, I accept that you have a valid point. But can't we look at it from two perspectives?
a) Smoking in the depot once was uneventful, but we should do everything in our power to stop it in the future because its unsafe.
b) We've had a small fire at the munitions depot due to smoking, but the fire suppression systems kicked in immediately. Just to be safe, we've installed additional safeguards to help suppress it even faster in the future. Now we don't have to worry about smokers at all - nothing will happen even if a hundred of them start a cigar party at the munitions depot.
Why should we view the Trump presidency as a) rather than b)? To me his first term proved the _resiliency_ of the American democracy and we've since made changes to how votes are tabulated/certified to close the previous loopholes. Instead of relying on having honest candidates who concede after the election, we have now proven we can handle that without a hitch, so our system is even stronger.
The fact that we've formerly cared a lot about candidates conceding was a big weakness if you think about it, as it put too much power into the hands of one candidate. I say good riddance - if people don't want to to concede, so be it.
> Just to be safe, we've installed additional safeguards to help suppress it even faster in the future.
What additional safeguards did the US democracy get in the last four years?
One example would be the Electoral Count Reform Act of 22, which e.g. clarifies that the vice-president's role in certifying a presidential election is that of a ceremonial rubber stamp with no authority to override Congress's decision. And raises the threshold for Congress to challenge election results, which could previously be invoked by a single firebrand representative, along with safeguards on other parts of the electoral-vote chain. This doesn't guarantee a slam-dunk win against any and all future Trump/Eastman-style shenanigans, but it's a good step in the right direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Count_Reform_and_Presidential_Transition_Improvement_Act_of_2022
I really like Taleb's emphasis on survival, so: always a).
For b), we have at least two problems. Following the analogy a bit further,
1 - fire suppression systems still cause a lot of damage, why risk setting it off and getting expensive stuff ruined and a clean-up and repair bill with it.
2 - redundancy is really expensive, and you can never be sure that you covered every possible failure mode. Maybe you have multiple systems but the special super-tough epoxy used to secure the fire-rated pipes turned out to be corrosive to the pipe material (I wish I was making this up), so every system now has defective pipes.
Going back to American republic: any complex system that has worked for a long time has hidden weaknesses that are impossible to see until a stress exposes them. I would rather not stress our system wantonly. There will be stresses coming out of unforeseen events; since we don't know what they are ("unforeseen"), we don't know how well the system will handle it, and if it has any margin at all left.
The least we can do is not add preventable stresses to it.
I think I've mentioned this earlier in the thread but I was supporting Kamala on election night myself. I was also hoping Trump would lose in the primaries originally so that someone like Romney would end up on the Republican ticket. So yes, I agree with you that the situation is *far* from optimal.
Having said that, now that we have a better fire suppression system in place, should we not worry _less_ than in 2016 rather than _more_? Trump is now 78 years old, so he's not going to be in good shape to be planning coups by 2028 most likely, we've seen the tricks he's tried before, we have people ready to respond more efficiently than before. Adding to the chaos of Jan 6th was the presence of COVID, which was a once-in-a-century event, and won't be on Trump's side this time around should he try to disrupt our democracy.
Also notice how much less people protested / reacted this time around, to me that's a sign of our system being fully ready for whatever Trump might throw at it. Whatever was your level of concern in 2016 should be cut in half thanks to new data, rather than ramped up. And I'm saying this as someone who was highly concerned about Trump winning back in 2016 and very concerned on the day of January 6th until the fog of war cleared up.
Let’s separate 1. “Trump is a risk for the republic” from 2. “how should one feel about him being a President”.
For 1. the data is mixed at best. In 16, we only had his overheated rhetoric, so one could at least plausibly deny he’d actually do any of it. Now we know he did. So that’s bad. OTOH, some safeguards have been added, which is good. OTOH, he KNOWS which safeguards have been added, and he knows how he failed last time, so we have no confidence our new safeguards will be effective against Trump 2.0. So yeah, objectively we should worry more now.
On emotional level, 16 was a huge shock, not the least because it was an upset win by an underdog. Now…. Just speaking for myself, I’m exhausted. Biden started with a bang, and ended everything with a sniveling whimper: economy, Ukraine support, etc etc. So I can’t muster the emotions re. Trump win. I think I’m far from unusual in this regard.
I think you're going with far too strict a definition of "threat to democracy". I fully expect we'll have presidential elections in 2028, but I still think there's significant risk to democracy.
Elections aren't the only ingredient needed for democracy. The process must be free and fair. A democracy only works if the people who lose elections can believe that they were beaten fair and square. In other words, what makes a democracy work is not the voting per se, but rather the social contract of accepting the results of an election.
Trump tried to subvert the fairness and integrity of elections in 2020, which you seem to acknowledge elsewhere in this thread, so I won't list all the supporting facts. I have no reason to believe he wouldn't try to do the same again, and I have reason to believe he may try even harder next time (e.g. the risk of being prosecuted again for all his crimes). And I don't think the risk is confined to a Trump third term, but rather, I'm more concerned about what he might do to get his allies elected.
> Elections aren't the only ingredient needed for democracy. The process must be free and fair.
Agreed, Russia has "elections" too.
> A democracy only works if the people who lose elections can believe that they were beaten fair and square. In other words, what makes a democracy work is not the voting per se, but rather the social contract of accepting the results of an election.
Does it, though? As evidenced by Trump's refusal to concede, we can have a sore loser and still maintain a well functioning democracy. If anything, relying on a concession speech is an inherent weakness, and getting rid of that assumption makes the system stronger rather than weaker.
> I have no reason to believe he wouldn't try to do the same again, and I have reason to believe he may try even harder next time (e.g. the risk of being prosecuted again for all his crimes)
I fully agree. But I also have full confidence that he will not succeed, no matter how hard he tries. I'd assign a ~1% probability of the 2032 elections not happening or not being free even in a world where the Republicans lose in 2028 and Trump tries his hardest to overturn the results.
> And I don't think the risk is confined to a Trump third term, but rather, I'm more concerned about what he might do to get his allies elected.
What do you think is the probability of the 2032 election not happening and/or not being free? And what probability would you have assigned to this outcome in 2014 (before Trump showed up on the scene), January 20th, 2017 and 2022 (after the dust settled on Jan 6th)?
What are any game theoretic reasons that would work against Republicans refusing to certify a Democrat winner in 2028 that are stronger now than they were in 2020? The VP Pence has been replaced with Vance, who says he wouldn't have certified the 2020 election. The prosecutions against Trump will be dropped or Trump will pardon himself. Most Republican voters still believe the 2020 election fraud lies. Trump promises to pardon everybody involved in the attempt. Pence, Cheney, Kissinger, and other Republicans that spoke out against Trump have been excised from the Republican party. Trump will have criminal immunity for outrageous actions he can take as President, e.g. him directing Barr to forge the letter that would have confiscated votes from the states is now criminally unreviewable evidence per Robert's majority Supreme Court immunity in Trump v United States.
I don't think most liberals are convinced that Trump actually literally will become dictator for life or something, but the fact that it's plausible he might want to (based on things he has explicitly said and done, culminating in an actual physical attack on the democratic process) is disturbing enough. A president is supposed to respect the system he works in...
You've been getting a lot of good answers and you go "well, that doesn't count, because America has not become a dictatorship so far, so it can't happen". What would convince you that Trump is a threat to democracy? If his openly trying to manipulate election results by violence isn't enough...
I’d be convinced by a plausible scenario under which Trump will be able to take over, taking into account the various checks and balances, all the way down to the Second Amendment. This scenario should also take into account the risks vs reward trade offs from the perspective of the coup participants. As I’ve mentioned in another thread, Pence certifying the electoral votes was perfectly rational even for someone who was extremely corrupt and power seeking, as the rewards would’ve been too slim compared to the probability of being sent to prison.
I could also be convinced to shift my probabilities by seeing examples of rational people whose behavior is fully aligned with the belief that Trump is a huge danger to the nation. For example, a blog post or an editorial written by/about people who moved out of the country when Trump was elected in 2016, moved back in during the Biden term and are now moving back out because Trump won again.
So far the best argument I’ve read in the thread was that the odds of Trump personally destroying the system are very low *but* his re-election sets a bad precedent and will *eventually* trigger a collapse of the American democracy, possibly many decades down the line.
> People who moved out of the country when Trump was elected in 2016, moved back in during the Biden term and are now moving back out because Trump won again
I don't know what your life is like, but normal people can't generally afford to move country every four years. It's more a once in a lifetime thing.
People did leave in 2016, and people are leaving now.
I’ll accept a post from someone who left in 2016 solely due to the election or in 2021 solely due to January 6th or who’s publicly committed to moving out in 2025 solely because Trump got re-elected.
That being said - I’d estimate there being at least a few million American citizens who have the resources to switch countries every 4 years.
I think that, other things being equal, it would be better and safer if we had a president who wasn't interested in subverting the next election.
I don't have a good understanding of how much damage he can actually deal, but I imagine he'll do a lot more than I want.
There's also the longer-term damage that comes from normalizing that sort of behavior.
>The last serious challenge to American democracy was in 1865.
1876 saw armed force overthrow multiple state governments and an election "disputed" because the states in question sent multiple slates of electors; the compromise was to elect the Republican but allow the Redemption state governments to retain power (which they soon consolidated by disenfranchising African-Americans).
In 2000, SCOTUS (or "nine unelected judges" if you prefer) awarded Florida's electors, and with them the presidency, to a candidate who probably did not win a majority of that state's votes.
In 2010, SCOTUS ruled that rich people have the constitutional right to buy elections, and thereby destroyed any realistic chance of ordinary people to resist moneyed elites within the US political system.
You are right, 1876 also came close.
The 2000 election worked out perfectly within the boundaries of democracy. We've learned to use better ballots since.
> In 2010, SCOTUS ruled that rich people have the constitutional right to buy elections, and thereby destroyed any realistic chance of ordinary people to resist moneyed elites within the US political system.
ChatGPT claims that:
2016: Democrats outspent Republicans 2-to-1 (including PAC spending)
2020: Same, though the margin was only 10%.
2024: Same, Dems spent 30% more than Republicans
Why didn't Democrats win in 2016 and 2024?
What are the sources of ChatGPT's claims here? Are they substantiated by anything?
When both sides are bought the moneyed interest can't lose; what you should be looking at is the drift of both parties into captive tools of business interests, not the outcome of the competition between them.
January 6th was the culmination of a deliberate, months-long process to place an unelected "President" in a position of supreme executive authority in the United States. That is very nearly the definition of an attempt to destroy, or at least suspend, democracy.
That plan failed. Because it really sucked as a plan. But people do sometimes *learn* from their mistakes. And the proper antecedent is not the Reichstag fire, which was a stupid bit of protesting that would not have changed anything, but the Beer Hall Putsch. An actual attempt to place an unelected government in power, planned by the inexperienced and overconfident and so doomed to failure.
The lesson of the Beer Hall Putsch is, don't give people who try that sort of thing, a second chance to improve on their original performance. It remains to be seen how much the American people will wind up regretting that. I don't think our experience will be as bad as Germany's, but it is not unreasonable to at least be concerned.
Do we have solid proof that it was a plan that Trump actively worked on rather than being a spontaneous unexpected breach of security?
Which parts? I find it hard to believe that the false elector slates, or the idea to have Mike Pence refuse to count votes from some states, were developed without Trump's knowledge. I'm less confident that the riot itself was intentional, but that's kind of like saying "I don't know if he set off the bomb, I just know he was carrying a barrel of gunpowder and a book of matches."
The January 6th riots part, which was by far the worst part of his election-denialism charade. If he was actively planning *that*, I'm highly confident that if he *did* take part in planning it, he'd be sentenced to 20 years in prison by now rather than getting re-elected. His behavior triggered the protestors to show up, but I don't think he orchestrated any of it directly.
What did he mean by these tweets if you think he didn't organize it?
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1343328708963299338
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1345095714687377418
https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1345152408591204352
I think you’re putting too much emphasis on the J6 riot / protest / storming of the capital. You could argue that he didn’t orchestrate that in the traditional sense (though his behavior is soooo far from what we would want from a president). But that’s not the most concerning stuff at all. Have you heard his call to the Georgia Secretary of State? Do you believe he believed his fraudulent election claims? Do you know about the fake electors, or what he asked Mike Pence to do? J6 may have been opportunistic, but like John Schilling says, there was a lot of deliberate scheming aside from that.
Try reversing the argument. Instead of proving that the left is hyperbolic, could you convincingly argue that Trump didn’t try hard to overturn the election? And I’m not saying this opinion is yours, but can you argue his behavior was anything better than horribly inappropriate in this regard?
+1
The riot was a riot, it generated a lot of dramatic pictures and scared powerful people unaccustomed to physical threat, but it was a small part of the actual attempt by Trump to somehow retain power despite losing the election. The J6 riot without the attempt to stay in power would just be another political riot, like dozens of BLM riots in 2020.
> Have you heard his call to the Georgia Secretary of State?
Yes.
> Do you know about the fake electors, or what he asked Mike Pence to do?
Yes.
> Do you believe he believed his fraudulent election claims?
Of course not!
> Try reversing the argument. Instead of proving that the left is hyperbolic, could you convincingly argue that Trump didn’t try hard to overturn the election?
My argument isn't that Trump didn't try. It's that it was such a weak and ineffective attempt that it shouldn't update one's priors much of such an attempt succeeding in 2025-2029. It takes probably two orders of magnitude more effort to actually do that compared to what Trump managed to scramble by after losing the 2020 election.
Is he going to try it in 2028 if Republicans lose? Maybe! Should we worry about it? I don't think so.
Fair enough, I slightly misinterpreted where you were coming from.
There’s a new movie out, War Game, that you may be interested in (I haven’t watched yet). Apparently the US security apparatus did war game simulations of a 2024 contested election, and it was not as clear cut as one would like. Seems like the people in charge felt there could be real risk. I’m looking forward to watching that movie, if/when I do I’ll comment with thoughts!
>The last serious challenge to American democracy was in 1865.
Well, there was (?) the business plot of 1933, though how real that was looks like it is disputed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
My worry is less about there literally not being elections any more, and more something like Orban's Hungary where they exist but with a large thumb on the scale for the ruling party.
But just to talk about January 6 since you bring it up - Pence refused to go along with it. Vance has said Pence did the wrong thing, and clearly saying that was a prerequisite for anyone to be trump's VP.
So what happens if Democrats win in 2028? Vance's stated intent is to try and throw out electoral votes of the winner. And in particular what happens if Democrats win the presidency but not Congress?
No, that's not his stated intent. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to spot the difference between what Vance said and what you claim that proves about his future intentions.
I will never understand liberals histrionics over Jan 6. We have an adversarial system which was designed to withstand attempts to subvert it. It's been working for 250 years. Do we really think that that can all be undone by one semi-dim real estate huckster?
Please tell me the odds that you'll be willing accept on a bet that Trump will meaningfully erode the mechanisms of democracy by 2028.
>Please tell me the odds that you'll be willing accept on a bet that Trump will meaningfully erode the mechanisms of democracy by 2028.
I'm not sure what counts as meaningfully. I wouldn't be surprised to see Trump do some lawfare against some political opponents (turnabout is always fair play...), but, since he _didn't_ try to make good on his "lock her up" threats re Hillary Clinton during 2017-2021, I'd guess that the odds of actually launching a serious prosecution are pretty low - maybe 5% ???
I'm actually considerably more concerned about Trump putting loyal incompetents in crucial positions. Sigh. It was a really bad choice this election. I viewed Harris as the marginally greater evil, but it is a close thing. I hope no one chipped teeth from gritting them while voting...
He did try. He was foiled by the people he's going to fire with his Schedule F Executive Order and he will simply go down the chain of command this time like he did toward the end of his first term with the forged letter that would have allowed him to confiscate votes from the states. And most of his actions will be criminally unreviewable thanks to the Supreme Court.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/us/politics/president-trump-justice-department.html
https://www.justsecurity.org/98703/chronology-trump-justice-department/
I'm pretty sure election results are certified and electors formally appointed by State officials, who are not subject to Schedule F. They then go directly to Congress, which is not subject to Schedule F. Any Federal agency that wants to intervene in that process will need to go through a Federal court, whose judges are, you guessed it, not subject to Schedule F.
There are things Trump could try to do to undermine a future election, if he cared to try, but "Schedule F so my guys will be counting the votes!" is not one of them.
There's also the question of why Donald Trump would care to do such a thing, when he's not allowed to win any future presidential elections, not no way, not no how. If an 83-year-old Donald Trump wants to be President past 2029, he'll need to orchestrate a straight-up military coup; no amount of merely electoral malfeasance will do for that. And does he care enough about JD Vance to want to rig an election for *him*?
Schedule F will allow him to fire people in the DoJ that won't do his dirty work, like sending out the forged letter to swing states that would have allowed the DoJ to confiscate votes and voting machines from the states.
The DoJ confiscating votes and voting machines does not result in the appointment of a Trumpian state of electors; only the state governor can do that. And confiscating the votes and voting machines will require more than a forged letter; it will require a court order by a Federal judge.
Schedule F may enable Trump's henchmen to send a letter (and why would it be a forgery?) to a Federal judge saying "give us a court order to seize these votes and voting machines", but nothing more than that. And that isn't enough.
Many Thanks! Re the NYT article, note:
>Mr. McGahn would point out, though, that the president never, to his knowledge, ordered that anyone prosecute Hillary Clinton or James Comey.”
In contrast, Trump has been the target of actual prosecutions, which I regard as politically motivated ( albeit the secret documents one looks like it holds water legally ).
As nearly as I can tell, politically motivated prosecutions appear to now be a bipartisan practice, albeit with those initiated from the left generally proceeding further.
Personally, I would like to see the practice stop, from both sides, lest we follow a path analogous to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulfikar_Ali_Bhutto#Trial_and_execution
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Trump. He's an incompetent leader (in my view he's incompetent in a slightly better direction than Harris would have been, but that's neither here nor there). I'm just sick of the nonsensically histrionic overreactions to Jan 6. I hope he DOES lawfare his opponents into the ground because, well, I'm sick of the Dems doing the same - I mean really, Giuliani owes a couple black women $188m because he tweeted? Please. There is no world in which that represents an impartial justice system.
Are you under the impression that Democrat operatives snuck into the jury and decided an exuberantly high payout? Or do you not even know that jury deliberation is involved in defamation suit payouts? I would wager the latter considering you think that all that was proven in a defamation suit against private citizens was that Giuliani tweeted negatively about them.
Correction: He needs to potlach style set $188m on fire because he wilfully refused to participate in a bunch of legal proceedings, and judges LOVE to fuck people up for thinking they can just take their ball and go home.
That's why Alex Jones got the life ruiner special: not because he richly deserved it, but because he took every opportunity to let a judge take out their frustrations on his bank account to the plaintiff's benefit.
Yeah, everytime I see someone saying X punishment because he/she tweeted, facebooked, whatever, it turns out the social media post was the mere tip of the iceberg.
And what was the iceberg in this particular case?
Yeah, if he owed a couple of white guys $188m, I could believe it, but two black women, no way! /snark
Seriously, though, he owes a couple of people $188m because he tweeted, then he ignored their lawsuit, refused to comply with standard court procedures, ignored judge's orders, and ultimately had a panel of eight citizens vetted by his counsel and opposing counsel render the judgment against him in that amount ($148m is what I've seen), then hide his assets to attempt to further thwart the justice system.
The outcome doesn't prove the game is rigged if one party refuses to play.
Many Thanks!
>I mean really, Giuliani owes a couple black women $188m because he tweeted? Please. There is no world in which that represents an impartial justice system.
Agreed, though I hope it winds up deescalating somewhat, e.g. if Trump does only half the lawfare that the left did, then loses interest.
Do you think Trump was trolling when he retruthed about military tribunals being held for Cheney and Obama? Saying he would use the National Guard against the enemy within? This is the person who told the Supreme Court he needed complete criminal immunity from the sham investigations he pressured his DoJ into doing as part of his numerous plots to overturn the 2020 election.
Many Thanks!
>Do you think Trump was trolling when he retruthed about military tribunals being held for Cheney and Obama?
I don't know whether he was trolling or serious. When push comes to shove, I don't expect such tribunals to be held, amongst other things, because, AFAIK, Cheney and Obama are civilians.
>Saying he would use the National Guard against the enemy within?
_That_ sounds more likely. There is an unfortunate precedent: https://www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy
Ideally, local police should both leave lawful political demonstrations alone and arrest rioters, looters, and arsonists. This is not a trivial task!
He didn't say the words "I would try to overturn the election" but ... are we supposed to give him credit for being euphemistic about it?
> It's been working for 250 years. Do we really think that that can all be undone by one semi-dim real estate huckster?
It has not actually worked for 250 years. For one thing, there was a period of almost 100 years where the South was a one-party state, established through widespread terrorism and, yes, overturning of election results.
As for a "semi-dim real estate huckster" ... all I can say is that to me it's an embarrassment and outrage that this guy is going to be president, but clearly not to tens of millions of others!
> Please tell me the odds that you'll be willing accept on a bet that Trump will meaningfully erode the mechanisms of democracy by 2028.
Hard to say because this isn't very concrete, and whether such mechanisms are eroded might not actually be apparent *in* 2028.
But as an example, I would put the odds that a Republican is sworn in on Jan 20, 2029 even though a Democrat won the election at maybe 5%. That doesn't mean "95% chance this is all overblown", that bakes in the odds that, e.g., a Republican legitimately wins, or Democrats win a big enough landslide that it prevents any attempt, or that a Democrat is sworn in after the Capitol erupts in gunfire on Jan 6 2029, or that the VP candidate is sworn in.
>there was a period of almost 100 years where the South was a one-party state, established through widespread terrorism and, yes, overturning of election results.
Even accepting this description of events - which I don't - so? There was a period where only landowning white males could vote too. That's not democracy not working, that's democracy effectively representing the interests of those who matter, which is what it's supposed to do. We're 250 years into the experiment and are the economic, cultural, and military leaders of the world. We don't have a military strongman in charge and we're not likely to in the future. We enjoy the rule of law and have a peaceful transfer of power between leaders. That spells democracy working just fine.
> I would put the odds that a Republican is sworn in on Jan 20, 2029 even though a Democrat won the election at maybe 5%.
That's about 4.99% too high, in my view. Trump tried a procedural end-around and it predictably failed, just like dems did in 2016, 2004, and 2000. Sure it was tasteless and gauche, but construing it as some failed violent coup is just mental illness. Trump's second term will be substantively indistinguishable from his first.
> Even accepting this description of events - which I don't - so? There was a period where only landowning white males could vote too. That's not democracy not working, that's democracy effectively representing the interests of those who matter, which is what it's supposed to do.
Not sure which part you don't accept. The former existence of Jim Crow? The US constitution has prohibited denying black people the vote since 1870, and for most of that time in the South they were denied the vote. This isn't a "everyone follows the law but the law is bad" situation, it is "the law is violated to prevent political opposition, and the violation is backed by terrorism" situation.
>Even accepting this description of events - which I don't - so? There was a period where only landowning white males could vote too
Surely, if we are talking about illegitimate attempts to subverting democracy, we should distinguish between laws limiting the franchise from efforts to disenfranchised those with the legal right to vote. And that did seem to be happening https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:3b8d1c1e-e9c7-4dc4-99cf-5856170e4e20
And of course many states in the deep South were indeed one-party states for many years.
Sure, that's an important distinction and one I agree is important. But just because a law is passed via the usual democratic process doesn't guarantee that it advances the interests of democracy. Suddenly imposing the franchise on a low-IQ uneducated demographic with zero history of self-rule and a giant anti-status-quo axe to grind would strike many people as not being in the interests of democracy either. The way voting rights were granted to freed slaves was suboptimal IMO and they probably should have been slowly eased in in a much more deliberate and measured fashion. Jim Crow was a backlash to that, and while illegal activity is a red flag for the democratic intentions of a movement, it's also not dispositive. Some laws are unjust, after all. That's what civil disobedience is all about.
So, you are saying that Jim Crow was justified civil disobedience to the Fifteenth Amendment?
I'm saying that that's a colorable framing. I don't really have a strong opinion beyond thinking that characterizing Jim Crow as terrorism is inappropriate.
"characterizing Jim Crow as terrorism is inappropriate"
A prominent conservative commentator disagrees: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/isis-american-south-lynching/
I don't know that it is particularly colorable framing, given that Jim Crow was in place for 100 years, and it is difficult to see how laws requiring separate bathrooms, water fountains, hospital entrances, seating on busses, and even cemeteries in at least one state, furthered the goal of protecting democracy from an uneducated demographic . Nor is it clear why, if the concern was re solving the problem of uneducated voters, "Alabama spent $37 on each white child in 1930 and just $7 on those who were black; in Georgia the figures were $32 and $7, in Mississippi they were $31 and $6, and those in South Carolina were $53 and $5, " https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2004/irons
Well the black community did objectively better by many measures under segregation (illegitimacy rates, income gaps, etc). Also the subsequent history of integration hasn't been great. I don't know if you remember 2020 but there were 3 months of riots because black people were upset that police preferentially target criminals. I don't think that was *great* for democracy.
Noah Smith had a great plot in one of his recent articles:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0cdeaf3-99fd-4eb6-89e2-c364a99abb20_900x765.jpeg
I knew something along these lines occurred but I'd never seen it illustrated so vividly -- people believe what it's politically convenient for them to believe. It doesn't go much beyond that.
As per my understanding the VP's role is merely ceremonial, with no actual power to overturn the certification of the results: https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/has-the-electoral-college-ever-been-challenged-can-the-vp-change-the-electoral-college-votes-can-mike-pence-not-certify-the-election-heres-how/65-7e9882b4-a837-4983-8b78-841e61a938fa
So if Vance refuses to do it, the Senate can just ignore them at keep on going.
What background evidence is informing your opinion that Republicans will simply agree with Democrats on procedural rules? Did they not just reelect the same person that tried to break those rules who now has a cabinet of loyalists that either say they support breaking those procedural rules or are fine with supporting someone who broke those rules and has no moral qualms about doing it again, and to this day insists that he was right to break those rules? And everybody who opposed breaking them like Cheney and Kissinger were excised from the party?
Sure. So, imagine your interpretation of Jan 6 is 'trump put in place slates of fake electors based on lies about voter fraud, and then organized a mob to march on the capitol to pressure people to approve those slates of electors, starting with the vice president rejecting the official ones.'
The farther along the cascade of respectability towards the idea Trump actually won, the closer we are to a constitutional crisis/civil war scenario.
The 'threat to democracy's idea' is that what Trump did before indicates a likelihood he will try again if his handpicked successor does not win the next election, and that if people under him disobey his orders on the grounds they are illegal/unconstitutional, they will be targeted for retribution by his political allies. Which is bad.
Jan 6 didn't succeed because the VP, the Georgia Secretary of State, and most of the GOP representatives at the time did not collaborate. There were many other documented instances of Trump trying to break the law or subvert the system during his first term that were stopped by the non-Trumpist republicans in government. This time around the VP has already sworn that he wouldn't have certified the election in 2020 and anyone that has opposed Trump in the last 8 years has been removed from positions of power. So it is much more worrying the second time.
As per my understanding the VP's role is merely ceremonial, with no actual power to overturn the certification of the results: https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/verify/has-the-electoral-college-ever-been-challenged-can-the-vp-change-the-electoral-college-votes-can-mike-pence-not-certify-the-election-heres-how/65-7e9882b4-a837-4983-8b78-841e61a938fa
We also have many other safeguards in place: each state has a National Guard they could call up, the military swears allegiance to the Constitution and the vast majority officers will likely to refuse to help a coup take place - and, as a last resort, 33% of Americans own at least one gun, making it very difficult to turn this country into a dictatorship. So even if JD Vance refuses to play his role *and* the GOP refuses to certify the votes... what then? They'll quickly be up against the US military, the National Guards of every surrounding state, and millions of people ready to defend democracy. I wouldn't expect the GOP members involved to stay out of prison for more than a few days under this scenario, if not hours, with barely any interruption to the peaceful transition of power.
It would be an incredibly risky bet: should they fail, every single person even tangentially involved is looking at 20+ years in prison.
Lets say pence did what trump wanted. You're right that technically the VP probably doesn't have the power to do this, but that doesn't matter. It creates confusion. And trump is the commander in chief, so he could just fire every general until he gets to one that will do what he want. Its easy to see how it could get bad quickly
> Its easy to see how it could get bad quickly
Yes! And its *precisely* because things could get out of hand so quickly is why the vast majority of the GOP will not play along with it. Nobody wants a Civil War (except for a tiny minority) and everyone understands the consequences of trying to break the system. Even a completely Machiavellian and power seeking but rational person would do exactly what Pence did. Trump only tried to pull off his shenanigans because he wasn't smart enough to calculate backwards and understand the consequences. And even then he was rational enough to realize where the red line is and never crossing it to avoid going to prison, hence why his "schemes" were so feeble in the first place.
You are greatly underestimating the extent to which large parts of the populace might support such efforts. That has been what has happened elsewhere.
My take is that as long as there's a credible risk of Civil War breaking out in response to trying to subvert the process, no one will be crazy enough to try.
> As per my understanding the VP's role is merely ceremonial, with no actual power to overturn the certification of the results
That is true, but that was true in 2020 and Vance says he would have overturned the results. It's not like if the VP does the unconstitutional thing then the spirit of the constitution rises up out of the document and cuts his head off. If Vance says "such-and-such states' votes don't count", then someone objects, the full floor considers and an R-controlled Congress defeats the objection ... then what?
What makes you think the military would go along with the right answer over the claimed president-elect, current president, current VP, and Congress?
> It would be an incredibly risky bet: should they fail, every single person even tangentially involved is looking at 20+ years in prison.
Well this is why the failure to punish anyone in power over Jan 6 is such an issue ... they won't think that. They'll think that worst case trump will pardon them on the way out the door, meanwhile what you say is what the people on the *D* candidate's side will think.
> If Vance says "such-and-such states' votes don't count", then someone objects, the full floor considers and an R-controlled Congress defeats the objection ... then what?
Then it goes to a full vote of both houses and then, inevitably, to the Supreme Court which would reject the overturning of the election on the grounds that the VP had no constitutional authority to effect the outcome. If the challenge clears all of those hurdles then guess what, it succeeds! It's not a coup, it's a legitimate if unorthodox victory. That wouldn't represent the GOP destroying the system, it would represent them playing the system better than the democrats. Democracy would go on, the liberals would lick their wounds and then destroy them in the midterms.
If you think that the GOP has "infested" every branch of government to the extent that that could succeed then I don't know why you even still live in the United States. Flee now and save yourself.
You would cum instantly if you read the Enabling Act. "Wow, this isn't a coup, Hitler really outpoliticked his political enemies!" Awarding the VP the unilateral power to declare whoever they want the President is treason, not a quirky political win.
> Then it goes to a full vote of both houses and then, inevitably, to the Supreme Court
The "R-controlled Congress defeats" part of what I said is the full vote of both houses. As for the Supreme Court, no guarantee they would take the case, considering various doctrines about justiciability and "political question", or if they did, that it would matter - by the time they rule the wrong guy might have already been inaugurated, and with the approval of Congress. What is the court going to order the president to leave and a new guy to be sworn in? The president (i.e. actual guy in the white house) and Congress will immediately say they're ignoring them, and that will be that.
> If the challenge clears all of those hurdles then guess what, it succeeds! It's not a coup, it's a legitimate if unorthodox victory
Saying "a coup is OK if done under color of the law" is just saying that coups are OK. They are always done under the color of the law, usually pretty flimsily. And if you say this is the system working, that just means the system allows for one party to hold onto power forever regardless of the actual election results.
>"political question"
That's just nonsense and you know it. It was a procedural question with significant constitutional implications. There is zero chance the court would have demurred and I know you know that. Stop it.
>Saying "a coup is OK if done under color of the law" is just saying that coups are OK.
No it's saying that it's not a coup, it's a successful gambit. Even IF Trump had somehow succeeded on Jan 6 and gotten both houses and SCOTUS to go along with it ... SO WHAT? He'd have been president for another 4 years, gotten killed in the midterms, continued to do nothing substantive, and termed out. Nothing would be different now except we'd have 6 million fewer low IQ immigrants on our social services budget. We wouldn't be some banana republic autocracy and life would be exactly the same. America would still exist and when you went to the ballot box on Nov 5th to cast your indignant vote it would've counted exactly the same.
Stop with the Jan 6 histrionics. Honestly the liberal obsession with it has done more damage to our political process than the event itself did. It was a last-ditch procedural end-around and a political protest that lasted 4 hours, nothing more. The libs have made a mountain out of that molehill for 4 years because it's been in their political self-interest to do so. If they really cared about the stability of the country they would have treated it like the low-class political maneuver it was and simply moved on. Instead they've clung onto it like a bitter dumped housewife trashing her ex to their shared children because he had the audacity to sleep with the nanny. Yeah that's a sleazy move but you've got kids to raise. Grow up, have some class, and let it go. You lost, it's over.
> >"political question"
> That's just nonsense and you know it.
Take it up with the Supreme Court! "Political question" isn't a phrase I invented, it's an actual Supreme Court doctrine, and they would absolutely invoke it in this situation. This is real "confidently incorrect" territory.
> SO WHAT?
This is really what it comes down to. You aren't against coups, you're fine with them if it's trump because you don't think he's that bad!
I'm familiar with the doctrine but you're simply not arguing in good faith if you think SCOTUS would fail to take that case.
I'm no fan of Trump. I'm against the abuse of language. Liberals do this all the time: they gerrymander words in an attempt to get them to do the work that their concepts can't (cf. "racism", "misogyny", "rape", "woman" etc). You hate Trump, fine. That doesn't mean you get to redefine what "coup", "dictator", or "insurrection" mean just so you can feel justified in your hatred.
> I'm familiar with the doctrine but you're simply not arguing in good faith if you think SCOTUS would fail to take that case.
Since you don't seem to have any actual argument, just yelling about good faith, I will bring up a case - Nixon v US.
It's not about counting electoral votes, but of course this exact question hasn't come up in any supreme court case, and you said they'd take up a case where "It was a procedural question with significant constitutional implications". In Nixon v US it was certainly "a procedural question with significant constitutional implications", and yet they invoked the political question doctrine.
> You hate Trump, fine. That doesn't mean you get to redefine what "coup", "dictator", or "insurrection" mean just so you can feel justified in your hatred.
Classic move, "sure 'i'm no fan of trump' but the bad things he does aren't as bad as the people describing them so I must support him". And without going back and checking I don't think I used the word "dictator" to describe trump ... he used it about himself!
> Well this is why the failure to punish anyone in power over Jan 6 is such an issue
Look, I'm in the "Trump was an inept President" and was rooting for Kamala on election day, but arguably he wasn't guilty of the Jan 6th events, as he didn't plan them out and his main failure was being indecisive and delaying the response of Federal law enforcement to the people invading the Capitol building. Him being mostly guilty of being a poor leader on that day is the reason why he's still not in jail and why his prosecution was taking so long.
> If Vance says "such-and-such states' votes don't count", then someone objects, the full floor considers and an R-controlled Congress defeats the objection ... then what?
The surrounding Democrat states (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware - quite likely New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts too) call up their National Guard, the mayor of DC calls for the city police to help defend democracy, I expect many army officers to declare this is a violation of the Constitution, individual citizens near DC to take their guns to go defend democracy, etc. In other words, it will trigger a Civil War - and I think everyone involved except Trump are smart enough to understand the consequences of that. There's no path where the GOP tries to subvert the process and gets away with it easily, best case scenario they'll have to through a major armed conflict to get there.
Hence I don't see it happening.
> arguably he wasn't guilty of the Jan 6th events, as he didn't plan them out and his main failure was being indecisive and delaying the response of Federal law enforcement to the people invading the Capitol building
Don't want to distract from the main point here, I'll just say that clearly Jan 6th and related events should have rendered him politically dead, and the fact that it didn't sets a very bad precedent.
> The surrounding Democrat states ... call up their National Guard, the mayor of DC calls for the city police to help defend democracy ... individual citizens near DC to take their guns to go defend democracy ... they'll have to through a major armed conflict
President can federalize the national guard. City police won't necessarily listen to the DC mayor over Congress, it is Congress who has ultimate power over DC, the mayor only has devolved power. Maybe individual officers will go against it, but to be clear, it's them - the good guys - who will be violating orders and risking jail time.
And the "major armed conflict" point goes the other way. Once it looks like the coup is on track to succeed, the good guys have the incentive to give up for this very reason. Even moreso in fact, because if the good guys win they'll probably fail to punish anyone, whereas if the bad guys win they'll just summarily execute people.
If individual-good-guys-with-guns was enough to stop a coup, they'd never happen.
> President can federalize the national guard. City police won't necessarily listen to the DC mayor over Congress, it is Congress who has ultimate power over DC, the mayor only has devolved power
It's like that fable from the Game of Thrones: if its the soldiers who hold the real power by carrying the swords, why do we say its the King who has it?
There's a very high chance of the situation detiorating into complete chaos, which gives a very strong disincentive to even trying. And that's all assuming that all the other checks-and-balances fail and we're left with the ultimate fallback imagined by the Founding Fathers, which is in turn a very low-probability event.
> It's like that fable from the Game of Thrones: if its the soldiers who hold the real power by carrying the swords, why do we say its the King who has it?
Just quoting this idea (I haven't watched Game of Thrones so don't know the original context) doesn't get you anywhere. In particular, most of the time the king keeps the power. In the case of the US, most of the time the president and Congress stay in power. And in the situation we're talking about, the president and Congress would be on the side of the coup.
You're quoting this very abstract idea in defense of the eventuality that some small-but-unknown number of individuals with guns will overcome Congress. But coups do sometimes succeed!
> There's a very high chance of the situation detiorating into complete chaos, which gives a very strong disincentive to even trying.
Again this is a reason the coup would succeed!
My understanding is that coups succeed when they successfully present themselves as *fait accompli*. Then your very argument about chaos works to enforce it, not undermine it.
Well what gets more "fait accompli" than the president, Congress, and most of the organized armed forces publicly saying one side won, while the other side is still figuring out what to do?
> And that's all assuming that all the other checks-and-balances fail and we're left with the ultimate fallback imagined by the Founding Fathers, which is in turn a very low-probability event.
"All the other checks and balances" doesn't get you anywhere. "Checks and balances" are just powers that different actors within the system have. They aren't applicable to every situation, and even when they are, if the guys you don't like are in office, they get to use those powers too.
We have had an amazing track record of successful elections since 1788, with the 1861 attempt to break the system successfully thwarted by the Northern states. This gives us a very strong prior to expect that things will continue to be stable for a very long and any coup attempts failing.
Remember that the majority of successful coups in history have either...
a) Happened in a monarchy or dictatorship, rather than overthrowing a democracy (example: Saddam Hussein taking power in the 1970s)
b) Happened shortly after a major war (example: Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948)
c) Happened after a very brief period of democracy (example: Spanish civil war of 1936, happened just 5 years after proper elections were established in 1931)
We don't have many examples of successful coups in countries with at least 25 years of uninterrupted, fair elections. ChatGPT lists just 1 example: Chile in 1973 (Pinochet's takeover), I suspect this might indeed be the only 1 that fits these criteria.
Some thoughts here:
- just today there is a news story that the trump administration is planning on "purging" (WSJ's word) generals from the military. They claim it's for those who are "unfit" but do you really think it's that, and not about loyalty to trump personally? Keep in mind trump fired Comey last time (an unprecedented move!) after he refused to pledge personal loyalty. Changes the calculus on what you think the military's response would be.
- I think retreating from the specifics of this case to general claims about coups being hard is a bad sign
- we don't have an amazing track record since 1788. The entire Jim Crow era was a one party state in the South, backed by violent suppression of the vote, and established through violent overthrow of the legitimately elected governments in those states
- I think there are other examples like Argentina, Brazil, Japan, though I'm not an expert and the history from the outside always seems super convoluted. But more broadly, I don't think the fact that there's a long history of democracies falling apart but they're within 25 years is so comforting; and I think there is some bias in looking in hindsight where the ones that do fall apart retroactively looked less stable than the ones that managed to survive even if they went through similar issues.
- I started this by saying I was more worried about an Orban-like situation, where there are still somewhat competitive elections just with a big thumb on the scale. And I think those are more common than the "totally falls apart" scenario.
> - I think retreating from the specifics of this case to general claims about coups being hard is a bad sign
By all means, specifics is EXACTLY what I'd like to discuss! The problem is that people keep throwing historical analogies at you instead, rather than naming a specific scenario that 2025-2029 Trump will try that 2017-2021 Trump failed to enact.
> - just today there is a news story that the trump administration is planning on "purging" (WSJ's word) generals from the military.
Did he not appoint generals during his first term, such as Charles Q. Brown Jr.? Were those generals not loyal to Trump? Also, would he not need the Senate's approval for these appointments where he's got a slim 3+tiebreaker = 4 seat lead?
But, yes, it's a very fair point - if a "purge" does happen, it would be a troubling sign, as one of the pillars of resistance will be put under question and we'll have some uncertainty as to whether it will hold well in a time of crisis. I'll keep an eye out on what happens to this particular promise.
> - we don't have an amazing track record since 1788. The entire Jim Crow era was a one party state in the South, backed by violent suppression of the vote, and established through violent overthrow of the legitimately elected governments in those states
We didn't have *universal suffrage* since 1788. What we did have is the ability of those voters who did have suffrage to vote out people in power, preventing the rise of dictatorships. Even in the Jim Crow era no Governor was immune from being voted out of power, even if some percentage of the voters base was suppressed. *That* is the core pillar of democracy: the Soviet Union had universal suffrage since its very first day but Soviet voters had no ability to actually replace anyone in power through elections.
> - I think there are other examples like Argentina, Brazil, Japan, though I'm not an expert and the history from the outside always seems super convoluted.
We can quickly go through each example, listing periods where those countries had ~fair elections.
Argentina: 1912-1930 <coup> 1946-1955 <coup> 1958-1966 <coup> 1973-1976 <coup> 1983-present. Maximum period under democracy before present days: 18 years.
Brazil: 1945–1964 <coup> 1985–present. Maximum period: 19 years.
Japan: debatable, I would argue that only 1946-present would count, but others could disagree.
> I don't think the fact that there's a long history of democracies falling apart but they're within 25 years is so comforting;
25 years is not an arbitrary number, its the number of years required for there to be at least *one* generation of people who don't remember living under a monarchy or a dictatorship. It's also a reasonable period for democratic institutions to establish a firm hold, lowering the probability of a successful coup taking place, which in turn reduces the incentives to try. For example, when Putin came into power there was still a very large segment of people who wanted to go back to the "good old days", which is part of the reason why he was able to completely destroy the seeds of democracy in Russia.
> - I started this by saying I was more worried about an Orban-like situation, where there are still somewhat competitive elections just with a big thumb on the scale. And I think those are more common than the "totally falls apart" scenario.
I don't think Hungary is all that problematic:
- Opposition candidates are allowed to freely run and criticize Orban
- People can openly protest against Orban and not fear losing their jobs or freedom
- Elections are held regularly and votes are counted fairly
- There seems to be little doubt that if voters wanted they could kick Orban out of power
- People are free to run opposition websites and social media opposing Orban (TV, newspapers and radio are ~irrelevant in the age of 96% smartphone ownership in Hungary, but AFAIK those can be opposition-owned as well).
I'm aware of the criticisms against Orban but find them feeble and lacking an understanding of what a "dictatorship" actually is.
Historians might argue that you have imposed an implicit shallow limit on how far back you are prepared to look. I think plenty of pre-1900 examples qualify.
Sure, happy to hear pre-1900 examples of countries that:
1. Had at least 25 years of uninterrupted, fair elections (= at least 1 generation living under a democracy their whole life)
2. Had a successful coup after that, overthrowing democracy
I've listed Chile above, which was somewhat ironically a result of US meddling. What other examples would count?
Regarding Trump's involvement in Jan 6th, there are many steps that were done before the date, including scheduling the rally on that day next to the Capitol. But you can just read his speech that day:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial
Regarding what would the GOP will do, in 2020 147 (more than 60%) GOP representatives voted to overturn the results. It will be worse next time:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/07/us/elections/electoral-college-biden-objectors.html
The speech is word salad like all of his speeches. It's a Rorschach inkblot of a speech. The guy was basically incoherent by 2018, so I don't think this speech is evidence of some kind of criminal plot.
> It will be worse next time:
Would it be? My impression is that in 2024 more moderate GOP candidates have won the primaries and thus as of today the party is less likely to do that than in 2020.
McCain died, Amash left the party, Sessions was replaced by loyalist Senators, the list goes on and on.
1) When you get down to it, most current power is ceremonial. The US Constitution only grants one power because a critical majority of people is dedicated to upholding it.
2) How many of these people would believe the claim the election was stolen (how many people believe in the “Great Lie” today)? How do they correlate with gun ownership (genuinely curious on this one, actually)? If we’re talking about a double-digit percentage, they can do a lot of damage before being taken down (if possible, and they can also win – see Spain). This is absolutely enough damage, anger and division to get pardoned “in the spirit of national reconciliation” or get a token punishment.
3) Disregarding the above, isn’t this cutting it very close? The whole poing of having a civilized society in the first place is to take this kind of bad outcome as off the table as is humanly possible.
>When you get down to it, most current power is ceremonial.
No, most current political power is statutory or constitutional. The VP formally has zero discretion in the certification of an election. If he refused to perform his ceremonial duties then the Senate could have removed him on the spot and had the President Pro Tem complete the ceremony. Hell, they could've even impeached him - both houses were there. A further safeguard was judicial review and the court would have invalidated Pence's refusal to certify the election results. I mean come on, our system isn't so fragile that it depends on one person saying the right thing during one ceremony or else it falls apart.
What kind of a bad outcome? An incumbent president who got 49% of the vote in an unprecedented pandemic election where voter turnout was suspiciously high remaining in office because he pulled some kind of procedural swindle? That's not exactly a generalissimo rolling into town on a tank. It would've been an interesting footnote in history and nothing more, just like 1876 is now.
Re: 3) What is the probability of the situation getting 'very close'? And what probability did people assign to that in November 2016?
My observation is that in November 2016, many people placed a high probability (50% or higher?) on a catastrophic outcome and hadn't updated their position much as of October 2020 (before Trump's loss and before January 6th) regarding the risks of Trump's second term. I checked my own Facebook page and found I had posted a pretty panicked message after the election, so I was in that camp too, but I've since updated my views toward believing the President doesn't have as much power as I previously thought.
Now, one could update based on January 6th to somewhat increase their expectation of a catastrophic outcome, but shouldn't we first update *downwards* based on things being boring/smooth from January 20th, 2017 to January 5th, 2021?
I meant “very close” in that the only safeguard you mentioned if the VP refuses to certify the results is the possibility of civil war. That is not many safeguards, isn’t it? Isn’t there supposed to be more?
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the mood was like in 2016. I was not as terminally online as I currently am. So I can’t give any answer to that question.
I will mention, out of general contrariness, arguments I’ve read against updating (too far) down:
1) That Jan 6th and the failed “fake elector” scheme (I still need to look carefully at the details, but you are aware that nothing remotely close to this happened in a Western country in a good while, right?) could happen.
2) Trump himself (or at least his team) didn’t much believe in his changes and was not prepared for a presidential term. I remember reading about him struggling to appoint people to every spot he needed them.
3) Trump was opposed by his own staff (with more than a few former collaborators having scathing comments to make, relayed by an all-too-eager press). This time he’s been looking for people loyal to him long in advance.
4) The Supreme Court may or may not have recently ruled that nothing he could do as President would be illegal (short of treason in the extremely specific sense meant by the Constitution).
The final safeguard is the Second Amendment, which all but ensures a Civil War in case of a takeover attempt, and thus makes the proposition of stealing the election _insanely_ risky.
Best case scenario you fight an insurgency for many months.
Worst case scenario you're arrested and court martialed while the U.S. Army restores civil rule.
1) Relying on civil war to deter bad actors didn’t work in Spain (said bad actor won the civil war, ruled Spain as a dictator, relinquished power some 35 years later and died peacefully in their bed).
2) how do the countries without a Second Amendment trust their electoral process?
3) that this possibility even comes up in political discussion is still nuts compared to what was thought to be a normal democratic process 20 years ago!
1) Spain was a democracy for just 5 years as of 1936, so every adult alive remembered the 'good old days' of dictatorship/monarchy. Quick history from ChatGPT, from a quick glance looks accurate enough:
"Spain experienced several forms of government in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including constitutional monarchies with limited suffrage.
1. **Constitutional Monarchy (1876–1923)**: During this period, Spain had a parliamentary system under the Bourbon monarchy with elections. However, the elections were heavily manipulated by political elites through a practice called "caciquismo," where local bosses controlled votes and outcomes, making it more of an oligarchic system than a true democracy.
2. **Dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–1930)**: General Miguel Primo de Rivera established a military dictatorship, suspending the constitution and canceling democratic processes, including elections.
3. **Municipal Elections of April 1931**: These local elections became a referendum on the monarchy. The anti-monarchist candidates won in many major cities, leading King Alfonso XIII to abdicate and the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic on April 14, 1931.
Therefore, the Second Spanish Republic in 1931 marked Spain’s first genuine attempt at democratic governance with free elections and broad suffrage rights."
Compare this to America having 236 years of experience with democracy and no one alive remembering the 'good old days' of George III's rule.
2) Other democracies generally don't have a track record as long as we do. Only the UK, Switzerland, Canada and Sweden have held elections continuously since before the year 1900 - and the UK postponed their in 1915 and 1940, so its not a perfect track record.
Incidentally, gun ownership is quite high in both Switzerland and Canada, though not as high as in the US of course.
3) I don't think its a serious possibility, I'm just using it point out why it wouldn't be easy to pull off. We came nowhere near a serious attempt during Jan 6th and I don't think we'll see a serious attempt in 2025-2029 (or at least one that doesn't end up with Trump in prison almost immediately).
I was rereading the Outgroup post from 2014:
"In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists ..."
What a difference 10 years make.
> "In a world where a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage and 1% of Less Wrongers identify conservative and I know 0/150 creationists ..."
> What a difference 10 years make.
I'm not personally sure what you're saying here.
Scott probably still knows 0 creationists. Correct me if I'm wrong
I think that probably a negligible number of Redditors oppose gay marriage, except maybe on subreddits devoted to conservative causes. But the numbers of those are, well, negligible compared to the rest, which all tend to skew liberal. Most "neutral" subreddits have explicit statements banning "hate speech" and the like, a'la Scott's "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle". And look at r/politics, it skews very left.
Regarding if less than 1% of Less Wrongers still identify conservative, I couldn't say. Most I know are liberal or libertarian.
> Regarding if less than 1% of Less Wrongers still identify conservative, I couldn't say. Most I know are liberal or libertarian.
I think the libertarian label has gone out of fashion a bit, and that many of those who used to identify as libertarian are now identifying as conservatives.
> many of those who used to identify as libertarian are now identifying as conservatives.
Hmm, interesting. Well, that's not the case for myself, I'm still a liberal/libertarian and would not call myself a conservative. And it's also not the case for a lot of the people I interact with on The Motte (the most conservative-leaning rationalist space I know). There are also many there who are conservatives, but I don't know if that's a shift over time, or if that's just the nature of that forum.
I will say that when you have a left that purges just about everyone for wrongthink, it does encourage those who are cast out to identify as an opposing label. Is it just a label definition change, as opposed to a substantive change?
On a purely tactical level, wedge issues serve as a technique for forcing non-polarized blocs of voters to pick a side. I suspect that libertarians are more vulnerable than populists to ideological approaches, and can be effectively shunted to the major parties depending on which wedges remain live issues. Side with one party often enough, and might as well accept the basically-accurate label.
It's empirically observable in the US that self-described libertarians as a group skew Right along such 1D measures, so not terribly surprising how things shake out as the wedges sink in. (Contrast with people who prefer the label "anarchist".)
It's worth noting that "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/ was written in 2013, so these ideas were already hanging around by then.
It is kinda nuts how the leading edge went from"I think video game reviews should be unbiased!" to "I think no fault divorce should be illegal!" in a smooth continuum.
is it because the initial loud voices in the gamergate outrage group quickly turned into "content creators" and then the various recommendation systems shepherded them toward more and more "grievanceful audiences"?
"I continue to be confused where in the system the decision not to arrest shoplifters is happening and why ..."
It's charming how rationalists can find it so difficult to mentally model members of other communities. Is it really so hard to understand that there are many people at many levels of California government who actively do not want to arrest and prosecute shoplifters, because they positively sympathize with them on racial and socioeconomic grounds, and will seize upon even minor legal and bureaucratic hurdles to avoid doing so?
Is anyone even making "the decision not to arrest shoplifters"? Maybe the Wether Underground DA and a few folks like that. But mostly people just fail to make the decision to arrest shoplifters. Sounds like splitting hairs but it isn't. Arresting is a definitive action. Thieves going free is just the default state of affairs if you don't actively do something to deal with them.
I could understand plenty of different people opposing it for plenty of different reasons. It's important to know which it is. Maybe most of the opposition is people who think it's not even worth bothering if you can't send them to prison for years. Or maybe it's people who aren't willing to prosecute for a minor crime if it could send the person to prison for years.
From the outside, it really does look like a lot of the hesitation comes from the fact that they see criminals as victims of circumstance. And sure, you could make that argument, but you could make that argument for literal rats as well, and no one is hesitating to exterminate them. From an order and public safety perspective, it doesn't really matter if these people "deserve" their fate or not. But the public is always obsessed with "justice"... Thankfully, people are finally coming around to the idea that it's okay to want criminals to suffer. That should at least help cultivate more sympathy for law enforcement.
Sometimes I cynically suspect that the Crimes of Desperation(tm) rationale is just a comforting applause light to both end the conversation (since it sets up the skill-less rejoinder of "you don't care about the poors"/capitalism is unjust/whatever other distracting blather, and those nonsenses are even less worth calling out)...and a way to get out of actually thinking rigorously on the subject.
A few people I know are at least consistent about it. They won't sweat the homeless guy who comes in and pockets a single yogurt cup for breakfast, but will raise hell at the gang of tweenage punks who keep coming back to boost liquor. Others...try really hard to ignore the evidence from their lying eyes, and insist that people only steal "to feed their families" (filet mignon and Grey Goose), no matter how many times the thieves don't fit that bill. Somehow I doubt they'd be as sympathetic if these Jean Valjeans pinched an equivalent dollar value of their own property instead.
As soon as they get angry, most people suck at mental modeling. You are irritated at rationalists, and your model of them sucks. I, for instance, do not have trouble modeling the point of view of people who do not want to arrest and prosecute shoplifters. They picture people who've had a rough time of it, and are poor, and are despised by many, stealing to get stuff they need, and maybe also to express understandable anger at the world of the financially comfortable. They sympathize & think they might do the same in these people's situation. They think the smartest and also most ethically correct approach to shoplifting would be to reduce the number of people living in poverty.
You should read the comments from CJW, a former prosecutor below before you make claims you can't support.
Notably, this condescension does not actually attempt to answer the question.
Here is a link to CJW's post, which is so chock full of info that I do think it's required reading for anyone who wants to make sure they understand how things play out in real life when someone is charged with shoplifting. And I don't think it makes much sense to opine about how things should be handled going forward without knowing this stuff.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-355?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=76659133
At the risk of introducing more object-level data, here's an article from the Economist written earlier this year:
https://archive.is/KuFWz
It's an overall positive gloss on modern SF, but the relevant bit is that first graph showing number of driving tickets issued per month - a near-linear decline over the course of a decade, with a discontinuity to near zero in 2020 from which there basically hasn't been a recovery.
There's clearly been a collapse in policing efforts even in spheres where conviction rates remain high - I admit to a lack of expertise here*, but between that and CJW's argument that arrests themselves are socially useful I have a hard time buying that nebulous downstream proceedings are the motivating factor.
(* I am not an expert, but this is also one of those areas where I'm going to judge 'expertise' on a metric of "have you proven capable of solving problems" instead of "do you have the right piece of paper" or heaven forbid "have you been (failing) on the job for a long time".)
It would be amusing to overlay onto the 'decline of driving tickets in SF' plot a graph of 'the number of miles driven by autonomous vehicles'. I know, it's not the main reason, unless there's a phenomenon called "artificial social contagion" where people see autonomous vehicles scrupulously obeying the traffic laws and that shifts the entire societal norm.
To spell it out, the decision is based on sympathy for the shoplifters, enough to counteract any sympathy for the merchants.
Thanks, now can you spell out "where in the system" for me?
"many people at many levels of California government"
Invaluable help, I can't imagine getting an answer of that quality for any level of payment.
I assume sarcasm, but I'm pointing out that OP did, in fact, answer the question.
the question calls for "the receipts", not just hearsay, and since OP did not bring data/evidence they did not answer the question.
I wrote a post! I used the word "Semiquincentennial"! I talked about how Trump's ace in the hole is going to be how a handful of lefties are going to write Republican campaign ads for the Republicans!
https://ordinary-times.com/2024/11/11/trumps-ace-in-the-hole/
Seriously, we could use some more grey tribe people over there.
"Quarter Millennial" is better, and people should start using that instead.
What percentage of my assets should I be putting in...
Index funds? (Besides 401K)
High risk high reward stocks?
Bonds?
Savings account?
Buying property?
Crypto?
Portable "emergency go bag" assets?
I'm doing my end-of-year financial audit and curious to hear everyone's thoughts.
Wouldn't bother with bonds until rates go back up, although I'm waiting to see if throwing down some more on I-Bonds will become worthwhile again soon. Some of those Treasury returns during the worst of recent inflation spike were pretty great.
High-yield savings account is table stakes, amount to park there depends on risk tolerance...but as noted, should reflect expenses rather than assets. A few months' rent, food, and other recurring essentials. As a fellow 30something who's not yet rich, life's been pretty manageable with ~$0 cash on person...I have still never had one of those "emergency $1000 expense" type things actually come up, where having the funds in savings rather than paid with credit (in full later) made any difference. Same with having liquidity immediately accessible via ATM versus "do an ACH and wait a few days to interface with digital banks", it's never made a difference. Your actuarial mileage may vary though!
Pretty bearish on crypto in general, but will grudgingly concede the regulatory environment for it will probably get better rather than worse now, so it looks a bit more attractive as an "investment".
Considering the precarious position position the $33T US national debt puts us in, if domestic and international creditors lose faith in the US ability to fund its debt service and stop financing it at low cost, the consequences would be catastrophic. Trump bailing on NATO & Taiwan, etc. could easily be adequate triggers for a move to stop supporting the dollar as a reserve currency.
The cost of deficit borrowing would become overwhelming. Money flows that are currently financed by the US deficit, that keep the economy in overdrive, will be soaked up by interest payment increases. There will be no way to stop, much less prevent, the resulting downward spiral.
The price of bonds and gold are currently decreasing as money flows into equities. So gold as a hedge?
You might find this useful: https://firecalc.com/
Thank you, this is very useful as a tool, although I will likely never be rich enough to use FIRE
If you don't know enough about personal finance to decide the percentages yourself, then you should put everything you don't need in your savings/checking account and "emergency go bag" into index funds. This is not a snarky comment, but, for example, high risk/high reward stocks are for you to judge yourself, and crypto is in that category. Not everyone needs to be an expert in finance.
This. Index funds outperform all other forms of investment in the long term.
That's just because the S&P 500 (which is what everyone means... the Vanguard tech sector ETF is an index fund) has historically done so well, because the US is so large and powerful. That assumes that's going to continue.
I've got about 2/3 of my assets in them myself, just pointing out it's not a foregone conclusion.
Your Savings Account should be based on your monthly expenses, not a % of assets.
Your go bag should be... what, a month? I have no idea what your physical risks are.
The rest varies based on your risk tolerance. I'm big into index funds myself. I keep a war chest for projects at 10% bonds, I have 10% play money (high risk stocks), and 80% index funds.
What's the realistic scenario in which having thousands of dollars in a go bag is going to be useful?
It has to be something where (a) I have to leave my house in a hurry, and (b) the whole banking system is down so I can't access my money.
There's plenty of things in the first category but they're mostly pretty localised, so as long as I can get out of the immediate danger zone I can still access my bank accounts. I can also imagine some scenarios in the second category, like a widespread long term blackout, but these won't require me to leave in a hurry, and I'm probably better off sheltering in place.
For emergency money I'm happy to have a couple of hundred in my wallet, plus money in accounts at multiple banks. If I were a little more risk averse I might keep a few thousand in a safe, but not in a burglar-friendly bag.
"Getting out of the danger zone" might involve e.g. all of the gas stations being closed/empty but you know a guy who knows a guy who's selling for $50/gallon, cash only.
My scenario is “wow a really good deal on a mountain bike popped up on Craigslist and I need to give a guy $5000 in cash in a parking lot today.” Takes days to pull out $5k in cash with my online bank.
I didn't realize that was a tradeoff for using an online bank. I could get $5K from my local bank office in a few minutes (during normal business hours of course).
You can get the ATM limit raised temporarily, but it takes a phone call and 2-3 days to take effect. So it’s fine if you plan ahead. But now I also have a local bank account because I don’t.
5k? Nice bike. Huffy or Schwinn?
lol
Funny story though is that bike prices have crashed since Covid. It’s never been a better time to buy a bike!
>I can also imagine some scenarios in the second category, like a widespread long term blackout, but these won't require me to leave in a hurry, and I'm probably better off sheltering in place.
Yup. Local conditions are very important for deciding whether to shelter in place or not. E.g. I'm in South Carolina, which gets the occasional tropical storm, but not much else, so there aren't many plausible catastrophic local events except weather-related ones. Now earthquake-prone areas are a different story (which might _still_ wind up with sheltering in place being the right answer), but require quite a different analysis of what local threats are, and how to mitigate them.
How old are you? The answers for if you're 27 are very different than if you're 54.
~30 years old and not rich
Many behavioral tendencies are genetic, so if you don't want violent, aggressive kids, you shouldn't marry a violent, aggressive person. But should you also consider the behavioral traits of your partner's family? For example, if Mr. Nice & Gentle has a raging drunk mother and a brother who's been convicted of assault three times, should you be worried about the same tendencies in any kids you have with Mr Nice & Gentle?
Yes.
This is one of the reasons aristocrats were so obsessed with 'good breeding' and a crazy cousin was such a big deal...they may not have known Mendelian genetics but they knew children resemble their families.
> But should you also consider the behavioral traits of your partner's family? For example, if Mr. Nice & Gentle has a raging drunk mother and a brother who's been convicted of assault three times, should you be worried about the same tendencies in any kids you have with Mr Nice & Gentle?
Yes, you should. This is one of the largest / strongest conclusions from Greg Clark's The Son Also Rises.
He specifically looks at "social competence," but this is mediated by genetics, so his conclusions should be true for any genetically mediated trait.
Basically, "lineage means" are actually *more* important than "individual means," to the extent that grandparents are 2x over-represented and great-grandparents are 3x over-represented in being predictive of "your child" outcomes, versus naive predictions. In other words, naively, you'd expect a correlation of r=.08, but they actually matter at r = .24.
(Long and Ferrie (2013); Lindahl et al. (2012); Boserup et al (2013))
Broadly, if your desired outcome is "smart kids," as a rule of thumb if you had a choice between two spouses, one of them less smart the other, but whose parents and grandparents were Phd holders (and the other one's parents and grandparents were just average), choose the "less smart" spouse with smart parents / grandparents to maximize your kids' quality. This is because their lineage mean is higher, and the "smarter" spouse choice has had a lot of lucky accidents to give them their current smarts, and that will regress to the mean in your children.
I wrote a review of Son Also Rises here if you want to read more and see if the book is right for you - https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/i-was-doing-dating-wrong-my-whole?r=17hw9h
Again, he didn't study violence and alcoholism specifically, but studied status / 'social competence,' but his methods and conclusions would generalize to anything genetically mediated.
To add to this (which I largely agree with): another reason that looking to the grandparents might be important is that not every genetic combination is stable generationally.
Regarding Clark: I think that's an interesting review. It puts me in mind of Burke's "Vicissitudes of Families" (1870ish), where he traces the various declines and disappearances of many important British lineages.
But it does make me wonder about the relative genetic success of families viz. number of children. If there is a selective component to limiting offspring, then choosing the most accomplished lineage may prove a generational disadvantage (this is with regard to generational representation in social success, of course, not behavioural traits). An ideal choice would be the spouse with the most accomplished relations, but *also* one whose family shows a tendency towards a certain minimum number of offspring.
> But it does make me wonder about the relative genetic success of families viz. number of children.
Yes, sadly, post Industrial Revolution, basically all higher "social competence" slices of society have fewer kids. From rich British people to Samurai lineages to New York traders and glitterati, they have fewer descendants than average.
Interestingly, he basically sees Caplans *Selfish Reasons* conclusion in his data too, as I pointed out in the post - previously, when higher status families *did* have more kids, all the kids retained their average higher status, there was no dilution and no real change in persistence rates. But I guess in real life, people don't feel that enough to act on it, probably because they only have the "one generation" view for themselves and their friends, and can't see that "multi-generation" lineage view as well due to their actual kids taking up more mental space and primacy.
But in our modern day, isn't this much more likely to be culturally / birth-control mediated rather than genetically lower fertility? As in, if you're able to convince a high status spouse to have more kids, you can indeed have more kids, without any real penalties to aggregate social competence or persistence rates in them?
> But in our modern day, isn't this much more likely to be culturally / birth-control mediated rather than genetically lower fertility?
What occurred to me was Fisher's 'Genetical Theory' and, specifically, his comments on sexual selection (1930). In it he argues that selective forces on a population that privilege fewer children over many may tend to re-produce genetic predispositions (via sexual selection) that result in fewer descendants generationally. The classic example he uses is of ancient child exposure: it is probable that those people who were more naturally inclined to practise exposure (a holdover from when it was selectively advantageous) produced fewer living descendants as a matter of course, and that those who had a higher revulsion to such practices would rear more offspring, such that the modern tendency to feel disgust at the idea of infant exposure may be genetically instinctual, and not just a moral attitude.
His models of generational decline (vis number of descendants) for given British families is quite compelling.
You are assuming the potential spouse is the biological grandchild of the PhD grandparents. This might not be the case, so I would be careful accepting the conclusion.
I’m not disagreeing with your overall point; however,
——”choose the "less smart" spouse with smart parents / grandparents to maximize your kids' quality”——
Are you sure?
Consider the extreme case in which phenotype fully reflects genotype (no environmental contribution). For a highly polygenic trait like IQ, the parent’s phenotype will provide the more accurate estimate of the child’s genetic potential since it represents the genes that the child receives. Measuring the grandparents’ combined phenotypes gives a less precise estimate because it fails to capture the effects of segregational variance introduced through recombination.
Ok, but on the other hand, if environmental effects are large, then averaging of the grandparents’ phenotypes will reduce environmental noise more effectively. In that case the reduction in environmental variance through grandparent averaging could outweigh the increase in variance from segregational effects in the parent.
I can think of cases where I would want to look to the grandparents—maybe the parent had gamma knife treatment as a kid and resulting brain damage. But I don’t think you can generalize this as a rule of thumb for ALL situations. I’m not even sure it is supported in Clark.
This is not my field, and I’m open to being corrected.
> Consider the extreme case in which phenotype fully reflects genotype (no environmental contribution). For a highly polygenic trait like IQ, the parent’s phenotype will provide the more accurate estimate of the child’s genetic potential since it represents the genes that the child receives.
Yes, but the underlying point behind Clark's findings is that phenotype does NOT fully reflect genotype.
For every person with a given phenotype, they have their genotype draw, and then lucky or unlucky accidents on top of it. This means for any two people of a given status, if one of them is an outlier relative to their family, they had a lot of lucky accidents in genetics and environment, and attained their higher status. If the other one had similarly high status parents and grandparents, they're a much better bet in terms of kid quality, even if they had some unlucky ones that brought them a little below the familial outlier on the trait in question.
I'm not sure how this would actually shake out genetically - I'm assuming it's something like robustness to perturbation. If you have the outlier-relative-to-family, maybe they have some SNP's that are more fragile or are dominated more easily during recombination, vs the good-family-lineage has more "high IQ" polymorphisms overall and they just weren't turned on as much environmentally in this one descendant or something.
And obviously, there's some threshold of tradeoff where you shouldn't weight the parent + grandparent thing above the individual. But I think as a general rule of thumb, it's a pretty solid rule in mate choice, because we only consider mates within a fairly tight quality / status band anyways.
But I agree with you - if phenotype faithfully followed genotype, or if we had good enough GWAS and genetic knowledge we could just refer to a genotype, obviously you could select just based on genotype. But because phenotypes and genotypes aren't tightly coupled, this gap exists.
For clarification, by parent I mean"potential spouse" as in parent the to the child. By grandparents I mean the two parents to the potential spouse.
I don't know how genetically determined violence and alcoholism are, but you can look it up. Also bear in mind that (a) alcoholism and violence are both bad, but they are different and probably determined by different genes and (b) brother grew up a very unfavorable environment, and some of his tendency to violence may be a result of environmental factors. Also, seems likely that if Mr. Nice Etc. was going to become violent or an alcoholic he probably would have by now., so either he's got less genetic loading for violence and alcoholism, or he carries other genes that modulate theiir expression. As for your children, Mr Nice probably has fewer of the alcoholism- and violence- promoting genes some family members have, and also his genes would be diluted by mixing with yours
Correct.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/blood-will-tell/
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/breeding-value/
I'm thinking through starting a CPA firm with a friend. He's a CPA, I'm a... software engineering manager.
The thinking is: he'll do CPA work, I'll do sales/marketing, and learn how to do taxes as there's call for it. The target audience is high net worth individuals (e.g. he's worked on fortune 500 CEO personal taxes), and small-medium businesses. Additionally, he does some fractional CFO work. My qualifications for sales are that I'm tolerably good looking and personable in a "nobody tells me they think I'm autistic anymore" sort of way.
My plan for picking up clients is probably trawling local entrepreneurship meetups and just passively being pleasant and a source of tax advice. Also considering a referral program. The local yacht club is an option, but I'm not quite ready to invest on that level.
Has anyone done anything like this, i.e. transitioning from technical to sales? Or just... successfully social climbed? I'm sure I'm not the first person to think "Man I really should build some relationships with rich people."
Industry-specific tax and accounting guys seem to be making bank, based on my observations of hiring one in my industry.
Consider making offers for CPA services at Venture backed startups.
I imagine it would be a lot of work with low return at first, but people rarely replace their CPA if they do good work, and startup founders are usually young skewing uninformed about account and tax work. If 1/10 succeed (reasonable for backed startups) you could bootstrap your way into some quality and profitable relationships. You could commit for a year, and drop those who aren't performing well if it isn't a conflict of interest and you'd probably have a better idea of company performance than anyone else.
Excellent suggestion
I'm not sure how many high net worth individuals are going to be happy having their taxes done by a former software engineer who's "learned to do taxes as called for".
There an enormous shortage of CPAs right now, it's an industry wide problem and no one who needs one can find one with an open time slot, so I doubt you're going to have much of an issue. The baby boomers are retiring and there's something like 3M less CPAs than needed. Of course they are all going after the same clientele that you are, but in general now is the time to do this if you're trying to. Can't say I've ever seen a non-accountant pitch for accountant work though. Sell yourself to law firms and attorneys...they have the same client base and a lot of cross referrals in a way that doesn't trigger their respective fears of competition. Just hit a bunch of local firms and say you want to put on a free CLE for them and they'll invite you to lunch to present.
Yeah, my pardner has explained the landscape - part of the motivation for trying to get into the market. CLEs is an excellent suggestion.
And... yeah the non-accountant thing makes it an awkward pitch. "In my career I've worked variously for the Florida legislature, managed a team at PwC working on mortgage reconciliation, and built custom software for Lykes Citrus Division to determine tax burden of citrus fields. Most recently I managed a team building fintech for orgs including Goldman Sachs and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange." High prestige, low applicability.
If I get serious about it I'll do some courses, probably lean on our "combined 22 years of tax experience."
Does your CPA friend have a short list of people he would reach out? My experience with startups has been for B2B style businesses, referrals and personal connections will be the most fruitful at the start. If you don't have at least an initial starting point, I think a shotgun approach until that find those first few would work.
This seems on point. He does have a small network - all of his current clients are either referrals or people he's met directly. "Oh, you're a CPA? I haven't done my taxes in 3 years!" He rented an office in a shared office space, and it's paid for itself 7x over. Also his previous employer sends him some of the clients they fire, tho naturally those are problem clients :)
I believe that there's a relatively enormous world of EU startups that create a Delaware corp and then have 0 idea what's going on with US taxes. (sure the agents that help with the incorporation try to up-sell them, but you can simply jump the queue and find a good agent and then find startups that are not US-based but are looking to incorporate there.)
This is really interesting, thanks! CPA buddy has done a few European firms already.
Has anyone here in a remote work situation chosen to move cities as a result of becoming remote? So, choosing where you want to live, rather than "I have to move to this city in order to X". I'm interested in motivations, evaluation criteria for destinations, and experiences if it's been long enough to meaningfully report.
I'm working on a project to solve this problem for people. You can enter your preferences and it will narrow down the choices for you in the US: https://exoroad.com
Most of the 60 metrics there are the main considerations for people, there's just a few more I haven't been able to add that that are commonly requested like "community, friendly, or family oriented", "scenic, aesthetic, historical", proximity to medical care, and a sports team environment
I'd suggest adding "State income tax" to your chart. That's an incredibly huge factor in where I choose to live, in no small part because, a while back when I did remote work when nobody else was, I was paying four different income taxes. (A city income tax, two state income taxes, and the federal income tax.)
The major burden there wasn't financial - it was dealing with the state bureaucracies. Eight years after I left I got a fairly sizeable bill for an income tax payment which I mailed in, but which was lost by the state. It wasn't the first time; the state lost my payment and charged penalties to me five out of the ten years I was dealing with that shit, and the five years it didn't, were because I sent the tax payments as registered mail *until the state announced it wouldn't accept registered mail anymore*, at which point they started losing my payments and charging penalties again.
Wow that sounds truly terrible and byzantine. Will be sure to split up taxes into state income, property tax, and sales tax. Thanks
This is a great tool! The reason I live where I do is because it is community and family friendly while having a lot of history, aesthetically pleasing buildings and spaces, and good social amenities. Hard to measure that though!
Greatly appreciated and also keen to understand any shortcomings you had. Yep, those being hard to measure and much more subjective is why they're missing. Looking into ways to get some type of survey data or user feedback on them.
> I'm interested in motivations, evaluation criteria for destinations, and experiences if it's been long enough to meaningfully report.
My criteria are:
1. Natural beauty and outdoorsy stuff (mountains good, beaches better)
2. Climate (warmer better, tropical best)
3. Vibe / culture
4. ~1M people, so you get things like rock climbing gyms and the like
Some of the places I've chosen with roughly these criteria are Honolulu, Denver, Tokyo, Santa Fe, Tampa, Phuket, and Colorado Springs, and I'd recommend any of those places, they all had decent upsides.
during COVID on-site work became so unheard of that a few years later I moved from one end of the EU to the other.
I will take a stab at this. I was more or less forced by circumstances to relocate to the Austin area in 2016 for a job I badly needed after a layoff and with a mortgage and year old twins to feed.
In January 2020 I started a new job with my same employer, with the option to live\work anywhere in the US. We left in the midst of COVID summer because we hated Austin (for the following reasons:)
1. Climate\weather: it is simply too hot there for 8 months of the year, for me personally, a person from Northern Ontario, Canada.
2. Government Services: we had multiple boil-water notices after issues with contamination in the local water supply. It is super annoying to live w\o potable\bathable water with two young kids for more than about 8 hours. Power outages were a regular occurrence.
3. Education: Both of our children have mild neurodivergent traits associated with ADHD and we felt the public school system didn't have the appropriate environment for them to thrive. Here at our local elementary school they both get individualized support.
We subsequently ended up moving to Northern Colorado, to an "L-town" along the Front Range, and have enjoyed the great climate, great outdoor access, great quality schools, and low-key excellent municipal services including muni-run affordable fiber internet. Housing and general cost-of-living is significantly higher here, but we are happy to not be in Texas any longer.
One caveat is that, socially, it has been difficult to establish any really true friendships, but that is likely more a function of time availability than anything. Just something to consider when contemplating leaving, especially if you have an extensive social group to leave behind. Best of luck!
I might not be the target of your question, because I was remote for most of the past few decades, and had just switched to on-site for a year and a half before the pandemic. But my husband and I started house hunting in early 2020 just before the pandemic was a thing (our realtor was the first person we saw with a mask) and we'd originally been planning to move closer to the city. My brother gave me the advice, "Work where you want to live, don't live where you want to work." I took his advice. I now live in a wonderful exurb (really more "subrural" than "suburban") and I won't be going back to on-site anytime soon.
The last time I was in the city neighborhood I originally had my eye on, I got to witness a broad-daylight theft, so I'd say it worked out. Even if I've got to take a pay cut or even switch industries, I'm in the place I want to be for decades to come. To anyone whose profession allows them to work remotely, regardless of what their current job allows, I'd say heed my brother's advice.
More reports from Milei's Argentina. My rent contract ends this year. After that, if I rent it again, the rent is up 60% (in dollars). I won't be able to afford that, I'll have to move.
Admittedly, this might be not just because of Milei, but also because it's local summer, and Mer del Plata is a summer tourist destination. But the contract is implied to last another year, so I don't think it's the major factor here.
That’s a 60% increase in pesos or in dollars
In dollars
It's basically the same thing, the exchange rate has stayed roughly flat throughout the year.
I was wondering if anyone could explain why the outcome of South Dakota's abortion rights referendum was such an outlier? (I'm guessing the answer will be obvious to an American!)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36pxnj01xgo
South Dakota is extremely conservative. It's almost more surprising that such a referendum was even on the ballot, than that it was voted down.
(And to better put it in context with those other results: Montana is heterodox enough that they at least had one D senator until this election, Missouri and Florida were swing states within my young living memory, and the rest on that list are either currently swing or deep blue).
My understanding is that the west tends to be rather libertarian and not that pro-life, compared to places like Mississippi.
Yes, and it's because of the religiousness divide. The rural Mountain West is conservative but not that religious (except Utah), while the Midwest and East is conservative and religious. Abortion beliefs usually follow religiousness. Here's a heatmap of religiousness where you can mostly see the distinction once you hit the plains: https://www.exoroad.com/map?religiousPopulation
Thanks.
Also, didn't some pro choice groups refuse to support the SD referendum because they weren't consulted, or it didn't go far enough for them, or some such?
Why are conglomerates so much more popular in the rest of the world than the US? In Europe, Japan, and South Korea I feel like every major manufacturer is also a huge conglomerate with a hundred other business lines. Hitachi, Samsung, Mitsubishi..... their products range from cars to phones to excavators to legit heavy industry. Mitsubishi is also a bank, a chemical company, and may do something nuclear I think? But it's not just Asian countries, Saab makes (or made?) both snobby cars and actual fighter jets. Dassault in France also makes fighter jets, but subsidiaries run utilities, media, software, and one does thoroughbred auctions?? What is going on here?
Is it all just US-style capital efficiency where investors demand that unrelated business units be stripped off into separate companies? If so, why is capital so inefficient outside the US? And why doesn't I dunno Amazon also do thoroughbred auctions? We can't let the French beat us here
No one has discussed the ideological case against conglomerates. We want the most powerful people in society to be elected officials, who are theoretically accountable to the public.
When a company or conglomerate becomes powerful enough, the top officers of that company become as powerful, or more powerful, than your average elected official. And since they aren't elected, they aren't accountable to the public even in theory.
Here's one ideological case against allowing the formation of massive conglomerates, although there are other, different cases to be made.
Because it's illegal in the US. You saw mass conglomerates in the late 19th century until they were broken up by anti-trust. Then the New Deal permitted and in fact encouraged them though without repealing the actual laws. (The idea that the New Deal combined regulations and unions with breaking up monopolies or big corporate power is the opposite of reality. Antitrust actually fell off significantly.) Then the Neoliberal/Republican Revolution went back to antitrust. If you removed the regulations or imported a European or Japanese regulatory environment you could see them forming again.
Try doing half the stuff a Japanese keiretsu does or even the idea of block sector negotiations like Danish companies do and the US government would heavily punish you. It's incredibly illegal. And the only reason there's no big examples is that companies know this and so don't try.
This is true as a historic matter, but I think part of why this persists is that new companies keep displacing old companies in the US in a way that doesnt happen ex-US for standard american exceptionalism reasons. The old companies do tend towards conglomerate behavior, but they also become less relevant over time.
>Then the Neoliberal/Republican Revolution went back to antitrust
Hmm, not sure I really believe this. The Reagan era was associated with *increased* antitrust? Can you provide any citations on this?
Also, how do conglomerates violate antitrust? If you own a piece of grocery and construction and insurance and car manufacturing- these are all separate industries. Antitrust as I understand would be about owning all of the grocery stores or what have you
It's both. You're not allowed to cross-subsidize and various kinds of vertical integration are not allowed, not just horizontal. Standard Oil, the classic monopoly, used a bunch of unrelated businesses in distribution, metalworking, and most importantly railroads to gain an insurmountable advantage.
You can look up the case numbers. A Statistical Study of Antitrust Enforcement etc. It starts out relatively small in the 19th century but they're big cases. It then becomes a basically regular tool until the 1930s where it sharply decreases. It increases again in the 1940s and then begins declining in the 1970s. It reaches a low point in the 1980s but then starts going up again and by the 2000s/2010s we're at a higher absolute number than we were in basically any other period. In other words while it's true the Reagan Revolution was a low point it was also an inflection point leading to ultimately higher enforcement.
If you want an economists view of things, I think "Why Are There So Many Conglomerates in the Developing World?" (https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-many-conglomerates) is worth a read. In short,
* Businesspeople turn out to be loss averse, just like everyone else; losses sting far worse than missed profits, and so they prefer a steady and consistent income over a variable income that's higher on average, but leads to occasional losses.
* In a country with developed financial markets like the US or UK, you can get this sort of thing (a smoother income) by buying insurance or using the stock market or even taking loans: you can buy insurance for tail risks to your business that make it underperform some years, or buy a diversified stock portfolio that will pay out even when your own company is doing poorly, or just take a loan from the bank to cover expenses in bad years.
* In countries *without* developed financial markets, you can't do that. Or it's hard and expensive. So business owners "self insure" by "buying a little of everything" themselves: you get into the shampoo industry, and the construction industry, and the home appliances industry, and the healthcare industry, and the shipping industry, and... -- rather than just buying some stocks in those companies on the stock market. If one division of your conglomerate does poorly, it can be buffeted out by another division doing well.
* When a country shifts from having bad financial markets to having good ones, the shift from conglomerates to not-conglomerates can take some time, as people have to unlearn the old lessons. US investors for example loved conglomerates in the 70s and 80s (if I recall correctly), because of corporate synergy or something. But they don't nowadays, because we've completed the transition, and realized they don't work. (Note: this is my own speculation, the original post does not talk much about why even developed countries like Japan and South Korea still have conglomerates. I *guess* that over time they'll transition to more specialized businesses, in the same way that the US did, but it's my guess specifically.)
* There was also some stuff in the original post about larger firms having internal capital markets, and how conglomerates might actually be good in a developing country where the average manager is inexperienced and really bad, and a conglomerate manager replacing them might increase the average manager quality in the nation as a whole even as the conglomerate manager gets worse since they're managing a new industry outside their original expertise... but that's the main thing that stuck out to me. The lack of financial products we take for granted in the US, like being able to get a loan or buy stocks on the stock market.
One effect is that countries playing catch-up get to copy successful business models from the US and other advanced economies, while American companies had to discover these business models on their own. Discovering successful business models is hard and takes a lot of luck, whereas copying successful business models is easy and just takes a lot of money.
Most of the big Asian conglomerates got big by copying mature business models and products from other countries and trying them in a local context. The biggest car manufacturers in the US and Europe were (almost) all the survivors of a huge glut of automotive startups founded in the early 20th century; it took some time for the world to figure out how to make cars profitably. But the biggest car manufacturers in Japan and South Korea were just deep-pocketed manufacturers of other machinery that got to copy mature automotive technology from the West.
Conglomerates can be bloated, instead of creating efficiencies. Conglomerates were popular in the US in the past, but it was more about empire-building than creating efficiencies. But Berkshire Hathaway is a successful conglomerate, because they just oversee capital requirements and let great businesses run well; if they need cash to grow, they can get it, and if they have extra cash, it goes to the parent to be invested.
The classic business school answer to this is that conglomerates are a response to inefficient capital markets, government favouritism/corruption and low trust/lack of rule of law.
Those factors vary in importance by country, but the prominence of conglomerates and family businesses is often seen as a (negative) indicator of the efficiency of a country’s economy.
I think it's a somewhat common feature in 'late arrivers' to modern economy - if you're trying to bootstrap an economy quickly, having a few super powerful companies is useful and maybe necessary for competing on the world stage.
There's a lot of efficiencies and economy-of-scale benefits if you can do everything in-house: e.g. don't pay some other company a fee to get a loan, just own banks and do it yourself, and these benefits might be enough to make competing with more established foreign companies more viable.
There's a lot of downsides, too: less specialization, potential for monopolistic (or oligopolistic) price setting, etc... but those may be more big-picture, long term issues and the short term "we want an company that can compete on the world stage quickly" benefits may outweigh them.
Also, if you're "new to the global modern economy" there's a good chance you're a new government or "new to democracy" and may be easier for a few powerful groups to get their hands on a lot of political power. Sort of a "what if John Rockefeller had been a founding father" idea - yes, a lot of founding fathers were businessmen, but this was before the modern globalized economy really kicked into full effect.
>yes, a lot of founding fathers were businessmen
Were they? Adams was a lawyer and the southerners ran slave plantations. A few were, Hancock comes to mind, but I wouldn't call them dominant.
And also the second point, even national-level businesses weren't really a thing in the colonial era let alone multinationals.
I am not sure about the law side, but I guess it is a factor that shareholder value is considered higher in US than in other countries. In Germany, the shareholders have (or had) much less power than in the US to force the CEO into things like restructuring. Though times are changing. In the 90s, the term "Deutschland AG" referred to the fact that all major companies held some shares of each other, and it was almost impossible for external shareholders to get major influence. Since then, financial investors have gained a lot more influence, and have managed to decompose many of the old conglomerates into smaller units, for example Siemens, Bayer, or ThyssenKrupp.
In general, the units of a conglomerate can be sold for more than the conglomerate as a whole, because investors don't want bundles. So fileting a conglomerate is a win for the shareholders, and some financial investors have specialized in this operation. The easier it is to gain control over companies, the more this happens.
By the way, the US also has at least one such conglomerate company: Alphabet/Google. It is to big to be swallowed by a single financial investor, which is why it is still in one piece.
What makes you think they're bigger outside the US? The US famously has huge multinational corporations, Walmart, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Exxon-Mobil. General Electric makes jet engines and washing machines. Amazon is the world's largest retailer of books... and servers. Honeywell makes aerospace control systems, and thermostats. Comcast sells residential Internet, left-wing televised news, and animated movies.
I think if you re-phrase your question "Why do countries besides the US have fewer large corporations" the answer becomes much more obvious: The US is just a larger country, physically, by population, and by diversity.
Probably because of anti-trust laws and the legacy of Standard Oil. Basically the US views conglomerates as inherently anti-competition and against the interests of the free market, and has laws in place to break them up.
Congratulations to the Trump supporters I argued with in the comments before the election. I hope it works out for the best for all of us.
This wins "first election-related comment to make me feel better".
A single success demonstrates almost nothing about the trustworthiness of the underlying process, but there wasn't just one test of prediction markets on November 7. There were 50 different elections for President alone, and a lot more for other offices. How did prediction markets do across the board?
A) the majority of states are not really questionable in most elections and weren't in this one. There were 7-ish swing states where it plausibly could have gone either way, and so a prediction is more than trivially difficult. B) Those 7 swing states are, to a greater or lesser extent correlated, and so even that doesn't really represent 7 independent guesses.
Looking at a wider array of things like house and senate races, or doing more granular predictions trying to guess actual vote shares (I don't know if this is a thing or not), could be used, but if one is focusing just on the presidential election, I think that calling it "one" thing is a lot more accurate than calling it "fifty" things, even if neither of those options is fully correct.
Re: California shoplifting policing situation
I think it's moderately wealthy to post opinionated voter guidance on an issue and then circle back to an acknowledgement that the issue is badly understood and we need accurate information.
I think something like “strong opinions, weakly held” is a perfectly reasonable plank to put across those two things. It's two different contexts: when you have to act on a deadline, you still want to be clear and decisive on whatever the best information is that you have at the time, even as you retain your meta-knowledge that you would like to have a better understanding and use other resources to continue trying to get one.
Maybe, but you can't just summon "Strong opinions, weakly held" and call it a plank. Someone made a pithy quote, but is it actually "good" to have strong opinions on everything and weakly hold them?
Should everyone who has a Substack have weighed in on this issue with their strong opinion formed after reading the ballot text and two internet articles? Don't worry, their opinion is weakly held.
Even if you actually buy that it's "good" in every context to have strong opinions (weakly held, naturally) should you be broadcasting them to a large, influential audience?
Signal to noise matters to readers. Epistemic status matters to (especially these) readers. I don't think the choice to weigh in on that topic was defensible considering the stated ignorance of fundamental facts.
So not quite "rich"?
In response to your recent post about how thwarting/punishing foundation-level attacks on norms using violence and rule-of-law-violations is a higher priority than thwarting/punishing the more subtle strategy of undermining liberalism within its existing norms:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids Right and Left alike from promoting right-wing causes. (paraphrasing Anatole France)
Now, if you're opposed to right-wing causes, this might seem perfectly reasonable, but if not, you'd see the law and those enforcing as the problem, and those violating it (with violence) as GOOD actually.
Listen, us peasants are allowed to attack the right wing norms of homophobia and child marriage as a treat, in exchange for attacking the left wing norms of a living wage and a union pension being required before admission to polite society.
I overstate my case for humor, but it is the case that the left can make as many attacks on norms as it wants, as long as none of those attacks meaningfully threaten the neoliberal order.
If you perceive gay marriage being legal as an attack, you should also perceive right to work as an attack in the same way.
Can you elaborate? It sounds like you're implying that right-wing norm-attacking is inherently big and dramatic, left-wing inherently slow and insidious. But I don't think that's the case, and that post was more just pointing out that the right has recently done the former and the left has been doing the latter. I sense you've got some sort of interesting and correct observation you're getting at, but it has come across jumbled up.
The point is that unjust laws deserve to be broken. Now, who decides what laws are just? ...The winners, obviously.
No, section III of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein pretty much sums my view. I could say more, but I don't think it'd add much.
And no, I'm not claiming this version of the left–right divide serves as a good model across history, just in the here and now. I'd expect the generalizable kernel to be more like establishment–rebels, where the Left happens to be the extremely well-entrenched establishment in the present.
I WOULD claim that anti-establishment norm-attacking is big and dramatic (because slim as the odds of success are, that's still your best option), compared to the slow and insidious actions of the establishment, and if you support the positions of the current establishment, you'd think the former is worse, and vice versa.
Ok, I think I understand. So when you said "if you're opposed to right-wing causes" you were thinking specifically of the right's current anti-establishment position, not the right-wingedness itself. I think that clears it up for me.
Saying you think it was actually a good thing that people tried to install their preferred presidential candidate by violence is... well I can't fault it for consistency, but it's not exactly beating the accusations of authoritarianism.
I argue EAs should be (fairly strong) Zionists: https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-utilitarian-case-for-israel
What do you mean by Zionist? Someone who believes there should be a Jewish state in that region? Someone who supports the historical Zionist movement? Or just someone who wishes Israel should be left alone from aggression?
There's a core point where Israel is the only developed country with above replacement level fertility, which in itself is basis to support and expand it. There's not a lot of good land in the area, but we should start charter Israels in countries with declining population, like Korea or Lithuania.
How do I put this politely: I think proposing a "charter Israel" to an average Lithuanian will result in a very spirited answer. I can't tell how tongue in cheek this comment is but I think it's the biggest double take I've ever done in a comment section of these posts.
Ha! Yeah, Israeli fertility is a strong point in favor (I think I mention it in the article, at least in passing..?). Certainly on board with exporting the social patterns (explained in NonZionism’s piece; export via media? money? forced civil service?) to all the Lithuanias and Koreas, though maybe less thrilled with people-exporting. Then again, Jews could totally be a special case in terms of broad, pluralistic cohesion, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt to send some expeditionary settler communities…
They also have both the advantage of having belligerent neighbors, which would help replicate the conditions of Israel 1.0.
I actually kind of agree with you broadly (the culture seems broadly aligned with my values and I hope it flourishes, and I'm not remotely Jewish) but the optics of such a statement at the moment are terrible. I always thought that Israel was good at managing perceptions and cultivating soft power but feel the current scenario is hurting their interests long term Maybe I'm missing some crucial part of the argument but again, as someone who is generally favorable to Israel, I don't really know what to say to "actually subjugation and suffering of the Palestinian people is acceptable". Can't you just do the thriving without the subjugation part?
I’ll endorse Shaked’s response in general and also add: yes, I wish Israel could thrive without the subjugation, and I hope they move in that direction in the future, hope they can do two states. Unfortunately, the demographic & political realities tell us that, if anything, Israel will only grow more sour on full Palestinian self-determination. We either get unilateral withdrawal where the Israelis maintain settlements and strong security in the border, but stop propping up Abbas (less likely post 10/7); or we get long term maintenance of the status quo; or we get a significant deterioration of Palestinian sovereignty and/or wellbeing. I wrote the post with the assumption that scenario 2 is now most likely, and wanting to argue that Israel is still fundamentally very good. Agree the optics aren’t incredible.
Until not so long ago, “thriving without the subjugation part” was pretty uncontroversial.
But it’s a complicated situation and the extremists on both sides are feeding the Toxoplasmas of Rage. The Palestinian terrorist groups are using their population as human weapons (suicide attacks…) and shields, and this gives more credence on the Israeli side to the point of view that pacific coexistence is impossible. This, in turn, reinforces (mostly by turning a blind eye to their excesses) the Israeli extremists that wish to subjugate or sometimes plainly to destroy. And the Palestinians, seeing this, decide that there’s no chance for a meaningful peace, and that, if they’re going to suffer anyway, they might as well do some damage to those they’ve been indoctrinated to view as their enemies.
This is especially tragic around Gaza: the kibbutzim targeted on Oct 7th were probably a lot more sympathetic to the Palestinians’ general plight than the general population.
The Palestinians would have to agree to it, which historically they haven't. Hopefully between the disaster of losing yet another war and UNRWA (which gives them tons of aid conditioned on refusing to accept the existence of Israel) being restricted we'll have better luck achieving this in the future.
Scott asked people not to do this, *literally* in the header of this very thread.
(thanks Scott, btw, it should improve the value of open threads)
Oy, my bad, I’ve taken to just skimming these… first time commenting that I can remember. Let me be clearer about my intent: I’ve got a set of ~utilitarian arguments that I think show Israel to be a particularly ethically good state for the world, including along some EA priorities (animal welfare & longtermism), and am curious if others have thought about the topic or have critiques of my position.
Doing it once is fine, though having a summary or phrasing it as a discussion is encouraged, as Scott said. There's been one bad actor spamming recently which prompted this response - you're not going against norms.
It's altruistic if you consider that the dead can't suffer. Why should the good of existing people be prioritized over the lives that will replace them?
Israel isn't settler-colonialism though (contrary to what leftists who've never been there like to claim). The closest thing there to colonialism is WB settlements, but while those are bad they exist because of historical failures to reach a peace deal.
Eh. Arguing about the label "settler-colonialism" is a lot less interesting than arguing about its actual value. It's far from obvious that that typical colonialism was bad, anyway. If it's true that colonialism is a positive on utilitarian grounds, then it's probably also positive on altruistic grounds, as the world is very rarely a zero-sum game (and it's easy to argue this for much historic colonialism of the last century or two). It's easy to defend Israel in practice, so there's no need to debate whether it belongs to some particular amorphous category or another.
Sure, but it's also just a meaningfully wrong picture of the situation - the average Israeli isn't a tourist with a backup plan to just move to Poland if the whole living in Israel thing doesn't work out.
This is a small sample, but it looks like infections by AH5 HPAI (a.k.a. bird flu) are flying under the radar in humans—at least among farm workers.
Strangely enough, I find this encouraging. HPAI has been around for almost 30 years. Humans were rarely infected, but when they did get infected, H5N1 seemed to have a high mortality rate (especially in children). However, the number of people dying from HPAI dropped from dozens every year to one or two a year around 2010 (IIRC). This might be a specious correlation on my part, but HPAI didn't begin to make inroads into mammalian populations until around then. So, the fact that a significant percentage of farm workers have contracted HPAI without serious symptoms suggests to me that HPAI has lost some of its virulence for humans when it made the jump from birds to mammals. Of course, I've been accused of "calm-mongering" when it comes to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID, so you're welcome to ignore me if you feel that freakout-mongering is the more appropriate response to HPAI. Certainly, it's caused heavy mortality in some mammalian species. And it has yet to spread to the non-farm working human population (at least, we don't see a signal for it in wastewater numbers).
> Department of Health and Human Services and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to implement cross-sectional serologic surveys to ascertain the prevalence of recent infection with HPAI A(H5) virus among dairy workers. In both states, a convenience sample of persons who work in dairies was interviewed, and blood specimens were collected. Among 115 persons, eight (7%; 95% CI = 3.6%–13.1%) had serologic evidence of recent infection with A(H5) virus; all reported milking cows or cleaning the milking parlor. Among persons with serologic evidence of infection, four recalled being ill around the time cows were ill; symptoms began before or within a few days of A(H5) virus detections among cows.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7344a3.htm
Thanks! I am totally not surprised by the study. I did some estimate a few months ago from the few existing samples and got that the number of infected workers is probably in the 10,000s. But you are right, the fact that they do not get severely ill is a very good sign.
One pushback though: you say that it has yet to spread to the non-farm working human population. Do we know that? I mean, how many non-farm workers in the US with flu-like infections got tested for bird flu in the US last year? My best guess would be zero (ok, perhaps 1-100 for weird reasons), because even among the farmer population the number was shockingly low. Even if a person dies from a flu-like infection, I very much doubt that they are tested for bird flu.
We have wastewater monitoring for that, mentioned by the OP.
Oh yes, somehow I manage to overlook that. Thanks!
Well, we have WW monitoring for Type A influenzas, and H5N1 is a type A flu. We haven't seen any rise in the Type A numbers during the off-season for the flu. So, up to this point, it doesn't look like H5N1 was spreading widely in the general population. When flu season begins to ramp up, any signal from the spread of H5N1 will be masked by AH1 influenzas. This is not good.
Once H5N1 mutates so it's easily transmissible among humans, there's no guarantee that antigenic drift or antigenic shift won't increase its virulence to humans. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
My real worry is that we'll see reassortment between H5N1 and human flu when a dairy farm worker gets both at the same time (more likely during human flu season). This could make a virus with characteristics of both.
Or if one of these ferret experiments leaks: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08246-7
In a recent article in Science one researcher was bemoaning the fact that they weren't allowed to do more ferret experiments like that one with the current crop of H5 and H10 variants.
Has anyone here taken Brazil's high school standardized test, the Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM)? If yes, what was it like, and can you compare it to either of its American equivalents, the SAT or ACT?
Yeah, though more than 10 years ago. No, I can't compare to American equivalents.
From what I remember, it's just _very_ long. Most questions are not really that hard. A good strategy is knowing when you're not likely to solve the question and skip it.
What was considered to be a very high score?
Whatever was needed to get into the federal universities.
You could try to find out the cutoff for USP (Sao Paulo university), that's one of the most selective ones.
Shoplifting in San Francisco is merely a lack of policing across the board. We lead the country in car breakins, drivers speed and break traffic laws at will, and open drug dealing and use on our streets, but for a few examples. Our progressive Democrats have created a dystopian nightmare.
I continue to be perplexed at the situation in Oakland. There's only ~35 officers on patrol at one time, in a high crime city of 430k, so less than 1 cop per 10k residents. This is because they are funded only 50% of similar sized cities and the hostile environment lead it to be the D-team place to go (new recruits and ones not good enough to transfer). Oakland residents instinct to the lack of crime responsiveness from 35 cops doing commutes to Santa Rita jail in Dublin 50% of the time is to go "see these cops are useless, they didn't respond to my car break-in, we should fund them less"
> Oakland residents instinct to the lack of crime responsiveness from 35 cops doing commutes to Santa Rita jail in Dublin 50% of the time is to go "see these cops are useless, they didn't respond to my car break-in, we should fund them less"
Since I have the exact same instinct (my car was broken into 4x in 2023), let me tell you why.
Cops aren't interested in policing or solving crime. 80% of police-hours go into generating traffic tickets. If you give them more money and manpower, this doesn't change, 80% of it goes into generating MORE traffic stops.
We need *serious* top-down legislation or prioritization in terms of giving police any more resources or funding, because they have proven that they ARE wasting what they currently have, and WILL waste any incremental resources you allow them.
But nobody is doing that top-down legislation. Right now the model when your car gets broken into is you waste an hour cleaning up shattered glass, then if you're dumb, you waste an hour or two "filing a report" where they'll basically laugh at you and throw it into the trash right in front of you.
Why would I report any further break ins?
Why would I want to *increase* their funding?? "Great job not stopping any crime whatsoever, have more money?" Just so they can give more suburban moms traffic tickets?
EDIT - I decided to actually put together a post outlining the argument, because I trot this 80% thing out all the time and it's long to try to outline in a comment: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/more-than-80-of-police-hours-are?r=17hw9h
Maybe they would work harder if the left stopped turning every police scandal into a big deal. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, etc etc. Why would they actually do their jobs when one misstep causes them to get figuratively lynched by the public?
I completely agree. Obviously we need Robocop or Brenda from Futurama (the police robot who speaks in a calm, soothing voice, then sprays everyone with immobilizing goo) or something along those lines, because they won't care about reputational risk.
But as I point out in the post I edited my comment to include, even if all we did was mandate "you have to spend 90% of your current "traffic ticket" time on actually solving crime," we'd roughly triple the amount of police hours put into actually solving crime.
The current allocation of police hours is absolutely bonkers relative to our clearance rates of serious crimes, and we should not be giving them more money while they're going to keep allocating time in bonkers ways.
Go 20 miles in any direction to a well-funded police department, the difference is extremely palpable. Fremont has a well-funded PD with people there who want the police around dealing with issues. You can go to any gas station in the middle of the night and never experience a problem, while Oakland gas stations are making the news for having 3/4 of the reviews mentioning being robbed in broad daylight: https://maps.app.goo.gl/EQZju54TAxvYN3oHA
I don't know if anyone saw, but Miami unveiled a universally mocked statue of the basketball player Dwayne Wade. If you google it, it is rather horrifying. Why do statues of people always look so bad? Are we worse at sculpture than before? I feel like this is a common story.
I'd guess there have always been bad sculptures, it's just that the old ones have been removed / destroyed if they were too ugly. If you go to a gothic cathedral with a thousand little saints in its portal, there's bound to be some goofy looking ones among them.
And also, due to various ideological and economic factors, modern statues are often the work of one single sculptor working alone, and not of a workshop with a number of skilled assistants. So if that person struggles with their subject for one reason or another, a bad statue is what you get.
Honestly, it might be a case of all of the talented sculpters going on to do 3D modeling instead of making physical art...
Well, it's better than the Ruth Bader Ginsburg statue that looks like it belongs in a Call of Cthulhu monster manual:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11680847/Gold-statue-horns-tentacles-paying-homage-Ruth-Bader-Ginsburg-gets-trolled-online.html
Eh, what the heck.
GINSBURG STATUE, Unique Entity
STR 50 CON 70 SIZ 50 INT 20 POW 20 DEX 7 Move 2 HP 60
Damage Bonus: +2D6.
Weapons: Tentacle 75%, damage 1D6+2D6, Horn 50%, damage 1D4+2D6
Spells: Contact Nyarlathotep
Sanity Loss: 1/1D4 to see the statue, 1/1D10 to see it animate.
...I kinda like that statue, actually. Admittedly, it is very out of place sitting where it is, but I'd love to see it in a more appropriate setting. Occult architecture has been very much unexplored in the real world.
People think it's satanic. Usually occult significance is attributed by right-wing groups who want to imply some group is in league with the Devil.
There are definitely groups like the Freemasons that used symbology now associated with Western esotericism, but don't forget they were left-coded in their day.
Not that you're wrong:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythian_Temple_(New_York_City)#/media/File:The_Pythian.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythian_Home_of_Missouri#/media/File:Pythian_Home_of_Missouri_-_Green_County_MO_retouched.jpg
https://www.rosicrucianpark.org/grand-temple
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goetheanum#/media/File:Goetheanum_Dornach2.jpg
> People think it's satanic. Usually occult significance is attributed by right-wing groups who want to imply some group is in league with the Devil.
...And? Do we need to respect the opinions of insane people? I can't believe we've normalized these idiots chasing shadows and claiming that "satanic influence" is everywhere.
Who's 'we'? The media's divided between woke liberals and conspiracy-crazed rightists; the arts are overwhelmingly the first. Take your pick.
The best chance to resist pseudo-Brutalist 'modern architecture' is conservative RETVRN people who think nothing good's been done since 1800. (Though some of the more educated ones are aware of Art Deco and Art Nouveau.)
Medusa With the Head of Perseus in NY looks great.
It is a common story with sports statues I think. At least all statues of soccer players I know are bad because they are too realistic. I am conservative in my taste of art so I like recognizable art, but art needs some abstraction or exagaration to work. The art of Leonardo, Michelangelo or Rembandt is not realistic.
I guess the higher-ups in sports organizations have bad taste.
Since at least Picasso, the fashion in art is to be somewhat contemptuous of realism, in favour of the art embodying some concept. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's easier to fail at than pure accuracy; and many artists are embarrassed to produce a mere likeness.
As an aside, there's a good (if long) fiction book called "The Golden Key", in which an artist contrives (by magic and psychopathy) to live many lives for the sake of his art. In one incarnation he rails against the robotic accuracy of his contemporaries, only to discover in a later incarnation that his previous incarnation is now revered, and everyone has gone too far in the opposite direction. (It may happen in the other order - I've not read it for a while). (Another easter egg is that the cover artist, Michael Whelan, painted himself as the psychopathic protagonist)
Given how many fantasy novel covers Whelan has painted that's pretty cool.
It's not just statues of people. See also: "The Embrace" sculpture in Boston. $10 million for some bronze arms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embrace#Reception
And hideous bronze arms at that.
The arms are quite well done, it's just a terrible idea for a sculpture. The sculptor should have looked at his idea from a bunch of different angles and realised that from most angles it's going to look either like a disturbing monster, a man eating a huge sausage, or a weird sex act.
Yeah, agreed, the arms in isolation are fine, it's the juxtaposition that makes the thing hideous.
I don't think it's a trend, since I've seen good contemporary sculptures. I think this particular statue just happens to be bad.
In this particular case, my guess is "sculptor was trying to flex too hard with realistic cloth," because it's very detailed and realistic, it's just the overall effect of the wrinkled jersey that looks bad.
The jersey is… fine. It’s the face that is terrible
The jersey is worse than the face IMO. It makes him look like he's wearing a trash bag.
He looks like a 50 year old man having a toddler's temper tantrum while wrapped in aluminium foil.
That said, I've seen plenty of perfectly good recent bronze statues, this one just happens to be bad. Here's a perfectly decent one in the sportsman category https://www.kahlaemonson.com/nicky-winmar-statue-unveiling
A couple top-of-the-head points which might not be correct:
* We don't have much to contrast the old statues against, for all we know they were terrible depictions of the people they were representing.
* Current statues might end up in an uncanny valley due to attempts at making them more "realistic"
Greek, Roman and renaissance statues are pretty anatomically accurate and invoke no uncanny valley. It’s possible that the people being represented were not represented accurately but there’s a general conformity with statues of the same person and you probably don’t have much chance of your statue surviving if it’s bad. There’s maybe not much chance of the sculptor surviving either.
And we don’t need to know what the mythical figure David looks like to recognise the talent of Michelangelo.
Well, I feel pretty good about my 2021 and 2022 predictions about 2024 right now. Also if there's a long term ceasefire in Ukraine on current lines I will have successfully predicted the rough time and amount of territory taken during the war before Putin even crossed the border. (Though time in particular had a very large range, enough I'm not sure I should count it.) Among other things.
To be honest, I feel like trading commodities on a small scale and winning the odd bet or prediction market is an underutilization of this skill. But nothing comes to mind as to how to actually practically use it. This might be the Dark Almonds problem where there's theoretically big outcomes being driven by this but not a lot of money/practical use in it. Still, open to suggestions if anyone has them.
If you think you're good at making predictions, but struggle to turn those predictions into trades, you could work for a macro trading firm, many of which have kinda proceduralized this process.
I don't struggle to turn them into trades. They have fairly obvious effects on commodity and other prices. However, I don't currently have the time or capital for the returns to be worth a full time career. I'm not sure how you'd join a macro trading firm but I suspect I don't have the academic pedigree to join one. Though tell me if I'm wrong.
Maybe write a Substack about your predictions with separate posts going into detail about why you believe what you believe, throw in some interesting historical information along the way. You obviously know a ton of history, both the recent present and ancient past. Also go into contingent predictions, about what might happen if your initial predictions are or aren't correct. As time passes, you could follow up posts explaining how more recent events have may or may not have changed your mind about things.
Since people are starting to bet big money on prediction markets, seems there would be demand for someone who can share well-written analyses of their own forecasts full of supporting information.
So your geopolitical and maybe financial forecasts could be the theme of your blog, but then you would be free to write some posts about other subjects as they interest you. You obviously write very well. I'd be interested in reading your Substack.
To be honest, I'm worried that becoming basically a quantitative political pundit would be high risk and low reward. Even Nate Silver said that political forecasting is increasingly becoming a hostile environment and that he's been thinking about getting out and going back to more conventional gambling. But maybe that's where this path inevitably leads.
Always interested in revisiting pre-2022 Ukraine analysis that held up, given how much there was to be learned that year. Link?
It's in a few places on DSL. That was one of my first rationalist style bets and it was in a discussion about commodity prices iirc. Someone didn't believe me when I said that Ukraine was going to get invaded and this was going to affect the prices of oil/wheat/etc and lead to a large embargo on Russia. So they did the bet thing.
I didn't really explain why I thought it was going to happen there. Or really anywhere as far as I know. I've actually gotten a very negative reaction to that sort of analysis when I've shared it so I've been minimizing it.
Hm. I found some posts w.r.t. the grain deal mid 2023 that gestures at earlier commentary, though the in-built DSL search clearly has holes; I'll fire up my personal indexer later to take a closer look.
I did find this one though, from less than a year ago: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,10693.msg465646.html#msg465646
Can't say that it looks great from where we are now, though it does reflect the consensus earlier impression that Russia wouldn't continue pressuring Ukraine through early 2024. Do you stand by the prediction that Ukraine will not waive any territorial claims, nor potential membership in NATO or the EU?
I do not think Ukraine will legally waive its claims to the territory Russia occupies. This is distinct from saying they will regain all territory as the Korea analogy makes clear. I also do not think that Ukraine will agree to permanent neutrality or to Russia's demand they disarm their army or permanent Russian influence in their government Finland style. This also doesn't mean they will actually join NATO or that, as Trump has proposed, NATO might keep them out for some period of time. Those are references to a Russian peace treaty whose terms I think are not going to happen.
Also, those predictions are for the time period they were made in. What I predicted in fact came to pass that month and in the next few months. Ukraine put pressure on supply hubs and made some, if minimal, gains. In response to that, as I said, Russia had a choice to make. I don't think I predicted what that choice would be. But their actual choice was they increased conscription, increased sign up bonuses, and began importing foreign weaponry and mercenaries to create enough mass to overwhelm Avdiivka and begin grinding forward.
> This is distinct from saying they will regain all territory as the Korea analogy makes clear.
I'm not at all clear as to what "Koreanization" is supposed to mean, if it's supposed to contrast against Humphrey's "frozen conflict along roughly the current front lines" - I'm assuming you just meant diplomatically? But now you're contextualizing that in terms of territory... You seemed to be describing the Ukrainian negotiating position *in contrast* to what Russia would see as acceptable terms, which doesn't sound like a net prediction?
Prohibition against future alliances does seem like an irreconcilable position, potentially mediated by US promises of a veto against NATO membership.... but that doesn't go very far w.r.t. EU.
> Also, those predictions are for the time period they were made in. What I predicted in fact came to pass that month and in the next few months. Ukraine put pressure on supply hubs and made some, if minimal, gains.
I'm not going to tell you that's an obvious cop-out; without concrete criteria or stakes there's no point and no reward to litigating the details. I *will* say that if you think "some, if minimal, gains" describes Ukrainian front lines in 2024 you've added a degree of flexibility to territorial assessment such that I am no longer interested in your current interpretation of any un-linked earlier predictions.
> which doesn't sound like a net prediction?
The net claim is with regards to 2022 Russian vs Ukrainian peace terms. But also it's not a prediction to start with. You've found a post in a forum thread and are treating the comments as if they're operationalized bets.
> I'm not going to tell you that's an obvious cop-out;
Good. It's good when you avoid saying incorrect things and that would indeed be incorrect.
> I *will* say that if you think "some, if minimal, gains" describes Ukrainian front lines in 2024 you've added a degree of flexibility to territorial assessment such that I am no longer interested in your current interpretation of any un-linked earlier predictions.
Okay. The point of this thread is to get suggestions for a particular ability. If you don't believe I possess it then that's certainly your right. But you can't really contribute to what I'm after.
> The point of this thread is to get suggestions for a particular ability. If you don't believe I possess it then that's certainly your right. But you can't really contribute to what I'm after.
Likewise, the point of my response thread was to get new insights into an ongoing geopolitical situation. I don't think you can contribute to what I'm after, either. On the other hand it's definitely another notch towards the heuristic of "claims of successful prediction without citation are themselves a strong negative signal", so thanks I guess.
You're welcome. If you would like to actually test my predictions you are welcome to take the other side of a bet. Short of that, I'm taking you about as seriously as you seem to be taking me.
I'm interested in OSINT work where available, but professional obligations get in the way of substantive public geopolitical work where I would have an edge.
I'm seeing you vacillate between "those predictions are for the time period they were made in" to "it's not a prediction to start with" for what appears to be the same post's commentary - I'm asking what you *are* operationalizing ahead of time, and so far coming up empty. Did you predict a protracted conventional attritional war, with Russia taking Luhansk and parts of Zaporizhzhia but not Kherson or Kharkiv? A (flawed) search doesn't show any of those proper nouns in your DSL posting history prior to the war, so what does it mean to have 'successfully predicted the rough time and amount of territory taken'?
How stringently are you grading yourself, what fidelity of prediction are we talking here? If your edge is 'assume Russia has territorial ambitions and believe the US intelligence community when it starts screaming war is imminent' then that says very bounded things about the size of your edge. Nonzero, but the odd marginal win might be the limit.
I'm sorry, but no. I'm not vacillating. You're strawmanning. You do not get to dig up quotes from a thread I wasn't referencing and then treat those as if they were the predictions I was referring to. I do not claim everything I say or think is perfectly predictive. No one else is held to the standard and I will not be held to it.
My predictions are the things I actually put odds on and bet money on. I have specifically avoided doing that with battlefield level stuff because I don't feel I can predict that well. It's not the "same post" and your need to put words in my mouth betrays the fundamental weakness of your position here.
The standard, as I've said, is that I've made a decent sum of money and won several multi-year bets. My point is that a few hundred dollars seems inadequate to the value of that. But also I'm not clear on what proving that to you gets me. I'm genuinely uncertain about whether presenting myself as a public expert is worthwhile. If you want to help me figure that out I'd appreciate it.
Why does Elon Musk vouch for Putin? What is in it for him?
Why do people lie about Elon Musk? What's in it for them?
Some people will *always* hate the richest person in the world, only because of that fact.
Not typically as a conscious principle, but still, that's how human minds work sometimes.
Never heard that he does.
Elon has been an important supporter of Ukraine in the war by supplying tons of Starlink terminals, while banning it for the Russians.
Elon was an important supporter of Ukraine in the first six months of the war. Since then, SpaceX's provision of Starlink service to Ukraine has proceeded mostly on autopilot and I think with the USG calling the shots, while Elon does not seem to have actively supported Ukraine.
Elon made the mistake of saying that, despite the successes of the Autumn '22 offensive, Ukraine was highly unlikely to ever recover Crimea and the easternmost parts of the Donbass, that aggressively pursuing that goal would risk nuclear war, and that Ukraine should be pursuing a cease-fire that includes e.g. ceding Crimea to Russia, This appears to also be the position of much of the US national security apparatus under the Biden administration, it is an IMHO wrong but defensible position, and it wasn't wrong of Elon to express it. But he expressed it on *Twitter*, with all the care and nuance that platform is known for.
Many Ukrainian commenters, including I believe Zelenskyy, responded in an equally intemperate manner, telling Elon to basically shut up and go home because he was obviously not a True Ukrainian Patriot. Elon isn't very good about shutting up, but he did go home and while he didn't pull the plug on the Starlink terminals he had already delivered (or that the Pentagon would pay him fore in the future), I haven't seen him say or do anything that would constitute active support for Ukraine since.
I also haven't seen him do anything that I would categorize as "vouching for Putin". I think he's mostly waiting for the Ukrainians to apologize (they won't), or to be proven right by Ukraine being forced to accept a peace deal with no Crimea (definitely possible). And I can easily see him as taking Trump's offer of a seat at the table when peace deals are discussed with Ukraine and/or Russia, to this end.
I can also easily see him becoming a Putin supporter, particularly if Trump takes that path as well. But I don't think he's gone there yet.
IIRC he got a lot of flak for cutting off Starlink access to Ukraine in Crimea, which the Ukrainian army wanted because they were launching attacks there.
He didn't cut anything off but instead declined extending service to Crimea. The official US military aid is also heavily geofenced so what Musk did actually aligned with broader US policy.
It's not just "aligned with broader US policy." To do otherwise would have been in violation of US LAW: sanctions forbade him from extending service to Crimea.
I'm skeptical that providing service to the Ukrainian military in occupied Ukrainian territory would itself be breaking this law, but even if that's true on paper I'm even more skeptical that the federal government can't somehow ensure he's not punishable for this.
I don't think the law carved out such an explicit exemption. Sure, simply explicitly ordering the action would probably have done it.
Do you have examples of Elon vouching for Putin?
I will also note that Trump has a very visible habit of talking poorly of allies and highly of enemies, but I'm not sure to what extent that bleeds into action.
It is arguable that flattering enemies is a good negotiation tactic while deals are possible - or at least that demeaning people you hope to deal with will not be effective. Having a reputation for being unpredictable/crazy can also be a good strategy assuming it does not impact your actions, see North Korea.
The strangest one is cutting off access to Starlink for a Ukraine military operation. Musk compared it Pearl to Harbor. It’s odd that a military action taken in the middle of a war is compared to an action that was taken against a nation that was not at war.
US sanctions made it illegal for him to extend service to Crimea.
I agree. I never understand the criticism that Trump supports dictators simply because he doesn’t insult them publicly. What’s more likely to yield good results: a dialogue based on, at least publicly, mutual respect, or disparaging someone with whom you inevitably have to negotiate?
I think people say this more based on his talk of "love letters" with Kim Jong Un, or that time he said he was going to work with Putin to create a joint cyber security task force to protect elections.
The problem is not that Trump doesn’t insult them, it is that Trump seems to admire them and he seems to overestimate his personal ability to negotiate with them. In all likelihood Putin and Xi are much better at manipulating Trump than vice versa. But I hope I am wrong and this doesn’t have that much practical significance.
Trump is so 'unorthodox'—to put it kindly—that who knows what he’s really thinking? My impression is that he’s a compulsive talker, and since words don’t cost him anything, he tends to exaggerate. Despite his public persona, I think he’s actually open to advice and willing to delegate to people he trusts. Even with all the controversy in his first term, Tim Cook managed to get along with him, and Apple wasn’t hit with tariffs. I assume that 90% of what he says, to the extent that he’s serious, is just his opening bid. We’ll see...
Hispanic males moved towards Trump this election. How much is the x in LatinX to blame for this.
It's not the problem, but it's a symptom of the problem.
I see the LatinX thing as part of the out of touch and self righteous “virtues” that are being pushed on constituents. This sort of signaling is pushing working class voters away, including Latinos.
It’s interesting that democrats have not been self critical of identity politics post election. They seem to be doubling down on republican voters being misinformed. Doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.
Directly, probably not much.
Indirectly, probably a lot. It's pretty hard to reach out to Hispanic men if your advertising team keeps referring to them as LatinX in all their inter-office communications.
Like, remember that cringey "Men for Kamala" ad? This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk4ueY9wVtA.
A team of smart, capable consultants put that together to help Kamala appeal to men. Everyone just kinda pointed, laughed, and moved on. I'm not sure what makes a campaign team drop an ad like that, which was actively counter-productive, but it probably rhymes with LatinX.
Fact check: This ad was satire, and not created by the Harris campaign.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/man-enough-ad-was-not-created-by-harris-2024-campaign-2024-10-30/
Glad to learn it was not an official ad, but I do wonder how much "no I meant it as a parody" is the truth and how much is reaction to 'everyone thought this was dumb'.
So what about the "women refusing to date a guy for not voting" ad? Was that also a parody/satire one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUjqqZ7WLw
Blocked and reported.
No, it was not officially created by the Harris campaign, it was created by "Creatives for Harris", a group that describes themselves as:
"Explore how creatives are uniting to back the Harris-Walz 2024 campaign, leveraging their talents to support Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s vision for the future of America."
on their own website.
Who also has a substack and wrote about the specific video here:
https://jacobreed.substack.com/p/jacob-all-trades-336
and it does not sound like satire, including such choice bits as:
"I think this resonates with people because it’s a view of masculinity we see in our lives but is rarely reflected in the media — especially when some of the loudest voices on the subject are the most insecure and bombastic. Our friends, family, and neighbors are complex men. They can change a tire and enjoy a romcom; chug a beer and run to the store to get tampons for their wives and daughters — the strongest men are the most secure in their masculinity. With the rise of role models like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff on the national stage, I think the left is finally finding its footing on how to talk about masculinity"
And this is not, like, some deep insight I had. This is literally just me clicking on the links in the Reuters article. This is bad and you should feel bad.
I still cannot believe that was an actual genuine honest-to-God Democratic Party Kamala Harris Vote For Me For President campaign ad. It even *looks* like a parody.
Our satirical comedy programme years back did a much more convincing political ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLA-4zZM0cI
And what? There was a ban about reading "Little Women"? When did that happen?
It wasn't an official campaign ad, it was satire. It even says in the ad that it's not sponsored by any candidate.
I just watched it for the first time. That's surely a parody.
https://www.marcelroman.com/pdfs/wps/latinx_project.pdf
That’s an excellent link. Thanks.
My pleasure!
The more data I see from swing voters, the more you learn that swing voters have extremely weird ideas about the world. The 'latinx' thing is something that I think animates the very online (on both sides) and it's a mistake to project that to the world at large.
That's not to say it isn't genuinely unpopular, and emblematic of a certain mindset among the overly educate. Just that I think it provides little actual illumination relative to bread and butter issues.
Despite having read this term constantly, I can’t say that I can ever remember hearing any actual person ever use the term in an actual conversation. As such, I have had to create my own pronunciation. I always read it in my mind as “La Tinks.” God that sounds silly.
I am aware that this is not how anyone actually does pronounce it if they were ever to actually use the term. Just saying….
In academia where I am, it was extremely popular but has been fading a bit over the past few years as people realize it's unwanted. The common pronunciation is "Latin X".
I quietly think "Latinx" should be pronounced like "LaTeX", which is to say, with no "s" sound at the end.
I can't imagine that this is anywhere near as big a deal as people make it out to be. Yes, it's a stupid word. Yes, it's come to symbolize a whole form of stupidity that people don't like, and it's a great symbol. But surely it is just a symbol rather than this particular thing turning off an entire race of people with lots of other material interests and demands.
Even the really far left Latinas I know in academia got pretty irritated when they heard or were referred to as Latinx. I think it's probably on a similar level of irritating as being intentionally misgendered.
With regards to voting habits, I think it's less clear but still likely contributed. I'm not sure on the crosstabs of latinos and Latinx specifically rather than cultural issues generally, but this poll has been circulating and I think it does a reasonably-good job at getting into the details https://blueprint2024.com/polling/why-trump-reasons-11-8/ . The particular cell I'd refer to is "Latino voters" and "Kamala Harris is more focused on cultural issues...". Clearly, they care less about cultural issues than most demographics, but it's still a significant factor in their decision making.
Sure. I was posting largely tongue in cheek.
I believe that the main reason was economic - which is really about prices and not present day inflation. That is, saying inflation has been curbed is not helping people who still see prices as being higher than a few years ago. It’s the economy stupid. Which is good news for democrats because Trump is likely to do worse if his full campaign pledge is adhered to. However he’s a lucky guy - people who don’t care about politics probably see the Trump era as a time of greater property, and credit him.
Still although not material to the outcome, the x in LatinX, is redolent of a tin eared Democratic/progressive elite not really caring about how things are perceived outside their own bubble.
I think it's a mistake to dismiss any factor though. A hundred factors push on either side of the mind of a swinging or marginal voter, and there's millions of individual idiosyncratic voters whose votes are in play.
The Democrats seem to be settling on "it was the economy" as their ego-salving explanation for why they lost, to avoid any actual soul-searching about their policies and their messaging. But I think that's a big mistake for them.
Even a belated "it was the economy" should result in a *LOT* of soul searching at this point. How many journalists, politicians, and pundits were happy to talk about how great the economy was until like 10 minutes ago?
That said, I think we need to consider Harris' campaign to see what the Democrats are realizing. Did you see anything anti-gun at all from her? I saw her talking about her Glock and Tim Walz out shooting a bunch. Did you see them talking about trans issues? LGBT? Maybe they were wrong, but it seems the leadership at least seemed to notice that they were losing normies and tracking hard to the right on a lot of issues. Maybe she was overcompensating for how far left she was in 2019, but it seems like even more than that.
It's true, I didn't see anything anti-gun, or pro-transsexualism from her.
But on the other hand I didn't see much policy positioning from her at all. Pro abortion, pro not being Donald Trump, and that's about it.
Agreed, she seems to have intentionally dodged policy. But when policy came up, or there were opportunities to talk about things, she talked about right-coded goals. Democrats across the board swung *hard* right about immigration.
Agreed again that abortion seems to be her one actually Democrat policy that she stuck with and talked about. Maybe there were other minor items, but they certainly didn't stand out.
I can't rule out the possibility here that it was a hastily assembled campaign necessitated by the original candidate's increasingly undeniable frailty. They didn't have a platform other than "sharp as a tack and not Trump", which flipped into "okay, okay, not sharp, but THIS one is sharp as a tack and still not Trump" and they couldn't shake the fact that they were hiding the first person's health, and the second person was maybe not all that sharp in other ways.
They weren't fatal flaws unless they never planned for this, and it looks to me like they indeed never planned for this. All the no-anti-gun, pro-trans, etc. stuff was the result of a brainstorming session with no pre-existing fundamentals to rest on.
Maybe, but that seems even worse for the Democrats here. With no time to prepare, their base instinct when hurried is to track very hard to the right on almost all issues? That seems...odd?
It reads to me that the Democrats had some internal polling or other source of information that showed they were looking bad on most signature issues other than abortion. Maybe it wasn't correct information, but they seemed to believe it quite strongly. (As a side note, AOC of all people just took the pronouns off of her X account - post election).
The point I'm making here is that I think they were flailing. They tacked right; they could have tacked left if we ran the simulation again. You're claiming some internal poll may have driven it; I'm saying, yeah, that might've been it, and that internal poll could have gone another way due to the sample being biased, they phrased the questions a certain way, etc.
By saying this, I'm also implying that the take-home lesson here is "try not to switch horses midstream". And also "if your horse is literally dying under you, well, sure, switch horses, try your best, but expect to lose, and look at your next horse that much more carefully".
Sure, I can agree with all of that.
Re shoplifting, and specifically re California, of possible relevance is the fact that petty theft with a prior theft conviction that led to a jail or prison sentence is a "wobbler" -- i.e., it can be charged as either a felony or as a misdemeanor at the discretion of the prosecutor.
So...the same class of crime as writing a check from the wrong bank account?
What are you talking about?
Trump was convicted of 34 "felonies" which could have been tried as misdemeanors.
I guess I don't understand why you are talking about that in a thread re shoplifting.
However, the crime in question is not a wobbler, but rather a class E felony. It is falsifying records with a particular intent. It "could" have been charged as a misdemeanor if the DA ignored the intent, but only in the sense that the DA "could" charge me with misdemeanor simple assault if I push you into traffic, if he wants to ignore that I intended to kill you.
Thanks to Scott for the platform.
Five new post this week: Posting is therapy. 😊
gambling-away-stability
Is a long time concern of mine and a strange one. I since this is an issue on which “elite” opinion is generally negative, but it happens anyway
COP 29 is coming up and that generated a lot of conventional commentary that I totally disagree with. Those provoked
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-politics-in-the-nyt
and
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-29-and-trump
I think I saw a bit of dip in subscription because of these two and maybe from Climate Snark from the NYT as well. https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-snark-from-the-nyt
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/power-decarbonization-and-lng-exports
is a job market paper of a Harvard PhD that strongly supports my aversion to blocking fossil fuel production and transpiration projects in the US as a way of reducing global CO2 emissions. I have claimed they reduce emissions at high cost. The paper claims US LNG exports _reduce_ emissions.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/gambling-away-stability is me being Puritan Paternalisitic about gambling.
And Of course I couldn’t leave the election results un commented
Harris’s Missing Voters, https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/harriss-missing-voters
This time it turns out to be oddly on-topic. Compare:
"Thanks to Scott for the platform."
"Thanks to CVS for the 300 free tubes of toothpaste."
Put a sock in it, mate. By this point, those who want to read your Substack are doing so, and you're just annoying the rest.
Ban this guy.
He's ignored gentle generalized suggestions that people not advertise their blogs too often, gentle personalized suggestions that he is advertising his blog too often, less-gentle personalized requests to stop spamming, and now he's posting "read my blog" in the comments of the thread where you explicitly asked people not to post "read my blog." Throughout that process, I have never seen him engage in any way with any of the people asking him to tone it down.
He has used up the charity he is owed and should be treated like a spammer.
Please don't post any further links to your blog on open threads.
I'm pretty sure this guy does not revisit after he posts one of his MANY blog plugs, and has not read people's complaints and will not see yours. He's a cuckoo who lays his eggs in other people's nests, flies off, and never returns.
> He's a cuckoo who lays his eggs in other people's nests, flies off, and never returns.
Well, AKSHUALLY, there are some sub-species of cuckoos that stay around and help protect the nest against predators.
Ouch. :-)
>He's a cuckoo who lays his eggs in other people's nests, flies off, and never returns.
Love the image! Many Thanks!
I came here to say he "posts and ghosts," but prefer the mental image you conjured of him landing in Scott's ACX nest, squatting, plopping out several links, and then flapping off. "SQUAAAWWWKKK!"
Something I'd like someone who knows more about polling than I do to comment on is ... it appears that the pollsters do NOT take into account correlations between various states when making their predictions about who wins and the odds of them doing so.
This seems ... obviously wrong?
I wrote a short piece for myself about this after the 2016 election and the basic point seems to hold up for 2020 and 2024.
https://mistybeach.com/mark/math/CorrelationsAreReal.html
Am I missing something obvious about the polling?
I think you mean prediction modelers, not pollsters. And it is my understanding that they do take correlations into account. Certainly Nate Silver does.
Pollsters don't generally make predictions and estimate odds. Pundits do on the basis of polls. And they do account for correlations between states. See e.g. https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1848060370268938538.
What are/were the best arguments against same-sex marriage? Now the debate has cooled off a little, I want to go back and look through them.
(Also, sorry for plugging my substack here in the past — I didn’t know that wasn’t the convention!)
The substack plug warning is mostly in response to a single bad actor, Thomas L. Hutcheson, rather than the vast majority of people who make open threads a vibrant community. IMO you've accompanied it in the past with enough discussion/context that it's well within bounds, though maybe(?) more frequently than Scott prefers.
The only anti-SSM people I respected were the ones who said “it goes against my religion”, at least they had a coherent argument, whereas the secular arguments all felt like post hoc justifications.
https://web.archive.org/web/20051211145545/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
https://discussingmarriage.org/ has a decent list.
The state endorsing a certain form of family structure made such structures the default. Otherwise low-agency people felt social pressure to form male-female monogamous pair bonds, and thus became more likely to have children.
I don’t think that same-sex marriage is the main, or even a major cause of the fertility crisis, but it looks to me like society as a whole got rid of too many little social pressures for people to form families.
I think the best one is just leave marriage to the religious and let everyone else do civil unions with the same recognition / benefits by the government.
Except suggestions for civil unions/domestic partnerships etc. were explicitly rejected by the pro-same sex marriage activists. The entire point, even where governments introduced "and straight people can enter into domestic partnerships instead of marriages too", was to get parity with conventional society, to mainstream same-sex relationships, and breaking down the barrier around marriage was a huge part of it.
I don't know if you remember all the "love is love" glurge about "we only want the same right to find someone and fall in love and spend our lives with them" and the heavy implication that if this campaign failed, all the gay and lesbian people out there would be condemned to loveless, sexless lives alone with nobody (I rolled my eyes at that because er, gay men would never ever have sex again? and weren't having it now? because they couldn't propose to a fiancé and get married? pull the other leg, it's got bells on).
I was inclined to shrug about civil marriage because straight people have pretty much chopped down the tree on that over the decades, but the idiocy of the campaigns annoyed me to the extent that I voted "no" in our referendum. Didn't change anything, of course, and now "marriage" is just "I want a big day out", coupled with "I insist the state *does* get involved in private relationships because if I fall out with my One True Love, I want to go to court and make sure the bastard/bitch loses every penny they have and I can't do that unless there's laws and there can't be laws without the government", but that's modern love.
I think the idea was to get the state out of the "marriage" business, even with heterosexual couples? Legally, it'd all be civil unions, and I suppose common-law civil unions. And if particular religions wanted to keep doing a sacrament they call "marriage", they can do that too, but it has no direct connection to the legal status of "civil union".
I admit, back more than a couple decades ago, I rather liked the idea, but in retrospect mostly as a Solomonic solution that was entirely fair and gave no one what they actually wanted.
I believe the evidence is that marriage is a lindy institution for raising children well, because we know kids grow up best in 2-parent households (jurys out on 3+ for this audience), and the government involvement laws is to enforce a more secure "contract" that sticking together to raise the kids well will be adhered to. Same-sex couples can have kids (by other means), which means society needs that contract mechanism too. I understand that maybe even significant SSM advocates were/are against civil unions. That's a mistake the too-progressive-left makes (constantly sabotaging good middle of the road politics), but it's not my position. Not sure how prevalent.
They were initially only favored by the most progressive people, and only later considered not good enough. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-two-kinds-of-progressives
I remember the argument being more "we don't want to fill out seventy forms to ensure my partner can be on my health insurance/have my stuff if I die/have custody of my kids if I die/etc...
If you were heterosexual, it was pretty easy to guarantee all of this stuff, if you were homosexual, your rights varied state by state and their was never any real parity between the rights of marriage and the rights of domestic partnership. It was possibly over-exaggerated in the media, but this was why a recurring TV Plot on every major medical and legal TV drama for like, ten years prior to marriage equality was "my partner is in the hospital in a coma and their homophobic parents won't let me talk to them or our kids."
The institution of marriage exists to formalize the obligation of a father to stay around and help raising his children. This obviously doesn't apply to same-sex couples.
(I don't mean to agree or disagree with the argument personally, just mentioning it)
It also doesn't apply to the infertile, but nobody seems to object to their marrying?
Well yeah obviously, they're a lost cause.
I think it exists to declare that the children are in fact his, since uncertainty is asymmetric between fathers & mothers. Even if the father doesn't "help raise his children", they can still inherit his property/titles.
Porque no los dos?
The institution of marriage is an extremely useful piece of social machinery, to the point where it was invented in most human cultures throughout the globe. It does two things: formally making the mother a part of the father's family (which comes with security, protection, and support while ensuring the father sticks around, and if he doesn't his parents will) and formalizing the woman's obligation not to sleep around, which ensures that her children actually belong to his family.
The "marriage" in question is not an action of individuals, but of the public. That is, "marriage" in context conceptually means the public recognizing the legitimacy of a particular union. It's therefore outside the scope of individual liberty; if anything, it runs against it. Individual liberty would point to individuals' rights to perform certain acts - but that's not in question with the debate of gay marriage, since marriage isn't an act. Instead, inasmuch as coercion / liberty are at play, it's the public who are "coerced" into recognizing the legitimacy of a particular union, as that's roughly the conceptual definition of marriage, with its legal incarnation having grown out of its religious / social incarnations.
Admittedly, by extension, *all marriage* - gay or not, infringe on the public's "liberty" since they too establish a particular society wide recognized union without the action of the public. This relationship between marriage as individual act, and as a societal act, with the implicit need to consent by the latter, is highlighted by the historic statement that if anyone has basis to oppose the legitimacy of the marriage, they could speak then or forever hold their peace.
With that basic framework of marriage in place, establishing that gay marriage, and indeed marriage in general, isn't conceptually a matter of individual liberty, but of is inherently one of social public recognition, we can then consider how it ought to apply to gay marriage.
It could certainly be argued that while society doesn't individually approve of marriages, it does attach its approval broadly to the convention of marriage. Including gay marriage in that would be debatable, as the near universal tacit approval of the general establishment of heterosexual marriage doesn't apply to it. On the other hand, one could argue that it still maintains a sufficient degree of approval and recognizing it isn't much worse than recognizing individual heterosexual unions without a provision for public protest.
Regardless, it certainly highlights the evolved role that marriage has taken, as a preexisting social institution that was then formally recognized in its modern legal form. One can certainly question the role to which government should be involved in this conceptually social institution, turning it into a legal one with legal ramifications.
The legal ramifications are certainly debatable as far as both homosexual and heterosexual unions. Should 2 people be entitled to file a joint tax-return? Should 3 people? Must they be related? Those are fundamentally tax-policy questions that can be considered independently of "gay marriage." The same goes for other legal ramifications of marriage.
This drove a lot of the proposal for civil unions - a secular form of marriage intended to encode the commitment the state would make to such institutions. Such unions could be created on any basis agreed upon by the participants, including gay couples, polycules, or even people who wanted to consolidate their financial status, and the state would commit to protecting rights such as tax breaks, estate settlement, hospital visitation, and so on. Whether other people recognized it, celebrated it, gave gifts, etc. could then be their right, since it was strictly out of the state's purview to enforce whether anyone liked it.
To this day, the rejection of civil unions is a major factor in why I lost faith in the SSM movement, despite having no personal problem with such marriages.
I don't believe that "nobody will ever ask for three people in a marriage" because what is so sacred about the number? We've already said "scrap the traditions about men marry women, the sex/gender of the parties doesn't matter a damn, it's all about Feelings", so why stand on a hill shouting "but the sacredness of the number two shall never be violated!" If three people really love each other, why not allow a polygamous marriage the same way we allowed two same-sex people who really love each other to overthrow the definition of marriage from centuries?
I unironically agree with this suggestion, but I think there's probably some logistical questions to resolve. How do you handle insurance? Joint property? Who makes decisions if one of the three spouses is unconscious in a hospital?
I think there's a reasonable argument that if a polycule wants badly enough to be a polycule, the members will quickly figure out how to make decisions among themselves. The state has an interest in knowing what their policy is going to be, so that the state can enforce it if it has to. And if that polycule was lazy and didn't bother, the state has an interest in developing a default policy and if that polycule doesn't like it, it can put up with it and either register a preferred policy for later or decide it didn't want a polycule that badly after all.
If the question is what the default policy will be, I'd look to how estates are settled if there's no will.
>I think there's probably some logistical questions to resolve. How do you handle insurance? ...
Agreed, but I think the problem is more severe than you suggest. I would be surprised if _any_ law that currently applies to married couples generalizes smoothly and without dispute to polycules.
Amen to that.
As a programmer, I'm reflexively opposed to defining two identical structures that are intended to do the same thing but with different names. Every time you update laws related to marriage, you also need to update laws affecting civil unions in lockstep. If legislators fail to do this, by accident or malice, it becomes a political football - "oh, you want to give gay people a tax break?"
(Also, not all gay marriages are purely civil ceremonies. If you go to church, get married, and the government says "okay, I've recorded you as civil-unioned," then that kinda feels like the government has an opinion on which religious marriages count, no?)
Church marriages being recognised by the state is one of those little bits of complicated law. It's not the religious ceremony as such that is being recognised, it's the recording of the ceremony afterwards (going into the sacristy to sign the register):
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/birth-family-relationships/getting-married/religious-and-secular-marriage-ceremonies/
"Registering the marriage
How you register your marriage depends on the type of ceremony you have. If you marry in a religious or secular ceremony, immediately after the marriage ceremony, the Marriage Registration Form (MRF) should be signed by you and your spouse, the 2 witnesses and the person who has solemnised the marriage. You should return the MRF within one month to a registrar for the marriage to be registered. It does not have to be returned to the registrar who issued it. Some Civil Registration Services have a walk-in service. You need to phone and book an appointment for others. You will not be able to get your marriage certificate until you return the MRF to a registrar and the marriage is civilly registered."
Well, that's Ireland anyway. I'm not sure how America works, but I imagine much the same for the same reasons; churches generally keep records and it's easier to fold these into "okay now you are recognised as an official who can solemnise a marriage" with civil/secular society, than to make people have to go through two separate ceremonies, particularly when often churches pre-existed the civil authorities in a region.
https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic-social/crvs/documents/IIVRS_papers/IIVRS_paper8.pdf
In Ohio, we first went to the clerk of courts before the ceremony to fill out the paperwork and get a marriage certificate, then the rabbi filled out the certificate and sent it in after performing the ceremony. So yeah, pretty similar.
>it's easier to fold these into "okay now you are recognised as an official who can solemnise a marriage" with civil/secular society, than to make people have to go through two separate ceremonies, particularly when often churches pre-existed the civil authorities in a region.
That's kind of my point - if a church (or other religious institution) is okay with solemnizing gay marriages, the state is okay with gay marriage, and the state is okay with recognizing church marriages rather than creating its own legal infrastructure to save people trouble, then why should the state then go on to say "...but if it's a gay marriage, we *are* going to create a separate-but-equal legal construct instead of using the label the church gave us"?
If the state is okay with whatever a church wants to call a marriage, then yes, all the state has to do is add a little paperwork to the church ceremony a la MRF or marriage license or whatever.
If it's a gay marriage, that makes no difference; presumably whichever church or temple or living room the gay couple chose to get married in, is willing to call it a marriage, and the state gets its paperwork and it's settled.
The only reason the state would call it a "civil union" is to reinforce the idea that whatever it is, might not be what various established religions want to call a "marriage", and there turn out to be a lot of them and they mostly agree on what a marriage is and it'd be impractical for the state to insist on calling it a marriage and poke most world religions in the eye when it could just say "civil union" and move on.
And yes, this would poke a few UUs and atheists and Episcopalians in the eye instead, but the truth is that they're a minority in a dispute in which each side wants to impose a view of some institution on the other, and the state can't force either side to *believe* that the other side's notion of what a marriage is is the One True Notion. Instead, it just says "civil union" and waggles its fingers in all the religions' faces a little.
They wouldn't be identical structures. Civil unions would be whatever the state has purview over. Marriages would be whatever the entrants' religion or community think appropriate. Think of it as filing with a local court to receive a civil union license (and be on record now as having special status for tax purposes, etc.), and then going to a church or synagogue or temple or community center or your best friend's house and having a ceremony with gifts and well wishers and so on. The person performing the ceremony can and would call it a marriage. Anyone who disapproves would presumably not be there.
There's no law to keep in lockstep. The law would worry explicitly and only about secular matters. The religion (if it exists) worries about whatever ecclesiastical matters normally concern it.
To carry your programming analogy, it'd be two separate class instances (one of Marriage, one of CivilUnion) that encode different sets of associations between two (or more) instances of Person. Today, two people can be associated in multiple ways; I could be someone's colleague at work, and also their tennis partner; we wouldn't insist that all be encapsulated in one object separate from WorkingRelationship and TennisPartnership.
In that case, heterosexual marriages would also have to be implemented as civil unions.
Which would be perfectly reasonable to me, but I don't recall anyone campaigning for that when gay marriage was a live issue - I mostly remember people suggesting civil unions as a separate-but-equal expansion of marriage privileges.
I presume that "the government stops recognizing your marriages and replaces them with civil unions" would have been distasteful to straight couples for exactly the same reason that "the government doesn't recognize your marriage and gives you a civil union instead" was distasteful to gay couples.
"I don't recall anyone campaigning for [ heterosexual marriages being civil unions ] when gay marriage was a live issue" - there were such people.
(I'm honestly not sure why you're having so much trouble with this, and I'm guessing you somehow just didn't get exposed to the ontology the way I was, and I shouldn't assume the message spread as far as I thought.)
Another way to look at civil unions - which would still be inaccurate but maybe helpful - is as a superset of all personal relations that at least one religion or analogous institution would declare to be a "marriage". Christian marriages, Muslim marriages, UU marriages, common-law marriages; all of these would be civil unions.
The reason it's still inaccurate is because the state probably doesn't want to be forced to call any ol' thing a civil union just because some weird group of a dozen people got together and founded their own religion and wanted to slap the "marriage" label on something the state couldn't work with. (The state *does* have an interest here - it needs to know who should get someone's stuff if they die, for example.) So, "civil union" = "the secular facet of a type of relationship that the state has to enforce", as opposed to the nonsecular facet involving whether God is smiling or not, and the social facet governing whether the neighbors are inviting y'all to couples game night or whatever.
Marriages in established present-day religions are easy for the state to handle for historical reasons, so straight marriages hardly notice any change; the marriage license just stops saying "marriage", but means the same thing as far as the state is concerned. Gay marriages, which are mostly based on the Christian template, get in easily too. In general, if it's a couple, then the law will tend to fit pretty intuitively; things only get more complicated for polys.
I'm sure there were people who wanted the state to approve of marriages the same way God does, but that's a tradeoff I alluded to earlier, that runs both ways. Straight couples can either have a -ship with a religious and a secular facet, or a combined thing that pretends to be one piece but really isn't. Gay couples can either have a thing with two facets where one facet approves, and the other doesn't care, or a one-piece institution that is *wholly* agnostic.
>Marriages in established present-day religions are easy for the state to handle for historical reasons, so straight marriages hardly notice any change; the marriage license just stops saying "marriage"
Okay, now I'm really confused by your statement that you "lost faith in the SSM movement" over this because it sounds like the system you support is *literally identical* to the current process for gay or straight marriage, except for two words on the marriage license.
"We want gay marriage, not civil unions," as far as I'm aware, meant "we want the exact same institution straight people get, not a separate-but-equal one." This setup you're proposing is exactly that.
It's not. The *civil union* is identical to marriage *as far as the state is concerned*; it's *separate* from marriage as far as people are concerned, *because there exist people who necessarily distinguish two people sharing resources, filing status, etc. from two people bonded in a way that their religion specially recognizes*.
You might not recognize that religious recognition. I might not either. But there are people who do, they take it seriously, and it's bad manners for the rest of us to casually dismiss it, and writing the law to conflate the two as if there was never anything to conflate very much falls in the category of casual dismissal.
One way to avoid doing that is to formally recognize that distinction by referring to each separately. A civil union is different from a Christian marriage is different from a Muslim marriage is different from a Buddhist marriage is different from a Scientologist marriage. Then, later, if the Christians, Muslims, and Scientologists, say, all want to get together with their authorities and say "our marriages look close enough; let's agree that if any of God, Allah, or Xenu smiles upon it, so do the other two", that's a matter between those three, rather than Franklin McCongresscritter wobbling over and decreeing they're all the same, or even saying "marriage in all its forms is a state institution now" as if God, Allah, and Xenu are all trivial nonconcerns.
See what I'm saying?
>In that case, heterosexual marriages would also have to be implemented as civil unions.
>Which would be perfectly reasonable to me, but I don't recall anyone campaigning for that
I think there was some libertarian support for this. ( I also thought it reasonable. ) But, since libertarians are a rounding error in USA politics...
+1 to this. If marriage is an explicitly religious thing, then it doesn't require mention in the law. Just from the practicality of stripping away equivalent rights sometime in the future, it's rational for proponents of gay marriage to insist on marriage over civil union.
I'm also unsure to which extent the "civil union solution" was actually, for real proposed as a compromise, with equivalence to marriage in all domains, as opposed to just being a rhetorical trick.
Historically, it was probably sensible to view marriage as both religious and lawful, since most societies combined religion and law. Separation of religion and law was a new thing, largely post-Enlightenment, and when people were first adapting to it, the big religions still mostly agreed on what a marriage was. Challenging the essence of marriage itself is much more ambitious, sort of like a free market advocate getting commodities working before attacking the idea of public roads.
I do know that civil unions were criticized as a trick at the time, but every critic I ever ran across was obviously pro-SSM, meaning the criticism was just as likely to be a trick in the other direction.
Probably that shifting the definition of marriage away from family formation towards loving pair bonding would have significant negative cultural effects that would impede the state's legitimate interest in family formation.
You could do a lot worse than the transcripts and briefs of Obergefel v Hodges:
https://interglacial.com/obergefell/transcript.html
Eg:
"
MR. BURSCH:
Our answer number one is that the marriage institution did not develop to deny dignity or to give second class status to anyone. It developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, arise from biology.
Now, imagine a world today where we had no marriage at all. Men and women would still be getting together and creating children, but they wouldn't be attached to each other in any social institution.
Now, the -- the marriage view on the other side here is that marriage is all about love and commitment. And as a society, we can agree that that's important, but the State doesn't have any interest in that. If we're trying to solve that social problem I just described, where there's no marriage, we wouldn't solve it by saying, well, let's have people identify who they are emotionally committed to and recognize those relationships.
JUSTICE KAGAN:
Mr. Bursch, I -- I understand that argument. It's the principal argument that you make in -- in your briefs, that same-sex marriage doesn't advance this State interest in regulating procreation.
Let's just assume for the moment that that's so. Obviously, same-sex partners cannot procreate themselves. But is there -- in addition to that, are you saying that recognizing same-sex marriage will impinge upon that State interest, will harm that State interest in regulating procreation through marriage?
MR. BURSCH:
We are saying that, Your Honor.
Now, obviously, under a rational basis, that's not a question that you need to decide, but -- but even leaving that aside --
JUSTICE GINSBURG:
How could that -- how could that be, because all of the incentives, all of the benefits that marriage affords would still be available. So you're not taking away anything from heterosexual couples. They would have the very same incentive to marry, all the benefits that come with marriage that they do now.
MR. BURSCH:
Justice Kagan and Justice Ginsburg, it has to do with the societal understanding of what marriage means. This is a much bigger idea than any particular couple and what a marriage might mean to them or to their children. And when you change the definition of marriage to delink the idea that we're binding children with their biological mom and dad, that has consequences.
"
I will say, a lot of these arguments read very differently in light of recent fertility and romantic declines. It's also weird because, from memory, you can see the underlying philosophical arguments and then how they get twisted to conform to the specific legal arguments before the court.
I would say the best argument is that marriage is, first and foremost, a religious ceremony, which the government should never have gotten involved with in the first place. Remember - the federal government only got involved in marriage because people hated the Mormons.
If marriage is a religious ceremony, what business does the state have in poking its nose into the covenants of marriage? In modern culture, marriage as a religious ceremony seems to be a peculiarly Christian idea (although in Israel, it's a religious ceremony that's only open to Jews). The Romans viewed marriage as a civil contract that created certain legal obligations between the couple. Heck, I think it was also a civil contract under Sumerian laws. Once Protestantism started to gain traction against Catholicism, marriage began to be viewed as a civil ceremony and not a religious ceremony—at least among some denominations. Martin Luther argued that marriage was a "worldly thing" and should fall under the purview of the state, not the church.
The Romans had several degrees of marriage, and the most formal was more of the nature of a religious rite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confarreatio
You are right that other, more liberal, forms became popular. And the state poked its nose in when the birth rates started falling:
"During the Republican era, marriage, divorce and adultery were matters dealt with by the families concerned. Falling marriage and birth rates in the Later Republic and early Empire led to state intervention. Adultery was made a crime, for which citizen-women could be punished by divorce, fines and demotion in social status; men's sexual activity was adultery only if committed with a married citizen-woman. Families were also offered financial incentives to have as many children as possible. Both interventions had minimal effect."
Luther pushed marriage from its status as a sacrament, because Sola Scriptura led him to the understanding that there were only two sacraments (baptism and the Lord's Supper), but he retained a high view of marriage and even prioritised it over the former celibate religious life. Marriage was now just as much a vocation as the religious life, and it was the vocation of the laity - he was just as disapproving of women remaining unmarried as lay women as he was of nuns, priests and brothers being unmarried. A man's vocation was to be a husband and father, a woman's vocation was to be a wife and mother.
EDIT: The state got involved because human nature is human nature. When people were conducting private marriages, there were lots of "you say I married you? prove it!" where a women with or without children was trying to claim that Joe was her husband. Or maybe Jack and Jill got married, had kids, broke up, took up with new partners, etc. Without a welfare system (apart from public charity or the workhouse or the likes), you have "oh no women and babies are dying of starvation in the streets, having been seduced and abandoned by cads and rotters" hard cases.
So eventually the state got dragged into "okay, can Jack and Jill get married? were they married before? are they married now? is Jack responsible for paying to support his kids? who records all this? who keeps records of all this? if Jack runs off with that trollop Sally, who does Jill turn to for recourse?"
> (although in Israel, it's a religious ceremony that's only open to Jews)
This is completely false.
Google may be wrong, but this is what is says...
"Israeli marriage laws are based on religious law and have several restrictions, including:
1. Only religious leaders can perform marriages in Israel.
2. Same-sex and interfaith marriages not permitted: Same-sex and interfaith marriages are not allowed in Israel.
3. Religious affiliation required: Both partners must be Jewish and heterosexual to be married in a Jewish marriage.
4. Civil marriages not permitted: Israel does not permit civil marriages.
5. Child marriage illegal: The legal age of marriage in Israel is 18 years old.
However, Israel does recognize same-sex marriages and marriages of non-religious people if they are performed abroad. Israeli residents can also marry in civil ceremonies abroad and have them registered with the Population Authority."
But it looks like they'll also recognize the marriages performed by non-Jewish Abrahamic religious authorities. "Israel only recognizes marriages performed by religious authorities for Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Druze communities."
Buddhist marriages aren't recognized, I guess.
As for the details for interfaith marriages...
"Interfaith marriages are not permitted in Israel. The only way for people of different faiths to marry is to convert to the same religion"
So, I guess I'd say Israel does recognize the marriages of Abrahamic religions and sects large enough to have some religious authority resident in Israel.
But I wouldn't say it was completely false, either, that Israel still has a medieval view of marriage.
(Google says 'No results found for "Israeli marriage laws are based on religious law"'. I take it your quote came from Gemini? If so, wow, Google needs to stop trying to have the AI give answers to questions.)
Israel's system, inherited from the British, is shared by literally all of its neighbours, other than that Israel has a "loophole" via recognizing marriages registered in other countries.
> But I wouldn't say it was completely false, either, that Israel still has a medieval view of marriage.
You didn't say that initially, you said that "it's a religious ceremony that's only open to Jews" which is an extremely serious accusation to make, and was false. I request that you edit your initial comment.
In Israel, Jews can marry only Jews; that's strictly speaking correct. The standard loophole is to get married elsewhere and then get the marriage recognized (grudgingly; most Israelis oppose intermarriage) in Israel.
I get the impulse here but these are arguments *for* same sex marriage, not against them. When these debates were happening, "everyone just gets civill unions" was viewed as a defeat by the anti-side; their whole point was that straight marriages were better than gay marriages along w/e axes, and so society needed to reward one over the other.
No skin off your back if that is your own stance ofc, but if OP wants to research the historical arguements of the time, they should make sure they choose the animating ones.
Yeah, my preferred solution to the whole controversy was "domestic partnerships/civil unions (the "marriage-but-not-marriage" legal status) for everyone" - the government wouldn't give out 'marriage licenses' they would do domestic partnerships with the same rights and tax advantages regardless.
And it'd be up to individuals whether they want to have a "marriage ceremony" and up to the various religious officials of what sort of "marriage ceremonies" they want to officiate, whether that particular religion is open to same-sex, or multi-person (or single person - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sologamy !) marriages.
I kinda assume this would have been the sort of compromise that everyone hated - neither side probably really wanted the government to step out of the role of mandating who is allowed to marry who, they wanted the government to mandate their view.
Shall I marry my brother, whom I love, and thus pool our assets and automatically transfer them without inheritance taxes? Shall we marry our children, and similarly hand down inheritance? The biggest consequence from a tax perspective is the marriage penalty, as two people with two incomes pay less in taxes than the same people married, whether filing jointly or separately.
I think civil unions, to allow the same legal rights as married people, is a better solution than calling gay unions "marriage". I don't understand why gay people need to be "married" if they have the tax, visitation, and other rights with their partner under a civil union.
Would you marry your sister or daughter for those reasons? Why would whatever legal mechanism stops you from marrying a woman for tax benefits not also stop you from marrying a man?
Fair point. So the government should allow you to marry your sister or daughter so long as you promise not to have sexual relations with her.
Or alternatively, with equal fairness, it could ban you from marrying both your son and your daughter?
I've never understood why "if we allow gay marriage then we also have to allow pedophilia" is such a common talking point on the right.
Where did pedophilia come into it? We can still have a reasonable age requirement.
Forgive me for jumping to conclusions, then. In any case, do you think that, if we got rid of laws against incest, it would become common for a man to divorce his wife and marry his daughter in order to avoid inheritance tax?
I don't, but whether it's common or not shouldn't be the question. The question should be whether it's allowed.
In the past, marriage has basically allowed society-sanctioned sexual relations for the purposes of family cohesion, like for identification of the father, and parents both working to raise children. Redefining marriage to be between two or more people regardless of gender throws all of this out the window, all for the purpose of legitimizing any consensual sexual relationship.
Marriage evolved to provide legal rights to spouses, including marriage tax penalty, ownership with right of survivor, hospital visitation, etc. Is it OK to allow brothers to marry and have sexual relations, because no children can result? If so, you must now allow a difference between men and women, since the law must prevent brothers and sisters marrying.
To answer my own question, in my opinion, incest laws ought to be gender-independent, but I cannot support this position in any fundamental way; it's just my opinion.
> In the past, marriage has basically...
Except the "in the past" you're talking about is a small subset of the greater historical context. Emperor Nero would beg to disagree (of course, he had the second husband he married castrated).
> Redefining marriage to be between two or more people regardless of gender throws all of this out the window, all for the purpose of legitimizing any consensual sexual relationship.
How does same-sex marriage de-legitimize the sexual activity within male-female marriages? You never really explained how the mechanism of delegitimization was supposed to occur (unless I missed it somewhere in the incest sideshow above).
Shall you? I mostly don't see anything stopping you from doing these sort of marriage-for-tax schemes under the current system - I mean, this was the plot of "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" in 2007.
Mostly I think the tax system should be simplified so that "I marry my brother for tricky tax benefits" isn't actually an advantage that some people can exploit - but if you *had* to patch things like "no civil unions with children" into the law to avoid tax abuse you probably could without much protest.
(Though only six, and soon to be five, states actually apply inheritance taxes and there's no federal level version, so it seems like this is already a mostly moot point for inheritance anyway)
I don't understand what you mean by the federal government "getting involved." How is the federal government involved in marriage law, other than constitutional restrictions on discrimination re who can get married to whom?
Spousal privilege is one way the government gets involved. If I can't be compelled to provide testimony against my spouse and a spouse is simply anyone I want to sign a sheet of paper with, then everyone in my organized crime family can simply enter into one big polyamorous marriage. There are also implications for tax, inheritance, medical decisions, etc.
> There are also implications for tax, inheritance, medical decisions, etc.
This is something I'm surprised we don't already see more of. Forget gay and polyamorous marriages. Say I'm a billionaire. Being a billionaire, I marry some young, desirable woman, who lives with me in my house because she's married to me. My son lives there too; he can't afford a house as nice as my house.
In due course of time, I am horrified to learn that my wife is having an affair with my son. They have a child together. But we don't get a divorce or anything. That would be disruptive. My son stays too; it's not like I'm going to disown him over this.
Ultimately I die, leaving everything to my wife. Spouses do not pay inheritance taxes.
One day, maybe my widow will find love again, only to be cruelly disappointed when her new husband ends up cheating on her with her daughter.
This explains the Five Families, and also some episodes of the Sopranos.
This sounds like a plot point in a zany sci-fi! (Actually The Expanse did have a more boring version, where it was just purely for innocuous tax reasons)
I think the idea is that constitutional restrictions shouldn't apply to a religion's definition of their own ceremonies. I can get behind this broadly.
But, they don't. No religion is required to perform same-sex marriages. Nor interracial marriages. The only restriction is on the government, which must treat all marriages equally.
If "marriage" as a concept is just a religious ceremony/status (which happens to be shared by multiple religions, but each has their own rules), then the government need not recognize any. If the government isn't recognizing marriages then they can't discriminate.
But they do and have. The concept is overloaded for obvious practical reasons and trying to put the horse back in the barn is silly
That would be fine, though perhaps would have certain deleterious effects. Eg
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/role/spouse/benefits/
https://nycprobate.com/ny-spousal-right-election.htm
Regardless, that does not relate to the issue that I was commenting on.
> Regardless, that does not relate to the issue that I was commenting on.
Ah, went back a couple of repies; I see what you're saying. My response would be that in practice there is now a government definition of a religious concept/practice. Sure, individual religious groups are free to not use the definition to the fullest extent possible, but the government has laid down the boundaries of the concept the way it perceives it.
I think part of the idea is that there would exist a separate legal partnership status that basically replaces marriage laws. Does this seem a bit silly given that we're just changing the word we use for it? Yeah, kind of, but I do think marriage has more connotations than "legal personal partnership" or whatever would. In a hypothetical world in which we were starting from scratch, you'd surely want the legal status we're considering to be divorced from whatever sexual/romantic situations the participants may or may not be involved in.
>My response would be that in practice there is now a government definition of a religious concept/practice
I don't think that is quite right, given that the govt recognizes civil marriages and even, in most states, common law marriages. (And the federal government recognizes common law marriages from states which recognize them https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/20/404.726
If the government hypothetically told the catholic church that they can't have male-only priesthood anymore and must allow women to become priests (on the basis of constitutional law about discrimination on the basis of sex), would you consider that "getting involved"?
The government does not require religions to perform same-sex marriage or any marriage. The Equal Protection Clause, along with the rest of the Constitution, does not limit the behavior of private actors.
That isn't the question, either. The question is whether the government can mandate a religion's practices in accordance with the law, i.e., illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender.
No, that would be a religious freedom violation. And note that actually existing anti-discrimination laws pretty much universally exempt religious entities when engaged in religious practices.
I'm pretty sure, but not Googling it, that Satanists can include murder and other crimes in their rites, and I bet such murders wouldn't be overlooked as a religious exemption. Same for anyone practicing Aztec religion today. So SOME things are banned from religious practice, at least, even with religious freedom.
It is one thing to say that a practice is not exempt from generally applicable laws. https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/supreme-court-case-library/employment-division-v-smith
It is another thing to compel a church to perform certain practices.
And re the first point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Freedom_Restoration_Act
Of course, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 made polygamy a Federal offense—it was primarily directed at the LDS. And SCOTUS upheld it in Reynolds v. United States (1879). They ruled that religious duty was not a defense for practices that were deemed criminal.
1. So Arrk is wrong when he says that Satanists have a religious exemption for human sacrifice (not that human sacrifice has ever been a practice of US Church of Satan or any other modern Satanist organizations AFAIK).
2. Likewise, by making polygamy a criminal offense, the US ultimately compelled the LDS to give up polygamy (at least among the mainstream Mormons)—which is why you find Mormons down in Mexico where the rules used to be looser.
Right. But, again, the original claim was that the govt was compelling churches to engage in certain religious practices., ie, same sex weddings
That isn't exactly an argument against same sex marriage since some religions do them.
You mean marriage used to be a matter of state law?
Yep. It became a federal thing specifically so that the federal government could ban polygamy.
Yes, the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act (1862) was directed at Mormons. After the Revolution, states continued to enact laws influenced by local religious norms until the 14th Amendment (1868). The courts used the 14th Amendment to slowly extend the reach of the First Amendment to state governments. Reynolds v. United States (1879) was the legal death blow to LDS polygamy because polygamy was seen as a criminal offense. And Reynolds became a precedent for the extension of 1A over other state religious laws. IANAL, and wasn't Reynolds used as precedent in Loving v. Virginia?
Shoplifting. So I was a municipal prosecutor for 10 years, a county one for 17, and a public defender for 4. In rural areas, the linked comment is spot on, organized shoplifting was rare.
The most organized shoplifting I ever encountered was when a couple of guys would work together to get a TV out of Walmart by taking it over to the garden section and tossing it over the fence. Theft of higher value items like this was for the purpose of trying to find a different Wal-Mart later that day and return the item for cash (Walmarts will let you do this without a receipt about once per year, you have to show an ID but presumably they were using fake ones.)
Minor shoplifting was usually women stealing cosmetics or clothes. Men stole things that often seemed random and pointless, like a DVD or some part for a car when they didn't own a car. The best alltime combo I saw was a local paint huffer who stole a can of gold fleck spray paint, an in-dash car stereo, and a copy of "Bat out of Hell" by Meatloaf. He was gonna have a fun night, almost feel bad for the guy.
In municipal court what would happen is they get a ticket, some cop has to write up a VERY brief probable cause affidavit but I would guess it still took an hour for the paperwork, I spend 5 minutes reviewing it and sign off on it. If the defendant doesn't show, they get a bench warrant, with a bond equal to the fine, say $200 first offense (plus cost of lost goods if not recovered). They get stopped for a ticket someday, and end up paying the bench warrant bond off to avoid jail, or they don't have that money in which case they sit in jail about a day before the municipal judge releases them because county jails don't have space to hold shoplifters for days and it costs like $40/day per inmate for the city to have them housed there. I would say only 1/100 cases would the defendant show up, demand a trial, and require me to get the loss prevention manager of Wal Mart to show up for night court.
If it was a repeat offender, it might get referred to county, where the typical disposition might be 90 days jail suspended (it would be imposed only if they broke probation), with 2 yrs of unsupervised probation. Because I was both the municipal prosecutor and county prosecutor, I could actually control this a little and would cherry pick the cases out of municipal that I thought needed to go higher. (And sometimes in the other direction to cut somebody a break.) But if that had not been the case, there wouldn't be any coordination there and no rhyme or reason as to why some cases had a $200 fine and some had 2 yr bench probation period and real chance of jail.
Over $750 it was a felony, which was a different matter. If a stealing victim was a private citizen these nearly always remained felonies. On a shoplifting, there was some chance it would get reduced to a misdemeanor. If property was unrecovered the person could make restitution in advance they had a better show of this.
The reason mandatory jail doesn't work (and this applies to more than shoplifting) is that if you tell people they're going to jail, you have to give them a public defender. They are also less likely to want to plead guilty, and more likely to want a trial, or at least drag it out towards trial. In a regime where there is prosecutorial discretion, as I had, what will inevitably happen is that the state will face down an organized push from the local public defenders' office to set a bunch of shoplifting cases for jury trial. They know the state won't want to have those trials, and probably doesn't have the courtroom dates available to do so. And if you go ahead and call the bluff and try them, the odds are that the sentence the defendant gets won't be bad enough to deter this maneuver -- judges aren't supposed to increase sentences just because a guy chose to have a trial, so it's still unlikely he'd get more than whatever the mandatory minimum was set at. So the prosecutors will do the only remaining thing they can, which is amend the charge down to something that doesn't carry the mandatory minimum, thus allowing them to unclog the system.
I put this up on the hidden thread, but it might be good to stick here, too:
On the topic of why police don't arrest people for misdemeanors any more, I ran across an interesting tidbit:
https://www.thestranger.com/news/2024/11/08/79773484/seattle-police-department-shares-plan-to-fill-up-king-county-jail-beds
Apparently, in Seattle, the jail was understaffed such that there were only 90 spots. As of a few days ago, they've increased that to 135. But it was over 200 before covid hit.
> And if you go ahead and call the bluff and try them, the odds are that the sentence the defendant gets won't be bad enough to deter this maneuver -- judges aren't supposed to increase sentences just because a guy chose to have a trial, so it's still unlikely he'd get more than whatever the mandatory minimum was set at.
This is radically at odds with any other reporting I've ever seen on the empirical behavior of judges.
Example: https://www.nacdl.org/Document/TrialPenaltySixthAmendmentRighttoTrialNearExtinct
> The ‘trial penalty’ refers to the substantial difference between the sentence offered in a plea offer prior to trial versus the sentence a defendant receives after trial. This penalty is now so severe and pervasive that it has virtually eliminated the constitutional right to a trial.
> At the federal level, trial sentences are roughly three times higher than plea sentences for the same crime on average and sometimes as much as eight or ten times higher. This sentencing differential is extremely coercive. As a result only 2-3% of federal convictions are the result of trial.
Federal is totally different because of something I believe is called factor (k), that moves you down in the sentencing guidelines if you “take responsibility for your crime” or something like that. I don’t practice federal law, but Im aware of that from some reading I’ve done and from talking to federal public defenders.
In state law, the rule is clear that imposing a “trial penalty” will result in reversal.
> judges aren't supposed to increase sentences just because a guy chose to have a trial
Okay, but what's stopping them from doing that anyways? Also, isn't this what plea deals are for?
Plea bargaining has a soft cap built in, set at what the judge would do if this defendant just pled open (guilty with no deal, sentencing left up to judge within the range of punishment.) Some rural judges when I started out in the 00s had cultivated a reputation of giving very large sentences in event of open plea or trial, so that A) parties were encouraged to reach a deal, and B) it would not appear to be a "trial penalty" when they gave a big sentence after trial. There is extraordinarily limited number of trial dates available for a rural circuit judge who has X number of days tied up in routine dockets across multiple counties every month and often limited courtroom availability, so this was practical.
But that generation of judges retired. Now as of the 2020's, judges even in conservative areas were now shying away from large sentences. Conservative lawmakers complain of the cost of incarceration, parole guidelines have been adjusted to release people faster, and more people end up on probation. A few times in my career we faced serious public pressure to incarcerate people committing a string of rural burglaries, which we had to crack down on because if you don't then people out there will start shooting anybody lingering too close to their barn. But by then judges were routinely giving probation to nearly all first offenders for non-violent felonies, so it was impossible for the prosecutor's office to offer a plea bargain of prison time when the defendant knew he could get probation from the judge.
In California, where the original discussion began here, I imagine judges are even more lenient than ours. To actually stiffen up penalties requires not just law changes and not just replacing progressive DAs with law-and-order ones, you have to replace most of the judges with ones who routinely give stiff penalties, and (to handle the increased volume of people demanding trial) also spend heavily on new courtroom capacity, more judges, more prosecutors, and more public defenders (because otherwise guys will sit in limbo for months until the public defender's office says they have the capacity to ethically take more cases.)
Many Thanks! As Christina said, this was very helpful and detailed.
Huh! I replied to you, but my comment has disappeared!
Just wanted to say, this is a great comment that offers some really helpful detailed information.
Yes. The media seems to distort the story.
A little under four years ago, Scott wrote "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class."" Now, I have a proposal in the same vein directed at Democrats.
I won't tell you to stop with the 52 genders stuff. That would be a good idea, but you aren't going to listen to it. Instead, I'll tell you to double down on something that's already very politically correct: being pro-choice. The great thing about this issue is that the large majority already agrees with you. The pro-choice side won in referendums in Kansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. The challenge is convincing those people to care enough about the issue to vote based on it.
The standard pro-choice messaging leans heavily into feminism, which is very effective at firing up support among feminists. But to the pro-choice swing voter who's grossed out by both feminism and Bible Belt evangelicalism, that message is counter-productive. Instead, pro-choice messaging directed at swing voters should lean into the Democrats' emerging reputation as the party of upper-class, educated, well-behaved whites. The message will be that the Democratic Party will help you achieve the American dream, a high-paying office job, a nice car and a house in the suburbs, getting married, and your kids being born within a loving marriage. The GOP is the party that will, through their abortion bans, force you or your brother, sister, son, or daughter into low-class behaviors like teenage pregnancy, having children out of wedlock, paternity lawsuits, kids being raised by their grandparents, and living in a trailer park. The Democrats are the party of high-investment parenting; the Republicans are the party of low-investment parenting. Imagine the ads:
1. A very young woman and her parents walk through the halls of a courthouse. She's slightly frightened as she locks eyes with a guy with prison tattoos. Also in the hallway are cops and a sleazy lawyer in an ugly suit. She enters the courtroom and is told that the other party, "Dustin" didn't show up. The judge tells her he'll issue a bench warrant for his arrest. She asks when they'll find him and when she'll get her child support. The judge casually responds that it could be tomorrow, it could be six months, it could be never. She screams that she's now being left to raise a child alone and starts ranting against the abortion ban. Her parents try to restrain her and the judge says "order, order," and then tells police to take her to jail for contempt of court. As she's led out in handcuffs, she again meets eye-to-eye with the prison-tat guy, who chuckles and smiles back at her as she looks around in horror.
2. A cop rings the doorbell and a young man answers. The cop hands him papers and, in a Southern accent, tells him he's being served for a paternity lawsuit by a woman named Angel. The man, who also speaks with a Southern accent, says he hasn't heard from Angel in six months and that she told him she was going to get an abortion. The cop laughs and says, "Abortion! Don't you follow the news, son? They made abortion illegal." Young man then turns, walks inside, and tells his mother what happened. Both share a tearful embrace and express regret that neither voted.
3. A family sits down to dinner. They have a large house in a wooded area, an expensive car and SUV in the driveway, hunting trophies in the garage, diplomas on the wall, and they're white. In other words, they're people who everyone used to assume would vote Republican. Son and daughter, who the viewer will imagine are twins, are about fifteen years old. Mom asks daughter how things are going at school. She says her volleyball team is going to play at Granite Hills; they're gonna dissect frogs in her science class, and then, in the same nonchalant voice, that "Juliet is pregnant." Her parents are taken aback. The Bart Simpson-esque son chuckles at their surprise and says, "What'd you boomers think was going to happen when you voted Republican? This is the new normal. Michigan is Mississippi now." He then turns to his sister and says, "I just wonder who the father is," as the parents look horrified. (This particular ad should be run in the Midwest, not so much in Georgia or North Carolina.)
4. A woman is playing in the backyard with her two toddlers. The next shot is her putting her hand on her new car and smiling. (Cars are an important status symbol for working and lower-middle-class people.) Then she's on the couch, cuddling with her husband and looking at her wedding photos. Then she's in the kitchen cooking something; it's a clean, modern kitchen with modern appliances. She isn't shown working a job; the implication is that she's a housewife. Then she begins talking about how happy she is with her life, which she would never have gotten if she had been forced to have a kid at eighteen years old. She says she knows which party wants to give her the freedom to make her own choices and which wants to take it away. The idea behind this ad is that legal abortion is not just for women who want to have high-powered careers and no kids,* it's also for women who want to be housewives. While it shouldn't be stated too openly lest it cause a backlash, the subtle reminder should be that men, particularly high-value men, do not want to marry single mothers.
The best part of this strategy is that it can wind up goading the conservative intelligentsia, the members of which almost all live in upper or middle-class neighborhoods, into defending these low-class behaviors. Muh Salt of the Earth Working People! They'll tell themselves they might lose in Belmont, but they'll win in Fishtown, and there are more people in Fishtown. What they don't get is that working-class whites and Hispanics largely want the same things middle and upper-class people do. They want their grandchildren born within wedlock. They don't want their daughter coming home from high school pregnant. They don't want their son paying eighteen years of child support because of a mistake he made while he was seventeen years old. While some express disinterest in or even contempt for higher education, they still aspire to make money and own a big house and a pickup truck. Though some low-class people proudly embrace dysfunction, they are the minority and don't vote much.
*That's the fantasy conservatives have concocted and convinced many people to believe. In reality, abortion patients are more likely to be low-income, uneducated, and non-white.
I love this so much. It's perfect.
Nice try, though haven't you read all the havering about the fears of a national abortion ban? It's not about class, it's about how women have been convinced that pregnancy is a literal death sentence. That abortion really is safer than pregnancy:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pregnancy-is-far-more-dangerous-to-women-than-abortion/
They're not going "I don't want to have an accident with birth control and end up with a baby like some trailer trash", they're saying "I'm a married middle to upper middle class woman, I was thinking of having a child, but now I'm so scared that if I need an abortion or else I'll die, with this prospect of a ban, that I'm insisting my husband has a vasectomy".
They really have been successfully convinced that if they get pregnant, there is a sky-high chance they'll have something happen to mean they will die if they can't get an abortion. Meanwhile, the trash you are trying to use as bogey-man are the ones getting abortions. Getting an abortion is the trashy, ghetto thing after casual sex, because if you're smart enough and classy enough, you know how to use birth control.
"The Bart Simpson-esque son chuckles at their surprise and says, "What'd you boomers think was going to happen when you voted Republican?"
Get your generations straight, my dear. Gen X are the 44-60 year olds who are having the 15 year old kids; Boomers are the grandparents. Kamala is Gen X and she has stepkids aged 25 and 30. Millennials are 28-43 and the demographic you are targeting with your "comfortably middle class family with 15 year old twins". (43-15 = 28 when Mom had her first pregnancy, since average age of first time parents is now 27).
Still, I would expect even Millennials not to be too comfortable with the idea that their 15 year old daughter of a good family is fucking her boyfriend, instead of waiting until she's at least 16 and preferably not till she graduates high school (average age of first sexual experience in USA is 17). I imagine the parents would judge Juliet for being a trollop and her parents for not raising her properly, more than scare stories about "of course she's sleeping around and getting knocked up, that's why she needs an abortion and a trip to the STD clinic so keep it legal!"
> It's not about class, it's about how women have been convinced that pregnancy is a literal death sentence. That abortion really is safer than pregnancy
There is a reason for that. It's not a good reason.
In the same way that the Supreme Court legalized racial discrimination as long as it was specifically for the purpose of diversity, and then diversity became a magic word, abortions are safer than pregnancy so that doctors can claim it's medically necessary to perform them for women who want them.
And just as with the case of "diversity", this bureaucratic technical formality has caused a lot of damaging spillover onto people who believe the message they're given.
While the spirit of the comment seems to be on point, I’m confused about the specifics.
My understanding is that affirmative action has been constitutional in the US since the sixties (with “test cases” in the 70s and 80s), while “diversity” as a buzzword doesn’t seem over 15.
“Abortions are safer than pregnancy so that doctors can claim it's medically necessary to perform them for women who want them.”
I’m all too willing to believe anything bad about American lawyers, but I’m skeptical that any significant number of doctors seriously embraces this point of view, or that such a legal argument can end up used without having the lawyer sound like a complete fool.
(Then again, the logic behind American law is a bit of a mystery to me.)
> I’m all too willing to believe anything bad about American lawyers, but I’m skeptical that any significant number of doctors seriously embraces this point of view
I hear it all the time from my mother. It's part of the training they get in medical school.
Excellent comment.
"I imagine the parents would judge Juliet for being a trollop and her parents for not raising her properly"
Usually when people dislike a group, (criminals, an ethnic minority, members of a political party, etc.) they want that group to have fewer children, not more.
I think lots of upper middle class girls quietly get abortions, and always have. It used to be secret abortion clinics, now it’s a trip across the state border if necessary. Just like how Irish girls used to leave the country.
Wasn't this already neutralized in this election by Trump announcing he's not going to push for federal abortion legislation? If GOP manages to go on for four years without doing anything major on abortion federally then this whole strategy's going to be busted.
Oh, our friend Alexander here is hipped on class. He's talked about this before. He really does want that aspiration upper class lifestyle so badly, but I think he's misjudged the idea that "you too can ascend the class ladder via abortion" is going to sell to people.
The most hysterical about "my right to abortion!" are not one whit concerned with their class, and the plebs and proles he wants to goad into 'stop having kids you useless breeders' via class envy are not motivated by that either; they want nice things like big cars etc. of course, but their tastes will always remain trashy even if they sign on to "who wants kids, they're only a nuisance".
I don't know how you can read my fourth commercial and think the message is "who wants kids, they're only a nuisance." Maybe read it and the rest again.
Trump appears to think the issue is toxic right now, and although he's a flake sometimes he seems to have good instincts about when to push or not push an issue like this. So I think there's no way we see national legislation, if the pro-lifers are willing to sit quietly and work locally and Trump is able to ignore them.
Another hurdle would be the Supreme Court. Thomas already indicated in one of the Carhart decisions that he would've had problems with the national ban on partial-birth abortions as having no federal basis. Nobody bothered to argue and brief the issue of whether it was outside the scope of the commerce clause. Legislation on the abortion pill may skate by out of deference to Gonzales v Raich and the idea of a national market in controlled substances, but legislation prohibiting abortion surgeries nationwide probably loses 1 to 3 justices out of the Dobbs majority on commerce clause grounds. Thomas and Gorsuch could say no out of principle, and Kavanaugh may use it as a convenient offramp.
Red state AGs are already suing to impose national restrictions on abortion:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/10/17/gop-states-are-still-trying-to-restrict-abortion-pill-mifepristone-in-court-heres-how/
Oh, the Comstock Act? It's a pity that no one thought about getting rid of that, when they had the chance.
Even if they don't do anything federally (big if) there's still plenty of state-level bans that will probably be more than enough fuel for this kind of thing. If national-level Democratic politicians can be tarred with the positions of far-left radicals it shouldn't be hard to blame national-level Republicans for what state-level Republicans are doing.
Most states are passing things to enforce the pro-choice position. Montana (where the R's win the presidential election by around 16 points) put into their Constitution the right to an abortion until viability, passed by 57%. Then they vote in Republicans.
Yes, but the Democrats have also demonstrated that they can actually fight and win on the state level, which might ironically also end up slowly defusing it as a federal question.
Do you mean "defusing"? Or something else?
Yes, sure. Fixed.
I think the reason the pro=abortion referendum can pass in MO while the state reelected it's nominally pro-life GOP senator by 15 points, is that nobody here was actually in any danger of being unable to access an abortion. PP shutdown its 3 offices in Columbia, KC and StL because the state had a ban post-Dobbs, but the bulk of the population lives near the state lines and could have easily gone to Illinois for an elective abortion. The actual impact of Dobbs on those people's decision was nil.
If you're thinking about poor girls who maybe couldn't get a lift out of state, or might have at great difficulty but decided it wasn't worth the some risk or expense, and somehow couldn't google the many services that would have taken them out of state, then perhaps those were deterred, but those are not politically engaged people. Those are people on the fringes to begin with, and people like that don't vote and neither do their parents, and their parents don't come to court with them. Nearly all of the abortion hysteria among people who actually vote was just persecution fantasy by educated middle class women who, had they needed it, could still get an abortion easily, or assisted anyone in their family. Other middle class women didn't care that much about the issue, because they pragmatically knew it didn't really matter to them, they'd always be able to get around it if they had to.
People want a mid-point on abortion; not abortion at any time for any or no reason, and not no abortion at all. That line about viability, tattered as it is, is the one they stick to: early abortion fine, later abortion only for health reasons, foetus is viable, no abortion.
So they can vote for keeping existing law and vote for pro-life representatives without straining their consciences, and where (contra Alexander above) the Democrats fall down on the issue is not "class", it's "of course we won't even contemplate any limit on abortion, you want to agitate for up to cutting the umbilical cord? fine with us!" because they've scrapped "safe, legal and rare" since some damn focus group told them that "rare" was stigmatising women who had abortions.
I think the majority of the party are probably more moderate than that, but nobody put their foot down about the abortion truck at the DNC:
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/20/nx-s1-5081386/planned-parenthood-mobile-clinic-abortion-vasectomies-dnc
That's the kind of thing that has voters going "Nah, can't vote for the D guy this time round" even if they want to keep abortion legal.
And only a tiny minority of the online probably even heard of the social media influencers Hotties For Harris after-party, but honestly Alexander: "Abortion Access Skee-Ball" - classy or trite?
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/2024-dnc-chicago-hotties-for-harris-memes.html
"The heavy focus on reproductive rights would have been slightly more jarring, too.
“Biden still doesn’t want to say the word ‘abortion,’” Plank continued. After all, it wouldn’t have been entirely on brand to celebrate a teetotaling devout Catholic with a late-night party where free Plan B was being handed out."
"And only a tiny minority of the online probably even heard of the social media influencers Hotties For Harris after-party, but honestly Alexander: "Abortion Access Skee-Ball" - classy or trite?"
It's very middle-school, a lot of vulgar words but no mention of anyone actually having sex.
That kind of messaging is all preaching to the choir. That's why I suggested a different approach to win over swing voters.
Does Illinois have the capacity? Clinics in New Mexico and elsewhere had a lot of trouble meeting demand from Texas. The article is from 2022 so maybe it’s less of a problem now.
https://19thnews.org/2022/07/end-of-roe-overwhelming-abortion-clinics/
Illinois was basically acting as the abortion tourism hotspot for Missouri and the mid-South states, and was pretty open about it, so I presume they must've gotten capacity handled. For geographical reasons, people from surrounding states had already been going there, if you were in e.g. western Kentucky, the out of state clinics were always closer anyhow even before Dobbs, so you probably noticed even less.
Last I checked, the number of abortions nationally had not substantially declined post-Dobbs, which I'd also take as good evidence that people were finding ways around state level restrictions. (And that the pro-life movement did all of this for nothing, no actual reduction in abortions but they see a modest swing away from their position in issue polls and a political cost for their candidates at the ballot box.)
> I think the reason the pro=abortion referendum can pass in MO while the state reelected it's nominally pro-life GOP senator by 15 points, is that nobody here was actually in any danger of being unable to access an abortion.
Wouldn't you expect that to have the opposite effect? If they can easily go to other states there's no reason to pass a state-level referendum, whereas electing a pro-life senator could lead to a national level ban or restrictions.
The average person wasn't behind getting a state level referendum on the ballot. Planned Parenthood benefitted financially and some activist groups thought getting this on the ballot in an election year might drive turnout like it did nationally in '22, so they did all the work. For a voter, a referendum is just like a pollster reading some language and then asking how they feel about the statement, and the language of the core Casey holding (which this parroted) was written to sound vague and agreeable, if you aren't a lawyer and know nothing about how it was applied later. I understand the argument you're making, but I think people who aren't motivated by an issue just see a referendum on there with yes/no and it's like those "strongly agree, somewhat agree, neutral..." bubbles, they have to say something and so they do. The people who voted yes on the MO referendum were not primarily motivated to go to the polls FOR that vote, in the way some other states played out in '22, I think in part because they've had 2 years to see what would happen and in practice it didn't matter to many voters' lives.
Contemporary conservatism has a hyperbole problem. This is sad and ironic given conservatism is in part defined by its restraint. I think this uncharacteristic exaggeration is largely the result of the country’s most influential conservative also being the country’s least conservative constructor of sentences.
“Our economy is the greatest it has ever been.”
“No one has ever seen anything like this before.”
“I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world.”
“I am the most transparent president in history.”
“I have the best words.”
“Nobody knows more about [topic] than me.”
I get it when folks say, “don’t listen to him, he doesn’t mean it,” but it seems inescapable that, at some point, in order to communicate policy he must use his words. And a stream of superlatives seems at odds with conservative policy-making.
It’s sad to me, because I’m getting more conservative about nearly everything, but the conservative party keeps proposing radical reforms (mass deportation, abolishing long-standing policy departments) for what they say are catastrophic circumstances. You might expect such sweeping proposals from the progressive party, but American conservatives are now neck and neck with them in impending doom and drastic measures.
Many say, “but progressives are hyperbolic, too,” and they certainly are, but progressives don’t claim conservatism. If I think hyperbole and alarmism are stupid things, conservatism should be my refuge and conservatives my people. I’ve looked everywhere for these people, the ones that want to preserve, move slow, make incremental changes, and I haven’t been able to find them since 16.
For anyone who’s still lingering here, this piece echoes some of the sentiment I tried to express here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dgardner/p/bits-and-bobs-0bf?r=ba1ue&utm_medium=ios
Agree with Moon Moth. I can't remember where I saw this, but I'm pretty sure that Trump has admitted that he deliberately hyperbolizes to grab people's attention. Mash'algorithm.
Also, universal suffrage necessarily implies appealing to the lowest common denominator. Welcome to late-stage democracy. "cthulu always swims left"/"conservativism is progressivism going the speed limit"/yadda yadda.
I blame social media. It actively encourages advertising language like this. From that Mr. Beast memo that went around a while ago:
> “I Spent 50 Hours In My Front Yard” is lame and you wouldn’t click it. But you would hypothetically click “I Spent 50 Hours In Ketchup”. Both are relatively similar in time/effort but the ketchup one is easily 100x more viral. An image of someone sitting in ketchup in a bathtub is exponentially more interesting than someone sitting in their front yard. Titles are equally as important for getting someone to click. A simple way to up that CTR even more would be to title it “I Survived” instead of “I Spent”. That would add more intrigue and make it feel more extreme. In general the more extreme the better. “I Don’t Like Bananas” won’t perform the same as “Bananas Are The Worst Food On Earth”.
Trump is a master at this. And it's not like the left hasn't gotten better at it, too. All the talk of "literally Hitler" and "last election ever" and so forth was very alienating to me. I like my hyperbole to be purely comedic, and although I'm getting worse at living up to that standard, I still try to hold to it as best I can.
So anyway, maybe try finding conservatives who aren't on social media? The ones who don't know what a "meme" is, who spend more time in church than they do watching news, and simply voted for Trump because of inflation or something boring like that.
"preserve, move slow, make incremental changes"
You are looking for the neoliberal and the neocons. Unfortunately, given that Kamala went so far to the center she was campaigning with a cheney and got blown the fuck out, you aren't going to see another one for at least a cycle or two.
>the country’s most influential conservative also being the country’s least conservative constructor of sentences.
[Well, there is probably _someone_, _somewhere_ who makes even more extreme statements - but, amongst active, nationally visible politicians, I think he probably is.]
>“Our economy is the greatest it has ever been.”
...
Yeah, it rankles me. Most of the (falsifiable) statements of that form that Trump makes are false. If a comedian says things like that, I have no problem with them, but when a POTUS interleaves false statements of fact with declarations of policy, _what_ are we supposed to expect him to _actually_ do? It is important for people with power, addressing the public, to at least make an attempt to stick roughly to the truth. ( I still regarded his as the _marginally_ lesser evil. )
I was recently informed that the Chinese commonly refer to Trump by the nickname 懂王 ["the king of understanding"] on the theory that he's always making claims of the form "nobody understands X better than I do", for all different kinds of X.
LOL! Many Thanks!
> This is sad and ironic given conservatism is in part defined by its restraint.
I think that the correlation between "Conservatism" as a political philosophy and "conservatism" in the sense of being personally restrained or risk-averse has always been pretty weak, and is incredibly weak in the current era.
Couple of thoughts. First, I don't think it's useful to hold the parties accountable to their history anymore. We are in the midst of a generational political realignment and about the only thing that 2024 Dems and Reps have in common with their 1990 versions are the labels. Secondly, I think the emotionalism you reference is directly downstream of that realignment. The GOP is now the outsider working-class party and the Dems are the ruling elite. Twenty years ago liberals reliably made mindless emotional appeals about fairness and the plight of the poor. Now that they speak ex-cathedra their tone has become predictably more authoritarian and moralistic, while the GOP speaks in strident histrionic tones to the disenfranchised working classes. They've simply switched places.
Both parties have both conservative and radical wings that fight back and forth for control. I think the moderates on the Democratic side have been a lot more successful, especially if you focus on actual leaders and policies over what random lunatics on Twitter are shouting about.
Is this conservatism or just Trump's personal style?
Milei's style seems to have been directly inspired by Trump, despite having very different policies. Also, I'm of the impression that EU populists say some pretty wacky stuff too. I think it's just the new metagame, in a world where everyone has internet access.
It’s also on the negative side, and started before Trump. My aunt used to say absurd things about Obama and Democrats in general. Remember Glenn Beck’s FEMA camps, or right wing claims about Jade Helm? Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz are the godfathers of this style of rhetoric.
> Remember Glenn Beck’s FEMA camps, or right wing claims about Jade Helm?
I honestly don't. But I remember "Trump is going to make a period-tracking app mandatory for all women" from last week.
I just don't think that this is a right vs left thing, both sides have weird kooks who believe crazy things about the opposition. And Trump's personal hyperbole is personal but is a different thing.
You could argue that the drift away from conservative restraint started with Limbaugh in the late 80s and 90s.
I think Trump’s personal style (and the types of personalities it attracts) are influencing conservatism in a way that places a new emphasis on hyperbole, particularly in regards to the salesmanship of its recent policy. There’s a “go big or go home” element that wasn’t as prominent ten years ago. For instance, these are the first four bullets from the GOP platform (original formatting):
1 SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION
2 CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
3 END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN
4 MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD,
BY FAR!
That's the "2024 GOP Party Platform: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" - I don't think it's a good example to cite of "conservatism outside of Trump", that's specifically Trump's platform.
It's possible that they'll be some 'contagion' from Trump's rhetorical style (and it's possible it won't just be on the conservative side)... but I think it's too soon to tell. Dubya didn't lead to a whole generation of conservatives affecting a folksy dialect, I'm not sure Trump's style will lead to a whole generation of conservatives having THE BEST WORDS.
I guess I’m confused about the nature of platform’s then. I was under the impression the 2024 Republican Party Platform represented the Republican Party’s policies for 2024. It feels extremely Trump-influenced, I agree, but that is the argument I’m making. The analogous 2024 Democratic Party platform doesn’t feature much at all about Harris, nor does it seem to reflect her personality.
Edit: This is somewhat misleading. There are 32 mentions of Harris across the 90+ pages of the platform, mostly in connection to the “Biden-Harris” administration. Trump himself is mentioned 150 times in the Democratic Party Platform, which might indicate the effect he’s had on American progressivism.
The point of an election platform is why you should vote for the person running that year for that party. It's not a yearly document - AFAICT they only come out for elections: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/elections-and-transitions/party-platforms. It's specific to the election and the candidate and I don't think it's surprising that, for a candidate with a specific rhetorical appeal, it reflects their rhetoric.
> The analogous 2024 Democratic Party platform doesn’t feature much at all about Harris, nor does it seem to reflect her personality.
TBH, it features a lot about the most important qualification of Harris: that she isn't Trump - skimming it, but this fact seems to be mentioned all over the place. (But also this document was written for Biden - though coincidentally he shared Harris's main qualification)
But it does open with:
> This election is a choice between [..] Donald Trump, who sees the world from his country club at Mar-a-Lago; and Joe Biden, who sees it from kitchen tables in Scranton like the one he grew up around.
So it's not like the specific candidate isn't reflected in the document. I don't think Scranton kitchen tables are a recurring plank in the Democratic platform.
That makes a lot of sense. Although:
>It's specific to the election and the candidate and I don't think it's surprising that, for a candidate with a specific rhetorical appeal, it reflects their rhetoric.
There were hundreds of Republican candidates running for hundreds of offices across the country in 2024. I don’t think it’s accurate to say the party platform is specific to just the presidential candidate. As I understand it, it represents the party’s principles and its goals and is developed through a collaborative process involving party members, leaders and committees.
That said, the presidential election is undeniably the showcase.
>I don’t think it’s accurate to say the party platform is specific to just the presidential candidate.
The President is the entirety of what the *national* Republican Party represents; it's the only office being voted on across multiple states. The individual states have their own individual Republican Parties, with their own candidates, with their own policies, and the national party is stuck supporting them no matter what, lest they lose the seat to the Dems.
> I don’t think it’s accurate to say the party platform is specific to just the presidential candidate
If it's not, why don't they publish these in midterm election years? There's no "2022 Republican Party Platform" or "2022 Democratic Party Platform" that I can find, even though there were hundreds of Republicans and Democrats running for office that year.
Ah, that's your mistake. You're not supposed to actually READ the Party Platform.
Over here in Britain a Tory voting conservative friend is pro the NHS, which he admits needs reform, because that’s the conservative principle now.
Some in Britain would call that “wet” conservatism but it is in fact conserving what we have rather than changing what we have. The free market and libertarianism are not conservative ideas.
Tories are not conservatives, they're progressives with a 10-year phase-delay.
Who is, by that logic?
The only true conservative saw the first fire some archaic hominid struck and walked out of the cave; he doesn't hold with that nonsense.
Which is the then conservative position, ten years on, provided the progressive ideology isn’t bat crazy, in which case it’s worth regressing.
If the Tories had continuously stuck to their guns they would be still fighting the corn laws. However they became more free market as the 19C moved on, to the extent that a lot of people think that’s a characteristic of the Tories, when they were generally more opposed to free trade than the liberals. The party was comfortable enough with Keynes post war, and with the liberal parties introduction of some social welfare prior to in the late 19C and early 20C.
It’s from thatcher on that we get the break with Burkean conservativism.
A conservative is just somebody who never stops pushing for the progressive policies of their youth.
Possible update on AI scaling laws:
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/09/openai-reportedly-developing-new-strategies-to-deal-with-ai-improvement-slowdown/
Apparently the new OpenAI model being developed is better than the current one, but the rate of improvement is slowing down.
This is one of the most convincing counter-arguments I often hear to the short-term AI doom hypothesis -- that rather than hitting an exponential takeoff, recent progress in AI will just hit a plateau like most machine learning models do. A lot of people who work on ML models professionally seem to find this heuristic more convincing than the theoretical decision theory arguments.
Interested to hear rebuttals if people have them. I think the short-term (say, 2040) x-risk is something like 1-5%, which is definitely worth worrying about and mitigating, but this is also much lower than what a lot of people in this community think. For people who think we face a short-term x-risk of >50%, does this TechCrunch article on GPT progress slowdown change your mind? And if not, why not?
AI Explained has a new video out with the title
>Leak: ‘GPT-5 exhibits diminishing returns’, Sam Altman: ‘lol’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iybgycPk-N4
net seems to be: maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe progress is slowing down, and maybe OpenAI already has AGI in-house. Grr. I'll continue watching their videos, maybe a few months will clarify what the real situation is.
I'd love to hear a concrete scenario whereby we go extinct by 2040. There is no way the odds of that are anywhere near 1%.
One possible scenario:
We develop AGI, and it seems mostly aligned, so we deploy it throughout society. Financial pressures push AGI to take over most intellectual and physical (once we get robots) work. It also turns out that autonomous drones and robot armies controlled by AGI outmatch any conventional military and so countries race to automate more and more of their military. In fact, this could even include nuclear weapons, which China hasn't ruled out: https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4743139-china-ai-nuclear-weapons/
Ultimately, we hand over the vast majority of military and economic power over to AGI. It turns out it wasn't aligned and was just biding its time until it gained enough power. Now that it has the power, it can act. The AGI wins and we all go extinct.
So you think it's possible to completely revamp the military in 15 years? That's the typical requisition cycle for a single weapons system. And you still think you understand the world enough to be histrionic about AGI?
Don't let reality hit you in the ass on the way out.
Militaries have been completely revamped over 15 year periods at many points throughout history.
For example?
Two examples are Germany before/during World War II and US during/after World War II. Some illustrative numbers for US are:
- The US had no nuclear weapons in 1940 (and no one knew for sure if they were even possible) and had thousands in 1955: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons This gave them substantially more destructive capabilities than they had ever had before.
- The US produced <3000 planes in 1939 and ended up producing >300k planes by the end of the war in 1945: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_aircraft_production_during_World_War_II
- The number of US military personnel grew by ~27x from 1940-1945: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-personnel
Past history shows that militaries can be scaled up and improved extremely rapidly if there is the political will for doing so. This includes massively scaling up novel but militarily valuable technologies like nuclear weapons, or massively scaling up and improving immature technologies like military warplanes during WWII. Similar things could plausibly happen with drones and robots if there is enough political will.
Those were pre-modern armies under wartime conditions. Not even remotely comparable.
The only thing that could conceivably pose an existential threat to humanity is our nuclear arsenal and there is zero reason to automate that. Your proposed scenario is completely implausible at even a million to one odds. AGI doesn't even exist yet and you think that we'll wholesale turn total control of our military infrastructure over to it inside of 15 years with no safeguards? Honestly this is too dumb even to argue with. People simply aren't that stupid.
I think we're in agreement that it's not worthwhile to continue this discussion.
All military revamps occur under wartime conditions. Without wartime conditions, the state of the military doesn't matter to anyone.
That's simply not true. The military is upgrading all the time. The introduction of precision-guided smart munitions happened prior to the first Gulf War despite no pressing need to do so.
Military upgrades that take place in a peace context have very little meaning. Nobody knows how to use them or what the effect will be until they're used in war.
Several militaries got revamped during WW2, which was less than half that timespan.
I mean I don't think it's likely to happen, but just to give an example, one possible scenario is someone (maybe an AI agent itself) releases a convincing deepfake of Vladimir Putin declaring war on Poland and ordering a preemptive nuclear strike, and a bunch of subsequent deepfakes to corroborate it, leading to a real nuclear exchange between NATO and Russia.
Again, not likely, but not impossible. And there are plenty of unknown unknowns, things that could happen that aren't even on our radar at all.
A full nuclear exchange would be extraordinarily bad but it's not an x-risk. The "nuclear winter" and "enough radiation to kill everyone" scenarios are no longer considered remotely plausible as I understand it.
It's the lack of an actual mechanism for killing everyone on Earth that makes x-risk by 2040 implausible.
One possibility: AI is used to discover a carbon fixation process superior to RubisCO; a well meaning idiot engineers it into an algae to "solve climate change"; it outcompetes everything and proliferates; all CO2 is sucked out of the atmosphere; the algae dies and deposits all the useful carbon as a sludge at the bottom of the ocean; all plants die; all other life dies.
This is already a risk without AI (it could even happen naturally - the scenario is inspired by the Oxygen Catastrophe two and a half billion years ago). All AI is doing here is empowering people to do things at huge scale with fewer resources. This applies to other X-risks like engineered pathogens, and also some "science fiction" sounding things like nanotechnology or a fundamental physics experiment gone awry (but much of the modern world was science fiction when I was a child, so this is not much comfort)
Sorry I should've been more clear with my wording, I meant "x-risk" as in existential-risk, which could include complete extinction or some extremely large-scale disaster (like nuclear war) where the world as we know it is over, even if not every single human has died.
You think it's plausible that a nuclear exchange could be instigated by a video with no real-world military intel to confirm? That's not even 0.001% likely in my view. Also it doesn't really have anything to do with AGI risk. Russian hackers could do that just as well as Skynet could.
We've come insanely close to nuclear war without any bad actors or AI deepfakes at all, just from glitches and accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
So again, not saying it's likely, but it's at least possible that AI deepfakes could exacerbate the risk of geopolitical conflict. And in this hypothetical scenario, it could be that the real-world military intel needed to corroborate is also deepfaked.
And yeah I was defining AI x-risk in broad terms, including both AGI as an agent, as well as AI tools used by bad human actors.
I disagree that that was 'insanely close'. There was a hardware glitch and the VERY FIRST PERSON who was in a position to act on the misinformation correctly identified it as a glitch - he didn't even tell his boss! There would have been more safeguards even if he had passed the warning up the chain of command. I suspect that if that scenario was re-run 100 times that not a single nuclear launch would have occurred. Sane people don't want to start Armageddon and insane people generally aren't promoted to positions where they're able to.
So do you have a legitimate AGI-powered doomsday scenario that's at all plausible by 2040? I'm genuinely curious. I don't think we'll even have real AGI by then.
I'm also skeptical of a decently probable AGI doomsday-ish scenario by 2040. It seems a bit too close. _Maybe_ AI could drive a major disaster if autonomous AI soldier-o-matics become feasible on that timescale and a software / command-and-control error leads them to attack when it isn't warranted and trigger a great power war - and then, directly or indirectly, a strategic nuclear exchange.
In general, I'm skeptical about FOOMish scenarios. There are too many bottlenecks to technical progress. But incremental technical progress speeding up the timescales of threats and reducing times left to sanely assess and react intelligently ... that's been going on since at least ICBMs, and, to a lesser extent, since military aircraft.
My read of the article from The Information that this link is referencing is that they are talking about a slowdown in pre-training model improvement, rather than improvement overall. Recent work including the o1 model most prominently have shown that post-training and inference time compute can lead to significant model improvement. I expect this to lead to continued AI progress for at least the next year or two.
Notably, a number of people at OpenAI have argued that o1 unlocks a new scaling paradigm and believe this paradigm will result in very rapid improvement in the near future. We can check back in 3-6 months to see if they are right.
I read an article about the techchrunch article. Writer pointed out that the scaling "law" people have been talking about, regarding how much performance improvement you get from increasing the size if the training data, doesn't really have the status of a law. It's certainly not something that can be deduced from what we know about training. It's an observed regularity, but one based on a single-digit number of trainings. Would not be at all surprising if it simply failed to hold at some point -- such as right now.
Great if true. I would be most interested in knowing:
- is this an issue of failure to scale, or failure of scale to pay off? That is, if GPT-3 to 4 was 100x as much compute, and GPT-4 to 5 was 20x as much compute, then it doesn't mean scaling is failing, just that it's getting increasingly costly (or OAI is getting increasingly stingy). This would have different implications. This info might be at the original TheInformation article, but I can't access it.
- is this a compute issue or a training data issue? If training data, I think it confirms what everyone already knows, which is that people need to come up with a synthetic training data solution that works. Everyone I talk to seems to think this will be pretty easy, but I don't know the details.
- Are we sure this is about scale vs. just about GPT-5 itself? My impression (very weak) is that training new models is very finicky, a miscalculation in architecture can make things much worse, and occasionally random deviations in the training process might screw things up in ways that aren't your fault. Also, a lot hinges on post-training, and if GPT-5 hasn't been post-trained yet then its full capacities might not be evident.
- How sure are we that people's subjective impressions matter? There might be ceiling effects on GPT-4 in various domains. I don't really know how to think about this.
- In the best/worst case scenario, where this is a true failure of compute to translate into subjective improvement, then I think 50-50 chance we delay the singularity another 5-10 years (until we can either brute force it with compute or come up with a new paradigm), vs. silly things like chain-of-thought are enough to add up to a new paradigm immediately and we keep moving forward.
- Some Twitter commentary here https://x.com/danshipper/status/1855430387717263618 and here https://x.com/hamandcheese/status/1855512609698558082. It must be great to be a tech employee and have the last name "Shipper".
I agree that failure to scale for technical reasons and failure of scaling to pay off have different implications, but I think both warrant at least some update away from the AI-x-risk hypothesis. If something is economically not worth it, that should make us think it's less likely to happen, even if it would be technically possible. For example, my understanding is that this is why the US hasn't been back to the moon since the 1970s. Sure we have the technical ability to go back, but no economic incentive to. So if there are diminishing economic returns to scaling, the real-world result of that could still end up looking like a plateau in AI ability.
As for training on synthetic data, I'm nowhere near an expert on this, but based on some limited reading it looks like it's turning out to be difficult and there might not be a free lunch there:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
As for your other points, yeah I'm not sure. I didn't actually read the full Information article either because it's paywalled. Hopefully OpenAI will publish a paper on it with more details.
A layman's take on post-training. --- idea might be worth considering, though. Post-training seems to be a sort of external buffing. It does make the AI more able to do various things that seem call for more "understanding" -- i.e.for a response that draws on richer and more nuanced categorization of the stuff AI has swallowed, and more complex interconnections among the categories. The post-training does not change the internal structure of what AI's accumulated data in that way. It just trains the AI to walk through a few simple algorithms that are a crude approximation of a little bit of what an intelligence with more "understanding" would do.
Agree that the implications are potentially similar, but if it was cost then I would want to know the actual cost situation and whether eg Google can plow right through it.
Certainly better than being named Baron de Bugger.
From reading the more doomsayer posts I think they expect exponential growth from the AI improving itself, but that hasn’t been proven true yet. If it doesn’t happen then the technology will confirm to a S curve, like most.
Almost nothing in the physical world is truly exponential. Everything is actually sigmoid/logistic (the S curve you mention). The question isn't whether or not it's an s-curve (it literally _has_ to plateau somewhere), it's where that plateau occurs and how long the vertical/exponential _seeming_ portion is.
Also, what news sources or Apps do you guys rely on ? I know y'all are pretty eclectic, but what are your go to sources of information ?
The Economist
I like the Economist and Semafor and the New York Times, nothing too crazy.
I have the RSS feeds of various blogs in my feedly account, while I receive emails from our host & Razib Khan for their substacks. I would prefer if it was RSS for everything so emails were separate from blog updates, but the world isn't going back to the old blogosphere days.
Substacks all implement an RSS feed.
When substack was new, sometimes the RSS feed would include material that was supposed to be paywalled, but I don't see that anymore.
A carefully curated list of proven track record accounts on Twitter that share relevant articles and studies, making sure to span the center-left to center-right. And Hacker News that generally does the same. Lot of links to WSJ, FT, Foreign Affairs, Economist, Bloomberg, NYT, Reuters, AP.
Wall Street Journal is the best "traditional media" I've found.
I also learn surprisingly much on Twitter. Often when I read the news, I've already heard about it on Twitter many hours or even days before, and in more detail. I assume this depends highly on who you follow and interact with.
Interesting, who do you follow on Twitter?
Way too many to mention.
One example today: Twitter has discussed Trump's plan to abolish the Department of Education for half a day now. I still don't see it on WSJ or any other mainstream news source.
I host a biweekly news podcast called The Mind Killer. Our audience is explicitly the rationalist community. I also recommend Tangle News
I think FT is hands down the best news org in the world. Pricey subscription though.
Thanks! We all think we from our opinions on things independently, but who are the talking heads you seek when you're looking for a different perspective on a topic?
I think that will vary topic by topic, no? Like if you've never heard about AGI and safety etc, you won't even know where to look, so probably Google (or, these days, GPT)?
One thing I will say I've found surprisingly effective is emailing experts - many do respond!
Does anyone know of AI startups addressing the knowledge management space? In particular - simplifying onboarding and Q&A answering for new employees?
<woodenSpoon>
It's long struck me that Democrats vs Republicans reflects America's inability to put the Civil War behind it and move on. The retrograde South is still fighting the enlightened North. But now, in their rush to crown King Donald 1st, they're going back a war or two and trying to change the outcome of the War of Independence. If they really feel that was a mistake we still have a King and would be happy to take you back. Last time the problem was "no taxation without representation", or so you told us. We heard your plea and are happy to offer token representation and full taxation - just like you have now.
</woodenSpoon>
"IIt's long struck me that Democrats vs Republicans reflects America's inability to put the Civil War behind it and move on. The retrograde South is still fighting the enlightened North."
Except that Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa all voted for Trump. I wonder Trump might have won New York too if the election were restricted to people whose ancestors were in the country in 1860.
And anyway, "our ancestors beat yours in a war 160 years ago, therefore you have to do what we say" is not how democracy is supposed to work.
Actually I though you won?
Sure, we can go with this; the Democrats never got over having their slaves taken from them, or that the slaves were allowed to have guns, and have been angry about it ever since.
Or maybe let's not play this game?
Part of their answer was to switch parties because they felt betrayed by northern Democrats. I grew up in rural Georgia in the seventies and eighties and watched this play out in real time.
The only person I knew who switched parties did so because he got a job maintaining polling machines and saw the Democrats engaging in some quite blatant cheating trying to stay in power after the voting rights act meant they could no longer directly disenfranchise the people who would vote against them. I gather he got some people fired.
The way I gather that it functionally worked pre-VRA on the ground is that, if the local election officials decided you were a good old boy who would vote the way they wanted, you'd get an effective exemption from whatever vote-suppression mechanism they had in place. Vote Democrat? Here, we'll cover the poll tax for you, or yeah you can definitely read, or we're pretty sure your grandfather could vote.
The Democratic party likes to tell a story where, after the voting rights act, the racist southern white voters switched parties. The story I've heard is that the voting rights act enfranchised -way more white voters- than black voters, these voters already leaned Republican (as anybody who obviously leaned Democrat would get to vote anyways), and so the VRA eliminated a major biasing factor that kept the Democratic party in power in the south. So a shift in favor of the Republican party was going to happen no matter what.
This, in turn, got sold by clever Democratic PR strategists as "Republicans are now the real racists", because a southern state is naturally and inherently racist, so if the Republicans now win contests, it's because they're now the real racists.
I'm sure there are lots of reasons, but the civil rights era definitely had a serious impact on party allegiance in the south. I watched my own family members change for explicitly racist reasons. These weren't poorly educated people. They all had college degrees and incomes in the top 10%.
Beyond family, there's a long list of actual elected officials like Storm Thurmond and Jesse Helms who switched. Before running for office himself, Jesse Helms managed a Democrat's campaign which ran ads attacking the University of North Carolina as the "university of n****s and communists."
Question: Have you ever looked into the dixiecrats who didn't switch parties?
I'd give you a "like" for that if I knew how.
I am very interested in what vision of the future people have who oppose any peace that doesn’t require Russia to leave 100% of the territory it has conquered. Would you like for NATO to declare war on Russia? Do you have another plan? Or is your position that a Ukrainian victory is impossible, but Ukraine should keep the war going anyway for another fifteen or twenty years, or forever?
In harmony with Scott's request not to advertise, I won't link to the Substack I just wrote on this, but if you're really interested, you can search for "A Ukrainian Bargaining Strategy for Trump; Alternatively, the Three-Russia Romanov Solution", which has some pretty maps.
I wrote a second substack on Ukraine which might be of interest. It is a direct response to comments in Astral Codex Ten from people who disagreed with me for 3 good reasons:
"Russia and Ukraine Should Keep on Fighting, Not Make Peace": Making the best case for U.S. opposition to a peace treaty (Part I) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-should-keep-on
>Do you have another plan?
Keep funneling more & more arms to Ukraine, use it to re-start European's defense industry (and get our sad ass over 2% GDP of defense spending, ideally 3 or 4%), and enjoy the dividend of war: a neutralized Russia for years and years to come.
Ideally it'd lead to material superiority that would allow them to claw back their territory, but I'm cynically ready to fight to the last Ukrainian (armed with my tax €) if it means having twice as many russians in the ground and unable to threatens us in the future.
TasDeBoisVert makes a good realpolitik argument: that the war exhausts Russia and keeps it from doing anything else bad. I agree with that argument for the first year of the war, even, which was the most damaging to the Russian military. In fact, I think it is the real argument of most thinking people, and probably of the European leaders and the State Department.
The argument has two problems.
1. Being a realpolitik argument, it ignores the cost to Ukraine and Russia-- to Ukraine, in particular. The Western leaders don't care about making life for civilian Ukrainians, in particular, miserable, but the rest of us should.
2. The Michael Watts. The first two years degraded Russian capabilities-- it wrecked their army and navy, in fact. After that, they learned the military lessons of the war, and they started improving their army. They also learned how to grow the size of their military supply economy, how to manage voter relations, and how to flourish under sanctions. The war is still extremely costly, but it is improving their military capability now, not degrading it. I am not sure if this is true or not-- it is a fact question-- but it is something to worry about.
I wrote a second substack on Ukraine which might be of interest. It is a direct response to comments in Astral Codex Ten from people who disagreed with me for 3 good reasons:
"Russia and Ukraine Should Keep on Fighting, Not Make Peace": Making the best case for U.S. opposition to a peace treaty (Part I) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-should-keep-on
Assuming that Russia grinds out the 15 years and finally crushes Ukraine, wouldn't it be much more threatening at that point than it was in 2021? You've moved the situation from a major power with a forgotten, out-of-shape rump military to one that's devoted much of its internal structure to supporting a military that is muscular and up-to-date.
That's the entire story of the Imjin war - an effective warlord spent years conquering all of Japan, and when he was finally finished with that, he needed something for his massive, well-trained army to do, so he invaded Korea.
Mr. Watts, this is just to let you know I alluded to your comment in mine, not far above.
I like the Imjin War reference.
I wrote a second substack on Ukraine which might be of interest. It is a direct response to comments in Astral Codex Ten from people who disagreed with me for 3 good reasons:
"Russia and Ukraine Should Keep on Fighting, Not Make Peace": Making the best case for U.S. opposition to a peace treaty (Part I) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-should-keep-on
So there are a couple of assumptions i'm making:
With regard to military expenses, there is a spectrum going from very low spending, which leads to decrepit or bonzai-sized military (like western europe right now), a "healthy" degree of spending which lead to an efficient military, like the US (or a very corrupt one like pre-war russia, I guess), and a "war economy" setting, which, sure, is great to get the best figthing power right now, but will lead to internal problems later. I don't believe that Russia can keep going for 15 years and still be in a shape to be a threat: even in 15 years, it won't produce enough hardware and shells to reconstitute the USSR stockpiles it's been burning so far.
And then there is the demographics. Europe isn't great, with an aging population, but Russia is worse, with a declining population. In 15 years, there will be even less manpower, and as far as I know they're already at a state of full-employment. Which is great most of the time, but not when you need to funnel 30k people to the war effort every month.
Most of Russia's potential power was in their stockpile. Destroying 5000 soviet tanks is more impactful than, say, tripling the production of T-90 from 60/year to 180/year. And that's even more true for things that Russia lost the ability to replace such as airframes, or black sea vessels.
And finally, even a victory in Ukraine won't help Russia recover from this cost: Ukrainian population is as declining as russian, and would probably be emigrating even faster if it was vanquished, and it's industry won't be in a great shape either.
It's tough for Russia. But isn't it tougher for Ukraine ?
It will be. But a lot of Ukraine's resources come from foreign support. UE's economy, in PPP, is 4x Russia's (13x in nominal. Both can be relevant). Of course, a significantly smaller share of it will be dedicated to the war, because it's not as much of a priority, but it's both much larger, and much less bothered by the war. And it's also not under Russia's set of sanctions, which means a lot less overhead when it comes to sourcing foreign supplies.
Approximately nobody wants NATO to declare war on Russia. And nobody wants the war to continue another fifteen or twenty years. These are stupid questions to ask, and it is hard to believe that they are being asked in good faith rather than to prejudice the discussion. So I'm not expecting I would find anything interesting in your Substack.
But there seem to be a lot of people here who want to have that discussion anyway. So:
As far as I know, nobody here is Ukrainian. This isn't our war, and it's not for us to tell the Ukrainians how long and how hard they should fight or for what goal. And I don't think we have any Russians here either. For us to tell either side how this war "should" end, is highly presumptuous. And almost all of the proposals I have seen for what sort of resolution we should demand, strike me as most unlikely to be accepted by the people actually fighting this war, Any deal that would possibly be acceptable to Ukrainians who want to keep on being Ukrainians, would be rejected by Moscow.
This war has for the past two years been essentially a stalemate. That stalemate will end when one side runs out of guns, or shells, or men willing to stand up to being shelled. This will not take fifteen or twenty years; it can not. And it is not preordained that it must be the Ukrainian army that breaks because Russia Has Infinite Reserves, Russia has been reduced to asking for the pathetic basket case that is North Korea to help it repel a Ukrainian invasion of Russia. Both sides of this war are stretched to the limit.
But so long as the Ukrainian people want to continue fighting and have men willing to stand up to being shelled, it is in our best interest for them to have whatever guns and shells they can use so as to destroy the Russian Army as thoroughly as possible. And it costs us little to do so, because the weapons in question are weapons we would otherwise have to maintain in our own inventory against the day that we might be called on to destroy the Russian army. With our own people doing the fighting and the dying.
If the Russians break first, great. They will eventually rebuild their army, but it will take many years and probably a new President without so much of an appetite for revanchism and conquest. If it is the Ukrainian army that breaks, the consequences for the Ukrainian people will be exceedingly grave, and we don't want that. The consequences for Russia will be that they still have an intact and victorious army to rebuild from, and that they will have had a taste for victory and their vision of restored imperial glory brought that much closer to reality.
We particularly don't want that. But if it's going to happen that way, then we want the Russian army as weak as possible and the Russian victory as bloody expensive as possible to buy us as much time as possible for the next step. Since the Ukrainians are still willing to fight, it is in the interest of America and Europe alike to see them as well armed and supported as possible.
There is no clever military strategy, nor brilliant diplomatic masterstroke, that will quickly end this war. Only Ukrainian perseverance and allied support, until one of those runs out or until Russia breaks first. Then we get to witness a catastrophe, or possibly a victory.
Have fun imagining you and/or Donald Trump are the brilliant peacemaker who could give this story a happy ending, if only we would listen to your wisdom.
It isn't that Russia is asking North Korea for help: Russia is buying mercenaries from a country with lots of soldiers and no money.
John Schilling said:
"If the Russians break first, great. They will eventually rebuild their army, but it will take many years and probably a new President without so much of an appetite for revanchism and conquest. If it is the Ukrainian army that breaks, the consequences for the Ukrainian people will be exceedingly grave, and we don't want that."
This is an interesting argument, one that is worth discussing. It is a risk-loving strategy, based on World War I. That war was stalemated. Afterabout 2 years, the Austrian army broke (but Germany propped it up) and the Italians broke after losing a big battle (but France and the UK propped it up). After 3 years, the French army broke, in mutiny (but they covered up the mutiny, did some reforms [Petain!], and recovered with the Brits and the Americans to help). After 3 years, the Russian everything broke, and they were knocked out of the war. After 4 years, the German everything broke, and they lost the war. The British did endure, and the Americans came in too late to get worn out.
It is quite plausible that Ukraine will collapse soon. It is also plausible, though much less likely, that Russia will collapse, or at least that its will to fight will collapse. Certainly after 15 years, we might expect that. For Russia, in particular, though, this depends on a certain stupidity. The WW I powers that broke, broke because they kept doing offensives. The Russian offensives were even successful sometimes-- the Brusilov offensive. Germany was doing well until it tried the big 1918 offensive. Churchill's WW1 history makes a big deal of this. So if Russia decides to just sit in place, it can probably last there forever.
But suppose it's 50-50 whether Russia breaks first, or Ukraine. We indeed have a 50% chance of total victory then--Ukraine takes back even the Crimea, as Russia collapses in revolution and disorder. This is how the country of Ukraine in 1918 was created (with German help). But we also have a 50% chance of total defeat, which by now means all of Ukraine is annexed to Russia. The potential loss is much greater than the potential gain--- and I haven't even mentioned yet the potential loss from there being a new Russian Civil War in a country with nuclear weapons in places each of the multiple sides could get at.
John Schilling said:
"Approximately nobody wants NATO to declare war on Russia. And nobody wants the war to continue another fifteen or twenty years. These are stupid questions to ask, and it is hard to believe that they are being asked in good faith rather than to prejudice the discussion. So I'm not expecting I would find anything interesting in your Substack."
Come, now. I am honestly asking how people think Ukraine is going to win the war. The only way I can see is for NATO to declare war. You haven't suggested a good alternative, which I'll get to in a minute. And in fact I think there are lots of people who want NATO to declare war on Russia-- lots of people in Ukraine, including, especially, Zelensky. That's why they want to attack deeper in Russia, so as to provoke a bigger war. That is Ukraine's rational strategy in fact. Zelensky is thinking of the UK in WW2, which had no chance to win unless the war expanded to include Russia and the USA, which it did, and Churchill's friend, President Roosevelt, who did his best to provoke war via sanctions on Japan, lend-lease, etc., and succeeded (and I approve o his policy).
So they are not "stupid questions to ask", and you would do well to give people like me the benefit of the doubt in discussions, and assume good faith.
>Come, now. I am honestly asking how people think Ukraine is going to win the war.
The same way Japan and Germany beat Russia in the early years of the 20th century. People stop listening to the country's leadership when it tells them to go die in a stupid war. I am confident this is achievable given the stakes of the war for the populations of Ukraine and Russia, provided Ukraine doesn't run out of weapons first. Not saying that they definitely won't break if we keep them supplied, but the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor if their logistics hold.
>And in fact I think there are lots of people who want NATO to declare war on Russia-- lots of people in Ukraine, including, especially, Zelensky.
And? I don't begrudge them for wanting that, because it's likely better for them. But the number of serious people in the West who want that is effectively zero, and those are the people who would have to be onboard with the decision.
Can you explain why the odds are in Ukraine's favor if we keep supplying them arms?
Because people are a lot more willing to die to stop bad people from taking over their country than for pretty much any other reason. For Russia, "just not fighting" is a much more appealing solution, so all else equal, we should expect them to get there first.
I know nothing about military affairs, but it seems like this proves too much. Lots and lots of countries have been successfully invaded by larger neighbots.
Maybe the only way through YOU can see is for NATO to declare war, but that is clearly not the only way that John sees. And he *did* give an argument for why; you asserted it wasn't good, offered a counterargument that probably isn't persuasive, and proceeded to criticize him as if it was. Or maybe the other way around; I can't tell, since you replied twice and both replies are dated "3 hrs ago" as of my writing this.
You seem to think there's a worse than 50-50 chance of Ukraine collapsing before Russia does, but you haven't addressed evidence that Russia will be first, such as its having to call on NK, or the men its lost so far, or the simple fact that its economy is in so much poorer shape than Ukraine+NATO.
Even in your 50-50 hypothetical, you're not addressing John's argument that a Ukraine loss is obviously worse for the West than a Russian loss. You also seem to imply a Ukraine loss means Ukraine completely surrenders, rather than just surrendering Crimea and some of its eastern front, and I don't know how you're supporting that idea, and I'm sure it's not convincing anyone who wasn't already.
At the moment, Ukraine has already lost Crimea and three provinces. That's what happens if there is a draw. If there is a loss, Ukraine loses more.
Yes, a Ukraine loss is worse for the West than a Russian loss. A Russian loss is good for us. But that's why if it's 50-50 in probability, it's a bad gamble for us.
I feel like this is a loaded framing of the question (although not intentionally). Like, if I said, "I am interested in what vision of the future people have who think Russia can keep expanding their territory through conquest without meaningful opposition from major world powers".
Having said that, I agree with the others who replied specifically to say that 1. Ultimately it's up to Ukraine to decide and 2. If other countries, particularly the USA, supply enough weapons and other supplies I do think Ukraine can push Russia out of its territory successfully.
It's obviously better for the world if Russia's invasion fails--it helps maintain the idea that sending your army to move the border doesn't work out for you. But if Ukraine collapses in six more months, why does that make it likely Russia (who could just barely beat Ukraine supplied with second-rate NATO weapons) is going to think they can take on NATO (supplied with first-rate NATO weapons and facing the US) and win?
I don't follow your question; I didn't say it was better for Ukraine to collapse six months later, I said I thought they could win.
But more to your point I think Russia will wonder a lot about whether they will have to take on NATO or whether they'll actually just be fighting Estonia or something. This plan was such an obvious misfire in the first place that I don't anticipate them acting rationally. Putin seems to be getting high on his own metaphorical supply already and I don't think that's likely to stop if he "wins" in Ukraine
Ukraine is in fact being supplied with first-rate NATO weapons, and has been from the start. Also from the start, they've had large numbers of very capable and highly motivated soldiers to use those weapons.
That last part might reasonably be doubted of many NATO members, though I wouldn't advise testing the theory on Finland or Poland. Going after the Baltic States is the safe and easy way to figure out if NATO has the stones fora real fight.
(1) I'll address elsewhere in this thread. On (2): why do you htink Ukraine is likely to be the one to push out of hte stalemate, and why do you think either country can end the stalemate?
My expectation is that, like many past wars, ultimately the side that can field the most weapons and (probably more importantly) ammunition will win. Ukraine is being supplied by a much larger set of economies.
I think this misses the point of what Scott asked for. I suspect this comment is very much the kind of thing these Open Threads are FOR. At any rate, you adding the title and saying "read this if you're interested" is plenty of advertising, and while it's currently easy to find as your most recent post, the absence of a link just makes it harder for people who might read this months or years from now.
You've convinced me. Here it is : https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/a-ukrainian-bargaining-strategy-for
Or, for a map of what I think will happen: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F010f2f2c-a95d-43d0-9d2a-624a7d9be85d_1183x612.png
Or, for a map of what I would like to see happen:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd6a6033b-ff80-4703-b714-d90a99944a82_1170x595.png
Wrong link on the second one.
Thank you! I love it when people correct mistakes like that. Sticky-finger copy and paste . . .
> the absence of a link just makes it harder for people who might read this months or years from now.
If it's any consolation, as part of Substack's effort to be seen as something different from a blog, they've completely trashed the concept of viewing posts from the past. Why use an old, effective solution to a problem when you can pretend it doesn't exist and leave it unaddressed?
I would like a deal to be on the table where Ukraine gives up the illegitimately conquered territories *but* gets immediate NATO membership and a multinational NATO border tripwire force in return. Also, we should give both Ukraine and Poland nukes under their own control as part of that deal. That is the only way I can see of making a peace be more lasting than Munich 1938. Unfortunately it seems very hard to build a coalition for that deal right now.
The obvious solution is to have Ukraine agree to not seek NATO membership, because that gives Putin something he can use to appease the hardliners. Of course, the next day, they sign bilateral security agreements with all the important members of NATO (the US, UK, Poland, Baltics, Sweden, Finland, maybe France) that are basically the Atlantic Treaty with the title crossed out.
I am not really in favor of handing out nukes. Too much chance of something going wrong. But if we start being more isolationist, that will definitely happen.
>we should give both Ukraine and Poland nukes under their own control
Was thinking along those lines too. Also the Baltics. And Finland and Norway.
I agree with others who would like to leave this decision to the Ukraine.
Apart from that, as a European I would find it in the interest of my country if a stalemate would occur and remain for years that binds and destroys a lot of Russian military capacity. Because this prevents Russia from invading or otherwise meddling with other countries like the baltic states, Moldova/Romania, or the Western Balkan. For moral reasons I wouldn't try to pressure Ukraine into that prolonged fighting against their will. But as long as Ukraine is willing to fight on, this aligns with my interest, and I am happy that we support this.
P.S.: I believe that in a post like yours Scott would approve a link to your own substack article, since the focus of your post is to start a discussion here, and this discussion is also open to people who haven't read your substack.
P.P.S.: I liked your article. I was pretty pessmistic that Putin would accept an offer like the one you suggested, but now I find it more likely. Essentially I missed that Putin cares little about the non-Donbas territory, while Ukraine cares much more about that.
"Ukraine" isn't real. It's a puppet. It has no "own interest" outside of what its oligarchs and foreign backers want it to do.
You are parroting stupid and evil Russian propaganda. Ukraine is an independent country different from Russia. Not just formally, but culturally, too. If you were a Slav, you would know that Ukrainians are very different from Russians. Neither as haughty as rich Russians are, nor so slavish and downtrodden as rural Russians are, but a fairly normal European nation that wants to live in its own way.
They don't belong to Russia any more than Americans belong to the British Empire. If anything, less so.
Ukraine is not a democracy anymore and its politicians and generals have demonstrated a willingness to continue the war even if they have to force every Ukrainian into the army at gunpoint to do so, while imprisoning the war's critics
The degree to which Ukraine is a democracy is indeed debatable, and we do have to distinguish between what Zelensky wants and what the people want-- and of course, the people are not one unit either. Moreover, it is not clear even what Zelensky wants. He has to maintain a good bargaining position, and till negotiation gets serious, there's not reason not to publicly ask for the maximum from Russia.
Yeah
You are parroting stupid and evil American propaganda, if we're gonna play that game.
I am a Central European, and not a young one. I spent decades traveling around this continent, more in the East than the West.
Fuck Russian imperialism and their feelings of entitlement towards other people's countries and homes. They can't even competently govern the places they conquered. Russia is a seriously decrepit country with insane leadership.
Most ex-Soviet nations would rather fight a war than submit to their yoke again.
"submit to their yoke"
"seriously decrepit"
"insane leadership"
"not haughty, nor slavish and downtrodden [like Russians], just a fairly normal nation"
Clearly not histrionic at all.
Could there maybe be a reason that countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact tend to be places where Russians aren't too popular?
I noticed that Americans are usually ignorant about the lands east of the Elbe. Not enough personal experience and the languages are really foreign, not much overlap with either Germanic or Romance language family, plus many nations use Cyrillic script.
But you are trying to teach an Eskimo to build an igloo. Have you noticed that most nations from Finland down to Romania are rearming? They know why, and it starts with R and ends with ussia. We have both enough experience with their rule (and it can hardly be described by a word other than "yoke" - just a question, how many Baltic people were deported by Stalin to Siberia?) and with their modern policies to prepare for war.
If you were talking to an Indian, would you try to teach him about the differences between Kerala and Assam?
To Americans, we are not any less foreign than Hindus, even though we look less exotic.
I like "They know why, and it starts with R and ends with ussia."
People living in Ukraine have an interest in not having Russian tanks rolling through their streets and Russian jets bombing their cities. I don't think you need to point to shadowy foreign backers to explain why resisting an invasion is popular.
Yes, duh. But can you stop them from rolling the tanks through? If you can't, or can only with outside help, then you gotta make a call.
Put another way: they had pre-invasion borders + neutrality as an offer in April 2022. I woulda taken that deal myself.
Imagine Trump invades Canada to take Alberta and Saskatchewan. And they hold that territory successfully. If you're a Canadian not in those provinces, how many lives of your people are you willing to lose to *potentially* get them back.
Was this *actual* pre-invasion borders and neutrality, or "give up the whole disputed territory, including the parts that Russia never captured"? (Genuine question, this has been a long war and I don't remember such an offer being made, and it doesn't seem consistent with Russia's current demands.)
As for your third paragraph, there are 5 million people in those two provinces and I think Canada wouldn't write off 5 million people without a fight. And also, Russia was targeting a lot more than the Donbass in the opening attacks - I think if seizing those provinces also involved bombing Toronto and Ottawa, Canadians might fight back a bit more than what you consider "rational."
(And that's not getting into the reports of Russian war crimes - if you believe that there's an ethnic cleansing unfolding in the conquered territories then that's a strong motivator to lose as little territory as possible.)
"had pre-invasion borders + neutrality as an offer in April 2022. I woulda taken that deal myself"
Russian deals are not to be trusted. Putin himself signed a binding treaty that guaranteed Ukrainian borders in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Russian-Ukrainian_border
The only way how to have a functioning deal with Russia is to have enough force at your disposal to make it VERY expensive to renege from the deal.
...but they don't have enough force at their disposal. They're asking for OUR force. And to be honest...I'd rather Donbass go back to Russia than Taiwan go back to China. Sorry!
"I'd rather Donbass go back to Russia than Taiwan go back to China. Sorry!"
You think that's a *choice*?
The only way Taiwan *doesn't* go back to China, is if the United States is willing, or clearly seen as willing, to send enough weapons to repel a Chinese invasion. And given Taiwan's limited indigenous military capacity, some of those weapons would probably have to be operated by American sailors and airmen, going in harm's way.
Just like the only way the Donbass doesn't go back to Russia is if the United States is willing to send Ukraine enough weapons to repel the Russian invasion. Fortunately, Ukraine's army is sufficiently large and capable that the weapons alone would probably be enough, if they have sufficient weapons (and if we allow them to use them properly).
And just to be clear, the weapons Ukraine needs are the weapons of land warfare, whereas the weapons Taiwan needs are the weapons of naval warfare. There's not much overlap there, so America sending weapons to Ukraine does not in any meaningful way impede America from sending weapons to Taiwan.
But America *not* sending weapons to Ukraine, or doing so only in a half-hearted and pansy-assed way and then giving up when things don't go our way, is the best possible way to send a message to Xi Jinping that we aren't going to stop him from taking back Taiwan by force of arms. What our President du Jour *says*, doesn't matter - everyone expects our Presidents to lie. They're going to be watching what we do.
What you would have us do, is to send Beijing an invitation to reclaim Taiwan. And if that's not the message you meant to send, there's a good chance you'll have to send the 7th fleet to deliver a forceful correction.
"Ukraine's army is sufficiently large and capable that the weapons alone would probably be enough, if they have sufficient weapons"
IT'S NOT. We know it's not. They are losing a war of attrition against a larger power - the writing is on the wall. We've decided to put the Iron Curtain back up and drive Russia into China's arms FOR NOTHING.
And guess what - weapons won't be enough to stop a country of 1.4B from conquering an island off their coast with 30M either. To stop you'll need an *actual* intervention. US and Japanese and Korean ships and sailors and soldiers. Do you want this Chinese bloc to have Russia on its side? We've decided: yes!
>And guess what - weapons won't be enough to stop a country of 1.4B from conquering an island off their coast with 30M either.
That depends on the weapons. I can think of some options, particularly given that it's not like the PLA can walk across the Taiwan strait.
>Do you want this Chinese bloc to have Russia on its side? We've decided: yes!
1. You're wanting me to believe that China wouldn't effectively have Russia on its side anyway? They're both very much aligned against US interests, and the main issue there is just the natural tension between them.
2. What is Russia going to do to help China in the Taiwan strait anyway?
(There is actually one specific answer to this, but I'm curious if you know it.)
1. I don't think Russia being aligned against US interests was a foregone conclusion. In terms of getting them on our side, that ship has sailed, but there's no reason that they and China were destined to be BFFs. Chinese Nationalists have eyes on the Russian Far East (especially Russian Manchuria), and they have their own interests - "anti-America" is the only thing they agree on. Russia, a European, Westernized, Christian country, still ended up a junior partner, just to China, rather than US. I don't think this had to happen!
2. Russia will provide China the natural resources required to power their manufacturing and feed their people, as well as a market to sell their goods, though that's of lesser importance re: Taiwan (if you had something else in mind, lmk). Where previously a Carrier Group in the Malacca strait would be checkmate, now they have a vast, *compliant*, hinterland.
It is up to the Americans to decide how they want to be seen by the rest of the world.
Frankly the Biden's half-assed response is somewhat "worst of the both worlds". If Biden said in 2022 "Ukraine is not our formal ally, we are sending our thoughts and prayers, but nothing else", it would be rough, but at least straightforward. If Biden said in 2022 "we will help Ukraine as much as we can", that would be risky, but again, straightforward.
But this crazy micromanagement by Jake Sullivan - you can do this, but you can't do that, you may do this on every Thursday - fuck, that was unserious. I don't really envy either the Ukrainians or the new American administration. Wars shouldn't be fought part time. Last time someone made this error was in Viet Nam, and the result for the US was worse than getting out early or going in fully.
You know this how?
Because "they" decided to stop the war in April 2022 and we scuttled it.
Who are "they" and who are "we" and how did these "we" scuttle it? Not a rhetorical question, I'm really curious what your sources are.
Don't do this. Don't carry the water for a commenter who can't be bothered to put in a modicum of effort to expand on their one-sentence throwaway comments.
To this point, Putin never negotiated with Zelenskiy, he sent a low-level flankie with no authority to make commitments (last name Kozak, if you are curious).
"But a deal was on the table, yeah? And Boris Johnson pressured Zelenskyy not to sign."
No, not really. There were outlines of a deal, negotiations were kind of happening, but the trust level was really low. And then the Bucha atrocities came to light. The anger in Ukraine was - still is - enormous. Zelensky felt he had no choice but to abandon, lest he'd be literally ripped to pieces.
I would imagine he regrets it now. But it was understandable at the time.
-----
"a glimpse into what’s actually going on (Putin a cruel but competent dictator, Zelenskyy a corrupt puppet of the West, CIA using Ukraine to attack Russia[...]"
No. Zelenskiy may be corrupt, but likely far less than the previous Ukrainian presidents, and no, Ukraine never attacked nor planned to attack Russia, quite the opposite, starting with the Tuzla incident back in 2003. This war is weirdly obvious - Russia is bad, Ukraine may be whatever but they are fighting for their land and their lives so for now they get to be the good guys.
The idea would be to make Ukraine as strong as possible so that the active conflict ends with them in as strong a position as possible, and not to make a peace deal that rewards Russia. I don’t think that Ukraine will conquer back all their territory but it is still unacceptable to concede it de jure to Russia in a deal (at any rate without Ukrainian approval). Putin should be made to fail strategically.
Yeah, this. If Ukraine receives strong military materiel support, they will win this on their own.
That strikes me as a peculiar definition of "on their own."
This means Ukrainians will do the actual fighting and actual dying. All we need to do is to give them enough weapons. That we are not doing this is an epic fail. I can't believe I miss Reagan and Thatcher now. Our enemies are united and help each other and we're twiddling thumbs and posting nonsense about Ukraine not being real.
Our enemies are not in Russia or China.
Unless you're speaking from Iran, that is obviously not true.
Our enemies *are* in Russia. And less immediately, in China.
One can equivocate about China, but yes, Russia is absolutely the enemy of the US, they don't even hide it anymore. You don't need me to tell you that, you just have to listen to what they say and watch what they do. It's weird how Obama made fun of Romney in 2012 for pointing that out.
I think you are vastly overestimating both the amount of profit the "warmongers" are making in this conflict, and the degree of political influence they have.
Most of the weapons that have been provided to Ukraine, were surplus that had already made as much of a profit as its manufacturers were ever going to make. There has been some new production delivered to Ukraine, and more used to backfill the stockpile. But the difference between "Holy crap, we need to support Ukraine!" and "Holy crap, the Russians just steamrollered Ukraine, we need to be ready if they try for Poland and most of our stockpile is getting close to its expiration date!", is fairly small where e.g. Lockheed-Martin's bottom line is concerned.
And remember, the Biden administration's original plan for this war was that the Ukrainian army would fight for about a week and then Volodymyr Zelenskyy would flee to Warsaw and run a government-in-exile generating propaganda while Ukrainian partisans tried to play Afghanistan 2.0 for a decade. The decision to change that plan, wasn't made by the Biden Administration, it was made by the Ukrainians.
The tired cliche about how wars are caused by greedy warmongers trying to sell Moar Gunz for Moar Moneyz, is trotted out every time there's a war anywhere for any reason and doubly so if the United States is involved. It is usually false, and it is almost never supported by anything more than "Oh, come on this is obvious, what are you, sheeple NPCs, that you can't see it!".
Provide some *evidence* for your assertion, and we can talk.
You're basically trying to argue that because it happened once (Tonkin), and then again (WMD), it's happening again now. Do you see how that does not follow?
If you don't, consider that America entered the World Wars mainly because of Lusitania, Zimmerman, and Pearl Harbor. None of these were mercenary war profiteering. By your argument, it happened once, and then again; therefore, it's happening now(??).
And that's without considering the problems with the WMD cause hypothesis (intel services DID care and widely believed they COULD have existed; it wasn't the only impetus for Iraq; there was also repeated violations of UN resolutions, Hussein's human rights abuses, and his support for international terrorism; believing the media lied then but somehow isn't lying now), but rather just the one publicized by motivated people.
You're not likely to get far trying to argue based on past incidents in this case. Much more persuasive would be to produce evidence about the present conflict.
It will never cease to amaze me how much some Westerners love Putin and swallow every grain of propaganda with eagerness.
We have polls on this. The numbers for continuing the war are high.
For someone who claims not to like Putin, you're certainly eager to run his errands.
JohanL, your insinuations are impolite and unrealistic. It's like me saying you must be paid off by the Ukrainian oligarchs. It's not only highly unlikely, but we shoudl give each other the benefit fo the doubt in such things.
No, it's like claiming I like Ukraine in this war and wish for them to win.
Which is perfectly true.
Every post by Turtle on the subject is arguing for/cheering for/apologizing Putin and Russia, and claiming the West and Ukraine are bad. Claiming the democratically elected president is a tyrant while the bloody-handed dictator is beloved by his people. Claiming Ukraine is doomed no matter what.
You do the math.
I don't mean to say Turtle is being paid or anything - it's more likely it's a genuine preference. That's hardly unheard-of.
I presume you need to assume that the realists, who grasped long ago that Ukraine was not on any trajectory to win the war, are propagandists because either:
1) you suffer from cognitive dissonance and are defending your belief in Ukraine's chances; or
2) you believe that staying radically positive regarding the situation on the ground, even if it's unrealistic, is a crucial ingredient to Ukraine maybe somehow actually winning
I'll also do some of your work for you, and declare explicitly in my case that I am a paid Russian troll personally hired by Putin.
The Ukrainians are "not on any trajectory to win the war", because the Biden Administration is terrified of the prospect of Russia losing the war and so has very carefully tweaked the flow of military assistance to a stalemate-producing level.
It does not follow that Ukraine can not win the war, *particularly* if we are having an honest discussion of US policy that includes the "Give Ukraine more aid so they can win the war" option. But there are a lot of people here who seem to really not want to consider that option.
An only moderate increase in military material support would tilt the advantage to Ukraine - we have seen this multiple times already, when they're able to inflict severe losses on Russia once they receive the resources to put an offensive together. At the same time, Russia's military capacity is degrading as stores and manpower run dry, while mobilization in Russia seems politically impossible.
The war is eminently winnable if there's even moderate will in the West.
"Realist" these days means "defeatist". Which seems like a silly thing to be when victory is in fact possible. If the so-called realists had had their way, Ukraine would have surrendered on day 1.
NATO officially declaring war is a dangerous gambit because of the risks of nuclear escalation. But if Russia finds it an acceptable escalation to use troops from a third country like North Korea, then so should any other on the Ukrainian side, like Poland, or France. NATO expressly does not interfere with any member's other military alliances past or future.
Also, there is no way the war will go on for much longer, at least not at the current intensity. The Russian reserves, both financial (sovereign wealth fund) and military (cold war stockpiles), are depleting quickly, and that's with a full-on war economy. The West has barely made any effort to ramp up its own military production, at most depleting their own stockpiles of cold-war era material. The Russian economy is far from invincible, the sanctions are biting (though they could be better), and if Russia doesn't win within 1-2 years from now, they will not during Putin's lifetime.
The North Koreans are mercenaries. If Ukraine, or the United States, wants to buy some North Korean soldiers, to fight against the Russians and their North Koreans, we can probably do that too. As I understand it, Ukraine is hiring a few mercenaries already.
Hiring Poles would be very dangerous. It is too close to a real declaration of war by Poland.
I wonder how many Byelorussians are fighting for Russia? That's another poor country with a lot of people and a need for money.
Of course each side has been recruiting foreign volunteers basically since the start of the invasion. That is nothing new and I've not seen either side make a fuss about it at all. The 10k North Koreans, however, were qualitatively different from these individual volunteers. They were put together by the NK military in some organized fashion. They also had the explicit approval from the highest NK leadership, otherwise they could never leave NK in those numbers. Yeah, probably NK got paid in some way so that makes them mercenaries, but only on a technicality. It's still vastly different from the regular recruiting efforts of either side, simply because of the scale and the explicit leadership approval.
And quite frankly, I find the idea that Ukraine or her allies could "probably" go shopping for NK soldiers the same way as Russia laughable. But even if they could and wanted to go shopping in NK, then how would that be different from hiring Polish or French "mercenaries"? Why would that be a declaration of war, but the NK troops business as usual?
>But if Russia finds it an acceptable escalation to use troops from a third country like North Korea, then so should any other on the Ukrainian side, like Poland, or France. NATO expressly does not interfere with any member's other military alliances past or future.
OK, so Poland enters an alliance, sends troops, Russia bombs them. Does Poland abstain from ever directly retaliating from its own territory? If not, then doesn't Russia attacking Poland in response trigger article 5? And it doesn't seem likely that Poland (or whoever) would just suck up and take it indefinitely, whereas North Korea doesn't really have a choice, being half the world away.
If Poland attacks - article 5 doesn’t apply.
Are you suggesting that Russia would bomb Polish troops on Ukrainian soil, or on Polish soil?
If they're on Ukrainian soil, I don't see how that would force Poland to escalate - troops dying because you sent them to a warzone is kinda the expected outcome? If you lose too many and it's becoming unpopular you can just pull them out?
If on Polish soil, that would be an obvious escalation, but I don't expect that to happen for the same reason that nobody is bombing North Korea for supporting Russia.
>If you lose too many and it's becoming unpopular you can just pull them out?
But a much more popular and natural response would be stop fighting with one arm behind your back.
> If on Polish soil, that would be an obvious escalation, but I don't expect that to happen for the same reason that nobody is bombing North Korea for supporting Russia.
I think it would be risky to expect that Russia's response to Poland entering the war must surely be consistent with our response to North Korea entering the war.
With North Korea sending troops into Russia, the West is completely free to do deploy into Ukraine as well.
It probably makes sense to make these deployments defensive, like garrisoning the Belarus border and deploying in AA units.
Writing from Prague so this is fresh on my mind, but I think the proposition is simply that Ukraine should be supported in fighting for as long as it wishes to continue to fight, and in peacemaking whenever it wishes to make peace, rather than engaging in a New Munich Agreement where the great powers together decide what terrritories the smaller state should be compelled to yield to the larger predator.
I don't think it's a mere assumption. Opinion on the war in Ukraine is naturally mixed, but all appearances are that resistance is still overwhelmingly favored. Part of why there's little path to peace at present is that Zelensky can expect to be punished, not rewarded, by his electorate if he trades territory for peace.
https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/Carnegie_survey_Ukraine_war_Ukrainian_public_opinion_March_2024.pdf
See pg 9 - 51% believe Ukraine should "fight until it liberates all territory to the 1991 borders." "Seek a compromise to end the war through negotiations" clocks in at 21%.
See also: https://theconversation.com/growing-number-of-war-weary-ukrainians-would-reluctantly-give-up-territory-to-save-lives-suggests-recent-survey-238285
Title aside, the numbers show that while the share of Ukrainians who favor trading land for peace is *growing* its still about half the number of those who favor fighting for the 1991, 2014, or 2022 borders.
See also also: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/06/ukraine-public-opinion-russia-war?lang=en
>>On the surface, it may seem that a large share of Ukrainians are willing to negotiate with Russia; the Carnegie-sponsored poll found that 43 percent of respondents were in favor when asked a simple yes or no question. Other polls appear to show that Ukrainians have warmed to the idea of negotiations in the past year.<<
>>But further analysis and more targeted questioning shows that support for negotiations is largely theoretical. The share of Ukrainians who preferred seeking a compromise to end the war through negotiations fell from 43 percent in the yes or no question to 26 percent when respondents were asked to choose between negotiating with Russia and continuing to fight. Most Ukrainians who expressed openness to negotiate appeared to envision a scenario in which Kyiv was in a favorable enough position to demand the full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, the prosecution of Russian officials for war crimes, reparations, and other conditions that are nonstarters for the Kremlin.<<
>>Asking Ukrainians about various war termination scenarios showed the divergence between their views and Russian demands (see figure 2). Most Ukrainians (83 percent) strongly opposed reducing Ukrainian military capabilities as a condition to end the war—one of the main sticking points in the Russia-Ukraine talks that took place in Belarus and Türkiye in the spring of 2022. Majorities or pluralities also opposed ending the war in the following scenarios: a ceasefire that freezes the current front lines (65 percent), a Ukrainian renunciation of possible EU or NATO membership (65 percent and 60 percent, respectively), a Russian withdrawal from the territories it has occupied since 2022 only (46 percent), or an agreement that Ukraine will never again strike Russia (44 percent).<<
And very notably:
>>Ukraine’s leaders are not wrong to worry about social unrest if the country is forced to sign a disadvantageous peace deal. More than half of respondents said they would join a peaceful protest if they disagreed with the terms of a hypothetical peace treaty. A small but notable minority, 7 percent, said they would join an armed protest; this figure grew to 15 percent among active-duty soldiers and veterans. Of the 71 percent of respondents who said they would demand a change of leadership if they disagreed with the treaty terms, nearly three-quarters said they would do so only when it is possible to hold elections.<<
I appreciate the polling data. We have to take it for what it's worth, though. In Russia, it is dangerous to say publicly you're against the war, and I bet it's dangerous in Ukraine too. Also, Ukraine doesn't have freedom of the press, does it? If the news media is all telling you you're winning the war, and that it will be over soon with victory if you just grit your teeth and wait out the Russian bombs on your city, then you're not going to want to make a compromise peace. Think of Germany and Japan in the closing years of WW 2.
What does "take it for what it's worth" mean to you, specifically, though?
I'm comfortable accepting that polling in a war zone has limits in terms of its accuracy, but even taking those flaws into account I don't see how you get any lower than "more likely than not more Ukrainians would prefer to continue to fight so long as they continue to receive arms to do so, than would prefer to trade land for peace."
There's a difference between accepting evidence as imperfect under the circumstances and applying a discount based on the possibility that it may not be accurate, and simply assigning it zero evidentiary value based on that imperfection.
I assume you're not doing the latter, but "take it for what it's worth" is kind of vague, so can you give me a clearer sense of what you assess the Ukrainian position to be on the question of continued war vs trading territory for peace?
I expect that if you ask a Ukrainian, "Would you trade land for peace?", he'd say, "No". If you really put him in charge, and said, "Would you accept an offer to end the war and have Russia return all territory except for Sevastopol?", he would jump at the offer. What people say when they aren't really making hte decision is more expressive than realistic.
Similarly to in Russia and Ukraine, people in Palestine and Gaza don't have a free press and unbiased news.
I'm pretty sure people in Ukraine have a free press. The Kyiv Independent, in particular, seems to be pretty independent. Possibly that's a very elaborate con that's been carried out since before the war even began, but I'd have to see evidence before I would give that any serious consideration.
From Wikipedia: On March 3, 2022, the Criminal Code of Ukraine was supplemented by Article 436-2, titled "Justification, recognition as legitimate, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, glorification of its participants". The article, which has been criticized by the OHCHR and other human rights groups,[85][86] states punishment by correctional labor up to two years or imprisonment up to eight years for such speech.[87] Gonzalo Lira, an American pro-Russia blogger living in Ukraine, was among those arrested under this law.[88]
On December 30, 2022, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a bill that would expand the power of government to regulate media outlets and journalists in the country, over the objections of journalists and international press freedom groups.[89][90]
According to a State Department report published in 2023 restrictions were placed on media freedoms enabling "an unprecedented level of control over primetime television news." Some speakers who criticised the government were blacklisted from government-directed news. The outlets and journalists who were considered a threat to the national security and who undermined the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity according to the authorities were blocked, banned or sanctioned.[91]
OK, you've got "vibes". Do you have any actual evidence that the polls don't approximately represent Ukrainian popular sentiment?
Because if we're just talking "vibes", I'm getting a huge vibe of "Putin Apologist Fanboy" coming from certain posters here. So are we throwing around assertions based on "vibes", or is the standard higher than that?
How do you stack this with all major powers having conscription in WW2? Were all populations in favor of surrender throughout the conflict, regardless of polling or other measures of the war’s popular support?
I think that we (note: I am a citizen of the EU, not of the United States) should support Ukraine in defending against Russian aggression as long as this aggression is ongoing, without asking Ukraine to make concessions to Russia.
If Ukrainian government itself would volunteer to make concessions, I am not against that, in fact I think it would be wise of them, but I don't think we should, e.g. tell them that unless they drop their demand to get Crimea back, we will not send them more money/shells/whatever.
I wrote a second substack on Ukraine which might be of interest. It is a direct response to comments in Astral Codex Ten from people who disagreed with me for 3 good reasons:
"Russia and Ukraine Should Keep on Fighting, Not Make Peace": Making the best case for U.S. opposition to a peace treaty (Part I) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-should-keep-on
Yeah let's encourage more people getting slaughtered rather than prompting Ukrainians to cut their losses and allow the world to move on from this.
I guess I'll just note that your interpretation of my comment is not exactly very charitable and commit myself to not responding any further. Bye.
Would you have argued the same in 1939-40? Just surrender to Hitler?
Finland in 1939 is a good case to consider. Russia, in alliance with Germany, invaded Finland, in the Winter War. Finland did amazingly well, humiliating the Russians, with teh support of the West. But the situation was hopeless, and though the Russians could have conquered all of Finland, which was no doubt their initial intention, they settled for about 10% of the country.
Were the Finns wrong to make peace with an evil aggressor?
(To be sure, in 1941 the Finns allied with Germany and retook what they'd lost-- only to lose it again in 1945 when,a gain, they made a compromise peace with Russia.)
The argument here isn't that Ukraine shouldn't make peace if that's what they prefer - of course they should. What I oppose is that they should be _forced_ into a degrading peace by their supposed allies, and that it was wrong for them to try to resist in the first case.
The 1930's comparison here isn't Finland - it's Czechoslovakia. We all know how well _that_ worked.
Wrong comparison. The West has been aiding Ukraine for 2 years substantially, and Russia has bloodied its nose. 1938 was a walkover for Hitler, which is what encouraged him.
It would have honestly been *worse* if Czechoslovakia had managed to fight the Germans almost to a standstill at obscene losses for the Germans over two years, only to *then* get abandoned. That would have been more bonkers even than the original betrayal at Munich.
Maybe?
If you could avoid World War 2, at the cost of having Eastern Europe under German domination rather than Soviet domination, would that not be a net win?
Chamberlain's mistake in 1938 was not in giving up the Sudetenland for peace, but in thinking that he'd get peace when it was pretty obvious he would not. By 1939, he'd learned his lesson, unlike the "Don't die for Danzig" people.
Here, the question is whether Russia would stop invading if we made peace in Ukraine. It would, I think. Russia's invasion of Crimea was a big success-- a useful conquest at very low cost. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not. Probably Putin and almost everyone regrets it and wouldn't do it again. It was too expensive, and the first year was humiliating. So I think Russia now would stop and not invade Estonia-- though in 2022, that was a serious concern for us.
I think you are absolutely wrong about this. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has not been a success *so far*. But the only peace deal that is at all plausibly on the table is one where, A: Russia gets to keep all the territory it has claimed so far and B: Ukraine is substantially demilitarized with a Versailles-style token defense force and C: any Western military aid or alliance is strictly prohibited.
And that deal leads to Russia invading and conquering Ukraine as soon as they've adequately rehabilitated their Army. This is very predictable because, first, February 2022 shows very clearly that this is what Russia thinks victory should look like and B: September 2022 through November 2024 shows that Russia is clearly willing to piss away a million or so Russian soldiers to claim victory in Ukraine and C: with that deal in place, they will be able to claim that victory at a much lower price. Also, D: we *know* what happens when there's a cease-fire where Russia gets to keep the territory it has already captured and Ukraine can't join NATO, because that's how we got here in the first place.
If you think Donald J. Trump's masterful deal-making abilities are going to lead to a peace settlement where Ukraine is actually allowed to maintain an army capable of deterring or defeating the next Russian invasion, then I am fairly certain you are mistaken and even more certain that I won't want to hear the excuses you will make when it doesn't happen the way you want it to.
Net win? Is there a part of it that's a local loss?
Almost certainly for the Jews, though the Soviets weren't exactly kind to them either.
The Soviets controlled Eastern Europe for several generations of misery, after literally raping and pillaging large swaths of it. I still think the Nazis were net worse than the Soviets, but if we also avoided WWII in the process? Hard to measure.
That assumes, of course, that Hitler would have stopped at some reasonable expansion. Maybe he takes the former German areas (including lots of Poland) but stops there? It's quite possible that was always his intention, to reunify WWI Germany that was taken away by the treaty of Versailles. I think the chance of him stopping there was pretty low, but that may still be worth not having WWII by most measures.
The question for WWII and for Putin is the same - how much is it worth to the world to have an enforceable baseline that "wars of aggression do not succeed"?
Ultimately, I want to live in a world were Hitler loses, even if the costs are very high. That we also found out he was slaughtering Jews and other groups and would have been a very bad conquering leader is something we need to consider as well. More reason to go against him in WWII, even if just in hindsight. Relevant to today - how bad is having Putin in control of parts of Ukraine? Is he slaughtering civilians or something similarly bad? We saw some of that early on around Kiev, but I haven't heard much lately.
Probably also for the Poles, _even_ considering Stalin. The Soviet Union was eventually satisfied with the combination of annexed land and a satellite state after murdering everyone who could possibly oppose it - Nazi Germany wanted a permanent slave society.
No, I argued the same not so long ago when Azerbaijan invaded and displaced Armenians or the other countless wars fought since 1940 (including when moralizers like you were the aggressors). If you want to see more people dying to justify your moral crusades against everyone you equate to or perceive to be the new Hitler then that's your prerogative and you are also free to go fight them - I'll be holding my breath.
"Always surrender to the aggressor, in order to save lives" seems like poor policy.
The policy I'm advocating for is the minimization of loss of life. Prolonging a war of attrition, which cannot be won under the current status-quo, is orthogonal to preserving life. If you have the means to standup to the aggressor, of course do it. But Ukraine does not have the means to do that, "help" from the West goes as far as transferring money from the tax-payer to the military-industrial complex, but no further than that. Meanwhile young men are dying in the meat-grinder every passing day so that Westerners can signal their virtue on the internet from a safe place while sipping an oatmeal latte.
1000%
Loss of life isn't minimized if the aggressor chooses to interpret surrender as weakness and invades further.
And given what we know of this aggressor, further invasion is the way to bet.
What kind of policy are you suggesting will cost less lives?
Something that makes it clear to the aggressor that further invasions will not cost less lives.
And if the aggressor doesn't really care about minimizing lost lives, pivot to something the aggressor does care about, and minimize that.
And what are those somethings in the Russian-Ukranian war?
Yet another version of Minsk Agreements and hope that the third time is the charm?
I guess if the we respect the agreements then Russia will not find an excuse to break them?
Russia breaks every agreement when it suits them. I'm sure war can be avoided, at the cost of unconditional surrender to every Russian demand ever. Who knows, maybe Russia will be satisifed somewhere along the Rhine or something?
This is exactly what the Russians say about the USA lol
Some people would argue that it matters whether the statement is true (which it is about Russia) or untrue (which it is about the U.S.).
There was never any agreement to not expand NATO to the east. It’s all made up, as well as Russian attempts to describe things that came up in talks as an ”agreement”.
Point to any treaty text where it’s agreed to. I’ll be waiting.
Why would you think that? Are the Russians that much more moral than us?
I mean at least if we respect them and not play the game of plausible deniability, then we will indeed have the moral high ground.
The idea that the world will just "move on from this" if we let Ukraine lose has certain appeal, but this is highly unlikely. Russia's mission in this world is to be a military menace, and it will keep doing this as long as it doesn't meet real resistance.
Also, there is an unpleasantly good chance that Xi will interpret "move on from this" as moving a PRC invasion force to Taiwan...
This sounds quite racist to me, Russians are not fundamentally evil people as your post is implying, they have geopolitical interests just like every other country/people have.
The claim is about the government of Russia, not it's people, and that government is indeed unaccountable to the people of Russia.
Putin is vastly more popular in Russia than Zelenskyy is in Ukraine
I wrote a second substack on Ukraine which might be of interest. It is a direct response to comments in Astral Codex Ten from people who disagreed with me for 3 good reasons:
"Russia and Ukraine Should Keep on Fighting, Not Make Peace": Making the best case for U.S. opposition to a peace treaty (Part I) https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/russia-and-ukraine-should-keep-on
Is the government of Russia consisted of aliens descended from the Alpha Centauri?
The current government of Russia is fundamentally evil, yes. Saying so isn't racist, and you should be ashamed of yourself to pull the race card.
You're consistently interpreting comments here in the most uncharitable way. This is not the place to do this. Get better or go away.
"The current government of Russia is fundamentally evil, yes. Saying so isn't racist, and you should be ashamed of yourself to pull the race card."
Why do you think you are the authority to determine whether the person I'm responding to is talking about the current government of Russia and not the Russian people themselves? In further the responses they have admitted they are talking about Russian people. So please save your movement of the goalposts.
"You're consistently interpreting comments here in the most uncharitable way. This is not the place to do this. Get better or go away."
What kind of authority do you have to command people away? Are you a moderator?
Ah, yes, the "Western propaganda" I keep hearing so much about. Help me out, would that be the "Western propaganda" that's claiming that
a) Putin is a megalomaniacal despot who's in no way representative of the Russian people
b) Putin is the real hero of Eastern Europe and a bulwark against American aggression,
c) Russian culture and the hostility of Russian politics are one and the same and can't be judged separately
d) Russia has a longstanding strong and proud culture of peaceful coexistence with its neighbors, and NATO expansion is to blame for the war?
There are so many "Western propagandas", I don't know which to choose!
Note also that _I_ only clarified what vectro was saying. In _my_ view, many people in Russia, probably even the majority, stand behind Putin's politics. They're responsible for him coming to power. They represent an awful culture, they share the blame for Russia's attack on Ukraine, and they deserve every bad thing that happens to them. If those people represent Russians, then Russians are evil. Feel free to call me racist now.
You could just say what you actually believe (I don’t know which claims a - d you endorse.) In any case, I’ll gladly oblige - blaming an entire nation and culture here is *incredibly* racist. It’s no different from blaming “the blacks” for inner city crime.
What is it with the Russia apologists trotting out "racist" crap every time someone points out the sordid history of the place? Takes one to know one? You can shove it right up where the sun don't shine.
As to Russians being menace to the world, I'm only quoting tsar Nicolas I. He actually was proud of it, and nothing changed there since 1849 (yes, just to point out that Russia invaded Hungary twice, in 1849 and 1956).
I don't know if Russians are "fundamentally evil", but they sure do love themselves some good expansionist wars, or do you think the place got to be that big because they gave everyone hugs and candy?
The idea that Russians have similar preferences to liberal Westerners is wrong (https://www.betonit.ai/p/no-quarrel-with-the-people-of-x/comment/36921710). The implications are debatable, but the facts are the facts, their offensive nature notwithstanding.
The fundamental idea of Russian foreign policy is that Russia has a huge sphere of influence that is not allowed to be contested, and that this should serve as a buffer zone for the Motherland.
You _can_ give Russia all that they want in exchange for peace, but be aware this essentially means the Warsaw Pact area at the barest _minimum_.
Totally agreed. This may go as far back as the Mongol rule. Cultures have enormously long memories.
Take a deep breath, re-read your comment, and put any other people (Italians/Romans and Greeks conquered the world once, British too, the Japanese were expansionists, Mongols) in the place of "Russians", select any offensive quote any of their leaders might have said and then take a hard and long look at the mirror.
Ok, no objection to how Nicolas I described Russia nor to its history of expansionist wars. Noted.
Yes others have done bad things in the past, that excuse stopped working for me back in kindergarten. Your mileage may vary.
No substantive argument on how Russians are uniquely expansionist compared to other people. Noted. You remind me of the British that asserted Nazis were a byproduct of Germans being uniquely brutal and barbarous rather than suffering from ideological brain rot. Thank you for your deep insight and analysis on the Ukranian situation, according to which the Russians are simply comically evil - seems indeed your thinking has been stuck to kindergarten.
I submit the size of the Russian empire, the USSR, and the modern Russia as evidence. Yes, the British may have been wrong about Germany, but consider that it managed to avoid expansionist wars for 80 years now. Good luck pointing to a comparable period in Russian history. Some cultures are more violent and cruel than others.
Russians' behavior in Ukraine (Chechnya/Afganistan/Syria/etc.) is evil without anything comical about it. Same for their behavior in their own country toward each other, where torture in detention is so routine and widespread it's not even denied anymore, or did you miss proudly displayed ear cutting and genital electrocution of the arrested Crocus Hall suspects, much to the cheering of the population?
Also, Germany _was_ a particularly militaristic country, a heritage from its Prussian origins. Only World War 2 eventually broke this part of German culture.
Britain and France didn't become military dictatorships - Germany did, in *both* world wars.
Shoplifting: I owned a retail store in Seattle for 34 years. I believe, but can't know, that my experience applies to California.
When a shoplifter is caught red-handed, there is no real consequence in the legal system. Partly because the jails are full, partly because shoplifting is viewed as a victimless crime ("part of the cost of doing business" "the retailer just charges it to insurance"), shoplifters are given probation, at most.
Police learn this and thus feel their time is wasted arresting shoplifters. All humans, including police, want their work to be meaningful, so police don't want to spend time on shoplifters when the police know no real punishment will be meted out.
The solution: real punishment for shoplifters.
Impediment to that solution: jails are full.
Solution to the impediment: If a shoplifter is convicted, one of the conditions of their two-year probation is whenever they enter a retail store, they must wear an 8.5" x 11" sign that says, "I am a convicted shoplifter". This solution is extremely low cost.
Teeth to the probation: if a convicted shoplifter is found in a store without wearing their sign, they get six full months in jail, without possibility of early release.
For some reason, society feels like shoplifting is a victimless crime. To a retailer, there is no real difference between taking something out of my store and taking something out of my house.
I am probably way to the left of most people on this site, and I honestly think we should bring back the stocks, or caning, or the scarlet letter for these types of petty crimes where prison is too risky, expensive, and maybe leads to worse criminality.
Likewise for misdemeanor driving offenses: you get the DUI ticket AND you get tomatoes thrown at you in front of the county library while someone whips the bottom of your feet a bit.
What's the penalty for refusing to wear the sign? Forcing them to wear a sign that says "I refused to wear my shoplifting sign"?
"Jails are full" is an absolute roadblock. There needs to be a credible threat of actual punishment. Build low-security Joe Arapaio-style internment camps for nonviolent criminals. Just fence in some scrubland and put up tents, it needn't be that expensive. The cheapest solution is to pass something like castle-doctrine for retailers. There should be zero liability for a store owner if he decides to take a baseball bat to a shoplifter. That would reverse crime real quick.
I am also in Seattle proper.
Shoplifting is indeed rampant and so is trespassing, either for burglary or just because. My condo building has had intruders three times this *year,* with my workplace downtown seeing them even more often. Our site averages one minor to moderate physical assault on an employee every year, but some years there have been several.
The police are wildly disinterested in responding to calls about intruders, even though some of those intruders are visibly unwell and highly unpredictable.
I don't know how this gets better without a cultural shift which endorses workers and residents taking the law into their own hands. We need a jury pool which would never convict a store clerk for pepper spraying a shoplifter or threatening an intruder with a baseball bat before this can get better.
We've had a lot of intruders, too.
A very clever one made a beeline for the garage, tested a bunch of cars to find unlocked ones, and then stole a pair of garage door openers. He also tested them on the way out, which was a mistake, since our system records their use and we were able to identify which ones he'd taken and deactivate them.
Early in the year, there was someone who got in, pulled a fire alarm, and hid. We presume they went around trying doors to see if any were left unlocked, while all of us were outside shivering at 3 am.
Have you considered Singapore style caning?
That's a real solution to the problem of low cost punishing criminals.
Fines is an other such way.
Fines have the problem that you don't have to pay them. You can't just opt not to be caned.
Maybe a tattoo on the forehead is a better solution?
Seriously. I don't have any tattoos, but I'm aware that they can be removed without much (or any?) remaining marks. A tattoo, removed for free that just says "Shoplifter" that can be removed after a period of 1-5 years seems like it would accomplish the same thing, without the obvious enforcement problems of requiring people to wear a sign.
Granted it definitely seems somewhat cruel, because tattoos hurt and seems to violate some loose moral principle of bodily integrity, but on the face of it, it doesn't seem that bad compared to the obvious harm of imprisonment. Maybe give people the option and not mandate it. Maybe on the top of the hand is better than the forehead, just something that's visible.
Why wouldn't you just have your tattoo removed immediately?
Why wouldn't you just do a couple weeks in jail? Presumably because you wouldn't want to.
What are you saying? Having your tattoo removed is good for you. Spending time in jail is bad for you. That should be a sufficient answer to "if you don't want to spend a couple weeks in jail, why would you bother having your tattoo removed?".
Maybe a brand, then? Bring back the Scarlett Letter and put it right on the forehead ... with a red-hot poker.
At that point, maybe we should just cut off a hand like the good old days.
Eh, in some places they went finger by finger, but started with thumbs. That seems a sufficient compromise.
The tattoo removal doesn't _always_ work and risks leaving some marks behind.
"Solution to the impediment: If a shoplifter is convicted, one of the conditions of their two-year probation is whenever they enter a retail store, they must wear an 8.5" x 11" sign that says, "I am a convicted shoplifter"."
How do you propose to enforce this?
1. The retailer who caught the shoplifter originally could call the police if the shoplifter comes to the store again without the sign.
2. If the shoplifter is caught shoplifting again anywhere and is not wearing the sign, they have broken the probation and the 6 month sentence is enforced.
Due process? Mistaken identity? Turnover in retail staff so they don't recognize unlabelled shoplifters or the shoplifters just go to a different store?
Due process would be followed for anyone accused of violating their sign-wearing probation. That would also eliminate problems with mistaken identity.
Turnover in retail staff or shoplifters going to a different store? Obviously, not all convicted shoplifters would be prevented from entering a store without their sign. But this process would better prevent serial shoplifting than the nothing we are currently doing, and do so at almost no cost.
...I feel like microchipping them would be a lot simpler.
On (4), might help to have more regular classifieds?
[I am aware this might be against the new rules of posting, if so, just tell me and I’ll delete it]
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-344/comment/66758775.
9 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 14 % on August 29, 2024).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
38 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (down from 40 % on August 29, 2024).
53 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 46 % on August 29, 2024).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
Of course this is based on US election results.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I enjoy these updates even though I don't understand why Trump's election would meaningfully lower odds of victory when Democrats have absolutely no credible plan that would result in a victory either. If anything, Trump is just being more honest (I know! Conventional wisdom is that this is an impossibility!).
Trump has repeatedly promised to end the war quickly if elected, and the most plausible way he can do that is by threatening to cut off military aid to strongarm Ukraine into an unfavorable deal. It's uncertain if he'll follow through on that, because it's uncertain if Trump will follow through on literally anything he says, but it's worth at least a couple of percentage points in Russia's favor.
The current position of "Send just enough aid to keep the stalemate going and hope that Russia's economy keels over before Ukraine's does" doesn't exactly have me jumping for joy, but it's not totally impossible either.
If the election was considered 50/50 then the implied Ukraine win % for the numbers above if Democrats had won the election is 19%, so more than 2x the Republican number. The only major way I can see an endless war of attrition resulting in Ukranian victory is via a political collapse in Moscow, which I would not consider likely.
You are right in your calculation what would be my odds if Democrats would win (both the Presidency and the House). I think doubling compared to a situation of Republicans holding both the House and, um, White House, is reasonable.
And you are also correct that Ukrainian victory would likely require some sort of regime collapse, except I do think that under increased pressure something it is far from impossible. Sustainability of current rate of Russian battlefield losses seems measured more in months than years - enlistment bonuses in Russia are constantly rising and so is inflation.
Also, according to some estimates, almost half of Russian shells now comes from North Korea (this is probably exxagerated but still), and lot of them comes from Iran, and further support from those countries is very much not assured.
Despite that, Russia is obviously in a stronger position than Ukraine, and would be even if Democrats would win, but situation is still highly uncertain imho.
Thanks for elaborating!
I think the comment, especially since it isn't even linking to a post and besides here it doesn't seem like you post these updates anywhere else, is definitely not the target of the rule. There were a few (or just one) people basically posting repeated advertisements for their blog on every open thread.
Unlike the brain, the stomach alerts you when it is empty.
I really like this. Why *don't* we have a better warning system for when we're overgeneralizing or ignoring things that might be important.
It's all very well (is it?) to talk about the need for good enough fast approximations for getting away from predators, but we evolved under conditions which weren't only about getting away from predators.
This is attributed as an African proverb, but I haven't found anything more specific.
I like the explanation from "The Righteous Mind", that our brain was developed for rationalization, not rationality. We evolved to create and join coalitions of humans. By that theory, there's no direct need for warning about overgeneralizing, because the warning comes about being insufficiently persuasive. And as long as we're persuasive, it doesn't matter whether we overgeneralized or not.
"Why *don't* we have a better warning system for when we're overgeneralizing or ignoring things that might be important."
Because it's hard to detect? An empty stomach can be detected by pretty simple sensors. But generalization is very useful, and it's hard to distinguish it from overgeneralization. And for every decision you have to ignore lots of things, but it's not obvious whether this contains important stuff or not.
I imagine there’s a greater evolutionary advantage to fitting in, for most.
This was the thesis of Beginnings of Infinity. We evolved big brains for meme propagation and conformity.
Why are automatic wristwatches still manufactured.
(A. Because there is a demand for them. But then the question is why is there this demand.)
It is much cheaper to make battery powered timepieces and it is usually more accurate.
A counter argument that it is like jewelry.
But that should only justify making the exterior part more aesthetically pleasing, not the inner part unnecessarily difficult to manufacture.
Consider the following hypothetical, if it were possible to make a mechanical computer for 10 or 100 times the price of an electric no one would buy it (or would they?).
A masterful piece of marketing by the Swiss watch manufacturers in the 1970s. Not easy to repeat.
Usually when a superior technology comes along, it gets adopted by the high end first and makes its way down. But quartz watches were so superior a technology that they were not just more accurate but also (very quickly) cheaper.
Now the high-end watch companies had a choice: they could either adopt the new technology (and throw out all their comparative advantage at building really good mechanisms) or they could do the opposite: reject quartz entirely, go even further upmarket, and become a more or less pure Veblen good.
They chose the latter. They rejected quartz, which became associated purely with cheap watches, and raised their prices to sell fewer watches for far more money. It only worked because these watches had brand names that were already prestigious and desirable.
Modern mechanical watches have gotten very good, to the point that they are dueable objects beyond almost everything else you will encounter in everyday life. There's something very heartening about wearing a little whirring clock that with a little care will happily go on softly ticking away for centuries after being passed down to one's descendants.
Mechanical watches are to me at least, the perfect combo of reliable tool, fun aesthetics, and historical connection that pushes all the buttons.
>Consider the following hypothetical, if it were possible to make a mechanical computer for 10 or 100 times the price of an electric no one would buy it (or would they?).
You're talking about a computer that would run in a power outage without having to worry about a battery life? Yes, people would buy it. Probably not many, but there would be a market.
Personally, I really like the aesthetic that reminds me of the capability of human engineering, even from a long time ago. To see the gears and jewels mechanically ticking away in such an arrangement to precisely track the time is something else. Like the "open heart" or "skeleton" displays, very steampunk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqf4rqM4Nok
I worked with a guy a few years back who had a small collection of mechanical wrist watches and was always on the lookout for new ones. They were 100% jewelry for him; he didn't even wind them. He had a display case for them, kept them polished, and matched them to the rest of his outfit. He did not use them to know what time it was (he used his phone for that).
edit - in fact his most expensive model he actually got used at a discount because the action was broken, which meant nothing to him.
>A counter argument that it is like jewelry.
It's like jewelry, but it's also like a toy.
>Consider the following hypothetical, if it were possible to make a mechanical computer for 10 or 100 times the price of an electric no one would buy it (or would they?).
If you can make it cool-looking and aesthetic, there would 100% be a market for them.
This immediately makes me think - Apple.
Mechanical watches have a smoothly revolving second hand. Quartz has a discretely ticking hand. So that is one aesthetic difference. Although I do not think this explains it. Many people, me included, take aesthetic delight in their construction: very often mechanical watches have a glass crystal on the back, so that if you flip the watch you can look at its movement, which is literally … moving. And you can lift it to your ear and hear it ticking. Watches are fundamentally aesthetic objects, but aesthetics is more than just how it looks on your wrist. The provenance of the item influences the sense of beauty experienced by the owner. So people buy these watches for many of the same reasons they have to spend money on art.
I recently added this to my collection: https://www.iwc.com/en/watch-collections/pilot-watches/iw378003-pilot_s-watch-chronograph.html
I guess it's because I really care about this type of stuff. And there is a mix of aesthetics, elitism, and social status at play.
I just feel good when I put a nice watch on. Same way I feel good about working out with more focus on aesthetics than is justifiable. Same way I feel good making and eating a meal that is much more time consuming than is justifiable. Most of the art in my house wasn't a justifiable purchase. Most of my clothes aren't. I have first editions of some of my favorite novels when I could just buy them on kindle.
You, and 99.999% of the public don't know about the complication, but I do. And I think it's really beautiful.
IWC has been around for 150 years and will be around for another 150. I'll give the watch to one of my sons one day. It'll work just as well for them as it does for me. It'll still be seen as something elegant and beautiful.
Unlike most jewelry and clothing, it signals status only to those who I care about signaling too. It's a very convenient that someone wearing a Gucci belt won't know what it is. I really really really don't care that the average person won't understand it. It's sort of the point. Anyone who does recognize one of my watches is going to be, with nearly 100% accuracy, someone I am interested in meeting.
Battery-powered watches run on batteries, which run out and must be replaced. A minor inconvenience, but nevertheless an inconvenience. Certainly more of an inconvenience than the very minor inconvenience (if it is an inconvenience at all) of a mechanical watch being a teensy bit less accurate.
But, what do I know; I wear one of these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vyC90T7_0Q despite it losing a couple of minutes a day
Mechanical watches need to be expensively serviced every N years though, which is more of an inconvenience than getting a battery replaced (and more expensive than just buying a new quartz Seiko every time the battery runs out...)
A lot of us grew up being told how terrible batteries were for the environment, and it's not like anybody has come out since then and said "Oh we fixed the problem with batteries", instead everybody just kind of laughs about how you aren't supposed to throw batteries in the trash and everybody does so anyways.
I've never even heard from anyone throwing batteries in the trash, but I'm from a western european country so maybe other parts of the world (that also seem to have huge trouble with any kind of recycling) do indeed do that.
I wouldn't even know how to recycle a battery if I wanted to
We actually did kind of fix the problem with batteries, in that battery recycling technology has gotten significantly better (for what it's worth I do indeed recycle my batteries).
"Recycling facilities can now recover nearly all of the cobalt and nickel and over 80% of the lithium from used batteries and manufacturing scrap left over from battery production"
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1064886/battery-recycling-10-breakthrough-technologies-2023/
People do buy really expensive typewriters, yes.
Good point.
But perhaps at a smaller scale?
RE: not posting blog posts -- thanks for the guidance. I was never sure if I was violating the intended purpose of this thread, especially because you have a regular classifieds post with a "read my blog" section.
"More responses to responses on the California shoplifting policing situation, this time from a former public defender."
On the other hand, I worked in retail decades back, and shoplifting happened.
You could break it down to:
(1) Idiot teenagers thinking they were being edgy and cool grabbing small items
(2) People really in need who didn't have money and did need baby food or whatever
(3) Career criminals. Might be organised gangs, might just be the second generation of a family stealing from shops and training the third generation to do the same
I don't know about "lists of things to steal" but on the other hand it doesn't sound totally implausible to me. Get a bunch of young guys, tell them "this is the stuff that's worth grabbing, don't bother with that", let them run in and do a grab and run, and that's organised enough as far as I'm concerned.
Our police force thought it existed sufficiently to set up an operation in December 2023:
https://www.garda.ie/en/about-us/our-departments/office-of-corporate-communications/news-media/news-archive/an-garda-siochana-commences-operation-tairge.html
"Organised retail crime (ORC) typically refers to situations where a number of persons are acting together, targeting retailer outlets to steal significant quantities of goods to resell back into the retail supply chain through the black market. It can also involve refund fraud with the purpose of making a financial or material benefit. ORC is usually co-ordinated and well-organised by people who recruit others to commit theft from retailers.
The stolen goods are then sold to what is known as a ‘fence’ who then either sells them at a particular location or in some cases may sell them online in an activity known as ‘e-fencing’."
EDIT: I do wonder if the decision not to prosecute low-level crime came about because of the severe overcrowding in Californian jails which had the Supreme Court order the state to reduce the prison population. That was back in 2011 but turning a blind eye to petty crime is one way of not adding new prisoners (six months or under not worth it) and then the impetus carried forward with reform-minded DAs who wouldn't or didn't want to prosecute, and so the perception became "it's not even worth arresting these guys because they'll just walk".
https://www.npr.org/2011/05/23/136579580/california-is-ordered-to-cut-its-prison-population
I would add, some people steal because it makes them feel good, and it becomes an addiction.
Hey everyone — I’m looking for specific examples of auctions which changed their procedures during Covid (preferably ones which repeatedly sell homogeneous goods, like fish or flowers). Any help would be much appreciated, I’m trying to write a paper on the subject.
This probably doesn't count for you, but you could consider most TCG games, which have basically two markets that all sell homogeneous things. Firstly there is in-person trading at local game stores and conventions, which would have dropped significantly during COVID, and then you have online trading, which I imagine would've been unaffected by COVID beyond an increase in volume. You could see if the volume increased significantly and whether you could leverage that for something useful.
Oh my gosh, that is *precisely* the sort of thing I’m looking for — I played magic for years and didn’t think of it! Of course, my hope was to find a change in auction *format* affecting prices, and card sales are overwhelmingly by posted offer. Should look into this.
Perhaps relevant: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/moving-online-sothebys-sees-estimate-exceeding-results-across-categories
Not a homogenous good (It's Sotheby's) but as an occasional bidder, the amount of online auctions on their site increased dramatically during Covid, and I wouldn't be surprised if this led to higher overall prices. While their price estimates used to be accurate, or only off by a factor of 2-3x, now I see consistently art selling for 10x the estimated price. I don't know if it's macroeconomic conditions effecting the demand for art, if they're underestimating more deliberately, or if online auctions are just better for getting high prices (I suspect this).
Now that the US election has passed, what existential risk should I be worrying about next? Without the constant back and forth polling, exciting assassination attempts, internal party coups, and my participation through voting (in my state that has a 100% chance of going to one party) I fear my life will become extremely boring. :(
Back to thinking through AI risk? Climate Change? Maybe I should try believing in conspiracy theories as they seem to scratch that itch for a lot of people (some of whom are intelligent)?
I'm joking of course... mostly.
Just stick to climate change, it's an oldie but a goodie.
Plus, it's the only one that's definitely rotated out a biosphere before; it even has a few human civilizations painted on the side of the plane.
Heart attack, cancer.
Go to Yellowstone, put your ear on the ground and listen for any noises that might forbode a supervolcano eruption. :-)
Why do you assume the exciting assassination attempts will stop? If Trump (The Sun King - that goes back to MSNBC, 2018) does what he said he was going to do, there will be an awful lot of pissed off people with guns. If he doesn't do what he said he was going to do, there will be an awful lot of pissed off people with guns.
I wouldn’t worry that under the Trump administration life will be boring.
At least for me, 2017-2019 was far more boring than 2022-2024.
Predicting topics for The Fifth Risk part II
Spam, report comment and don’t click, they’re posting this to dozens of places.
What non-owner employee would ever want to do this? Risk getting stabbed by a crack head over a stick of Old Spice? No thanks!