Applications for the next round of High Impact Professional's Impact Accelerator Program (IAP) are open.
The IAP is a free, cause area agnostic, 6-week program designed to equip experienced (mid-career/senior) impact-focused professionals not currently working at a high-impact organization with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start taking actionable steps right away.
✅ The IAP is set up to help participants:
- identify paths to impact,
- take concrete, impactful actions, and
- join a network of like-minded, experienced, and supportive impact-focused professionals.
- Program duration: 6 weeks (week of February 10, 2025 – week of March 17, 2025)
If you have questions about the IAP or just want to know more about the program, please check the following resources:
(1) 👉 Attend one of our informational webinars featuring an introduction to the IAP and a Q&A session – we’ll have 2 webinar sessions to accommodate as many time zones as we can, so please join the one that suits your schedule best
❓ We aim to address as many questions as possible in the webinar sessions – Please send us your questions about the IAP via this form: https://bit.ly/3Zjv1nB
(2) See the IAP page for general information and the FAQ section on that page for answers to common questions: https://bit.ly/498iBkm
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
"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)!”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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…
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
...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?
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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"?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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:
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
“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”?
…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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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)?
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
"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 ..."
> "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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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).
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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 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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).