Ahhhh. Slightly more than comfortably full. Tryptophan addled. House a on the warm side of comfortable.Time to lie on the sofa in front of a football game I have no intention of paying attention to and uh uhhhnn….
A hypothetical situation/question that has bugged me since childhood: A ball is thrown at a wall. The distance between the ball and the wall can be measured and expressed mathematically. As the ball approaches the wall, that measurement becomes a smaller and smaller number. Numbers are infinite, and numbers can be always be divided and made smaller (in my understanding). My question - as the ball nears the wall, the numerically expressed distance can always be made into a smaller number - how does the ball, numerically speaking, ever actually make contact with the wall? This may be a dumb question, but hey, if you don't ask... Thanks in advance.
These are not trivial problems at all. If you suppose that the ball moves at constant speed of 1m/s toward the wall, and starts out 3m away, then the distance to the wall is (3-t)m and as the time t approaches 3, the distance goes to 0. There's nothing special happening at t=3 from a mathematical sense, though physically the ball contacts the wall at that point and you need to refine the model to go any further.
Actually, Newton developed calculus to deal with problems of the type you're describing. The way calculus is taught in schools and universities obscures this fact, but the basics of the subject are all about making sense of processes which happen in continuous time, like the one you describe.
You'll read this and think I haven't answered the question. Actually setting calculus on a completely rigorous mathematical footing took around 250 years, and the effort of many mathematicians. (Real numbers are already surprisingly difficult to describe formally - and then you're looking at processes involving these to describe the real world.) To get a completely satisfying answer to the question, you would probably need to go through a sequence of undergrad level calculus courses - but hopefully this gives a sense of what's going on.
Keep in mind that time works the same way; every time you remeasure the distance from the ball to the wall, you remeasure the time it takes to travel there. Eventually you hit... is it Planck, or Heisenberg? Either way, there's a distance at which things are no longer things, and then the ball changes direction.
Technically, the ball never touches the wall. The ball is made of atoms, the wall is made of atoms; if you put the atoms too close, they repel. At a tiny but nonzero distance the force becomes strong enough to make the ball bounce.
(If Chuck Norris throws a ball at a wall, a microscopic black hole is created at the place of collision, and then it gets complicated. EDIT: The atoms would probably just fit in places between other atoms and the ball would get stuck inside the wall, possibly leading to an explosion.)
You're looking for solutions for Xeno's paradoxes, which in the modern era broadly get solved with calculus. I'm not super up on the exact solutions, but it's something to do with limits?
Gebru and Torres, two dissident researchers who became famous as coauthors of the renowned "Stochastic Parrots" article, recently published a new paper critical of the rationality sphere and EA:
They coin the awesome-sounding acronym TESCREAL to describe the sphere, and then argue that it has roots in the eugenics tradition. Are you aware of this article, and have you considered responding to it?
In what way are they "dissidents"? They're representatives of the boring, narrow hegemony that rules intellectual life, trying to extend that hegemony into one of the few corners they don't control.
Once I strip aside the authors' tone of moral panic about the followers of TESCREAL beliefs (Transhumanism, Extopianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, EAism, and Longtermism) their arguments boil down to (a) these are all influenced by eugenics-based ideas, and (b) and most of their AGI hopes and dreams are not based on sound scientific nor engineering principles.
As for the first, they admit that the dream of breeding/creating superior humans goes back long before the early 20th-century Eugenics movement, and they fail to tie the current eugenical beliefs to those of the previous century. But they try to tar the current movements with old stains of the old movement.
And as for the latter, I tend to agree with their statements. A lot of the TESCREAL beliefs are attractive to smart people who think they know more than they do (and Charlie Stross has noted how much of their beliefs have been influenced by old science fiction tropes). I see the TESCREAL belief systems as being mostly harmless crackpottery. Of course, certain billionaire followers of TESCREAL beliefs could do a lot of social and political damage if they're given the power to do so.
Reading the article, commenting as I go, I am not promising that I will make it to the end:
> we have seen little discussion of why AGI is considered desirable by many in the field of AI, and whether this is a goal that should be pursued
Apparently no one reads Yudkowsky these days.
> In this paper, we ask: What ideologies are driving the race to attempt to build AGI?
In this comment, I answer: it's about money and power; the things that transcend all ideologies.
> the acronym “TESCREAL” denotes “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”
At the first sight, this sounds like a complicated way to say "nerds". (Later we will see how much the words can actually be substituted, but if yes, that would kinda reduce the entire finding to: "the people trying to build AGI are... nerds". Which is true, but not really surprising.)
> The idea of eugenics can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition
Yeah, I guess if you want to talk about transhumanists and singularitarians, you need to start with the recent examples, such as Plato and Aristotle.
> second-wave eugenics arose in response to new technological possibilities associated with genetic engineering and biotechnology. Such technologies opened the door to human “improvements”
When the authors say "eugenics", they basically include anything that concerns human DNA. If you worry about your child potentially getting Tay–Sachs disease, you know who else worried about people having inferior genes, right?
The link between eugenics and transhumanism seems to be that eugenicists wanted to improve humans by improving the genetic pool, and transhumanists want to achieve the same goal by abandoning the biological limitations completely. Different methods, the same goal.
Extropianists were the first organized modern transhumanist group. Singularitarians are also transhumanists. This... apparently makes the belief that an artificial intelligence could be smarter than humans an eugenicist belief, by the power of association. (I wonder whether a belief that Google can find things online better than you is also a fundamentally eugenicist belief. Or that a calculator can do multiplication faster than you.)
Never heard about cosmism before, so whatever; I find it plausible that it is also somehow related to thinking about the future and technology (which, as we have already established, are fundamentally eugenicist topics). Rationalists... also believe that AI is a big thing, and that it would better for the poweful AI to be good rather than evil. (Those assholes.) Effective altruists want to alleviate poverty... I am sure there is something sinister behind that, too, let's wait for the punchline... ah, yeah, some of them also worry about the future humans. And longtermists, those by definition worry about the future. (Remember, worrying about the future is an eugenicist thing.)
> Indeed, transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism are examples of second-wave eugenics, since all endorse the use of emerging technologies to radically “enhance” humanity and create a new “posthuman” species.
OK, still in 20% of the article, but seems like this is the crux. If you accept the premise that trying to improve humans in any way (such as curing hereditary diseases or augmenting humans by technology) is basically the same thing that Nazis tried to do, only using modern technology, then... either you become a Nazi sympathizer, or you need to ban all efforts to cure genetic diseases or augment humans. Anything else means being in denial; and luckily we have two smart professors here to expose your hypocrisy.
> The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together.
The belief in either horrible or glorious future is also in Marxism, just saying. On the other hand, effective altruists are mostly worried about the dark present. (I think that rationalists are also quite concerned about people being stupid right now.)
> The reason for concern is that emerging technologies are expected to be (a) extremely powerful; (b) increasingly accessible to both state and nonstate actors; and (c) dual-use, as exemplified by CRISPR-Cas9, which could enable us to cure diseases but also synthesize designer pathogens unleashing an “engineered pandemic”.
Here I would like to ask the authors whether *they* agree with this assessment factually, or not. Because if they do, then it also puts them in the category of people worrying about the future. (And if they don't, then what's the point of obsessing whether the technologies are connected to the sinister TESCREALs?)
> in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews.
Ah, Yudkowsky being Yudkowsky. But what exactly are the authors trying to say? Are they suggesting that Yudkowsky proposes the extermination of Jews/humans as a desirable thing to do? Or are they just taking things out of context in order to make their point?
> “Intelligence,” typically understood as the property measured by IQ tests, matters greatly because of its instrumental value
Uhm... yes?
> The obsession with IQ can be traced back to first-wave eugenicists, who used IQ tests to identify “defectives” and the “feeble-minded.”
Ah, I see the logic. In a parallel universe where Nazis sent *short* people to death camps, it is probably a taboo to talk about human height, and if you suggest that putting things on the top shelf can make them difficult to reach for some people, you get cancelled.
A list of people and organizations to get cancelled.
> Effective accelerationists believe that the probability of a bad outcome due to AGI is very low
Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing as Yudkowsky says, except with "not" at the beginning.
(Would that make the acronym TESCREALEACC?)
> how TESCREAList groups are steering the field of AI toward the goal of creating AGI.
This feels like giving too much credit. Are they saying that without these people, it wouldn't occur to anyone to build an LLM?
> In 1955, four white men officially launched the field of AI
Ah, the field is forever tainted by the association with crackers. :(
> many researchers in fields currently associated with AI, such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV), explicitly distanced themselves from the term “AI,” in part because it became associated with unfulfilled grandiose promises. Nonetheless, some groups continued to work toward “artificial general intelligence,”
So, both the former and the latter agree that the AIs we have now are not AGIs? And that is somehow controversial? Or why the framing of "some researchers work on X, but others [sinister music starts playing] work on Y"? Isn't it quite normal that different researchers work on different things? It seems like the authors are trying to hint at some dark controversy here, but to me it sounds about as sinister as saying "some biologists study mice, but others [sinister music starts playing] study frogs". Like, yeah, that's how research works. (Actually, I may be wrong here. That's how research works in natural sciences. In some other fields, it is probably very important that the researchers agree with each other and all do the same thing, otherwise they get cancelled?)
> How, then, would researchers know that they have achieved their goals of building AGI? They need to know how to define and measure “general intelligence.” Unsurprisingly, these definitions rest on notions of “intelligence” that depend on IQ and other racist concepts
(facepalm)
> For these reasons, Keira Havens, who has written extensively on race science, asks those attempting to build AGI: “Why are you relying on eugenic definitions, eugenic concepts, eugenic thinking to inform your work? Why [...] do you want to enshrine these static and limited ways of thinking about humanity and intelligence?”
Mussolini promised to make trains run on time. Why are you still using trains?
> One conjecture is that the resulting AGI will be so intelligent that it will figure out what the best thing to do is in any potential situation.
I'm confused. So did they read Yudkowsky or didn't they? Or were they just looking for a quote to take out of context, and ignored everything else, including the part where he *literally* called exactly this thing "the sheer folly of callow youth"?
> TESCREALists have been able to divert resources toward trying to build AGI and stopping their version of an apocalypse in the far future, while dissuading the public from scrutinizing the actual harms that they cause in their attempts to build AGI.
Uhm... sorry about mentioning this Yudkowsky guy all the time, but you included the movement he started in your acronym... and you pretend to be experts on what the movement is about, so... maybe it would be nice to get familiar at least with the very basics?
> As an example, one of us worked as a hardware engineer designing audio circuitry for devices such as laptops. Some of the tests that we performed as part of our work included drop testing, constantly dropping devices to understand the manner in which their functionality degrades when they are exposed to shocks, placing the devices in extremely cold or hot environments, frequently restarting them [...] we argue that the first steps in making any AI system safe are attempting to build well-scoped and well-defined systems like those described as “narrow AI,” rather than a machine that can supposedly do any task under any circumstance.
OK, I really don't want to put your expertise in restarting laptops in doubt. But, you know, these AI things sometimes turn out to work differently than you would expect. For example, I think that scientists in 1960s believed that we will make artificial intelligences understand human knowledge one topic at a time, by building expert systems and cleverly designing the semantical nets. They would probably be shocked to hear that the state-of-art AIs of 2024 are good at poetry and painting, but suck at math. And yet, here we are. The line between the narrow AIs and AGIs may turn out to be similarly unpredictable; it can happen much later or much sooner that we expect, and may be caused by an improvement that we will not suspect of having exactly that impact.
(THE END)
OK, my summary would be that the authors identified a group of people whom I would describe as "nerds thinking about the future, specifically the technology", and correctly noticed that there is an overlap between various groups.
The connection to eugenics is mostly made through "trying to improve things" and "believing that intelligence is a thing". I understand that both of these things are *problematic* for some people, but I also think those people are... how to put it politely... not thinking clearly, and probably not even interested in thinking clearly.
Some of their arguments require *a lot* of cherry-picking. If you fail to notice that the effective altruists mostly care about reducing the suffering that exists *today*... or if you believe that Yudkowsky wants to build the AGI as soon as possible, and believes that by the virtue of being generally intelligent it will get all the answers right... then I strongly doubt your expertise on the individual elements of the "TESCREAL" boogeyperson you invented. It's more like you sometimes need to make things the very opposite of what they are, in order to make your point.
Congratulation on finding your powerful and rich enemy responsible for manipulating the society and science towards their sinister goals. You know who else did that, right?
Yes. As usual, it is 10% of reality that gets 90% of the attention, but see e.g. here: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities -- malaria, malaria, vitamin A, some unspecified vaccines. Okay, I guess the vaccines are about reducing suffering in the future, but it is still different from what the "TEASCREAL" model suggests.
Maybe somewhere lower on the list there is a longtermist project, and that is what makes some people freak out. Or maybe there are also separate lists by categories, and the longtermist category contains longtermist projects. But there is a difference between "there are some X somewhere among Y" and "Y is about X".
I coin a slightly less awesome acronym HGT, which means Hitler, Gebru, and Torres. I claim that HGT has roots in Nazi traditions, and I have historical data to prove that at least one third of HGT was actively involved. That sounds quite damning, in my opinion.
Long story short, you can choose a perspective that supports your conclusions. As a rationalist, you should also reflect on how much your conclusion reflects the territory and how much it merely reflects the perspective you chose. To get the best results, you should aim to "carve reality at its joints", i.e. let yourself be guided by how things actually are, rather than your arbitrary definitions, no matter how clever they may sound (they may or may not be correct). For example, I am pretty sure you can find a connection between "TESCREAL" and eugenics tradition, just like you can find a connection between the eugenics tradition and progressive politics. The question is, is the former connection stronger than the latter? (If not, why do you focus on it so much? Instead of e.g. writing an article about "TESCREAL" having roots in the progressive politics?)
...okay, now I am going to actually read the article.
EDIT: One of the names sounded vaguely familiar, took me a moment to remember why:
Still haven't read the article, but now it seems to me that the alleged main connection between eugenics and "TESCREAL" is... consequentialist thinking, and worrying about the future of humanity. Technically true. (So it's like, someone says: "I would prefer if AI didn't kill all humans", and the response is: "so what you're saying is that you are worried about preserving the future of the while race?")
Well I skimmed through it... and the paper doesn't seem that wrong at the object level. Hell, even the last survey Scott posted did show that the readership for the blog is relatively pro-eugenics (but only when he didn't use the word "eugenics"). It's just that the authors' values are completely idiotic. What is with these people's obsession with identity politics and "marginalized communities"? Calling people "racist" just for trying to improve humanity is just... well, it's certainly proving their opposition's point that all of this is necessary.
I agree. Unfortunately, these values are dominant in Western academia and their supremacy is jealously guarded. Some high-profile EA should probably make a response, otherwise I'm worried that good EA ideas will see even more opposition from the academy.
Well that shouldn't matter, academia is going to get ideologically purged soon anyways. Though, I guess we'd have bigger things to worry about at that point...
By the new administration. Do you think the Republican party sacrificed all of their values just so they could maintain the status quo? The people, and the people that lead them, want change, and the only way to accomplish that is by rooting out the rot at the top. Not just in academia, but in corporations as well.
Of course, they almost certainly hate EA as well for being filled with leftist vegans, so uh... Good luck with that.
The Trump administration last time around couldn't even manage to purge the Trump administration. This time around I think they'll be ever so slightly more effective, but I doubt they'll manage a purge of academia.
Is the rationalist movement privileged? Ok, stupid question. I'd say the answer is an obvious yes. What I mean specifically is privileged in the economic sense. I.e. something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do. And when I say rationalist I mean someone who esteems truth for truth's sake. Feel free to argue for or against this first question, but I take it as a given. It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told. So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically? Do you see it sort of like a Socratic matter of principles (I'll be broke as hell but at least I'll know I was being honest with myself), is the world really just dog-eat-dog and poor people should just excise rationalist thinking from their lives if they know what is best for them? Other ways of looking at this? I ask because I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Good question. Why not take a data centred approach?
How do we measure privilege? It's going to depend on the society you're immersed in, and your own values. But most people would agree that wealth, education, a 'good' job, social standing and various freedoms/civil rights are a reasonable measure of this. The first three are fairly easy to measure. In the amount of time I'm willing to spend on this, I can compare the ACX survey to US demographic data.
Something like 85% of Scott's readers have a third level degree, upwards of 20% have a doctorate. Less than 40% of the population in the US has a bachelors degree. Approx. 2% have a PhD and at most 5% have doctoral level qualifications. So readers of the blog do have educational privilege. Since the ability to do a PhD requires years of forgone earnings, it's reasonable to infer that blog readers are coming from a family background which is higher socio-economic status.
Unfortunately, the survey data just reports numbers for income with the majority of responses censored. You could ask Scott for the data if you wanted to do more analysis, but I think it's likely that average and median earnings are well above the US average. Participants did self-identify their SES but I would treat this with caution, it's better to collect 'hard' data rather than self-descriptions, particularly when something like 'upper-middle class' is context and country dependent. Personally, I think the level of education and amount of free time required to read blogs like this and post in them means that they're biased to the privileged.
Recently, I've been at odds with my manager over small issues. E.g. they wanted to rearrange the schedule of a meeting I was chairing so they could arrive and deliver the welcome address 30 minutes in - I insisted the welcome be at the beginning, they could speak on other topics if arriving at the end of the meeting - they rescheduled to arrive on time. I don't think this is in any way a rationalist approach - to me it's common sense. I had the background and sufficient social standing to make my case persuasively. I didn't play the political game though - and I'm lucky to have a boss who is (mostly) willing to listen to pushback. I'd be curious to hear if a card carrying rationalist would have approached this differently - to me it was a mixture of common sense and my own stubbornness.
Not especially; the non privileged rationalist don't call themselves rationalists because that term is intensely weighed down (unfairly) in the consensus by your Theilites and your SBFs and your weird cryptofascist orbiters.
Eg, they decided not to pursue lots of money for moral reasons; they are out there digging wells or being teachers or doing the type of research that doesn't end in you being super rich for inventing the Juicero.
I would say that it's hard not to be a rationalist if you are at all introspective.
A) The Big Yud often said that "rationality is the art of winning". I.e. winning is the goal, rationality is a tool. If rationality precludes you from winning, discard rationality and win. He typically relies on Zen motifs to get his point across. C.f. "The Twelfth Virtue" [0] and "Something to Protect" [1].
B) The wealthy are privileged ipso facto. Dependency (of any kind, including financial dependency) represents exogenous influence. Unfortunately, specialization has made modern society quite interdependent. So it often is, infact, in your best interest to adeptly navigate Baudrillard's Simulacrum [2]. Another way of thinking about money: money is "slack" [3], and slack is options. Including the option to be intellectually-honest.
> So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically?
C) To paraphrase The-Bugman-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named: "you have to live like you're in enemy territory". If the powers-that-be don't like what you're teaching your students, you need to realize that you're basically distributing samizdat.
Hm... I don't remember anything like that. Got links? Not gonna lie, it's been a long time since I read The Sequences. And I never completed the entire corpus. So I'm prepared to be surprised.
Whatever the case, I stand by my initial comment, insofar as winning is ultimately more important than truth. (No, this isn't a carte blanche to act like a pathological liar. But Kant's radical honesty, for example, is a kinda bonkers imho.)
Movements are not privileged; people are. Some rationalists are rich, some are poor, most of them probably somewhere in the middle. Or slightly above the average, considering their typical professions.
> something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do.
My personal freedom of speech is mostly a result of living in Eastern Europe where no one gives a fuck about what you think. If I lived in America, I would probably watch my tongue more carefully. I am *not* wealthy enough to not need a job, which dramatically limits the things I can do (and in America would also limit the things I can say).
> It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told.
Yeah, your type of job determines what kind of idiots you are surrounded by.
> Other ways of looking at this?
It seems like some good (for self-preservation) habits from communism are also useful in the woke era, so here is one:
* Don't think.
* If you think, then don't speak.
* If you think and speak, then don't write.
* If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
* If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
Personally, I would think, and only talk to friends or talk pseudonymously on the web.
> I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Yeah, you can use some rationality at your work, without saying explicitly that this is what you are doing. (When someone important says "there is a dragon in a garage", say "of course there is", and then continue using the garage as usual. Which is what many people actually do.)
Others may chime in with different takes, but, for me, rationalism is about forming confidence estimates related to beliefs, it is not about saintly purity in how you choose to act or what you choose to say.
Taking an example from inside your question: imagine a situation where you are called to make a statement and you see two choices (a) what you believe to be true, (b) what you believe to be politically expedient. Rationalist methods could help you in the following ways:
(i) identify a false dichotomy and determine a third (or even more than one) alternative thing to say/way to act
(ii) form and update an estimate of the probability that (a) is a better/worse choice than (b)
(iii) phrase your belief (a) in a way that does not have the assumed political cost (because you indicate openness to other possibilities, you support your statement with evidence, you shade your statement probabalistically)
Last year I found myself across the table from Substack CEO Chris Best—and I hoped he would satisfy my curiosity on one matter. So I asked:
“Chris, I have a question. Has Elon Musk made an offer to buy Substack?”
Then I added:
“Appropriate answers to this question are (1) Yes, (2) No, or (3) I prefer not to say.”
Chris didn’t answer immediately. He thought it over for a moment, then responded: “I prefer not to say.”
In this soft-spoken way, Mr. Best showed his wisdom. Although he works hard to empower journalists, he’s smart enough to know to watch his words around those pesky folks. We’re as leaky as sieves, and only half as reliable.
But the New York Times reported yesterday that Elon Musk did attempt to buy Substack last year. Musk also hinted that he would merge it into Twitter and let Best run the combined companies.
The Times also reports that Best rejected this offer.
And he didn’t even fret about it. It was a “short-lived discussion,” according to the Times’ three sources.
That proves that Chris not only has wisdom, but also possesses integrity and strong core values. When he says that he supports indie writers, he really means it.
If Musk’s plan had been accepted, Chris would have enjoyed a huge payday in the transaction, and also might have found himself running the most powerful media force in the world right now.
But he didn’t hesitate to walk away from that.
I want to commend Chris and the entire Substack team. They not only talk the talk, but walk the walk—which is rare in the media world right now. Or in any world right now.
First, saying "I prefer not to say" is not necessarily the same as kinda-deniable "yes". Maybe he rejected Musk. Maybe he is waiting and hoping that Musk will offer more money. Maybe someone else offered money, and he is trying to make the other person think that they are competing against Musk. Maybe he even said yes to Musk, but they have some kind of deal that the website will officially change hands on January 1st 2025, and until then there is an embargo on this information.
From business perspective, the Substack model seems great. By taking a fixed fraction of subscriptions, the financial interests seem aligned; Substack makes money when the authors do. The possible downside is that this can make the platform attractive to all kinds of conspiracy theorists and scammers (I imagine that writing Flat Earth News could be quite profitable), but if you advertise yourself as a platform where no one gets censored, that already goes with the territory.
But technically, using Substack can be quite frustrating experience, and frankly it seems like it's no one's priority to improve it. It took years just to make ACX comment section usable, and it still could be improved a lot. Or the bug where if you replied to a comment in an e-mail, your reply got inserted incorrectly in the comment tree. (That one is probably fixed, but that also took years.) I haven't written a post lately, but I remember it to be also frustrating. Like, how am I supposed to write articles containing code examples, if all existing character style options are so huge that you can barely fit 40 characters in a line? Or why do I have to choose whether a word is monospace or a hyperlink, but it cannot be both? It's obvious that the intended type of article is "type a lot of text, drag and drop a few pictures and a YouTube video, insert five 'subscribe' buttons, and call it a day", which I guess is where most money comes from. Yeah, it makes sense economically, but that means that if your technical skills are even slightly above zero, Substack will constantly make you cry.
So, maybe don't sell to Musk, but at least hire someone who is technically competent and who cares.
Are we sure Musk didn't just lowball him? There's no practical reason for him to overpay for Substack like he did with Twitter, considering that this site is already pretty right-leaning.
And reading the article more closesly, Substack still isn't doing very well financially... Musk has more than just money as leverage, given that he immediately retaliated by hiding posts with substack links, not to mention his new political connections. He'll get what he wants eventually.
Not that I think that'll be a massive issue anyways; all that'll happen is that everyone at Substack gets fired and the site gets merged into X. And also he'll probably stop renewing most of the contracts with the writers here. I guess that'll suck for Scott.
One of the weird things happening in the amazing nowadays is the number of people eager to jump to defend Musk. Like, you know he's a man with immense wealth and power, and is quite capable to looking after himself. He's also not running for any popularity contest. So... why do so many spend so much effort defending whatever he does? Jumping to counter every lightest slight in his direction, like he was a precious baby or something...
That's weird, because I got the opposite impression, that recently it is incredibly popular to accuse Musk of... well, nothing specific, just being generally the worst. Seems to be so since the moment he bought Twitter, but maybe I got the timing wrong.
I don't even like the guy; I think he is neither a saint nor a devil, just a smart rich guy trying to become even more rich, who seems to spend too much time online shitposting.
Is there somewhere a list of his "crimes" that I could read?
For the same reason that lots of people jump to criticize him for no real reason. He's become a symbol of the culture wars, so everything he does gets framed that way.
Also I don't think it's fair to characterize my comment as "jumping to counter every lightest slight". I genuinely don't think him buying substack would be bad for anyone and don't understand why someone would reflexively assume that it would be.
He makes rules on the fly and interprets hazy policies in a way that justifies him banning, suspending or pushing voices he doesn't like off the platform. When he took over I was curious to see what twitter with free speech would look like, but unfortunately these are not the actions of someone with a genuine commitment to free speech.
Wait! Wait! The Webb Telescope disproved the existence of Dark Matter?! I guess I must have been snoozing. The massive galaxies that Webb observed in the early universe are an excellent fit for MOND, and their existence that early in the universe pretty thoroughly falsifies the Dark Matter models of galaxy formation.
Stupid question: if Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a better description of gravity, how does this affect the value of the Cosmological Constant? Does Dark Energy also go away? I don't know enough about MOND because I never took it seriously. I guess another Internet rabbit hole awaits my exploration.
Hmm, well I've been following Mond for a while now. Tracy McGaugh's blog is full of stuff. https://tritonstation.com/
Later edit;
I just want to add that Mond is less of a 'theory' and more of a 'fit to the data'. If gravity at accelerations below a_0 became a 1/r force law, (rather than 1/r^2) then that fits all the data.. up to some point. Mond fails at the mass level of galaxy clusters, it doesn't fit the third hump in the CMB data. nor the bullet cluster... There's something missing from Mond.... My favorite idea is some hot dark matter... sterile neutrinos. (I mean first of all I love the name.) Oh and that Mond is true... whatever mond is... beyond a fit to the data.
I don't think it can be concluded yet that DM or that the age of the universe has been falsified nor that has MOND been proven.
On this topic, the empirical evidence for MOND seems better but that isn't a 100% exclusion for DM.
DM can explain current star formation history, if and only if models of star/galaxy formation "innovate".
Be it a non constant IMF, super eddington accretions, assumptions about black holes and dust prevalences and properties, etc.
We are at the limit where nearly 100% of baryons needs to be converted into stars which sounds highly unlikely though. There has been some pre JWST era models that match most current observations. Moreover there are many possible more exotic catalysis mechanisms of galaxy and star formation, among which some might require new physics or standard physics but in practice non standard physics (few people will understand what I mean here), e.g. via dust based Mock gravity, rydberg matter or Zeldovich radiation.
Most importantly the debate should not be dumbed down to MOND or DM, one both can coexist, two there are many extensions (interacting DM, etc), three both can be false, the true theory might be quantized inertia, etc
My personal belief is that the age of the universe is at least moderately wrong.
The MOND existence will be forever settled via GAIA DR4 in 2026 (is settled in 2025 but ESA will gatekeep the data because they do not follow open data science)
BTW here is the biggest issue in LCDM by far, and you'll never hear of it, like in most sciences, the most interesting discoveries are absolutely unknown because well there is only one person on this planet reading the scientific literature extensively (me)
In reference to your paper, how would a missing dust signature in the CMB support the existence of dark matter? Would the presumed distribution of dark matter—clumped around galaxies and diffuse to a near-perfect vacuum in intergalactic space—reduce the density of dust in intergalactic space?
This is Scott's substack, and he has the power and the right to draw whatever lines he wishes. But in the past, Scott used to post a separate political open thread every week (month?) that allowed political discussions and arguments. He did a good job snuffing out the political crap on the other threads—but I suspect it became too onerous for him. And so, I'm forced to wade through political crap to get to any interesting philosophical or scientific discussions. This is one of the reasons I haven't re-upped my subscription to this sub.
Matt Gaetz has already withdrawn from the Attorney General nomination, having previously resigned from the House, meaning he's currently not in any political offices. This removal of Matt Gaetz from Congress has the chance to be the first win of the new Trump cabinet, although I don't know if his resignation will actually hold this early in.
It aeeems that nobody who writes about these things in the news and elsewhere is familiar with negotiating or what they call in VEEP "cock-thumb" it was immediately obvious to me that that's what trump was doing with Gaetz.
Put aside the question of whether Sanders is right or wrong at the object level - my opinion is that Israel has a right to self-defense, crushing Hamas/Hezbollah is in the interests of all non-insane people, and while all conflicts have occasional outrages the IDF has overall done a good job in a challenging urban environment - the war is divisive in America. Whether those opposed are right or wrong isn't the question. Everyone has a right to their opinion and proportional say in how American power / tax money are used, dumb though their opinion may be.
What's a rough percentage of Americans opposed to this or some policy generally that you feel is sufficient opposition to be placated? Does it need to be a majority? 50%, 25%, 10%, etc.?
Would it be smart politically for the Democrats to cater to that opposition? For Trump? Would it be unifying or equally divisive for the government to say that the cost in domestic dispute is too high and Israel should source weapons elsewhere?
Democrats basically alternate between cheerleaders for the military (who quickly fall out of favor when wars go badly) and diehard pacifists (who get credibly accused of being America-hating foreign agents).
It's smart to have both wings so that a candidate from either side can be put forward when the situation calls for it. In previous conflicts, the pacifists have been either really, really right (Iraq the second time, e.g.) or really, really wrong (Iraq the first time, e.g.), so it helps to have a wide range of stances.
Republicans do the same - Donald Trump represents his party's isolationist wing, whereas George W. Bush (the previous Republican president) represents the interventionist wing.
Hillary Clinton (2016 nominee) voted for the Iraq War. Barack Obama (2008 President) voted against it.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama campaigned on the idea that Afghanistan was the "good war". His Vice President, Joe Biden (2020 President) withdrew from Afghanistan, letting it fall to the Taliban.
So the Democrats liked the Iraq War enough to vote for it, and to vote against it. They liked the Afghanistan War enough to campaign on winning it, and then to lose it.
I think it's easier to describe that as two separate ideological wings living uncomfortably with each other, rather than one group exercising a consistent ideology.
Wasn't Biden left with a fait accompli by Trump who'd made continued occupation untenable by the time he'd left office (by making a deal with the Taliban, letting the Taliban infiltrate governmental zones, and making physical preparations for total withdrawal)?
That's one way to frame it. Of course, when he was running for President, he discussed withdrawing from Afghanistan - look at the 2020 Democratic Party Platform and you can read their plans of Afghanistan under the heading "Ending Forever Wars". It's pretty much identical to Nixon's peace with honor that ended the Vietnam War.
Contrast that with 2008 - the chapter on Afghanistan is called "Win in Afghanistan", with sentences like "We will send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, and use this commitment to seek greater contributions–with fewer restrictions–from our NATO allies."
So I find it hard to believe that Biden wanted to surge additional troops into Afghanistan, a la Obama, but was thwarted by Trump. I think it's easier to believe that both Biden and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but blame the other party for the inevitable bad press.
There's 13 years between the 2008 campaign and the 2021 withdrawal; plenty of time to change your mind based on the "facts on the ground" (a rare actual military use of the cliche). Also, two different people.
I'm trying to argue that the Democrats have two different wings - one pacificist/isolationist, and the other interventionist. I'm comparing the most recent Democratic President with the previous Democratic President - those two are unfortunately separated by 12 years. That's an unfortunate, but unavoidable part of the data set I'm working with.
You could however look at a single slice in time, with a single chamber. Look at the 2003 vote on the Iraq War - 81 Democrats voted in favor, 126 voted against it. For comparison, 215 Republicans voted for it and 6 against. The Republicans at the time were very much interventionists. The Democrats? They were split - not perfectly split, but a 60-40 split is a very real split.
That's a fair point on my wording. I apologize. It was a quickly written post and I shouldn't have used that framing. I was thinking more of Hamas in light of Oct. 7th but it was much too forceful and broad. Consider it withdrawn.
If you punch me in the face, don't complain when I rain punches on you. "But you're the one punching now! You ought to stop!"
Israel's objective is not to produce refugee camps or mass graves, but to prevent being attacked again. Were they trying to wipe out the Palestinians, they're doing a bad job given their resources. They are showing as much restraint as reasonable in limiting civilian casualties.
I don't expect much support on account of society being composed of shortsighted stay-the-course cowards who reserve their strongest antipathies for outsiders and who will die defending their leadership absolutely no matter how bad they are. I assume this comment wil go over like a like a lead balloon thus proving my point.
Even the people in Room 101 loathed Emmanual Goldstein.
The first paragraph not so much. It's perfectly possible for a response to be excessive. If someone punches me once, and then I "rain punches down on him," continuing to just beat him until well after he's been turned into an unconscious broken piece of meat, I'm well past the point of a reasonable self-defense and should expect others to intervene, and possibly to be convicted of a crime. A lesser crime than I would be if I was unprovoked, but "he hit me so anything goes" is not the relevant standard. At a certain point, when "you're the one punching now," you really *ought* to stop.
> I'm well past the point of a reasonable self-defense and should expect others to intervene, and possibly to be convicted of a crime
I'm sure you can get away with that if you have the blessing of the US government and military. The justice system exists to serve a need that isn't applicable in military conflicts, or any other state-sanctioned violence for that matter.
Well, it wasn't a perfect analogy, as none is. But you're right from one standpoint: one punch doesn't give license to punch forever. My point was more that you can't just call to stop just because you're losing.
And Israel, in this case, is trying to prevent the "first" punch from happening again. I do believe that if they were convinced it would stop, they would cease hostilities. But they think, justifiably, that if they stop it will just give their enemy a breather to prepare for another devastating attack. And then what is the proper response to prevent future attacks? Genocide?
what is the proper response to a conflict that was started by their forefathers but then they turned it up to 11 since ... let's say 1995?
they tried to ignore the simple fact that their co-tenants are not happy with the arrangement they forced and continue to force on them.
of course - turns out! would you believe it? - that after decades of marginalization said co-tenant's behavior shows, rather concerningly, heightened aggression.
and as a complete surprise, the hardliners continued promises that they can keep the peace ... failed.
....
yes, this is a big fucking Situation (waaay beyond Troubles level), with heavy military aspects, so the use of military force is not unfortunately some kind of "crossed line".
the moral arguments usually focus on the cruelty (and in some sense futility) of what the IDF does, and how it does it, not that it has "the right"
not to mention that - as far as I understand - the concept of self-defense is not well defined or really applicable for states occupying territories
so, on one hand, the IDF could go slower, be more careful, the tunnels won't run away after all. the only semi-sane objective is long-term occupation, otherwise the tunnels will get built again
on the other hand this is just more of the same, this guarantees more instances of mistreatment. (and even typing the words international peacekeeping mission led a laugh track fading in from somewhere.)
... and all that said, what is the proper response to being in this fucking terrible pickle? well, a bit more brotherly love would go a long way, but apparently there's been some mixup in the warehouse and thus recently folks are mostly getting war, far-right authoritarians and mayhem in other shape and form.
Most likely it has to start with showing self-restraint. (While not neglecting this elusive self-defense either.) But as long as Israel cannot really commit to dealing with its own fundies it will have an ample supply of counter-fundies :(
Agreed on both counts. Though when to stop is a more complex consideration than if you happen to be the one happening to be punching at the moment.
I'd expand a little on the second paragraph. The delta in mass graves / refugee camps between Israel and Hamas don't - as far as I can tell based on Hamas' stated goals and actions - reflect a difference in intents, only capabilities.
Ark is leaving out the part where he got punched in the face a while before the current punch... and punched again a while before that... and before that... and pretty much on a regular basis going back several decades, including a few rains of punches here or there.
In other words, the current punch isn't the only punch; it is the latest, and delivered as if there will be more, and maybe even a rain if permitted. That's why he rains punches back.
It's even worse than that. A few punches ago, he punched back more than once and "you're the one punching now" *was* the argument used to get him to stop... and then he got punched again. So that argument fails twice as hard now.
No, it's really not. It's a problem for a bunch of loud yutzes, but they poll in the 5% range, and literally no one else cares except for the people (>10%) who are wondering why Israel hasn't been tough enough.
>Everyone has a right to their opinion and proportional say in how American power / tax money are used
Yeah, no. Literally no one gets a proportional say in how their tax dollars are spent, most especially including the yutzes. I'm not sure why you think this either is or should be the case, but no, that's not happening.
The right answer for Dems is just what they've been doing, which is to pretend the yutzes don't exist and that they don't have to do anything about them.
> Yeah, no. Literally no one gets a proportional say in how their tax dollars are spent, most especially including the yutzes. I'm not sure why you think this either is or should be the case, but no, that's not happening.
You're correct that we, wisely, don't take an Athenian style vote on major decisions or budget line items. However, everyone does get an equal vote when it comes to elections - theoretically equal, state level distortions for the Presidency not withstanding, at a minimum equal at the level of your state.
Also agree with Peter Defeel below. If you're American you have ~335 million brothers and sisters. There are always going to be significant portions that see you as a yutze. You will be a yutze to your future self and vice versa. But there are no correctness requirements for voting. We don't throw out the votes of someone motivated by fear of subterranean lizardmen or equivalent. Like it or not, everyone with the right to vote gets a say even if their reasons are objectively or, to you, deeply stupid.
The question is also more of about the "ought" versus the "is". Yes, an administration with sufficient support from elected officials has the formal power to do whatever it can. But imagine a scenario where Examplestan is in an armed conflict with New Somewhereville. Magically reliably polling shows 50.1% in favor, 49.9% against. To what degree as a matter of national unity ought the views of a minority position be considered?
Well, that's why the two-party system was nice: it made sure the populace didn't get to have a voice in regards to actually important matters. Of course, the Republicans ended up defecting, but a one-party system effectively does the same thing.
Almost everyone who supports a "ceasefire" is imagining a particular set of terms for that ceasefire. Which they imagine to be obvious and achievable, so that as long as the war continues they'll say "stop it, you guys, cease fire now! [on my terms]". If the firing ceases and their terms are not in place, they'll say "that's not what I meant and you know it!". It's win-win for feeling good about yourself and blaming the bad stuff on other people.
So, what are the terms for the cease fire you're implicitly advocating, and what's the line for "that's not what I meant by ceasfire"?
It is impossible for an electorate to have in-depth, technical views about how things should be done. Instead, it is ideal for them to have an understanding of what they want done and for the political leadership to figure out how to reconcile their desire with the hard realities of the matter. The pro-Palestine people want peace and the upholding of international law. The US could work towards these aims by leaning on Israel a lot harder than they have been doing and forcing Israel to restrain itself when it comes to damage done to civilians, journalists, and other noncombatants. Israel could otherwise pursue its ambition to eradicate Hamas under these constraints.
That's awfully vague as a response to "what are the terms of the ceasefire you are advocating". But I notice that, at the end, you've got Israel continuing to try to eradicate Hamas.
In which case, what you are proposing is almost definitionally *not* a cease-fire. Unless you have a serious plan to eradicate Hamas without shooting at them, or unless you weren't serious about Israel continuing to try to eradicate Hamas.
Hamas delenda est; all else is commentary. If somewhere in that commentary is a serious, actionable plan to delenda Hamas with fewer civilian casualties, great, but all I'm seeing is a wish or a command for such a plan to exist.
It would be expedient for police in Europe to carry firearms everywhere they go and to shoot first and ask questions later like their American counterparts, but it has been deemed by democratic political processes undesirable that expedience should take such precedence over other concerns, like the possibility of innocents getting shot. Just because eradicating Hamas would be made easier by ignoring the international community doesn't mean that it is desirable from a broader perspective or an ethical one. America is sacrificing its own values by supporting Israel, as it is going against the very rules-based global order it created, currently manages, and has always championed, where nations are supposed to submit themselves to international consideration rather than act unilaterally out of realpolitik and pure power-consideration. America is torching its own moral authority. Even from a pure realpolitik perspective this seems to be more damaging to America than beneficial.
The practical limits Israel would need to adhere to would be no greater than those America accepts when waging its foreign wars. It is surely still possible, but an effort towards optics would have to be made, a fig leaf adorned.
A quick search of recent polling didn’t give me any answers to these questions but suggests younger Americans are less enthusiastic about military aid to Israel than older ones.
I personally like to see Senators fostering debate on big foreign policy issues and would like to see it happen more often, even if it doesn’t lead to legislation.
Sanders is 83. He ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. Both times, it was clear the Democratic establishment was against him winning and both times Sanders ultimately failed. Any hope he has of one day being US President has to be a massive longshot at this point. People know that he doesn't speak for the Democratic party as a whole.
So, he might as well just voice his conscience, his honest opinions on things.
He never actually joined the Democratic Party, still hasn't. It was odd that a sitting legislator who'd pointedly declined to be a member of a political party for decades, could enter himself into primaries of that party. (Will Rogers' Depression-era joke was "I don't belong to an organized political party -- I'm a Democrat.")
I suppose by letting a non-party member run in their primaries and seeing him get some substantial votes in them, the Dems are then basically stuck with him as far as public impressions go.
Politicians should, as clearly as possible, say ahead of elections what they will do if elected, and in which cases they will exercise their judgement in new situations and based on what.
Bernie sanders is acting predictably. So is Trump. So are most politicians, from the perspective of their voters, on this issue.
Agreed. Voting is an extremely lossy signal though. A strong isolationist, America First style Trump voter may be completely opposed to all military aid but still vote for him although he says that he'll increase support to some countries.
>Would it be smart politically for the Democrats to cater to that opposition?
Yes. I assume Republicans already get the voters who really want to support Israel. Democrats should offer the opposite option for voters who really don't want to support Israel. Not doing so leaves an opening for Republicans to take at least some of those votes. Eg, Trump did a lot of outreach to Arab Americans before election day.
Similarly there should be parties that stand for isolationism so voters can express that preference, which is why I think it's a good thing that neocons have been pushed away by the Republicans as the Democrats have increasingly embraced them. I also don't like the chattering classes trying to set the agenda by making certain preferences verboten, whether it's restricting immigration or asylum (increasingly less so today), being against support for Ukraine, etc.
That seems odd. Is there a minimum threshold of votes before a party should take an opposite approach to grab those voters? Pro-murderism seems open, for instance, but seems like it would do more harm than good.
The Republicans absolutely do not get all of the pro-Israel votes, and the Democrats are pretty evenly divided on the issue (with older Democrats overwhelmingly in favor of Israel while younger ones are only somewhat disapproving). That's a lot of voters to lose, and pretty much doom for the Democrats if they did. Supporting Hamas over Israel is one of the biggest losers in electoral politics, similar to things that nobody would consider part of electoral politics (even if not as bad as being pro-murder).
>Is there a minimum threshold of votes before a party should take an opposite approach to grab those voters?
Yeah, it's about 5%. If you try to grab single-issue voters below 5%, you'll end up losing more votes from either people who quietly disagree with that 5%, or who think that anyone who would go after that 5% is a sleazy charlatan. The Ds somehow realized that anyone who backed Hamas would be thought of as either a lunatic or a sleazy charlatan, and miraculously avoided doing so. I know! I'm as surprised as you are!
Where is this magic 5% coming from. This seems to be arguing in bad faith - perhaps the 5% is in favour of the destruction of Israel or pro a one state solution. What Bernie is arguing for is the end to the recent war which is popular with democrats and young people.
I get the feeling you're not really responding in good faith. Obviously some positions are far outside the Overton Window and it's pretty unreasonable for you to ask me to name some specific number of votes that a position should give before a party offers it as an option. "Implement/compel a ceasefire" for example is not outside the bounds of acceptability as you made out. Second, saying that Dems should, say, campaign on decreasing military aid to Israel is not saying that Dems should also campaign on giving that aid to Hamas instead.
I'll admit I'm somewhat incredulous about the support for Hamas that we see. From the perspective of Democrats, though, it seems electorally insane to offer any support for Hamas, and only qualified support for the Gaza Palestinians (who apparently like and/or support Hamas). You offered the perspective that it would be "smart" for Democrats to court that vote, and I pointed out two issues - 1) Support for Hamas is not popular in the US, even among Democrats, and 2) Support for Israel is far more popular, including among Democrats.
It's a losing proposition. I also don't think "chase single issue voters even if their goals are unpopular" makes any sense generally. It's perfectly fine for neither major party nor any minor party to support the KKK. It's also more than okay if no party supports Hamas.
I've never argued against someone pro-Israel on the internet before this, but I finally understand why the other side gets annoyed by online pro-Israel commenters strawmanning them constantly to the point that it honestly looks like the Israeli government is actually paying people (you) to do it.
There are a sizeable number of people who'd like their governments take actions that Israel, or at least the current government, might not like but are not pro Hamas.
Here is my peace plan for Israel/Palestine. It may take a few years, but it is still more realistic that any proposed alternative I have seen:
Every Jewish family should be legally required to have at least 10 kids. When those kids get 18 years old, the entire territory of Israel and Palestine becomes one huge democratic state, and everyone who lives there will get full citizen rights.
This is a perfect win/win solution for everyone. The Jews get their Jewish state. The Arabs get to live in peace at the place where their ancestors lived. Everyone gets democracy and human rights.
(Alternatively, make it 20 mandatory kids for every Jewish family, and also conquer Lebanon. You are probably going to do that anyway, so at least let something good come out of it.)
Sure, but for some reason it seems most people aren't really going for any of the many third way options. From my perspective, it seems the anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian side wants to force the issue to be binary in order to juice their gains. Mixed would by far be the most popular, followed by pro-Israel, if all options were on the table. The only way to get more than a lizardman level of support for Hamas is to force the dual choice.
I'm at the Whipple museum of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge university. So cool. Here's info about an instrument built by John Harrison to measure longitude at sea.
I've been to a similar museum in Harvard, but this is even smaller and less overwhelming...
Btw, Longitude is a great book for young kids.
Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?! Only for a social life I suppose. And in some states because it's a legal requirement.
Great question. No, a museum won't be all of the curriculum, but a learning aid. And dies it have to be in your city? Give the $17k per kid per year to the homeschooling parents to use for such expenses.
The govt needs to be good at some minimal checks on the process and results. The results seem to be better than what public schools can produce. So this should be possible for motivated parents.
Different kids need different things, and the same kid might need different things each year.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system. And others have thought through this better than I have.
Sort of but not really. The museum is chosen by the parents as part of a curriculum, one designed or children by the parents.
The teacher can be the parent (if they have knowledge in the area) or a homeschool teacher hired by the parent. Parents of homeschooled children with different areas of expertise form co-ops and teach each other's children based on their expertise.
The basic difference is if it isn't going well for the child, the teacher can be fired immediately.
I know this is probably very worrying for Americans because this is going to be your government, but today's headlines about Trump's cabinet picks have me laughing.
New Secretary for Education is, if I go by the headlines, "WWE wrestling mogul" Linda McMahon. I know there was a lot of disdain for his last pick there in the first administration, Betsy de Vos, so I'm awaiting (with a certain amount of glee, I have to say) the reaction to this. It would seem her experience in education was serving on the Connecticut state board of education 2009-2010 and being on the board of trustees for a Catholic school:
"She served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Seen as a relative unknown in education circles, she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice."
More Catholics in the cabinet? I am delighted to see the Sinister Papist Conspiracy to extend the tentacles of the Vatican into American government is proceeding apace!
Dr. Oz to oversee health insurance? Okay, even I have to blink at that one.
Head of Commerce department could affect us here in Ireland, as (and I have to agree on this one), allegedly he tweeted (or Xed, is that how we should say it now?):
"Lutnick was recently critical of the nature of Ireland's trade relationship with the US.
"It's nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense. We don’t make anything here any more – even great American cars are made in Mexico. When we end this nonsense, America will be a truly great country again. You’ll be shocked," he wrote in a post on X in October."
It is nonsense, and it's not anything tangible (except for the pharma plants here), it's all down to our tax strategy to attract multinationals (like the FAANG set) which have headquarters here and move money around from one bank account to another. The effect on our economy is such that we need to have a separate calculation for GDP to account for the 'phantom GDP' from this.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home, and of course this will have a knock-on affect on Irish employment as/if plants are closed or the Silicon Docks crowd shutter their offices. We'll have to see what happens!
I'm curious: what's your view of the worst case scenario here? Like what's the worst possible outcome that a bad DoEd secretary could cause? In my view the DoEd doesn't do anything positive for the cause of education, so it's impossible to do any harm by nominating an incompetent secretary. I think the country would be better off if the entire dept was completely abolished.
The DoEd becomes dysfunctional without having its duties transferred to other agencies, six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants, many of them have to drop out of school, their lives are diminished, the nation's supply of skilled labor is diminished, and there's a massive electoral backlash of mostly Trump supporters looking for the anti-Trumpiest possible candidates in the next election.
If you were under the impression that the Department of Education was just a bunch of wokescolds who send out letters to people trying to run good schools and saying "you need to be more woke or else!", then no, that's not how any of this works.
> six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants
And? They're still college students. They are affiliated with the left as far as the populace is concerned.
If the economy does go to shit, they have more than enough scapegoats to blame it on. Hell, if left wing people end up leaving in droves, the administration won't even have to rig the next election in order to maintain power!
And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions. Eliminating Pell grants would go some way to eliminating cost disease and bloat in higher education. Academia has become a lumbering zombie and a propaganda indoctrination zone. Anything that cuts it down to size is good in my view. Education needs far less regulation.
< In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions.
Well, Wanda, I come from a family with only one college-educated parent, and our finances were very tight indeed when I went to college. My parents were especially honest people, and did not fudge the truth to make us look poorer than we were when they filled out the financial aid forms. Our income and savings were low enough that I got almost a full scholarship for the entire 4 years. I graduated from an Ivy, scored 99th percentile on the GREs and got PhD. Jeez, maybe if you'd had Betsy DeVos's job I'd never have gone to college, and would instead be your hairdresser. Or, like, the lady who gives you Brazilian waxes.
As for other teens whose Pells you'd like to yank: I just looked at some data about four year colleges and their average SAT score.
For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above. 1200 places someone at 64th percentile in the group that took the SAT, & that group's average intelligence and academic performance is surely above the average for college students as a whole. I'd say it's someone scoring that well or better on the SAT is not in the in your born-to-be-your-hairdresser (or hair-plucker) group, and can certainly benefit from college-level courses. If you nix the Pell grants of all the kids in those schools, that's a lot of people unable to pay for an undergrad degree they could probably have made good use of. And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok, you're the exception. Getting 99th percentile on your GRE's means you have a >120 IQ. You're exactly the kind of poor person that's supposed to be discovered via standardized testing.
>For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above.
Ok. An SAT of 1200 is an IQ of about 120 which is about the top 10% of the population. That's who should be going to college, not the ~50% that we currently send. I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't. And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive. I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go. College used to be a sorting mechanism. It's not anymore and that loss imposes very reals costs on society. It's incredibly useful for everyone to know where to get smart people.
>And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok. That number should be 0. If someone gets a 1000 on the SAT then they shouldn't come anywhere near a college. College is for the top 10-25% of society. Everyone else should just learn a trade. Hairdresser is an excellent example.
<And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive.
"Let them eat cake."
Actually, the way the colleges set financial aid is by using the data the parents send about their savings and income, and the data parents must give is *very* detailed. There really is no loophole that allows people to look less able to pay for college than they are by having a secret rental property or whatnot. Of course they can lie, but colleges are allowed to do some checking around so that's pretty daunting. Using the data the parents sent, colleges calculate how much parents should be able to pay, and their idea of what people of a given income can cough up is generally more than people themselves feel able to cough up (though most can by penny-pinching. To cover the amount parents will not be expected to pay, colleges give a financial aid package, which is a mix of scholarship (i.e. college eats the cost), loans the parents or kid must take out, and money the kid must earn with an on-campus job. Financial aid packages always set the amount the parents and kids borrow as the maximum in government student loans they are allowed to borrow . Colleges give scholarships to cover the rest, and for kids who qualify for Pells the scholarship includes the Pell grants. So if the Pells are yanked, either the colleges would have to be willing to eat more of the cost or the kid and parents would have to borrow more. However, the family is generally already stuck with borrowing the maximum they are allowed to as federal student loans. The alternative for borrowing more is bank loans. People who are poor enough to qualify for Pell grants, and have already committed to take out $10,000 in student loans for the coming year generally do not qualify for bank loans.
<I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go.
Jeez, Wanda, what even are mongrel genes?
< I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't.
You know, I think I agree that people scoring at or below average on the SAT generally can't benefit from college courses. (Although there are college majors in things like hospitality, and when I was on vacation in Mexico I met a young couple who had actually majored in that and were looking like they were going to make a go of it with an eco-resort.). But I find you extraordinarily mean-spirited, and would even if I were not in the 35% you'd rather have doing your hair. It's pleasant to remind myself, and you, that nobody but you gives a shit who you are willing to sacrifice.
I'd prefer the backlash be more "reversion to the mean" and less "pendulum swings back like a wrecking ball", and I'd prefer not to have millions of innocent young men and women thrown abruptly out of school to that end.
And, yeah, among the hip rationalists and contrarians, academia is all cost disease and bloat and indoctrination and signaling. To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing. That's the story that made J.D. Vance a household name, but I suppose as an Ivy-league alum we're supposed to write him off as an irredeemably woke leftie or something.
The now-predominately-Republican working class likes that sort of social mobility, because those are *their* kids with a shot at what they see as a better life. The Democrats like that sort of thing because they think they'll get more Democrats out of it. I like that sort of thing because I'm a libertarian who believes in meritocracy. I'm not sure what you are that you don't see this as a good thing, but whatever it is, there aren't enough of you to matter.
And the bit where there's at least a large minority that's annoyed by all the kids going to Oberlin to study Uselessology or Columbia to join Team Hamas, fine, but *these aren't those kids*. Those are mostly the ones from upper-middle-class families who assume they'll be getting an upper-middle-class lifestyle just for having a college degree, and feel guilty about it. The ones who need a Pell Grant to make it through school, know they need to make that education count for something in the real world. So, yeah, pat yourself on the back for having reduced the number of college students, but you're getting rid of the students and your pissing off their parents and they're going to make you pay for that.
I think the problem is that university is associated in people's minds with being above average on the social ladder, so the popular sentiment is "if we all can get university education, then we will all be above the average".
Unfortunately, this is not how averages work. If everyone gets university education, then you will need PhD to get a hairdresser license.
So perhaps instead of extending the sweet deal of "get more credentials in return for a lifetime of debt" to an ever increasing part of population, we should go in the opposite direction and reduce the need of credentials. To become a hairdresser, you should need one month of training, at most. Make it so that if you decide that being an unemployed bum or a software developer sucks and you would prefer to be a plumber instead, you will only need two or three months, and you are legally free to start your own business.
Separately from that, we should improve education, and there are many things that could be improved there. But we should not make it legally required in order to get a good job.
Ahhhh. Slightly more than comfortably full. Tryptophan addled. House a on the warm side of comfortable.Time to lie on the sofa in front of a football game I have no intention of paying attention to and uh uhhhnn….
A hypothetical situation/question that has bugged me since childhood: A ball is thrown at a wall. The distance between the ball and the wall can be measured and expressed mathematically. As the ball approaches the wall, that measurement becomes a smaller and smaller number. Numbers are infinite, and numbers can be always be divided and made smaller (in my understanding). My question - as the ball nears the wall, the numerically expressed distance can always be made into a smaller number - how does the ball, numerically speaking, ever actually make contact with the wall? This may be a dumb question, but hey, if you don't ask... Thanks in advance.
There’s a collision detection system in the simulator, it works pretty well.
These are not trivial problems at all. If you suppose that the ball moves at constant speed of 1m/s toward the wall, and starts out 3m away, then the distance to the wall is (3-t)m and as the time t approaches 3, the distance goes to 0. There's nothing special happening at t=3 from a mathematical sense, though physically the ball contacts the wall at that point and you need to refine the model to go any further.
Actually, Newton developed calculus to deal with problems of the type you're describing. The way calculus is taught in schools and universities obscures this fact, but the basics of the subject are all about making sense of processes which happen in continuous time, like the one you describe.
You'll read this and think I haven't answered the question. Actually setting calculus on a completely rigorous mathematical footing took around 250 years, and the effort of many mathematicians. (Real numbers are already surprisingly difficult to describe formally - and then you're looking at processes involving these to describe the real world.) To get a completely satisfying answer to the question, you would probably need to go through a sequence of undergrad level calculus courses - but hopefully this gives a sense of what's going on.
Keep in mind that time works the same way; every time you remeasure the distance from the ball to the wall, you remeasure the time it takes to travel there. Eventually you hit... is it Planck, or Heisenberg? Either way, there's a distance at which things are no longer things, and then the ball changes direction.
Technically, the ball never touches the wall. The ball is made of atoms, the wall is made of atoms; if you put the atoms too close, they repel. At a tiny but nonzero distance the force becomes strong enough to make the ball bounce.
(If Chuck Norris throws a ball at a wall, a microscopic black hole is created at the place of collision, and then it gets complicated. EDIT: The atoms would probably just fit in places between other atoms and the ball would get stuck inside the wall, possibly leading to an explosion.)
You're looking for solutions for Xeno's paradoxes, which in the modern era broadly get solved with calculus. I'm not super up on the exact solutions, but it's something to do with limits?
EDIT: Here's the actual solution, explained for people that haven't thought about math formally for a long time: https://sciencehouse.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/math-solved-zenos-paradox/
Gebru and Torres, two dissident researchers who became famous as coauthors of the renowned "Stochastic Parrots" article, recently published a new paper critical of the rationality sphere and EA:
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11599
They coin the awesome-sounding acronym TESCREAL to describe the sphere, and then argue that it has roots in the eugenics tradition. Are you aware of this article, and have you considered responding to it?
> dissident researchers
In what way are they "dissidents"? They're representatives of the boring, narrow hegemony that rules intellectual life, trying to extend that hegemony into one of the few corners they don't control.
Once I strip aside the authors' tone of moral panic about the followers of TESCREAL beliefs (Transhumanism, Extopianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, EAism, and Longtermism) their arguments boil down to (a) these are all influenced by eugenics-based ideas, and (b) and most of their AGI hopes and dreams are not based on sound scientific nor engineering principles.
As for the first, they admit that the dream of breeding/creating superior humans goes back long before the early 20th-century Eugenics movement, and they fail to tie the current eugenical beliefs to those of the previous century. But they try to tar the current movements with old stains of the old movement.
And as for the latter, I tend to agree with their statements. A lot of the TESCREAL beliefs are attractive to smart people who think they know more than they do (and Charlie Stross has noted how much of their beliefs have been influenced by old science fiction tropes). I see the TESCREAL belief systems as being mostly harmless crackpottery. Of course, certain billionaire followers of TESCREAL beliefs could do a lot of social and political damage if they're given the power to do so.
Reading the article, commenting as I go, I am not promising that I will make it to the end:
> we have seen little discussion of why AGI is considered desirable by many in the field of AI, and whether this is a goal that should be pursued
Apparently no one reads Yudkowsky these days.
> In this paper, we ask: What ideologies are driving the race to attempt to build AGI?
In this comment, I answer: it's about money and power; the things that transcend all ideologies.
> the acronym “TESCREAL” denotes “transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism”
At the first sight, this sounds like a complicated way to say "nerds". (Later we will see how much the words can actually be substituted, but if yes, that would kinda reduce the entire finding to: "the people trying to build AGI are... nerds". Which is true, but not really surprising.)
> The idea of eugenics can be traced back to the origins of the Western intellectual tradition
Yeah, I guess if you want to talk about transhumanists and singularitarians, you need to start with the recent examples, such as Plato and Aristotle.
> second-wave eugenics arose in response to new technological possibilities associated with genetic engineering and biotechnology. Such technologies opened the door to human “improvements”
When the authors say "eugenics", they basically include anything that concerns human DNA. If you worry about your child potentially getting Tay–Sachs disease, you know who else worried about people having inferior genes, right?
The link between eugenics and transhumanism seems to be that eugenicists wanted to improve humans by improving the genetic pool, and transhumanists want to achieve the same goal by abandoning the biological limitations completely. Different methods, the same goal.
Extropianists were the first organized modern transhumanist group. Singularitarians are also transhumanists. This... apparently makes the belief that an artificial intelligence could be smarter than humans an eugenicist belief, by the power of association. (I wonder whether a belief that Google can find things online better than you is also a fundamentally eugenicist belief. Or that a calculator can do multiplication faster than you.)
Never heard about cosmism before, so whatever; I find it plausible that it is also somehow related to thinking about the future and technology (which, as we have already established, are fundamentally eugenicist topics). Rationalists... also believe that AI is a big thing, and that it would better for the poweful AI to be good rather than evil. (Those assholes.) Effective altruists want to alleviate poverty... I am sure there is something sinister behind that, too, let's wait for the punchline... ah, yeah, some of them also worry about the future humans. And longtermists, those by definition worry about the future. (Remember, worrying about the future is an eugenicist thing.)
> Indeed, transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, and cosmism are examples of second-wave eugenics, since all endorse the use of emerging technologies to radically “enhance” humanity and create a new “posthuman” species.
OK, still in 20% of the article, but seems like this is the crux. If you accept the premise that trying to improve humans in any way (such as curing hereditary diseases or augmenting humans by technology) is basically the same thing that Nazis tried to do, only using modern technology, then... either you become a Nazi sympathizer, or you need to ban all efforts to cure genetic diseases or augment humans. Anything else means being in denial; and luckily we have two smart professors here to expose your hypocrisy.
> The TESCREAL bundle shares certain “eschatological” (relating to “last things”) convictions. As with religions like Christianity, these take two forms: utopian and apocalyptic, which are inextricably bound up together.
The belief in either horrible or glorious future is also in Marxism, just saying. On the other hand, effective altruists are mostly worried about the dark present. (I think that rationalists are also quite concerned about people being stupid right now.)
> The reason for concern is that emerging technologies are expected to be (a) extremely powerful; (b) increasingly accessible to both state and nonstate actors; and (c) dual-use, as exemplified by CRISPR-Cas9, which could enable us to cure diseases but also synthesize designer pathogens unleashing an “engineered pandemic”.
Here I would like to ask the authors whether *they* agree with this assessment factually, or not. Because if they do, then it also puts them in the category of people worrying about the future. (And if they don't, then what's the point of obsessing whether the technologies are connected to the sinister TESCREALs?)
> in 1996, Yudkowsky expressed concerns about superintelligence, writing: “Superintelligent robots = Aryans, humans = Jews.
Ah, Yudkowsky being Yudkowsky. But what exactly are the authors trying to say? Are they suggesting that Yudkowsky proposes the extermination of Jews/humans as a desirable thing to do? Or are they just taking things out of context in order to make their point?
> “Intelligence,” typically understood as the property measured by IQ tests, matters greatly because of its instrumental value
Uhm... yes?
> The obsession with IQ can be traced back to first-wave eugenicists, who used IQ tests to identify “defectives” and the “feeble-minded.”
Ah, I see the logic. In a parallel universe where Nazis sent *short* people to death camps, it is probably a taboo to talk about human height, and if you suggest that putting things on the top shelf can make them difficult to reach for some people, you get cancelled.
(PART 2)
> Table 1: “TESCREAL bundle” of ideologies.
A list of people and organizations to get cancelled.
> Effective accelerationists believe that the probability of a bad outcome due to AGI is very low
Yeah, that's pretty much the same thing as Yudkowsky says, except with "not" at the beginning.
(Would that make the acronym TESCREALEACC?)
> how TESCREAList groups are steering the field of AI toward the goal of creating AGI.
This feels like giving too much credit. Are they saying that without these people, it wouldn't occur to anyone to build an LLM?
> In 1955, four white men officially launched the field of AI
Ah, the field is forever tainted by the association with crackers. :(
> many researchers in fields currently associated with AI, such as natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV), explicitly distanced themselves from the term “AI,” in part because it became associated with unfulfilled grandiose promises. Nonetheless, some groups continued to work toward “artificial general intelligence,”
So, both the former and the latter agree that the AIs we have now are not AGIs? And that is somehow controversial? Or why the framing of "some researchers work on X, but others [sinister music starts playing] work on Y"? Isn't it quite normal that different researchers work on different things? It seems like the authors are trying to hint at some dark controversy here, but to me it sounds about as sinister as saying "some biologists study mice, but others [sinister music starts playing] study frogs". Like, yeah, that's how research works. (Actually, I may be wrong here. That's how research works in natural sciences. In some other fields, it is probably very important that the researchers agree with each other and all do the same thing, otherwise they get cancelled?)
> How, then, would researchers know that they have achieved their goals of building AGI? They need to know how to define and measure “general intelligence.” Unsurprisingly, these definitions rest on notions of “intelligence” that depend on IQ and other racist concepts
(facepalm)
> For these reasons, Keira Havens, who has written extensively on race science, asks those attempting to build AGI: “Why are you relying on eugenic definitions, eugenic concepts, eugenic thinking to inform your work? Why [...] do you want to enshrine these static and limited ways of thinking about humanity and intelligence?”
Mussolini promised to make trains run on time. Why are you still using trains?
> One conjecture is that the resulting AGI will be so intelligent that it will figure out what the best thing to do is in any potential situation.
I'm confused. So did they read Yudkowsky or didn't they? Or were they just looking for a quote to take out of context, and ignored everything else, including the part where he *literally* called exactly this thing "the sheer folly of callow youth"?
https://www.readthesequences.com/The-Sheer-Folly-Of-Callow-Youth
> TESCREALists have been able to divert resources toward trying to build AGI and stopping their version of an apocalypse in the far future, while dissuading the public from scrutinizing the actual harms that they cause in their attempts to build AGI.
Uhm... sorry about mentioning this Yudkowsky guy all the time, but you included the movement he started in your acronym... and you pretend to be experts on what the movement is about, so... maybe it would be nice to get familiar at least with the very basics?
> As an example, one of us worked as a hardware engineer designing audio circuitry for devices such as laptops. Some of the tests that we performed as part of our work included drop testing, constantly dropping devices to understand the manner in which their functionality degrades when they are exposed to shocks, placing the devices in extremely cold or hot environments, frequently restarting them [...] we argue that the first steps in making any AI system safe are attempting to build well-scoped and well-defined systems like those described as “narrow AI,” rather than a machine that can supposedly do any task under any circumstance.
OK, I really don't want to put your expertise in restarting laptops in doubt. But, you know, these AI things sometimes turn out to work differently than you would expect. For example, I think that scientists in 1960s believed that we will make artificial intelligences understand human knowledge one topic at a time, by building expert systems and cleverly designing the semantical nets. They would probably be shocked to hear that the state-of-art AIs of 2024 are good at poetry and painting, but suck at math. And yet, here we are. The line between the narrow AIs and AGIs may turn out to be similarly unpredictable; it can happen much later or much sooner that we expect, and may be caused by an improvement that we will not suspect of having exactly that impact.
(THE END)
OK, my summary would be that the authors identified a group of people whom I would describe as "nerds thinking about the future, specifically the technology", and correctly noticed that there is an overlap between various groups.
The connection to eugenics is mostly made through "trying to improve things" and "believing that intelligence is a thing". I understand that both of these things are *problematic* for some people, but I also think those people are... how to put it politely... not thinking clearly, and probably not even interested in thinking clearly.
Some of their arguments require *a lot* of cherry-picking. If you fail to notice that the effective altruists mostly care about reducing the suffering that exists *today*... or if you believe that Yudkowsky wants to build the AGI as soon as possible, and believes that by the virtue of being generally intelligent it will get all the answers right... then I strongly doubt your expertise on the individual elements of the "TESCREAL" boogeyperson you invented. It's more like you sometimes need to make things the very opposite of what they are, in order to make your point.
Congratulation on finding your powerful and rich enemy responsible for manipulating the society and science towards their sinister goals. You know who else did that, right?
> If you fail to notice that the effective altruists mostly care about reducing the suffering that exists *today*
To be fair, is that even the case anymore? I thought that disagreement about that was what caused Open Philanthropy to splinter off of Givewell.
Yes. As usual, it is 10% of reality that gets 90% of the attention, but see e.g. here: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities -- malaria, malaria, vitamin A, some unspecified vaccines. Okay, I guess the vaccines are about reducing suffering in the future, but it is still different from what the "TEASCREAL" model suggests.
Maybe somewhere lower on the list there is a longtermist project, and that is what makes some people freak out. Or maybe there are also separate lists by categories, and the longtermist category contains longtermist projects. But there is a difference between "there are some X somewhere among Y" and "Y is about X".
On the other hand, top 2 (and also 5th and 6th) careers recommended by 80KH (as of today) are AI risk-related.
https://80000hours.org/career-reviews/
I coin a slightly less awesome acronym HGT, which means Hitler, Gebru, and Torres. I claim that HGT has roots in Nazi traditions, and I have historical data to prove that at least one third of HGT was actively involved. That sounds quite damning, in my opinion.
Long story short, you can choose a perspective that supports your conclusions. As a rationalist, you should also reflect on how much your conclusion reflects the territory and how much it merely reflects the perspective you chose. To get the best results, you should aim to "carve reality at its joints", i.e. let yourself be guided by how things actually are, rather than your arbitrary definitions, no matter how clever they may sound (they may or may not be correct). For example, I am pretty sure you can find a connection between "TESCREAL" and eugenics tradition, just like you can find a connection between the eugenics tradition and progressive politics. The question is, is the former connection stronger than the latter? (If not, why do you focus on it so much? Instead of e.g. writing an article about "TESCREAL" having roots in the progressive politics?)
...okay, now I am going to actually read the article.
EDIT: One of the names sounded vaguely familiar, took me a moment to remember why:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yAHcPNZzx35i25xML/emile-p-torres-s-history-of-dishonesty-and-harassment
Torres wrote a response, if you want to go down that rabbit hole:
https://mileptorres.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-is-a-dangerous
Still haven't read the article, but now it seems to me that the alleged main connection between eugenics and "TESCREAL" is... consequentialist thinking, and worrying about the future of humanity. Technically true. (So it's like, someone says: "I would prefer if AI didn't kill all humans", and the response is: "so what you're saying is that you are worried about preserving the future of the while race?")
Well I skimmed through it... and the paper doesn't seem that wrong at the object level. Hell, even the last survey Scott posted did show that the readership for the blog is relatively pro-eugenics (but only when he didn't use the word "eugenics"). It's just that the authors' values are completely idiotic. What is with these people's obsession with identity politics and "marginalized communities"? Calling people "racist" just for trying to improve humanity is just... well, it's certainly proving their opposition's point that all of this is necessary.
>What is with these people's obsession with identity politics and "marginalized communities"?
Buzzwords and such part of an institutional jargon designed to advance that institution's interests or satisfy certain needs.
I agree. Unfortunately, these values are dominant in Western academia and their supremacy is jealously guarded. Some high-profile EA should probably make a response, otherwise I'm worried that good EA ideas will see even more opposition from the academy.
Well that shouldn't matter, academia is going to get ideologically purged soon anyways. Though, I guess we'd have bigger things to worry about at that point...
By whom?
By the new administration. Do you think the Republican party sacrificed all of their values just so they could maintain the status quo? The people, and the people that lead them, want change, and the only way to accomplish that is by rooting out the rot at the top. Not just in academia, but in corporations as well.
Of course, they almost certainly hate EA as well for being filled with leftist vegans, so uh... Good luck with that.
The Trump administration last time around couldn't even manage to purge the Trump administration. This time around I think they'll be ever so slightly more effective, but I doubt they'll manage a purge of academia.
Is the rationalist movement privileged? Ok, stupid question. I'd say the answer is an obvious yes. What I mean specifically is privileged in the economic sense. I.e. something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do. And when I say rationalist I mean someone who esteems truth for truth's sake. Feel free to argue for or against this first question, but I take it as a given. It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told. So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically? Do you see it sort of like a Socratic matter of principles (I'll be broke as hell but at least I'll know I was being honest with myself), is the world really just dog-eat-dog and poor people should just excise rationalist thinking from their lives if they know what is best for them? Other ways of looking at this? I ask because I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Good question. Why not take a data centred approach?
How do we measure privilege? It's going to depend on the society you're immersed in, and your own values. But most people would agree that wealth, education, a 'good' job, social standing and various freedoms/civil rights are a reasonable measure of this. The first three are fairly easy to measure. In the amount of time I'm willing to spend on this, I can compare the ACX survey to US demographic data.
Something like 85% of Scott's readers have a third level degree, upwards of 20% have a doctorate. Less than 40% of the population in the US has a bachelors degree. Approx. 2% have a PhD and at most 5% have doctoral level qualifications. So readers of the blog do have educational privilege. Since the ability to do a PhD requires years of forgone earnings, it's reasonable to infer that blog readers are coming from a family background which is higher socio-economic status.
Unfortunately, the survey data just reports numbers for income with the majority of responses censored. You could ask Scott for the data if you wanted to do more analysis, but I think it's likely that average and median earnings are well above the US average. Participants did self-identify their SES but I would treat this with caution, it's better to collect 'hard' data rather than self-descriptions, particularly when something like 'upper-middle class' is context and country dependent. Personally, I think the level of education and amount of free time required to read blogs like this and post in them means that they're biased to the privileged.
Recently, I've been at odds with my manager over small issues. E.g. they wanted to rearrange the schedule of a meeting I was chairing so they could arrive and deliver the welcome address 30 minutes in - I insisted the welcome be at the beginning, they could speak on other topics if arriving at the end of the meeting - they rescheduled to arrive on time. I don't think this is in any way a rationalist approach - to me it's common sense. I had the background and sufficient social standing to make my case persuasively. I didn't play the political game though - and I'm lucky to have a boss who is (mostly) willing to listen to pushback. I'd be curious to hear if a card carrying rationalist would have approached this differently - to me it was a mixture of common sense and my own stubbornness.
Not especially; the non privileged rationalist don't call themselves rationalists because that term is intensely weighed down (unfairly) in the consensus by your Theilites and your SBFs and your weird cryptofascist orbiters.
Eg, they decided not to pursue lots of money for moral reasons; they are out there digging wells or being teachers or doing the type of research that doesn't end in you being super rich for inventing the Juicero.
I would say that it's hard not to be a rationalist if you are at all introspective.
A) The Big Yud often said that "rationality is the art of winning". I.e. winning is the goal, rationality is a tool. If rationality precludes you from winning, discard rationality and win. He typically relies on Zen motifs to get his point across. C.f. "The Twelfth Virtue" [0] and "Something to Protect" [1].
B) The wealthy are privileged ipso facto. Dependency (of any kind, including financial dependency) represents exogenous influence. Unfortunately, specialization has made modern society quite interdependent. So it often is, infact, in your best interest to adeptly navigate Baudrillard's Simulacrum [2]. Another way of thinking about money: money is "slack" [3], and slack is options. Including the option to be intellectually-honest.
> So my actual question is, in what ways can one incorporate rationalist principles in their life if honing these skills may actually end up hurting them economically?
C) To paraphrase The-Bugman-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named: "you have to live like you're in enemy territory". If the powers-that-be don't like what you're teaching your students, you need to realize that you're basically distributing samizdat.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/twelfth-virtue-the
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect/
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/simulacrum-levels
[3] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/slack
Big Yud also said that it's about truth, and assumed the formulations were equivalent , and they're not.
Hm... I don't remember anything like that. Got links? Not gonna lie, it's been a long time since I read The Sequences. And I never completed the entire corpus. So I'm prepared to be surprised.
Whatever the case, I stand by my initial comment, insofar as winning is ultimately more important than truth. (No, this isn't a carte blanche to act like a pathological liar. But Kant's radical honesty, for example, is a kinda bonkers imho.)
> Is the rationalist movement privileged?
Movements are not privileged; people are. Some rationalists are rich, some are poor, most of them probably somewhere in the middle. Or slightly above the average, considering their typical professions.
> something that some wealthy people can afford to do/be but less wealthy people can't afford to be/do.
My personal freedom of speech is mostly a result of living in Eastern Europe where no one gives a fuck about what you think. If I lived in America, I would probably watch my tongue more carefully. I am *not* wealthy enough to not need a job, which dramatically limits the things I can do (and in America would also limit the things I can say).
> It seems obvious to me that some people are getting subsidized by their jobs/career to be rationalists while most other people get subsidized to shut their mouths and do what they are told.
Yeah, your type of job determines what kind of idiots you are surrounded by.
> Other ways of looking at this?
It seems like some good (for self-preservation) habits from communism are also useful in the woke era, so here is one:
* Don't think.
* If you think, then don't speak.
* If you think and speak, then don't write.
* If you think, speak and write, then don't sign.
* If you think, speak, write and sign, then don't be surprised.
Personally, I would think, and only talk to friends or talk pseudonymously on the web.
> I work as a secondary ed teacher and I've found that there are aspects of my job where being a rationalist is helpful/good but I think it is valuable to bifurcate rationalist thinking (truth for truth's sake) and just play the political game a lot/most of the time.
Yeah, you can use some rationality at your work, without saying explicitly that this is what you are doing. (When someone important says "there is a dragon in a garage", say "of course there is", and then continue using the garage as usual. Which is what many people actually do.)
Others may chime in with different takes, but, for me, rationalism is about forming confidence estimates related to beliefs, it is not about saintly purity in how you choose to act or what you choose to say.
Taking an example from inside your question: imagine a situation where you are called to make a statement and you see two choices (a) what you believe to be true, (b) what you believe to be politically expedient. Rationalist methods could help you in the following ways:
(i) identify a false dichotomy and determine a third (or even more than one) alternative thing to say/way to act
(ii) form and update an estimate of the probability that (a) is a better/worse choice than (b)
(iii) phrase your belief (a) in a way that does not have the assumed political cost (because you indicate openness to other possibilities, you support your statement with evidence, you shade your statement probabalistically)
Ted Gioia just dropped this on his substack - https://www.honest-broker.com/p/strange-and-dazzling-things-are-happening
tldr - NY Times reports, paywalled, (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/business/media/substack-politics-newsletters.htm) that Musk tried to buy Substack, but failed. Ted is a big enough whale on Substack that he has met Substack CEO Chris Best in person. Ted's comments are worth quoting, so here they are -
Last year I found myself across the table from Substack CEO Chris Best—and I hoped he would satisfy my curiosity on one matter. So I asked:
“Chris, I have a question. Has Elon Musk made an offer to buy Substack?”
Then I added:
“Appropriate answers to this question are (1) Yes, (2) No, or (3) I prefer not to say.”
Chris didn’t answer immediately. He thought it over for a moment, then responded: “I prefer not to say.”
In this soft-spoken way, Mr. Best showed his wisdom. Although he works hard to empower journalists, he’s smart enough to know to watch his words around those pesky folks. We’re as leaky as sieves, and only half as reliable.
But the New York Times reported yesterday that Elon Musk did attempt to buy Substack last year. Musk also hinted that he would merge it into Twitter and let Best run the combined companies.
The Times also reports that Best rejected this offer.
And he didn’t even fret about it. It was a “short-lived discussion,” according to the Times’ three sources.
That proves that Chris not only has wisdom, but also possesses integrity and strong core values. When he says that he supports indie writers, he really means it.
If Musk’s plan had been accepted, Chris would have enjoyed a huge payday in the transaction, and also might have found himself running the most powerful media force in the world right now.
But he didn’t hesitate to walk away from that.
I want to commend Chris and the entire Substack team. They not only talk the talk, but walk the walk—which is rare in the media world right now. Or in any world right now.
The article makes it seem so obvious, but...
First, saying "I prefer not to say" is not necessarily the same as kinda-deniable "yes". Maybe he rejected Musk. Maybe he is waiting and hoping that Musk will offer more money. Maybe someone else offered money, and he is trying to make the other person think that they are competing against Musk. Maybe he even said yes to Musk, but they have some kind of deal that the website will officially change hands on January 1st 2025, and until then there is an embargo on this information.
From business perspective, the Substack model seems great. By taking a fixed fraction of subscriptions, the financial interests seem aligned; Substack makes money when the authors do. The possible downside is that this can make the platform attractive to all kinds of conspiracy theorists and scammers (I imagine that writing Flat Earth News could be quite profitable), but if you advertise yourself as a platform where no one gets censored, that already goes with the territory.
But technically, using Substack can be quite frustrating experience, and frankly it seems like it's no one's priority to improve it. It took years just to make ACX comment section usable, and it still could be improved a lot. Or the bug where if you replied to a comment in an e-mail, your reply got inserted incorrectly in the comment tree. (That one is probably fixed, but that also took years.) I haven't written a post lately, but I remember it to be also frustrating. Like, how am I supposed to write articles containing code examples, if all existing character style options are so huge that you can barely fit 40 characters in a line? Or why do I have to choose whether a word is monospace or a hyperlink, but it cannot be both? It's obvious that the intended type of article is "type a lot of text, drag and drop a few pictures and a YouTube video, insert five 'subscribe' buttons, and call it a day", which I guess is where most money comes from. Yeah, it makes sense economically, but that means that if your technical skills are even slightly above zero, Substack will constantly make you cry.
So, maybe don't sell to Musk, but at least hire someone who is technically competent and who cares.
>That proves that Chris not only has wisdom
What makes you confident of that? Maybe accepting the offer would have been good for Substack. Why are you so sure that it wasn't?
"Cannot confirm or deny" is usually the best response to questions about possible takeover offers even if they haven't occurred.
> "Cannot confirm or deny"
It's also the preferred statement from the CIA, which is known as the Glomar response.[1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
Well, at the very least we can be sure that the negotiations didn't go well:
> This month, Mr. McKenzie publicly called Mr. Musk a propagandist “with more conflicts of interest than El Chapo.”
Are we sure Musk didn't just lowball him? There's no practical reason for him to overpay for Substack like he did with Twitter, considering that this site is already pretty right-leaning.
And reading the article more closesly, Substack still isn't doing very well financially... Musk has more than just money as leverage, given that he immediately retaliated by hiding posts with substack links, not to mention his new political connections. He'll get what he wants eventually.
Not that I think that'll be a massive issue anyways; all that'll happen is that everyone at Substack gets fired and the site gets merged into X. And also he'll probably stop renewing most of the contracts with the writers here. I guess that'll suck for Scott.
It would suck not just for Scott but also all of us here in the comments.
In what way? Musk has shown a commitment to free speech that few others in media have.
Until it's speech that he doesn't like. Then, um, not so much
One of the weird things happening in the amazing nowadays is the number of people eager to jump to defend Musk. Like, you know he's a man with immense wealth and power, and is quite capable to looking after himself. He's also not running for any popularity contest. So... why do so many spend so much effort defending whatever he does? Jumping to counter every lightest slight in his direction, like he was a precious baby or something...
That's weird, because I got the opposite impression, that recently it is incredibly popular to accuse Musk of... well, nothing specific, just being generally the worst. Seems to be so since the moment he bought Twitter, but maybe I got the timing wrong.
I don't even like the guy; I think he is neither a saint nor a devil, just a smart rich guy trying to become even more rich, who seems to spend too much time online shitposting.
Is there somewhere a list of his "crimes" that I could read?
For the same reason that lots of people jump to criticize him for no real reason. He's become a symbol of the culture wars, so everything he does gets framed that way.
Also I don't think it's fair to characterize my comment as "jumping to counter every lightest slight". I genuinely don't think him buying substack would be bad for anyone and don't understand why someone would reflexively assume that it would be.
Oh? What's an example of speech he's suppressed purely because of its content?
He makes rules on the fly and interprets hazy policies in a way that justifies him banning, suspending or pushing voices he doesn't like off the platform. When he took over I was curious to see what twitter with free speech would look like, but unfortunately these are not the actions of someone with a genuine commitment to free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensions
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/elon-musk-twitter-still-banning-journalists
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-musk-hypocrite-free-speech
Doesn't substack have competitors by now?
Wait! Wait! The Webb Telescope disproved the existence of Dark Matter?! I guess I must have been snoozing. The massive galaxies that Webb observed in the early universe are an excellent fit for MOND, and their existence that early in the universe pretty thoroughly falsifies the Dark Matter models of galaxy formation.
Stupid question: if Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a better description of gravity, how does this affect the value of the Cosmological Constant? Does Dark Energy also go away? I don't know enough about MOND because I never took it seriously. I guess another Internet rabbit hole awaits my exploration.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad834d/meta
Hmm, well I've been following Mond for a while now. Tracy McGaugh's blog is full of stuff. https://tritonstation.com/
Later edit;
I just want to add that Mond is less of a 'theory' and more of a 'fit to the data'. If gravity at accelerations below a_0 became a 1/r force law, (rather than 1/r^2) then that fits all the data.. up to some point. Mond fails at the mass level of galaxy clusters, it doesn't fit the third hump in the CMB data. nor the bullet cluster... There's something missing from Mond.... My favorite idea is some hot dark matter... sterile neutrinos. (I mean first of all I love the name.) Oh and that Mond is true... whatever mond is... beyond a fit to the data.
I don't think it can be concluded yet that DM or that the age of the universe has been falsified nor that has MOND been proven.
On this topic, the empirical evidence for MOND seems better but that isn't a 100% exclusion for DM.
DM can explain current star formation history, if and only if models of star/galaxy formation "innovate".
Be it a non constant IMF, super eddington accretions, assumptions about black holes and dust prevalences and properties, etc.
We are at the limit where nearly 100% of baryons needs to be converted into stars which sounds highly unlikely though. There has been some pre JWST era models that match most current observations. Moreover there are many possible more exotic catalysis mechanisms of galaxy and star formation, among which some might require new physics or standard physics but in practice non standard physics (few people will understand what I mean here), e.g. via dust based Mock gravity, rydberg matter or Zeldovich radiation.
Most importantly the debate should not be dumbed down to MOND or DM, one both can coexist, two there are many extensions (interacting DM, etc), three both can be false, the true theory might be quantized inertia, etc
My personal belief is that the age of the universe is at least moderately wrong.
The MOND existence will be forever settled via GAIA DR4 in 2026 (is settled in 2025 but ESA will gatekeep the data because they do not follow open data science)
BTW here is the biggest issue in LCDM by far, and you'll never hear of it, like in most sciences, the most interesting discoveries are absolutely unknown because well there is only one person on this planet reading the scientific literature extensively (me)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04771
Oh Mond is by no means complete.. it fails at higher mass levels, galaxy clusters and above.
In reference to your paper, how would a missing dust signature in the CMB support the existence of dark matter? Would the presumed distribution of dark matter—clumped around galaxies and diffuse to a near-perfect vacuum in intergalactic space—reduce the density of dust in intergalactic space?
Also the Z>14.3 barrier has already been broken, the information is just not public yet
Uhm, could we please restore the ancient tradition of Open Threads without politics? I am not really interested in reading about Trump every day.
Yeah, I agree. The only problem is where (or who) draws the line?
Banning the word "Trump" would alone get us 80% there. Adding "woke", "Israel", and "Palestine" would move it to 95%.
This is Scott's substack, and he has the power and the right to draw whatever lines he wishes. But in the past, Scott used to post a separate political open thread every week (month?) that allowed political discussions and arguments. He did a good job snuffing out the political crap on the other threads—but I suspect it became too onerous for him. And so, I'm forced to wade through political crap to get to any interesting philosophical or scientific discussions. This is one of the reasons I haven't re-upped my subscription to this sub.
Are those not the hidden open threads for the paypigs?
No. Plenty of Trump stuff there too.
Yes please.
I second that motion!
https://apnews.com/article/gaetz-trump-fbi-justice-department-248b46ba0c882dd46d661568e8bd3bd7?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Matt Gaetz has already withdrawn from the Attorney General nomination, having previously resigned from the House, meaning he's currently not in any political offices. This removal of Matt Gaetz from Congress has the chance to be the first win of the new Trump cabinet, although I don't know if his resignation will actually hold this early in.
It aeeems that nobody who writes about these things in the news and elsewhere is familiar with negotiating or what they call in VEEP "cock-thumb" it was immediately obvious to me that that's what trump was doing with Gaetz.
Bernie Sanders' latest doomed crusade is limiting American arms shipments to Israel: https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/article-829168
Put aside the question of whether Sanders is right or wrong at the object level - my opinion is that Israel has a right to self-defense, crushing Hamas/Hezbollah is in the interests of all non-insane people, and while all conflicts have occasional outrages the IDF has overall done a good job in a challenging urban environment - the war is divisive in America. Whether those opposed are right or wrong isn't the question. Everyone has a right to their opinion and proportional say in how American power / tax money are used, dumb though their opinion may be.
What's a rough percentage of Americans opposed to this or some policy generally that you feel is sufficient opposition to be placated? Does it need to be a majority? 50%, 25%, 10%, etc.?
Would it be smart politically for the Democrats to cater to that opposition? For Trump? Would it be unifying or equally divisive for the government to say that the cost in domestic dispute is too high and Israel should source weapons elsewhere?
I do not know if I have good answers.
Democrats basically alternate between cheerleaders for the military (who quickly fall out of favor when wars go badly) and diehard pacifists (who get credibly accused of being America-hating foreign agents).
It's smart to have both wings so that a candidate from either side can be put forward when the situation calls for it. In previous conflicts, the pacifists have been either really, really right (Iraq the second time, e.g.) or really, really wrong (Iraq the first time, e.g.), so it helps to have a wide range of stances.
Republicans do the same - Donald Trump represents his party's isolationist wing, whereas George W. Bush (the previous Republican president) represents the interventionist wing.
Maybe both parties support wars they like, and oppose ones they dont.
Hillary Clinton (2016 nominee) voted for the Iraq War. Barack Obama (2008 President) voted against it.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama campaigned on the idea that Afghanistan was the "good war". His Vice President, Joe Biden (2020 President) withdrew from Afghanistan, letting it fall to the Taliban.
So the Democrats liked the Iraq War enough to vote for it, and to vote against it. They liked the Afghanistan War enough to campaign on winning it, and then to lose it.
I think it's easier to describe that as two separate ideological wings living uncomfortably with each other, rather than one group exercising a consistent ideology.
Wasn't Biden left with a fait accompli by Trump who'd made continued occupation untenable by the time he'd left office (by making a deal with the Taliban, letting the Taliban infiltrate governmental zones, and making physical preparations for total withdrawal)?
That's one way to frame it. Of course, when he was running for President, he discussed withdrawing from Afghanistan - look at the 2020 Democratic Party Platform and you can read their plans of Afghanistan under the heading "Ending Forever Wars". It's pretty much identical to Nixon's peace with honor that ended the Vietnam War.
Contrast that with 2008 - the chapter on Afghanistan is called "Win in Afghanistan", with sentences like "We will send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, and use this commitment to seek greater contributions–with fewer restrictions–from our NATO allies."
So I find it hard to believe that Biden wanted to surge additional troops into Afghanistan, a la Obama, but was thwarted by Trump. I think it's easier to believe that both Biden and Trump wanted to end the war in Afghanistan, but blame the other party for the inevitable bad press.
There's 13 years between the 2008 campaign and the 2021 withdrawal; plenty of time to change your mind based on the "facts on the ground" (a rare actual military use of the cliche). Also, two different people.
I'm trying to argue that the Democrats have two different wings - one pacificist/isolationist, and the other interventionist. I'm comparing the most recent Democratic President with the previous Democratic President - those two are unfortunately separated by 12 years. That's an unfortunate, but unavoidable part of the data set I'm working with.
You could however look at a single slice in time, with a single chamber. Look at the 2003 vote on the Iraq War - 81 Democrats voted in favor, 126 voted against it. For comparison, 215 Republicans voted for it and 6 against. The Republicans at the time were very much interventionists. The Democrats? They were split - not perfectly split, but a 60-40 split is a very real split.
Sounds about right as long as "ones they like" are just "ones they started".
I'd love to just poke my head briefly into the Gore-invaded-Iraq timeline to see how it's playing out.
And sometimes, they get confused about which wars they're supposed to support and which ones they aren't supposed to support.
if you're gonna traffic in atrocity denial at least give us the courtesy of not calling your critics insane
one party in this conflict is producing refugee camps and mass graves and it's not Hamas or Hezbollah
That's a fair point on my wording. I apologize. It was a quickly written post and I shouldn't have used that framing. I was thinking more of Hamas in light of Oct. 7th but it was much too forceful and broad. Consider it withdrawn.
If you punch me in the face, don't complain when I rain punches on you. "But you're the one punching now! You ought to stop!"
Israel's objective is not to produce refugee camps or mass graves, but to prevent being attacked again. Were they trying to wipe out the Palestinians, they're doing a bad job given their resources. They are showing as much restraint as reasonable in limiting civilian casualties.
No it isn't. Remove 1 terrorist organisation and another pops up.
Israel is doing exactly what I said they would do in the immediate aftermath of October 7th.
I wrote about it here 2 days after the massacre:
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-point
And I reviewed that prediction a year later here:
https://youtu.be/OR67EQNvc1k
And last week I published the actual solution.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/hasbara-vs-hasbara
I don't expect much support on account of society being composed of shortsighted stay-the-course cowards who reserve their strongest antipathies for outsiders and who will die defending their leadership absolutely no matter how bad they are. I assume this comment wil go over like a like a lead balloon thus proving my point.
Even the people in Room 101 loathed Emmanual Goldstein.
O how far from Eden we are.
The second paragraph here is a good point.
The first paragraph not so much. It's perfectly possible for a response to be excessive. If someone punches me once, and then I "rain punches down on him," continuing to just beat him until well after he's been turned into an unconscious broken piece of meat, I'm well past the point of a reasonable self-defense and should expect others to intervene, and possibly to be convicted of a crime. A lesser crime than I would be if I was unprovoked, but "he hit me so anything goes" is not the relevant standard. At a certain point, when "you're the one punching now," you really *ought* to stop.
Hamas is still punching, though, so the whole analogy seems misguided. It's not like Hamas surrendered and Israel just kept bombing them.
> I'm well past the point of a reasonable self-defense and should expect others to intervene, and possibly to be convicted of a crime
I'm sure you can get away with that if you have the blessing of the US government and military. The justice system exists to serve a need that isn't applicable in military conflicts, or any other state-sanctioned violence for that matter.
Well, it wasn't a perfect analogy, as none is. But you're right from one standpoint: one punch doesn't give license to punch forever. My point was more that you can't just call to stop just because you're losing.
And Israel, in this case, is trying to prevent the "first" punch from happening again. I do believe that if they were convinced it would stop, they would cease hostilities. But they think, justifiably, that if they stop it will just give their enemy a breather to prepare for another devastating attack. And then what is the proper response to prevent future attacks? Genocide?
what is the proper response to a conflict that was started by their forefathers but then they turned it up to 11 since ... let's say 1995?
they tried to ignore the simple fact that their co-tenants are not happy with the arrangement they forced and continue to force on them.
of course - turns out! would you believe it? - that after decades of marginalization said co-tenant's behavior shows, rather concerningly, heightened aggression.
and as a complete surprise, the hardliners continued promises that they can keep the peace ... failed.
....
yes, this is a big fucking Situation (waaay beyond Troubles level), with heavy military aspects, so the use of military force is not unfortunately some kind of "crossed line".
the moral arguments usually focus on the cruelty (and in some sense futility) of what the IDF does, and how it does it, not that it has "the right"
not to mention that - as far as I understand - the concept of self-defense is not well defined or really applicable for states occupying territories
so, on one hand, the IDF could go slower, be more careful, the tunnels won't run away after all. the only semi-sane objective is long-term occupation, otherwise the tunnels will get built again
on the other hand this is just more of the same, this guarantees more instances of mistreatment. (and even typing the words international peacekeeping mission led a laugh track fading in from somewhere.)
... and all that said, what is the proper response to being in this fucking terrible pickle? well, a bit more brotherly love would go a long way, but apparently there's been some mixup in the warehouse and thus recently folks are mostly getting war, far-right authoritarians and mayhem in other shape and form.
Most likely it has to start with showing self-restraint. (While not neglecting this elusive self-defense either.) But as long as Israel cannot really commit to dealing with its own fundies it will have an ample supply of counter-fundies :(
Agreed on both counts. Though when to stop is a more complex consideration than if you happen to be the one happening to be punching at the moment.
I'd expand a little on the second paragraph. The delta in mass graves / refugee camps between Israel and Hamas don't - as far as I can tell based on Hamas' stated goals and actions - reflect a difference in intents, only capabilities.
Ark is leaving out the part where he got punched in the face a while before the current punch... and punched again a while before that... and before that... and pretty much on a regular basis going back several decades, including a few rains of punches here or there.
In other words, the current punch isn't the only punch; it is the latest, and delivered as if there will be more, and maybe even a rain if permitted. That's why he rains punches back.
It's even worse than that. A few punches ago, he punched back more than once and "you're the one punching now" *was* the argument used to get him to stop... and then he got punched again. So that argument fails twice as hard now.
Are they showing restraint in torture?
>the war is divisive in America.
No, it's really not. It's a problem for a bunch of loud yutzes, but they poll in the 5% range, and literally no one else cares except for the people (>10%) who are wondering why Israel hasn't been tough enough.
>Everyone has a right to their opinion and proportional say in how American power / tax money are used
Yeah, no. Literally no one gets a proportional say in how their tax dollars are spent, most especially including the yutzes. I'm not sure why you think this either is or should be the case, but no, that's not happening.
The right answer for Dems is just what they've been doing, which is to pretend the yutzes don't exist and that they don't have to do anything about them.
> Yeah, no. Literally no one gets a proportional say in how their tax dollars are spent, most especially including the yutzes. I'm not sure why you think this either is or should be the case, but no, that's not happening.
You're correct that we, wisely, don't take an Athenian style vote on major decisions or budget line items. However, everyone does get an equal vote when it comes to elections - theoretically equal, state level distortions for the Presidency not withstanding, at a minimum equal at the level of your state.
Also agree with Peter Defeel below. If you're American you have ~335 million brothers and sisters. There are always going to be significant portions that see you as a yutze. You will be a yutze to your future self and vice versa. But there are no correctness requirements for voting. We don't throw out the votes of someone motivated by fear of subterranean lizardmen or equivalent. Like it or not, everyone with the right to vote gets a say even if their reasons are objectively or, to you, deeply stupid.
The question is also more of about the "ought" versus the "is". Yes, an administration with sufficient support from elected officials has the formal power to do whatever it can. But imagine a scenario where Examplestan is in an armed conflict with New Somewhereville. Magically reliably polling shows 50.1% in favor, 49.9% against. To what degree as a matter of national unity ought the views of a minority position be considered?
Well, that's why the two-party system was nice: it made sure the populace didn't get to have a voice in regards to actually important matters. Of course, the Republicans ended up defecting, but a one-party system effectively does the same thing.
*Moldbug sweatily pounds out 10,000 overwrought words on the Sovereign.*
Replete with italicized irony.
A ceasefire is supported by the majority of democrats and the majority of people under 40.
> Literally no one gets a proportional say in how their tax dollars are spent, most especially including the yutzes
Everybody is a yutze to someone else.
Almost everyone who supports a "ceasefire" is imagining a particular set of terms for that ceasefire. Which they imagine to be obvious and achievable, so that as long as the war continues they'll say "stop it, you guys, cease fire now! [on my terms]". If the firing ceases and their terms are not in place, they'll say "that's not what I meant and you know it!". It's win-win for feeling good about yourself and blaming the bad stuff on other people.
So, what are the terms for the cease fire you're implicitly advocating, and what's the line for "that's not what I meant by ceasfire"?
It is impossible for an electorate to have in-depth, technical views about how things should be done. Instead, it is ideal for them to have an understanding of what they want done and for the political leadership to figure out how to reconcile their desire with the hard realities of the matter. The pro-Palestine people want peace and the upholding of international law. The US could work towards these aims by leaning on Israel a lot harder than they have been doing and forcing Israel to restrain itself when it comes to damage done to civilians, journalists, and other noncombatants. Israel could otherwise pursue its ambition to eradicate Hamas under these constraints.
That's awfully vague as a response to "what are the terms of the ceasefire you are advocating". But I notice that, at the end, you've got Israel continuing to try to eradicate Hamas.
In which case, what you are proposing is almost definitionally *not* a cease-fire. Unless you have a serious plan to eradicate Hamas without shooting at them, or unless you weren't serious about Israel continuing to try to eradicate Hamas.
Hamas delenda est; all else is commentary. If somewhere in that commentary is a serious, actionable plan to delenda Hamas with fewer civilian casualties, great, but all I'm seeing is a wish or a command for such a plan to exist.
It would be expedient for police in Europe to carry firearms everywhere they go and to shoot first and ask questions later like their American counterparts, but it has been deemed by democratic political processes undesirable that expedience should take such precedence over other concerns, like the possibility of innocents getting shot. Just because eradicating Hamas would be made easier by ignoring the international community doesn't mean that it is desirable from a broader perspective or an ethical one. America is sacrificing its own values by supporting Israel, as it is going against the very rules-based global order it created, currently manages, and has always championed, where nations are supposed to submit themselves to international consideration rather than act unilaterally out of realpolitik and pure power-consideration. America is torching its own moral authority. Even from a pure realpolitik perspective this seems to be more damaging to America than beneficial.
The practical limits Israel would need to adhere to would be no greater than those America accepts when waging its foreign wars. It is surely still possible, but an effort towards optics would have to be made, a fig leaf adorned.
A quick search of recent polling didn’t give me any answers to these questions but suggests younger Americans are less enthusiastic about military aid to Israel than older ones.
I personally like to see Senators fostering debate on big foreign policy issues and would like to see it happen more often, even if it doesn’t lead to legislation.
Sanders is 83. He ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries. Both times, it was clear the Democratic establishment was against him winning and both times Sanders ultimately failed. Any hope he has of one day being US President has to be a massive longshot at this point. People know that he doesn't speak for the Democratic party as a whole.
So, he might as well just voice his conscience, his honest opinions on things.
He never actually joined the Democratic Party, still hasn't. It was odd that a sitting legislator who'd pointedly declined to be a member of a political party for decades, could enter himself into primaries of that party. (Will Rogers' Depression-era joke was "I don't belong to an organized political party -- I'm a Democrat.")
I suppose by letting a non-party member run in their primaries and seeing him get some substantial votes in them, the Dems are then basically stuck with him as far as public impressions go.
Politicians should, as clearly as possible, say ahead of elections what they will do if elected, and in which cases they will exercise their judgement in new situations and based on what.
Bernie sanders is acting predictably. So is Trump. So are most politicians, from the perspective of their voters, on this issue.
Agreed. Voting is an extremely lossy signal though. A strong isolationist, America First style Trump voter may be completely opposed to all military aid but still vote for him although he says that he'll increase support to some countries.
>Would it be smart politically for the Democrats to cater to that opposition?
Yes. I assume Republicans already get the voters who really want to support Israel. Democrats should offer the opposite option for voters who really don't want to support Israel. Not doing so leaves an opening for Republicans to take at least some of those votes. Eg, Trump did a lot of outreach to Arab Americans before election day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGJdclFhtO4
Similarly there should be parties that stand for isolationism so voters can express that preference, which is why I think it's a good thing that neocons have been pushed away by the Republicans as the Democrats have increasingly embraced them. I also don't like the chattering classes trying to set the agenda by making certain preferences verboten, whether it's restricting immigration or asylum (increasingly less so today), being against support for Ukraine, etc.
That seems odd. Is there a minimum threshold of votes before a party should take an opposite approach to grab those voters? Pro-murderism seems open, for instance, but seems like it would do more harm than good.
The Republicans absolutely do not get all of the pro-Israel votes, and the Democrats are pretty evenly divided on the issue (with older Democrats overwhelmingly in favor of Israel while younger ones are only somewhat disapproving). That's a lot of voters to lose, and pretty much doom for the Democrats if they did. Supporting Hamas over Israel is one of the biggest losers in electoral politics, similar to things that nobody would consider part of electoral politics (even if not as bad as being pro-murder).
>Is there a minimum threshold of votes before a party should take an opposite approach to grab those voters?
Yeah, it's about 5%. If you try to grab single-issue voters below 5%, you'll end up losing more votes from either people who quietly disagree with that 5%, or who think that anyone who would go after that 5% is a sleazy charlatan. The Ds somehow realized that anyone who backed Hamas would be thought of as either a lunatic or a sleazy charlatan, and miraculously avoided doing so. I know! I'm as surprised as you are!
Where is this magic 5% coming from. This seems to be arguing in bad faith - perhaps the 5% is in favour of the destruction of Israel or pro a one state solution. What Bernie is arguing for is the end to the recent war which is popular with democrats and young people.
I get the feeling you're not really responding in good faith. Obviously some positions are far outside the Overton Window and it's pretty unreasonable for you to ask me to name some specific number of votes that a position should give before a party offers it as an option. "Implement/compel a ceasefire" for example is not outside the bounds of acceptability as you made out. Second, saying that Dems should, say, campaign on decreasing military aid to Israel is not saying that Dems should also campaign on giving that aid to Hamas instead.
I'll admit I'm somewhat incredulous about the support for Hamas that we see. From the perspective of Democrats, though, it seems electorally insane to offer any support for Hamas, and only qualified support for the Gaza Palestinians (who apparently like and/or support Hamas). You offered the perspective that it would be "smart" for Democrats to court that vote, and I pointed out two issues - 1) Support for Hamas is not popular in the US, even among Democrats, and 2) Support for Israel is far more popular, including among Democrats.
It's a losing proposition. I also don't think "chase single issue voters even if their goals are unpopular" makes any sense generally. It's perfectly fine for neither major party nor any minor party to support the KKK. It's also more than okay if no party supports Hamas.
I've never argued against someone pro-Israel on the internet before this, but I finally understand why the other side gets annoyed by online pro-Israel commenters strawmanning them constantly to the point that it honestly looks like the Israeli government is actually paying people (you) to do it.
There are a sizeable number of people who'd like their governments take actions that Israel, or at least the current government, might not like but are not pro Hamas.
Is there a third choice besides "supporting Hamas" and "supporting Israel"?
Here is my peace plan for Israel/Palestine. It may take a few years, but it is still more realistic that any proposed alternative I have seen:
Every Jewish family should be legally required to have at least 10 kids. When those kids get 18 years old, the entire territory of Israel and Palestine becomes one huge democratic state, and everyone who lives there will get full citizen rights.
This is a perfect win/win solution for everyone. The Jews get their Jewish state. The Arabs get to live in peace at the place where their ancestors lived. Everyone gets democracy and human rights.
(Alternatively, make it 20 mandatory kids for every Jewish family, and also conquer Lebanon. You are probably going to do that anyway, so at least let something good come out of it.)
Sure, but for some reason it seems most people aren't really going for any of the many third way options. From my perspective, it seems the anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian side wants to force the issue to be binary in order to juice their gains. Mixed would by far be the most popular, followed by pro-Israel, if all options were on the table. The only way to get more than a lizardman level of support for Hamas is to force the dual choice.
I'm at the Whipple museum of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge university. So cool. Here's info about an instrument built by John Harrison to measure longitude at sea.
https://collections.whipplemuseum.cam.ac.uk/objects/15687/
I've been to a similar museum in Harvard, but this is even smaller and less overwhelming...
Btw, Longitude is a great book for young kids.
Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?! Only for a social life I suppose. And in some states because it's a legal requirement.
What, is every city in the world going to have a museum covering every topic?
Great question. No, a museum won't be all of the curriculum, but a learning aid. And dies it have to be in your city? Give the $17k per kid per year to the homeschooling parents to use for such expenses.
The govt needs to be good at some minimal checks on the process and results. The results seem to be better than what public schools can produce. So this should be possible for motivated parents.
Different kids need different things, and the same kid might need different things each year.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system. And others have thought through this better than I have.
>Why does a kid even need to attend school if they can go to such a museum with guidance?
Guidance from whom? A human being? Wouldn't that human being thus be a teacher, and the museum a school?
Sort of but not really. The museum is chosen by the parents as part of a curriculum, one designed or children by the parents.
The teacher can be the parent (if they have knowledge in the area) or a homeschool teacher hired by the parent. Parents of homeschooled children with different areas of expertise form co-ops and teach each other's children based on their expertise.
The basic difference is if it isn't going well for the child, the teacher can be fired immediately.
I know this is probably very worrying for Americans because this is going to be your government, but today's headlines about Trump's cabinet picks have me laughing.
New Secretary for Education is, if I go by the headlines, "WWE wrestling mogul" Linda McMahon. I know there was a lot of disdain for his last pick there in the first administration, Betsy de Vos, so I'm awaiting (with a certain amount of glee, I have to say) the reaction to this. It would seem her experience in education was serving on the Connecticut state board of education 2009-2010 and being on the board of trustees for a Catholic school:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/world/arid-41520317.html
"She served on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year starting in 2009 and has spent years on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Seen as a relative unknown in education circles, she has expressed support for charter schools and school choice."
More Catholics in the cabinet? I am delighted to see the Sinister Papist Conspiracy to extend the tentacles of the Vatican into American government is proceeding apace!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-Catholic_octopus_cartoon.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fus-anti-catholic-cartoons-portraying-the-catholic-church-as-v0-4elnjjf86nnd1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D768%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D739ca4399e09440f78fff0a25e87a778fb71c67b
Dr. Oz to oversee health insurance? Okay, even I have to blink at that one.
Head of Commerce department could affect us here in Ireland, as (and I have to agree on this one), allegedly he tweeted (or Xed, is that how we should say it now?):
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1119/1481894-trump-to-nominate-howard-lutnick-to-lead-commerce-dept/
"Lutnick was recently critical of the nature of Ireland's trade relationship with the US.
"It's nonsense that Ireland of all places runs a trade surplus at our expense. We don’t make anything here any more – even great American cars are made in Mexico. When we end this nonsense, America will be a truly great country again. You’ll be shocked," he wrote in a post on X in October."
It is nonsense, and it's not anything tangible (except for the pharma plants here), it's all down to our tax strategy to attract multinationals (like the FAANG set) which have headquarters here and move money around from one bank account to another. The effect on our economy is such that we need to have a separate calculation for GDP to account for the 'phantom GDP' from this.
So I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration changes taxes to make it attractive for American multinationals to keep their business at home, and of course this will have a knock-on affect on Irish employment as/if plants are closed or the Silicon Docks crowd shutter their offices. We'll have to see what happens!
I'm curious: what's your view of the worst case scenario here? Like what's the worst possible outcome that a bad DoEd secretary could cause? In my view the DoEd doesn't do anything positive for the cause of education, so it's impossible to do any harm by nominating an incompetent secretary. I think the country would be better off if the entire dept was completely abolished.
The DoEd becomes dysfunctional without having its duties transferred to other agencies, six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants, many of them have to drop out of school, their lives are diminished, the nation's supply of skilled labor is diminished, and there's a massive electoral backlash of mostly Trump supporters looking for the anti-Trumpiest possible candidates in the next election.
If you were under the impression that the Department of Education was just a bunch of wokescolds who send out letters to people trying to run good schools and saying "you need to be more woke or else!", then no, that's not how any of this works.
> six million college students (mostly from poor or working-class families) lose their Pell Grants
And? They're still college students. They are affiliated with the left as far as the populace is concerned.
If the economy does go to shit, they have more than enough scapegoats to blame it on. Hell, if left wing people end up leaving in droves, the administration won't even have to rig the next election in order to maintain power!
And why is that a bad outcome? In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions. Eliminating Pell grants would go some way to eliminating cost disease and bloat in higher education. Academia has become a lumbering zombie and a propaganda indoctrination zone. Anything that cuts it down to size is good in my view. Education needs far less regulation.
Wouldn't you support an anti-Trump backlash?
< In my view far fewer people should be going to college, *particularly* those from poor and working-class families. Elitism is good in elite institutions.
Well, Wanda, I come from a family with only one college-educated parent, and our finances were very tight indeed when I went to college. My parents were especially honest people, and did not fudge the truth to make us look poorer than we were when they filled out the financial aid forms. Our income and savings were low enough that I got almost a full scholarship for the entire 4 years. I graduated from an Ivy, scored 99th percentile on the GREs and got PhD. Jeez, maybe if you'd had Betsy DeVos's job I'd never have gone to college, and would instead be your hairdresser. Or, like, the lady who gives you Brazilian waxes.
As for other teens whose Pells you'd like to yank: I just looked at some data about four year colleges and their average SAT score.
https://www.univstats.com/corestats/admission/colleges-by-average-sat-score/
For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above. 1200 places someone at 64th percentile in the group that took the SAT, & that group's average intelligence and academic performance is surely above the average for college students as a whole. I'd say it's someone scoring that well or better on the SAT is not in the in your born-to-be-your-hairdresser (or hair-plucker) group, and can certainly benefit from college-level courses. If you nix the Pell grants of all the kids in those schools, that's a lot of people unable to pay for an undergrad degree they could probably have made good use of. And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok, you're the exception. Getting 99th percentile on your GRE's means you have a >120 IQ. You're exactly the kind of poor person that's supposed to be discovered via standardized testing.
>For about 35%, the average SAT score is 1200 or above.
Ok. An SAT of 1200 is an IQ of about 120 which is about the top 10% of the population. That's who should be going to college, not the ~50% that we currently send. I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't. And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive. I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go. College used to be a sorting mechanism. It's not anymore and that loss imposes very reals costs on society. It's incredibly useful for everyone to know where to get smart people.
>And only 8% of colleges have have SAT scores 1000 (the average score) or below.
Ok. That number should be 0. If someone gets a 1000 on the SAT then they shouldn't come anywhere near a college. College is for the top 10-25% of society. Everyone else should just learn a trade. Hairdresser is an excellent example.
<And pulling Pell Grants wouldn't prevent them from going, it would just make it more expensive.
"Let them eat cake."
Actually, the way the colleges set financial aid is by using the data the parents send about their savings and income, and the data parents must give is *very* detailed. There really is no loophole that allows people to look less able to pay for college than they are by having a secret rental property or whatnot. Of course they can lie, but colleges are allowed to do some checking around so that's pretty daunting. Using the data the parents sent, colleges calculate how much parents should be able to pay, and their idea of what people of a given income can cough up is generally more than people themselves feel able to cough up (though most can by penny-pinching. To cover the amount parents will not be expected to pay, colleges give a financial aid package, which is a mix of scholarship (i.e. college eats the cost), loans the parents or kid must take out, and money the kid must earn with an on-campus job. Financial aid packages always set the amount the parents and kids borrow as the maximum in government student loans they are allowed to borrow . Colleges give scholarships to cover the rest, and for kids who qualify for Pells the scholarship includes the Pell grants. So if the Pells are yanked, either the colleges would have to be willing to eat more of the cost or the kid and parents would have to borrow more. However, the family is generally already stuck with borrowing the maximum they are allowed to as federal student loans. The alternative for borrowing more is bank loans. People who are poor enough to qualify for Pell grants, and have already committed to take out $10,000 in student loans for the coming year generally do not qualify for bank loans.
<I want poor, potentially-stupid people to think very carefully about whether their mongrel genes can actually benefit from an expensive education before they just blithely go.
Jeez, Wanda, what even are mongrel genes?
< I would MUCH rather sacrifice the 35% who should be there for the 65% who shouldn't.
You know, I think I agree that people scoring at or below average on the SAT generally can't benefit from college courses. (Although there are college majors in things like hospitality, and when I was on vacation in Mexico I met a young couple who had actually majored in that and were looking like they were going to make a go of it with an eco-resort.). But I find you extraordinarily mean-spirited, and would even if I were not in the 35% you'd rather have doing your hair. It's pleasant to remind myself, and you, that nobody but you gives a shit who you are willing to sacrifice.
I'd prefer the backlash be more "reversion to the mean" and less "pendulum swings back like a wrecking ball", and I'd prefer not to have millions of innocent young men and women thrown abruptly out of school to that end.
And, yeah, among the hip rationalists and contrarians, academia is all cost disease and bloat and indoctrination and signaling. To the *vast* majority of Americans, the sort of social mobility represented by someone from a working-class family going to college and hopefully making a better life for themselves, is seen as a *good* thing. That's the story that made J.D. Vance a household name, but I suppose as an Ivy-league alum we're supposed to write him off as an irredeemably woke leftie or something.
The now-predominately-Republican working class likes that sort of social mobility, because those are *their* kids with a shot at what they see as a better life. The Democrats like that sort of thing because they think they'll get more Democrats out of it. I like that sort of thing because I'm a libertarian who believes in meritocracy. I'm not sure what you are that you don't see this as a good thing, but whatever it is, there aren't enough of you to matter.
And the bit where there's at least a large minority that's annoyed by all the kids going to Oberlin to study Uselessology or Columbia to join Team Hamas, fine, but *these aren't those kids*. Those are mostly the ones from upper-middle-class families who assume they'll be getting an upper-middle-class lifestyle just for having a college degree, and feel guilty about it. The ones who need a Pell Grant to make it through school, know they need to make that education count for something in the real world. So, yeah, pat yourself on the back for having reduced the number of college students, but you're getting rid of the students and your pissing off their parents and they're going to make you pay for that.
A+ comment, no notes.
I think the problem is that university is associated in people's minds with being above average on the social ladder, so the popular sentiment is "if we all can get university education, then we will all be above the average".
Unfortunately, this is not how averages work. If everyone gets university education, then you will need PhD to get a hairdresser license.
So perhaps instead of extending the sweet deal of "get more credentials in return for a lifetime of debt" to an ever increasing part of population, we should go in the opposite direction and reduce the need of credentials. To become a hairdresser, you should need one month of training, at most. Make it so that if you decide that being an unemployed bum or a software developer sucks and you would prefer to be a plumber instead, you will only need two or three months, and you are legally free to start your own business.
Separately from that, we should improve education, and there are many things that could be improved there. But we should not make it legally required in order to get a good job.