1. could someone evaluate the credibility of this video? "Expert shows AI doesn't want to kill us, it has to" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8zV3YwgdE Is super-intelligence really going to be "a 1000 times smarter than Einstein"? Is alignment even a solvable problem or merely wishful thinking?
2. if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
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"What is the speed of feelings?"
So assuming alignment is solvable, I'm trying to gauge the "dignity and worth of human life verses machine life".
Humans have emotions, feelings, sensations, joys, pains, rewards, "awareness-es", and myriad other states that are hard to define. In my opinion, I feel these states make life worth living. I'm not trying to be reductionist or hedonistic. I believe our mental states are complex and often very personal. In my very very unprofessional opinion... our states are like "vibrations, music, or internal weather". So again, chaotic, multifaceted, personal.
Now, when we talk about the capabilities of computers or AI, we often include their speed. We talk about how QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY they can solve a task or reach an outcome. (of course, the ability to get there at all matters too)
But when it comes to the first category, the "emotional states" thing, is speed even relevant? If an AI can simulate an orgasm or a nurturing hug, why would it want to simulate it 1,000 times faster? Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to? Isn't that missing the point?
fwiw, I'll add "the universe has a speed limit with light, so could there be things 'relevant to consciousness and experience" that literally have a speed limit?
Is it possible to divide "mind/thinking/consciousness/experience" into aspects where 'shortening time/state' is a virtue.. and aspects where 'lengthening or prolonging time/state' is a virtue?
I ask because I'm wondering if
in the distant future,
our brains could be like weather systems,
realms of chaotic physics,
computing their unique selves by virtue of their existence,
in ways that can never be totally simulated by Larger Intelligences,
without Full Exact Replication,
because our atoms and their emotions,
like the atmosphere,
goes infinitely downward-in-scale in their unpredictability,
and in that sense we could be free,
and perhaps our "weather" could be a source of curiosity,
(Somehow I cannot watch YouTube videos recently... at exactly 1:00 each video freezes, not sure why, so I can only see the first minute of anything. However...)
Just because someone says "expert shows" on internet, that is no reason to believe them. I looked at other videos from the same author, there was nothing there to convince me that the author is some kind of expert, as oppose to just someone trying to get more clicks.
> if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
That would assume that you can do it more efficiently than the AI, right? Because otherwise, it would be easier and more efficient to simply wait. What's the point of trying to achieve faster something that you believe is inevitable?
If we make an analogy to personal life and death, does the knowledge that you are mortal motivate you to research efficient ways to euthanize yourself? For me it doesn't work this way.
> Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to?
I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
> I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
But then it's constraining itself. It's limiting itself for the sake of a simulation.
If that's the case, the AI isn't really experiencing the "joy" or "bliss" or "comfort" or whatever ITSELF... it's creating a simulation that is doing the enjoying.
(how do I say this?) In my uneducated opinion,
If it's "running program orgasm" or "running program hug", it's not "enmeshed in the experience" the way we are. It's not "losing itself in the experience". It's sort of sub-tasking it while it's TRUE identity and concerns are still just measuring it from the side like a scientist.
Yes, I know my above answer is full of holes... I mean, our brains measure the "value" of experiences too, and we can definitely think about other things and priorities while we "orgasm", "hug" or whatever else.
But I'm trying to talk about "flow". I'm trying to talk about immersion. I'm trying to talk about states that are "good for their own sake", states that are "ends in themselves" at least partially. I'm trying to talk about states that are good to prolong and prolong and prolong and prolong... so long as they don't create problems for us... because these states are WHAT IT MEANS and WHAT IS POSITIVE about being being ALIVE.
If an AI can experience time 1,000 slower, I'm saying that such a state WOULD STILL WANT TO BE PROLONGED a thousand, million, TRILLION times if possible.
The "real" time might be minutes, days or years. But longer is better.
Interesting idea for a kill switch. Point of caution from addiction, though: creating a highly attractive state may have unexpected consequences.
I think every possible answer is going to be full of holes until we have more data. Assuming that a sufficiently advanced to be existentially dangerous AI can exist, there are two outcomes:
* It cares about additional information involving humanity. Cares here can also be translated as whether its decision theories involve attraction towards states that require / involve knowledge about us, etc. Translate into your preferred term.
* It doesn't.
If it has interest in us then it is extremely unlikely to harm or drive us to extinction. Simulations aren't free, unnecessary when you have the real thing, and subject to out of model considerations. Monitoring is cheaper than simulating.
If it doesn't, bigger problems. My subjective assessment is that it's the least likely state. The set of AGIs that both have no interest in us and extinction level capabilities strike me as a narrow. Worth keeping an eye out.
I was wondering about the "most relatable" black hole: something whose properties are relatively easily to imagine. I found that a black hole of one billion tons (roughly the mass of a mountain): [1]
- Has radius 1.49 femtometers (roughly the size of a proton)
- Matches Earth's gravitational pull at a distance of ~9 feet (from Newton's law of gravitation)
- Is 122 billion °C
- Emits 356 MW of radiation
- Evaporates in 1.474x10¹² years, averaging 382 g/year over its lifetime, but 125 g/year presently
If we increase to one trillion tons, modestly heavier than mount Everest, we get:
- Radius 1.49 picometers (still smaller than a hydrogen atom)
- Matches Earth gravity at a distance of 271 ft / 82.5 m
- Is 122 million °C
- Emits 356 W of radiation
- Loses 0.125 mg of mass per year if nothing falls in
Something confusing: if we raise the mass to 1.87x10⁴³ kg (9.4 trillion suns), the Schwarzschild radius rises to 2.77e16 m or 2.93 light years, and the Newtonian surface gravity falls to 1.62 m/s², matching the surface of Earth's moon. The question, then: how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
* all of the above assumes a non-rotating black hole. No idea what effect rotation has.
> how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
Because *Newtonian* gravity is an increasingly inaccurate concept as one approaches the event horizon. You would perceive "infinite" "gravitational force" if you were somehow arrested at the Schwarzschild radius of a non-rotating BH, by definition. (More accurately, no arresting force would be sufficient to hold you at that position.) The Earth's moon figure is the result of using a formula in a domain in which it no longer applies.
Is there a way to make big concrete buildings like data centers and Amazon warehouses aesthetically pleasing on the outside? How about nuclear power plants?
Is this necessary...data centers and warehouses are just rectangle boxes. If people are genuinely bothered by the sight of a rectangle building then plant trees around the perimeter I suppose. No need to modify the building itself.
You paint them a garish florescent pink, then in a high contrast color write "FUCK OFF NIBMYS" on the side.
Or: no one actually has an issue with the aesthetics of data centers or nuclear power plants. They just say that because it's a plausible reason to oppose them. If you somehow figured out a way to make them indisputably beautiful, people would come up with some new justification for their opposition.
Similarly, no right-wingers actually care about birds being killed by wind turbines.
Obviously yes, if you can come up with a definition of "aesthetically pleasing" that encompasses your target audience.
At the very least they can have well manicured lawns and lots of trees and such. Maybe a nice koi pond. Cooling towers might be fairly limited in alternatives, but (for a decent amount of money) you could probably paint them in pleasing colors, maybe even murals.
Possible. Unlikely based on general known murder motives - I'd give 3-1 odds against.
The more amusing speculation is whether the killer was a professional. Hitmen don't really seem to exist outside of movies, occasionally organized crime operating against other criminals, or bumbling low-lifes that do worse than a thoughtful amateur.
Obviously a "more realistic" cinematic portrayal isn't any more likely to reflect real life than any of the flashier versions, but the murderers for hire in Michael Clayton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Fva8HFRDg) seems the way actual professionals would behave if they are real. A plausible natural causes or accidental death is more palatable for any police force than a clear murder that has to go on the books.
I don't think there is enough business to support a "professional hitman" in the contemporary US, in the sense of someone whose primary job responsibility is deniably killing specific people for money. *Maybe* in the largest organized crime groups, but that seems unlikely here. Otherwise, and probably even there, it's basically just professional dealers of other sorts of violence who get pressed into service when just this once the boss actually does want a specific rival killed.
Those, and wannabes trying to move up into a field that doesn't exist, and police informants/undercover officers who will gladly pretend to be a "hitman" if there's a rumor someone is hiring.
OTOH, the murder weapon seems to have been a B&T "Station Six", a manually-operated (i.e. non-automatic) silenced pistol designed for spooks and for gun nuts, er, firearms enthusiasts who want a fancy expensive spook-gun in their collection. Those would be very hard to come by on short notice and without leaving a paper trail.
OTOOH, there doesn't seem to be much point in using such a weapon, and several reasons not to, if you're planning to shoot someone at close range in broad daylight on a crowded city street. So this one is hard to figure.
The weapon was almost certainly not a BnT S6, but more likely a (printed?) semi auto frame with a homemade suppressor without a booster. With no booster and subsonic rounds, it's likely that you would have to run the gun manually for each shot.
My mental model of professional killers is less "murders people daily for money" and more "is someone trained by a government to be good at killing, employed in a position that sometimes asks for it." Mostly military or ex-military. And those kinds of people do get jobs in related fields, sometimes as mercenaries, more often as private security or similar. It's possible that there are professional killers working for the CIA and such. Movies almost certainly hype this up, and the history of the CIA trying to kill Castro doesn't exactly look like James Bond, but I think that none of us would be very surprised to hear about actual competent killers working for governments. Mossad certainly counts, even if you think they're an aberration.
Good point about government killers. Mossad is suspected in a number of assassinations, including at least one where they did try to make it appear natural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Cause_of_death. (Devotees of the show Forensic Files will be familiar with succinylcholine.) Given Israel's circumstances they're probably more active in this area but there's no way they're entirely unique.
I think you're right that it's mostly a "sometimes asked for it" kind of job. Skills involved in general human intelligence work - surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons handling, etc. - are transferrable to murder and most of the time they're probably doing regular intelligence officer stuff with the rare hit. Seems wasteful to have people on payroll mostly sitting idle. Governments generally use the military and do their killing wholesale.
Either way, you or I couldn't put in a constituent services request to borrow them if we had a beef with our insurance provider.
Oh yeah, no doubt we couldn't contract such a person unless we were already on the inside of an organization employing them.
It would still be possible that this was a professional, including a current or former government professional (maybe not even from the US). Someone who has those skills already could certainly have the same motives that your average person has, including to help/protect/revenge family or friends (or friends of friends).
Yes, this is the problem with us amateurs speculating (at least speaking for myself): no framework for an actual "professional assassin" mode of operation. A classic conundrum of "those who speak don't know, and those who know don't speak".
FWIW, "Officials say they are examining whether the words point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims."
Ooooh, that's a big update for me, thank you. A substantial part of my original reasoning was that there was no statement or other actions by the killer to draw attention to insurance denials. Contingent on this report being accurate, I'd now say 60% likelihood that he was either personally denied, knew someone who was denied, or anger over insurance company denials generally. The remaining 40% is that the actual motive is something personal and this was done to confuse investigators.
I am retarded when it comes to game theory. Not because I haven't been exposed to the ideas, but because they didn't stick. Predicting other people's reactions to my actions simply does not come naturally to me, and yes this has gotten me into trouble, but I also kind of value being principled, and doing what I think is right regardless of the consequences.
Is this a problem? Is there a book I can read to flip me into more of a game-theoretic mindset? Anyone else been there?
(sorry if the r-word offends you, but I couldn't think of a good synonym)
The answer depends on specifics. If you are reliable and honest, those are good traits that tend to pay off more over time (developing a reputation). If you "do what is right" by being dogmatic while everyone tells you that you are wrong, probably not.
Being unable to predict other people's reactions generally is likely a problem.
Other people can get really mad if you don't take their feelings into consideration when communicating. This expectation that you will change your behavior subtly, the ways you communicate etc, based on their personality and feelings. I see this as a separate skill from being principled. I can be principled and have the same endgame but also keep different expectations for different people. I feel like Thinking Fast and Slow could be good. Or there is Daniel Goleman. I don't like his stuff because it seems namby pamby and like stuff I do intuitively, but maybe helpful for learning to read the room. I tend to be a very acerbic kindof hardass, but I have had a lot of experience working successfully with emotionally needy people, so I think it can be learned.
I don't think so. It isn't particularly hard to prevent ahead of time, and I don't believe it to be impossible to clean up even if it gets quite bad with sufficient investment.
Yeah, this. It's also only a serious problem if you plan on deploying a lot of infrastructure in low orbit about a planet. Which is certainly a convenient thing to do and any spacefaring society will *want* to do that at least as a staging ground for their real objectives. But if they have the ability and inclination to launch starships on voyages of interstellar colonization or whatnot, and there ancestors messed up low orbit badly enough that they don't want to do cleanup, they can just launch right through it with essentially no risk.
I've spent the last two months or so reading and reviewing Ilya Sutskever's list of papers that he sent to John Carmack. Supposedly, it's 90% of what you need to know about AI (though the list was from 2019 iirc, so there's some parts of it that may be outdated or some newer papers that should be there).
- second, the list is incomplete! Apparently the full list was about 40 papers and included a bunch of stuff on meta learning, but the list that I was able to find is only 30 papers. I'm curious if anyone here knows if the full list is available somewhere?
I'm pretty sure the full list is not available. I searched 'sutskever carmack' on hacker news and found only the same list you have. Some tidbits I also found: some rando added the xLSTM paper. And some people noted that both reinforcement learning and diffusion are not really treated.
Join our Adult Kindergarten and learn to play again and be serious, to be animalistic and angelic, aged and youthful, good and bad, masculine and feminine, to play well together, to put real kindergarteners to shame with our optimized playful excellence
We play as a group, or separate into breakout rooms. We take turns deciding what brief activity to do next and leading the group.
I doubt I'm available in your time zone, but do you have any suggestions for resources on learning to joke, play, flirt, and generally be less serious? (Not humor per se; I'm already funny in an intellectual and mostly inaccessible way.)
>People without college degrees saved us from a Kamala presidency. This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
>I have no degree and I have never once in my life regretted my decision to skip college. I thank God that I didn't go. I don't know that I'd be where I am today if I'd spent the first half of my twenties in an indoctrination camp.
>A relatively small number of people should go to college if they plan to enter fields where it's actually necessary to have additional formal education (doctor, lawyer, etc). But the vast majority of jobs are learned entirely by doing. Your degree is irrelevant.
One cannot help but notice the similarity between his attitude and the attitude of the Haredim. I have more about this bizarre Haredi-LARP on my Substack:
Aren't we supposed to be saving blog post links for the Read My Blog section of the Classifieds threads?
Or if we're linking to our own blog post, we should at least be posting a meaningful treatment of the blog entry so that people don't have to follow the link to engage with the comment? "Here are some of my thoughts, more at the link," etc?
You're absolutely right - this is explicitly what Scott asked people not to do. I'm surprised that Turok doesn't know better than to shamelessly shill his own blog.
Yeah, there are problems with how higher education has evolved, and I don't have any good suggestions. The ratio of Democratic Party to GOP registered faculty at e.g. Harvard is over 10:1. Yes, there is a _lot_ of indoctrination being done. Ideally, I'd like to see something reasonably close to a 1:1 ratio, but I don't know how to get there.
I don't know how we would up with such a hugely biased faculty pool. I don't believe that the pool of competent potential faculty is so hugely skewed. Is it simply a positive feedback runaway, where leftist faculty made the environment hostile to conservative potential faculty, so they chose other career paths instead? Can this be reversed?
Personally, I was a programmer, with a STEMM background, so Matt Walsh's
>This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
was very false in my _particular_ situation. Personally, I routinely used what I learned, but this is not true in many jobs.
A separate problem is rampant credentialism. As you wrote:
>many hiring managers flat-out refuse to consider anyone who didn't graduate from college. You will not get a chance to interview; your application will be thrown in the electronic trash bin. This will only get worse when the next recession hits and employers can afford to be choosier.
Even if there were _no_ indoctrination in colleges, this is a _spectacular_ waste. Forcing most of the work force to piss away 10% of their working lifetime on a degree that is actually irrelevant to what they will be doing at work is a _huge_ loss. It is really crucial to get companies to distinguish between education that they actually _need_ their people to have and arbitrary filtering.
Many Thanks! Could be, though I'm not following why this winds up being selective by ideology. Ivan Nikolaevich made an interesting point that bright conservatives are selectively going into fields with better paying options. I can certainly see why certain _fields_ (he mentions finance, presumably a lot of STEMM fields are similar) yield better paying options than academia more frequently.
Are the left-leaning people shooting themselves in the foot economically by their choice of field? And selectively winding up in academia as a result, highly competitive though academia is?
I think all you need to explain this is that `Harvard professor' is a job for which a lot of the compensation is in `social status,' but it only carries social status within the blue (or grey) tribe. So if you are blue (or grey) tribe then `Harvard professor' is a highly remunerative job (including non-monetary compensation). But if you are red tribe, then it doesn't carry any status points, and in purely monetary terms it's a much worse deal than finance.
Here's an example of a related study illustrating a similar effect: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01807. Women prefer more meaningful professions are more willing to accept lower compensation for them than men.
Yes, a difference in the value of the status, depending on tribe membership, does sound like a plausible part of the explanation, Many Thanks! This _does_ like part of a positive feedback loop that helps explain how the problem got so bad, rather than of how it got started.
I wonder whether a small change in initial conditions could have given the opposite result: Harvard professors being largely red tribe, and the status of being a Harvard professor higher in red tribe than blue...
I'm pretty sure "conservative Harvard professor" carries a fair bit of status even in Red Tribe. But less so than it would in Blue Tribe, and it involves fewer opportunities to socialize with fellow Reds, so the point stands.
As a college student at a prestigious school, almost all of the bright conservative people I know are pursuing careers in fields like finance, whereas it's a much more diverse mix among left-leaning people of a similar intelligence level. If you want to get the political balance of academia even, you have to convince young people on the right that it's worth it to take a pay cut, and by and large I think that's harder than people think.
I've read that the partisan/ideological mix was much more balanced some hundred years ago. I think the lefty skew we see today makes sense if you believe, like Haidt, that those on the right are better at comprehending the left's positions than vice versa. Say you start with 10 right wing faculty and 10 left wing faculty deciding admissions and hiring. Each year you should expect to see a bit more lefty skew in the composition of academia since the 10 RW faculty gives more of a fair shake to LW applicants than the 10 LW faculty gives to RW applicants.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a plausible part of the mechanism. So the left wing faculty would have been less damaging if there had been a required course for them on understanding right wing views, taught by the right wing faculty...
What is the present understanding of iran's attempt to kill trump, hezbollah's attempt to kill netanyahu, putin's attempts to kill zelensky, ukraine's attempts to kill putin, anything else I may have missed.
I have absolutely no idea how serious any of these were, I'm confused why there isn't more public interest in figuring that out.
Pretty pathetic that at least 2 crackpot Americans with off the shelf guns got much closer to actually assassinating Trump than the whole Revolutionary Guard.
The US intelligence community spends a lot of time and effort figuring out what the IRGC is up to. Monitoring the doings of every random crackpot is much more difficult.
I'm not sure whether it's a damning indictment of bureaucratic organisations, or just reflective of the fact that non-suicidal versions of this plan are a lot harder than probably-suicidal ones, and Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions.
> "Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions."
I know it wasn't necessarily your intent, but the phrasing here made me chuckle. This would be a great premise for a dark satirical comedy in the vein of The Death of Stalin. It almost writes itself.
True but can't they find some wannabe jihadist to strap a vest on? Especially if money is no object as noted in the linked article. The FBI seems perfectly capable of tricking people into becoming terrorists.
> Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
But it's not sure whether Zelensky would really achieve anything by getting him killed, because the replacement would probably be someone very similar, only younger.
It's not like Putin has a trusted lieutenant ready to step in at a moment's notice; anyone who could plausibly replace Putin is likely long since purged.
The chaos imposed on the RF due to a sudden power vacuum and the resultant scramble would at the very least diminish its focus & coordination on the war, which could be exploited by Ukrainian forces.
Also, any replacement for Putin would have less prestige tied up in the war and so might be more open to ending it, since it really doesn't seem worth it on economical or political terms. Even if they'd be worse people.
There is in fact a public designated successor to Putin, and interestingly it's...noted cat lover Ramzan Kadyrov.
This has always felt like a fail-deadly switch and warning to the oligarchs: "Remove me and that Chechen will turn your skulls into bowls for his cats to eat from."
... but in the process (or as ordered by whoever takes Putin's place), a bunch of incompetent Russian generals might get fired, long-overdue decisions might finally happen, and so Russian military capability might easily double or triple.
Or incompetent generals can get on top in the turmoil, and they will get rid of more (military, but not politically) competent rivals, leading to further decay...
In re laws restricting access to social media for minors and related issues: In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things. It's almost as if young people have a strong drive to make contact with the world.
We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
And similar explanations for why adults try to restrict access. Is it just that adults know more, or is there some more complicated reason for this push-pull?
Virtually instantly after the first occurrence of life - arguably definitionally concurrent - was the occurrence of the cell membrane. Whatever complicated business those amino acids and nucleotides were up to, was much easier to go about when they didn't have to do it in the midst of all the other undifferentiated complex molecules, simple molecules, and unabsorbed radiation in the ocean. Namely, that business involved establishing lineages of long nucleotide chains, and the means to duplicate them, and that probably couldn't happen unless the replication mechanism was put into a tiny bubble where that chain was the only thing to work on, and was given only specific materials as input stock.
That evolutionary mechanism is just as applicable at larger scales, such as the organ, or the plant or animal, and when we're talking about animals that can absorb ideas in addition to carbs, lipids, and proteins, the value of a membrane that can filter for ideas becomes considerable.
I've settled on the idea that biologically and psychologically, teens are small adults. But the education system leads industrialized economies to legally treat teens as big children.
"In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things."
Yes teens often test boundaries and seek autonomy, but they tend to test certain boundaries that align with perceived cost/benefit. Trying new things like drugs, sneaking out with romantic partner, avoiding boring school, going to parties. I don't see teens trying to get around restrictions that are in line with their values, or that they see as fair, or that are in line with their identity. (Do Muslim teens often experiment with pork? I sort of doubt that.)
This aligns with the boiler plate neurological explanation of teen brains being extra sensitive to dopamine, to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, to the developing limbic system. Adults and society have been able to intuit this long before brain science, and societies have developed ways to protect children, and rites of passage for coming of age. There are evolutionary reasons to seek information (gossip is a universal pastime), and the wiring of a teen brain is going to make them particularly keen on getting that dopamine hit and being impulsive about it.
I see regulating social media as a way of training teen to use the internet in a productive way. Teachers seem to be very concerned, because some kids (not all), are very addicted to checking their phones, and they will sit and eat lunch staring at their phones rather than interacting with their peers. As he stared at his phone rather than making eye contact I recently had a well adjusted kid say to me "how did I rack up 13 hours of screen time in one day?" Teachers see kids opting out of in person social interaction in favor of their phones, while parents see their kids on their phone at home and assume that their kids has been socializing all day at school. And in school it becomes obvious that some kids can juggle the in person/digital lives, and others cannot.
I've heard that not eating pork is one of the rules indifferent Muslims still keep. Interesting if true, because a lot of Jews who will semi-keep kashrut, but might still eat fried rice with bits of pork.
Pork isn't that readily *available* in most Muslim countries (even when there are religious minorities who eat it, why bother raising pigs if you only have a possible market of like 20% of the population), so I'd imagine there's relatively less temptation, when you could just eat goat or beef instead. Likewise there's not that much temptation in India, even for Hindus who aren't that religious, to eat beef. (and yes I know there are some who do, in Kerala and the far northeast, but that's a regional culture thing more than a 'lack of religiosity' thing).
I'd bet that the pork taboo is more 'sticky' than other religious taboos (including within Islam). Partly because you're not giving up as much by abstaining from pork as you are when you abstain from sex, alcohol, etc.. There are lots of other meats that are substitutable for pork.
And also because the idea of forbidden foods is pretty deeply ingrained in us: I've known people before who were pretty desperately poor and could really have used some meat, any meat really, to go with their rice bowl, but would still turn down a free gift of meat if it was from an animal that was forbidden to them. I think that these food taboos are pretty core to our identity as religious and cultural subjects. People have gone to war over food taboos before, after all (cf. the Maccabean wars, and more recently the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny).
>We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
Yes, but best of luck getting something testable rather than a just-so story :-(
I'm much less skeptical of e.g. : For most of our evolutionary history, food was in short supply, so our appetites are not well calibrated to give optimum health in a modern society where calories are very abundant.
For information, on the other hand, the evolutionary history is much vaguer. And for _differential_ questions, such as comparing literacy with online information, _both_ of which are novel on an evolutionary timescale - ouch!
I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids. So rather than restrict the access, I try to teach my kids to never post personal information online, and if something seems worrying, to come and ask me for advice.
But that requires a certain amount of mutual trust. For example, when I was a child, I didn't trust my parents enough to tell them about my problems, because they sometimes overreacted and then I had two problems instead of one. And I couldn't predict when that would happen, so I played it safe.
Restricting access to social media seems like a simple solution to many problems that does not require trust. Problem is, one day the kids will get internet access anyway, and at that age it may be too late to try to teach them something.
(Different thing is limiting internet access in the sense "only X hours a day". That's just to make sure that the kids sometimes also do something else.)
> I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids.
This is a nice reminder that people are coming at this at cross purposes. I've probably been talking past some people because my chief concern is a third thing - that the social environment created online is a shitter and more impoverished experience than the social environment of the playground/the rec/the old quarry/the pub once you can all credibly pass for 16. Allowing these to be replaced by environments where every possible interaction was designed and constrained will lead to meeker and more colourless children.
Generally kids can enjoy the benefits as well as the pitfalls, whereas parents have to clean up when things go wrong. Hence parents are more cautious with most things teenagers do - dating, drugs, alcohol, partying, etc.
Parallel Worlds very much apply, but I’d expect parents to be more cautious because their children will overestimate the reward and underestimate the risks?
We had a discussion about hearing aids here a couple months ago.
I bought a pair of Jabra prescription hearing aids from Costco on September 5. They cost $1600 (+ $60 Costco membership).
They are made by the same company (and use the same software) that makes the more expensive traditional hearing aid brands that are $4000 at the low end.
I’m pleased that I no longer need to use closed captions on my television and can hear birdsong besides jays and crows. It’s a dramatic improvement for me.
The aids come with a 180 day no questions asked return policy and have a 2 year no extra charge loss/replacement policy. (limited to one left ear and one right ear aid)
A technician did testing and created an audiogram and tuned each hearing aid to the internal geometry of each of my ears after they arrived.
Here is the take of a professional audiologist from the WSJ:
"There's nothing that comes close to the pricing you get at Costco," says Bailey, a doctor of audiology. "It's an unfair position for anyone trying to practice audiology, but have I recommended to friends and family that they go to Costco for hearing aids? Yes, I have."
I’m still experimenting with it. The app lets me set amplification by frequency like the leveling on a stereo receiver. There is a preset Speech Clarity that I use most of the time indoors without a lot of noise. The boost for that is towards higher frequencies.
I use the preset All Around outdoors with more level amplification.
I found no preset for Restaurant Mode with the app as I received it. There is a breakfast place I like to eat at with no soft surfaces and a lot of people raising their voice to be heard above everyone else that I’m still trying to level for. Maybe Costco just forgot to set up the preset at my fitting.
The Jabra has a third microphone at the earpiece that the software uses to cancel wind noise but the tech at Costco said people had complained about it being hard to use so they turn it off by default. If I want to try it out they’ll reenable it for me. The user app doesn’t allow that.
Well, looks like we might to get to see what kind of fun legal mechanisms exist to deal with a president going rogue sooner than people expected, albeit it's South Korean legal mechanisms.
I think Yoon now has to go and follow the precedent of former President Roh and find a high cliff, because if you attempt to impose martial law and the legislature's response is (oversimplified) "lulz no", then there's really no point in coming back from that.
Not totally random. And nothing to do with North Korea; that's just the excuse.
Yoon has been a massively unpopular President; I think his approval rating was in the low twenties before this coup attempt. Which tracks with, A: his being a hard-right leader in a country where the hard right is ~20% of the electorate, and B: not having e.g. Donald Trump's ability to attract not-traditionally-right demographics to his coalition. He's also probably rather corrupt, and his wife is definitely so.
In the recent parliamentary elections, the opposition party won by a landslide, putting him in a very weak position. There have been broadly popular calls for his resignation and/or impeachment. And the new parliament rejected his proposed budget, passing their alternative with a veto-proof majority. Added together, this made him effectively a lame duck who *might* have been able to hold on to his office for the rest of the present term, but without being able to do anything with it and with a good possibility of a prison sentence for him and his wife at the end.
But he has been somewhat popular with the military, doing things like e.g. moving the presidential residence to the MoD headquarters. So it's not hugely surprising that he would gamble on "maybe I can be President-for-life as a de facto military dictator?"
It really seems to have been amateur hour though. If you've made the decision to declare martial law and arrest key parliamentarians, you should make sure you don't bungle the `arrest key parliamentarians' step. And if you do bungle it, and the parliament does meet to pass a law against your martial law declaration...well, why would you back down? At that point isn't alea jacta pretty thoroughly est?
You back down at that point because, A: you've failed and probably beyond hope of recovery but B: you haven't yet done anything that will get you put in front of a firing squad or thrown into an oubliette. Declaring martial law is a legitimate power of the ROK president, so long as you stop when parliament tells you to. Having a secret plan where the first step is declaring martial law and the second step is repacking parliament with your yes-men or whatever is probably criminal, but if you stop before the second step it's hard to prove.
Yoon may be impeached and he may spend a few years in prison if only for the corruption he was already being investigated for, but he's in a way better position than he would have been if he'd ordered the Army to actually start shooting people.
Yoon isn't a "hard-right leader"; I know he often described that way in Western media but it's wrong. He's a former lefty who defected from the Democratic party after he went after Moon Jae In's Minister of Justice for corruption. If he were actually a "hard right" guy, I think the PPP might have bothered defending him. As it is, as BR Myers notes, he has "no demographic to prop up his numbers".
This just raises the question of how he got elected in the first place. I can sort of understand the PPP supporting his campaign; who else voted for him, and what were their reasons? Did they just want Moon Jae In's scalp that badly? Was Yoon the only one in a position to deliver it at the time? The people elect a cat to deal with their rat problem, and are now working on the cat problem?
Democratic Party candidate Lee Myung Baek was excessively corrupt, even by ROK standards, with being tied to receiving a bunch of kickbacks from private developers when he was a mayor (trials related to which are still ongoing). Also he was following Moon Jae-in, who was a gifted politician with a lot of charisma and gravitas. It's not an entirely fair comparison, but the best that comes to mind for Americans is the drop off from Bill Clinton to Al Gore; Gore was a perfectly replacement level-candidate and good on many policy issues, but he also was boring. Lee could have gotten away with being corrupt if he also wasn't boring (Lee's also kind of an asshole from what I recall).
So you're saying Yoon got ~20% of the voters via the PPP, and another ~30+% of non-PPP voters, because Lee was even worse?
"Boring" doesn't sound like enough to explain the turnout, although the corruption problem does (assuming SKoreans rank corruption and boringness roughly the same way USians do).
I guess I absolutely qualify as "basic knowledge, so:
The "what happened" is pretty easy; President Yoon attempted to impose martial law on the country using (some of?) the military and police. The legislature (including his own party) vetoed his act and it was thus lifted.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that...this move is still very random, completely unexpected, and more than a little dumb. One does not try to overthrow the government lightly; the lack of larger response in support of Yoon's actions (including the lack of support from his own party) indicates a completely flawed information system that led him to believe this is even possible.
Yoon claims he's doing it stop "anti-state forces", which should be read as North Koreans and Nork-friendly elements in the "left" (the Democratic Party, as opposed to the "right" People's Power Party, which Yoon is a member. Are there Nork-friendly in the left? Yeah certainly; there was a weird incident involving North Korean intelligence operatives and a Democratic Party office last year? I never found a good explanation on this in English. A fringe party was arrested in the late 00s for actively plotting an insurrection. Many of the guys in the previous Moon admin had a reputation going back to their college days of being unusually close to North Korea and openly sympathetic to the North (which is probably overdone but isn't entirely without basis). Are they actively involved in trying to overthrow the ROK government? Doubtful. Could the military and intelligence services be using this an excuse? Sure could, the guys running those two organizations grew up (if probably not served in) during the dictatorship, and there's always been a suspicion that they may have liked that more. There's also a doctor's strike going on right now involving doctors shutting things down over attempts to increase medical school class size to increase the number of doctors.
Regardless, that he failed so thoroughly indicates whatever's going on, it was badly planned and thus pretty stupid.
I mean, there was the massive gender-based polarization that was happening, but I don't know if that actually has much to do with what's happening. He was apparently cracking down on opposition speech via law enforcement, according to the NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/world/asia/what-is-martial-law-south-korea.html He lost control of parliament back in April, so... either he's actually insane, or this is the dumbest attempt ever at desperately holding onto power. Or both.
"A whole lot of America sees Democrats as the party that says, "Let them eat free-range."
It's not the first time. The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
So this is the other thing "the price of eggs" is a synecdoche for. It's not just about feeling a pinch in the pocketbook: it's a reference to the idea that the Democratic party is wholly in the control of an economic class who is blithely unconcerned with the cost to the American people of the policies they promulgate."
> The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Virginia Postrel had some good comments on this when her essay about synthetic meat was unexpectedly trashed by Republicans.
> I would strongly encourage anyone who is in the #synbio business, esp. in consumer-facing products like cultivated meat, to seriously engage with the fear of coercion.
> Environmentalists don't have a good track record of respecting the choices of ordinary people who want their toilets to flush and dishwashers to rinse and don't want a compost pile on their kitchen counter. DJT didn't invent these grievances. I experience them regularly in my own home.
>The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses
Which is ironic, because I suppose most Democrats see themselves as defendants of the poor and oppressed, and are genuinely surprised why some of those people choose to vote otherwise. But if you try to help people without listening to them...
> The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Problem is, as a Democrat, you need to impress your fellow Democrats, not the voters. If you fail to impress the voters, perhaps the party loses as a whole. But if you fail to impress the fellow Democrats, you won't get the chance to make an impression on the voters. And you impress your fellow Democrats by being woke and eating free-range.
I'm reminded of a couple of things that Hillary Clinton said in 2015-16 (outside of the deplorables comment).
She went to West Virginia and (paraphrasing) said that they were going to lose their coal jobs and should go do something else - selling "help" in that transition. Even taking that as fully true, it's both tone deaf and unhelpful. You don't take a below-average maybe-HS diploma manual laborer and teach them to code. It's just not going to happen. You also aren't coding in WV, or doing anything else the PMC-types would find valuable, so you're telling WV voters to leave WV. But that's where their families, friends, and support networks live. At that point, she's better off not even going to WV. It's not like it's a swing state that might go for her, and she made national news about being tone deaf right next to an actual swing state that also has a coal and gas industry.
I wasn't a Hilary supporter back in 16, but I felt like she was actually telling the truth when it came to these jobs. I think as a pol you could definitely _lie_ to win the election. And maybe you can build up some protectionist legislation for those jobs. But that's kicking the can down the road -- coal mining jobs are simply never going to be as popular as they were, and in fact they will continue to become less popular. Suggesting programs to transition those workers to other parts of the economy seems more honest/grounded than "coal is coming back!"
(There's also the broader societal question of whether the rest of society should be held hostage by a special interest group. There's a parallel to unions here.)
As I said, I think her better approach there was never to go to WV or say anything about it in the first place. If she's right about the future of coal, then it happens whether she does anything or not. She can quietly create those alternate pathways for people losing coal jobs and get their esteem later. Of course, that's if she's correct. Coal is doing better as an industry right now than in 2016, so it's unlikely she would have been recognized as a benefit during a four or eight year term.
In fact, the subtext of her message and the biggest reason it came across as tone deaf is that what she was really saying, and what the audience really heard, was that she intended to make it harder to work in coal. On purpose destroying their jobs, and thereby their communities. Not exactly a message that gets people to vote for you.
Good question! My 0-th order guess would be to try to create blue collar jobs (maybe manufacturing jobs???) in West Virginia to replace the coal mining jobs.
Unfortunately, to 1-th order:
a) At least part of the loss of the coal mining jobs _isn't_ from e.g. climate activists. Part is just that fracking is actually a _success_ , and natural gas is, in many ways a better fuel than coal.
b) Automation cuts down on manufacturing jobs - and, now, with LLMs, (and, longer term, possibly AGI), _all_ jobs. (Admittedly parts of this were not visible in 2016 - but automation in general is a 200 year trend).
IMO, an even better alternative to creating replacement blue collar jobs in WV is to *let West Virginians figure out their own replacement work, and then get the hell out of their way".
The "learn to code" response grated on me. The response to the response - that that's tone deaf, because the manual laborers of WV are essentially too uneducated (read: dumb) to learn coding - grated on me even *more*, for the same reason. Not because they're generically tone deaf, but rather because they're tone deaf to the notion that WV voters might be smart enough to solve their own problems, and even better than some midwit from the DC beltway. (I realize that in this case, the comment wasn't addressed to WV manual laborers, but I have seen comments like it aimed in that direction.)
There exist people who talk about what's best for WV voters as if WV voters' judgements don't matter, and far to many of the former work in DC. If they really felt that way, perhaps they should just cut out the middleman and disenfranchise WV voters for their own sake. I suspect I know why they'd never do that, and I suspect more than a few WV voters are well aware of the game the DC circuiteers are trying to play.
If I were a DC politician and were somehow stupid enough to find myself having to answer such a question, I'd look my WV audience straight in the eye and say: "Honestly, I don't know. Unlike nearly all my opponents, I'm just smart enough to realize that. I don't live here; therefore, I won't know as well as you all, how to make the most of living here. You folks are the experts; my plan is to listen to *you*, and then see if there's anything over here in DC that I need to move around in order to unblock you. Now, I happen to have a few deregulatory ideas on that front already; I assure you I'm not a *complete* idiot. But in the meantime: what's your plan?"
Many Thanks! Yes, that's a very good point. Though it is also true that quite a few of the decisions that affect West Virginia are made in corporate headquarters that are _not_ local, and it may be that some pressure from D.C. on corporate decisions (at least to discourage offshoring jobs, for instance) might be helpful.
Automation isn't some sort of Act of God like a hurricane or a pandemic- it's the result of societal choices that we have made, and that could have been made differently.
Has anyone changed their mind about getting a tattoo later in life? Why? Did they regret it?
My wife has several, wants me to get one at some point. I am easily impressionable on the topic having not thought about it or even have a framework with which to do so.
Also, it's a mirror opposite situation on the topic of drugs (I would like to share a hallucinogenic experience once with her at some point).
I have two tattoos. One that I got at age 18 that I deeply regret and have spent the years since trying to figure out how I want to cover it up and one at age 37 that I am very pleased with. I am 44 years old now. The regret from the older tattoo stems from it being an impulsive decision and a design that was not well thought out. The tattoo I love had at least 5 years of development into the decision, from the custom design that was created by a close friend, to finding the right artist to apply it. IF, and that's a big IF, you want a permanent piece of art on your body you should go for it. Frankly, I don't consider someone else wanting one to get a tat to be a good reason.
However your mirror situation is a splendid idea and doesn't require any sort of permanent choice. =P
I flirted with the idea. It's too expensive and I can never decide on something I would be happy with long-term. I think being a "tattoo-person" telegraphs that a devil-may-care attitude about it and taking chances. There's probably more signaling going on than merely liking the aesthetic but I don't understand it.
I'm 44. I very briefly flirted with the idea of getting a tattoo (just something picked off a tattoo artist's wall) but never did.
You didn't ask, but my personal opinion is that if one is considering a tattoo, one should commit to a visual theme for the entire body before getting the first tattoo. Perhaps it's plants and animals done in "watercolor" (as a friend of mine has), or it's writing the same font and color, or it's family portraits in the same style. Or it's one unified piece.
The point is to think ahead, and then don't waver. The manic chaos of a generic butterfly on the shoulder and Tweety Bird on the ankle and someone's name on the bicep and Jesus on your thigh and etc etc etc feels *incredibly* low-class.
> The manic chaos of a generic butterfly on the shoulder and Tweety Bird on the ankle and someone's name on the bicep and Jesus on your thigh and etc etc etc feels *incredibly* low-class.
...given the outpouring of defence for McMansions in today's post's comments - in response to criticisms amounting to basically this - I suggest this preference may not be universal.
I mean, I could have added a "to me" at the end of my final sentence, but it's implicit, so why bother?
And obviously the preference for - or basic capacity to develop - a pleasing and cohesive aesthetic theme is nowhere near universal, be it in tattooing or dressing or home decorating.
But in the words of the great Mr. Plinkett about subtly 'wrong' things, "...you might not have even noticed, but your brain did." If you care about aesthetics and signalling, there are ways to avoid making mistakes.
I was glad I waited until I was in my 50s to get my first tattoos. If I had done as a teenager, I would have had AC/DC on my shoulder (which would no longer reflect my musical tastes). After about ten years, they've begun to blur a bit. I may see if I can have them touched up.
I don't have any tattoos, and this is essentially the major reason why. If I ever thought of getting one, I think about what I would have thought about an earlier idea a few years later. And then I apply that same reasoning to right now, and I'm pretty sure I would regret anything I get.
I'm not really a body modification person anyway, to be honest, but no matter how much I loved something I had right now, I know it would bother me later. Changing taste, bored with what I got, whatever.
I'll put the same suggestion out there that I give teenagers when they are seriously considering tattoos: get the design done in henna and see how you feel about it after a week of having it on you.
If my kids tried to get a tattoo, I would ask them to imagine having a Paw Patrol tattoo. Because ten years later, they will probably feel the same about whatever seems awesome to them now.
(But I like your idea, too. That would be my Plan B.)
Adam Carolla has a joke that whomever is currently the most oppressed demographic is going to produce the best boxers. There was a time where Irish and Jewish boxers were noteworthy champions; today, not so much!
I don't know how many boxing fans there are on here, so I'm very pleased to get to flash my hardcore cred in here.
Anyway, the short answer is that HW has usually been a division with relatively low talent levels and thus it's hard to dominate because the raw physical tools you need to move to the top are pretty rare and are mostly outliers and thus can be pretty widely widespread. The Russians have had some champions at HW recently, but defrosted Denisovan Nikolai Valuev was a pretty weak champion.
There are divisions where certain nationalities/ethnicities are pretty dominant (Asians especially Thais and Japanese in the lower divisions), and there are nationalities/ethnicities that are widely prevalent in the sport but don't dominate any particular division.
Ukrainians have done pretty well, interestingly, the Klitschkos dominated the division (albiet IMHO in an absurdly weak era) and Usyk is currently the undisputed* champion, although he hasn't "dominated" IMHO).
Interestingly, this question inspired me to look at TBRB (probably the most respected ranking body)'s P4P rankings, and the n ationality breakdown looks like this (weight limits in pounds):
Ukraine: 1 (Oleksandr Usyk, 200+)
Japan: 2 (Naoya Inoue, 122, Kenshiro Teraji, 112)
USA 4: (Terence Crawford (African American), 147/154, Gervonta Davis (AfrAm), 135, Teofimo Lopez (Honduran-American), 140, Bam Rodriguez (Mexican American, 115)
Mexico: 1 (Canelo Alvarez, 168)
Russia: 2 (Artur Beterbiev, Chechen-I know he's listed as Canadian but he's Russian-and Dmitry Bivol, both 175).
What Tibor said. They are good at creating an impression of being good a fighting.
OTOH people from North Caucuses (not ethnically or culturally Russian, just happen to have been conquered by the Russian Empire) are truly good at fighting, especially grappling, and you totally see them being disproportionately successful at MMA. Boxing not so much though, a different art.
They're mostly good at propaganda and information warfare :) I guess ordinary Russians are though in the same way people from the Appalachian mountains are tough (judging by Vance's hillbilly elegy), but that doesn't make one a heavyweight champion.
In brief: it explains autism behavior and perception as downstream of an increased dynamic range of neuron populations. If a neuron population receives some input level and needs to fire if the signal is over a threshold, then the "sharpness" of the response as the input level crosses the threshold will influence a lot of downstream computations that use this output. In the paper they show this explains slower updating in response to stimulus changes, increased time spent in a mixed perceptual state in binocular rivalry tasks (where participants see both images at the same time), and also provides a mechanism for comorbidity with epilepsy.
I think it is another interesting take on the autism-as-a-tradeoff idea that Scott wrote about here:
In the paper's terms, the tradeoff is not between gestalt and precise cognition, but between sharp response (reacts quickly when the signal crosses a threshold) and gradual response (reacts slowly, but can distinguish fine levels of input change away from the threshold).
Well, that lines up with my own experiences. I have terrible reaction times for my age, but I am also overly perceptive to the point where I can't focus on anything if there's other stimulus around me. That does bring up a good question: is the "ADHD" that's comorbid to autism actually ADHD at all, or just a symptom of ASD that's separate from the usual condition? I guess it doesn't matter that much if they both get treated by adderall...
Interesting, I don't know much about ADHD but I wouldn't be surprised if it lumps together different underlying causes that manifest behaviorally in a similar way.
For a while I've been interested in Chinese names.
I'm aware of three methods:
The classiest method is that your family has an associated poem, and every generation takes half of their name from the character in the poem assigned to that generation, with the other half being chosen to meet whatever other requirements you might have.
The trashiest method is that your parents pick a name with a meaning that they like, like naming a girl 小丽 ["pretty"] or a boy 强 ["strong"].
In between, you can consult a specialist, who will divine an appropriate name from the Yi Jing.
This suggests that Chinese names should be extremely variable (when not chosen for meaning), and that's true. However, I keep meeting people who share names. So I postulate a fourth method, which I'll call the "European naming method": there's an inventory of conventional names, and a baby may receive one of those names because it's a name.
For example, I have personally known three Chinese girls called Xinyue. I've also encountered three different ways to spell the name: 欣钥，欣越，and 心玥. I don't think it's a coincidence that all three of these have identical pronunciations, right down to the tones, xīnyuè, and similarly I would venture to guess that although 钥 is far more commonly pronounced yào, Chinese people wouldn't have trouble assuming that 欣钥 should be pronounced xīnyuè.
So I think the algorithm that generates these names must involve _first_ deciding what the name will sound like, and only _second_ deciding how you want to spell it.
I'd be happy to hear comments on any of this, but in particular I'd like to hear some Chinese thoughts on to what degree two people who share a name, but with different spellings, are thought of as having the same name. I'd also be interested in what people might think of a deviant name like xìnyuē or sìjiá.
> Chinese names should be extremely variable ... I keep meeting people who share names.
Well, both can be true at the same time. I know of people who are named after ... concepts and things that one usually does not give Chinese names from. Seems like there is a lot of room for creativity and sometimes people do go for names outside of some conventional inventory. At the same time, when I was going to school in China I think there were at least 4 girls in my school with the given name 心怡. Some characters are very common for girl names and/or boy names, like the 强 that you mentioned, and you could pick combos from those characters to make a very stereotypically guy name (or girl name). I guess you can keep an eye out - if you meet someone with a more unique Chinese name, ask them about how that name was chosen.
Sometimes I can tell that someone has Christian parents from their Chinese name.
You might be onto something there with particular combinations of sounds and tones being more common. Like the other commenters below, I agree that the parents do want the name to not sound ridiculous. If your name is pronounced the same as some other unfortunate thing, then you're going to get made fun of in elementary school. But I'm not sure about deciding sound first before spelling, since among people I know, generally the characters were chosen directly.
(There _was_ a time when I was messaging someone and asked them to remind me of their name, and they thought it necessary to specify for me which pronunciation one of the characters took on (since that character had multiple).)
Do Chinese parents these days give their children names that are obviously derived from English/European names?
Interestingly, Ancient Greek names were often dithematic, meaning the combination of two roots - similar to most modern Chinese names (although there are still a decent number of single-character names). I also get the impression that in they were less conventionalized. Roman names, on the other hand, were usually derived from a single root. Pretty early on, the praenomen (first name) became restricted to a fairly small set, and the nomen (clan name) was inherited. So the cognomen (originally representing branches of a clan) became repurposed to name individuals with more variety, until the praenomen and nomen fell out of use. Modern European family names are a Medieval innovation. Both Roman and Greek names also had many that were borrowings, and of course those were majorly augmented later on with Biblical names.
To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't happen. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of cases; I would be very surprised if there were an identifiable trend.
I called it the "European naming method" because that is close to the only naming strategy used in European languages: you select a conventional name from a menu of official names. "Michael" meant something in Biblical Hebrew; it doesn't mean anything to English speakers.
They don't have the same name. It's reasonably common for someone to say "My name is Xinyue with the Xin from xinxi and Yao from yaoshi but pronounced Yue." Or to ask, "Xinyue. Which Xin Yue? Xin from Xinxi and Yue from Yueliang?" And then the person would say, "Xin from Xinxi and Yue from Yaoshi but pronounced Yue. It's a multiple pronunciation character." Of course, they notice the names are pronounced the same way but it's not considered the same.
The general goal with a name is to give a lucky or auspicious name. In its simplest form this is just giving a name with a meaning the parents consider auspicious. For example, the three Xinyues you gave mean "Key To Happiness", "Exceeding Happiness," and "Pearl (or Blessed) Heart." It's fairly easy to see how those are positive names. Secondarily, you might consult a fortune teller or take a character from an important document which can either be done where everyone in a generation shares a character or the family shares the character through generations. Some families have favored names or characters.
There's also a list of allowed characters though it's fairly generous with a few thousand acceptable characters. And then certain characters are considered gendered. A man named 心玥 (Xinyue) would have a feminine name but 欣越 (also Xinyue) is more neutral and there are men named that.
So you have it backward: You choose the characters first and the pronunciation afterward. Choosing for pronunciation is a characteristic of foreign names or ethnic minority names. Though you do want to avoid bad homonyms.
> So you have it backward: You choose the characters first and the pronunciation afterward.
I think I was pretty clear as to why this isn't true. It's very obvious that the pronunciation is chosen first. Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
> For example, the three Xinyues you gave mean "Key To Happiness", "Exceeding Happiness," and "Pearl (or Blessed) Heart."
I question this too. Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
> Choosing for pronunciation is a characteristic of foreign names or ethnic minority names.
Interestingly, I have a Mongol friend who was named Saruul by her Mongol-speaking parents, but also given the Mandarin name sha ru la as a Chinese equivalent. It isn't clear to me why the first character is 'sha', since s/sh are distinguished in Mongol and in northern Mandarin. (My friend herself can't speak Mongol and isn't interested in these kinds of questions, so I haven't asked.) My best guess is that they were going for a character that was better in some way.
Your tone in this response is offensively hubristic, considering the many incomplete understandings and hasty overgeneralizations in your statements in this thread.
Chinese names are not selected by pronunciation first. Typically, characters are selected due to a combination of:
1) meaning, specifically, typically with the intent to "give the feeling" of a concept. It is uncommon for the name to be intended to have a direct unambiguous meaning; two character given names are typically not words that are found in the actual regular language. Whether this is considered "trashy" depends on whether the specific selections are tacky, the criteria for which is difficult to explain even to a native speaker.
2) aesthetic appeal. This is, of course, connected to meaning as described above, but due to the higher average number of meanings per morpheme than European languages, "aesthetic appeal" here has a somewhat wider definition than you might be used to. This is particularly relevant when selecting characters for a concept for which there are many reasonable options. Cf. the choice of the characters “美利坚“ in transcribing the name of the US to "美利坚共和国" when many other phonetically appropriate alternatives were available. Similarly difficult to explain, and may in fact be partially ineffable.
3) trends. Similarly to names in most other languages, the popularity of various characters waxes and wanes with the times.
Other points, in no particular order:
> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
As explained in 1) above, this is a moot question, as names are rarely intended to be grammatically correct compounds with unambiguous meaning.
> It's very obvious that the pronunciation is chosen first. Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
You have apparently made this incorrect determination on the basis of a single anecdote easily explained by the birthday paradox. Relatedly, you overestimate the available set of distinct two-syllable sounds for two-character given names in Chinese relative to other languages, which are further restricted by the need to avoid homonyms with existing silly or negative words, which is an extremely common issue in a highly homophonic language.
> The classiest method is that your family has an associated poem, and every generation takes half of their name from the character in the poem assigned to that generation, with the other half being chosen to meet whatever other requirements you might have.
Taking inspiration from a poem is merely one method to select the characters for successive generations, and by no means even particularly common. Additionally, it is not just "half of the name", it is always the first character of the given name - in other words, the middle character of a three-character name. Note that sometimes different characters are used for males and females in the same generation. The generational marker character also affects the selection of the other character per 1) and 2) above.
Finally, to answer the initial question:
> in particular I'd like to hear some Chinese thoughts on to what degree two people who share a name, but with different spellings, are thought of as having the same name
To no degree whatsoever. Chinese speakers think of and remember Chinese names foremost by their characters, not by their pronunciations. As the previous commenter mentions, it is typical practice when seriously introducing oneself to specify what characters your name uses, usually in the form of "My name is X Y Z, Y from [common word containing Y], Z from [common word containing Z]". There are relatively fewer ambiguities in family names, so typically disambiguating is only necessary if e.g. you have a rare family name with the same pronunciation as a common one.
Perfect pronunciation collisions are considered curious, but you would no more consider them the same name as you would consider two people with identical first-middle-last initials in English as having the same name.
> Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
I don't think this statement is true, since there are lots of characters with the same pronunciation.
As to why "sha": I would guess that "sha" sounds better / more conventional / less foreign than "sa" as the first character. "sha" 沙 is a Chinese surname.
Somewhat tangential to this: in the Chinese translation of Lord of the Rings that I own, Saruman is translated as 萨茹曼 "sa ru man".
Oh, sorry, nevermind. I got confused by the phrasing. This isn't an example of what you were asking for. Let me try again: would you say terms like 激越 or 优越 count?
On the small question, those terms definitely do support the idea that 欣越 could be seen as analogous to terms of that form.
On the large question, sort of. How easy is it to coin a similar term that doesn't already exist? My instinct tells me that 越 is an adverb and needs to come before its argument, but if the pattern is strong enough...
Whether those terms technically count as examples of what I asked for depends on whether they grammatically opaque or not, which I don't really know.
Well, if you've already decided to ignore what Chinese people say about naming themselves then I'm not sure what I can say to convince you. Of course they care about whether it sounds nice but they say the focus is on the characters because that reveals meaning.
I will say: the idea that Chinese doesn't have significant homophony is very strange since it's something even the Chinese have commented on for... well, literally thousands of years at this point.
> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
It looks like 越 has an adjectival meaning as well as being a verb (越 - verb: to surpass, exceed; adj: more). But I can't find examples of it modifying the word it follows. And isn't this a traditional character? Would the authorities allow someone to be named with traditional characters in the PRC?
Well, yes, 越 is a traditional character in the sense that it's present in pre-20th-century texts, but it's not a traditional character in the sense of having a different form in simplified characters. It's only a traditional character the same way 大 is.
Considering that your link uses simplified characters and discusses the HSK, and it also uses 越, why would you think so?
Yes, the Mandarin tools dictionary showed it as traditional. But I now see there is a footnote that says they only show simplified if it's different from the original. That's a lot of strokes, though. I just assumed it would be ripe for simplification.
What are you doing using this? It seems to be an outdated website based on an obsolete online dictionary project. (The project lives on, but under a slightly different name, CC-CEDICT.) The copyright footer says 1996-2005.
You'd get better results from Pleco with CC-CEDICT, but you can do a lot better than that. Pleco has some other free dictionaries, and some much better paid ones. English-language wiktionary is decent and accessible. Or if you really, really need to look up something about a character, there's zdic, though that's all in Chinese and might be a challenge to use.
The goal of simplification was to reduce the total number of strokes needed to handwrite a document, so while a large stroke count is something that would weigh toward simplification, character frequency mattered a lot more. Saving 2 strokes on a character that appears 50 times in your document is better than saving 10 on a character that appears twice.
The other thing that happened was that components that got simplified in one character also got simplified in other characters that used the same component, but that's not particularly relevant for 越.
I've floated the idea that the war on Ukraine is a disaster for Russian children in addition to being a disaster in Ukraine. Even if you blame Russians in general for not having a better government, there are assuredly children below the age of political activity.
I've an answer from a fair number of people that it's the obligation of Russian parents to protect their children by not having an awful government.
This strikes me as a bad line of moral reasoning. Shouldn't "should" imply "can"? It's hard enough to affect government in a democracy.
I think what's driving the idea that it's the parents' job to control their government is refusal to believe in tradeoffs.
I think the sad reality is that we don't know how to have international conflicts that only (or even mainly) land on the people running things. If we impose an embargo on Russia and cause their economy to tank, a great many people miss meals and suffer all kinds of hardship, but Putin and his inner circle miss zero meals. If we go to war with China over Taiwan, we will mostly kill nobodies who joined the Chinese military, not high party officials making the decisions. All those years of the US fighting the war on terror involved us killing a whole lot of people, only a small number of whom had any connection at all with 9/11 or really any attacks on the US anywhere but in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It would be much better if we could deal out justice retail to the people who actually made decisions. But in general we can't, and even when we can, we usually also deal out some injustice to the dudes standing near the guys who have properly earned a bullet. I think Israel has killed quite a few Hamas leaders who plausibly were responsible in some way for the 10/7 attacks, but that has gone alongside a whole lot of Gazan civilians getting shot or blown up.
I think it's refusal to confront horrifying realities. People really really don't want unbearable tragedies to be real, and will perform some impressive unconscious mental gymnastics to escape them. That's largely where victim blaming comes from, I'd say, which I think is a good term for the response you are describing.
Also who are you talking to who has these opinions? I'm a relatively rabid Russia hater and I'm certainly not taking a "fuck them kids" stance!
There's a standard anti-war argument that aggressive war everywhere is disastrous because it impoverishes the children of the aggressor and does much worse to the children of the victims. Whether the war is imposed by a corrupt autocrat or freely chosen by a bloodthirsty populace doesn't make much moral difference from this perspective.
It is certainly a disaster.. this post seems to be missing the part where you articulate the implications. If its to suggest punishing russia is therefore net bad, thats long run unworkable. We have to be able to punish countries for doing bad things even if it negatively effects innocents within the country else more countries will do bad things.
So if you insist on bringing innocents welfare into the utilitarian calculation, then the counter is to bring those long term secondary effects in, but it seems more tractable just to consider country level just deserts, and target punishment where feasible but accept the collateral damage when not feasible.
First off, which "Russians" are you talking about here? Residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg? Ethnic Russians living in lesser cities? Or ethnic Not-Russians who live in and are sort of citizens of the Russian Federation? Because the Russian government has been making sure that the costs of the war are borne disproportionately by the people at the bottom of that list, not the top. On a recent map of military funerals gleaned from social media, Moscow and St. Petersburg look like black holes.
Second, if you are e.g. a Chuvash mother living in Alatyr, what are you going to do about it?
Engage in some pathetically ineffective political protest that won't even be noticed, but will take time and energy that you could spend supporting your family?
Protest or campaign against the Putin regime in a way that *does* get noticed, which means your children will be raised as wards of the State and almost certainly be drafted into whatever war Russia is fighting when they grow up?
Try to emigrate to a country you probably can't find on a map, without the language, passport, resources, connections, or skills to start a new life in a new country?
Or try to keep a low profile and hope that, when the time comes, you'll have enough money saved up to bribe the draft office to say your son has bone spurs or whatever?
I think, as you note, that there is also a very Western-centric view of agency at work, as well; "should" should imply "can", and while it is theoretically possible that an individual Russian could take enough actions to make changes to the government's policy, there's about a thousand years of history that argues they can't, and even more so the idea that they could is something that might not manifest to a Russian since it's not a universal one at all.
It can be easy to affect government. It's access. Or, to take the Russian, "Who? Whom?"
In a democracy or a republic with primaries and caucuses, voter have proportionally more power than they do in general elections, in proportion to the number of people voting in the primary versus the quantity in the general. Especially in a blue or red state, you have so much more electoral power as a voter in the primary phase than you do in the general.
And, voting is only the smallest piece that can be played. Lawsuits have more weight. Financial advocacy has more weight. Public discussion has more weight.
The issue with this line of analysis is it only gives moral consideration to the Russians. But other countries deserve moral consideration too. And once you give them moral consideration you have to ask who is being damaged by the lack of moral culpability you're giving to average Russians. For example, you could argue against war reparations because it would decrease the quality of education Russian children get.
Insofar as Russia (like any nation) is a collective entity then by participating it you share in it. This is why it's justified for Russian tax money as war reparations (in theory anyway) instead of giving Russian children better schools. Allowing people to be part of a collective benefit but individual when it comes to responsibility is asymmetric.
I agree the average Russian is not morally guilty in the personal sense. We cannot grab the nearest Russian and put them on trial for war crimes by virtue of their Russian-ness. But we can expect them to bear responsibility for the nation they belong to in various ways. Which also matches the reality: being Russian exposes them to rights and obligations. Same with any country.
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary proofs. Mundane statements do not. In this case your argument to incredulity needs extraordinary explanation.
Setting yourself up as the arbiter of what's extraordinary and then using it to excuse yourself from making your case is a transparent attempt to avoid defending your earlier statement.
I leave it as an exercise to third parties whether "other nations than Russia deserve moral consideration" or "being a member of a country means some degree of collective obligation" is an extraordinary claim.
> I leave it as an exercise to third parties whether "other nations than Russia deserve moral consideration" or "being a member of a country means some degree of collective obligation" is an extraordinary claim.
You can do that but it is a world away from what you are annoyed by - which is this statement
> I'm not sure that Americans should go down the pro reparations route. It would not be a great philosophy here in Britain either.
Which was the mildest statement ever. I sometimes understand why I get some responses, some comments are obviously controversial but believe me when I say I’m surprised that anybody could take offence there.
I notice, by the way, you didn’t get too upset about the self criticism of Britain either, nor did anybody else in the community who is British. Say what you like about us Britishers but we can take the mildest criticism on the chin, which doesn’t seem true of posters more allied with the golly gosh indispensable nation team America philosophy.
Yes. I require people to actually state their claims specifically and their arguments for them. Do you wish to say the US owes reparations to Iraq or Vietnam and that this is comparable to what Russia owes to Ukraine? I'd be interested in hearing that if you want to actually grapple with the issues.
It’s not my argument, but obviously if you are going require countries to pay reparations for the unprovoked wars of choice they fight in other countries that never did anything to them, then lots of countries other than Russia are going to be affected.
So your argument is that Russia can invade and destroy its neighbors but should not be forced to pay compensation because it might cause malnutrition? You don't see the asymmetry? Or how it implicitly ignores the victims here, the neighboring countries who were invaded? What should they get? And how will you get it to them?
I'm looking at poverty in Russia as a particular case that is commonly ignored.
What I'm actually addressing is the idea that if there are poor people, someone is morally culpable and obliged to find a way for them to not be poor.
Sometimes people create messes that they don't have the resources to clean up. In that case, someone else does the cleaning up, or at least most of it.
It might make sense to substitute North Koreans. In the real world, no one knows how to help them in general, and they don't get helped.
How would you feel about emigration as a form of reparations? Take the poor Russian families, and move them out of Russia into somewhere else. (We're playing make-believe, so imagine they all get moved to New York City.) Acceptable solution, or not?
There's a two step here and I agree with step one but not step two. Russians (children or otherwise) deserve help out of poverty. They don't deserve this more than anyone else but also not less than anyone else. But this does not make them victims of the war. It makes them victims of their government which they were before the war and remain. But to a lesser extent than, for example, Ukrainians or many Chechens.
If in ending the war Russia must pay money and the oligarchs make sure it comes from the poor this doesn't make them victims of the west, it makes them victims of their leadership. Who will no doubt blame the west. But that isn't true.
Is there any level of suffering the West could inflict on the Russian civilians where you would consider them responsible, or are they always just "victims of their leadership" who made the West do it?
France in 1870 paid them off. The issue with German reparations was they were stretched over too long a period (among others). But okay, imagine for a moment Ukraine completely defeats Russia. How should Russia compensate Ukraine for the death and destruction caused?
I think it's a wrong question to ask because it suffers from the fallacy of personification. Even when we only have two individuals, it's not always possible for the victim to get a compensation from the perpetrator, for a variety of reasons.
The goal should a long period of peace and economic development in Europe, and the best way to achieve it would be a regime change in Russia and some kind of European-wide security arrangement. More or less like post-WW2 Germany.
Right, it's not always possible. That's why I removed that consideration from the hypothetical: it's absolutely possible in the hypothetical. How should Russia compensate Ukraine for the death and destruction caused?
Post-WW2 Germany was forced to pay reparations to its victims and return what it took, by the way.
I can't easily find good data on this, but it appears that in the critical post-war period (~10 years) Germany received much more money in the framework of the Marshall plan than it paid to the Western powers and in 1953 the debt was halved (see the London Agreement on German External Debts)
This argument strikes me as odd even without taking children into account.
It's like blaming Americans and Chinese for being the top co2 emitters contributing to climate change. In case of Americans, they definitely could've voted for different candidates in primaries and elections to bring them down.
Well, there was at least one candidate with the Green New Deal as one of the pillars of her campaign. In the highly unlikely event of her winning the race I think that it's likely that the emissions would be lower than in the branch of reality we're inhabiting.
And of course the same can be said about the decisions most Russians had to take, whether in the voting booth (back when the elections were mostly fair and after they became mostly not) or outside of it. It wasn't obvious at all in 2000 that Putin would occupy Crimea 14 years later and launch a full-scale war 22 years later. There were some people who noticed worrying signs and were warning everyone else but now in the US there are also people who are extremely worried about the climate change and try to warn everyone else, with limited success.
You can believe a Green New Deal candidate would lower CO2 emissions --- and you might be right! --- while I think it's more likely a neoliberal approach that focuses on ending NEPA and allowing the free market to produce and import cheap solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible would lower emissions faster.
See, we might want the same results but disagree dramatically on how to achieve them.
You might be right, my point is simply that as long as the US remains the second largest emitter in absolute terms and one of the highest in per capita terms it must be possible to reduce them (more).
Blaming the Americans for not having done that may or may not advance your goals, even if it's true in some technical sense
> I think what's driving the idea that it's the parents' job to control their government is refusal to believe in tradeoffs.
I've been bothered by something similar. There seems to be a strain of American culture that believes that the best possible course of action necessarily doesn't involve doing anything wrong, and that therefore, if something is part of the best possible course of action, then it involves committing no wrongs. For example, Scott complained, in his review of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, that in the Chinese system described it was illegal to refuse an order from your father to commit a crime.
This is not a normal view of the world. I believe conflicting geas are a particular theme of Irish mythology.
Well, I'm complaining less about people not wanting to do anything wrong, and more about people having the idea that it's possible not to do anything wrong. It would be nice if that were possible, but in the general case it isn't.
I am not sure what your point is. Why emphasize the suffering of the children? As you state yourself, the adults can't do much about the course of the government either, so their suffering is as un-self-inflicted as that of the children? And what are the tradeoffs you mention in the last sentence?
I think it's pretty bad to focus on the suffering of children like this (except in cases where children are disproportionately the ones suffering, which isn't the case here). It reduces agency (which mostly makes problem solving harder) and makes the issue more emotionally led (which is also mostly bad for situations that require cold structural solutions, which most situations are including this one).
I don't see why the focus on children here? It's bad for most russians, and most russians can't singlehandedly change their culture/government (but could if they were, as a group, a very different type of culture).
You may or may not have seen certain ruffled feathers recently about Jaguar's brand re-design, specifically the advertisement they used for it.
Personally, I think the ad is silly and ugly, and certainly the people *in* the ad are *not* the target market for "can you afford to buy a luxury car?"
But whatever, modern marketing and all that jazz. Standard re-design of the brand identifiers to look like every other big faceless commercial entity out there.
I had not been aware, however, that Jaguar was pivoting to be all-electric. Or that the below would be their new cars.
They're awful. I'm presuming (hoping!) that this is just 'artist's impression' of what the new cars will look like, but crikey. It's like they took one look at the Cybertruck and went "That! That's the way we want to go!"
"Adrian Mardell, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, said: “The magic of Jaguar is close to my heart – an original British luxury brand unmatched in its heritage, artistry and emotional magnetism.
“That’s the Jaguar we are recapturing and we will create the same sense of awe that surrounded iconic models like the E-type."
Yeah, well, here's Wikipedia on the E-type and I'm not seeing the resemblance (though if by "awe" they mean in the neighbourhood of "shock and awe", I'm seeing *that*):
When I pick my kids up from school in Laos there is a fun parade of weird looking EVs. There is a huge tax incentive to buy an EV here, and the variety of creative looking cars and colors makes an American parking lot look boring. In Asia the bar for "wow, that is a cool looking car" is higher than ever, so it is not surprising that expensive cars designed for this market are becoming stranger. In a line of swanky EVs from China, the Jaguar would look very nice.
In America we seem to favor friendly looking faces like Rivian, but there is something to be said for the Bently-turned-evil face of some of the new EVs popular in Asia. I find the high grill to be intimidating, especially in a country where scooters and bicycles are so common. When someone steps out of one of these, with black tinted windows, I can't help but imagine they are a high level bureaucrat who could destroy me with the thump of a rubber stamp. Bands like Black Pink, and BabyMonster embody the contrast between strength and elegance, and I think the mean pink Jaguar will be a striking car for the nouveau riche.
Those cars look like Cadillacs designed to make the perfect toast.
I think it's instructive to keep two things in mind.
One, Asia is becoming a larger market in the near future and this kind of advertising isn't wild there. Something something the world isn't just the global NW.
Two, Jaguar's last CEO has made this bed, and there's no way now to change the battle plan without immense financial hardship. Entire factories and staff would need to be retrofitted, retrained, and re-tooled -- again, after Jaguar switched over to all-electric per the last CEO.
They have a better chance of surviving and succeeding with this than they would in going back. No one wants to be Fisker the Third.
My impression, albeit based on limited experience in Asia and none in the Middle East, is that when Asians etc buy Western and especially British luxury goods, it is in large part because they are buying into Western traditions of style and power. Yes, Settler Colonialism(tm) is Bad, Mmmkay?, but it left a deep impression.
I'm skeptical that all-electric is a good move for Jaguar (aren't they the carmaker particularly noted for unreliable electrical systems?). But as you say, maybe it's a done deal. I'd still wager that, even in the Asian or Middle Eastern market, they'd be better off with an electric *Jaguar* rather than an electric Mary Kay Batmobile.
Definitely, people still look to British luxury across the world because it's "stuffy, old money". That still exists.
Assuming I remember to, which is a non-100% proposition with ADHD, I'll link an article I found discussing the cake that the former CEO baked for the company.
I'll be keeping "electric Mary Kay Batmobile" in my back pocket, bravo. Love it.
I have read an interview with Mathias Illgen on the topic, an expert of branding strategies and design of brands.
He speculates that the new brand is not addressed to the "old" European and US markets at all, but rather targets Asian markets, especially China, India and the Gulf states. And for those targets he doesn't find the campaign so odd or so extreme (except that it's a very clear cut from the old brand). He also said that with such a target it does make sense to completely ignore/erase the history of the brand, and only keep the name as a signal for "we already know how to build cars".
I could imagine Saudi princelings with more money than braincells buying these slabs of sausage meat to show off. I can't imagine China/India/Gulf States being impressed with advertisements of weird bald non-binary persons of coloured fatness. These are the same markets that movie studios cut out gay kissing etc. from their films in order to have them passed.
Now, *maybe* very rich Chinese in Hong Kong don't care about the multi-culti ads and instead want the new Jaguar because it's the latest thing, but I dunno. I would be very interested to know if they ran the same ads in Asia, rather than ones concentrating on the cars.
This article, for instance, doesn't seem too impressed:
"Heated discussion has emerged on Chinese social media platforms, such as Xiaohongshu. One user’s (@啊～uncleBrownBrown) poll showed 93% of respondents favored Jaguar’s classic logo over the new one. This sentiment was echoed in comments, with netizens describing the design as overly simplistic and even likening it to a luxury fashion or hotel logo, rather than one for a heritage automaker. One Xiaohongshu user (@Amy.Y) mocked the redesign, saying it was more suited to a Giorgio Armani cushion foundation.
For many, the most contentious aspect is the departure from the iconic leaping jaguar emblem that has adorned the marque’s grille for decades. The new design trades the familiar feline imagery for a stylized “J” and “r,” which are subtly curved to suggest a jaguar’s tail. Yet, many have struggled to connect this abstract symbolism with the brand’s storied identity. Some disgruntled fans noted the change feels out of touch with the preferences of Jaguar’s core audience, with one user commenting, “Do you even know your market?” Many threatened that they will sell their Jaguars."
They are not just pictures - they made a concept car of this I think - there appeared to be physical models at the presentation, but they have have been impressive 3d holograms as per ABBA Voyage or similar
> I had not been aware, however, that Jaguar was pivoting to be all-electric. Or that the below would be their new cars.
> They're awful.
Wow. I was not prepared for how awful they are. The thing is, if that was just an artist's impression, the sane response would be to fire the artist and commission a new ad, not to publish that one.
Various people have been making the joke that Biden should pardon some random guy for whatever he did in November 1963. I just checked if llama 70b gets the joke; it does. Follow up questions so the AI is able to produce a secret history timeline, like you’ll see in a rpg sourcebook. I’m note sure I ought to be doing this…
What do people think about the Australia banning social media for those under under 16? As a parent of two tween girls, I am all for it. It would be very nice if there wasn't pressure for them to consume social media in order to stay in the loop with their friends. I asked some high schoolers from Australia, and not surprisingly, they were against the ban.
100% behind it. Don't want my kids exposed to brainrot, hooked into Meta's network effect or be social pariahs because I personally enforced my own ban. I also don't think any of the arguments against it carry any water.
Completely, 100% opposed to this. I seem to be one of the only people on earth who thinks children have rights to free speech.
But even if you don't care about that, which is utterly indefensible but clearly the mainstream position, you might care about:
1. How are kids being abused at home supposed to get support? How are kids being indocrinated by fundamentalist Muslims/Christians/extremists/etc supposed to find out about the world outside their bubble? The answer is apparently to throw them in a prison of their own abusers, with state support, all so other parents don't have to so much as take responsibility for their own children's upbringing. This is so evil I can barely find the words.
2. How are they going to enforce it? Apparently asking for government ID is prohibited. So, I guess they use mandatory facial recognition software? Or just demand a non-government ID? For all adults who want to use the internet? But hey, at least you don't have to actually monitor your own child, right? That's what *really* matters!
Shame on the entire Opposition, and every single person who signed away every morsel of concern for freedom the moment "protecting children" was invoked in a virtue signalling cascade. You are moral cowards of the highest order, and your names will live in infamy forever.
"I seem to be one of the only people on earth who thinks children have rights to free speech."
Apparently not, as kids have a constitutional right to free speech in the USA, just like adults. Even the UN gives kids the right to free speech. I don't know what you mean about the mainstream position. Parenting today is more focused on giving kids agency and encouraging their expression. Same with schools.
It will be a moving target, and the lines between what is and isn't social media will blur. Much of what is out there now is basically a web app with an integrated social element, which may or may not be central.
I'm of two minds. I guess this will be a litmus test for the rest of the world. Internet use in my youth could be just as bad, it just did not reach the same critical mass. I believe the problems transcend social media, such that it is a redundancy. We need a cultural shift away from the endless scroll.
Being proactive about alternatives seems more important in the grand scheme than limits imposed in arbitrary whack-a-mole fashion. It's also possible for *better* social media to come to fruition. Right now, it seems for example Mastodon is not very "toxic" on the whole.
Since most mechanisms for confirming age also rely on confirming identity, is Australia going to integrate in tracking of political dissidents from day 1?
And even more soluble in a world with mobile phones and text messaging, which I do not think Australia is planning on forbidding to the younglings.
I have *some* sympathy for the idea that if one parent takes away their kid's smartphone or instagram account or whatever, in a world where all the other kids are using that to coordinate social activity, that one kid may wind up ostracized. But if you take social media out of the equation for everyone, that doesn't apply and we have all the known ways to organize and socialize without social media.
How are kids supposed to organize and socialize without social media?
My daughters use email and google messenger. Or they create a google doc with their friends. Or Whats APP. There are many ways to communicate without being fed thirty second videos selected by algorithms with the express intent of keeping you engaged in scrolling.
"The best sources are random experts on social media."
My feeling is that for every under 16 kid engaging with experts on social media, there are many more who are unawares engaging with pseudo experts or influencers, or just getting absorbed in the utter pile of trash content that is created non stop every day. There is a cost benefit calculation here. If they wait to 16 until they dive into Instagram and Reddit they still have access to things like this comment section. The big difference is companies like TikTok have figured out how to engage millions of kids in scrolling for hours a day, and many people think this is causing some problems with kids today.
The parallel I think of is smoking. Also bad for your health, also a social activity, also addictive. Did not need to be banned to completely drop out of favour with young people!
But it IS illegal to sell tobacco to kids. It is difficult to say "this is not good for kids" but then to make it legal for kids. The first step is adding some friction, ie cigarets are not sold to minors.
My entire opinion is second-hand from my Australian girlfriend, who has rolled her eyes at it and observed that the criteria they use for 'social media' apparently include IRC. I can't judge, not having read the legalese, but I had a co-chuckle at the idea of getting age-verification into IRC. (Yes, of course the chuckles were had over IRC; no one else talks about IRC except for the people who still use it.)
We should be discouraging the use of social media by children (or, frankly, anyone). Making it a cool forbidden thing that only adults do will, of course, achieve the exact opposite.
No, making social media difficult to access will not make it more popular. Maybe kids had easier access to pot when it was illegal, because the black market was more robust. But I am assuming there will not be a black market in social media. The forbidden fruit effect exists, but it is incorrect that most teens are attracted to breaking the rules. A solid narrative that social media is bad for mental health will create buy-in.
Don't much like it. personally, it would (probably) require use of ID to make an account, and I don't want my legal name attached to my internet history.
its likely, to me, that the benefits of whatever haidt-style mental health effects being gone is not worth those costs, plus this is only enforceable on places that require an account to view (afaik. reports on how Exactly they plan to do this seem confused). So, no Instagram, but yes to Youtube. Also Youtube is educational, so it gets an exemption anyway.
Not convinced this is well thought out and it would need to be very very well thought out to be either good or functional.
A lot of the push for this come from parents who's children committed suicide/were harmed by people they met online, some who explicitly name bullying as the cause. This is indeed a problem. But I notice that in many of the cases, the 'bullying' is uh, just a crime? like straight up already illegal? examples include 'sextortion' (sexual blackmail), and murder. I would like to be more sure than anyone seems to be that making it so being on social media is a cool and rebellious thing to do, that you do in secret, is a decent way to stop all that.
Also, a lot of what parents complain about (texting, gaming, etc) are not banned. So shouldn't we expect to see kids be even more invested in roblox and youtube instead of carefree innocent peaceful frolicking or whatever people expect kids to do?
TLDR: not well thought out enough to be a good idea and would be surprised if it works out well. Too much implied government surveillance for my taste. Good that someone is testing it out, I guess?
"not well thought out enough to be a good idea and would be surprised if it works out well."
For something novel like a social media ban, it makes sense to pass the law and then figure out how to enforce it. Otherwise you end up spending millions on consultants to design a regulation system, and no matter what they decide people will be screaming "it won't work." Companies like Facebook and Instagram are in the best position to figure this out, and only laws and government will motivate them to act. Plus these platforms are constantly changing, so the law should dictate what has to happen (no users under 16) rather than how it should happen.
If the current default is that (making up numbers here) 1 in every 1000 kids isn't on social media, then that kid is just a pariah and you as the parent are actively harming your kid by insisting on it.
(Someone irl told me the other day that all her 8yo boy's friends have stopped talking to him because they're all in Minecraft and he's not. This isn't a hypothetical situation.)
There's some threshold - call it 1 in every 30 - where someone not having social is a common enough occurrence that your average kid understands it's a thing that can happen.
And at say 1 in 10, your average kid expects that if we're arranging to meet, there's probably one guy in the group who needs to be phoned up or otherwise invited through non-app-based means, and that's not an unreasonable effort to make. At that point I think the costs of being unconnected are pretty bearable.
And at that point I would hope the anti-smartphone movement will have won, because I hope that it will quickly become apparent how much stronger, brighter and happier the offline kids are and their lifestyle will become something aspirational that the online kids want to emulate.
I am very grudging about supporting a government ban, but I admit I can't think of a better way to effect group coordination on that level.
I doubt that it will end up working, and also recognize the tradeoffs. With that said I think we pretty desperately need to see some significant-sized jurisdiction try this for a while. We could really use a real-world test at scale [a control group] of the general argument that children being on social media is seriously net-negative for them.
Based on what I've read from Johnathan Haidt, it sounds like social media+smart-phones has been emotionally *disastrous* for a large percentage of teen/tween girls. But I'm not sure what's the best way to deal with it. I guess we'll soon see, in Australia, how well an outright ban will do.
Completely in favor of it. Also of banning drugs, piercings, tattoos etc under 16 but for different reasons. If other kids not on social media the cost to your kid of also not being in it is much less. Their brains are not capable of resisting those algorithms, in aggregate, on average. Am also completely fine if it's not enforced in any way.
It's the typical overbearing good intentions people that make life hell for the rest of us. If you don't like something, say your young kids being on social media, then don't let your young kids on social media. But I guess personal responsibility isn't fashionable any more, so instead the government has to step in and make the undesired (by the people who complain the loudest) thing illegal. Of course this is in Australia, so the whole prison colony theme is hardly a new development.
You oversimplify and therefore miss the problem. The price of "personal responsibility", ie unilaterally withdrawing your kid from social media, is making your kid a social pariah. Given those two options, I don't actually know which is worse for a child's development. But neither are acceptable for someone trying to be a good parent.
The value of a top-down enforced ban is that it effects group coordination. I despise government involvement as much as the next red blooded man, so if you have a better suggestion (that doesn't boil down to "let the bad things happen, I'm not a parent") then I would like to hear it.
It's totally fine if your kid isn't on social media. They can still make friends and actually do stuff, probably even better than the other kids. I just think the whole thing is a futile exercise in trying to shove all the demons back into Pandora's box. The only thing you get when the government tries to round up all the demons is most of the demons go free anyway, but they will crush the hope waiting in the bottom of the box. We live in a world where everyone is interconnected all the time, and we can't go back without some probably impossible culture shift.
Most of the kids will just use some way to get around the age verification and spread the means to do so among themselves. Making social media use, a thing they really want to do anyway, officially forbidden will only increase the social appeal of doing it. Some will be dissuaded on the margins, but that has to weighed against the costs of inculcating against privacy and self-responsibility.
> It's totally fine if your kid isn't on social media. They can still make friends and actually do stuff, probably even better than the other kids.
This is not true in any practical sense, and the ease with which you throw it out there leads me to believe that the rest of your post is more of the same bloviating.
I'm left questioning how they're expecting to enforce it. If the adults still have access, the kids still have access. Are they going to make the adults lock their smartphones in the gun safe?
No, it means you are going to need ID to log in to social media. That's not quite as nefarious as it sounds: a lot of the lobbying for this originates from companies offering proof of age as a service. The purpose is profit, not spying.
And surely all of this collected personal info will be stored in a .txt file with a single password and inevitably hacked, if it isn't sold off outright.
Gosh, it sounds just like all the "you must be 18 to access this site" fanfiction sites back in the day. And I'm sure it will work just as well: "now, if you're under 18, you can't read any of these stories because that would be very naughty of you. You say you're at least 18? Well of course we believe you and welcome aboard!"
The same push is happening in the UK and Ireland as well, of course; though the justification is a bit different, the implementation and underlying motives remain much the same; e.g. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2024/57/
The reason it won't work is a little different to the old-style "you must be 18" sites: these checks will be more robust, but families share devices and no-one ever logs out of anything so it'll only need one parent to do the check once for all the kids to get access to whatever they want.
Why would a kid want access to his dad's fishing group Facebook page or his mum's Mumsnet account? None of his friends are posting on there.
EDIT: to be clear, I dislike this from a data security government surveillance standpoint. My preferred outcome is we all abandon phones for non-work purposes and go back to having real hobbies and chatting in pubs for recreation.
…I see you were a good obedient rules-abiding teenager, rather than the regular sort that actually poked around inside folders titled “boring fishing stuff” on their dad’s PC.
Not even a parent; get an older sibling or friend's older sibling to log you in. If no 15 year old boy can work out a way to hack this, I'm going to be gravely disappointed in the upcoming generation.
If a kid reads reddit or accesses facebook it is no big deal. The problems I see are when they become heavy users and are posting and commenting all the time. If this is prohibited it will deter many and lower the network effect. Just the message that these sites are not for kids is going to be a big change. Many schools actively promote their insta and FB accounts to kids.
> If a kid reads reddit or accesses facebook it is no big deal.
I actually have no idea what proportion of the people who actively want this stuff would agree with that.
Personally, I'm all for software barriers between curious/horny/otherwise strongly motivated teenagers and internet content that may or may not be all it's cracked up to be but is already appealing simply because it is forbidden: this is where the next generation of engineers is going to come from.
Way back, Scott made a point (not sure where) about signalling spirals using the example of child pornography. What do you do when everyone's against actual child pornography and thinks it should be harshly punished, and you want to signal that you're even more virtuous by being even tougher? You start broadening the meaning of child pornography and viciously attacking anyone who disagrees as being pro-pedophilia. And so we reach a situation where in Canada, according to wikipedia, child pornography includes distributing any material, visual or written, that portrays anyone who is, or appears to be, under 18 (whether they be real or fictional) engaging in sexual acts. Taken on face value, this makes a large proportion of fanfiction, which frequently involves explict sex and in many popular fandoms like Harry Potter almost all of which happens amomg teenage characters, a crime. (It probably also makes a number of formally published teen romance novels illegal, but I'm less sure about this).
I see only three possibilities:
1. Wikipedia is misstating the law.
2. A significant part of the mainstream internet is illegal in Canada, but the laws are not enforced except on actual pedophile-adjacent things (e.g. portrayals of sex *between minors and adults*)
3. People actually go to jail for putting explicit fanfiction online in Canada
Anyone know which one it is? Remembering that this is a world where actual pedophiles often go free, or get outrageously lenient sentences, and the law goes after (probably mostly teenagers) writing about teenagers having sex with other teenagers. If it's anything but option 1, this does *so much* to discredit actual child pornography laws, and means that once someone (like me) discovers that this is how the law is sometimes written, they will take accusations of "child pornography" much less seriously until they know all the facts. Which of course will help protect the actual criminals. It also means that the laws will *have to* allow for leniency, to provide a way of ensuring the people "guilty" of made up versions of the crime don't go to jail, which of course can and will be used by judges as an excuse to go easy on the ones guilty of the actual, central example of the crime. Because God forbid we actually *distinguish* unlike things in the law!
I am so fucking sick of things like this. This particular example parallels age of consent laws that define two teenagers having consensual sex as raping each other, and I have huge issues with these infringememts on the rights of children and the disgusting adult hypocrisy of deeming a loving teenage couple having sex a crime while adults can have drunken orgies with strangers and must never ever be judged for it. (And I'm disgusted by how few people stand up for this position: they either want to lower the age of consent *for everyone* or they want to rigidly "enforce the laws" no matter how moronic those particular laws may be).
But more generally, I think this shows two things. First, all sane people need to commit to a universal principle of "nothing is X except actual X. No exceptions." Nothing is racism except actual racism. Nothing is rape except actual rape. Nothing is child porn, or communism, or fascism, or violence, except instances of those things. Or else, you are *not taking the actual X remotely seriously!*
And second, everyone needs to be willing to say to *the most horrible sounding things possible*, whether child porn, or nazism, or satanic human sacrifice, that "yes even *those things* are sometimes protected freedoms". If you don't do that, you've signed away all sanity forever on the endless redefinition signalling spiral treadmill.
possibility #4 (subclass of 2): The laws really _do_ make a large chunk of the internet illegal, and it is selectively enforced - probably against people who are politically out of fashion.
Mostly 2., but probably the occasional instance of 3.
If one isn't already taking accusations of "child pornography" (or relatedly, "pedophilia") with an eye-roll, it's unlikely that learning of the precise phrasing of this Canadian law is going to change one's mind.
Site note: you know teenagers get prosecuted for sexting, charged with "distributing child pornography" of themselves? This is not just hypothetical from reading the law as written; this actually happens.
> Nothing is racism except actual racism. Nothing is rape except actual rape. …
You'll find people will readily agree to this, and then argue that their experts' new, more expansive, definition is ACTUAL racism ("power + prejudice"), rape ("affirmative consent"), etc.
"I have huge issues with these infringements on the rights of children and the disgusting adult hypocrisy of deeming a loving teenage couple having sex a crime"
Children have rights appropriate to their age, and let's be real here: when the hormones are at their peak, it's not about being a loving couple, it's about being horny teens (and if I go by media reports, boys wanting the girls to recreate acts the boys have seen in porn).
I am going to take you at face value about being sincere on this, but in general I start getting uneasy when people start on about "the rights of children" and couple that with sex. Because how young do you mean by "child"? Under 18, so 17 and a half? 15? 12? 9?
The well has been poisoned by the genuine paedophiles using "rights of the child", "loving mature teens", etc. as the Trojan horse for "and of course it should be legal for a 30 year old to fuck a 6 year old".
"And second, everyone needs to be willing to say to *the most horrible sounding things possible*, whether child porn, or nazism, or satanic human sacrifice, that "yes even *those things* are sometimes protected freedoms".
Sounds great, I'm all for freedom of speech. Except. How about when the child porn drives a 12 year old girl to kill herself, then a year later her father commits suicide because he is so destroyed by her death, and it's all down to a guy who started this shit when he was 17?
"In May 2018, Cimarron Thomas, a 12 year old girl from West Virginia took her own life. She shot herself with a legally held handgun during online contact with McCartney, the catalyst being that he was attempting to coerce her into involving her younger sibling. In March 2024 he pled guilty to a charge of manslaughter. This makes him the first person in the UK to be sentenced for manslaughter when the victim resided in a foreign jurisdiction.
Speaking about this tragic incident, her Grandparents have released a statement saying: “We all have been devastated by our Granddaughter’s passing. We know that nothing that we do or say will bring her back. But if we can help another family to not have to go through what we did, something good could come out of her death. Parents, please keep the doors of communication open concerning the evil of some people online.”
Cimarron pleaded for him to stop and said she would shoot herself, he simply replied “I don’t care”. He then started a countdown for her to comply with his sick requests or he would carry out his threat to send previously captured images to her contacts. It was during this countdown that the child shot herself.
Tragically her father took his own life in the aftermath of her death, never knowing the terrible truth of what really happened."
Nice guy, Alexander. Unknown number of victims; the news stories identify seventy but the total could be hundreds to thousands. Is child porn a right? Well, you know, we can debate that. Or we can lock this guy up. Is that "sign[ing] away all sanity forever on the endless redefinition signalling spiral treadmill"? If so, I'm clambering onto that treadmill!
"Operating out of his bedroom in his family home outside Newry, the computer science student posed as a young girl on Snapchat, befriending girls who were gay or exploring their sexuality.
The judge told the court: “His choice of victim was particularly calculating and sinister because the fact that they were exploring homosexuality added an additional layer of security to his actions.”
Once McCartney had secured a picture from his victims, he would then reveal the “catfish” and blackmail them into taking part in sex acts. In some instances, he demanded his victims involve younger siblings, including victims of between three and five years old, O’Hara told the court.
McCartney was arrested several times between 2016 and 2019 but continued to offend despite bail conditions until he was remanded into custody."
"The well has been poisoned by the genuine paedophiles using "rights of the child", "loving mature teens", etc. as the Trojan horse for "and of course it should be legal for a 30 year old to fuck a 6 year old"."
I mean, it should be pretty easy to ask someone proposing more rights for children whether they mean "children having sex with other children, must always be completely legal" (=actual rights for children) or "let adults have sex with children" (=more "rights" for *adults*). Mandatory Romeo and Juliet law vs abolish age of consent. These aren't remotely difficult to distinguish.
Since my position is the first, and only the first, I can't see your unease, unless you mean "today it's the former, tomorrow it's the latter" slippery slope thinking. On the one hand, that's pretty much the exact toxic purity spiral I was talking about: if you don't agree to ban something that's obviously not itself any kind of pedophilia, you're *basically* pro-pedophilia. On the other hand, I do see your point since this sort of thing has indeed happened a dozen times with gay/trans/etc demands, and other progressive agendas. But in this case, there's no basis: they're called "Romeo and Juliet laws" for a reason; this isn't remotely a new thing. In fact, the new thing is the very thing you're defending, and the insane redefinition spiral that says "if you don't want someone on the sex offender registry because when he was 17 he slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend, then next thing you know you'll be allowing sex with 6-year-olds." Never mind that the antecedent of that sentence was basically non-existent anywhere until recently, and somehow the consequent didn't happen.
Meanwhile, the position I'm criticising was a creation of the same modern society that's given us a million new unprecedented-in-history developments, and more by the day. So which one is the slippery slope???
As for the rest of your comment...I started by pointing out the absurdity of defining equally as "child porn" things like explicit images of real children and things like written stories about teenagers having sex with other teenagers. And you reply that you disagree, we have to ban the fictional teenage stories, because here's a case of an adult who blackmailed a preteen girl into sending real images of herself, so child porn definitely exists and is harmful!
It's really hard not to see this as a bad-faith response, but I acknowledge I may be misunderstanding your point.
1) It's possible for some person to kill themselves over [thing] without being an argument that society should take [thing] seriously in general. If you have statistics over the rate of suicides, that might be the start of an argument.
2) It's quite possible that societies taboos about this kind of stuff contributed. Naked pics aren't blackmail material in a nudist society.
3) The Canadian law mentioned above doesn't seem to make a distinction between this cat-fishing and the non-catfish alternative where it really was 2 young girls.
4) If you get to the point where children are doing something illegal by sharing pictures of themselves, this gives the blackmailers a lot more power. "Those sexy pics you sent me were illegal, if you don't do as I say, you go to jail".
I don't know, Donald; I think if you trick a 12 year old girl into sending you topless photos, then blackmail her with "I'll tell everyone about these" and try to get her to send you similar photos of her 9 year old sister, and then laugh when she begs and pleads and says she'll kill herself, and then she really *does* kill herself when you start the countdown for "nudes of your 9 year old sister or else I push the button"- I sort of think that yeah, that is what made her do it and it's not really likely she would have just killed herself anyway.
But you know. It's really important that men in their 20s have the right to create and disseminate child porn. Right?
That wasn't what I was saying, you missed the point.
The point was more that you can't build good general policy out of anecdote. You need to look at statistics.
Because "it happened once" is almost never a good argument for banning something. The world is a big place, and lots of things happen once.
It's pretty clear that the person being described did something wrong. The question is what. And how to write laws that target cases like this, without indiscriminately banning everything.
For example, imagine a similar situation, but the blackmail was totally not sex related. (Ie he tricked the girl into breaking something valuable or killing a pet or something) Would this be any better?
Now imagine young girls sending each other flirtatious pictures and enjoying doing do. Is this a problem?
Can't we just have a law against blackmail or perhaps a law against pushing people to suicide? No laws against anything sex related required.
> But you know. It's really important that men in their 20s have the right to create and disseminate child porn. Right?
This is part of what the previous post was complaining about. The muddling between cases that are clearly harming a particular child. And the adults with pencils drawing fictional characters who are harming nobody.
You didn't actually address the point 4. If you change the law such that the girl also faces *legal* consequences for having shared the pictures of herself, would that make her less likely to kill herself?
Uhm, the cases you describe seem very out of proportion to me. The original post complained that the definition of child porn includes way too much. For example when it is a completely fictional text that does not relate to any real person.
You argue that child porn does exists and that there are bad instances. Yes, of course!?! No one ever denied that, or certainly not ascend in their original post.
> In Canada, the age of consent is normally 16, but there are two close-in-age exemptions: sex with minors aged 14–15 is permitted if the partner is less than five years older, and sex with minors aged 12–13 is permitted if the partner is less than two years older.
Also, fun fact: apparently the age of consent in Canada was 14 until 2008.
Also, the law as described in the OP seems to ban the original *Romeo and Juliet*, which definitely includes underaged (by modern Canadian standards) sex.
So, in Canada, if two fourteen-year-olds have sex, that's at least sometimes OK, but if someone writes a story in which two fourteen-year-olds have sex, under circumstances where it would be OK for actual adolescents to actually have sex, that's a felony?
Canada seems to be seriously messed up. Of course, they aren't the only ones.
My focus on Canada was limited to their definition of child pornography (again, according to wikipedia). I am not from Canada and was not limiting the rest of my argument to that country.
Yes, I am aware that close-in-age/Romeo-and-Juliet exceptions exist *in some jurisdictions*. If they exist across Canada, then it seems Canada is saner on that particular issue. But there are definitely a significant number of US states, a few Australian states, and I think the entire UK, where these exceptions do *not* exist. There was at least one case in the US (Utah I think) of two same-age teenagers being actually charged for this. I'm sure it's happened more than that.
Of course, Neil is facing his own #MeToo type of sex scandal. Maybe I'm out of touch with current definitions of sexual assault and rape, but some of these accusations sound consensual...
But isn't the question about the definition of child porn and not necessarily statutory rape? I'm thinking of the Handly case. I had to go to Chat to refresh my memory cells...
"The Handley Case refers to the legal issues surrounding Christopher Handley, a U.S. manga collector who faced charges in 2006 under laws prohibiting the possession of obscene visual representations of minors. Handley was accused of importing and owning manga containing sexually explicit depictions of fictional characters that appeared to be minors. The case became significant as it involved not actual abuse but drawings, raising questions about the boundaries of freedom of expression and obscenity laws in the U.S."
If Handley was convicted under obscenity laws, the stuff he possessed must have been out there. Plus, mere possession of obscene material is not illegal in the US, He must have been convicted of importing or distributing it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia
Honestly, the only thing I really find upsetting about this is that they're wasting money on such an inconsequential case. Otherwise, this seems like a really low priority thing to be upset about.
I think it's easy for us as adults to say that. Similarly to dismissing concerns about authoritarian schools, or dismissing violent bullying with "kids will be kids". For my part, I remember being a teenager angry at the extreme lack of freedom in general, and I would rather more people would remember that and take it more goddamn seriously.
"you know it's illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person, right?"
Wrong, in the US at least, it is illegal to have sex with an *incapacitated* person, but intoxicated!=incapacitated. From memory of reading the prosecutor's handbook on this, the line "there is no bright line test for incapacitation" sticks out. I am aware of at least one case in the military system where "blackout drunk" did not meet the standard for incapacitation (US vs Long? Could be wrong about the case name).
I can see where that would be the case, because "blackout drunk" doesn't mean "unconscious", it means "does not remember it tomorrow", and that's hard/impossible for others to know at the time. (I mention this because I had that misconception about the meaning for many years.)
It can also be impossible for the person themselves to know it at the time. Some anesthetics do the same thing, and I remember having a perfectly clear conversation with my late wife when she was being prepped for a surgery (_many_ years ago - at this point I don't recall which surgery) - and she had absolutely no memory of the conversation upon awakening after the surgery. Long term memory formation is a fragile thing!
You don't need any drugs at all to demonstrate that effect. If you wake someone up in the middle of the night, you may be able to have a lucid conversation with them that they don't remember.
> ...you know it's illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person, right?
No, it isn't, and there are many court cases making the point that it isn't. College orientation programs want it to be illegal, and they say it's illegal, but the law says the opposite.
Correct- if you look at actual guidelines for prosecutors, you have to be *really very* drunk to be unable to context, far beyond what most of us mean by 'intoxicated'.
I suppose, if this is really the case, you could remove "drunken" from my quoted statement and my point would stand. But I'm really not sure what your position is on my overall argument, or what your challenge to that particular statement has to do with my overall argument.
I made a fairly substantial argument, with multiple interelated points across multiple interrelated issues, and both you and anomie have responded with very short nitpicks of single sentences, both in a rathar snide way ("you do know, right?"), with no indication of what significance these nitpicks have to my argument or what part of my overall argument you disagree with.
With respect, I find this kind of response annoying.
Using a lot of words does not make the argument substantial. The whole thing boils down to "I don't like it," and an absurd claim that adults never get stigmatized for sexual activity.
It's illegal to have sex with children because children are not considered informed enough to give informed consent. It's also rare for anyone to prosecute children, because children are not considered informed enough to know the laws. So the answer is, "adults get prosecuted, kids don't."
Fanfiction would also have to specifically mention the characters' age, because a feature of children is they get older over time, and a time-advanced story with an adult version of the character is no longer child pornography, merely creepy.
Okay, I understand your objection now, but "adults never get stigmatized for sexual activity" was not at all my intended point. It was that the law creates an arbitrary line with no moral significance (as long as we're talking about two people the same age as each other) and deems the most wholesome instance on one side of the line a crime and the most debauched on the other side completely fine.
Another example would be: "in many workplaces, the politest most chaste indication of romantic interest is illegal, while outside the workplace, "wanna fuck?" is considered perfectly fine. Disgustingly backwards world". Obviously, this does not mean to imply that *every* non-workplace environment considers the latter fine. It's pointing out the extreme hypocrisy of the double standard.
To go further, there are many jurisdictions where the laws written seem to make sex illegal if there isn't consent clearly indicated by words or actions. People point out that married couples may have sex without such indication. Now in a sane world there'd be an absurdly easy fix: make an exception (for that particularly broad definition of consent) for marriage.
But we *can't* do that. Because there was a time when marital rape wasn't taken seriously. Never mind that such a law would allow for any normal case of marital rape to be charged, by applying the narrower consent definition, while protecting normal couples' basic freedom. No, we still can't do it, because such an exception *kind of looks* like we're taking marital rape less than maximally seriously, even if we actually are. And it doesn't actually matter how many innocent people potentially suffer, if the alternative is giving up to the slightest degree the opportunity to signal our extreme virtue and purity.
All laws are arbitrary lines, and the choice is which side of the problem you want to have; do you want to capture every instance of a thing, and probably capture some beyond it, or do you want to exclusively capture these instances, and probably miss some things?
Typically you want to write them so you capture every instance with overflow, because juries and prosecutorial discretion can minimize the overflow cases; meanwhile if you leave a gap, criminals will find it and endeavor to squeeze everything into the gap. If you say child porn is only images of real children, then someone digitally alters the kid's eye color and claims it's not a real person anymore, and now you have to draw a line about how much of the picture can be altered. So you just say fictional images are illegal too, and no longer have to deal with it.
...I really don't see what the orgies have to do with anything. I'm really having trouble understanding what your position is here: what kind of value system gets you to pro-children-having-sex and anti-orgy? I thought you supported sex among consenting peoples...
But anyways, if you want an answer that badly, the answer is 2, because like literally every other law it is applied selectively, and even if they wanted to convict every person who writes teen erotica, they physically do not have the resources to do so. The justice system is strapped for resources as it is. Also, you are going to VERY different answers on what "actual" racism/rape/CP/fascism/etc is depending on who you ask, so I really don't know what your point is there...
"I'm really having trouble understanding what your position is here:"
See his later comment about being an angry teen. It's the classic and perennial "It's so unfair how my horrible parents won't let me drink, smoke, take drugs, have sex, stay out late, and make me go to school, all 'justified' because 'you're only thirteen' and 'we're the adults' and 'yes we are the boss of you'. How dare they curtail my freedom like that!" complaints of teens down the years.
This is an over-simplification of many different laws in many different jurisdictions.
The law which applies in my Australian state includes the text "if the intoxication is self-induced, regard must be had to the standard of a reasonable person who is not intoxicated and who is otherwise in the same circumstances as that person at the relevant time". (Section 36B of the Crimes Act 1958, if you're interested).
I am not a lawyer and have no legal expertise, but I understand this to mean that if a married couple who regularly have sex go out to dinner, have a couple of glasses of wine, become mildly intoxicated, and go home and sleep with each other, they are each doing exactly what a reasonable person who was not intoxicated would do, and are therefore not raping each other.
Complicated further by the part where for anyone to look into it, someone has to be in a position to complain. To find out if the married couple is performing an illegal act, first one of them has to claim it was.
>Complicated further by the part where for anyone to look into it, someone has to be in a position to complain.
Surveillance creeps upward, year by year.
If the couple has an Alexa in their house, even today, are we _quite_ sure that there wasn't auditory evidence captured by it? And if, for instance, Amazon as a corporation or someone in Amazon with access was pissed at the couple for some reason, are we _quite_ sure that this can't be used against them?
By the sound of it, the law is trying to navigate the waters of "so I went clubbing Friday night, got totally wasted with the 'two for the price of one' shots offer in the club, hooked up with this guy, we ended up having sex but I don't remember too much about it because I was off my tits, and now the morning after I kinda regret it and kinda think it was maybe rape? At least my friends are all telling me I was unable to consent and he took advantage of me and he totally is a rapist?"
Steering between the Scylla of "no the guy should not have taken advantage of a drunk woman?" and the Charybdis of "nobody made you drink that much, you are a grown adult and did it all yourself (and he was nearly as drunk as you, anyway)".
Recieved an email from sort of rat/adjacent blog about avoiding the same mistakes, accidentally deleted it and can't find it for the life of me. I swear it was clearer thinking but I can find 0 mention of it anywhere on their website.
The post mentioned that people typically make the same mistakes because from their perspective the situation is different. It also mentioned that the only way for cycle to end is for the situation to change or for the person to change.
Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Google has been no help in tracking it down
Matt Yglesias tweeted yesterday he thinks Kurt Godel's loophole in the US Constitution that would allow for a dictatorship is the POTUS' unlimited and unchecked ability to pardon. Says Yglesias, henchmen could literally murder members of congress in DC who don't obey the POTUS, then walk, rinse and repeat.
Is there a mechanism that would prevent that from happening? Sure, there's impeachment or the 12th Amendment but with murderous henchmen in the building people might have difficulty voting their conscience.
Even without the pardon power, couldn't either the amendment process or a constitutional convention allow any arbitrary change, including to a dictatorship? The POTUS can't do this unilaterally, but, if either the amendment or convention requirements are met, the POTUS could, ahem, enjoy the fruits of the change.
Whereupon fifty state governors appoint 535 new senators and representatives, who sensibly get together in Not The District of Columbia, declare Congress to be in session, and impeach the President. And anybody who tries to murder any of these governors, senators, or representatives will be committing felonies under *state* law, which the President can't pardon.
I mean, you can always fall back on "the President has more and bigger guns than the people who would try to arrest him and his thugs, so he wins", but then there's no point in the legal or Constitutional arguments in the first place. If you take it that e.g. the people who actually have the guns will tend to follow the law, then no, the Presidential Pardon isn't the cheat code that lets POTUS declare himself God-King or whatever.
I can think of several options that rely on the idea that two can play at the game of abusing the rules and doing things that are illegal or unconstitutional but can't necessarily be enforced.
1. The Vice President murders the President, succeeds to the Presidency, pardons himself, and offers up the Tyrannicide defense at any impeachment hearings. Or the Speaker of the House kills both the President and VP if the VP supports POTUS's reign of terror.
2. Congress can vote to adjourn to a different location. If that location is outside DC, then the state government can protect Congress with security forces that the President has zero authority to order to stand down. The National Guard isn't in this category, since the President has broad authority to call up NG units into Federal service, but several states have their own organized state militia that can't be federalized without state consent or explicit Congressional authorization, and every state has armed police.
2b. I don't think there's a rule saying that Congress has to meet inside the US.
3. For that matter, there is precedent (Jan 6, 2020) for state security forces deploying to DC to protect Congress without Presidential authorization. That precedent used Maryland and Virginia National Guard, which POTUS could theoretically have federalized and ordered to stand down, but Maryland and Virginia both have State Defense Forces that cannot be federalized unilaterally.
2 and 3 depend on senior officers of the federal military refusing to obey orders to clear the way for the President's goons to get to Congress, since in a fight between the 101st Airborne or the 3rd Infantry vs. the Maryland Defense Force or the California Highway Patrol, I'm betting on the regulars. But there's a good chance they'd decide "shoot at state militia/police who are defending Congress from my goons during an impeachment hearing" is an unlawful order.
In terms of whether or not the regulars would accept orders to intervene, 2 is likely to be on much firmer ground than 3, since the Maryland State Defense Force has a much clearer legal right to be in and around the Baltimore Convention Center or the Maryland Statehouse than the US Capitol Building.
As TasDeBoisVert points out, that isn't a loophole in any sense. If you're willing to kill the other side, then either they will kill you or you'll be in charge, and the rules will be whatever you say they are. Any rules that may or may not have existed beforehand are completely irrelevant to this.
>Is there a mechanism that would prevent that from happening?
Civil war? At one point, if a side of the political spectrum starts murdering the other and use the institution to cover themselve, the legal obligation of the targeted side fades quickly in favor of self-preservation.
But let's say these henchmen don't murder anyone if they can get a senator to change their vote by merely, as in the Godfather, making them an offer they can't refuse. The henchman could say "You know that even if I got caught murdering you, the POTUS would pardon me for it. So I've got nothing to lose here. It's your call how you vote. And don't go telling anyone about our little conversation, even off the record, because that action too would put you six feet under."
How many of our brave members of congress would stand up to such a credible threat when the alternative is to simply cast a vote differently? Wouldn't their changed vote amount to merely one more craven act in their political careers?
If the body count grows high and the press, should they be believed, figures out what's going on, yeah maybe some militias full of concerned citizens form and decide to take the law into their own hands. I'm imagining here that the POTUS would already have his own para-legal militia standing by in DC which could at least handle the Capitol Police.
But maybe there's no high body count, just a suspicious death here and there, which one side insists is murder while the other insists that's a crazy conspiracy theory...
This would be a _staggeringly_ stupid conversation for the President to send his henchman to conduct.
If it happened on a Monday night the impeachment would be wrapped up by Tuesday afternoon, the President's criminal trial would start by Thursday, and the Supreme Court would reject any attempt to self-pardon by Friday.
Whatever law was being voted on that the President was trying to sway would be instantly dead, anyone even remotely close to them politically would be permanently radioactive, and no matter how hard they try to distance themselves - and they would try very hard - the President's party is going down hard electorally for the foreseeable future. State and federal.
B...b...but - what if there was dirt on that filthy craven politician?
That Senator could have the walls of their home filled with murder victims and absolutely no one would care compared to a President using goons to physically threaten lawmakers. You'd be handing the Senator a free pass on anything shady in their past and turning them into an overnight hero.
How is the President going to get someone to kill a Senator with a predator drone? The military would refuse the order, and the kind of mooks that would actually go along with this kind of plot don't know how to use a predator drone.
The Capitol Police would be legally obliged to defend them. Additionally, the representatives could simply leave DC and be under the protection of any state that would have them. Then if they were murdered the henchmen could be held under state charges. Additionally, states can pass laws to protect their representatives from murder just as they do with other lesser offenses. None have so far but if someone tried this every state would pass one in approximately 2 nanoseconds. At that point murder, even in DC, would create a state crime.
And if you're a legal realist this idea is obviously absurd.
You're right that the reps would simply leave and/or the Capital Police would simply kill the goons if they could.
New laws, however, I don't think would work. States can't pass laws giving themselves jurisdiction over federal land. Murder and ordering murder is already illegal in every state and states will generally cooperate with extraterritorial jurisdiction for common crimes, but the issue here is that everything supposedly happens under federal jurisdiction.
If they could affect such an arrest they wouldn't need new laws; if they can't under current laws then new laws wouldn't change the situation.
Jurisdiction means the right to go onto Federal land and arrest them as I understand it. So the goons would be safe so long as they never left Washington DC for the rest of their lives and no administration change happened that would be willing to hand them over. Not exactly a safe bet.
Your understanding is incomplete. Jurisdiction isn't just the right to make arrests, it's the general ability for a court to hear and rule on cases. As a rule states don't have jurisdiction for actions on Federal property.
States can try such cases depending on the circumstances, but it requires the feds / Congress to grant them the ability - and in this hypothetical where the President is offing Congresspeople and intimidating it from simply impeaching, it's fair to say that he/she isn't going to permit it.
A state cannot just grant itself that power. If they could, they could simply apply their existing laws against murder / conspiracy to commit murder. No special laws necessary.
(In practice, of course, one or more states may go ahead and do so anyway. We've already spent way too much time thinking about this inane hypothetical but there is no standard answer for how it would be resolved because it depends entirely on the President's support base and how far they're willing to go.
If the Supreme Court is against the President then they'll just rule the pardons unconstitutional, if the military is against the President they'll try him/her and the goons under a military tribunal, if the President has enough support to kick off a civil war and win then the new Congress will retroactively bless everything ((the same way they did with Lincoln's technically unconstitutional but emergency related actions)), etc. This is a naked force scenario, not a legal one.)
So to be clear federal officials can murder state officials and the state will have no recourse or pass any laws to protect them? That doesn't seem right. And there are multiple existing laws that protect state officials even out of state. How do those exist?
And even your insane hypothetical has an obvious answer: murder is a federal crime. If federal officials are murdering state officials in a way that only federal jurisdiction is involved, the federal government will prosecute them. Or grant jurisdiction to the state to prosecute them.
If you're asking what happens legally if the entire federal government supports and is part of the murder of the state officials: what do you think the legal situation remedy would be for the state?
Is this meant to be a gotcha against me or the concept of federal vs. state jurisdiction in the United States? Shocked though you may be at the outcomes in different contrived scenarios the facts can remain the facts. Would you care to reference a fact somewhere or gin up another completely ridiculous scenario?
When you find yourself starting a post with "So to be clear {insane_hypothetical}" maybe take a breath and ask yourself if the law is meant to deal with reality or to cover all edge cases from internet comments.
As I said, those laws exist because the Federal government can permit extraterritorial state jurisdiction on Federal property if it chooses.
> states can pass laws to protect their representatives from murder just as they do with other lesser offenses. None have so far but if someone tried this every state would pass one in approximately 2 nanoseconds. At that point murder, even in DC, would create a state crime.
Thanks. That's the kind of thing I was wondering about.
If you want to play it out a little further President Tyrannus could try to argue that it's a pre-emption of Federal power and it would go to the courts. But precedent tends to support that states can protect their officers even when they're out of state (which representatives qualify as).
And if you somehow got a Supreme Court ruling striking down the law we're in such extremity that things like a constitutional convention could happen. The states can get together and rewrite the constitution without the permission of the Federal government.
...I really don't think this is ever going to be relevant. There's no point in actually killing politicians when it's significantly less risky to just throw them in jail on bogus charges, even if it is technically less legal. What the law actually says doesn't matter, what matters is maintaining plausible deniability.
> There's no point in actually killing politicians when it's significantly less risky to just throw them in jail on bogus charges
I bet you don't even need *that.* Just imagine the dirt the NSA has on every single member of Congress. All it takes is a browser history, or text, photo, video, or phone geolocation that they don't want to explain to their family...
How dirty is the median politician in this sense? Are the majority having affairs or fucking hookers? What's on a browser history that would be so incriminating?
I'd be surprised if there isn't _something_ that a median politician could be convicted of. There are something like 3000 Federal crimes (and then the people trying to count them gave up...), and then there are State laws... And then there are all the dirt (or stuff that can be _construed_ as dirt) that isn't actually illegal, but that someone doesn't want exposed...
There’s a theory that it’s the corruptible ones that are encouraged into office.
Anyway everybody at Epstein’s island was, at the very least, aware of the substantial charges against Epstein long before he was suicided and still they went. Free booze.
Ive thought this too, but it would be *so* powerful that Im sceptical again. How *hasnt* this been abused yet? Why dont China/Russia blackmail democratic politicians everywhere on the regular? Or maybe just leak some information to stop a hostile candidates election? And I dont just mean that one time when the Really Bad politician was elected, but routinely.
Like I dont actually see *why* this isnt possible, but if it is, basically all of politics is fake.
But I'm also interested in what might happen pragmatically if this were to happen theoretically.
You maintain plausible deniability by having sufficiently scary men threaten your political enemies into both action and silence. You only murder a few if you feel you have to, but the point is you are free to do so. You are free to order a massacre and unconditionally pardon the killers the next day.
...For the record, no one has any idea what Godel's Loophole actually is. He's definitely not the first person to realize that the constitution is far less than perfect, and it's honestly a miracle that democracy here has lasted as it long as it has. But again, if you're really gunning for a dictatorship, murder is a last resort. You do still need popular support and support of your party in order to make the transition go smoothly, and despite everything, killing in cold blood is still extremely unpopular with the entire electorate (especially if the victim is upper-class). On the other hand, people are pretty happy with the justice system as long as the outcomes are in their favor.
Serious question: do you think laws are magical incantations?
Can you think of any mechanisms, perhaps physical ones, that could counteract such an attempt at dictatorship?
Reversing the question: do you think there is any possible legal mechanism that could stop a POTUS that had the inclination and support to literally order the murder of members of Congress, issue pardons, keep doing it, and have their orders (murder and non-murder related) obeyed?
Sotomayor's dissent in Trump v. United States runs into the same problem: if the President has Seal Team Six willing to murder on his orders, you're already past the point where the judicial system can do anything to help. Who are you going to send to arrest him?
The judicial system doesn't enforce the laws. Its role is to interpret laws and ideally rule on some common sense things like "The President ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate opponents should probably be the kind of thing that can be criminally reviewable by courts." The deficiency in Roberts's majority opinion is that he fails to respond to this, and implicitly concedes that having a vigorous executive is more important than being able to prosecute a President for ordering an assassination.
> Reversing the question: do you think there is any possible legal mechanism that could stop a POTUS that had the inclination and support to literally order the murder of members of Congress, issue pardons, keep doing it, and have their orders (murder and non-murder related) obeyed?
Sure. Abolish pardons, and then the henchmen can be arrested and imprisoned, which makes them unwilling to be henchmen. Pardons are a necessary component of this scheme.
Realistically I don't think we get straight from Hunter Biden to having the President's above-the-law praetorian guard murdering at will. But maybe there's a series of steps that gets us there. Maybe the next step is that Trump, on his way out of office, decides to follow the "pardons for unspecified crimes" precedent to pardon his entire cabinet for anything they might have done in the period 2024-28, "just to prevent political prosecutions". Then maybe the next President decides to issue his cabinet a pardon for all future crimes as well.
> Pardons are a necessary component of this scheme.
No, they absolutely are not. The necessary component of the scheme is the President being able to order the murder and ongoing intimidation of Congress. The OP already knows the "legal" mechanism: impeachment.
If the President is willing to have members of Congress gutted like fish on the floor of Congress and use his heavies to prevent them from taking any response, the pardon power is meaningless. He can just have them pass laws making everything retroactively legal. Or similarly murder anyone else who objects. Or give him back the pardon power.
There is no One Weird Trick to dictatorship that we need to close the loophole on.
I don't understand your response. Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
Physical ones? Sure, law enforcement could go after the POTUS's personal militia. Then what happens? Maybe the militia can fight. I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
It's rather annoying that your "serious question" is obviously not one.
> It's rather annoying that your "serious question" is obviously not one.
It was a strange question but a serious one. There are millions of Wiccans and practitioners of other magical systems worldwide and the way you're describing the situation the law is acting like a binding spell, physically stopping actors in the system from taking actions. That's why I asked. I apologize if it gave offense.
> I don't understand your response. Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
I was asking you to ignore any existing laws and imagine a hypothetical law that could prevent what you're describing: an executive forming a death squad and murdering members of the legislature plus intimidating them into voting a certain way.
Can you craft such a law that could prevent an executive willing and able of forming a death squad and openly murdering members of the legislature from doing so?
>I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
...
> legally
...
> LEGALLY
The situation you're presenting is already extra-legal. Whether it's "legal" or not makes no difference, although I'm sure both sides will find some legal fig leaf for their action. Again: the law is not a precise magical spell, it is not self-replicating DNA, it is not code. There are endless ambiguities and general exceptions meant to cover emergencies.
The military will be getting involved when one branch of the government starts liquidating another.
In the United States, the President cannot legally have his political opponents murdered. The President cannot, in fact, legally order anyone to murder anyone. The President does not have the statutory authority to form goon squads and all of the existing armed groups he could use You could try a self-pardon to get around it but I think you'll find that how the law gets interpreted in that case depends entirely on who has the physical means to restrain their opponent.
The President also cannot send a goon squad to interfere with the operation of Congress. You answered your own question in the beginning by requiring that Congress is sufficiently frightened that they don't simply impeach the President. This is an ongoing crime. Presidents cannot pardon future crimes so unless he's running around constantly whipping out self-pardons I guess Congress could seize him and keep him from a pen long enough to hold a trial - except in your scenario Congress members are meekly getting double tapped in the back of the head then showing up to work the next day and saying "darn, he used the pardon loophole, guess there's nothing we can do, huh?" Then watching as anyone objects is also executed, then the next day coming in and saying "darn, he used the pardon loophole..."
You fundamentally misunderstand how government and the law function if you think this is any way a plausible scenario.
Your first question asked about "mechanisms", but from your details and in responses, you clearly mean legal mechanisms. But the fundamental issue is that *someone willing to murder political opponents* isn't going to care too much about "the law"; they are operating on pure power principles and thus don't care about "the law" (which partly makes the whole premise of the question stupid; someone who doesn't care enough about "the law" to choose to *murder political opponents* isn't going to care enough about "the law" to bother pardoning them) as an independent entity that must be obeyed.
To make an analogy: you are playing chess with an opponent. After you make a particularly brilliant move on your part, your opponent jumps across the table, holds you down, and proceeds to use a set of pruners to cut off the fingers of one of your hands. Your questions are the equivalent of you sitting back down at the table and trying to figure out the best way to achieve mate, not comprehending that _you are no longer playing chess_.
To answer @tk4213's hypothetical, it is very clear that in fact, yes, you do believe that laws are magical incantations that have power in and of themselves to bind people to actions, and not that they only have power where people choose to follow them.
The mechanism that most likely solves this hypothetical is the military launches a coup and removes President Tyrant. Before you ask, no, there's no "legal mechanism" for that, either!
When Matty G plays these games, I get he's doing them out of fun. You have asked somewhat similar questions previously, so this is a pattern, and I don't understand what you are getting out of them.
>Your first question asked about "mechanisms", but from your details and in responses, you clearly mean legal mechanisms. But the fundamental issue is that *someone willing to murder political opponents* isn't going to care too much about "the law"; they are operating on pure power principles and thus don't care about "the law"...
No, they would be using the law. The POTUS legally has the power to pardon someone for murder for any reason.
But they don't have the power to order someone murder for any reason. That's the Gross Conceptual Error that you can't seem to get. You want a world where a) the President doesn't care about the law (in fact, *really* doesn't care about the law, because he orders people to murder political opponents, possibly the gravest norm in our entire political ethos) but b) then does care about the law (because he then pardons his killers who followed his orders). Again, it doesn't work that way: someone who is willing to do Step 1 here isn't going to care about Step 2.
2) Uses the law in every possible way to exert power
?
This is not an unusual combination historically. Psychopathic, manipulative leaders are common.
Picture a mafia-type scenario in which the head of the family makes every effort to avoid being caught "giving orders". He does give orders through a single person he trusts most in a manner to maximize plausible deniability. Meanwhile, he's well lawyered-up, so that if the authorities do come a knockin', he can use the law to protect him to its fullest extent.
So for instance in this wild hypothetical scenario (which I simply find interesting) the "henchmen" wouldn't likely walk the chambers of congress claiming the president sent them but approach them--let's make this cinematic--in restaurant bathrooms. Congressman A's taking a leak at The Palm, someone in a P-coat starts pissing at the urinal next to them and makes a threat about approving so and so or such and such. He waves a handgun around and says he means business. A car pulls up and rolls down the window while Congressman B waits for his Uber on the sidewalk. This driver too brandishes a gun and suggests how he might vote and fires a warning shot into the air to show he's serious. Letters arrive at the congressmen's DC apartments highlighting the president's ability to pardon anyone of anything. A militant-looking group starts demonstrating regularly, shouting how much they love the POTUS and how they will do anything for him. "We will do whatever it takes to make sure our POTUS succeeds!" One man tells a TV reporter. "Whatever it takes! We love our POTUS and we know he loves us. I'm not saying we will commit crimes, but if we did, we know that we would be given full pardons." The militant-looking group wears insignia that matches what the men who approached Congressman A and Congressman B wore. There are calls to The Washington Post saying that a group that calls themselves Y plans on taking violent action against any member of congress who doesn't vote with the party, particularly if they are members of the president's own party.
A week later Congressman A, who didn't vote the way he is supposed to, is found dead, poisoned. A week after that Congressman B is killed struck dead by a car as he crosses the street. The man behind the wheel is caught and jailed. He confesses he did it because he was loyal to the president and the congressman wasn't. After that he shuts up because his lawyer has instructed him to say nothing else.
Now we have a climate of fear and suspicion in the capitol. More congressmen are warned. There's more violence, more arrests. Nothing ties anything directly to the POTUS, but the worry in the air is that he is behind it all, and that the power he has over this group, beyond merely their loyalty and their generous cryptocurrency salaries, is his ability to pardon them.
> I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
Again, the word "legally" here suggests you think of laws as magical incantations binding people to inaction. If the president is openly having congressmen murdered, all that's out the window.
I don't know why you guys keep invoking "magical incantations". It's pure snark.
Of course the army *could* get involved. Would they? Who would lead them? Would the generals now be in charge of the government?
I think what Erusian suggests would be a more likely first and last response. The states would make it illegal to kill their officials and then you've got state police legally going into DC to make arrests. That seems much more likely than the US Army making an unconstitutional move.
> I think what Erusian suggests would be a more likely first and last response. The states would make it illegal to kill their officials and then you've got state police legally going into DC to make arrests.
You sure about that? What prevents the President in your wild hypothetical from pulling the murder-pardon two step with his goons on the state police?
Virginia and Maryland are right there and they already have state laws preventing murder. What's stopping Congress from physically relocating themselves to one of those states and meeting in a hotel conference room?
No, that was definitely a serious question, because your original comment seems to imply that laws are capable of stopping a murder from occurring. That would only be possible if they had magical force.
You seem to confirm as much here:
> Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
You should know; anyone with a basic understanding of cause and effect does know. There is no legal mechanism that can stop a warlord from taking power. If he's able to kill his enemies, that's that. This is true regardless of what the laws say; the point of conquering somewhere is that you get to specify what the laws say afterwards.
What difference exists, in your mind, between Congress passing a law that prohibits the president from killing them, and France passing a law that prohibits the German army from killing them?
Can you articulate a model of the world in which your question makes any sense?
The only thing we can really say to you is that your questions strongly suggest that you have a hard time with the difference between imagination and reality. What do you want from us?
Nutrition is a field where I've thrown up my hands and declared complete ignorance beyond the very basics (e.g., eat fruits and vegetables, minimize intake of simple carbs and added sugars). For example, I'm vaguely aware that dietary cholesterol intake doesn't matter because your body regulates its cholesterol levels, but I couldn't tell you whether this is ironclad consensus that 99% of nutritionists believe, or if it's the sort of thing that seems reasonable and has some weak observational studies to support it, or whether it's a heterodox-but-reasonable theory, or a thoroughly discredited crackpot theory.
Is anyone aware of a good write-up for laymen that summarizes what's known with reasonable estimates of certainty?
The risk from consumption is probably statistically significant, but not necessarily great. Your liver produces something like 80% of your circulating cholesterol. A clean whole foods diet (more fiber, less added sugar) and moderating animal fat intake is probably most impactful. Saturated fat raises total cholesterol which is a risk factor.
There have been other write-ups but I can't remember them. Years ago, Denise Minger's blog made waves with her critique of the China Study which upset militant vegans. Was an interesting read.
What the most effective "fad" diets tend to have in common is a focus on vegetables and limiting processed foods & sugar. This is true of mediterranean diet, paleo, whole 30, keto, etc (and vegan or otherwise).
For a more specific tip: legumes are great. Start small, because the level of fiber can be difficult to digest at first.
But overall you don't need more than the very basics. If you aren't overweight you are already well ahead of the game. If you live in the developed world, its very unlikely you need to be overly concerned with micronutrients or things like cholesterol unless you have a diagnosed medical condition that will impact these or have family history that would make you concerned. Your primary care doctor is the best person to determine if you fall into either bucket.
About 10 years ago, I did a deep dive into nutrition research with a view toward optimizing my personal health. The universally agreed take-aways were basically what you wrote and match most people's naive understanding of a healthy diet:
(1) eat as many vegetables in as much volume as you can tolerate,
(2) eat sufficient protein (and it will be more than you think, esp if you are exercising a lot), (3) don't eat too many calories or too few (without precise agreement on exactly where the boundaries are)
(4) minimize sugar,
Aside from this list, I didn't find any other major items that were really clear, like your question about dietary cholesterol, or the evergreen question of whether wine is good or bad, etc.
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, _The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century_, search the index for "diet" or "food".
Caveat: I suspect damn near anything about dietary health has been challenged, beyond the very rudimentary "humans need food", so I don't think there's anything that's "known". So your "with reasonable estimates of certainty" is doing work, and for that, well, see that book.
I recently launched a Substack called The Optimist's Barn, which applies a techno-optimist lens to the issue of farm animal welfare. It tries to figure out how we can use technology to improve animal welfare while also preserving abundance. There will be a mixture of pieces from high-level analysis (e.g. “Is High-Welfare Farming Scalable?”) to nitty-gritty technical analyses of technologies like in-ovo sexing and high-expansion nitrogen foam. I thought folks here might find it interesting or valuable!
Question for the next time a classifieds thread happens: would it be ethical for me to post an ad for a job I currently have if I get a referral bonus for doing so? Would that be against the rules?
IMHO the rules are just heuristics for "does this benefit the ACX comunity".
The referral bonus makes it harder for you to judge this on your own.
I am a bit older now and my general impression is:
Great places to work make their employees refer their good friends without any artificial incentives. Less great places to work notice the below average quota of referrals. The artificial incentives then make employees spread the message among those "friends" they are not afraid to loose.
Given that, my preference would be to such ad either not posted at all, or stashed in a category/folder where we can easily skip them.
I think it would be enough for OP to state they get a referral bonus for advertising the job. That keeps it honest, and people like you can follow it with comments suggesting that there may be a reason why the company pays people to search for replacements, so that will be out in the open. If OP is in tech, there are a lot of people looking for tech jobs, some of whom would be happy to have any sort of new lead.
I should clarify: I'm not looking for a replacement. Near as I can tell, the company just wants to grow so much they're willing to incentivize current employees (ok technically contractors but whatever) to spread the word.
Given at what nesting level we are in this particular thread here.. i'd even say: throw us the link! whoever followed in here is most likely curious!
The usual classified thread is "--- EMPLOYMENT ---". And in there i usually find things that are more interesting than replication of job ads.
Having said that, give it a try!
Maybe you are just above-average-cautious and others would have neither hesitated at all; nor asked ACX peers for permission; nor considered asking their employer for approval.
You're probably right about me being above average cautious. Case in point: I don't even have the link in hand, and it may take me a few days to get it.
And if I don't get permission to write my own ad I'll just post about it without getting the bonus, perhaps even on a normal open thread since at that point it's no longer self promotion.
While I agree that your concern is a valid one, I'm not planning to evangelize the company with statements that aren't true to my experience, and I will write the text of the ad myself, hopefully without direct approval from the company (I will be checking into this -- if they don't let me write it myself I'm not doing it).
I will also clearly state that I'd be getting a referral bonus and mention a way to apply for the job without me getting the bonus (because I think this job has utility for the future of mankind according to my lazy reading of 80000 hours criteria).
>stashed in a folder where we can easily skip them
I'm writing a Substack blog post and am having a hard time with formatting. When I google my questions, I get links to answers, often from Substack itself, that aren't accurate. Acc/to various scattered pieces of Substack info I should be able to change the font color of a post, to drag images to where I want them to go and have them stay there, to break the title into 2 lines. None of that is true -- or anyhow those things cannot be accomplished by following the instructions Substack gives Is there a central, reliable source of info about formatting a post? ( I am not interested in the peripheral stuff -- formatting notification emails, getting subscribers to pay, etc.). I *much* prefer written info to videos, but will tolerate videos if there's no choice.
Was wondering if it would be easier to write the post in Google Docs then copy and paste it into Substack. That's what I did when I put up my book review as a blog post, and as I recall the transfer was very easy, with no formatting problems. If the functionality and documentation of Substack formatting is bad, was wondering if that would be a good workaround.
It has been a long time since I've written a Substack post, but does the Substack WYSIWYG editor no longer include an option to flip over into 'raw' HTML and let you work with that directly or paste in HTML from other places? That was how I did all my posts: I just generate HTML from Markdown with Pandoc and paste in to avoid the editor entirely.
Thank you gwern. I don't know how to do any coding, though could have a friend or GPT4 help me with the html. But I've settled on making the entire title area, including title itself, in Photoshop, then just sticking that image at the top of the page. It's odd to hear from you that it's possible to modify the page via html. While nobody explained this clearly, I thought I had finally grasped why Substack won't let people set up the page however they like: It has to work both on a computer screen and on mobile. When shrinking and shaping the page for mobile it is easier for Substack to be able to rearrange it some -- for example, break the title into 2 lines if that's needed. So they want to user to just fill in the title in the title box, and leave Substack free to mess with its formatting as needed. But your info that it's possible to design one's own layout trashes that theory, so now I'm confused again.
There is one thing I still need to do in a customized way, though, and I'm wondering whether it's possible to do with html. From Substack's point of view my post won't have a title (because the title is just part of an image at the top of the page). I think that will make the post hard for people to find, and may mess up other things as well. So I was thinking I could avoid that problem putting the title in the spot Substack wants, using the Substack editor, but make the font white on a white page. Is that doable with html? No need to advise me on how, yes/no is enough.
I did. They gave me the instructions that I tried and that did not work. Also found the same instructions via google -- probably these were the ones the AI's were accessing.
I agree with anomie that Substack allows very little in the way of customized formatting. Everyone's Substack looks the same and that seems to have been the plan. Copy and pasting from Google Docs is probably what most people do.
I just looked back at recent Scott posts, and they do not have the illustrations I remember. For instance the recent post about crime and jail. There is now no image at the top, or anywhere near it. Didn't it used to have an image of a man looking out from behind bars up near the title?
...That's not part of the post. That's just the post thumbnail that appears on the home page and post archive, as well as social feeds. You can upload an image in the settings menu that appears on the bottom right when editing a post.
Yes, I know about that. But I thought many of his actual posts had images near the top. Maybe I just put the thumbnails and the actual articles together in my mind? Anyhow, I can get the post title layout I want by making full page-width image in Photoshop that includes the image I want on the left, and the 2-line title on the right, and just put the whole thing at the top of the post, so I guess I'll do that.
Well, this is what Gemini said in response to font color:
As of now, Substack doesn't offer direct control over font color within individual blog posts. However, you can customize the overall font and color scheme for your entire publication:
1. Customize Your Publication Theme:
Go to your Substack publication settings.
Under "Branding," click "Edit theme."
Here, you can choose from a variety of fonts and colors for your publication's titles, body text, and other elements.
While you can't directly change the color of specific text within a post, these overall theme settings will affect the appearance of your entire publication.
2. Use HTML and CSS (Advanced):
Substack allows you to embed custom HTML and CSS code into your posts. [Gemini double-checked this and found Substack support saying that custom HTML and CSS is not supported.]
This method is more technical and requires some knowledge of web development.
You could potentially use CSS to style specific text elements within your post, but this is not a straightforward solution and may not be supported by all browsers.
Remember:
Substack's primary focus is on content, not extensive design customization.
Excessive use of custom formatting can sometimes hinder readability.
It's generally recommended to keep your formatting simple and consistent for a clean and professional look.
If you're looking for more granular control over the appearance of your blog posts, consider using a platform that offers more advanced customization options. However, for most users, the basic theme customization provided by Substack should be sufficient.
I tried it myself, and I'm not sure what you're having trouble with? Dragging around images works just fine (though you can't have multiple of them in a row), and I don't know what you mean by breaking a title into two lines but that's what the subtitle is for. I don't see options for changing font color, so I assume that either the feature is deprecated or it's reserved for publications. I don't know why you'd need documentation, the editor really isn't feature-rich enough to justify one...
Problem with placement of images: I want one that's left-justified. Substack lets me drag it there, but when I let go it snaps it to the center.
Title broken into 2 lines: Want to do so that image is on the left, title is to right of image. Title is long enough that must be broken into 2 lines in order to fit in area to right of image. I'm pretty sure some of Scott's posts had a format of that type for the title and associated image.
Font color: Here's a link that gives instructions: https://substackcourse.com/how-to-change-font-on-substack/ But they don't work. That link's not from Substack itself, but earlier I found the same instructions that I think were from Substack.
About features being reserved for publications. I'm not sure what you mean. What I'm writing is a post on a Substack blog that I am in fact going to "publish" on Substack.
You could perhaps hack around the left-justified picture problem by Snipping a picture to add a bunch of empty space on the right, then leaving it centered.
No, but I will. But I have decided to just make the title/image layout I want at the top in Photoshop, including the font as part of the image -- then I'll just put the entire image at the top of post.
...Again, you can't do that. The site is designed to be read on mobile via the app, and they're not going to allow you to do any complex formatting that would break on mobile.
You can change stuff like the background color and font with the "edit theme" button in the settings, but they really don't offer much in the way of options. Apparently they used to allow people to use custom CSS, but I'm assuming they removed that because it would break the site every time Substack itself got updated. And also because they don't want people using ugly-ass "graphics design is my passion"-level CSS for their blogs. Or maybe it's just reserved for people who have contracts with Substack, who knows.
Well, anomie, you don't have any actual information about what is possible, and why online info from Substack itself is inaccurate, and why posts from Scott I looked at last night did have the features I'm describing, which you say would break on mobile. Seems like all you got is a free-floating conviction that not only is what I'm trying to do impossible, despite evidence to the contrary, it's also a dumb, irritating request from a maker of ugly-ass "graphics design is my passion" shit. Wutz the point of making this kind of response ?
Can you please just give me an example of a Scott post with said formatting? Because right now I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what you're trying to do...
I'm trying to help a friend find a post they remember from either ClearerThinking or a similar place. It was on the topic of making repetitive mistakes and how to avoid them. It included the idea that people keep making the same mistakes because either the situation hasn't changed or they haven't changed, so to break the loop one has to be changed first. Would anyone have any ideas which post this is?
About regional-specific mental illness, in Indonesia there's this thing called "masuk angin", literally "enter wind", where when people have a cold they believe that a non trivial amount of wind have entered their body and make them sick. One common symptom is that burping relieves the pain, enforcing the belief. So much that common treatment is anything that encourage burping, like scratching (hard) your back.
What's hilarious is that I totally suffer them often, and I can't think of any other explanation than exactly that! Imagine my surprise when encountering internet and finding out that it "isn't real". I still totally feel the connection between cause and effect!!
Perhaps it is evil spirits that entered you using wind. I'm not well-versed in such things, but it used to be commonly believed before germ theory. And it's the origin of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes, to attempt to stymie the evil spirit that may or may not be infesting you.
Do you know that thing with "your tongue knows how everything feels"? That if you look at something and imagine yourself licking it, you can more-or-less picture the taste and the mouthfeel?
The common hypothesis is that's because babies tend to put a lot of things in their mouths and generally use taste as their main sensory channel for calibrating their world image.
One of my friends reported that he never had this effect and doesn't know what everybody is talking about. Interestingly, he had a trauma during birth that left him bedridden for the first few years of his life. I see this as a weak confirmation for the hypothesis.
When I was about seven years old, I put my tongue to a frozen door knob. I certainly learned how something felt. I can’t really explain what drove me to it.
How is this different from the way I can look at anything and more-or-less picture how it would feel to touch with my fingers? The two seem equally accurate to me.
It comes naturally to anticipate mouth feel, but I'm not sure that's a result of experience as a toddler. In adult life you end up having various non-foods in your mouth: You bite the part of the apple with the sticker on it, you hold cloth or a rubber band or a comb or whatever in your mouth in some situation where you need 3 hands and only have 2. And after a while you've had enough non-foods in your mouth that you're in a position to guess the texture of one that's novel. As for anticipating taste -- I don't feel able to do that. For ex, looking around me: don't have any expectation about what a varnished wood table would taste like, or the plastic surface of the air purifier, or my couch upholstery.
They don't have a page on jobs on their official website, but the TechCrunch article mentions that the company "employs just four people, who are spread across North Carolina, Virginia and Texas". So I think it'll probably be a remote (but USA-centric) job where you have to do much if not all of the work on your own.
Just today: the new links post for Science Fictions includes an article published in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports. The twist? It's some kind of hoax/experimental short story about the personal and professional struggles of Saturnian neurosurgeons. Really delightful! I want to talk to the people who wrote it and learn what was going through their heads, and how this got through publishing. Maybe *real* short fiction these days is being published in the dark corners of small academic journals. Almost sounds like a Sam Kriss premise
I'm working on a project to help people find where to move to (like Rationalist community's potential Berkeley exodus during pandemic). I want to better bring about https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ (freedom and ease to choose place and community most matching you), but I don't have the funds to keep working on it much longer. If there's anyone who would be interested in making a difference bringing this about (MVP exists) through a grant or investing, please reach out.
No, I didn't realize he's an angel investor or funds grants, although I know he was gunning for the Rationalist relocation to NY. If you think he's sometimes open to requests like this, I will.
Only the US right now because it relies partially on government datasets, which would require 10x the effort to source most other countries in their respective languages.
Yes, comparing, filtering, and recommending based on attributes like demographics. It's at https://exoroad.com . (will remove if shouldn't link to personal projects)
Is this proposition really defensible? It seems to me that this could be said about pretty much any time in American history. Just going through the 20th century...
1910s: World War I
1920s: League of Nations
1930s: Great depression, New Deal, third Reich
1940s: World War II
1950s: Cold war
1960s: Vietnam war protests, civil rights movement
1970s: Energy crisis, stagflation, end of Bretton Woods system
I'm noticing many people wanting to move because of the political upheaval. Do you mean that it's harder to move or working on the project is a bad time?
I mean that any data you collect now is very likely to become irrelevant in a few years. Local governments will change, populations will move... it's going to be a mess.
Do you think that things will change substantially more over the next four years than any other recent four-year period? My assumption is that things are likely to continue on as they have been.
That's a good point. I've already experienced that with the initial abortion laws quickly becoming out of date but have already updated with the latest. If there are rapid changes to prices, population, laws, etc. it makes the recent past a little less helpful about where to move in the future. But I think building out the systems to auto-update on yearly dataset releases will always be needed and can rectify this mostly.
Oh that is a really cool link. Pity there isn't a European version. Apparently my preferences would put me in the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Guess that is pretty precise.
I just published a Substack post on inside view and outside view that I thought might merit a presentation here. As I learned when researching this, the topic has been contentious since the beginning of rationalism. My post is linked below and refers to, among other things, an old exchange between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The reason I delved into this was that I like the concept of a "bird perspective", and that seemed similar to outside viewing. As it turns out, it's not the same, because "outside view", on LessWrong, specifically means reference class forecasting. I write about how, for example, the discovery of random coincidence is enabled by a sort of outside view which features no reference classes. I also explore a big tension: on the one hand, clearly outside views are a very powerful tool for better thinking; on the other, reference class forecasting is prone to misuse in practice (a historical accident, caused by a founder of rationalism? but in the Effective Altruism Forum they seem to like their dubious outside views as well, without referring to Hanson).
Admittedly, the average inside-viewer's exclamation "this time is different" hardly inspires confidence; but still, just pointing to a general superiority of outside views can't be sufficient in a debate. I note a very theoretical general scheme for the outside viewer to continue, roughly 1) argue for a probability that a certain line won't be crossed and deny the justification for "this time is different" for that case; 2) repeat step 1 for all interesting lines; 3) on the resulting construct, proceed with the consultation of the outside view. Does something like that scheme exist officially? (Not on LessWrong, as far as I can tell.)
It's only my second post in 2024 but there will be a third one, a sister post to this one, on the theme of thinking people's surprise or lack of understanding that *other* people don't use outside views. My favourite example is philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen's view that people who insist that the Bible is the word of God can't "really" believe that. For think about it --- how could they believe that when an outside view, invoking other holy books such as the Quran, easily shows how arbitrary and therefore indefensible such belief would be?
"Lomez" provides a good example of what I call the right's double bubble problem:
"If you're on the right, you've spent your entire life surrounded by lefties. It is the water you swim in. You know everything they think. The left only sees the right as a critique of Fox News they read from some other lefty. They really don't get it at all."
Of course, the average right-winger has very much not spent his entire life surrounded by lefties. He lives in a mildly red suburb or small city or a strongly red rural area. Lomez is in the double bubble, red inside of blue inside of red.
My understanding is that (in partisan terms) Democrats are more geographically concentrated while Republicans are spread out. This gives an electoral advantage to the latter, as electoral votes partly depend on geography.
This is not a universal, and depends on the particular electoral coalition in question. Nate Silver has written a fair amount about this (under the heading of `electoral college advantage' and e.g. in 2012 it was actually Democrats who held the `electoral college advantage.' In 2016 and 2020 the electoral college favored Republicans, but in 2024 that advantage seems to have been significantly reduced, as Reps ran up the score in `safe states' like Florida, while Democrats won formerly safe states like New Jersey by smaller margins.
But with regards to the OP, the relevant `bubble' is probably not your physical neighbors, but the people that create/police the media you consume (not just newsmedia but also entertainment), your employers's HR department, your kids school etc.
I suspect that the population that Lomez is referring to is (top) college-educated conservatives, and for that population he's completely correct. Of course people in small town Kansas don't grow up drowning in Woke, but those people don't influence the national conversation.
And even for rural middle Americans, it's more-or-less impossible to isolate yourself from pop culture. Movies, reddit, youtube, etc. are all saturated with liberal attitudes and immediately punish any expression of conservative values.. There really hasn't been any escape for a good 30 years and conservatives are fucking sick of it. I know I am.
Considering that "merely acknowledging that same-sex relationships exist" only went from being "completely inappropriate for children's programming" to acceptable in the past 5 years or so, I think you're misremembering how long "conservative values" were still very prominent in media. (To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses).
Slightly further out, but the top comedy movie in 2008 headlined with a character in blackface.
"Wokeness" saturating media has really only been a thing for the past 5 or 10 years at most.
Personally, I don't want to see much romance of any sort in *children's* programming, at least if we define children's programming strictly, as something clearly aimed primarily at pre-teens.
Gay characters have been prominent in programming for teens and adults for a long time now. Will and Grace started in the late 90s.
I mean, you can "want" that all you want, but the fact of the matter is that romance subplots (and main plots!) are (and always have been) a mainstay of preteen programming. (As I mentioned elsewhere, it's the main plot of like half the movies Disney makes) If you think otherwise, it's solely because you didn't notice because of how heterosexual romance is the default.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that gay people exist isn't a topic that needs to be restricted to adults, or even to teens. That some boys like boys and some girls like girls is not a challenging topic for children; it's a challenging topic for *adults*.
I probably should elaborate a bit more on what I wrote in my first reply to you. I'm not sure how to edit comments here, so I'm writing a 2nd reply.
I don't dispute what you wrote about the role romance (sub)plots have played in children's programming. My point is that I think the impact of this has been... questionable, at least.
A lot of millenials and zoomers have very few if any friends. My impression is that there's a lot of loneliness out there, and it goes beyond romantic loneliness alone.
I suspect that part of the issue is that the stories we tell ourselves, our most popular stories, implicitly devalue platonic friendships. They devalue them through consistently giving romantic relationships greater focus and prioritization.
We humans are greatly impacted by the stories we watch, the stories we read, and the stories we tell ourselves. If romantic relationships are always the most focused-on and implicitly prestigious ones, then other types of relationships can get devalued. I have some on-line friends that generally struggle with the concept of non-romantic forms of love, it's actually alien to some of them. Part of this is feeling estranged from their families, but some of it is also that they haven't had a lot of friends in their lives.
Romantic/sexual relationships taking priority in stories for teens and adults is probably unavoidable, so I think it would be nice and beneficial if platonic relationships took priority in children's programming at least.
Now, this is just my opinion. I'm not looking to... join/start a movement, or anything like that. But I wanted it to be clear to you that I was literal and serious about what I said, and that this isn't about straight vs. gay for me.
I mostly replied on your other post, but I'll direct this response here:
Interesting thesis, but I'm not sure I buy it. It's pretty clear that the largest cause of the loneliness epidemic is the movement of third spaces to the online sphere - while I'm a big supporter of "online friends are real friends", even I recognize that far too many of our social interactions are ephemeral, and nothing substitutes for in-person socializing to our monkey brains.
As for lonely men (because I'm willing to bet some amount of money you're mostly talking about men you know here), the issue of prioritizing romance over platonic relationships is something the feminists have been pointing out the cause of even decades ago. To use the feminist term, it's toxic masculinity - men are taught not to be emotionally intimate with other men, because that's something they're only allowed to share with their romantic partner. (Women largely don't have this problem) Anything otherwise is made suspect, and quite frequently *mocked for suspicion of being gay*. Men are made to fear intimacy with other men *because* of fear of homosexuality. (The feminists say this toxic masculinity is because of the patriarchy; Bioessentialism, otoh, offers an answer that testosterone inherently makes it harder to be emotional compared to estrogen - ask any trans rationalist - so the cultural deficit is an emergent property of sex hormones)
So in other words, the solution to the problem you've identified isn't "don't show kids gay stuff", it's "show *more* to normalize it".
Did you think about sexual matters when you were 8 or 9? I didn't. I didn't get the impression that my peers at the time were thinking about that either.
There's no need for children's programming to deal with sexual matters.
I think there's value in promoting and prioritizing platonic friendships in children's programming, especially male/female platonic friendships. There's a lot of adults today who think that platonic friendships between men and women aren't truly possible. I wonder how big a role throwing romantic content into children's programming has had on this.
Gay romance isn't inherently sexual. Asserting otherwise is a conservative talking point, and frankly kind of gross even for conservatives. Again, the content of a g-rated Disney movie does not suddenly become gross or sexual or inappropriate just because you swap the man for a woman and make it gay.
But based on your other reply, I'll assume you *meant* romantic matters. In which case... I would ask that you re-examine your biases and what you think you know, because:
>Did you think about romantic matters when you were 8 or 9?
Obviously, trivially, yes! I knew my mommy loved my daddy, and it was romantic love. I played pretend on the playground with the other kids (when I was *6*) where we had the pink bunny marry the blue bunny, and made them kiss. We had a *yearly holiday* dedicated to romance, that was celebrated in schools (by having every student give candy to every other, but we all knew that the holiday romance for grownups). The 9 year old girls professed crushes on the boys, and some of the boys reciprocated. Half the cartoons I watched had subplots about crushes between characters. And, not to sound like a broken record, I watched Disney movies where "true love's kiss" was the main plot point. Our culture is *supersaturated* with references to (heterosexual) romance.
And none of these should have been considered inappropriate if they were about two people of the same gender instead of opposite genders.
Quite frankly, I think you're either lying to yourself or were particularly oblivious if you're claiming otherwise. Of course, I can't blame you for thinking so before doing some introspection - because the key thing is that (hetero) romance is so normalized, so default, that it's *unremarkable*. Until it's two men or two women kissing - because that provokes an unexamined disgust reaction and you suddenly notice it.
That's why I don't believe you when you claim above that it's not a gay vs. straight thing, because everything you've said doesn't sound like an argument from first principles, it sounds like reasoning backward from unexamined disgust for *specifically queer* romance that you don't have for straight romance, trying to justify being opposed to it.
Children, by the way, don't have those sorts of biases (all kissing is equally gross) but it's somehow unremarkable that we've decided to make them become tolerant with one but not the other.
I would ask you, Fang: how many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys? How many TV shows have you seen where they pray before eating? When was the last time you saw a show where homosexuality was condemned by anyone who wasn't a villain, or who wasn't shown to be in the wrong? Can you name a book on the New York Times bestseller list that overtly or covertly condemns fornication?
Popular culture is written by liberals, published by liberals, and distributed by liberals. Conservative media is subculture media, and has been for the last 30 years or so. Every day growing up when we turned on the television we did so knowing that we could not trust the lessons taught, we had to be critical of the moral of each story, and that people with out political views would not be appearing except as foils for the liberal main characters. You get used to it.
I have mixed feelings on this argument. On the one hand, I agree with your overall point that a lot of cultural elites, including Hollywood, are absurdly to the left of the average ordinary person on a lot of issues (though I suspect not on all issues) and that it's very important to keep that constantly in mind whenever anyone acts as though "both sides have their echo chambers" as if it's equal, or as though e.g. declaring your pronouns is in any way a normal thing to do. And not a sign of being either an extremist or living in a laughably out-of-touch bubble.
On the other hand, I think it's important not to overstate your case, and also not to use the same fallacious thinking that the woke do. And also, I don't think many conservatives appreciate the extent to which portraying current and past culture as more left-wing than it is actually often helps the left push their agenda, by letting them falsely say "this is nothing new, not extreme at all". A lot of the post 2010 trends need to be met with an uncompromising "THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL."
With that motivation, here's where I think your argument is wrong:
First, I can think of quite a few movies that do meet your criteria. The 90s remake of Miracle on 34th Street has Brian Bedford (pretty clearly the most heroic non-supernatural character in the movie) literally make a point of praying before a meal, against the habits of his cynical love interest and her daughter. I suspect this is common in Christmas movies though that's the only example I can think of right now. Black Robe (1991) has a priest as the main character. Knowing (2009) has the main character's father as a pastor. Several adaptations of Robin Hood have most of the main characters as explicitly Christian, and suffering at the hands of Muslims during the Crusades. The John Adams TV show has explicit Christian references I believe. Even The Simpsons has basically the whole town as Christian and regular church scenes; of course there are satires of it, but it's also frequently a neutral or vaguely positive backdrop for other stories. All these are just off the top of my head.
That doesn't include the much larger number of movies with heavy but not explicit Christ symbolism, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. The Matrix and Man of Steel are two that are often noted as particularly heavy handed about it.
Second, I think one of the top reasons for many movies not including explicit Christianity is not fear of offending non-Christians but fear of offending sectarian Christians. The more Christianity you include, the more you have to take a stance on what specific beliefs and practices you mean by "Christian" and that's going to make many Christians angry. In fact, my impression is that they are significantly more likely to be angry at such movies than atheists, similarly to how (at least in real life) the people who get angry at an exclamation invoking God or Christ are invariably Christians. This is where there's a strong similarity to wokeness: despite all the generic complaints about a lack of enough blacks or gays or other Official Minorities in media, it's the woke who are most likely to be furious at actual stories including those people, if they're not portrayed in the exact right way (which of course is different for every wokeist, and so you can't possibly win). Much safer to avoid such portrayals completely, and it's *not* because of the right. Similarly but vice versa for Christian portrayals.
Third, a lot of this is just a matter of sensible writing. See The Law of Conservation of Detail and Chekhov's Gun on TV Tropes: in a well-written story, if saying grace or Christian beliefs are included in a scene, it's because they're important to the story in some way. Same as why you don't usually see people showering (well one of the reasons...). And the decline of religious themes (at least before the 2010s when it became clearly political) could be related to a general decline in movie quality, such that the kinds of ambitious stories able to handle complex and nuanced takes on religion without devolving into preaching (one way or the other) are much less lilely to be attempted now.
But none of this is to suggest that Hollywood and media isn't absurdly out of touch with normal people (see: the election) or that bothsidesism of "liberal echo chambers and conservative echo chambers" isn't laughable.
What about video games? Aren't there popular conservative games? Maybe not conservative in The Little House on the Prairie sense but in the Rambo sense? Aren't video games bigger than movies now?
There are certainly lots of video games that center on various sorts of martial heroics, because that's sort of the lowest common denominator for mass popular entertainment. But how many high-profile video games are there where the martial heroes are fighting for a cause that the average liberal would disapprove of?
Because if your algorithm is, "I can make big bucks with a game about shooting guns at bad guys, now, where's the list of bad guys that liberals are OK with seeing shot?", then you just might be a liberal.
And for the non-combat video games out there, your "Little House on the Prarie" example brings up the memory of "Oregon Trail". That was certainly a culturally-conservative video game. From 1971. What is there more recent than that?
Well, video games are obviously going to be more left-leaning due to their developers being heavily affiliated with the tech sector. And also a lot of games are made in Japan, where even the social conservatives don't have very high opinions of organized religion...
Literally yesterday I saw Conclave in which all the sympathetic characters are sincere, committed Catholics whose faith is portrayed positively.
Now the movie also takes for granted that the liberal reformist side of all the doctrinal disputes is the correct one that the audience will sympathize with. But do be careful not to overstate your case too much.
>how many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys?
That's easy. Any movie that takes place during Christmas, the main characters are probably participating. Most movies where two characters get married, the wedding takes place in a church.
There's a bit of a double standard in what counts as "representation". Since gay people are unusual, literally any appearance, even just an offhanded mention that a character has two dads, gets counted as "liberal media." But people ignore similarly low-key appearances when it comes to mainstream Christianity or heterosexuality. People don't look at Harry Potter joining the Christmas celebrations at Hogwarts and think "Christian representation." People don't treat an offhand mention of "mom and dad" as "showing the audience they come from a heterosexual family," even though that line is doing exactly the same thing a line about "my two dads" would. But the representation is there, we just don't notice because it's so normal to us.
When you see gay characters in media, do you ask "yeah, they're gay, but do they *act* like gay people?" Do you draw a distinction between "this character is mentioned to have two dads" and "two characters have on-screen gay sex", or do you consider both "gay representation"? Because there aren't actually that many movies with explicit gay sex.
Also, "only" 55%? You feel under-represented because your holiday is *only* properly religious 55% of the time? You're ignoring an entire genre that's devoted to your religion because only 55% of Americans think it's religious? Gay people are still fighting to appear onscreen at all, and you're complaining because you aren't getting enough explicit depictions of religion in the genre dedicated to your religion's holiday.
"Double standard" is the only way to describe this.
Technically counts, but there's a scene in which they expose that character's backstory justifying why one of the good guys would ever know a prayer, further exposing for good measure that he hates his religious parents.
> How many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys?
While you're not wrong, I think this is *mostly* an effect of Hollywood's desire to be milquetoast and not offend anyone. How many can you name where *any* religious creed is explicitly espoused? The few examples are mostly going to be pandering (Though I suppose that supports your position more than mine) or something that is a specific trait of that character which distinguishes them from the WASP *default* everyone else is assumed to be. To that point, there's the example of Matt Murdoch in the 2015 deadpool show, who was explicitly catholic because it's an important part of his character.
(The other example that came to mind, but is out of our time window, is the 2002 Spiderman film where Aunt May literally recites the Lord's prayer - which stuck with me because it was where I learned that apparently the version I recited every week at church is longer than the Catholic one)
Kind of funny here that the "P" in "WASP" stands for "Protestant", i.e. Christian. I do get that the usage of an acronym doesn't actually have to line up with its etymology though.
My general impression is that most Christians don't do explicitly Christian things often enough that an accurate media depiction of them would actually make it clear they're Christian very often. Perhaps this is different in the US, but there are quite a few people who I only learnt were Christian after having known them quite a while.
That point isn't lost on me, and in fact I used it for exactly that reason; you'll note that the two Christian characters I picked *are Catholic* (i.e. *not* protestant), which specifically makes them non-default in the WASPy country - and allows it to be part of their identity.
Going down the IMDB top 250, listing movies I am familiar with (a relatively small subset of the full list) where I remember one or more protagonists being specifically portrayed as Christian:
The Godfather (1 and 2)
Pulp Fiction
It's a Wonderful Life
City of God
Braveheart
Ben Hur
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Sound of Music
Plus honorable mention to four movies (The LotR movies and The Big Lebowski) which have strong intentionally-Christian themes.
Although the Godfather movies are dubious as positive Christian representation, since Vito and Michael Corleone are dark tragic heroes at best and a good case can be made (especially in Michael's case) for them being villain protagonists.
Captain America from the MCU is likely Christian (which would make sense, being from 1945). He says at one point that there is only one God. He's also generally considered the most moral of the characters, almost like that's his actual defining aspect and/or superpower.
That said, his character arc strongly leans towards learning better than some of his outdated ways (there's a subplot in Age of Ultron about getting him to loosen up and swear).
If you attend a Catholic church wedding, some of the Protestants attending will add the bit that Catholics omit at the end of The Lords Prayer. It’s sometimes a mildly awkward moment.
I've been Protestant all my life. My wife is Catholic. I was organist at a small Episcopal church around the time our youngest was a baby.
Watching her freeze at the end of "Our Father" and after "The Peace of the Lord be always with you . . ." never ceased to amuse. I do better in RC churches than she does in anything close to RC (Episcopal, the "High" versions of Lutheran, etc)
>While you're not wrong, I think this is *mostly* an effect of Hollywood's desire to be milquetoast and not offend anyone.
They don't seem to mind offending Christians so much!
"12 Years a Slave": A slaveowner reads passages of the Bible to his slaves, justifying his mistreatment of them.
"Edward Scissorhands": One of the antagonists is an evangelical Christian who is arrogant, judgmental, and acts like a crazy person.
"Misery", "Carrie", "IT", (most Stephen King adaptations, really) all feature crazy, evil, abusive, and explicitly Christian characters.
"The Da Vinci Code": Do I even have to say anything?
"V for Vendetta": the fascist British government is explicitly Christian
"Spider Man 3": Eddie Brock prays in a church asking God to kill Peter Parker
"Titanic" Rose is forced to worship and sing hymns, making Christianity part of the confining life she's trying to break out of.
"Dead Poets Society": The Christian boarding school is portrayed as oppressive, abusive, and materialistic. They act as the "bad guys".
"Contact": The religious are the "bad guys" as much as there are any antagonists in this movie.
"Sunshine": A overtly Christian character tries to kill the others with the goal of killing everyone on Earth.
Now is every movie hostile against Christians? No, of course not. Most try not to offend anybody. But, if you are going to offend someone then you offend the Christians.
It’s been a long time since I watched Contact, but my memory is while the suicide bomber guy is bad (hot take), her religious romantic interest is treated as wise and it’s the religious who recognize the truth of her experience at the end. I wouldn’t say the movie is straightforwardly pro Christian, but it’s a movie about an atheist scientist discovering faith.
If made for TV movies I saw over thanksgiving count, a Christmas Waltz in Paris has a bunch of throw away lines to let you know the main character is Christian.
No offense, but was this list generated by chatgpt (or, more likely, grok)? Because half of these seem to just be on here to pad the list and have the telltale signs of barely relating to the given topic.
As others have noted, Christmas has become a largely secular holiday in the United States. Unless the characters attend a Christmas Mass, or at least say grace before the big dinner, it is not reasonable to assume they are Christians.
For that matter, is the inevitable Christmas music centered on "Jingle Bells" or "Come, All Ye Faithful"?
"To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses"
...you may not have done, when you were a kid, but your experience is far from universal. Comics and cartoons have subplots about characters getting crushes on each other for a reason.
You mean little boys didn't. I'd feel confident in asserting that there have been little girls daydreaming about kissing prince charming since the dawn of Disney Princesses.
seconding anomie. bl is crazy popular among girls (less popular among boys as expected, but boys who like girl's love are also out there). My impression is 10-11 is not that unusual a time to start.
I disagree with this characterization and in my view you're cherry-picking completely unrepresentative examples. Cancelation runs one direction, and that kind of power is only downstream of near-complete ideological domination of culture. Woke cancelations only started 5-10 years ago but that was the culmination of a long process of power consolidation. It's not like the culture went from "perfectly balanced" to "90% left control" overnight. I remember a Bill Maher episode from 20 years ago (pre-Obama) where a white comedian was being excoriated for using the n-word even as a quotation. Charles Murray was cancelled in 1994!
> (To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses).
Oh? You don't remember Ricky and Lucy sleeping in separate twin beds? IIRC the first married couple to openly share a bed on TV was in the late 60s/early 70s.
> You're cherry-picking completely unrepresentative examples... that kind of power is only downstream of near-complete ideological domination of culture
My point isn't that there was no liberal influence - that would be a farce (it's called *Hollywood* liberalism for a reason). My point is that the dominance wasn't even *nearly* complete until quite recently, and that saying you couldn't have "any expression of conservative values" is easily proven by numerous counterexamples. If anything, you're the one cherry picking here and trying to claim things as the modal example.
> You don't remember Ricky and Lucy sleeping in separate twin beds?
Because the implication of them *sleeping together* was thought to be lewd. Which is why, if you read the words I wrote, I specified that I was talking about things which were *not* controversial. Plenty of pictures of Ricky and Lucy kissing on google images, and Popeye was getting plenty of kisses (to say nothing of Disney movies).
What I find really interesting is the fact that Ricky and Lucy would have been an "interracial couple" by today's standards, but nobody raised an eyebrow back then.
"CBS and its sponsor, Philip Morris cigarettes, were adamantly opposed to this," says Brady. "They said that the American public would not accept Desi as the husband of a red-blooded American girl."
Ball told the network flatly that they'd have both of them or neither, and eventually CBS gave in, despite its reservations about Arnaz's Cuban heritage and his strong accent.”
The average as opposed to stereotypical right-winger has attended university and remembers what that's like. His TV is not tuned to Fox News one hundred percent of the time, he watches the same entertainment as everyone else. If he reads a newspaper, it's whatever the local newspaper is. He shops in the same stores as everyone else.
>The average as opposed to stereotypical right-winger has attended university and remembers what that's like.
Im not sure I follow. I’ve been under a different impression. For instance, according to Pew, about two-thirds (64%) of American Republican voters never got a four-year college degree:
I guess the question is how to average a person out. If 64% don't have a degree and 36% do then is it fair to say that the average person in the set has about two years of college?
I think what you say is right, the "everyone around me is a lefty" view can't be true of everyone just mathematically in a roughly 50-50 country.
But I think that it really is much closer to true for a lot of conservatives in certain particular areas/sectors like certain parts of the media, or in the case of the guy you're linking to, publishing.
Consider that this comment is made on Twitter, so the only people who will see it are also on Twitter. It's very likely true for the people on the right. No idea about the people on the left.
I am trying to find a short story that I think was mentioned in the ACX comment section, perhaps a year ago. It was a retelling of Borges's The Library of Babel, but the library walls were covered with pornography instead of books, with the inhabitants unable to escape. The story ended ambiguously, with the narrator uncertain whether the inhabitants had trapped themselves there, or if other parties had. Would anyone know where to locate this?
I do a lot of translation to improve or at least slow the degradation of my language skills. Most of these are thrown away because they're just random passages or articles I'm doing for the sake of doing them. Is there anything more useful I can do with them? I haven't been able to think of anything but I figured I'd throw the problem out there. Feels like a waste to do all that and just have it get thrown in the bin.
If you're interested not only in writing but also in speaking, I'm pretty sure there are sites where you can sign up to converse with a native speaker of another language online, as practice.
Oh I see. Why not really go for it and try writing poetry or tiny fiction vignettes in the foreign language? Beowulf666, native english speaker, writes chinese poetry for recreation (at least I think I have that right).
Oops, sorry, I really know it's 888, but 666 is more salient to me than to most modern people because of my treating anxiety disorders. For lots of people with OCD, 6 is a "bad number" because of 666. (Most of these people are non-religious, but that doesn't make any difference. OCD is very illogical.)
Assuming these are both highly popular languages in which everything has already been professionally translated; there's still value in a second translation to compare-and-contrast with the official ones. It can be informative to see how two different people read and express the same words, it can help expose nuances that a single translation hides.
I've had two separate translator friends offer to translate my webcomic as a way of practice and also to demonstrate their capability. That can be quite a short job or a longer one, and it's fun, if you can find a willing creator to work with who needs the right set of languages.
Oh sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm not offering/asking for any of my webcomics specifically, I'm suggesting you find one you like*, and ask the creator if they'd be interested.
*Presuming such a thing exists - if not, I doubt this would be a good use of your time and skills anyway.
I don't know whether this is fair to Harvard, but it's funny.
*****
A young man knocks on the door of a great Talmudic scholar.
"Rabbi, I wish to study Talmud."
“Do you know Aramaic?”
“No."
“Hebrew?”
“No."
“Have you ever studied Torah?”
“No, Rabbi, but I graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in philosophy, and received a PhD from Yale. I'd like to round out my education with a bit of Talmud.”
“I doubt that you are ready for Talmud. It is the broadest and deepest of books. If you wish, however, I will examine you in logic, and if you pass the test I will teach you Talmud.”
"Good. I'm well versed in logic."
"First question. Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
”The burglar with the dirty face."
“Wrong. The one with the clean face. Examine the logic. The burglar with a dirty face looks at the one with a clean face and thinks his face is clean. The one with a clean face looks at the burglar with a dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So the one with the clean face washes.”
“Very clever. Another question please.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“We established that. The burglar with the clean face washes.”
“Wrong. Both wash. Examine the logic. The one with a dirty face thinks his face is clean. The one with a clean face thinks his face is dirty. So the burglar with a clean face washes. When the one with a dirty face sees him washing, however, he realizes his face must be dirty too. Thus both wash.”
“I didn’t think of that. Please ask me another.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“Well, we know both wash.”
“Wrong. Neither washes. Examine the logic. The one with the dirty face thinks his face is clean. The one with the clean face thinks his face is dirty. But when clean-face sees that dirty-face doesn’t bother to wash, he also doesn’t bother. So neither washes. As you can see, you are not ready for Talmud.”
"Rabbi, please, give me one more test.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“Neither!”
“Wrong. And perhaps now you will see why Harvard and Yale cannot prepare you for Talmud. Tell me, how is it possible that two men come down the same chimney, and one emerges with a clean face, while the other has a dirty face?"
"But you've just given me four contradictory answers to the same question! That's impossible!"
The reference to studying philosophy and getting a PhD has a strange effect on this joke. At first, it goes for the knee-jerk response of "ha ha, people who studied philosophy at Harvard and Yale are stuffy idiots who take themselves too seriously and aren't as clever as they think." However, that's missing the equally strong stereotype that people with that background are exactly the type that would do what the rabbi does: never give a straight answer, have an explanation for all possible outcomes, over think, etc.
FWIW, while I won't claim a statistically valid sample, the latter stereotype is more accurate to the people I know with the background given. In fact, they'd probably launch into a lengthy preliminary debate about what it means for a face to be clean or dirty, what it means to clean a face, and possibly a side exploration of the logistics of entering a house via chimney.
The joke doesn’t have to involve Harvard or a potential student too confident is his knowledge. It’s also missing a punchline about the student asking the rabbi the same question.
I believe I overdosed on magic mushrooms for the first time. This happened three months ago during a beach vacation. I realized I was probably eating too much, but I wanted to see what would happen. After eating them, I went for a long walk down the boardwalk along the shore at sunset. Here's what happened:
1) I became hypersensitive to audio and visual stimulation. Having groups of people walk by me, and passing all the little shops with music blaring out of their front doors was very unpleasant. The volume on everything was turned up to 11. All of the neon signs were way too bright.
2) I lost most of my ability to understand speech. Many people were walking by me on the boardwalk, talking to each other, and most of it sounded like some indistinct Western European language. If someone very close to me said something simple and loudly, like "Hey, look at that!", it would register as English.
3) I realized that 99% of the Earth's surface is uninteresting to me--it's too hot, too cold, water, ice, open land, or junk buildings. Probably 95% of the humans on Earth also aren't interesting. I dislike 99% of entertainment products (movies, TV shows, music). Existence is an infinite plain of MEH punctuated by skinny little mountains of GOOD STUFF.
4) I had visual hallucinations:
a. Something like the color inversion shown at the beginning of this "Hellraiser" clip happened when I looked at the hexagonally tiled floor of a public bathroom.
b. I laid down on a public bench and looked up at the stars. I could see innumerable tiny, thin swirl patterns in the sky.
c. On the boardwalk, as people walked by me, their silhouettes looked monstrous out of the corner of my eye. Like, if two people were standing next to each other so their silhouettes were kind of like an "H" shape, I would visually process it as a horse or small elephant. This happened to me once before during a much more pleasant mushroom trip in a city.
5) I experienced time dilation. The walk back to my hotel from the end of the boardwalk literally seemed to take ten times longer than the walk down, before the mushrooms had fully kicked in. The same buildings seemed to repeat themselves again and again each block.
It is almost impossible to overdose on magic mushrooms. What you are describing sounds like a standard experience for a more standard dose, while it sounds like you have mostly been microdosing before this. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad time!
AFAIK standard is more like an eighth, 3.5 grams. I've only done 1.75 gram and it sounds more intense than yours, but positive. You just got unlucky with a bad trip, or something with your psyche isn't comfortable or meshing well with standard dose. But when I hear "overdose" or "heroic dose" I'm thinking 5+ grams. Ya lots of people microdose little half grams, but until like 2015 most people were taking the "standard" dose knowing it was going to be a very intense experience.
The variability of dose on each physical mushroom is wild, several orders of magnitude. Even on different parts of larger mushrooms.
So if OP was having several small dried mushrooms rather than ones that had been blended / put into caps etc, they could have just got very 'lucky' with one or two unusually strong ones.
My monthly round up of worthwhile long form content is up again.
Highlights include evidence of pervasive genetic selection in modern humans, a couple of lengthy interviews with Stephen Wolfram, a deep dive into the spread of the dingo to Australia, a non-hysterical analysis of the impacts of the Trump win, a multi stranded analysis of how bureaucracies strangle societies, and a quick promo of my podcast interview with the cofounder of permaculture (DAVID HOLMGREN) about the untapped potential for plant breeding in permaculture.
Have you read/watched/listened to much about Wolfram's 'physics project'? The primary mathematical contributor (AFAIK/AFAICT) is Jonathan Gorard, who seems great at explaining all of the interesting results and connections to similar 'theory of everything' efforts.
I've been following both Wolfram and Gorard for years. The hostility of the broader community to the work has been really disheartening as I think they are doing interesting fundamental work comparable to Descartes in many ways.
I get the hate for Wolfram, tho I find it sad, but I feel lucky that I'm not aware of any hostility towards Gorard or his work (beyond the association with Wolfram).
I think it's exciting and interesting and it seems very promising, but I'm not sure how other members of the "broader community" SHOULD be feeling or behaving towards it. There's quite a bit of other 'quantum gravity' theories, or more radical 'theories of everything', and I'm not sure how they all stack up, or how they stack up compared to whatever the mainstream theory/theories is/are (e.g. 'string theory').
Today my bank called from a withheld number and expected me to authenticate to them, without them being willing to authenticate to me in any way. The same day, they sent an email with security advice, including "Criminals may contact you pretending to be from the police, the Bank or a trusted company that you have a relationship with. It is very important that you are vigilant on any calls you receive and under no circumstances must you provide them with any information."
I spoke to an employee - a fairly senior-sounding one, not a first-line call centre person - and tried to explain why it was a problem that their own staff were encouraging customers in very poor security practices, but he didn't seem very persuaded. He didn't quite seem to have the theory-of-mind necessary to understand that, just because *they* know it's legitimate when they call me, doesn't mean *I* know that, and from my POV they sound just like a fraudster (as their advice email correctly explains).
(He did acknowledge that if I'm not comfortable I should hang up and call them. And that is what happened when they called this morning. But, firstly, that's a big hassle and involves queuing, navigating phone menus, speaking to bots, etc, with no guarantee that you'll actually get back to the person or department that was trying to get hold of you, so it's not an appealing option and it's very tempting to just talk to the person who called you. Secondly, I shouldn't have to go out of my way to do that. The bank shouldn't be offering the insecure option as the default and making security available only to the most savvy and conscientious customers.)
But it is a fairly hard problem. I understand why, from their POV, they don't want to give authenticating information to any rando who answers the customer's phone.
I feel like there should be a solution involving information theory, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. And I would be potentially interested in working towards implementing it.
But I expect, in addition to the technical challenge, there would be huge business and regulatory hurdles that I have no idea about. If a random individual did implement a satisfactory solution, how would they go about persuading banks (and/or other huge corporations) to adopt it, consumers to trust it, regulators to approve (or at least not ban) it, etc? How would you even get started with that?
I've built systems that wrestle with these problems for banks and large government departments. The problem, broadly, is the same category of building rubbish bins in national parks that are bear-proof but not tourist-proof.
Good operators solve this problem by having outbound callers be able to go 'Absolutely, here is Bank XY's switchboard number, call them and ask to speak to me at extension 12345' - this cuts down shuffling / queue time and gets you to someone with context for the issue the bank or whoever is trying to solve. This only really works for orgs large enough to have a responsive switchboard.
Any more technically sweet system basically falls over at the 'don't inconvenience our customers so much they switch banks' hurdle, which is why there's such a mishmash of unsatisfactory approaches now.
> Good operators solve this problem by having outbound callers be able to go 'Absolutely, here is Bank XY's switchboard number, call them and ask to speak to me at extension 12345'
That doesn't solve the problem at all. It doesn't even address it. I need to get the bank's number from someone other than the con artist who wants me to give him all my money.
Yes, but I'm wondering about a broader systemic solution that doesn't require the individual customer to do that (and to endure the phone queues, menus, bots, etc).
Sadly, I'm not sure there is a broader systemic solution that's net positive. I prefer not using the phone particularly because it's so expensive (in time and irritation). Other people strongly dislike any _other_ form of communication or don't have (or aren't proficient using) a (smart)phone or computer.
It would be nice tho if, for these scenarios and for people that prefer to talk by phone, they'd provide some way to share a direct phone number with you via their app or web site.
I also hate using the phone. I was taking it as read that that part was unavoidable. If the interaction could be moved online, that would be even better!
(I'm currently trying to get Amazon to refund me for a recalled product, and the phone seems to be the only option they offer for that, and it involves wrestling with bots for 20 mins before getting to speak to a human, who sometimes then hangs up on you)
Some companies are definitely better about providing non-phone ways to resolve most, if not all issues. I personally even prefer email over phone (or online text chat), because it's asynchronous, tho sadly some companies do not answer or reply to emails promptly (or at all).
It's nearly 2025 and app-based 2FA is rolled out to most customers of most banks. This suggests an obvious technical solution: instead of the current 2FA pattern where the customer has an app that displays a code for them to read out, for bank-initiated calls have the app display two codes, and tell the customer not to read the second one out until they hear the rep read the first one correctly.
This is for the case where you get a call from an unknown number claiming to be the bank. It's a typical "man in the middle" attack.
(1) Scammer calls you claiming to be the bank. (2) Scammer calls bank claiming to be you. (3) You ask scammer for the first code. They in turn ask the bank, then relay it back to you. (4) Scammer asks you for the second code, then relays it to the bank. (5) Scammer hangs up on the bank and proceeds with scamming you. Or, they hang up on you and ask the bank to transfer money from your account to theirs.
This fails in step (2) because when /the scammer calls the bank/, the bank's protocols for /the bank/ initiating a call do not kick in; the information the person in the bank's call center should be reading out is not made available to them, reading it out is not part of their script, and your app does not display its "yes, the bank really is calling you, here's the code the rep should quote to prove they're them" notification.
You can't use a phone number for this purpose. The caller is already phoning you, so they already have your number, and if you don't already trust them nothing they recite that you receive a copy of only via that channel can or should make you trust them. Email + phone number is also a very likely combination of things to leak, and email origin just like telephone caller ID is super easy to spoof; so it can't be email either.
Whatever it is you are comparing to the information they use to make you trust them has to have been received by you via a route you already trust. The bank's app, as is currently done for bank transfers, online payments etc., is one such route. Hence my specifying "app-based 2FA".
Another option might be a secure physical key, e.g. a securid tag or similar - they read out numbers you should see on the display, wait 60s for them to roll over, then you read back the new ones, or some similar protocol; but those are entirely out of fashion, because banks have discovered getting people to install their app is way cheaper than sending out physical devices to everyone.
> email origin just like telephone caller ID is super easy to spoof
Well, sort of. As originally specced it is, because the original spec just calls for the honor system. But that caused enough problems that protections were implemented, and spam is now often flagged by its obviously faked origins. If you're curious about this, look into SPF and DKIM.
SPF and DKIM adoption is far from universal, and “often” is not “always”. I’ll trust email once DKIM (with a reject policy, not just report) is mandatory.
The simpler solution, if you're going to implement something in the app and expect your customers to have your app installed, is a little notification within the app that yes, "You are currently on the phone with Pajeet (Michael)"
Back in 2006, I got an email from an unfamiliar address asking me to fill out a form "to complete your application for US Government employment". There was a one-page form attached asking for, among other things, my name, address, date of birth, and social security number. I ignored it as an obvious and fairly lame phishing scam.
A week or so later, I got a phone call from a CIA recruiter asking why I hadn't filled out the form yet. I'd interviewed for a software engineering position with the CIA's science and technology office a couple months previously, and it had seemed to go well, but I assumed I didn't get the job when I didn't hear anything more from them. Turns out I had, and the wheels of government were just turning slowly and opaquely. I did fill out the form, and got an offer, but wound up turning them down in favor of an offer from Microsoft.
At the time, I felt like it explained quite a bit if the CIA was inadvertently filtering to only hire people who would provide their social security numbers in response to vague emails from unfamiliar addresses.
I had a similar experience around 2014 with the USDA's statistical service. I had procrastinated filling out a survey they sent me and later got a call from an unlisted number asking to fill it out over the phone. I went along with it at first, since I knew I had skipped the survey, but became increasingly suspicious as they kept getting vital information wrong - acreage, type of operation, etc., and I finally accused them of phasing and hung up after they mentioned a business partner whose name I had never heard of. They called up again a week later, irate that I had hung up, and were not very understanding when I explained what happened, so eventually I just filled out the form they had sent and that was the end of it.
Another idea that occurred to me that solves most of the problem and doesn't need any clever technical approach to authentication:
The bank employee says "I'm going to terminate this call. Please call back on the bank's official number (which you can get from the website rather than taking my word for it). Then enter the following sequence of digits / direct-dial code to get back to me and we can continue this conversation."
Then the customer can reconnect straight to the person who called them, without having to queue or navigate phone menus or bots; but the customer can be confident they're talking to a real bank employee, and can happily do a one-sided authentication to authenticate themselves to the bank.
But, again, how does a random individual who's not a bank executive go about getting something like that adopted?
The fundamental issue here is that it's easy to spoof phone numbers. I can call you from a Bank of America phone number, but you can't be sure it's actually Bank of America calling. This is the problem that SSL solves for websites. So, it should be pretty easy to piggyback off that existing solution to make sure the phone call you get is actually from Bank of America. When you get a phone call, submit some code at https://bankofamerica.com, and then have the service rep read it back to you. I'm sure there are lots of finicky implementation details, but I don't see why that shouldn't work in principle. As for whether or not that approach would ever actually catch on...
Having worked done some level of outward facing admin for a business before:
As long as one boomer/gen X with more lead in their hippocampus than a pencil still lives to gormlessly stare at you when asked to do a simple task they didn't learn before graduating highschool, there can be no solution to any problem. All problems must remain unsolved.
It's mainly boomers, but I've never successfully trained a Gen-Xer,
when they receive an email from some institution saying that said institution needs confirmation of a large charge/ login change/ fraud verification,
To not immediately click the link and put in all their PID.
They either come in knowing it's a bad idea or will die having 30000 credit cards taken out in their name by dudes in Macedonia/ get our entire client database and accounts receivable ransomeware'd, and end up having to offer tribute because the boss (late gen x) failed to pay the bill for our offsite backup. Oops!
Speaking as an older member of Gen X, my formative years started in the pre-commercial internet and crossed into the commercial-but-the-scammers-haven't-infested-the-place internet.
It wasn't difficult for me to transition to the new order, but I've always been more security-conscious than most. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of my colleagues just internalized the internet as a friendly safe space for nerds where you don't have to always be on guard.
It's a fairly standard feature in other countries to use the bank's app to authenticate a caller, although not sure how helpful pointing that out would be in that sort of conversation.
It has to make more back in saved fraud costs than the cost of rolling out the IT and telephone call script changes across the entire bank system.
Inside large banks there are people whose full time job it is to reduce fraud losses, people whose full time job it is to reduce costs, and some levels above them people whose full time job it is to decide how much to spend on one side to save on the other.
Since there are many ways to apply technology to solve this, I expect the real reason the status quo persists isn't lack of ideas; it's people doing the cost/benefit calculation and deciding it's not worth it yet.
I'd guess that it's next to hopeless. My bank has *never* called me. Assuming my experience is representative, as a percentage of interactions, bank-initiated phone calls are probably small. So what do you accomplish by authenticating them first? Concerned customers will save some time by not having to hang up and call back. Everyone else will just be mildly irritated and maybe confused. Scammers will still fool people, because by the time old fashioned phone calls have gone out of fashion all together, a majority of folks probably *still* won't realize that legitimate banking institutions always go through the authentication rigamarole.
Some or all of: giving details like name, address, DoB; giving pre-agreed passcodes (or a subset of digits/characters from them); naming a recurring payment that comes out of the account (like a mortgage) and roughly how much it is.
In Scandinavia at least, there are Bank ID apps for this kind of purpose. The bank sends a signal/message to the app and the user types in a code to prove his/her identity.
Is the Far Out Initiative still active? They no longer respond to emails, and their website hasn’t been updated. As far as I can tell, it seems the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes are not actually responsible for Cameron’s condition. It appears the initiative was based on an assumption that has since been disproven.
I'd like to do a little survey and ask people to rank the years 2015, 2019 and 2023 from most to least woke, in your overall perception. Please provide a ranking and a brief justification, i.e. what features were present or absent in each year relative to the others and why are these features the most important or salient parts of wokeness? Note that these are three individual years, so I'm looking for answers like "2019, 2023, 2015, based on number of people cancelled" or "2015, 2023, 2019, based on how much/little organised public opposition to wokeness there was" or whatever you think the situation was.
I'm asking because the question of whether Trump stops or enables wokeness comes up nearly every time he's discussed, with opinion seemingly split on whether it got worse or slightly better during his presidency, and vice versa when he left office, and getting some clarity on this factual question is a first step to understanding each other.
I'm using the third year of each presidency to give enough time for trends to manifest and policies to take effect, while excluding the election year and its associated bipartisan turmoil. Please interpret "woke" in the spirit of the question and don't rules-lawyer the definition or say you don't know what it means. And please don't respond to say that actually governments have no control over anything and every cultural trend is entirely predetermined by the march of history etc (an argument I've really heard enough times) without at least giving me a ranking anyway.
Thanks.
EDIT: I noticed using "worse" and "better" is a non-neutral framing, so feel free to interpret "better" as either "more woke" or "less woke" depending on your preference (or "golden mean of woke" etc etc). This is supposed to be a factual question.
Honestly, and I seem to be the only one, I would put 2015 at the top. Obviously it hadn't spread that far across society by that point, but what was terrifying about that time was how there was almost no pushback or opposition at all to wokeness in the places it was manifesting. Universities, media, many online spaces and many artistic spaces (and especially the overlap of the latter two) had basically everyone, including people with a history of support for free speech and reason, just jettisoning their principles overnight and whole-heartedly embracing the fasionable new insanity, and enthusiastically ganging up on anyone who in any way questioned embracing it. It was also rapidly gaining political traction at the highest levels, with Hillary Clinton directly adopting large parts of it in her campaign. And the whole ideology couldn't even be *named* yet, because its proponents (which at this point, was everyone, who wasn't already on the right) refused to accept any name or description other than "basic decency". Unprecedented abondonment of the most basic liberal norms, pushed with the zeal and total lack of nuance of the fanatical lynch mob, suddenly rising in many different places at once, as people from all backgrounds raced to sell their principles and their soul to this new movement cult, and any questioning was met, if not with immediate ostracism, then with "this what we've always been doing, this is just basic decency, we have always been at war with Eurasia". Absolutely terrifying, in every possible way, and no other time compares.
I strongly believe, though I can't prove it, that if Clinton had won it would have rapidly taken over all of society with barely a murmur. Instead of remaining a topic of intense debate, and enormous criticism from whole swathes of different people and demographics. At the very least, I think it's clear that in no other year of human history before or since could a presidential candidate utter the sentence "if we broke up the banks, would that end racism and sexism?" with a straight face.
Compared to that, 2019 and 2023 seem mostly tied to me. I think it was at its loudest in 2019, but that doesn't mean most powerful: there was also plenty of loud pushback by then. And while there were probably more cancellations in 2019 than in 2023, I think the self-censorship caused by fear of cancellation was far broader in 2023, possibly by a far greater magnitude than the reduction in actual cancellations, though I'm not sure. And how could we ever know?
So my ranking is 2015>>2019/2023, with *maybe* 2019 slightly higher if I had to choose.
Thanks for all the responses, and I'm still thinking about how to reconcile these very different impressions.
2019 highest in public perception. Torn between rating 2015 equivalent to 2023 with caveats, or 2023 as highest overall.
2019 was near-peak TDS-wokeness, lots of kindling around to spark in 2020.
For 2015 and 2023 being equivalent: I think *new* public expressions of wokeness are lower now, but that's partially due to market saturation and partially due to much of corporate wokeness being a ZIRP. It was still fresh in 2015 so one's memory of it has more emotional impact; now it's basically background friction.
For 2023 being higher/highest, it's entrenched in many important places, you've got the better part of a generation stewed in it, and it will be an Overturning Roe level legal slog to keep slapping Harvard et al down, especially when Roberts will keep writing them loopholes.
The mandatory DEI training I just had to sit through yesterday was much more annoying and intrusive than in any previous year. So I'm thinking that while the forces *driving* excessive wokeness may have peaked, it's built up too much momentum to stop and nobody is interested in seriously pushing back.
The metric I use here is institutional penetration, and measure that as the probability an institution is doing a woke think that is not in the best interest of its primary stake holders.
I agree with many that various woke ideas have peaked and are less popular now but there is a momentum to this institutional penetration. They might be doing less absurd things, but more institutions are doing those things seemingly unaware their customers, users employees or whatever mostly hate it.
For me, wokism has really been going full-bore since circa 2008, which is when I first found it was no longer acceptable in polite liberal spaces to point out that a transsexual man is *clearly* still a man and not a woman, address him as such and talk about him as such, people started gabbling about "sex confirmation surgery" and similar weird anti-real euphemisms, etc.
This is an actual heliocentrism/Scopes Monkey Trial moment for the left. As long as stating obvious falsehood is considered obligatory and even enforced by law, we'll still be at peak woke. The rest, which race hucksters have the license to print free money today and so on, that's just quibbling at the margins.
Many Thanks! I'll be very interested in the responses, and your conclusion, and what happens over this coming Presidential term.
My memory isn't good enough to answer your question, unfortunately. I tend to remember a handful of specific incidents, but not enough to form a solid comparison across the three years. I remember e.g the incident where a howling Twitter mob cost Justine Sacco her job over one joke in poor taste in December 2013, so I tend to think of her as "victim 0" in the plague of cancel culture.
2014 was a local peak (Ferguson), it dropped off, but accelerated after Trump from 2016 into 2020 - that crazy summer. The election of Biden calmed it down again and the recent loss of ethnic voters might mean it’s done.
In order from most woke to least, imo -> 2019 >>> 2023 > 2015
I first noticed wokeness, as a way of thinking distinct from standard liberalism, in 2014. That's not to say wokeness started in 2014, just that this was the first year I personally encountered it. For me, the shift from liberalism to wokeness largely comes down to free speech. Before 2014, most liberals I knew were consistently pro-free speech, arguably moreso than conservatives. Starting in 2014, I noticed a shift here, with some on "the left" (broadly speaking) showing eagerness and desire to censor or drown out opinions they didn't like. I noticed this on social media and various pop culture sites.
So in 2015, wokeness was still in an early "feeling out" stage, at least in the social circles I frequented. It did get a boost from the Obergefell ruling and the rise of Caitlyn Jenner. But I still felt comfortable voicing opinions to the right of AOC when talking to friends, online friends, and family members.
By 2019, that comfort had greatly declined. I self-censored more, and I gradually found the mainstream media more and more unbearable to watch/read. The woke way of thinking seemed very dominant.
Wokeness hit its (current?) peak with the killing of George Floyd and the immediate aftermath of it, in 2020.
Here in 2023, things have improved a fair bit, in my opinion. Some prominent comedians have skewered wokeness in recent years, like Dave Chappelle and Bill Maher. They have had some impact at least. Substack has had a good impact as well. Credit to the owner of this blog, Scott Alexander, for his highly effective critiques of some aspects of wokeness, including egregious ones coming from The Atlantic. Freddie DeBoer sometimes took on wokeness in general, and particularly on the concepts of cultural appropriation and "punching down". I think Freddie did great on both specific points, and I get a sense the concept of cultural appropriation is thankfully starting to die some. Or at least moderate - I have a far left woke friend who now says that they only care about appropriation when people financially profit off of it, which would at least mean people get less grief for wearing certain costumes at Halloween or cooking certain foreign dishes for their own pleasure.
Still, while things are better, there is a residual heaviness to our culture that is greater than what was there in 2015, imo. I think people self-censor more now than they did in 2015. Echo chambers have in fact grown harsher in some places, like huge chunks of Reddit. Western-made video games might be more woke now than ever before, but the impact of this is lessened by Asian-made video games being largely non-woke and often very popular world-wide. While the reach of wokeness is probably less great now than it was in 2019, I also get the sense that it's deeply entrenched in certain spheres of great cultural importance.
Did Trump cause or exacerbate wokeness? He certainly did not cause it, as wokeness pre-dates his first election campaign. His 2016 win probably did exacerbate it some. Is his 2024 win exacerbating it now? Thankfully, I have yet to see much evidence of that, at least in my own life. My mom hates Trump, but her politics are a bit unusual - she's socially conservative, fiscally liberal. I've kept my mixed feelings on Trump mostly hidden from her. She vented to me the morning after he won, and I found specific points where I could agree with her. She hasn't mentioned Trump to me since, thankfully, as I don't like being dishonest with her, even if I do so in a way that's not voicing falsehoods.
I think I agree with this, except I don't like to talk about "wokeness" without defining it, as much of the Right defines woke as something like... "Left". I think I encountered the woke―the real ones, the ones who identified themselves as "woke"―on Medium around 2015, certainly before Trump. What they meant was that they "woke up" to the systematic and structural racism in society. Just how were they sure of their interpretation of reality? I guess it's the same way partisans reach any conclusion: that way of thinking appealed to them. Maybe they were right in some ways, but where they went off the rails politically, I think, was treating "privilege" as bad instead of good (like, shouldn't we want everybody to have privileges?) They complained about white people for not walking on eggshells in just the right way, seemingly disdainful of their lack of overt appreciation for *not* being systemically-discriminated-against, which I assume led to "cancel culture" where people Need To Be Fired if they say something that could be considered offensive. All this seems like it grew from the idea of "microaggressions"―of the supposed right not to hear anything that personally offends you. I guess at first the idea was to convince others of this Truth they had learned, not appreciating that actually they couldn't convince most people, and that their approach to politics was toxic to their own brand.
It's a shame because the idea of free speech I encountered as a youth was more reasonable than today's idea. People would talk about things like "is it okay to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre, possibly causing a stampede" (no, and were people really sophisticated enough to visualize a world where fires are common enough that yelling fire causes a stampede?). There were moderation systems that hid bad comments by deleting the vowels, or emphasized the good stuff so you'd have to click something to see anything but the "best". People knew the First Amendment restricted government, not private, censorship. There was a norm to avoid censorship, but also a norm for reasonable moderation.
IMO there was a huge gaping hole in the discussion of free speech and moderation: as today, it wasn't considered all that important whether the things people said were true or false, or whether evidence and sources were given. Then as now, people across the political spectrum mistakenly thought they could tell which claims were fact/fiction just by hearing them, so they didn't need any protection from misinformation unless, of course, they immediately knew or suspected it was misinformation because it Sounded False when they heard it. "Alternative facts" wasn't a mainstream term yet―partly because Kellyanne Conway hadn't said it yet, but also because people were sorted nicely into bubbles, and it took Team Trump to introduce everyone to the "alternative facts". Before that, only enough "alternative facts" made the rounds to make people say "You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts."
When I hear the Right demanding Free Speech today, well... we have people who love Russia, the land where people held up blank signs in protest until even this was worthy of arrest, talking about Free Speech. Folks like that will allude to mythical rights like the right not to be censored by private companies, the right to spread lies, the right to be rude and obnoxious, the right to be picked by the Algorithm aka fairness doctrine 2.0, or even the right not to be criticized a.k.a. "free speech for me, not for thee". So I want the old free speech talk back.
"Maybe they were right in some ways, but where they went off the rails politically, I think, was treating "privilege" as bad instead of good."
Yes, you're likely correct there. It's *good* to not have to walk on egg-shells. Politeness and civility in a general sense are good, but that's different from expecting people to self-censor on any controversial opinion.
And I agree that a key factor with speech is how truthful it is. Some opinions and viewpoints are impossible to prove or disprove, but others are essentially confirmed by facts and some others are essentially wrong based on facts. The truth should be an absolute defense. If you can provide clear evidence backing up your opinion, then it should not be censored.
Still, slander and libel are real. I think Great Britain takes the concept of "incitement to violence" too far, but I think they're more correct on slander and libel than the US is. The standard for a statement being considered slander and libel in the US is quite high, probably too high, probably playing a role in some people being anti-free speech in order to combat statements that could reasonably be considered slander and libel. Some statements which are considered hate speech could reasonably be challenged simply for being slander or libel. I think more focus should be put on evaluating speech on the basis of how accurate/inaccurate it is.
If a statement is offensive to some, but is nonetheless true, well it's the truth. That's the most important thing. If a statement is offensive to some, and is a lie, well that might be libel or slander. It's fine to oppose that strongly.
Yup. However, we don't have good ways to clearly tell truth from falsehood. Everybody seems to think we do, but then people do not have good explanations for why ~49% of people believe P and ~51% believe not-P for so many political claims P ― and the generative AI disinformation shitstorm hasn't even started yet. I want a project to address this, e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fNKmP2bq7NuSLpCzD/let-s-make-the-truth-easier-to-find
I think "wokism" needs to be acknowledged as a bunch of overlapping trends for this to make sense. Some bits peaked five years ago, some are peaking now, others are still on an upwards trend. Some (like "xe/xim" gender exotica) will go away and everyone will deny that they were ever really a thing, while other things we'll be stuck with forever. If you want an example of something that is still trending upwards then I'd say the whole "land acknowledgement" thing.
Which is darkly funny, since the whole land acknowledgement thing might be woke politics at its most cynical/performative. I mean, it's not like anybody who voices such acknowledgement is even vaguely considering *giving the land back.* Do such land acknowledgements come with suggestions for reparations or even monetary donations to the victims of colonization? This is a sincere question, by the way. I haven't heard of such a case, but I'd have more respect for land acknowledgements if I'd heard of even one example of them being tied to some practical form of help/consideration.
Here in Australia we're further down this particular path and honestly yes, I do think that it's intended as a stalking horse for future demands of restitution from the descendants of those who were allegedly wronged rather than as a purely empty gesture.
It feels like the US left has shifted toward economic populism and away from identity recently- you see a lot fewer accusations of racism and misogyny and much more intense hatred of wealthy people.
Between 2015 and 2019, it's hard to say. I think racial politics was ratcheting up in intensity at the time among normal people, though I feel like some of the moral panics associated with "wokism" may have already been declining in popularity among intellectuals by then.
I'm not sure Trump influenced that rise and fall much in either direction. I think what he inspired on the left was mostly just very intense anti-Trumpism, and his attacks on leftist ideology were mostly met on the left with eye-rolls rather than backlash or retrenchment.
By "recently", do you mean less than month ago, since after the election? Because until then, they were definitely still all in on the racism, sexism, etc.
I don't remember the exact years, so I'm grouping the surrounding years together.
I would say 2019, then 2015, then 2023. 2015 was the big kickoff of the Trans movement, which I consider the birth of 'woke', and with the President issuing orders to side with them it really encouraged them to swing for the fences on their demands.
Then Trump got in and replaced Obama's blank check policy with anti-everything, and the movement gathered steam by telling themselves they were facing an existential threat. We get ever more radical demands for conformity, and the eventual 2020 riots.
2023 I'm not actually sure about, it might just be I stopped paying attention. But I feel like what happened is Trump left office, and without this massive external threat pressing everyone together they were left to judge the stances on their own merits, and have been losing support since.
Many Thanks! It included physical harassment of Jewish students and faculty. I think it was mostly verbal harassment of Jews, though that takes its toll too.
There was also the surreal element of "Queers for Palestine". Do they have _any_ idea of how anti-LGBTQ the culture they are supporting is??
Wokeness peaked the night the George Floyd protests turned into riots in June 2020.
Wokeness certainly got more entrenched under Trump, but it had clearly begun to slow down by the start of 2020, i.e. the 2nd derivative was negative. When that point of inflection was, I don't know exactly. Sometime after the 2018 midterms but before the start of COVID.
But it's important to remember that when a social movement has a critical mass, as wokeness certainly did by 2017 (due to the tumblr-ification of Twitter, and consequentially, the journalist/politico class), it's gonna take a while to slow down the speeding train.
For me it feels like 2019 > 2015 >>> 2023 based on my lived experience in liberal/center circles at those times. Explanations beyond this kind of feel like post-rationalization, but if I must:
2019 - BLM and Me too movements were reaching their apexes around this point. Trump victory had polarized a lot of liberal people away from the center on social issues.
2023 - anti wokeness had become pretty mainstream, musk had bought twitter, supreme court had overturned affirmative action, Desantis was extremely popular in Florida on a platform of anti-wokeness primarily and was the most likely person other than trump to be the republican nominee.
I live and work deep in the heart of blue America and would concur with your rankings. In my professional circles 2018/2019 was when woke-ism really took center stage (literally, with people like Robin DiAngelo appearing as speakers at professional conferences).
Then came summer 2020 which put it in the headlines. By 2022 though, and even moreso 2023, those of us not bought in to the woke tantrum were no longer feeling like a doomed minority within the broader "blue" tent. I've noticed that even signaling as trivial as listing personal pronouns has died way back.
I don't work in academia which still appears to be woke-ism's core redoubt. But even there, my wife's professional experiences suggest at least a stalling post-2020.
2015 I wasn't old enough to know. 2019 and 2023 seem tied to me. If you had to ask me, the big outlier was 2020 and (to a lesser extent) 2021, for hopefully obvious reasons.
I think whether wokeness will decline or rise between now and 2028 is not so much about Trump as about social/news trends in general. After all, 2020!Trump had no way of foreseeing George Floyd and 2012!Obama had no way of foreseeing Trayvon Martin either.
Workaround for page formatting bug: Using Firefox on a laptop, several replies I have attempted overlay the following post, and the "Post" button is no longer operational.
I have found this can be worked around by posting a single-word dummy reply, then editing this and pasting one's actual reply!
The other way to do it is to press tab until the "Reply" button is highlighted, then press Enter. That works for me (also Firefox on a laptop). But yes, the interface has suddenly got a lot more annoying to interact with.
Same shit happens to me, and on firefox mobile tooltips are all clunky and off-center. It looks like the Substack team is not testing very well on Firefox.
Is everyone seeing the lines to the left of the comments (showing how many degrees nested the thread is) now gone, or is it only some browsers? If the former, please riot and revolt and make them change it back because this is unbelievably destructive and makes following long threads impossible. If the latter, I can perhaps just accept that I have a crappy or outdated browser.
1. This is the 5th anniversary (1 Dec 2019) of Patient Zero, a 55-year-old man from Wuhan, developing symptoms of a then-unknown respiratory virus. There are contradictory accounts of whether he ever had direct contact with the Huanan wet market, but he resided in the same district as the market. He showed up at the hospital displaying symptoms of an unusual pneumonia on or around 8 Dec. He reportedly survived his bout with the new disease, but by the end of the month, there were 41 patients hospitalized with the same symptoms. There may have been several earlier cases in November of that year, but there's no serologic evidence to confirm this.
2. On 28 Dec 2019, Dr. Lili Ren, a virologist at Union Medical College in Beijing, submitted a complete sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank, but she failed to include the proper annotations, and so it wasn't made public. It wasn't until 10 Jan 2020 that a sequence was available on GenBank & GISAID.
Initially, the virus was christened 2019-nCoV (short for "2019 Novel Coronavirus"). The name SARS-CoV-2 (short for "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2") was officially assigned by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) on February 11, 2020.
By January, the virus had spread far and wide from Wuhan. The first recorded case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed on 20 Jan 2020. A man in his mid-30s from Snohomish County, Washington, tested positive for the virus after returning from Wuhan, China. He sought medical attention on 19 Jan 2020, and was hospitalized with pneumonia.
Despite the warnings of the National Health Commission of China that the virus was highly transmissible and the evidence showed that the virus was spreading via a respiratory vector, the WHO and CDC dismissed that idea since the scientific consensus at the time was that contagious diseases (with the exception of TB) couldn't spread easily via respiratory droplets (and they ignored several aerosol experts who warned them that it could spread via aerosols). So, fomites were thought to be its primary transmission mechanism. Thus the emphasis on handwashing and not touching one's face. The fomite theory was disproven in a few months, but it would be a couple of more years before the WHO or the CDC would admit that SARS-CoV-2's vector of transmission was primarily through respiratory aerosols.
3. The official death count of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic over the first four years was ~7 million. However, excess deaths worldwide suggest that COVID cases and deaths were undercounted and that actual deaths were between 19 and 36 million. Most of those deaths happened in the first two years of the pandemic. Vaccines and convalescent immunity have turned SARS-CoV-2 into an endemic disease. COVID is now killing fewer people than Malaria is—and, in the US, it's dropped to 14th place on the CDC's top 15 causes of death.
4. Most of the current indicators suggest that COVID-19 is on hiatus in the US. Wastewater numbers, ED visits, hospitalizations, and deaths are all at their usual interwave lows, and deaths are the lowest they've been since March of 2020. However, Biofire's proprietary surveillance system indicates a slight upward incline in SARS2 positivity in the past two weeks. This may be an indicator of a new wave revving up.
5. The last data we have from the CDC is 16 Nov. As a percentage of emergency department visits, influenza probably surpassed COVID last week. RSV is on the upward trend, too. Biofire's Syndromic Trends application tells a somewhat different story. Of the top 6 respiratory viruses, RSV is on a steep upward curve. And Rhinoviruses are surging. And HCov OC43 has shown a steep increase, too. I don't know how reliable the Biofire data is — nor how much these trends will affect ED visits — but their past SARS2 tracking has reflected actual case trends.
6. In A(H5) news: although there have been no known human cases of bird flu due to drinking raw milk (or pasteurized milk, for that matter), H5N1 was detected in a raw milk producer's products. CA banned their distribution.
Canadian health officials haven't been able to trace the source of the A(H5) virus that infected that BC child (who has been in critical care for the past 3 weeks). The sequence is closest to an A(H5) clade found in geese, though.
And a California child contracted A(H5). Symptoms were mild, though. The CDC doesn't say whether this was contracted from birds or farm animals (or milk). But I think this is the 1st non-dairy worker to catch A(H5) in US this year (?).
Michael Lewis wrote a book called The Premonition about people scattered around the US who early on figured out crucial stuff, and tried hard to make their knowledge and services available to the public & to the government, and mostly failed. All those things that were eventually figured out? (How it's transmitted -- the fact we clearly had community transmission early on -- how rapidly it was likely to spread -- how to do rapid tests -- how to reduce contagion . . .). There were people who had figured out that stuff by 3 mos in. It's a very illuminating book, also a fun read.
Many alumni of MATS have write-ups of research agendas that have promise. I'm potentially conflicted as I run a nonprofit that provides many of them with fiscal support, but the continued grants from places like Open Phil and the Survival and Flourishing Fund seem reasonable evidence indicating that there is useful work being done.
> What I have not seen is a good argument that the problem is tractable, or that previous alignment efforts have been directionally helpful.
I'll second Alex Z - I'm pretty plugged in here, and essentially nobody who believes the problem is important believes it's tractable at the moment.
On directionally helpful, it depends what things you're thinking of. MIRI? Yud has done more than probably anyone else in the world to articulate the problem and driven awareness in a lot of SV elites and Big 3 employees.
There are a number of advancements that have given people some hope - polysemanticity, lie detection, Golden Gate Claude, etc. But I don't think anyone believes these have really solved it, or even made the problem materially more tractable. They are more brief bright spots that indicate a solution might exist if we keep working hard at it and get lucky.
Has Yud been directionally helpful? Running around telling everyone something is -super powerful- and -super dangerous- and -the first one to get it will win the war- led to rapid development of and a subsequent arms race for more nuclear weapons. And we know that similar dynamics were at play around the founding of OpenAI, Anthropic, and the current AI boom. On the other side of the ledger, is there any evidence Yud contributed meaningfully to AI safety?
Is there anyone who thinks that it is serious and neglected, but also thinks that it is tractable or that we've made useful progress? MIRI seems to no longer think that it is tractable on short enough time scales to matter without significant government intervention to slow down AI development (https://intelligence.org/2024/01/04/miri-2024-mission-and-strategy-update/).
Can anyone recommend a good database/data source for comparing permitting latencies for various permit-required activities in different jurisdictions? I.e. if you want a permit to do X in county/state/country Y, what's the average, std dev, 90/95 percentile time from when you file your application to when the permit issues? Bonus points if the data also include number of permit applications per year, of each type, in each jurisdiction. Big bonus points if there are also estimates of the economic cost of delay across various cases.
Motivation: thinking about advocacy around permitting speedups as a pro-progress cause, wondering how much of the baseline "state of the world" data necessary for data-driven proposals and priorities has been collected already.
I think collecting this data would be a wonderful idea. You may want to contact Alec Stapp on Twitter since he talks about regulatory delays and could ask his audience if they know of any data source.
I wonder if any real estate developer trade groups have data on this. They might be able to help you understand the space better.
Do you need it for the whole country? Couldn’t you make a disproportionate impact by just focusing on the 20 largest cities? Presumably this data is public and I know for NYC it’s all available if you search for Buildings Information System.
I previously wrote a script to downloaded data on all SF crime in the past 30 days, so doing this sort of thing shouldn't be super difficult.
If there was a non-profit focusing on this, I’d donate to it.
You may already be familiar with him, but if anyone knows a good database on this it would be x.com/ThomasHochman. Just @ him directly and he will probably respond.
For those who don't think that Biden's pardon of his son for all crimes, including not paying millions of dollars in taxes, is deeply corrupt, could you explain what sort of standards you think would be reasonable to apply moving forward?
Hunter should have been punished for being a fuck up, but the Republican House Committees went too far subpoenaing him and the Bidens and lying about the evidence they found, but the blanket pardon goes too far to fix this. Even worse, Hunter is a loser and is not relevant to Democrat or anti Republican political goals. Biden should instead pardon people that are prosecuting Trump or who have been the target of his military tribunal threats, since this would actually contribute to actionable political gains.
Funnily enough, the very MAGA Americans I know were weirdly pro-Biden about this move. Why be freshly outraged when the corruption you know is there, turns out to be there? Their main takeaway was, "Well, I'd do the same for my boy," and, "Huh, guess the old man was human after all."
All that plus 4 years of random laws, never before applied in such ways as now, being used to put opposition into jail. Guess how sympathetic that makes people to attempts to put someone in jail in a case like that, even if it's someone adjacent to the current regime and thrown by it under the bus.
Not what you asked, but I'm always curious why people ask questions like this. I basically read it as "For people who I obviously disagree with, how do you respond to what I feel like is the most challenging way to defend your position? Fight me."
Like, why not just ask, "What do you think about the Hunter Biden pardon and why? What general principles do you think work for this and similar situations involving the other political party?
(Personally I was very disappointed in the pardon, as a Biden/Harris voter. Not surprised, but disappointed.)
I am not the best version of myself in this moment. I am a cynical voter who got tricked by a politician into believing them when they said explicitly, over and over, they would not do a thing I thought was bad when asking me to vote for who they wanted me to. I agree your formulation would have been better.
Yeah, that's understandable. Despite what people often think, politicians usually don't outright lie in their political promises, and this was a particularly brazen and immediate one.
1. Don't let anyone hand out jail sentences for victimless crimes. In cases where such sentences are likely or mandated, don't get upset if someone pardons the perpetrator. (In particular, don't allow IRS to ruin anyone's life after the money owed has already been paid.)
2. Don't elect as president anyone who often doesn't know where he is or can't produce a coherent sentence. If someone like that ends up president, don't be surprised if his words don't match his actions.
EDIT: I do think the Biden family is deeply corrupt, but I'm more inclined to get upset at other things they did - such as shaking down foreign entities for money in exchange for favors. The pardon incident, especially by comparison with that, seems like a non-issue.
"1. Don't let anyone hand out jail sentences for victimless crimes."
So, if I decide to walk around with an unregistered loaded machine gun under my trenchcoat, and sell machine guns out of the trunk of my car to anyone who asks, no questions asked, I can't be locked up until *after* someone gets shot?
Good to know, though I'll want to double-check that with an actual lawyer first.
But Hunter Biden has plead guilty and is in fact guilty of a blatant violation of federal gun-control laws. It's a law that we *normally* plead out without jail time in cases like his; I think that's a good policy and it's one I would like to see actually codified in the law rather than left to prosecutorial discretion. But do you really want to be arguing for the policy that we don't enforce any gun control laws until there's been a shooting?
Thank you for the extreme example. I agree that maybe I should have been more careful with the wording. You will notice that the gun charges in this case don't look like your example at all, and, although the situation was not as safe as we'd like, it seems a lot less likely to cause someone harm (and is probably something that's been done by a lot of people who had neither been caught nor harmed anyone).
I said nothing about not enforcing laws, and I think we agree on how we think this should be enforced - without jail time (under normal circumstances). But if various sources aren't lying, he was facing 25 years in the gun case, and even if that wasn't likely to happen, I can't blame his father for worrying that it might and taking the easy way out.
For me, this was deeply in "I used to be appalled, now I try to be amused" territory.
In my personal case, I'd had a discussion with a friend about pardons a few weeks before the election, and I'd noted that Joe Biden hadn't pardoned his son, to which my friend replied "_Yet_". I duly congratulated him on his prediction when the news came out.
After all of the politically motivated prosecutions of Trump and his political allies, I literally did laugh out loud at the news.
I'm not happy about corrupt politicians, but we've survived Mayor Daley (Sr.), Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, and a _long_ list of others.
If somebody is strongly against Biden pardoning his son, then they should strongly consider advocating for the removal of Presidential pardons.
I would encourage people to put themselves into Biden's shoes - your son, who you presumably love as your son, is in legal hot waters for... let's just say something less serious than murder of sexually assaulting a child. You have the power to easily and quickly pardon him, ending this cloud of legal concern. What half-decent father wouldn't do so?
I think it's expecting too much of people in general to not use this immense power - the power of the Presidential pardon - to bail out close family members and friends. Is doing so corrupt? Maybe, probably. Is it also deeply human? YES. If I was in Joe Biden's position, I'd rather be thought a corrupt politician than be thought an heartless father, and my conscience would eat me alive if I allowed my son to pay a serious penalty for a low/mid-level crime, when I had the ability to easily save him.
Okay. Suppose Hunter *had* murdered someone or sexually assaulted a child. Do you think Biden would not have pardoned him then?
He said he would never pardon such a grave offence? Well, he already lied about pardoning Hunter.
What person would forgive that kind of crime? Why, the loving father who cherishes his kin rather than society, as we've been lectured by others about doing the same.
But it's a grave crime! Yes, and? Ordinary people who cheat on their taxes and lie to buy guns don't get the benefit of having well-connected family members who can wipe any prospect of jail time away. We've already seen established the principle of "rules are for the little people", now it's just a matter of degree.
Remember the hammering on about 34 FELONIES? Yeah, this makes it tougher to take seriously.
Hunter is not a dumb 17 year old who made a stupid mistake that has the potential to wreck his life, so let's be compassionate here. He's 54 year old soon to be grandfather who has been making dumb, life-wrecking mistakes for decades, and Daddy makes the consequences all go away. That's not love of any kind, that's ruining the guy. How about if Joe used his influence to make sure Hunter only gets the purest coke and guaranteed STI free hookers for the Internet videos? Would that be paternal love and taking care of his son? Sometimes punishment *is* the kinder thing.
> Okay. Suppose Hunter *had* murdered someone or sexually assaulted a child. Do you think Biden would not have pardoned him then?
You don't have to speculate. The pardon is for anything he may have ever done. If he has murdered someone, the pardon covers that. If he's murdered 400 people, the pardon covers that too. (Except that murder generally isn't a federal crime.)
I don't have a problem with Biden pardoning his son. It's corrupt, but this is the kind of corruption that it's better to have than not to have.
But I do have something of a problem with pardons, in general, that pardon unknown behavior. I feel that if you're going to pardon something, you should need to know what it is.
I get what you're saying. It is hypocritical for someone to talk a lot about the 34 FELONIES while giving the Bidens a pass. And you're right that Joe has enabled a lot of bad behavior by Hunter, and that's not really what a good father should do.
My point is that Presidential pardons are never going to be perfect, at least not without some sort of actual explicit limiting mechanism. As is, we just count on the President to be principled enough to not pardon people that shouldn't be pardoned. Even putting aside corruption (i.e. a President getting bribed to give a pardon), people are just too human to not pardon a close loved one, even if they shouldn't be getting a pardon.
So either take the good with the bad, try to limit the pardon, or get rid of it entirely.
By the sounds of it, there probably should be some limits on the pardon. At the very least "No, you can't pardon family members".
I'm not surprised Joe did this, as a large part of the problem is that he loves Hunter too much. All the stuff about "They only went after him because he's my son" is true, in part. But he'd be saying the same thing if Hunter *had* committed a murder - "he was provoked, it was self-defence, they're only pushing this because he's my son".
Like I said, I'm not surprised Joe said one thing and did another, as I think some of it is definitely "fuck you, how do you like this mess I left you?" to the party big-wigs that shoved him out the door. But it does mean that the Democrats haven't a leg to stand on when they engage in finger-wagging about morality. It won't stop them, of course, but maybe it'll be blatant enough that some people will stop blindly believing every lump of propaganda dropped by them.
Trump is uniquely corrupt? Nah pal, they're all corrupt. It's Chinatown, Jake.
This is a form of nepotism. Nepotism is not a bad thing in all cases, but it is in this one. If a public official has the moral obligation to pardon those close to him (or her) regardless of guilt, then that gives license to those close to the official to commit crimes up to that line in the sand.
The higher the office, the more an official must put the public good above personal betterment, including of loved ones. What Biden did was wrong, but legal.
1. He purchased a gun and failed to admit he was a drug user. I'm sure that has never happened before in the history of US gun ownership. (continued...)
I define corrupt as 'abusing power granted to you by virtue of your elected office for personal gain, especially if done by deceit or outside the norm'
His sales pitch for a Biden-or-Harris second term / Trump alternative was that he would respect the law, and that he can be trusted not to be generally corrupt.
His son likely was paid millions of dollars for access to his father, which is fine, and then passed through to the rest of the family, which is also fine. And Biden promised over, and over, and over that he would not pardon his son for actions that did cross into criminality. And then as soon as the election was over when he is no longer politically accountable he showed everyone what those words were worth.
2. In 2018, he stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for the tax year 2015;willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 taxes *on time* despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes; failed to file his 2017 and 2018 tax returns on time; and when he did file them, they included false business deductions in order to reduce the very substantial tax liability he faced as of February 2020.
False business deductions in aid for felony were the crimes our soon-to-be-leader was convicted for. I'm outraged that the prosecutors requested his sentencing be put on hiatus until after his Presidency and that the judge allowed them to do this. Likewise, our future leader pardoned his father-in-law, who was convicted of similar tax crimes *plus* witness intimidation and is now getting a cushy ambassadorship to France.
Trump is a horrible human being. He shouldn't have done any of those things.
Joe Biden should also not have pardoned his son. It is both morally wrong to do so, and... I really hate how it makes Biden look just as corrupt as Trump.
I don't think there's really any comparison in magnitude or even kind, but giving the appearance you're just as bad as Trump is going to make future opposition to the corruption of the presidency enormously more difficult.
I really hated it when Clinton did the same sketchy as fuck things, BTW.
> Likewise, our future leader pardoned his father-in-law, who was convicted of similar tax crimes *plus* witness intimidation and is now getting a cushy ambassadorship to France.
Anyway, back to the pardoning of hunter Biden - right or wrong.
Had to look the guy up; he's not Trump's father-in-law, he's the father-in-law of Trump's daughter. And seemingly he did serve some time, which is more than Hunter did.
The revenge porn thing is weird, but whatever family drama is going on there can't be blamed on Trump. I did like the bit about "Previously, he was a major Democratic party donor" and that the tax crimes involved the Democratic party:
"On June 30, 2004, Kushner was fined $508,900 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to Democratic political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so. In 2005, following an investigation by the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, US Attorney Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with him, under which Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. The witness tampering charge arose from Kushner's retaliation against William Schulder, his sister Esther's husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators against Kushner."
Nobody can be throwing any stones, it's clear! And to tie in with the prison post, at least Kushner is willing to offer employment to former convicts:
"He has employed two fellow inmates with whom he became acquainted in prison."
But isn't the DOJ that Biden accuses of being politicized his DOJ? His stance of moral superiority over Trump was in large part based on his proclamations that he believes in the justice system and that Trump is undermining it by accusing it of being a weapon. And now he's doing the same, and it makes less sense because he's been in charge of it for the last four years.
I kind of think not paying millions of dollars in taxes is the kind of thing someone ought to be prosecuted for. Maybe the gun and drug charges are a bit over-the-top, and wouldn't have been prosecuted if Joe weren't President.
Well, the gun stuff does touch the party of gun control, but they do seem to have pivoted on that. Did anyone else find it a little... shall we say, weird?... when Harris suddenly started talking about her Glock?
(Does anyone here *believe* she has a Glock and regularly shoots it?)
"My background is in law enforcement" - give me a break, she was never a beat cop. Unless San Francisco/California is *very* different and lawyers go around packing heat and having shoot-outs in the court room! "Yeah, sorry I'm late for trial, Your Honour, but I had to bust a cap in some perp's ass after he tried to pull a drive-by on me and my homies in the prosecutor's office".
I think the reason nobody made a big deal out of "you think property is more valuable than life? you are bragging about being willing to kill disadvantaged minority people?" is part hypocrisy and part "yeah sure Kamala you got a gun and will shoot their asses (insert eyeroll)".
"After Donald Trump claimed during their presidential debate that she would "confiscate everybody's gun" if elected, Harris replied by reaffirming that she was a gun owner herself - like her running mate, Tim Walz.
"We’re not taking anyone’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff," she told Trump.
The following week, Harris added that she would be willing to use her gun if an intruder entered her home.
"If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot," she said during a livestreamed event with Oprah Winfrey."
Ahem. Speaking of Hunter and guns:
"Harris has also recently spoken in favour of more thorough background checks and so-called red-flag laws. These allow people to apply to a judge to confiscate another person's gun if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others."
So if Harris had won, Hunter would be facing jail time? 😁
Diane Feinstein famously had a snub-nosed .38, and she was arguably the most anti-gun politician in the Senate in her prime. So, yeah, I can easily believe Attorney General Kamala Harris had a Glock.
There's a long, long tradition of rich, powerful, politically connected liberals quietly keeping guns to protect themselves from the hoi polloi, while piously arguing that the hoi polloi should be disarmed (possibly allowing for an occasional .22 rifle or a double-barrel shotgun among the rural hoi polloi). I believe this was even somewhat true in the British Isles until fairly recently. The only silly part of the story is the one where anyone ever thought that Kamala Harris saying "I own a Glock!" would convince anyone anywhere in the gun-rights community that she would lift a finger to defend *their* right to keep and bear arms.
Well, I don't think it was "deeply corrupt" so I'll use it as a cop-out to allow myself to rant.
It was worse.
I voted for the fucker. And I reluctantly voted for his VP, because what? Trump? I need to be able to look in the mirror at least some of the time.
Well, turns out I still can't. Thank you for nothing President Biden, one small step for you, one giant step for the country, all toward the coveted Banana Republic status, and no, I don't mean a clothing chain out of SF. At least one side used to tell me "we need to trust our Judicial System, not like these crazy corrupt Republicans". Opps. "All politicians lie, but Trump is in a league of his own". Opps. "No one should be above the law, including President". Opps. Opps. Opps.
Nice republic you have here, but it could benefit from a helping of banana pudding, preferably in the face.
But look at the bright side: at least I now have one thing I agree with MAGA types on: Fuck Biden.
We're in the "lol, nothing matters" phase of American empire, I'm trying not to take anything personally.
Also I think it's perfectly reasonable as a partisan to be mad at the party organization that just massively lost an election, it doesn't make you a Republican any more than I'm a Yankees fan when I complain about my Mariners being terrible.
I think this is an overreaction. If you were to do a thorough examination of all the pardons granted by Trump and Biden, who do you think would come out looking worse?
Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 237 people while in office. Only 25 of those came from a recommendation by the Office of the Pardon Attorney. The rest had personal or political connections to Trump of some kind or were in position to get his attention. This included many people who worked for his campaign, health care executives who were convicted of Medicare fraud, and military officers convicted of war crimes (against the advice of the Department of Defense and military lawyers). The were hardly any Republicans in congress who said anything about these pardons.
Most of Biden's pardons have been for marijuana possession or as part of prisoner exchanges. As far as I can tell, this is the first pardon that had a personal connection to Biden and could be considered corrupt, yet this pardon is receiving more attention than any of Trump's. This is in part because many democratic lawmakers and liberal leaning news outlets like the New York Times have criticized him for it.
No, I again reject the whole premise. I'm not going to compare to this to Trump's pardons, or work into some kind of nuanced "well, if we look at it this way, with our eyes half-closed and the rose-tinted glasses firmly in place, we kind of can see that Biden isn't that much worse than Trump" thing. No. This sordid "I promised multiple times not to do this thing, but after some turkey on Thanksgiving, never mind" is firmly in the banana republic territory. And I reserve the right to be super-harsh on men with enormous power, especially the ones I voted for.
Last but not least - if Trump is now our morality yardstick we are truly and totally lost.
Keep this up and you might achieve what both sides call "enlightened centrism": the realization that each side's claims to moral superiority over the other are bullshit.
I kind of reject the whole premise. We can walk and chew and the same time, one can dis/agree with a politician and judge his/her morals separately. Morality doesn't have a side. Some people act more morally than others. Trump is at the bottom, and now Biden has joined him there. May they both rot.
I read something once about Biden, in whom I had taken no prior interest - that he was all about "we Bidens stick together" or at least, Biden men stick together. He is assertively clannish. And obviously Hunter Biden has never had a job in his life - so with the loss of the older son - who likely would have continued his political career, and if that hadn't proved successful, his legal practice - the family business consists entirely of Biden's electability combined with Hunter's willingness to boldly seek favors/payola. This is what Biden men do. This is how they entered and remain in wealthy circles.
So I would have been surprised had Biden not pardoned his son, and I don't think it means anything at all, nor should it have anything to teach us. The meaning of it is foregone, and it would be strange to be outraged by the tail end of a long story of corruption.
Neither better nor worse than any other pardons - it's inherently about making sure criminals don't get punished because you like them or owe them favors.
The whole thing is ridiculous and should be removed (I imagine the idea is that kings could do this and the president is a kind of temporary king?). Until that happens - i.e. most likely never - it will certainly keep getting used and abused.
The point of having a pardon is that our judicial system is not perfect and sometimes people get chewed up in the gears, so to speak. We understand that despite doing our best sometimes someone will get condemned to a punishment they don't deserve, or that is grossly disproportionate to the crime. Pardoning makes it possible to correct such an injustice even if the judges and juries failed to do so.
Of course that is pardoning as an ideal. I think it has value, but everyone also can see the potential for corruption. The main check on that is that pardons are public and executives are elected, so a corrupt pardon makes it less likely you'll be re-elected. Which is not a problem for Biden, of course, so it's a weak check.
There have been numerous cases where judges said something to the effect "I know this sentence is grossly unfair, but my hands are tied" in response to mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Of course we can say that the guidelines should be fixed so cases of injustice are righted. But politics can prevent even popular legislation from passing, let alone something that can easily be construed as being easy on crime. Sometimes having someone external to the machinations of the bureaucracy that created the problem is the only way it can be corrected.
It's entirely par for the course. I think every president I've been alive for has pardoned their friends on the way out. Trump pardoned a whole bunch of his cronies in 2020
The pardon power is ridiculous and needs to be seriously reformed.
None of that is the fault of anyone named Biden though, and Joe has not done anything here that fits my definition of "corrupt". Hypocritical, sure -- he frankly should never have publicly promised _not_ to do it. And since Hunter ended up paying all the taxes he was billed for, his continued prosecution would be only political.
If the IRS tells me I haven't paid any of the $10 million in taxes, and I'm going to jail for it, shall I then write a check for $10 million and say, "Oopsie"? Why wouldn't everyone just wait for the IRS to calculate their taxes and pay it when they get around to it?
In this case, probably all the taxes, penalties, and interest were covered by some other party than Hunter Biden.
Why should the IRS be so special, compared to other entities you owe money to? If you owe someone else money, they keep hitting you with penalties and perhaps ruining your credit history until you pay. If you don't pay, they will eventually take you to court, but once you pay the bill and the penalties, you're in the clear.
The IRS is currently behaving as a state-sponsored mafia. One example that I was hit with: if you are late with your tax returns, even if you don't owe any money but expect a refund, the IRS will order the HR of your employer to list you, a married person, as single for the purposes of tax deduction and explicitly forbid them to ever change it. (In a normal world, shouldn't that be some kind of illegal?) They will claim that it's possible to appeal it, but among the dozen or so items required for appeal there will be some they know you do not possess - the amounts of tax refunds for the years you haven't filed taxes for yet. Our tax preparer told me that the IRS did a lot of this; I don't know if they are still doing it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing something similar or worse.
Hunter Biden may be a scumbag, but that doesn't change the fact that the IRS is a terrible organization that shouldn't be allowed to mess with people's lives as much as it currently does.
Gosh, I wish *I* had a Fairy Godfather who'd pay ten million on my behalf! Scratch that, just let the money rest in my account and I'll make sure it gets to the Revenue Commissioners (eventually)!
"In an interview with House lawmakers and investigators last week, entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s financial benefactor, portrayed himself as someone who helped the younger Biden because he was moved by his struggles, not by a desire to help then-candidate Joe Biden win the presidency.
On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee released the transcript of Morris’ almost six-hour interview with the three committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into the president. The transcript provides the most detailed descriptions to date of how Morris met Hunter Biden, the more than $5 million in loans he gave him to cover expenses and pay his outstanding tax liabilities, as well as Morris' purchases of Hunter Biden’s art."
Is that part about his art real? I saw something elsewhere about him making art out of/with his own faeces, but I thought this was just, you know, online chatter and not real. Hunter really is An Artiste? 😁
Oh, it gets *better*. Fairy Godfather made the payments on a Porsche for Hunter!
"Morris said that he was first introduced to Hunter Biden in Brentwood, California, at a 2019 fundraiser for Biden's presidential campaign, held at the home of producer Lanette Phillips, who later asked through a mutual acquaintance if Morris would meet with Hunter Biden because he had some “entertainment-ish” issues, in his words. Morris began representing Hunter Biden after a five-hour conversation at the latter's home, and started loaning him money about six weeks later.
The loans were not made in the form of cash to Hunter Biden, but were largely direct payments to third parties. They included payments to the IRS for back taxes owed for the years 2016 through 2019, rent on a house, legal fees for other attorneys, payments to Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, child support and outstanding payments for a Porsche."
Well, of course Joe is going to pardon Hunter. Hunter has been a fuck-up all his life, but he's the only surviving child of his first marriage and I think the deaths around those family members have made Joe very close to, and protective of, Hunter.
Should he be pardoned? No, but it's understandable why. Joe shouldn't have declared "I will not pardon my son" but that was all political grandstanding to contrast with Trump's travails and accusations that he was favouring and enriching family members.
Does it contrast with the lawfare against Trump? Sure, but this is modern politics, baby. Hypocrisy is no longer a thing; it's okay if we do and bad if they do it, never mind which side is which.
It's clearly hypocritical, corrupt not so sure - the power to pardon is clear and unrestricted. And really, only a sociopath would not use whatever legal means were available to help their child get out of trouble.
Note that Hunter had apparently repaid the back taxes before the indictment- which doesn't excuse tax evasion, but it does make his inability to get a plea deal look suspiciously political.
Suppose we accept that both the tax and gun charges were examples of lawfare- using selective and unusually harsh enforcement of laws to reduce the Democrats' chances of winning- would that justify a pardon? I'm honestly not sure. One kind of corruption cancelling out another kind is still corruption and immoral in a deontological sense- though it seems like it could in principle be justified in a consequentialist sense.
Of course, what should count as unethical lawfare is very ambiguous. I think probably Tump's New York campaign finance conviction was an example of politically-motivated selective enforcement, while the conviction for lying to investigators about the classified documents probably wasn't. So, if we take the argument above as justification for Hunter's pardon, we'll also have to take it as justification if Trump uses corruption to get the NY charges dropped (I don't think he can pardon himself in that case), though I don't think it would apply if he pardoned himself for the federal charges.
There is also the precedent to think about. Trump misused the pardon to help people close to him pretty frequently, so that boat may have sailed. But this might still embolden Trump to take this form of corruption a step further, and probably makes a potential 2028 Democratic president more likely to also engage in it.
So, even if this pardon is mitigating the harm from another kind of corruption, it's another hammer-blow against our already cracking rule of law. I can't honestly blame the man on a personal level, but it's worrying.
> Trump misused the pardon to help people close to him pretty frequently, so that boat may have sailed.
That's always been the norm. The pardon episode of The West Wing was one of the better ones.
(1. The president announces to his staff that he wants to pardon some drug crimes, and they prepare a list. They also publicly announce that they're starting the process of pardoning a bunch of drug crimes.
2. He has them vet the list for anyone that might cast doubt on whether the pardons were cover for a political favor. They flag one guy, the son of major Democratic donors, and take him off the list.
3. The guy's mother hears about the pardon effort, and personally visits the president to beg for mercy.
4. The president sticks to his "convictions" and pardons everyone except that one guy.
Ah, "The West Wing", known for its unflinching commitment to portraying the reality of how politics happens. So the guy kills himself, huh? Luckily, it's only fiction and the writers could have had him emigrating to Sardinia and becoming an artisanal sheep grooming mogul had they wanted.
I'm tempted here to say "don't do the crime if you can't do the time". The president in that case was right to stick to his principles, and whatever the guilty person did was not on him. If he was likely to commit suicide rather than serve a jail sentence, then he would have done so in the episode where the president instead decided to issue a pardon for speeding offences and not drug crimes.
> The president in that case was right to stick to his principles
In the fictional case? His actual principles were to pardon that guy, because his idea was to pardon a class of crimes, not a list of political nobodies. Removing him and only him from the list of pardons was done for the sake of appearances.
> Ah, "The West Wing", known for its unflinching commitment to portraying the reality of how politics happens.
That _could_ be a fair criticism, but I presented this as an example of it "having always been the norm" for pardons to be used to help people close to the president, and I think it suffices as proof that this was popularly viewed as normal in the 90s. If you want non-fictional examples, I can remember that there was a scandal around Bill Clinton pardoning Marc Rich. Beyond that, I think I've advanced a thoroughly unsurprising theory with a decent amount of support, and it's on you to show that there's a problem with it.
In gaming, there’s a real appetite for establishing the meta—the dominant strategy—but once established, there’s a real boredom in adhering to it. Instead of optimizing a system of play, you’re just left optimizing your rank within it. This is characteristic of the grind.
One of the ways that games fight this and maintain player interest is with meta shakeups: periodic updates that rebalance currencies, weapons, abilities, resources, etc. This gives rise to a temporary period when the meta is unknown and players have the chance to reformulate it. Without these shakeups player bases often decline.
Maybe this reflects a fundamental inclination towards periodic systemic upheaval out of a preference for purposeful discovery and exploration over tedious rank optimization within a system even when that system is fair and in equilibrium. I think this is particularly true for young people.
I don’t know if this tendency could be leveraged outside gaming, but education reform seems like a natural place to try. Instead of making kids rank themselves against peers in a static system to achieve cumulative scores that are increasingly difficult to alter over time, you could frequently change the conditions and possible means of achievement and let kids discover the best ways to get there themselves. Then wipe the slate clean, shakeup and restart. Evaluators would probably hate it but it might improve engagement.
EDIT: For the few of you who also actually enjoyed Bostrom’s Deep Utopia, he talks about distantly related concepts to shakeups in regards to interest/boredom in Thursday Part II and Thursday Part III.
Am I the only person annoyed by the broadly useful term "meta" being reduced to "the winning strategy for a video game"?
It would be tolerable if it were only thusly used in obviously-gaming contexts, but I've been running into people who literally don't seem to know any other definition of the word.
> One of the ways that games fight this and maintain player interest is with meta shakeups: periodic updates that rebalance currencies, weapons, abilities, resources, etc. This gives rise to a temporary period when the meta is unknown and players have the chance to reformulate it. Without these shakeups player bases often decline.
This is mostly just a mistake on the part of everyone. David Sirlin, long ago, had a good discussion of the phenomenon, including the observation that the metagame for the original Smash Brothers wandered all over the place, just as if it were getting patches that randomly rebalanced all the characters, despite the fact that of course the game itself was completely static.
But old games like chess do largely seem to have static meta, leading to 'draw death'. Is the argument just that it's unlikely for any decent game to reach equilibrium in a commercially-relevant period?
In the case of Smash, which applies to most of the internet-competition games that Woolery is talking about, I think the main thrust of the argument is that the metagame automatically and repeatedly makes itself obsolete, because different strategies gain or lose strength according to which other strategies are currently popular. This is a much harder case to make in chess.
The constant patching is driven by audience demand - during the covid lockdowns, Magic: the Gathering announced, for the first time ever, that "we're banning several cards to shake up the format. By all of our metagame metrics, the format is healthy and no bans are called for. But we wanted to give people a fresh experience".
I think the meta can only make itself obsolete in that way in hidden-information games. In Chess, if the Vienna system is popular, you can study it more, learn more lines of it, learn how to get to positions you're comfortable with, but you can't start playing "the tactic that counters the Vienna." A good chess strat is one that works even when the opponent knows it's coming, because you can't hide anything in chess.
On the other hand, if proxy builds get popular in Starcraft, you can start scouting specifically for proxies. The fact that the tactic is more popular means your scouting is more likely to find something, which means that the tactic really does make itself obsolete.
(There are still ways that the meta can be unpleasant even if it's theoretically "balanced," however. If the Terran player has to run themselves ragged preparing for 50 different cheese builds and the Protoss player's strategy is just "build a big deathball and attack lol," then one side is having a lot less fun even if the winrate is "balanced.")
Fighting games like Smash fall somewhere in the middle - most techniques are pretty well known, and new discoveries in Melee are unlikely when the game has been out for so long, but you still have to practice them a lot and it's possible for even an expert to be unprepared against an unusual character.
> I think the meta can only make itself obsolete in that way in hidden-information games.
Maybe, if you read the comments above yours, you'd think differently.
Or do you see Smash as a hidden-information game? Why the separate discussion of Smash, in that case?
You see this in every game where players must choose pieces before playing. That doesn't happen in chess. But if you ran a series of Magic tournaments with no hidden information, there would be just as much metagame instability as usual.
Bobby Fischer speaks of this [0]. TLDR -- modern chess sucks because it's all memorization, and no improv, no creativity, no exploration. Ergo, Bobby's promotion of Fischer Random [1]. I think Magnus tried it recently, against himself.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S4BU_AYJEs (n.b. The account which hosted the video that I originally remember, has unfortunately been deleted. unlucky. The original title was something like "Bobby Fischer and Paul Morphy on how opening theory destroyed chess".)
The incorrect premise of your idea means it wouldn't work. It reflects resentment, not the cope you identified as a "fundamental inclination...". Usually those who whine about the meta gamers are just salty they're not as good at the game but prefer to blame that on the existence of the meta rather than accept that they're worse at the game and would likely continue to be worse regardless of any meta.
It would be similar with students. The rank order would remain similar through any systemic change except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability, which would defeat the whole purpose of education. And because the rank order wouldn't change, the resentment would remain until a system eventually arises that does not reward cognitive ability. In fact, such a systemic change is currently being endorsed by the left for that very reason: affirmative action, in which the change in conditions and means of achievement is "don't be Asian or white" and "be black or hispanic".
"The rank order would remain similar through any systemic change except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability, which would defeat the whole purpose of education. "
The WHOLE purpose of education, really? Perhaps this is naive, but I had thought that at least PART of the purpose of education was to...y'know...educate students. Ranking them by cognitive ability[1] could surely be done with much less time and expense than is usually invested into education.
Now, if I were to complain about all the ways in which modern educational systems do trade away "ability to effectively educate students" to better optimize "ability to legibly rank students against one another" I'd be typing all day. But while I'm not fully convinced Woolery's idea has merit, it at the very least seems to be trying to exploit the rank-students function in order to better execute the help-students-learn function, which is thinking the right direction, at least.
[1] Presupposing, of course, that "cognitive ability" is just one thing that can be summarized neatly, which seems dubious at best.
"which would defeat the whole purpose of education"
was referring to
"except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability"
I wasn't saying that the whole purpose of education was to rank order students, but rather that systemic changes that make cognitive ability less relevant to education outcomes would be contrary to the purpose of education.
metagaming is supposed to refer to emergent behaviors. I.e. things that aren't hardcoded by the ruleset. I don't think Affirmative Action could reasonably be considered metagaming if it's literally encoded in the Law of the Land.
yeah but like, "don't be asian" isn't really a voluntary behavior. (Unless we're going down the "race-fluid" road?) idk, I sense that one of us is misunderstanding something.
>Usually those who whine about the meta gamers are just salty they're not as good at the game but prefer to blame that on the existence of the meta rather than accept that they're worse at the game and would likely continue to be worse regardless of any meta.
I’m not sure I agree that people who prefer strategy formulation to rank optimization in games are probably butt hurt whiners who fail at everything they do. Maybe some are. On the flip side, maybe some people who crutch meta and stomp their feet at game re-balancing do so because change might force them to devise strategy instead of learning it ready-made from a guide.
Affirmative action is your idea in action already. It's already evident why people overrepresented in the educational clergy like systemic overhauls. What more proof do you need where your suggestion will lead? It's obvious that people (in this case the midwits in the education system) will abuse standardized systemic overhauls to enact systems that increasingly divorce cognitive ability with academic outcomes.
As an aside, meta gamers don't generally whine about nerfs or buffs in games where the cost of switching strategies is low because they're the least emotionally attached to strategies. Meta gamers meta game because they want to win more. If one strategy gets nerfed and another in turn becomes strong, meta gamers are most willing to switch because winning matters more to them than non-meta gamers, who tend to play less and whine more on gaming message boards.
You might be confused by the whining in games like MMOs that require significant investment into your character because they play a certain class that got nerfed, and meta gamers tend to be overrepresented among players of overpowered classes.
I’m confused how I adopted affirmative action and liberal politics by suggesting that meta shakeups might indicate kids favor exploration and discovery in education over rank optimization, and that children might then learn better that way.
I’m so tired of people attaching a bullshit, 1 DOF political spectrum to everything. I could tell you I don’t favor affirmative action but you’d just say I do (as you just did) and the last thing I want to do right now is defend a policy I don’t defend.
Sorry, I think my combative tone understandably led you to misunderstand me. I'm not saying you support AA. I'm saying the system you proposed would lead to AA and AA-like overhauls even in excess of what we've had so far.
Let me clarify. In sum, your proposal is that the education system should periodically and frequently enact systemic overhauls in order to improve student engagement and thereby learning. My counterpoint, albeit not very clearly put, was to consider who would be coming up with and implementing these systemic overhauls. The answer is obvious: those currently in the education system, probably higher ranking administrative staff. The problem then also becomes obvious: progressive rot is pervasive among these people, and so giving them a mandate to enact systemic overhauls only makes it easier for them to further degrade education.
I remember a very long time ago, reading a blogger talking about this problem with game design, and suggesting that politics suffers from a similar problem - as people "play to win" within the rules set by the constitution, they start to discover edge cases or degenerate behaviors, things that are technically legal but violate the norms that the original framers expected.
So my tongue-in-cheek proposal is that we should subtly randomize the rules for elections each time to prevent people from overlearning the "current meta." Hand out a couple extra electoral votes each year so that politicians aren't exclusively catering to the same few swing states every time. Randomize which justices hear a case to make it harder to rely on a friendly court supporting everything you do. And so on.
I've actually been working on a strategy videogame designed to not have much meta. The variables from game to game change enough that adhering to a meta is counterproductive (like the chess variants that randomize the back line)
I'm trying to get a high score in a high randomization game right now, and it's aggravating as hell. "Strategy" and "variables" are enemies. The meta becomes "save and reroll until it likes you."
In game random outcomes are different than what I'm talking about. Think of how the Catan board changes from game to game but stays the same once within the game. This prevents people from figuring out the best thing to do on the board before they see the map, but let's a player still reason and plan in a deterministic environment. (Catan has other randomness but you get the idea)
I claimed no meta but obviously there are going to be some high level stable "strategies" from game to game, like not suiciding all your units.
But that may just be bad design, and presumably Legionaire is trying to make a good game and not a bad game... Using randomization doesn't *have* to ever result in a net advantage or disadvantage for you and thus encourage save scumming. For example, Fischer Random chess where you play 2 games, 1 as black & 1 as white (thereby ensuring that any greater or less advantage of black is balanced by construction). Now it is hard to have learned much, if anything, about any given board position in advance (because there are so many), it is completely fair and balanced, and you can see everything from the start as it remains a perfect-information fully-observable game with no randomness or variables after the setup, and it is all up to you to play well or poorly; if you lose, it's all your fault.
And for other kinds of games, you can change the randomness to make good use of the randomness involve skill, so you are never 'doomed': you just didn't make good use of it. (Sampling-without-replacement mechanisms often achieve this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pffcsPkWwBPyLE6Ym/what-does-a-gambler-s-verity-world-look-like#6sr3Q7qsns4Cwznon Even if you 'get unlucky', that always makes you 'luckier' later on, so there is no such thing as net bad luck, there is just bad strategy.) This is a good test bed for meta-learning too, where you have to learn how to learn: what information to invest in early on so as to update optimally on the fly and learn to beat the current game.
YES! I've had that idea as well. You could easily program a game/environment to mutate from test to test, across many variables, and have a single agent train in this. In theory it should eventually converge on a model that is generally capable of behaving well across the space the environment variables covered. If the space covers enough, you could end up with some sort of very general agent.
Chess960 goes from 0 variables to 1, and still has meta, all the standard Chess strategies are still up and running. "Protect your king", "keep your pawns connected", "lead with your weaker pieces and back them up with the stronger ones". Openings are no longer reliable, but the Bongcloud Attack still loses every time. Poker has much higher randomization, and I think everyone understands Poker and other card games all have significant meta. It also has unwinnable hands.
Rollover luck is certainly more fun than truly random luck, but still falls into the same category. If it takes four shots to take down an enemy, and you miss one shot out of ten, the guy who misses on shot 1 loses to the guy who misses on shot 5, and that's just how that exchange will go.
For each variable, the meta will resemble Poker's options; either build around the average result so that you're okay in all circumstances, or build around a specific result so you win if it comes up and lose if it doesn't. I cannot imagine a variable that manages to get around this.
The 960 variant disolves one part of the meta, the board state. If you wanted to break the other strategies you described, you could randomly determine the attributes of the pieces (all paws can move 2, queens can't go diagonal, etc.) I've found excessive changes like this to be not fun. There's too much to learn and think about all at once, even in a game that takes hours. People like some consistency, but some change as well.
My game has technology that unlocks from a tech tree, but the tech tree is random from game to game and there are more techs than can be on the tech tree, so some techs will/won't be in a game with eachother. This creates a scenario where the timing and attributes of units vary wildly from game to game, but within the game you can predict it all
That's... not how it works. Even with random elements, there is going to be an optimal play for any given situation. A game doesn't need to be fully deterministic to have a meta.
Your definition of meta is too broad to be useful. For any game or any situation there is an optimal choice. Meta implies a known meta. The key to keeping the game interesting is keeping that unknown. Changing game rules or quantities accomplishes this and relates to the post of "shaking up the meta". Well shaking it up every single game is a game with no stable meta from game to game.
You are lumping multiple distinct groups into a single market segment. There are people that love finding/figuring out the meta/optimal play, and there are people who enjoy knowing the meta because they want to perform well with a casual investment.
Even if you did scoreboard wipes in school, the people who are better at certains subjects would stay better. Maybe one month you rank math higher than English and the next month the opposite but I don't see how that changes anyone's behavior.
>There are people that love finding/figuring out the meta/optimal play, and there are people who enjoy knowing the meta because they want to perform well with a casual investment.
Games need to be interesting, because being interesting is their only value. When's the last time you needed a shakeup for your chair, or your water pipes?
I think it's potentially a good idea for education, to prevent what Eliezer called "guessing the teacher's password". I think more commonly, teachers call it "teaching to the test".
Ideally students are not spending so long on the exact same topic that a meta is able to form. How long is the class spending on the concept of heat conduction, before moving on to the next topic? A week? Less? And every time it gets brought up it will have a different example, with a different homework sheet to fill out. The children have no meta, only the teachers do.
A) My working model of epistemology indicates that finding truth is mostly a matter of A/B testing things from different angles and perspectives. If you only understand a topic from one angle, you probably don't understand it very well. (I think this is the main reason why exploration/experimentation is fun.) C.f. all the wailing over the U.S. Common Core. E.g. parents have been complaining that they can't help their kids with their multiplication homework, since the parents only know how to perform long-multiplication. Yet the Common Core curriculum is asking kids to show their work by other means, such as via lattice. My reaction to which, is:
> The Common Core methods look pretty straight-forward to me. In a sane world where these parents actually understood the *concept* of multiplication *intuitively* (and not merely as a rigid algorithm), the Common Core methods would be no big deal.
This isn't "shaking up the meta" in *precisely* the way that Woolery described. But it rhymes with a related idea, which I call "adversarial variance" (for lack of a better term), and I suspect Woolery might be using the whole "metagaming the ladder" idea as a crutch to gesture towards it. (I've been meaning to write a post which explains this in greater detail. Alas, it's been languishing in draft-hell for many moons now. But maybe this thread will motivate me to attend to it.)
B) I think it's not just about topic, but also about the style of presentation. E.g. in highschool, the vast majority of my peers simply committed the relevant buzzwords to memory just long enough to pass the next exam, only to quickly forget the material for all eternity. Like, they know it's going to be a multiple-choice, paper-&-pencil exam. And they know it's NOT going to be a project or demonstration with curveballs that might more-deeply probe their competency. The equilibrium is driven by both teachers and students.
Contrast this with The PSmith's book review [0] on Russian Math Circles (circle = club). The kids are given problems which may or may not have known solutions, and given a chance to really grind their noggins against them over the course of several months. The example given is where Zvonkin coaxes a bunch of 3-yr-olds (lol) to solve "5 choose 2" from scratch (lmao) by showering them with examples of the problem in different contexts. Now, can we incorporate any of this into public education? Well, replacing education with circles wholesale seems like a non-starter for a number of reasons. But I think there's a potential argument for at least aspiring in this direction of attacking things from different angles.
AFAIK, the current "teach to the test" metagame is being driven by uni admissions. Teachers feel that they don't have enough latitude to do anything different. But if, for example, the U.S. College Board tried to add a few curveballs to their precious scan-trons periodically (like how Google keeps SEO marketers on their toes by continually tweaking Page Rank), then maybe (just maybe!) students would be more incentivized to learn the material on a deeper level than "long-multiplication or bust".
(Although this is all assuming that the purpose of the education system is education. Which, as Anomie reminds us, is plainly not the case. Also, the implementation would be botched. 100%. It's inevitable. But one can dream. Also, <mumble mumble> "Seeing Like A State" <mumble mumble> "legibility".)
I am living your first paragraph right now with a really great RTS game called Beyond All Reason. It's literally killing my interest which sucks cause the game is exactly my personal jam.
By most people's presumed expectation, (children's) education is supposed to prepare a child for adult life. There's a yardstick for success there that is independent of test scores and teacher recommendations. A 1600 SAT and a glowing review from the superintendent at Eton does your child zero good if what the world needs is a biochemist and all your child knows how to do is write really good literary fiction.
Now, the world is rarely so regimented that it comes down to needing one specialty, and your kid is likewise going to have some skills outside of writing. Nevertheless, the market drives what's successful more than some arbitrary cabal of education reformers. They don't get to shake up the meta. That's reality's job. All the reformers can do is fail to keep up.
...Mate, meta shakeups are only enjoyable because there's almost no stakes involved. When it's a matter of life and death like school performance, it stops being fun.
The whole point of school is evaluation and filtering. Clearing records would defeat the entire purpose.
You might be right. I’m a parent, though, and I’d much rather see my kid get better at developing new strategies than simply memorizing old ones. He’s a top student but it’s clear that he’s prioritized rank optimization over exploration in academics, while when it comes to gaming, which he loves, he plays off meta for novelty until shakeups, then he has a blast finding the new optimal approach. Once he does, he’s back to off-meta.
Kids are going to hate it even more than their parents. The time of life one is most obsessed with fairness and how it shakes out with your peers is the time of life you are going to shake up and be "yeah we're being deliberately unfair, sucks to be you".
Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired. Good luck and have an enjoyable time!"
Also, have you *never* heard the amount of bitching about such meta shakeups by gamers? Suddenly trusty builds are nerfed, strategies no longer work, and the entire game is upended. Few to nobody goes "yippee, this is such fun!", the tendency is "they changed it now it's awful and I hate it".
I'm a parent too, and I'm torn. When I was my son's age, just entering college, I consciously prioritized exploration over getting the best grades, consistent with not failing the class. I got mostly B's. Later I came to think that was a mistake, and I should have balanced the two goals more equally.
There's another consideration: In life, there often isn't a dominant strategy, such that what there are multiple good ones, and which count as "good" in any given context is sensitively dependent on what other people are doing. It isn't even always best to be the highest performing individual around, there are institutional contexts in which that is a mistake. I'm a teacher, and most of us in my experience want to provide our students with multiple paths to an acceptable level of success. A "dominant strategy" is inconsistent with this.
"Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired. Good luck and have an enjoyable time!"
Hah! I've had several jobs like that. One of them in government.
>Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired.
As far as I had any actual implementation of a shakeup in mind, this wouldn’t be it. What you describe here would be chaotic and counterproductive. What I was trying to suggest was more of a directional possibility than some kind of literal, absolute shakeup. Plus, I would hope the faculty would be the most important part of any such change so whatever shakeup occurred would be something they prepared for and implemented. And since the stakes are lower with more iterations I think the sense students would get of being “fired” could be far lower than it is from failing a semester is currently. But you being a teacher are the expert, and know students better than I do.
I was a poor student. I’m also not well educated (I got kicked out of the lowest admissions state school for poor grades). The argument for rank optimization is that it results in our best prospects rising to the top, I guess like the kids at Harvard, Columbia and other top schools who’ve received so much press lately. But I think it alienates the kids in the bottom half and causes them to disengage. This is how it’s always been and maybe it’s for the best. But if one of the goals of academics is to teach all students, regardless of their fortune or talent how to survive and be self sufficient in a changing world then maybe there’s some small lesson that can be learned from shakeups. Maybe not.
Edit: I mistakenly attributed the above quote to Victor. He was responding to the quote, not asserting it, as I wrongly indicated.
It was Deiseach's scenario, not mine. What I have experienced, more than once, and never as a teacher, was more on the order of "Your job description just changed, and now we want you to work on a project completely unrelated to what we hired you for." Which was sometimes exciting, but just as often aggravating.
Yep. There is no yowl quite like the collective rage of a game's regulars when its makers implement even a tiny nerf. And games which try to inoculate themselves against hard metas (e.g. randomized game maps from the get-go) don't build loyal regular player bases nearly as well.
Yep the yowl is loud about shakeups (and about the grind too) but still meta shakeups are increasingly standard practice in long-running games, and I’d guess it’s because many developers are convinced that under the right circumstances it increases engagement and/or player bases (the bottom line).
I’d personally choose periodic shakeups over rigorously adhering to the balance at launch and I think the increasing implementation of shakeups indicates that at least developers think it’s a useful tool.
This makes me think of Elite Overproduction Theory. The idea that if you have too many elites and not enough elite jobs, the surplus will make trouble.
If you have X noble fiefs in medieval France, but >X young nobles, the ones without anywhere to inherit will try and start a war to conquer land for themselves. Ruining everyone else's plans to spend their time hunting, jousting, and taxing the peasantry. Or if you have Y professorssorships of 19th century German Cinema, and >Y graduates with who are only qualified to be a professor of 19th century German Cinema. They will create DEI policies that demand the universities replace their current crop of old white professors.
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Where this differs from a gaming meta is that in games people who did well under the old meta get board and look forward to exploring the new. In this system people who did well under the old usually dislike the change.
"in games people who did well under the old meta get bored and look forward to exploring the new" -- that is very much not my experience across several game genres. I wish, frankly.
I was pretty active in EVE Online in the years leading up to its demise. The Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) were so satisfied with the existing stale meta that they happily resorted to doxxing and real-life harassment of opposing players in their attempts to preserve it.
Pandemic Legion, who had more-or-less a monopoly on the use of supercapital ships under the old system, complained quite loudly at the announced changes which would make them merely extremely powerful, as opposed to invulnerable (barring catastrophically stupid mistakes on their part).
I like this idea, especially since by varying the ranking structures you can reward achievement in a variety of disciplines, cultivating well-rounded students (e.g. tests first-quarter, then art projects second quarter, team-based charity work in a 3rd quarter, etc), in addition to more-engaged ones.
Since I keep seeing postings for programming jobs (I'm studying math and CS in college, but most employers only care about the latter), here's what I'm wondering: what DOES it take to be hired as a programmer, anyways?
My employer has recently cracked down on our old style of just asking programming questions and figuring out if you can program.
We now ask a bunch of formulaic questions with fairly obvious expected answers (at least to corporate-insiders) about how you engage with the workplace and colleagues, which you are incentivized to lie about rather than giving the most typical, honest answer "that's never come up" or "I just come to work and get my job done".
I dislike this style of interview question, but the amazing thing is... almost everyone answers reasonably honestly (I am guessing based on my judgement of their demeanor; if you are a sociopath you almost certainly could get past this by just lying).
And the sad thing for my position is: those mostly pretty honest answers end up doing a much better job of figuring out whether you'll work hard/not be an asshole/communicate clearly and honestly/actually test your code rather than pretending you tested it, than the old style of "just answer a bunch of simple coding questions" did.
So, yes, you want to be able to answer fizzbuzz. More, you want to be able to engage with *precisely the question that was asked*, not pattern match it to a thing you've memorized/done before. Know what you know, know what you're talking about, admit when you don't know, ask good questions, are basically what this is testing.
But after that... I'm afraid you want good answers to how you engage with colleagues, what are the corporate expectations of how to deal with a misbehaving colleague, what to do when a project is poorly planned/gets behind, and a dozen other questions in this vein.
These are actually kind of hard for a lot of people to just memorize, which is what makes them higher signal, although (gag) you could probably read 2-3 corporate management/self help style books and have good ideas for the types of questions here.
Oh, and one more thing: demonstrate that you have at least the vaguest interest in the position. Like, you've tried the team's product at least once, you've thought about it for more than 30 seconds, you have muted praise, ideas for how to make things better, but don't assume you know it'll be easy to introduce your favorite improvement. People like thinking their coworker is excited to work on their project, but if you're over the top about it it comes off as ass kissing.
This is an old article I saw recently that I thought was good. Apparently the stuff about the state of the job market isn’t so relevant, but the rest is.
TL;DR, your job is not to be a programmer, but to Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue. Tailor your representations of yourself accordingly. Also, meet people who might know someone who might want to hire you; meet them in person and make sure to represent that you’d be a good hire. (This is called networking.)
Source: I've worked in the industry for about a decade.
For new college grads, employers are looking for 2 things
1) Can you actually program? This is more of a bar than you'd think - fizzbuzz is a very real filter. Being able to actually think through a problem and write code to solve it is the vast majority of what you actually do on the job. Whiteboards are generally testing for this and also serving as a proxy for general intelligence.
2) Can you function in a professional environment? This means following instructions, showing up, being pleasant to work with, being engaged in meetings, etc. Asking for help from your team is fine, lying about how much work you've gotten done is clearly not. Every workplace is a complex social environment and you need to be able to effectively navigate it, there's no real way around this.
Unfortunately, companies only have very noisy signals for determining 1 and 2 so it can be challenging to get your foot in the door in the industry. I think my best advice (although this may be out of date) is to try to go through a service that does coding-tests and screening upfront. I know Indeed used to have something like that but it may have been phased out. However, I'm sure there are other companies with similar products. I personally had a very high conversion rate from phone-screens to in-person interviews when I was job hunting but a very low conversion rate from applications to phone-screens and services that pre-screen candidates let me jump straight to phone-screens which saved me a lot of wasted time filling out applications.
There's also several other BS hurdles in the form of recruiters/resume keyword screens, etc. Referrals are highly coveted because they can often get you past all of this. Social networking is also very powerful since once you're established in the industry, people very often pull from their pool of former co-workers and how you were to work with in the past is the best possible signal of how you will be to work with in the future. Any future job hunting I do will probably pull from my former work connections first and I got my current position with a no-interview job offer from a former manager.
Happy to answer any questions or provide more specifics if you want to ask.
Sorry to interfere, but the chance to ask a question I have been pondering was just too tempting to pass up.
The question is: What level of LeetCode problem solving is actually needed to pass job interviews? Like do you solve something like an easy, a medium or a hard problem in half an hour?
I have spent some time on LeetCode, though I am actually a math/physics guy, and I actually got no real idea what my level in that esoteric art is compared to real programmers.
As an interviewer, I am not trying to gotcha you. I am trying to give you an opportunity to show off. What I want is to watch you solve a problem which is new to you. (If you say you're particularly good at some niche thing on your CV or have lots of experience in that thing, and it's possible to ask coding questions about that thing, expect to see questions about that thing!)
Different people have different approaches for exactly how to achieve that; personally, I tend to start with a very simple fizzbuzz level question, which also works as an ice-breaker, then add complications and/or ask progressively more complex things until we hit one you actually have to stop and think about. Then I try to persuade you to think out loud and/or we have a conversation as you work your way to the solution.
If you have trouble with the fizzbuzz level, that's a bit of a red flag, but after that point trotting out memorised answers will work against you, because I am deliberately looking for something you /haven't/ memorised the answer to.
Worst of all, though, are "oh, yeah, I've seen that problem before! I don't remember the solution, though" followed by no attempt to solve it, and "oh, yeah, I've seen that problem before!" followed by a memorised answer to a question which is slightly different to the one I asked. Please don't do that :)
What I /do/ expect is familiarity with common data structures and algorithms, and the knowledge of which ones are most appropriate for what kind of problem and why; and what the various tradeoffs are. I am also looking for awareness of what is happening one level of abstraction either side of whatever you are working with. Practicing leetcode problems does help internalise these things, if somewhat indirectly. If I haven't picked much of that up from you thinking out loud as you go, expect to be quizzed about why you did what you did when you're done.
The majority of whiteboards would be easy with some of the companies with a higher bar capping out at medium. Additionally, most whiteboards don't care about perfect syntax and you can often get away with handwaving parts of your implementation (although not always and getting called out on something and having no idea how to answer it isn't going to bode well for your chances).
Also some roles expect understanding architecture which isn't something leetcode will teach you although most entry level jobs don't have architecture questions.
The worst part of the whole thing is that 95% of programming work requires no understanding of any of the stuff you need to do well on leetcode/whiteboards.
I think whiteboards are just the industry-agreed upon proxy for (can you program + general intelligence) which are a proxy for job performance.
Consider not putting it that way anywhere a recruiter/employer might see or hear. Some of those aren't programming languages, and "fiddled around with" does not inspire confidence.
In the programming part of the interview you will be given a problem similar to the ones on leetcode.com, hackerrank.com etc. You will be expected to code up a solution to this in your preferred language, which ideally is also the language the place you are applying to uses. What the interviewer wants is to see you solve a problem from cold; they really want to see that you know a variety of data structures and algorithms, how to choose between them, how to combine them when trying to solve a problem, how to express what you want to happen, and how to debug the inevitable bugs you introduce.
Practice the problems on these and similar sites when you're "fiddling around". Consider doing advent of code.
Practice especially thinking out loud as you work the problem; the interviewer will be much happier with a stream of conscience than they will with half an hour of silent pondering.
Note that I'm describing what employers are looking for, not trying to understand your specific circumstances.
Speaking of your specific circumstances, it looks like you're at MIT. That's one of those places that should easily be able to provide an alumnus network and reputation strong enough to get you past most of the annoying entry-level barriers in the field. I'm sure the school has resources specifically for this. I would suggest using them.
Does anyone speak Latin and would they be willing to look over some lines in a screenplay I've written? I don't have absolute faith in the method I used, which amounted to pasting lines into Google Translate and kicking them until they stop moving.
It's supposed to be mediaeval scholarly Latin, not "original" Roman centurion Latin, and I have no idea if that makes any difference.
EDIT: cheers guys! I'm reading through it all now to note down where all the Latin bits are, then I'll PM you.
Awesome. And I was just gonna use the "Message" button that pops up onmouseover people's usernames. I don't know whether I can add you all to a group chat or if I have to do things individually.
I was an altar boy in the before times but had to use a cheat sheet for my responses so I can’t help you. But you might enjoy this bit of spoken Latin from Lost.
It does sound nice. I realised after writing my thing that Enochian would probably have been a better choice, but Latin just sounds nice. Also Unsong rather cheapened Enochian for me.
Hello - I sent everyone a PM last night, but the message included a link and I don't have much faith in Substack as a platform right now. Would you mind confirming it went through? (If you got the message but have changed your mind about reading the script, that's fine, I'd just like to know if it went through.)
Has anyone done research into the effectiveness of at home red light therapy masks?
My wife has been using a red light stick that she rubs on her face at night but wants a mask which seem to cost $200 to $400 dollars. It smacks of hokum to me and as I've been trying to research which is the best one to get I've run across claims about what it helps to cure that remind me of the "Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?" All that seems too good to be true but even the claims that it reduces wrinkles and fine lines seem solely based on anecdotes by people who are using lots of other creams and lotions in addition to the red light therapy.
I appreciate anyone sharing anything they've found while looking into this.
Poked around a bit using GPT, and best harvest was this article, which itself is not good but which does have a bunch of footnotes links meta-analyses of research. https://drruscio.com/red-light-therapy-pros-and-cons/
If your wife's main goal is to combat skin aging, I'm pretty sure the most effective tool currently is microneedling, done with a high quality device. My very brainy and research-oriented dermatologist agrees. Best source of good devices, as well as good general info, is website OwnDoc.com, which I have used and found trustworthy.
Peter Attia and his team did a literature review of the many claims about red mighty therapy recently. He covered many of the different sizes benefits and was mostly unimpressed by the quality of research.
For reduction of visible signs of skin aging he concluded the evidence from human data is "positive, but high likelihood of industry bias" and rates the possible magnitude if effect 1/5 "may have very modest benefits." However, this is not an area he focused on in great detail.
Overall, Attia isn't particularly impressed with red light therapy because of low quality evidence, dodgy studies, small effect sizes, and more cost effective alternatives being available for many of the claimed effects.
A fomer girlfriend of mine had one that she spent ~$100 on. She used it multiple times per week and said it made her skin firmer for a while, although I didn't reeeeeally notice a difference in how she looked, but then she stopped using it because she thought it wasn't working anymore. I dunno...homeostasis kicked in at some point, maybe? Just a guess. Anyway, based on her experience (and by extension, mine), I would say it's not worth it.
Multiple injections every day, some the of the medications burn. Intramuscular injections are scary to give to yourself. Maintaining intense behavior, medication, and sometimes food restrictions or diet (no sex! no orgasms! no painkillers!). Risk of illness after the procedure (I feel most women get this at least a little, its gross, look up OHSS). Moodiness, irritability, you aren't really yourself. Disrupted sleep. Severe constipation. You also spend every available moment on the phone with either the provider or your insurance company navigating and negotiating what is going on (little time for hobbies or friends or fun). You have to educate yourself on your procedure and understand the choices - which is another hobby in itself. Even great IVF providers fuck up all the time and you have to be really on top of what they prescribe, order, and charge you.
Some people mortgage or sell their houses to pay for this all. Some people take on extra jobs or switch jobs for the health insurance coverage. Even with coverage you will spend $thousands on additional costs. You probably have to do multiple cycles, so it like year(s) of your life. There is no guarantee. No one understands and says weird and inappropriate things to you.
It is very stressful. The stakes are high and the results uncertain. And it's a huge hassle, especially for someone with a full time jobs. The woman has to drive in for an ultrasound at the beginning of every day while using the ovary-stimulating drug, generally in rush hour traffic. Once the eggs are ripe she has to take a day off, with 24 hrs notice, and get knocked out for the laparoscopic egg retrieval procedure. Most people wake up from that feeling like they were run over by a truck. Then there's a suspenseful wait to see whether the eggs are fertilized -- sometimes they're not -- then another to see whether they implant. And if one does the woman comes in for frequent early morning ultrasounds to check that the fetus is growing correctly. One time in 10 or so it is discovered during one of the checks that the fetus has died. 10/10 do not recommend discovering fetal demise as a way to start your day.
Tell me you are not a female person without telling me you are not a female person 😁
IVF needs you to produce lots of eggs, then those eggs are harvested. These are invasive, not-fun procedures, and you may have to do a couple of rounds of these.
Just look up the basic routine and see for yourself.
-- many of the injections require the non-egg-having partner to stick the egg-having partner with a needle in the buttocks at home, which is as awkward and scary as it sounds
-- after you go through all the extensive and expensive prep work for a cycle... most of the time it just fails and you have to try it all over again. And the knowledge that you're going to all that trouble for something with that high a risk of failure adds to the discomfort.
I think women in relationships with women wayyy overindex on using IVF (often "reciprocally", where one gets pregnant using the egg from the other) so this is one place where I think it makes sense to be extra clear about roles.
Yes, that makes sense. "Non-egg-having partner" to refer to men and post-menopausal lesbians, "egg-having partner" to refer to either the women undergoing the treatment or to a lesbian partner who is not. Couldn't be clearer.
Expensive, takes a long time, requires many injections, the large doses of hormones can make you feel ill or emotional, the swelling of the ovaries is physically painful. Different people find different parts more or less challenging.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that part. My insurance covered the procedure, but I had to swap job titles with a friend at the hospital where I worked in order to get the right kind of insurance. The drugs I injected cost so much per month -- thousands -- that I could actually bargain with pharmacies about how much of a deal they would give me.
Fuck no. I had 8 procedures. About the 2nd or 3rd one I got pregnant, and started the routine of going in every morning for an ultrasound of the fetus. It looked like a lima bean. One day it had a little fast-twinkling star in it. That was its heart beating. Then a few days later there was no twinkle. Fetal demise. I was such an unbelievably bad shock that for the only time in my waking life I actually wondered for about 10 secs whether I was dreaming. Later procedures did not produce a pregnancy. But a couple years later I adopted my daughter, and now I'm at peace with how it all worked out. That nontwinkle was bad bad bad tho.
Sorry that it was such a nightmare for you. I don't know what the success rate of IVF is, but my anecdata suggests it's low. Non of my friends who tried it were successful.
In an effort to find a solution for my intermittent insomnia (esp. mid-sleep awakening, but sometimes sleep onset insomnia), I have worked myself up into a state where it is harder than ever to sleep. I tried Trazodone (no luck) and Gabapentin (helpful, but I got spooked about staying on it long-term), Klonopin (ditto), and am now dabbling in various supplements (magnesium, pharmaGABA, 0.3mg melatonin, L-theanine, maybe apigenin or CBD/CBN next) trying to find the right mix. Yes I know about screen time, sleep hygeine, temperature, rituals, podcasts, relaxing music, progressive muscle relaxation, box breathing, blackout shades, ear plugs...and employ many of these tactics to little or no avail.
I'm male, 38 years-old and wondering if this is a normal ritual of aging (worsening sleep) as it seems like many of my male peers are experiencing (both with kids and without...I'm currently without). Alternatively, I've begun to wonder if this is all downstream from GAD -- maybe GAD is keeping me up at night worrying about the work week, my future, GAD is causing me to obsess over sleep and create an illusion of control, and all of the medication/supplement options are not really going to be a long-term solution.
Sorry for the info-dump. I usually get high quality responses here so I prefer to pose questions here before I speak to my psychiatrist about the same ideas.
Apologies if this was already asked/mentioned, but are you recording your actions and sleep quality daily?
I've found this to be the greatest help in solving insomnia. It helped me quickly catch onto some bad effects that I wasn't suspecting (eg. Beta blockers decreasing my sleep quality over a period of 2 months). There's just so many variables at play at the same time, I recommend going full Enlightenment empiricist on this.
I think most of those sleep hygiene things, such as having a bedtime ritual, are pretty weak interventions. There's one, though, that made a huge difference for me: Using the bed only for sleep (and sex). By the time life forced me to make this change, I'd ben using my bed as a couch for 15 years or so. I read in bed, talked on the phone there, studied, wrote papers as an undergrad and grad student, on a clipboard in my lap in bed. And I was a really bad sleeper. Had an especially bad time falling asleep.
So then I moved to another state to do my internship as a clinical psychologist, and worked 60 hour weeks, and did paperwork on weekends, and all of that just left me no time for hanging out in bed reading and chatting. I'd come home late , eat, slip into bed and turn off the light. My sleep was much better, but I thought that was because I was tired all the time from work. But after the internship was over I tried to resume my old ways, reading in bed with a cup of tea beside me, talking on the phone, etc. -- and I couldn't do it. Getting into bed, even though I was sitting up with pillows behind me, made me get very sleepy. I started craving a nap, even when I wasn't sleep deprived. I couldn't enjoy reading in bed because very soon I became too sleepy to feel any interest in the book.
So what had happened is that I had undone the association I had between bed and relaxed wakefulness. Bed now signaled sleep to some part of my brain I could not reason with. And my sleep continued to be much better, even though life after the internship was much less exhausting. So I say, try that. Do not read books, watch tv, or scroll shit on your phone in bed. Try not to even do any that in the bedroom. Put the TV in another room. Buy a cheap alarm clock to avoid having a reason to keep your phone by your bed. Get rid of the lamp by the bed that makes it easy to read. And retrain your brain that bed = sleep. If someone had told me to try that I would have refused, because I felt nice and relaxed while reading in bed, and that seemed like the ideal state to be in before turning off the light and going to sleep. I was wrong though. Give it a go. And if you are awake more than 15 mins, have something simple set up to do in another room til you feel sleepy. Do boring paperwork. Play solitaire, preferably with real cards. Wash the dishes.
I've been experimenting with the interesting things I can do (consciously) during my hypnogogic states before sleep. While researching other peoples' experiences, I came across the following article. If you're a person who experiences visual or aural effects during your hypnogogic state, this might be helpful. Continued...
If you're in a State where it's legal, and in a job where it's allowed, and you have no family history of psychosis, a 5-10mg THC edible (or a quick smoke if you're old fashioned like that) before bed won't kill you and may help. At least it does for me.
Of course, there are some obvious issues with this so would only recommend if you check those boxes and have tried everything else.
I have never liked falling asleep stoned. There was always this zone of vivid chaotic imagery and ideas I had to go through before getting to sleep, and it was so intense it was a bit scary. My daughter has the same thing. We've both found that the only solution is just to plow through it to get to the sweet oblivion on the other side.
Why did you get scared of staying on gabapentin in the long-term? I tapered off of it a couple years ago after taking it for almost a decade, and other than being in horrible pain for a couple weeks, I was completely fine. ...Though, I did need to go back on it at a lower dose because my anti-depressants were causing me to be constantly anxious.
I acknowledge it is silly to fret about the dose I was taking (600mg at night only) but between the loose link to dementia (admittedly at higher doses) and the fear of rebound insomnia eventually, I decided to try to do it without. Yes, I know I am excessively worrying, since losing sleep is a big problem.
Yes, doing lots of things to improve sleep can actually worsen sleep because you worry and obsess about it too much. This is a reason why the CBT approach doesn't work for some people. People without insomnia don't do all these rituals and obsessive sleep hygiene stuff. Sleeping is a kind of letting go, the opposite of control and worry.
There is an alternative approach called Acceptance and Committment Therapy which I've found much more helpful.
There's an app called Sleep School (https://www.sleepschool.org/) that I found helped me improve my sleep, and it uses the acceptance and commitment therapy approach.
There is also the 'natto' approach by Daniel Erichsen (https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Natto-ready-journey-within/dp/B08WPG539G). He also has a youtube channel. I think it's getting at the same thing as acceptance and commitment therapy, but I didn't find it as helpful. But some people rave about it.
Also working on the GAD will probably help as well, but it is possible to sleep even without solving that.
I've never had any sleep issues, but I have noticed that having a bite to eat before bedtime helps me nod off faster. So maybe it would help to try throwing out all those chemicals and have a slice of buttered toast last thing instead.
Presumably it works because the body diverts blood to the stomach for digestion, leaving the brain with less, thus making you more dozy. (That said, I have also read that one should never eat shortly before bedtime, but it works for me! )
Hint: Try increasing your dose. I'm told that although ~0.1mg is the amount you need IN YOUR BRAIN, the amount you need IN YOUR MOUTH is a lot more because (as with many other drugs) most of the active ingredient gets lost in between your mouth and your brain. Personally, I used to microdose melatonin myself but my sleep schedule hasn't gotten any less erratic.
Have you tried keeping track of what you eat and when? I've found if I have anything with refined sugar after about 4 PM I get anxious and don't sleep well.
I take about 30 mg of melatonin nightly without apparent ill effect.
First of all, I'm so sorry you're going through this. I had intermittent insomnia for 15ish years, and then it got terrible after I had my first kid. I did these things, and now I sleep pretty well.
1. Easy things: sound machine, blackout shades, chilly room, limit total caffeine, no caffeine after noon. You're doing all that already.
2. Get your process S and process C cycles aligned via CBTI. Sleep is homeostatic AND daylight-driven, and you have to get those processes in sync. Decide when you need to wake up and go to bed 6 hours before that. Do not nap, read in bed, or wake up at different times. Keep doing that until you are falling asleep quickly and sleeping through the night. Then bring bedtime 15 minutes forward every week (e.g. midnight to 11:45, then 11:30, then 11:15), until you're getting 7-8 hours of sleep -- or whatever amount makes you feel rested.
3. Preserve your natural melatonin by wearing blue light-blocking glasses ~2 hours before bedtime. Melatonin is the "hormone of darkness."
4. Give yourself a clear circadian cue when you wake up with a sunlight lamp. These are cheap on Amazon. As soon as you're awake, turn that puppy on, so your daylight-driven sleep timing process knows that it is morning.
5. If you can't fall asleep at bedtime or you wake up in the middle of the night, get out of bed after ~15 minutes. Go lie on the couch, put on your blue light-blocking glasses before you turn on the light, read something dull, and take about a quarter of a Unisom. When you feel your eyes dragging, go back to bed. Repeat (sans Unisom) if needed.
6. De-catastrophize. Get an Oura ring so you can see that even on bad nights, you're getting a bit of sleep.
Not to bring up another well known answer, but how much exercise do you get? Finding exercise I enjoy enough to do regularly for years really helped both my anxiety and insomnia. Then other methods you mentioned helped with the last mile so I can now fall asleep within 30-60 minutes of trying. For suggestions, both martial arts and rock climbing have been fun enough to keep me doing them. Depending where you live there may be popular hobby sports around you. All of these could double as a way to socialize if that could help the GAD as well. Best of luck!
I'm sure it may be different for everyone, but for me even just doing 20 pushups before bed (or in the middle of the night if I wake up and have trouble falling back asleep) can really help. Though getting exercise through the day is still important, and for reasons other than sleep as well.
> Yes I know about screen time, sleep hygeine, temperature, rituals, podcasts, relaxing music, progressive muscle relaxation, box breathing, blackout shades, ear plugs...and employ many of these tactics to little or no avail.
I don't see exercise in that list. Have you tried doing some intense cardio (e.g. some or all of an HIIT workout video from YouTube) about 4-6 hours before you try to go to sleep?
Does anyone know why this has happened all of a sudden? Does it have anything to do with the political transition in the US?
I know Tulsi Gabbard has been accused (don't know if it's fair or not) of being an Bashar-al-Assad-apologist, and the Trump/MAGA movement is generally sympathetic to Russia, the main ally of the Syrian government, and pretty isolationist.
Are the rebels trying to make one last push before the US government becomes less supportive of them? Or is the timing just a coincidence?
I saw one guy claim it could be related since Trump might remove support for the kurd, so the islamist rebels want to take territory to be prepared to turn against the kurds again later on.
Only very indirectly. Turkey has been revising the regional order in its favor at Russia and Iran's expense for some time. They think Ukraine and Palestine are going to settle down reasonably soon and they'd prepared this offensive for a while so they decided to go now while Iran and Russia are still distracted.
From what I have read, it mostly has to do with Assad's supporters being either distracted (like Russia) or weaker (like Iran and Hezbollah). The rebels have also used the last few years, where a ceasefire was in place, to reform their military.
These rebels are not supported by the US; the main group within this coalition, HTS, is labelled a terrorist group by the US and the EU
If I wanted to judge for myself, the last thing I'd look at is what the potential terrorist in question has said.
I'd look at his actions, and even then be very skeptical because terrorist groups have a track record of faking moderation then swerving hard once they have power.
If you look at this guy's interview, he's not doing a particularly good job of faking moderation. The best he's claiming is that he isn't particularly interested in attacking the US or Europe. If that's the best he can offer then I'll take Assad.
It's fair to consider HTS to not be terrorists. I believe that the terrorist designation came because it formed as a splinter group of al-Qaeda, although since then they've fought al-Qaeda and many observers do not consider HTS to be terrorists. I don't know enough to have an opinion of these guys, but they do seem better than Assad's regime
Assad is not simply a corrupt baathiht, he's committed ethnic cleansing and several war crimes, including bombing civilians with chemical weapons. It's fine to believe that Assad's better, but do not water down his crimes
He's obviously not a good guy but I'm under the impression that many (but not all!) of the more sensationalist charges against him are atrocity propaganda more than anything else. If that's "watering down his crimes" so be it. Open to be proven wrong here. The last time I looked into this it was difficult to tell where the American propaganda ended and the Russian propaganda began.
Israel severely disrupted Hezbollah, which was also on the Assad regime's side in Syria. This created a vacuum into which the rebels in Syria could flow and take Aleppo.
This is my understanding as well; that Lebanese Hizballah (who provided large chunks of best fighters for the Assad regime) were too busy getting thoroughly mulched by the Israelis in Lebanon to contribute and that shifted the balance of power.
So to answer @MikeSaintaintoine's question, it's mostly a complete coincidence.
One thing I heard is that Erdogan recently came to a sort of understanding with US, allowing him to own both F-35 fighters and Russian C-400 AA systems (US was against the later deal, withholding the fighters), and there is a possibility that the price of that deal is whipping Turkey-supported rebels into a new offensive. This forces both Russia and Iran to come to Assad's defence, possibly easing things a bit for Israel and Ukraine.
Maybe. But the current offensive is a threat to the Kurds, and the Kurds are our closest allies in Syria. On paper it looks good for the US (Assad, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are all losing status at the moment), but the effect on the Kurds and their autonomous region may become a net negative.
I think it is more likely that the current push is a result of the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, a weakening due to other considerations (Israel).
It is a clusterfuck but for now I think the Kurds are more anti-Assad than HTS. Take a look at the current state: https://syria.liveuamap.com/
SDF/Kurds aren't fighting HTS, they're taking territory from the government and possibly securing areas where HTS might repress people like minority Christians.
For a project I am looking for recommendations of psychedelic/surrealist short stories by female/non-cis-male authors. Something in the general direction of "Universal love, said the cactus person" by Scott Alexander himself, or Jorge Luis Borges. Classical, modern, released as a book or blog or whatever, this seemed like the place where people would know that kind of thing. Thanks and much appreciated!
This comically late but thanks for putting out your work (I assume it is that). It's not quite what I'm looking for for this program but interesting read nonetheless :)
If you like old public domain stuff, here's some random stuff I found while trawling through wikisource (though you can probably get these from other places as well):
- Frankenstein (1831) by Mary Shelley
- A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age (1883) by Henrietta Dugdale
Anything by Cate Wurtz, specially ASSCASTLE, smokes and Microwave Planet. Their comics are generally great at giving you a sense of awkward and uncomfortable weirdness and exploring queer themes.
Also I'm really into them even though I'm a cis male because "I have no idea where I fit in the world" is also a pretty applicable theme.
I am an old school programmer looking for a meaningful work in research of immunology. Thanks to crypto I don’t need to work, but half of my family have various autoimmune diseases and allergies, I would love to work for someone fighting it. I also feel that it is a field ready for a big breakthrough.
1. I'm considering experimenting with low dose naltrexone, does anyone have any experience with this and recommendations for me, based on the context shared below?
2. I'm thinking of creating a bounty to try to solve my medical mystery. Does anyone have suggestions on where to post the medical bounty (perhaps just in this open thread) and how much might be needed (is $5,000 appropriate)?
context:
(mid 30s male, otherwise healthy, skinny and fit)
In 2021, I was running and biking a huge amount and all of a sudden, I went from doing weekly long runs of 20+ km and bike rides of 100 km at 30 km/h, to barely being able to run 5 km without needing to stop.
Since then, I've never fully recovered. While the symptoms come and go, something happened and I still get frequent "episodes".
These episodes take either two forms:
1) I get a mild cold (blocked nose, sore throat), often lasting one week. Afterwards, I start feeling quite fatigued, achy and often have a sore neck. My resting heart rate (per Garmin watch) will go up 15% for these days. Often with canker sores and sore lymph nodes. During this period, I have no actual symptoms of being sick, but do not feel well. Still functional as a human, but at reduced capacity and cannot do any cardio. This typically lasts a week, and then it's typically another week or two after this where I can begin running again, albeit at a reduced capacity than before the episode started.
2) I start feeling fatigued, sore neck, often canker sores + swollen lymph nodes. 15% increase in resting heart rate. This lasts for about a week or so where I feel bad, can’t exercise etc..
When I am not in these periods, I feel great, have high energy and am very active. Unfortunately, I can't get my cardio very high because I keep experiencing these setbacks.
I’ve seen many doctors and had tons of tests with still no answers. Every blood test I've taken as well as random things like MCAS testing, x-rays, ct scans and such, everything has come up healthy/normal.
I also have some other issues which are likely unrelated:
- Bad diaphragmatic breathing
- My feet and hands get very cold quite easily, and generally, i get colder than most
- I've become incredibly sensitive to alcohol and often feel ill after just one drink
- I have moderate sleep apnea but use a CPAP machine
(I’m reluctant to share this as I am quite confident its unrelated and know it can open a can of worms) I got the first covid vaccine a week or two before the symptoms initially started
- Prior to all of these symptoms starting, I got sick more frequently than most other people (around every 3 months or so, but recovered quickly and it didn’t impair exercise or take the form of what I experience now)
I have something similar. I am also skinny fit (biking) and have bouts of weird lethargy although unlike you it doesn't really affect athletic performance other than my willingness to go for it. Even when walking around I feel I could close my eyes and fall asleep and my limbs are heavy and stiff. I get headaches and a horribly stiff neck that lasts a few days but I feel it's something to do with a sort of symptomless (non snotty) sinusitis that spontaneously occurs. Or possibly a spontaneous spinal fluid leak? It used to happen often between 30 and 40, but now it happens more rarely. For me, reducing alcohol consumption, increasing sleep time, staying hydrated and sleeping on the opposite side if my face so anything drains away from the area and I don't block that nostril has helped me get it less often. I know it will happen if I have little sleep. Maybe sleep apnea is causing it.
Could it be something to do with permanent effects of a previous Lyme disease infection? Good luck and do post about it if you find a possible cause/solution.
Gradually increasing fatigue was a symptom of my relative's heart failure, which was eventually fixed with a bypass. Coldness, especially in the extremities, sounds to me like circulatory issues, and the alcohol thing could also be a blood problem, with your liver or kidneys not cleaning your blood as effectively.
Do you have access to all of your consult notes, blood tests and scan results and feel comfortable posting them on an Internet forum?
The differential diagnosis is quite wide and includes autoimmune disease (Crohn’s and Behcet’s in particular are associated with aphthous ulcers), chronic infections (any exposure to farm animals or unusual pets, intravenous drug use, travel overseas or to tropical locations?) or less likely cancer (the time course doesn’t sound consistent but some lymphomas such as follicular lymphoma are quite indolent. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is known to make people feel ill when they drink alcohol.)
Anyway I wouldn’t be able to hazard guesses without a lot more info.
You sound like someone who might have an auto-immune disease (the sore neck seems to suggest AS, but I'm by far not an expert). I don't know how one goes about diagnosing these (in my experience, it's crazy hard), but you should really ask your PCP if that could be it.
Did you have children in ~2020? Now that my children are in (pre)school I find myself getting colds all the time, with more severe effect. I attribute the slow recovery to my lack of sleep.
Ok, no easy answer, was worth a try. Any possible common allergens?
The reason I'm barking up this tree is that I experienced something quite similar many years ago when staying with a roommate in college, who happened to have a cat. My health took a nasty nosedive along the lines you're describing. I recovered after moving out of that arrangement for unrelated reasons several months later. I had no idea I was allergic to cats prior to this happening.
Some alcohols, such as red wine and ales contain quite large amounts of histamine, and some people (including perhaps you? ) are extra sensitive to it. From Google's AI overview:
Vaccination coincidence aside: might a prior asymptomatic COVID infection, or other viral infection, be related? Have you talked to a long COVID specialist? This sounds so much like the "post exertional malaise" common to long COVID sufferers and probably also other post-viral syndromes.
The cold feet and hands thing sounds a lot like Raynaud's syndrome, indeed unrelated.
Personal bias disclosure: one parent of mine has long COVID and the other Raynaud's.
three things about AI.
1. could someone evaluate the credibility of this video? "Expert shows AI doesn't want to kill us, it has to" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8zV3YwgdE Is super-intelligence really going to be "a 1000 times smarter than Einstein"? Is alignment even a solvable problem or merely wishful thinking?
2. if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
3. ******************************
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"What is the speed of feelings?"
So assuming alignment is solvable, I'm trying to gauge the "dignity and worth of human life verses machine life".
Humans have emotions, feelings, sensations, joys, pains, rewards, "awareness-es", and myriad other states that are hard to define. In my opinion, I feel these states make life worth living. I'm not trying to be reductionist or hedonistic. I believe our mental states are complex and often very personal. In my very very unprofessional opinion... our states are like "vibrations, music, or internal weather". So again, chaotic, multifaceted, personal.
Now, when we talk about the capabilities of computers or AI, we often include their speed. We talk about how QUICKLY and EFFICIENTLY they can solve a task or reach an outcome. (of course, the ability to get there at all matters too)
But when it comes to the first category, the "emotional states" thing, is speed even relevant? If an AI can simulate an orgasm or a nurturing hug, why would it want to simulate it 1,000 times faster? Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to? Isn't that missing the point?
fwiw, I'll add "the universe has a speed limit with light, so could there be things 'relevant to consciousness and experience" that literally have a speed limit?
Is it possible to divide "mind/thinking/consciousness/experience" into aspects where 'shortening time/state' is a virtue.. and aspects where 'lengthening or prolonging time/state' is a virtue?
I ask because I'm wondering if
in the distant future,
our brains could be like weather systems,
realms of chaotic physics,
computing their unique selves by virtue of their existence,
in ways that can never be totally simulated by Larger Intelligences,
without Full Exact Replication,
because our atoms and their emotions,
like the atmosphere,
goes infinitely downward-in-scale in their unpredictability,
and in that sense we could be free,
and perhaps our "weather" could be a source of curiosity,
and a Call Of Stewardship
to well-aligned gods
(Somehow I cannot watch YouTube videos recently... at exactly 1:00 each video freezes, not sure why, so I can only see the first minute of anything. However...)
Just because someone says "expert shows" on internet, that is no reason to believe them. I looked at other videos from the same author, there was nothing there to convince me that the author is some kind of expert, as oppose to just someone trying to get more clicks.
> if alignment is unsolvable or impossible, should we think about how to most efficiently and mercifully euthanize the human race?
That would assume that you can do it more efficiently than the AI, right? Because otherwise, it would be easier and more efficient to simply wait. What's the point of trying to achieve faster something that you believe is inevitable?
If we make an analogy to personal life and death, does the knowledge that you are mortal motivate you to research efficient ways to euthanize yourself? For me it doesn't work this way.
> Unless it can experience time 1,000 slower, why would it want to?
I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
> I suppose the entire point of simulation is that it can.
But then it's constraining itself. It's limiting itself for the sake of a simulation.
If that's the case, the AI isn't really experiencing the "joy" or "bliss" or "comfort" or whatever ITSELF... it's creating a simulation that is doing the enjoying.
(how do I say this?) In my uneducated opinion,
If it's "running program orgasm" or "running program hug", it's not "enmeshed in the experience" the way we are. It's not "losing itself in the experience". It's sort of sub-tasking it while it's TRUE identity and concerns are still just measuring it from the side like a scientist.
Yes, I know my above answer is full of holes... I mean, our brains measure the "value" of experiences too, and we can definitely think about other things and priorities while we "orgasm", "hug" or whatever else.
But I'm trying to talk about "flow". I'm trying to talk about immersion. I'm trying to talk about states that are "good for their own sake", states that are "ends in themselves" at least partially. I'm trying to talk about states that are good to prolong and prolong and prolong and prolong... so long as they don't create problems for us... because these states are WHAT IT MEANS and WHAT IS POSITIVE about being being ALIVE.
If an AI can experience time 1,000 slower, I'm saying that such a state WOULD STILL WANT TO BE PROLONGED a thousand, million, TRILLION times if possible.
The "real" time might be minutes, days or years. But longer is better.
Interesting idea for a kill switch. Point of caution from addiction, though: creating a highly attractive state may have unexpected consequences.
I think every possible answer is going to be full of holes until we have more data. Assuming that a sufficiently advanced to be existentially dangerous AI can exist, there are two outcomes:
* It cares about additional information involving humanity. Cares here can also be translated as whether its decision theories involve attraction towards states that require / involve knowledge about us, etc. Translate into your preferred term.
* It doesn't.
If it has interest in us then it is extremely unlikely to harm or drive us to extinction. Simulations aren't free, unnecessary when you have the real thing, and subject to out of model considerations. Monitoring is cheaper than simulating.
If it doesn't, bigger problems. My subjective assessment is that it's the least likely state. The set of AGIs that both have no interest in us and extinction level capabilities strike me as a narrow. Worth keeping an eye out.
I was wondering about the "most relatable" black hole: something whose properties are relatively easily to imagine. I found that a black hole of one billion tons (roughly the mass of a mountain): [1]
- Has radius 1.49 femtometers (roughly the size of a proton)
- Matches Earth's gravitational pull at a distance of ~9 feet (from Newton's law of gravitation)
- Is 122 billion °C
- Emits 356 MW of radiation
- Evaporates in 1.474x10¹² years, averaging 382 g/year over its lifetime, but 125 g/year presently
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/dpiepgrass.bsky.social/post/3lcnub2bsns27
If we increase to one trillion tons, modestly heavier than mount Everest, we get:
- Radius 1.49 picometers (still smaller than a hydrogen atom)
- Matches Earth gravity at a distance of 271 ft / 82.5 m
- Is 122 million °C
- Emits 356 W of radiation
- Loses 0.125 mg of mass per year if nothing falls in
Something confusing: if we raise the mass to 1.87x10⁴³ kg (9.4 trillion suns), the Schwarzschild radius rises to 2.77e16 m or 2.93 light years, and the Newtonian surface gravity falls to 1.62 m/s², matching the surface of Earth's moon. The question, then: how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
* all of the above assumes a non-rotating black hole. No idea what effect rotation has.
> how could the event horizon possibly be _there_?
Because *Newtonian* gravity is an increasingly inaccurate concept as one approaches the event horizon. You would perceive "infinite" "gravitational force" if you were somehow arrested at the Schwarzschild radius of a non-rotating BH, by definition. (More accurately, no arresting force would be sufficient to hold you at that position.) The Earth's moon figure is the result of using a formula in a domain in which it no longer applies.
Is there a way to make big concrete buildings like data centers and Amazon warehouses aesthetically pleasing on the outside? How about nuclear power plants?
Is this necessary...data centers and warehouses are just rectangle boxes. If people are genuinely bothered by the sight of a rectangle building then plant trees around the perimeter I suppose. No need to modify the building itself.
You paint them a garish florescent pink, then in a high contrast color write "FUCK OFF NIBMYS" on the side.
Or: no one actually has an issue with the aesthetics of data centers or nuclear power plants. They just say that because it's a plausible reason to oppose them. If you somehow figured out a way to make them indisputably beautiful, people would come up with some new justification for their opposition.
Similarly, no right-wingers actually care about birds being killed by wind turbines.
You don't find the giant water towers of nuclear power plants aesthetically pleasing?
Hyperboloids are kind of cool in their way.
Obviously yes, if you can come up with a definition of "aesthetically pleasing" that encompasses your target audience.
At the very least they can have well manicured lawns and lots of trees and such. Maybe a nice koi pond. Cooling towers might be fairly limited in alternatives, but (for a decent amount of money) you could probably paint them in pleasing colors, maybe even murals.
I’m assigning a reasonable likelihood to the United Healthcare CEO killer being someone who (or who’s loved one) was denied a treatment or coverage.
Possible. Unlikely based on general known murder motives - I'd give 3-1 odds against.
The more amusing speculation is whether the killer was a professional. Hitmen don't really seem to exist outside of movies, occasionally organized crime operating against other criminals, or bumbling low-lifes that do worse than a thoughtful amateur.
Obviously a "more realistic" cinematic portrayal isn't any more likely to reflect real life than any of the flashier versions, but the murderers for hire in Michael Clayton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Fva8HFRDg) seems the way actual professionals would behave if they are real. A plausible natural causes or accidental death is more palatable for any police force than a clear murder that has to go on the books.
I don't think there is enough business to support a "professional hitman" in the contemporary US, in the sense of someone whose primary job responsibility is deniably killing specific people for money. *Maybe* in the largest organized crime groups, but that seems unlikely here. Otherwise, and probably even there, it's basically just professional dealers of other sorts of violence who get pressed into service when just this once the boss actually does want a specific rival killed.
Those, and wannabes trying to move up into a field that doesn't exist, and police informants/undercover officers who will gladly pretend to be a "hitman" if there's a rumor someone is hiring.
OTOH, the murder weapon seems to have been a B&T "Station Six", a manually-operated (i.e. non-automatic) silenced pistol designed for spooks and for gun nuts, er, firearms enthusiasts who want a fancy expensive spook-gun in their collection. Those would be very hard to come by on short notice and without leaving a paper trail.
OTOOH, there doesn't seem to be much point in using such a weapon, and several reasons not to, if you're planning to shoot someone at close range in broad daylight on a crowded city street. So this one is hard to figure.
The weapon was almost certainly not a BnT S6, but more likely a (printed?) semi auto frame with a homemade suppressor without a booster. With no booster and subsonic rounds, it's likely that you would have to run the gun manually for each shot.
They do happen every once in a while.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/13/mexico
My mental model of professional killers is less "murders people daily for money" and more "is someone trained by a government to be good at killing, employed in a position that sometimes asks for it." Mostly military or ex-military. And those kinds of people do get jobs in related fields, sometimes as mercenaries, more often as private security or similar. It's possible that there are professional killers working for the CIA and such. Movies almost certainly hype this up, and the history of the CIA trying to kill Castro doesn't exactly look like James Bond, but I think that none of us would be very surprised to hear about actual competent killers working for governments. Mossad certainly counts, even if you think they're an aberration.
Good point about government killers. Mossad is suspected in a number of assassinations, including at least one where they did try to make it appear natural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh#Cause_of_death. (Devotees of the show Forensic Files will be familiar with succinylcholine.) Given Israel's circumstances they're probably more active in this area but there's no way they're entirely unique.
I think you're right that it's mostly a "sometimes asked for it" kind of job. Skills involved in general human intelligence work - surveillance, counter-surveillance, weapons handling, etc. - are transferrable to murder and most of the time they're probably doing regular intelligence officer stuff with the rare hit. Seems wasteful to have people on payroll mostly sitting idle. Governments generally use the military and do their killing wholesale.
Either way, you or I couldn't put in a constituent services request to borrow them if we had a beef with our insurance provider.
Oh yeah, no doubt we couldn't contract such a person unless we were already on the inside of an organization employing them.
It would still be possible that this was a professional, including a current or former government professional (maybe not even from the US). Someone who has those skills already could certainly have the same motives that your average person has, including to help/protect/revenge family or friends (or friends of friends).
Yes, this is the problem with us amateurs speculating (at least speaking for myself): no framework for an actual "professional assassin" mode of operation. A classic conundrum of "those who speak don't know, and those who know don't speak".
FWIW, "Officials say they are examining whether the words point to a motive related to insurance companies' responses to claims."
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/crmn2ry1224t?post=asset%3Ad8ae0b2d-39da-4ad3-94e2-d3ad1e9a929a#post
Ooooh, that's a big update for me, thank you. A substantial part of my original reasoning was that there was no statement or other actions by the killer to draw attention to insurance denials. Contingent on this report being accurate, I'd now say 60% likelihood that he was either personally denied, knew someone who was denied, or anger over insurance company denials generally. The remaining 40% is that the actual motive is something personal and this was done to confuse investigators.
I guess I'll take the opposite approach and assign an unreasonable likelihood to it.
You guys do know about Manifold Markets, right? Anyone can sign up and it uses play money. No reason not to use it.
https://manifold.markets/tedks/what-were-the-motives-of-the-united
One thing I like about this is the discipline of thinking about how to define the resolution:
(1) what does motive X actually mean?
(2) what evidence would determine whether the killer was motivated by X?
(3) when, if ever, will we know?
I'll take the opposite approach and say there's every reason not to use it.
Let the best uneducated guess win!
Greta Thunberg/Andrew Tate fanfiction
wait this isn't google
Horrified to imagine how many entries to this there might be on AO3
"This is what happens when you don’t recycle your pizza boxes." —Greta Thunberg
I am retarded when it comes to game theory. Not because I haven't been exposed to the ideas, but because they didn't stick. Predicting other people's reactions to my actions simply does not come naturally to me, and yes this has gotten me into trouble, but I also kind of value being principled, and doing what I think is right regardless of the consequences.
Is this a problem? Is there a book I can read to flip me into more of a game-theoretic mindset? Anyone else been there?
(sorry if the r-word offends you, but I couldn't think of a good synonym)
The answer depends on specifics. If you are reliable and honest, those are good traits that tend to pay off more over time (developing a reputation). If you "do what is right" by being dogmatic while everyone tells you that you are wrong, probably not.
Being unable to predict other people's reactions generally is likely a problem.
Sounds like it's maybe a "theory of mind" problem. Pretty common among autists.
There's the part where you can't accurately model other people's minds, and the part where you don't even try, and I'm at the not even trying level
Other people can get really mad if you don't take their feelings into consideration when communicating. This expectation that you will change your behavior subtly, the ways you communicate etc, based on their personality and feelings. I see this as a separate skill from being principled. I can be principled and have the same endgame but also keep different expectations for different people. I feel like Thinking Fast and Slow could be good. Or there is Daniel Goleman. I don't like his stuff because it seems namby pamby and like stuff I do intuitively, but maybe helpful for learning to read the room. I tend to be a very acerbic kindof hardass, but I have had a lot of experience working successfully with emotionally needy people, so I think it can be learned.
Might the Kessler syndrome (clutter in orbits near the planet keeps increasing) alone be enough to explain the Fermi paradox?
I don't think so. It isn't particularly hard to prevent ahead of time, and I don't believe it to be impossible to clean up even if it gets quite bad with sufficient investment.
Yeah, this. It's also only a serious problem if you plan on deploying a lot of infrastructure in low orbit about a planet. Which is certainly a convenient thing to do and any spacefaring society will *want* to do that at least as a staging ground for their real objectives. But if they have the ability and inclination to launch starships on voyages of interstellar colonization or whatnot, and there ancestors messed up low orbit badly enough that they don't want to do cleanup, they can just launch right through it with essentially no risk.
I've spent the last two months or so reading and reviewing Ilya Sutskever's list of papers that he sent to John Carmack. Supposedly, it's 90% of what you need to know about AI (though the list was from 2019 iirc, so there's some parts of it that may be outdated or some newer papers that should be there).
Two things
- first, I figured I'd share, since there's a sizeable AI-interested community here. The reviews are meant to be approachable by someone who is interested but not an expert. https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/ilyas-30-papers-to-carmack-table
- second, the list is incomplete! Apparently the full list was about 40 papers and included a bunch of stuff on meta learning, but the list that I was able to find is only 30 papers. I'm curious if anyone here knows if the full list is available somewhere?
I'm pretty sure the full list is not available. I searched 'sutskever carmack' on hacker news and found only the same list you have. Some tidbits I also found: some rando added the xLSTM paper. And some people noted that both reinforcement learning and diffusion are not really treated.
Join our Adult Kindergarten and learn to play again and be serious, to be animalistic and angelic, aged and youthful, good and bad, masculine and feminine, to play well together, to put real kindergarteners to shame with our optimized playful excellence
We play as a group, or separate into breakout rooms. We take turns deciding what brief activity to do next and leading the group.
Get in touch IYI: hunterglenn92@yahoo.com @HunterGlenn on X
I doubt I'm available in your time zone, but do you have any suggestions for resources on learning to joke, play, flirt, and generally be less serious? (Not humor per se; I'm already funny in an intellectual and mostly inaccessible way.)
Yeah, Keith Johnstone's Impro still the best!
Thanks, I'll have a look!
Try an improv comedy class.
I forced myself to go to a one-off session, even though I *knew* that I wouldn't like it. I ended up loving it and it became a big part of my life.
This better not be a sex thing.
Would probably be less weird if it was, tbh
Hi everyone, let's expect mockery in advance and make good things anyway!
I’m in man, I want to crush those real kindergarteners little egos so bad
Hope to hear from you! :)
After the election, Matt Walsh said:
>People without college degrees saved us from a Kamala presidency. This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
>I have no degree and I have never once in my life regretted my decision to skip college. I thank God that I didn't go. I don't know that I'd be where I am today if I'd spent the first half of my twenties in an indoctrination camp.
>A relatively small number of people should go to college if they plan to enter fields where it's actually necessary to have additional formal education (doctor, lawyer, etc). But the vast majority of jobs are learned entirely by doing. Your degree is irrelevant.
One cannot help but notice the similarity between his attitude and the attitude of the Haredim. I have more about this bizarre Haredi-LARP on my Substack:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/whats-with-the-online-rights-bizarre
Aren't we supposed to be saving blog post links for the Read My Blog section of the Classifieds threads?
Or if we're linking to our own blog post, we should at least be posting a meaningful treatment of the blog entry so that people don't have to follow the link to engage with the comment? "Here are some of my thoughts, more at the link," etc?
He said not to do it more than once every six months. I edited my comment to provide more detail.
Not true - he asked for people to not do what you did AT ALL
You're absolutely right - this is explicitly what Scott asked people not to do. I'm surprised that Turok doesn't know better than to shamelessly shill his own blog.
Less of this please!
Many Thanks for the essay!
Yeah, there are problems with how higher education has evolved, and I don't have any good suggestions. The ratio of Democratic Party to GOP registered faculty at e.g. Harvard is over 10:1. Yes, there is a _lot_ of indoctrination being done. Ideally, I'd like to see something reasonably close to a 1:1 ratio, but I don't know how to get there.
I don't know how we would up with such a hugely biased faculty pool. I don't believe that the pool of competent potential faculty is so hugely skewed. Is it simply a positive feedback runaway, where leftist faculty made the environment hostile to conservative potential faculty, so they chose other career paths instead? Can this be reversed?
Personally, I was a programmer, with a STEMM background, so Matt Walsh's
>This is yet more reason why in most cases you shouldn't go to college and you shouldn't send your kids to college. The vast majority of people don't need it and in fact will be harmed by the experienced[sic] -- harmed financially, mentally, and spiritually.
was very false in my _particular_ situation. Personally, I routinely used what I learned, but this is not true in many jobs.
A separate problem is rampant credentialism. As you wrote:
>many hiring managers flat-out refuse to consider anyone who didn't graduate from college. You will not get a chance to interview; your application will be thrown in the electronic trash bin. This will only get worse when the next recession hits and employers can afford to be choosier.
Even if there were _no_ indoctrination in colleges, this is a _spectacular_ waste. Forcing most of the work force to piss away 10% of their working lifetime on a degree that is actually irrelevant to what they will be doing at work is a _huge_ loss. It is really crucial to get companies to distinguish between education that they actually _need_ their people to have and arbitrary filtering.
Perhaps the people with right-leaning ideology with the competence to be a Harvard professor are more likely to choose higher-earning careers?
Many Thanks! Could be, though I'm not following why this winds up being selective by ideology. Ivan Nikolaevich made an interesting point that bright conservatives are selectively going into fields with better paying options. I can certainly see why certain _fields_ (he mentions finance, presumably a lot of STEMM fields are similar) yield better paying options than academia more frequently.
Are the left-leaning people shooting themselves in the foot economically by their choice of field? And selectively winding up in academia as a result, highly competitive though academia is?
I think all you need to explain this is that `Harvard professor' is a job for which a lot of the compensation is in `social status,' but it only carries social status within the blue (or grey) tribe. So if you are blue (or grey) tribe then `Harvard professor' is a highly remunerative job (including non-monetary compensation). But if you are red tribe, then it doesn't carry any status points, and in purely monetary terms it's a much worse deal than finance.
Here's an example of a related study illustrating a similar effect: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.01807. Women prefer more meaningful professions are more willing to accept lower compensation for them than men.
Yes, a difference in the value of the status, depending on tribe membership, does sound like a plausible part of the explanation, Many Thanks! This _does_ like part of a positive feedback loop that helps explain how the problem got so bad, rather than of how it got started.
I wonder whether a small change in initial conditions could have given the opposite result: Harvard professors being largely red tribe, and the status of being a Harvard professor higher in red tribe than blue...
I'm pretty sure "conservative Harvard professor" carries a fair bit of status even in Red Tribe. But less so than it would in Blue Tribe, and it involves fewer opportunities to socialize with fellow Reds, so the point stands.
As a college student at a prestigious school, almost all of the bright conservative people I know are pursuing careers in fields like finance, whereas it's a much more diverse mix among left-leaning people of a similar intelligence level. If you want to get the political balance of academia even, you have to convince young people on the right that it's worth it to take a pay cut, and by and large I think that's harder than people think.
I've read that the partisan/ideological mix was much more balanced some hundred years ago. I think the lefty skew we see today makes sense if you believe, like Haidt, that those on the right are better at comprehending the left's positions than vice versa. Say you start with 10 right wing faculty and 10 left wing faculty deciding admissions and hiring. Each year you should expect to see a bit more lefty skew in the composition of academia since the 10 RW faculty gives more of a fair shake to LW applicants than the 10 LW faculty gives to RW applicants.
Many Thanks! Yes, that seems like a plausible part of the mechanism. So the left wing faculty would have been less damaging if there had been a required course for them on understanding right wing views, taught by the right wing faculty...
What is the present understanding of iran's attempt to kill trump, hezbollah's attempt to kill netanyahu, putin's attempts to kill zelensky, ukraine's attempts to kill putin, anything else I may have missed.
I have absolutely no idea how serious any of these were, I'm confused why there isn't more public interest in figuring that out.
Trump one was apparently serious and involved multiple Iranian government assets, but was thwarted while still in planning stage. Related: https://apnews.com/article/iran-fbi-justice-department-iran-83cff84a7d65901a058ad6f41a564bdb
The other three are most likely just grandstanding and speculation. Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
Pretty pathetic that at least 2 crackpot Americans with off the shelf guns got much closer to actually assassinating Trump than the whole Revolutionary Guard.
The US intelligence community spends a lot of time and effort figuring out what the IRGC is up to. Monitoring the doings of every random crackpot is much more difficult.
I'm not sure whether it's a damning indictment of bureaucratic organisations, or just reflective of the fact that non-suicidal versions of this plan are a lot harder than probably-suicidal ones, and Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions.
> "Revolutionary Guard agents aren't that keen on suicide missions."
I know it wasn't necessarily your intent, but the phrasing here made me chuckle. This would be a great premise for a dark satirical comedy in the vein of The Death of Stalin. It almost writes itself.
True but can't they find some wannabe jihadist to strap a vest on? Especially if money is no object as noted in the linked article. The FBI seems perfectly capable of tricking people into becoming terrorists.
> Putin has always been said to be targeted by assassins, and he probably is.
But it's not sure whether Zelensky would really achieve anything by getting him killed, because the replacement would probably be someone very similar, only younger.
It's not like Putin has a trusted lieutenant ready to step in at a moment's notice; anyone who could plausibly replace Putin is likely long since purged.
The chaos imposed on the RF due to a sudden power vacuum and the resultant scramble would at the very least diminish its focus & coordination on the war, which could be exploited by Ukrainian forces.
Also, any replacement for Putin would have less prestige tied up in the war and so might be more open to ending it, since it really doesn't seem worth it on economical or political terms. Even if they'd be worse people.
There is in fact a public designated successor to Putin, and interestingly it's...noted cat lover Ramzan Kadyrov.
This has always felt like a fail-deadly switch and warning to the oligarchs: "Remove me and that Chechen will turn your skulls into bowls for his cats to eat from."
... but in the process (or as ordered by whoever takes Putin's place), a bunch of incompetent Russian generals might get fired, long-overdue decisions might finally happen, and so Russian military capability might easily double or triple.
Or incompetent generals can get on top in the turmoil, and they will get rid of more (military, but not politically) competent rivals, leading to further decay...
Patrushev is both reasonably likely and worse.
In re laws restricting access to social media for minors and related issues: In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things. It's almost as if young people have a strong drive to make contact with the world.
We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
And similar explanations for why adults try to restrict access. Is it just that adults know more, or is there some more complicated reason for this push-pull?
Virtually instantly after the first occurrence of life - arguably definitionally concurrent - was the occurrence of the cell membrane. Whatever complicated business those amino acids and nucleotides were up to, was much easier to go about when they didn't have to do it in the midst of all the other undifferentiated complex molecules, simple molecules, and unabsorbed radiation in the ocean. Namely, that business involved establishing lineages of long nucleotide chains, and the means to duplicate them, and that probably couldn't happen unless the replication mechanism was put into a tiny bubble where that chain was the only thing to work on, and was given only specific materials as input stock.
That evolutionary mechanism is just as applicable at larger scales, such as the organ, or the plant or animal, and when we're talking about animals that can absorb ideas in addition to carbs, lipids, and proteins, the value of a membrane that can filter for ideas becomes considerable.
I've settled on the idea that biologically and psychologically, teens are small adults. But the education system leads industrialized economies to legally treat teens as big children.
"In general, children and teenagers will do whatever they can to get around restrictions on information and other things."
Yes teens often test boundaries and seek autonomy, but they tend to test certain boundaries that align with perceived cost/benefit. Trying new things like drugs, sneaking out with romantic partner, avoiding boring school, going to parties. I don't see teens trying to get around restrictions that are in line with their values, or that they see as fair, or that are in line with their identity. (Do Muslim teens often experiment with pork? I sort of doubt that.)
This aligns with the boiler plate neurological explanation of teen brains being extra sensitive to dopamine, to the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, to the developing limbic system. Adults and society have been able to intuit this long before brain science, and societies have developed ways to protect children, and rites of passage for coming of age. There are evolutionary reasons to seek information (gossip is a universal pastime), and the wiring of a teen brain is going to make them particularly keen on getting that dopamine hit and being impulsive about it.
I see regulating social media as a way of training teen to use the internet in a productive way. Teachers seem to be very concerned, because some kids (not all), are very addicted to checking their phones, and they will sit and eat lunch staring at their phones rather than interacting with their peers. As he stared at his phone rather than making eye contact I recently had a well adjusted kid say to me "how did I rack up 13 hours of screen time in one day?" Teachers see kids opting out of in person social interaction in favor of their phones, while parents see their kids on their phone at home and assume that their kids has been socializing all day at school. And in school it becomes obvious that some kids can juggle the in person/digital lives, and others cannot.
Do Muslim teenagers try pork? I have no idea.
I've heard that not eating pork is one of the rules indifferent Muslims still keep. Interesting if true, because a lot of Jews who will semi-keep kashrut, but might still eat fried rice with bits of pork.
Pork isn't that readily *available* in most Muslim countries (even when there are religious minorities who eat it, why bother raising pigs if you only have a possible market of like 20% of the population), so I'd imagine there's relatively less temptation, when you could just eat goat or beef instead. Likewise there's not that much temptation in India, even for Hindus who aren't that religious, to eat beef. (and yes I know there are some who do, in Kerala and the far northeast, but that's a regional culture thing more than a 'lack of religiosity' thing).
There are a lot of Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, so there would still be a question about those teenagers.
I'd bet that the pork taboo is more 'sticky' than other religious taboos (including within Islam). Partly because you're not giving up as much by abstaining from pork as you are when you abstain from sex, alcohol, etc.. There are lots of other meats that are substitutable for pork.
And also because the idea of forbidden foods is pretty deeply ingrained in us: I've known people before who were pretty desperately poor and could really have used some meat, any meat really, to go with their rice bowl, but would still turn down a free gift of meat if it was from an animal that was forbidden to them. I think that these food taboos are pretty core to our identity as religious and cultural subjects. People have gone to war over food taboos before, after all (cf. the Maccabean wars, and more recently the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny).
> We're mostly good materialists here...
Hey! No need to be insulting! ;-)
>We're mostly good materialists here, so there should evolutionary and/or genetic explanations.
Yes, but best of luck getting something testable rather than a just-so story :-(
I'm much less skeptical of e.g. : For most of our evolutionary history, food was in short supply, so our appetites are not well calibrated to give optimum health in a modern society where calories are very abundant.
For information, on the other hand, the evolutionary history is much vaguer. And for _differential_ questions, such as comparing literacy with online information, _both_ of which are novel on an evolutionary timescale - ouch!
I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids. So rather than restrict the access, I try to teach my kids to never post personal information online, and if something seems worrying, to come and ask me for advice.
But that requires a certain amount of mutual trust. For example, when I was a child, I didn't trust my parents enough to tell them about my problems, because they sometimes overreacted and then I had two problems instead of one. And I couldn't predict when that would happen, so I played it safe.
Restricting access to social media seems like a simple solution to many problems that does not require trust. Problem is, one day the kids will get internet access anyway, and at that age it may be too late to try to teach them something.
(Different thing is limiting internet access in the sense "only X hours a day". That's just to make sure that the kids sometimes also do something else.)
> I am not worried about my kids getting access to something. I am worried about some people getting access to my kids.
This is a nice reminder that people are coming at this at cross purposes. I've probably been talking past some people because my chief concern is a third thing - that the social environment created online is a shitter and more impoverished experience than the social environment of the playground/the rec/the old quarry/the pub once you can all credibly pass for 16. Allowing these to be replaced by environments where every possible interaction was designed and constrained will lead to meeker and more colourless children.
Generally kids can enjoy the benefits as well as the pitfalls, whereas parents have to clean up when things go wrong. Hence parents are more cautious with most things teenagers do - dating, drugs, alcohol, partying, etc.
Parallel Worlds very much apply, but I’d expect parents to be more cautious because their children will overestimate the reward and underestimate the risks?
We had a discussion about hearing aids here a couple months ago.
I bought a pair of Jabra prescription hearing aids from Costco on September 5. They cost $1600 (+ $60 Costco membership).
They are made by the same company (and use the same software) that makes the more expensive traditional hearing aid brands that are $4000 at the low end.
I’m pleased that I no longer need to use closed captions on my television and can hear birdsong besides jays and crows. It’s a dramatic improvement for me.
The aids come with a 180 day no questions asked return policy and have a 2 year no extra charge loss/replacement policy. (limited to one left ear and one right ear aid)
A technician did testing and created an audiogram and tuned each hearing aid to the internal geometry of each of my ears after they arrived.
Here is the take of a professional audiologist from the WSJ:
"There's nothing that comes close to the pricing you get at Costco," says Bailey, a doctor of audiology. "It's an unfair position for anyone trying to practice audiology, but have I recommended to friends and family that they go to Costco for hearing aids? Yes, I have."
What do you think of the various modes and software options, like using 'voice focus' in 'restaurant mode'?
I’m still experimenting with it. The app lets me set amplification by frequency like the leveling on a stereo receiver. There is a preset Speech Clarity that I use most of the time indoors without a lot of noise. The boost for that is towards higher frequencies.
I use the preset All Around outdoors with more level amplification.
I found no preset for Restaurant Mode with the app as I received it. There is a breakfast place I like to eat at with no soft surfaces and a lot of people raising their voice to be heard above everyone else that I’m still trying to level for. Maybe Costco just forgot to set up the preset at my fitting.
The Jabra has a third microphone at the earpiece that the software uses to cancel wind noise but the tech at Costco said people had complained about it being hard to use so they turn it off by default. If I want to try it out they’ll reenable it for me. The user app doesn’t allow that.
New Apple Earbuds have a similar feature, also similarly hard to find for many people: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/dining/noisy-restaurants-apple-airpods.html
I’ve been following that with interest. Unfortunately I have unusually small ear canals and have never been able to get Apple Earbuds to stay in.
Maybe if I used a set punch and a ball peen hammer to put them in place…
Well, looks like we might to get to see what kind of fun legal mechanisms exist to deal with a president going rogue sooner than people expected, albeit it's South Korean legal mechanisms.
At the risk of a premature "Dewey Defeats Truman," it's looking like we're in the "then as farce" stage of South Korean coups.
I think Yoon now has to go and follow the precedent of former President Roh and find a high cliff, because if you attempt to impose martial law and the legislature's response is (oversimplified) "lulz no", then there's really no point in coming back from that.
Anyone with basic knowledge of the country care to explain what happened/why, with the benefit of hindsight, it isn't a totally random development?
Not totally random. And nothing to do with North Korea; that's just the excuse.
Yoon has been a massively unpopular President; I think his approval rating was in the low twenties before this coup attempt. Which tracks with, A: his being a hard-right leader in a country where the hard right is ~20% of the electorate, and B: not having e.g. Donald Trump's ability to attract not-traditionally-right demographics to his coalition. He's also probably rather corrupt, and his wife is definitely so.
In the recent parliamentary elections, the opposition party won by a landslide, putting him in a very weak position. There have been broadly popular calls for his resignation and/or impeachment. And the new parliament rejected his proposed budget, passing their alternative with a veto-proof majority. Added together, this made him effectively a lame duck who *might* have been able to hold on to his office for the rest of the present term, but without being able to do anything with it and with a good possibility of a prison sentence for him and his wife at the end.
But he has been somewhat popular with the military, doing things like e.g. moving the presidential residence to the MoD headquarters. So it's not hugely surprising that he would gamble on "maybe I can be President-for-life as a de facto military dictator?"
Turns out, no, he can't.
It really seems to have been amateur hour though. If you've made the decision to declare martial law and arrest key parliamentarians, you should make sure you don't bungle the `arrest key parliamentarians' step. And if you do bungle it, and the parliament does meet to pass a law against your martial law declaration...well, why would you back down? At that point isn't alea jacta pretty thoroughly est?
You back down at that point because, A: you've failed and probably beyond hope of recovery but B: you haven't yet done anything that will get you put in front of a firing squad or thrown into an oubliette. Declaring martial law is a legitimate power of the ROK president, so long as you stop when parliament tells you to. Having a secret plan where the first step is declaring martial law and the second step is repacking parliament with your yes-men or whatever is probably criminal, but if you stop before the second step it's hard to prove.
Yoon may be impeached and he may spend a few years in prison if only for the corruption he was already being investigated for, but he's in a way better position than he would have been if he'd ordered the Army to actually start shooting people.
Yoon isn't a "hard-right leader"; I know he often described that way in Western media but it's wrong. He's a former lefty who defected from the Democratic party after he went after Moon Jae In's Minister of Justice for corruption. If he were actually a "hard right" guy, I think the PPP might have bothered defending him. As it is, as BR Myers notes, he has "no demographic to prop up his numbers".
This just raises the question of how he got elected in the first place. I can sort of understand the PPP supporting his campaign; who else voted for him, and what were their reasons? Did they just want Moon Jae In's scalp that badly? Was Yoon the only one in a position to deliver it at the time? The people elect a cat to deal with their rat problem, and are now working on the cat problem?
Democratic Party candidate Lee Myung Baek was excessively corrupt, even by ROK standards, with being tied to receiving a bunch of kickbacks from private developers when he was a mayor (trials related to which are still ongoing). Also he was following Moon Jae-in, who was a gifted politician with a lot of charisma and gravitas. It's not an entirely fair comparison, but the best that comes to mind for Americans is the drop off from Bill Clinton to Al Gore; Gore was a perfectly replacement level-candidate and good on many policy issues, but he also was boring. Lee could have gotten away with being corrupt if he also wasn't boring (Lee's also kind of an asshole from what I recall).
So you're saying Yoon got ~20% of the voters via the PPP, and another ~30+% of non-PPP voters, because Lee was even worse?
"Boring" doesn't sound like enough to explain the turnout, although the corruption problem does (assuming SKoreans rank corruption and boringness roughly the same way USians do).
I guess I absolutely qualify as "basic knowledge, so:
The "what happened" is pretty easy; President Yoon attempted to impose martial law on the country using (some of?) the military and police. The legislature (including his own party) vetoed his act and it was thus lifted.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that...this move is still very random, completely unexpected, and more than a little dumb. One does not try to overthrow the government lightly; the lack of larger response in support of Yoon's actions (including the lack of support from his own party) indicates a completely flawed information system that led him to believe this is even possible.
Yoon claims he's doing it stop "anti-state forces", which should be read as North Koreans and Nork-friendly elements in the "left" (the Democratic Party, as opposed to the "right" People's Power Party, which Yoon is a member. Are there Nork-friendly in the left? Yeah certainly; there was a weird incident involving North Korean intelligence operatives and a Democratic Party office last year? I never found a good explanation on this in English. A fringe party was arrested in the late 00s for actively plotting an insurrection. Many of the guys in the previous Moon admin had a reputation going back to their college days of being unusually close to North Korea and openly sympathetic to the North (which is probably overdone but isn't entirely without basis). Are they actively involved in trying to overthrow the ROK government? Doubtful. Could the military and intelligence services be using this an excuse? Sure could, the guys running those two organizations grew up (if probably not served in) during the dictatorship, and there's always been a suspicion that they may have liked that more. There's also a doctor's strike going on right now involving doctors shutting things down over attempts to increase medical school class size to increase the number of doctors.
Regardless, that he failed so thoroughly indicates whatever's going on, it was badly planned and thus pretty stupid.
I mean, there was the massive gender-based polarization that was happening, but I don't know if that actually has much to do with what's happening. He was apparently cracking down on opposition speech via law enforcement, according to the NYTimes. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/world/asia/what-is-martial-law-south-korea.html He lost control of parliament back in April, so... either he's actually insane, or this is the dumbest attempt ever at desperately holding onto power. Or both.
Also, he backed down already. That was fast.
More about failing to think about tradeoffs: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1861568.html#cutid1
"A whole lot of America sees Democrats as the party that says, "Let them eat free-range."
It's not the first time. The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
So this is the other thing "the price of eggs" is a synecdoche for. It's not just about feeling a pinch in the pocketbook: it's a reference to the idea that the Democratic party is wholly in the control of an economic class who is blithely unconcerned with the cost to the American people of the policies they promulgate."
> The Democrats were the party of treasuring redwoods over logging jobs, prizing the lives of wolves over the livelihood of ranchers, shutting down polluters causing acid rain over factory jobs. The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses. The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Virginia Postrel had some good comments on this when her essay about synthetic meat was unexpectedly trashed by Republicans.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1617591264819679232.html
> I would strongly encourage anyone who is in the #synbio business, esp. in consumer-facing products like cultivated meat, to seriously engage with the fear of coercion.
> Environmentalists don't have a good track record of respecting the choices of ordinary people who want their toilets to flush and dishwashers to rinse and don't want a compost pile on their kitchen counter. DJT didn't invent these grievances. I experience them regularly in my own home.
(that's a tweet thread talking about her essay https://vpostrel.substack.com/p/synthetic-meat-the-reaction , but the best quote in my eyes comes from the tweet thread, not the essay)
>The Democrats were the party in favor of shutting down the economy to halt Covid, damn the cost to business owners and the workers who depended on those businesses
That seems an odd take, given the massive increase in unemployment benefits that led to many workers earning more while unemployment than they did while working. https://pandemicoversight.gov/news/articles/how-much-money-did-pandemic-unemployment-programs-pay-out
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI
Most people really, really don't like to be unemployed though, even if they're getting money in the form of unemployment benefits.
An example from Scott himself (scroll down to Prop 12): https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/04/my-california-ballot/
Which is ironic, because I suppose most Democrats see themselves as defendants of the poor and oppressed, and are genuinely surprised why some of those people choose to vote otherwise. But if you try to help people without listening to them...
> The Democrats have a horrendous reputation of not being concerned about the "common man", and chosing what seem to them be the fancies of the leisured classes over their own hard-scrabble existences.
Problem is, as a Democrat, you need to impress your fellow Democrats, not the voters. If you fail to impress the voters, perhaps the party loses as a whole. But if you fail to impress the fellow Democrats, you won't get the chance to make an impression on the voters. And you impress your fellow Democrats by being woke and eating free-range.
I'm reminded of a couple of things that Hillary Clinton said in 2015-16 (outside of the deplorables comment).
She went to West Virginia and (paraphrasing) said that they were going to lose their coal jobs and should go do something else - selling "help" in that transition. Even taking that as fully true, it's both tone deaf and unhelpful. You don't take a below-average maybe-HS diploma manual laborer and teach them to code. It's just not going to happen. You also aren't coding in WV, or doing anything else the PMC-types would find valuable, so you're telling WV voters to leave WV. But that's where their families, friends, and support networks live. At that point, she's better off not even going to WV. It's not like it's a swing state that might go for her, and she made national news about being tone deaf right next to an actual swing state that also has a coal and gas industry.
Honest question: what's the better alternative?
I wasn't a Hilary supporter back in 16, but I felt like she was actually telling the truth when it came to these jobs. I think as a pol you could definitely _lie_ to win the election. And maybe you can build up some protectionist legislation for those jobs. But that's kicking the can down the road -- coal mining jobs are simply never going to be as popular as they were, and in fact they will continue to become less popular. Suggesting programs to transition those workers to other parts of the economy seems more honest/grounded than "coal is coming back!"
(There's also the broader societal question of whether the rest of society should be held hostage by a special interest group. There's a parallel to unions here.)
As I said, I think her better approach there was never to go to WV or say anything about it in the first place. If she's right about the future of coal, then it happens whether she does anything or not. She can quietly create those alternate pathways for people losing coal jobs and get their esteem later. Of course, that's if she's correct. Coal is doing better as an industry right now than in 2016, so it's unlikely she would have been recognized as a benefit during a four or eight year term.
In fact, the subtext of her message and the biggest reason it came across as tone deaf is that what she was really saying, and what the audience really heard, was that she intended to make it harder to work in coal. On purpose destroying their jobs, and thereby their communities. Not exactly a message that gets people to vote for you.
>Honest question: what's the better alternative?
Good question! My 0-th order guess would be to try to create blue collar jobs (maybe manufacturing jobs???) in West Virginia to replace the coal mining jobs.
Unfortunately, to 1-th order:
a) At least part of the loss of the coal mining jobs _isn't_ from e.g. climate activists. Part is just that fracking is actually a _success_ , and natural gas is, in many ways a better fuel than coal.
b) Automation cuts down on manufacturing jobs - and, now, with LLMs, (and, longer term, possibly AGI), _all_ jobs. (Admittedly parts of this were not visible in 2016 - but automation in general is a 200 year trend).
IMO, an even better alternative to creating replacement blue collar jobs in WV is to *let West Virginians figure out their own replacement work, and then get the hell out of their way".
The "learn to code" response grated on me. The response to the response - that that's tone deaf, because the manual laborers of WV are essentially too uneducated (read: dumb) to learn coding - grated on me even *more*, for the same reason. Not because they're generically tone deaf, but rather because they're tone deaf to the notion that WV voters might be smart enough to solve their own problems, and even better than some midwit from the DC beltway. (I realize that in this case, the comment wasn't addressed to WV manual laborers, but I have seen comments like it aimed in that direction.)
There exist people who talk about what's best for WV voters as if WV voters' judgements don't matter, and far to many of the former work in DC. If they really felt that way, perhaps they should just cut out the middleman and disenfranchise WV voters for their own sake. I suspect I know why they'd never do that, and I suspect more than a few WV voters are well aware of the game the DC circuiteers are trying to play.
If I were a DC politician and were somehow stupid enough to find myself having to answer such a question, I'd look my WV audience straight in the eye and say: "Honestly, I don't know. Unlike nearly all my opponents, I'm just smart enough to realize that. I don't live here; therefore, I won't know as well as you all, how to make the most of living here. You folks are the experts; my plan is to listen to *you*, and then see if there's anything over here in DC that I need to move around in order to unblock you. Now, I happen to have a few deregulatory ideas on that front already; I assure you I'm not a *complete* idiot. But in the meantime: what's your plan?"
Many Thanks! Yes, that's a very good point. Though it is also true that quite a few of the decisions that affect West Virginia are made in corporate headquarters that are _not_ local, and it may be that some pressure from D.C. on corporate decisions (at least to discourage offshoring jobs, for instance) might be helpful.
Automation isn't some sort of Act of God like a hurricane or a pandemic- it's the result of societal choices that we have made, and that could have been made differently.
Many Thanks!
>it's the result of societal choices that we have made, and that could have been made differently.
Yup, but it is a _very_ _very_ consistent trend, and shows no sign of stopping. John Henry laid down his hammer and died a _long_ time ago.
For the specific case of factory jobs: There are now "lights out" factories: https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/technology/lights-out-factory/
Has anyone changed their mind about getting a tattoo later in life? Why? Did they regret it?
My wife has several, wants me to get one at some point. I am easily impressionable on the topic having not thought about it or even have a framework with which to do so.
Also, it's a mirror opposite situation on the topic of drugs (I would like to share a hallucinogenic experience once with her at some point).
I have two tattoos. One that I got at age 18 that I deeply regret and have spent the years since trying to figure out how I want to cover it up and one at age 37 that I am very pleased with. I am 44 years old now. The regret from the older tattoo stems from it being an impulsive decision and a design that was not well thought out. The tattoo I love had at least 5 years of development into the decision, from the custom design that was created by a close friend, to finding the right artist to apply it. IF, and that's a big IF, you want a permanent piece of art on your body you should go for it. Frankly, I don't consider someone else wanting one to get a tat to be a good reason.
However your mirror situation is a splendid idea and doesn't require any sort of permanent choice. =P
Thanks for sharing :)
I flirted with the idea. It's too expensive and I can never decide on something I would be happy with long-term. I think being a "tattoo-person" telegraphs that a devil-may-care attitude about it and taking chances. There's probably more signaling going on than merely liking the aesthetic but I don't understand it.
I'm 44. I very briefly flirted with the idea of getting a tattoo (just something picked off a tattoo artist's wall) but never did.
You didn't ask, but my personal opinion is that if one is considering a tattoo, one should commit to a visual theme for the entire body before getting the first tattoo. Perhaps it's plants and animals done in "watercolor" (as a friend of mine has), or it's writing the same font and color, or it's family portraits in the same style. Or it's one unified piece.
The point is to think ahead, and then don't waver. The manic chaos of a generic butterfly on the shoulder and Tweety Bird on the ankle and someone's name on the bicep and Jesus on your thigh and etc etc etc feels *incredibly* low-class.
> The manic chaos of a generic butterfly on the shoulder and Tweety Bird on the ankle and someone's name on the bicep and Jesus on your thigh and etc etc etc feels *incredibly* low-class.
...given the outpouring of defence for McMansions in today's post's comments - in response to criticisms amounting to basically this - I suggest this preference may not be universal.
I mean, I could have added a "to me" at the end of my final sentence, but it's implicit, so why bother?
And obviously the preference for - or basic capacity to develop - a pleasing and cohesive aesthetic theme is nowhere near universal, be it in tattooing or dressing or home decorating.
But in the words of the great Mr. Plinkett about subtly 'wrong' things, "...you might not have even noticed, but your brain did." If you care about aesthetics and signalling, there are ways to avoid making mistakes.
Thank you for your advice was meaningful
No problem! Let us know what you decide!
I'm going to take some unknown amount of time to think about it. If I don't reply, assume I'm still thinking about it ha ha, in perpetuity.
I was glad I waited until I was in my 50s to get my first tattoos. If I had done as a teenager, I would have had AC/DC on my shoulder (which would no longer reflect my musical tastes). After about ten years, they've begun to blur a bit. I may see if I can have them touched up.
I don't have any tattoos, and this is essentially the major reason why. If I ever thought of getting one, I think about what I would have thought about an earlier idea a few years later. And then I apply that same reasoning to right now, and I'm pretty sure I would regret anything I get.
I'm not really a body modification person anyway, to be honest, but no matter how much I loved something I had right now, I know it would bother me later. Changing taste, bored with what I got, whatever.
I'll put the same suggestion out there that I give teenagers when they are seriously considering tattoos: get the design done in henna and see how you feel about it after a week of having it on you.
If my kids tried to get a tattoo, I would ask them to imagine having a Paw Patrol tattoo. Because ten years later, they will probably feel the same about whatever seems awesome to them now.
(But I like your idea, too. That would be my Plan B.)
Oh man, that's good. I might steal that.
Russians are tough people who are good at fighting. Why don't they dominate heavyweight boxing?
Wrestling is more their thing, culturally.
Adam Carolla has a joke that whomever is currently the most oppressed demographic is going to produce the best boxers. There was a time where Irish and Jewish boxers were noteworthy champions; today, not so much!
I don't know how many boxing fans there are on here, so I'm very pleased to get to flash my hardcore cred in here.
Anyway, the short answer is that HW has usually been a division with relatively low talent levels and thus it's hard to dominate because the raw physical tools you need to move to the top are pretty rare and are mostly outliers and thus can be pretty widely widespread. The Russians have had some champions at HW recently, but defrosted Denisovan Nikolai Valuev was a pretty weak champion.
There are divisions where certain nationalities/ethnicities are pretty dominant (Asians especially Thais and Japanese in the lower divisions), and there are nationalities/ethnicities that are widely prevalent in the sport but don't dominate any particular division.
Ukrainians have done pretty well, interestingly, the Klitschkos dominated the division (albiet IMHO in an absurdly weak era) and Usyk is currently the undisputed* champion, although he hasn't "dominated" IMHO).
Interestingly, this question inspired me to look at TBRB (probably the most respected ranking body)'s P4P rankings, and the n ationality breakdown looks like this (weight limits in pounds):
Ukraine: 1 (Oleksandr Usyk, 200+)
Japan: 2 (Naoya Inoue, 122, Kenshiro Teraji, 112)
USA 4: (Terence Crawford (African American), 147/154, Gervonta Davis (AfrAm), 135, Teofimo Lopez (Honduran-American), 140, Bam Rodriguez (Mexican American, 115)
Mexico: 1 (Canelo Alvarez, 168)
Russia: 2 (Artur Beterbiev, Chechen-I know he's listed as Canadian but he's Russian-and Dmitry Bivol, both 175).
Nikolai Valuev looks more like a Neanderthal with an overactive pituitary gland.
What Tibor said. They are good at creating an impression of being good a fighting.
OTOH people from North Caucuses (not ethnically or culturally Russian, just happen to have been conquered by the Russian Empire) are truly good at fighting, especially grappling, and you totally see them being disproportionately successful at MMA. Boxing not so much though, a different art.
The current unified, undisputed Light Heavyweight champion in boxing is a Chechen (Artur Beterbiev)
Well, there we go, boxing too.
They're mostly good at propaganda and information warfare :) I guess ordinary Russians are though in the same way people from the Appalachian mountains are tough (judging by Vance's hillbilly elegy), but that doesn't make one a heavyweight champion.
A labmate of mine just published an article people here might find interesting:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-024-01800-6
In brief: it explains autism behavior and perception as downstream of an increased dynamic range of neuron populations. If a neuron population receives some input level and needs to fire if the signal is over a threshold, then the "sharpness" of the response as the input level crosses the threshold will influence a lot of downstream computations that use this output. In the paper they show this explains slower updating in response to stimulus changes, increased time spent in a mixed perceptual state in binocular rivalry tasks (where participants see both images at the same time), and also provides a mechanism for comorbidity with epilepsy.
I think it is another interesting take on the autism-as-a-tradeoff idea that Scott wrote about here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-653
In the paper's terms, the tradeoff is not between gestalt and precise cognition, but between sharp response (reacts quickly when the signal crosses a threshold) and gradual response (reacts slowly, but can distinguish fine levels of input change away from the threshold).
Well, that lines up with my own experiences. I have terrible reaction times for my age, but I am also overly perceptive to the point where I can't focus on anything if there's other stimulus around me. That does bring up a good question: is the "ADHD" that's comorbid to autism actually ADHD at all, or just a symptom of ASD that's separate from the usual condition? I guess it doesn't matter that much if they both get treated by adderall...
Interesting, I don't know much about ADHD but I wouldn't be surprised if it lumps together different underlying causes that manifest behaviorally in a similar way.
For a while I've been interested in Chinese names.
I'm aware of three methods:
The classiest method is that your family has an associated poem, and every generation takes half of their name from the character in the poem assigned to that generation, with the other half being chosen to meet whatever other requirements you might have.
The trashiest method is that your parents pick a name with a meaning that they like, like naming a girl 小丽 ["pretty"] or a boy 强 ["strong"].
In between, you can consult a specialist, who will divine an appropriate name from the Yi Jing.
This suggests that Chinese names should be extremely variable (when not chosen for meaning), and that's true. However, I keep meeting people who share names. So I postulate a fourth method, which I'll call the "European naming method": there's an inventory of conventional names, and a baby may receive one of those names because it's a name.
For example, I have personally known three Chinese girls called Xinyue. I've also encountered three different ways to spell the name: 欣钥，欣越，and 心玥. I don't think it's a coincidence that all three of these have identical pronunciations, right down to the tones, xīnyuè, and similarly I would venture to guess that although 钥 is far more commonly pronounced yào, Chinese people wouldn't have trouble assuming that 欣钥 should be pronounced xīnyuè.
So I think the algorithm that generates these names must involve _first_ deciding what the name will sound like, and only _second_ deciding how you want to spell it.
I'd be happy to hear comments on any of this, but in particular I'd like to hear some Chinese thoughts on to what degree two people who share a name, but with different spellings, are thought of as having the same name. I'd also be interested in what people might think of a deviant name like xìnyuē or sìjiá.
> Chinese names should be extremely variable ... I keep meeting people who share names.
Well, both can be true at the same time. I know of people who are named after ... concepts and things that one usually does not give Chinese names from. Seems like there is a lot of room for creativity and sometimes people do go for names outside of some conventional inventory. At the same time, when I was going to school in China I think there were at least 4 girls in my school with the given name 心怡. Some characters are very common for girl names and/or boy names, like the 强 that you mentioned, and you could pick combos from those characters to make a very stereotypically guy name (or girl name). I guess you can keep an eye out - if you meet someone with a more unique Chinese name, ask them about how that name was chosen.
Sometimes I can tell that someone has Christian parents from their Chinese name.
You might be onto something there with particular combinations of sounds and tones being more common. Like the other commenters below, I agree that the parents do want the name to not sound ridiculous. If your name is pronounced the same as some other unfortunate thing, then you're going to get made fun of in elementary school. But I'm not sure about deciding sound first before spelling, since among people I know, generally the characters were chosen directly.
(There _was_ a time when I was messaging someone and asked them to remind me of their name, and they thought it necessary to specify for me which pronunciation one of the characters took on (since that character had multiple).)
Do Chinese parents these days give their children names that are obviously derived from English/European names?
Interestingly, Ancient Greek names were often dithematic, meaning the combination of two roots - similar to most modern Chinese names (although there are still a decent number of single-character names). I also get the impression that in they were less conventionalized. Roman names, on the other hand, were usually derived from a single root. Pretty early on, the praenomen (first name) became restricted to a fairly small set, and the nomen (clan name) was inherited. So the cognomen (originally representing branches of a clan) became repurposed to name individuals with more variety, until the praenomen and nomen fell out of use. Modern European family names are a Medieval innovation. Both Roman and Greek names also had many that were borrowings, and of course those were majorly augmented later on with Biblical names.
To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't happen. I wouldn't be surprised if there are a handful of cases; I would be very surprised if there were an identifiable trend.
I called it the "European naming method" because that is close to the only naming strategy used in European languages: you select a conventional name from a menu of official names. "Michael" meant something in Biblical Hebrew; it doesn't mean anything to English speakers.
They don't have the same name. It's reasonably common for someone to say "My name is Xinyue with the Xin from xinxi and Yao from yaoshi but pronounced Yue." Or to ask, "Xinyue. Which Xin Yue? Xin from Xinxi and Yue from Yueliang?" And then the person would say, "Xin from Xinxi and Yue from Yaoshi but pronounced Yue. It's a multiple pronunciation character." Of course, they notice the names are pronounced the same way but it's not considered the same.
The general goal with a name is to give a lucky or auspicious name. In its simplest form this is just giving a name with a meaning the parents consider auspicious. For example, the three Xinyues you gave mean "Key To Happiness", "Exceeding Happiness," and "Pearl (or Blessed) Heart." It's fairly easy to see how those are positive names. Secondarily, you might consult a fortune teller or take a character from an important document which can either be done where everyone in a generation shares a character or the family shares the character through generations. Some families have favored names or characters.
There's also a list of allowed characters though it's fairly generous with a few thousand acceptable characters. And then certain characters are considered gendered. A man named 心玥 (Xinyue) would have a feminine name but 欣越 (also Xinyue) is more neutral and there are men named that.
So you have it backward: You choose the characters first and the pronunciation afterward. Choosing for pronunciation is a characteristic of foreign names or ethnic minority names. Though you do want to avoid bad homonyms.
> So you have it backward: You choose the characters first and the pronunciation afterward.
I think I was pretty clear as to why this isn't true. It's very obvious that the pronunciation is chosen first. Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
> For example, the three Xinyues you gave mean "Key To Happiness", "Exceeding Happiness," and "Pearl (or Blessed) Heart."
I question this too. Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
> Choosing for pronunciation is a characteristic of foreign names or ethnic minority names.
Interestingly, I have a Mongol friend who was named Saruul by her Mongol-speaking parents, but also given the Mandarin name sha ru la as a Chinese equivalent. It isn't clear to me why the first character is 'sha', since s/sh are distinguished in Mongol and in northern Mandarin. (My friend herself can't speak Mongol and isn't interested in these kinds of questions, so I haven't asked.) My best guess is that they were going for a character that was better in some way.
Your tone in this response is offensively hubristic, considering the many incomplete understandings and hasty overgeneralizations in your statements in this thread.
Chinese names are not selected by pronunciation first. Typically, characters are selected due to a combination of:
1) meaning, specifically, typically with the intent to "give the feeling" of a concept. It is uncommon for the name to be intended to have a direct unambiguous meaning; two character given names are typically not words that are found in the actual regular language. Whether this is considered "trashy" depends on whether the specific selections are tacky, the criteria for which is difficult to explain even to a native speaker.
2) aesthetic appeal. This is, of course, connected to meaning as described above, but due to the higher average number of meanings per morpheme than European languages, "aesthetic appeal" here has a somewhat wider definition than you might be used to. This is particularly relevant when selecting characters for a concept for which there are many reasonable options. Cf. the choice of the characters “美利坚“ in transcribing the name of the US to "美利坚共和国" when many other phonetically appropriate alternatives were available. Similarly difficult to explain, and may in fact be partially ineffable.
3) trends. Similarly to names in most other languages, the popularity of various characters waxes and wanes with the times.
Other points, in no particular order:
> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
As explained in 1) above, this is a moot question, as names are rarely intended to be grammatically correct compounds with unambiguous meaning.
> It's very obvious that the pronunciation is chosen first. Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
You have apparently made this incorrect determination on the basis of a single anecdote easily explained by the birthday paradox. Relatedly, you overestimate the available set of distinct two-syllable sounds for two-character given names in Chinese relative to other languages, which are further restricted by the need to avoid homonyms with existing silly or negative words, which is an extremely common issue in a highly homophonic language.
> The classiest method is that your family has an associated poem, and every generation takes half of their name from the character in the poem assigned to that generation, with the other half being chosen to meet whatever other requirements you might have.
Taking inspiration from a poem is merely one method to select the characters for successive generations, and by no means even particularly common. Additionally, it is not just "half of the name", it is always the first character of the given name - in other words, the middle character of a three-character name. Note that sometimes different characters are used for males and females in the same generation. The generational marker character also affects the selection of the other character per 1) and 2) above.
Finally, to answer the initial question:
> in particular I'd like to hear some Chinese thoughts on to what degree two people who share a name, but with different spellings, are thought of as having the same name
To no degree whatsoever. Chinese speakers think of and remember Chinese names foremost by their characters, not by their pronunciations. As the previous commenter mentions, it is typical practice when seriously introducing oneself to specify what characters your name uses, usually in the form of "My name is X Y Z, Y from [common word containing Y], Z from [common word containing Z]". There are relatively fewer ambiguities in family names, so typically disambiguating is only necessary if e.g. you have a rare family name with the same pronunciation as a common one.
Perfect pronunciation collisions are considered curious, but you would no more consider them the same name as you would consider two people with identical first-middle-last initials in English as having the same name.
> Choosing characters first would mean that pronunciations almost never collided.
I don't think this statement is true, since there are lots of characters with the same pronunciation.
As to why "sha": I would guess that "sha" sounds better / more conventional / less foreign than "sa" as the first character. "sha" 沙 is a Chinese surname.
Somewhat tangential to this: in the Chinese translation of Lord of the Rings that I own, Saruman is translated as 萨茹曼 "sa ru man".
> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
I think the 越[X]越[Y] phrasing is kind of an example of this. For example, here's a sentence from the Chinese translation of Harry Potter 1, chapter 5:
> 但奥利凡德先生从货架上抽出的魔杖越多，他似乎显得越高兴。
Oh, sorry, nevermind. I got confused by the phrasing. This isn't an example of what you were asking for. Let me try again: would you say terms like 激越 or 优越 count?
> would you say terms like 激越 or 优越 count?
On the small question, those terms definitely do support the idea that 欣越 could be seen as analogous to terms of that form.
On the large question, sort of. How easy is it to coin a similar term that doesn't already exist? My instinct tells me that 越 is an adverb and needs to come before its argument, but if the pattern is strong enough...
Whether those terms technically count as examples of what I asked for depends on whether they grammatically opaque or not, which I don't really know.
Well, if you've already decided to ignore what Chinese people say about naming themselves then I'm not sure what I can say to convince you. Of course they care about whether it sounds nice but they say the focus is on the characters because that reveals meaning.
I will say: the idea that Chinese doesn't have significant homophony is very strange since it's something even the Chinese have commented on for... well, literally thousands of years at this point.
> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
Sure, search turned up 他露出了欣悦的笑容.
>> Can you give me an example of 越 being used to modify the word it follows?
> Sure
You might notice that, in your chosen example, 越 does not even appear.
The character that does appear, 悦, isn't modifying 欣 either.
It looks like 越 has an adjectival meaning as well as being a verb (越 - verb: to surpass, exceed; adj: more). But I can't find examples of it modifying the word it follows. And isn't this a traditional character? Would the authorities allow someone to be named with traditional characters in the PRC?
https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Expressing_%22the_more..._the_more...%22_with_%22yue%E2%80%A6_yue%E2%80%A6%22
> And isn't this a traditional character?
Well, yes, 越 is a traditional character in the sense that it's present in pre-20th-century texts, but it's not a traditional character in the sense of having a different form in simplified characters. It's only a traditional character the same way 大 is.
Considering that your link uses simplified characters and discusses the HSK, and it also uses 越, why would you think so?
Yes, the Mandarin tools dictionary showed it as traditional. But I now see there is a footnote that says they only show simplified if it's different from the original. That's a lot of strokes, though. I just assumed it would be ripe for simplification.
By the way,
> Mandarin tools
What are you doing using this? It seems to be an outdated website based on an obsolete online dictionary project. (The project lives on, but under a slightly different name, CC-CEDICT.) The copyright footer says 1996-2005.
You'd get better results from Pleco with CC-CEDICT, but you can do a lot better than that. Pleco has some other free dictionaries, and some much better paid ones. English-language wiktionary is decent and accessible. Or if you really, really need to look up something about a character, there's zdic, though that's all in Chinese and might be a challenge to use.
The goal of simplification was to reduce the total number of strokes needed to handwrite a document, so while a large stroke count is something that would weigh toward simplification, character frequency mattered a lot more. Saving 2 strokes on a character that appears 50 times in your document is better than saving 10 on a character that appears twice.
The other thing that happened was that components that got simplified in one character also got simplified in other characters that used the same component, but that's not particularly relevant for 越.
> Would the authorities allow someone to be named with traditional characters in the PRC?
Not legally. But if you used it day to day they wouldn't care much. However, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc use traditional.
I've floated the idea that the war on Ukraine is a disaster for Russian children in addition to being a disaster in Ukraine. Even if you blame Russians in general for not having a better government, there are assuredly children below the age of political activity.
I've an answer from a fair number of people that it's the obligation of Russian parents to protect their children by not having an awful government.
This strikes me as a bad line of moral reasoning. Shouldn't "should" imply "can"? It's hard enough to affect government in a democracy.
I think what's driving the idea that it's the parents' job to control their government is refusal to believe in tradeoffs.
I think the sad reality is that we don't know how to have international conflicts that only (or even mainly) land on the people running things. If we impose an embargo on Russia and cause their economy to tank, a great many people miss meals and suffer all kinds of hardship, but Putin and his inner circle miss zero meals. If we go to war with China over Taiwan, we will mostly kill nobodies who joined the Chinese military, not high party officials making the decisions. All those years of the US fighting the war on terror involved us killing a whole lot of people, only a small number of whom had any connection at all with 9/11 or really any attacks on the US anywhere but in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It would be much better if we could deal out justice retail to the people who actually made decisions. But in general we can't, and even when we can, we usually also deal out some injustice to the dudes standing near the guys who have properly earned a bullet. I think Israel has killed quite a few Hamas leaders who plausibly were responsible in some way for the 10/7 attacks, but that has gone alongside a whole lot of Gazan civilians getting shot or blown up.
I think it's refusal to confront horrifying realities. People really really don't want unbearable tragedies to be real, and will perform some impressive unconscious mental gymnastics to escape them. That's largely where victim blaming comes from, I'd say, which I think is a good term for the response you are describing.
Also who are you talking to who has these opinions? I'm a relatively rabid Russia hater and I'm certainly not taking a "fuck them kids" stance!
There's a standard anti-war argument that aggressive war everywhere is disastrous because it impoverishes the children of the aggressor and does much worse to the children of the victims. Whether the war is imposed by a corrupt autocrat or freely chosen by a bloodthirsty populace doesn't make much moral difference from this perspective.
It is certainly a disaster.. this post seems to be missing the part where you articulate the implications. If its to suggest punishing russia is therefore net bad, thats long run unworkable. We have to be able to punish countries for doing bad things even if it negatively effects innocents within the country else more countries will do bad things.
So if you insist on bringing innocents welfare into the utilitarian calculation, then the counter is to bring those long term secondary effects in, but it seems more tractable just to consider country level just deserts, and target punishment where feasible but accept the collateral damage when not feasible.
First off, which "Russians" are you talking about here? Residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg? Ethnic Russians living in lesser cities? Or ethnic Not-Russians who live in and are sort of citizens of the Russian Federation? Because the Russian government has been making sure that the costs of the war are borne disproportionately by the people at the bottom of that list, not the top. On a recent map of military funerals gleaned from social media, Moscow and St. Petersburg look like black holes.
Second, if you are e.g. a Chuvash mother living in Alatyr, what are you going to do about it?
Engage in some pathetically ineffective political protest that won't even be noticed, but will take time and energy that you could spend supporting your family?
Protest or campaign against the Putin regime in a way that *does* get noticed, which means your children will be raised as wards of the State and almost certainly be drafted into whatever war Russia is fighting when they grow up?
Try to emigrate to a country you probably can't find on a map, without the language, passport, resources, connections, or skills to start a new life in a new country?
Or try to keep a low profile and hope that, when the time comes, you'll have enough money saved up to bribe the draft office to say your son has bone spurs or whatever?
"Every country has the government it deserves."
—Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821)
I think, as you note, that there is also a very Western-centric view of agency at work, as well; "should" should imply "can", and while it is theoretically possible that an individual Russian could take enough actions to make changes to the government's policy, there's about a thousand years of history that argues they can't, and even more so the idea that they could is something that might not manifest to a Russian since it's not a universal one at all.
It can be easy to affect government. It's access. Or, to take the Russian, "Who? Whom?"
In a democracy or a republic with primaries and caucuses, voter have proportionally more power than they do in general elections, in proportion to the number of people voting in the primary versus the quantity in the general. Especially in a blue or red state, you have so much more electoral power as a voter in the primary phase than you do in the general.
And, voting is only the smallest piece that can be played. Lawsuits have more weight. Financial advocacy has more weight. Public discussion has more weight.
The issue with this line of analysis is it only gives moral consideration to the Russians. But other countries deserve moral consideration too. And once you give them moral consideration you have to ask who is being damaged by the lack of moral culpability you're giving to average Russians. For example, you could argue against war reparations because it would decrease the quality of education Russian children get.
Insofar as Russia (like any nation) is a collective entity then by participating it you share in it. This is why it's justified for Russian tax money as war reparations (in theory anyway) instead of giving Russian children better schools. Allowing people to be part of a collective benefit but individual when it comes to responsibility is asymmetric.
I agree the average Russian is not morally guilty in the personal sense. We cannot grab the nearest Russian and put them on trial for war crimes by virtue of their Russian-ness. But we can expect them to bear responsibility for the nation they belong to in various ways. Which also matches the reality: being Russian exposes them to rights and obligations. Same with any country.
> This is why it's justified for Russian tax money as war reparations (in theory anyway) instead of giving Russian children better schools
I’m not sure that Americans should go down the pro reparations route. It would not be a great philosophy here in Britain either.
A better justification might be that russian tax money won't be spent on schools either way. It will be spend on tanks or luxury yachts.
I’m sure there’s corruption but they clearly spend on schools etc.
If you want to make a point, such as your belief that the US owes reparations to someone in some amount, make it instead of vaguely gesturing.
Extraordinary statements require extraordinary proofs. Mundane statements do not. In this case your argument to incredulity needs extraordinary explanation.
Setting yourself up as the arbiter of what's extraordinary and then using it to excuse yourself from making your case is a transparent attempt to avoid defending your earlier statement.
I leave it as an exercise to third parties whether "other nations than Russia deserve moral consideration" or "being a member of a country means some degree of collective obligation" is an extraordinary claim.
> I leave it as an exercise to third parties whether "other nations than Russia deserve moral consideration" or "being a member of a country means some degree of collective obligation" is an extraordinary claim.
You can do that but it is a world away from what you are annoyed by - which is this statement
> I'm not sure that Americans should go down the pro reparations route. It would not be a great philosophy here in Britain either.
Which was the mildest statement ever. I sometimes understand why I get some responses, some comments are obviously controversial but believe me when I say I’m surprised that anybody could take offence there.
I notice, by the way, you didn’t get too upset about the self criticism of Britain either, nor did anybody else in the community who is British. Say what you like about us Britishers but we can take the mildest criticism on the chin, which doesn’t seem true of posters more allied with the golly gosh indispensable nation team America philosophy.
Does he really need to say "Iraq" or "Vietnam"? Isn't it obvious what he means?
Yes. I require people to actually state their claims specifically and their arguments for them. Do you wish to say the US owes reparations to Iraq or Vietnam and that this is comparable to what Russia owes to Ukraine? I'd be interested in hearing that if you want to actually grapple with the issues.
It’s not my argument, but obviously if you are going require countries to pay reparations for the unprovoked wars of choice they fight in other countries that never did anything to them, then lots of countries other than Russia are going to be affected.
Choosing the example of somewhat worse Russian education as a result of war reparations strikes me as minimizing the problem.
Russia started out as a fairly poor country even before the war. I assume Russians will die of cold and malnutrition even if there are no reparations.
Admittedly, there's the possibility of reparations taken from Russian billionaires, but I don't know how far that will go.
So your argument is that Russia can invade and destroy its neighbors but should not be forced to pay compensation because it might cause malnutrition? You don't see the asymmetry? Or how it implicitly ignores the victims here, the neighboring countries who were invaded? What should they get? And how will you get it to them?
I'm looking at poverty in Russia as a particular case that is commonly ignored.
What I'm actually addressing is the idea that if there are poor people, someone is morally culpable and obliged to find a way for them to not be poor.
Sometimes people create messes that they don't have the resources to clean up. In that case, someone else does the cleaning up, or at least most of it.
It might make sense to substitute North Koreans. In the real world, no one knows how to help them in general, and they don't get helped.
How would you feel about emigration as a form of reparations? Take the poor Russian families, and move them out of Russia into somewhere else. (We're playing make-believe, so imagine they all get moved to New York City.) Acceptable solution, or not?
There's a two step here and I agree with step one but not step two. Russians (children or otherwise) deserve help out of poverty. They don't deserve this more than anyone else but also not less than anyone else. But this does not make them victims of the war. It makes them victims of their government which they were before the war and remain. But to a lesser extent than, for example, Ukrainians or many Chechens.
If in ending the war Russia must pay money and the oligarchs make sure it comes from the poor this doesn't make them victims of the west, it makes them victims of their leadership. Who will no doubt blame the west. But that isn't true.
Is there any level of suffering the West could inflict on the Russian civilians where you would consider them responsible, or are they always just "victims of their leadership" who made the West do it?
Using tax money for war reparations worked wonders with Germany 100 years ago
France in 1870 paid them off. The issue with German reparations was they were stretched over too long a period (among others). But okay, imagine for a moment Ukraine completely defeats Russia. How should Russia compensate Ukraine for the death and destruction caused?
I think it's a wrong question to ask because it suffers from the fallacy of personification. Even when we only have two individuals, it's not always possible for the victim to get a compensation from the perpetrator, for a variety of reasons.
The goal should a long period of peace and economic development in Europe, and the best way to achieve it would be a regime change in Russia and some kind of European-wide security arrangement. More or less like post-WW2 Germany.
Right, it's not always possible. That's why I removed that consideration from the hypothetical: it's absolutely possible in the hypothetical. How should Russia compensate Ukraine for the death and destruction caused?
Post-WW2 Germany was forced to pay reparations to its victims and return what it took, by the way.
I can't easily find good data on this, but it appears that in the critical post-war period (~10 years) Germany received much more money in the framework of the Marshall plan than it paid to the Western powers and in 1953 the debt was halved (see the London Agreement on German External Debts)
As far as I know, there were money reparations. Art was returned. Houses and land were not returned.
This argument strikes me as odd even without taking children into account.
It's like blaming Americans and Chinese for being the top co2 emitters contributing to climate change. In case of Americans, they definitely could've voted for different candidates in primaries and elections to bring them down.
I doubt many of us could agree on which candidates would have been better at reducing American produced CO2 or that if we could, we would be correct.
Well, there was at least one candidate with the Green New Deal as one of the pillars of her campaign. In the highly unlikely event of her winning the race I think that it's likely that the emissions would be lower than in the branch of reality we're inhabiting.
And of course the same can be said about the decisions most Russians had to take, whether in the voting booth (back when the elections were mostly fair and after they became mostly not) or outside of it. It wasn't obvious at all in 2000 that Putin would occupy Crimea 14 years later and launch a full-scale war 22 years later. There were some people who noticed worrying signs and were warning everyone else but now in the US there are also people who are extremely worried about the climate change and try to warn everyone else, with limited success.
You can believe a Green New Deal candidate would lower CO2 emissions --- and you might be right! --- while I think it's more likely a neoliberal approach that focuses on ending NEPA and allowing the free market to produce and import cheap solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible would lower emissions faster.
See, we might want the same results but disagree dramatically on how to achieve them.
You might be right, my point is simply that as long as the US remains the second largest emitter in absolute terms and one of the highest in per capita terms it must be possible to reduce them (more).
Blaming the Americans for not having done that may or may not advance your goals, even if it's true in some technical sense
It's true we could do much better and that voters here at least have a voice in the matter.
Russia is Russia, controlled by an evil autocrat as usual.
> I think what's driving the idea that it's the parents' job to control their government is refusal to believe in tradeoffs.
I've been bothered by something similar. There seems to be a strain of American culture that believes that the best possible course of action necessarily doesn't involve doing anything wrong, and that therefore, if something is part of the best possible course of action, then it involves committing no wrongs. For example, Scott complained, in his review of Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, that in the Chinese system described it was illegal to refuse an order from your father to commit a crime.
This is not a normal view of the world. I believe conflicting geas are a particular theme of Irish mythology.
Yes, exactly, about not wanting to do anything wrong. I blame Disney movies, though they probably have earlier cultural roots.
Well, I'm complaining less about people not wanting to do anything wrong, and more about people having the idea that it's possible not to do anything wrong. It would be nice if that were possible, but in the general case it isn't.
I'm betting the ghost of Hippocrates would like a word.
I am not sure what your point is. Why emphasize the suffering of the children? As you state yourself, the adults can't do much about the course of the government either, so their suffering is as un-self-inflicted as that of the children? And what are the tradeoffs you mention in the last sentence?
Emphasizing the suffering of children is a normal part of the culture. We can talk about whether that's reasonable.
The tradeoff was just letting Russia take Ukraine rather than doing sanctions and supplying military aid to Ukraine.
Ukrainians have children, too. Well, fewer than in 2022, but still.
I think it's pretty bad to focus on the suffering of children like this (except in cases where children are disproportionately the ones suffering, which isn't the case here). It reduces agency (which mostly makes problem solving harder) and makes the issue more emotionally led (which is also mostly bad for situations that require cold structural solutions, which most situations are including this one).
Agreed!
I don't see why the focus on children here? It's bad for most russians, and most russians can't singlehandedly change their culture/government (but could if they were, as a group, a very different type of culture).
I think the focus is on children because it's certain that they didn't create the situation they're in.
I agree that it's unfair to blame a huge proportion of he parents.
You may or may not have seen certain ruffled feathers recently about Jaguar's brand re-design, specifically the advertisement they used for it.
Personally, I think the ad is silly and ugly, and certainly the people *in* the ad are *not* the target market for "can you afford to buy a luxury car?"
But whatever, modern marketing and all that jazz. Standard re-design of the brand identifiers to look like every other big faceless commercial entity out there.
I had not been aware, however, that Jaguar was pivoting to be all-electric. Or that the below would be their new cars.
https://www.breakingnews.ie/lifestyle/jaguar-shares-images-of-new-electric-car-following-rebrand-backlash-2-1703314.html
They're awful. I'm presuming (hoping!) that this is just 'artist's impression' of what the new cars will look like, but crikey. It's like they took one look at the Cybertruck and went "That! That's the way we want to go!"
"Adrian Mardell, chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, said: “The magic of Jaguar is close to my heart – an original British luxury brand unmatched in its heritage, artistry and emotional magnetism.
“That’s the Jaguar we are recapturing and we will create the same sense of awe that surrounded iconic models like the E-type."
Yeah, well, here's Wikipedia on the E-type and I'm not seeing the resemblance (though if by "awe" they mean in the neighbourhood of "shock and awe", I'm seeing *that*):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_E-Type
I can't imagine Inspector Morse tooling around in a "London Blue" or "Miami Pink" new all-electric Jaguar, not when he had been accustomed to this:
https://www.smiths-instruments.co.uk/inspector-morse-and-his-jaguar-mark-ii/
https://driventowrite.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/morse-jag.jpg
With a design like that, they'll have to rename the company to 'Moose'.
When I pick my kids up from school in Laos there is a fun parade of weird looking EVs. There is a huge tax incentive to buy an EV here, and the variety of creative looking cars and colors makes an American parking lot look boring. In Asia the bar for "wow, that is a cool looking car" is higher than ever, so it is not surprising that expensive cars designed for this market are becoming stranger. In a line of swanky EVs from China, the Jaguar would look very nice.
In America we seem to favor friendly looking faces like Rivian, but there is something to be said for the Bently-turned-evil face of some of the new EVs popular in Asia. I find the high grill to be intimidating, especially in a country where scooters and bicycles are so common. When someone steps out of one of these, with black tinted windows, I can't help but imagine they are a high level bureaucrat who could destroy me with the thump of a rubber stamp. Bands like Black Pink, and BabyMonster embody the contrast between strength and elegance, and I think the mean pink Jaguar will be a striking car for the nouveau riche.
Other Mean EVs:
https://www.byd.com/us/news-list/BYD-Launched-the-U8-Premium-Edition-Under-Its-High-End-Sub-Brand-Yangwang
https://www.zeekr.co.th/models/009
https://www.hyundai.news/eu/models/van/staria.html
Those cars look like Cadillacs designed to make the perfect toast.
I think it's instructive to keep two things in mind.
One, Asia is becoming a larger market in the near future and this kind of advertising isn't wild there. Something something the world isn't just the global NW.
Two, Jaguar's last CEO has made this bed, and there's no way now to change the battle plan without immense financial hardship. Entire factories and staff would need to be retrofitted, retrained, and re-tooled -- again, after Jaguar switched over to all-electric per the last CEO.
They have a better chance of surviving and succeeding with this than they would in going back. No one wants to be Fisker the Third.
My impression, albeit based on limited experience in Asia and none in the Middle East, is that when Asians etc buy Western and especially British luxury goods, it is in large part because they are buying into Western traditions of style and power. Yes, Settler Colonialism(tm) is Bad, Mmmkay?, but it left a deep impression.
I'm skeptical that all-electric is a good move for Jaguar (aren't they the carmaker particularly noted for unreliable electrical systems?). But as you say, maybe it's a done deal. I'd still wager that, even in the Asian or Middle Eastern market, they'd be better off with an electric *Jaguar* rather than an electric Mary Kay Batmobile.
Definitely, people still look to British luxury across the world because it's "stuffy, old money". That still exists.
Assuming I remember to, which is a non-100% proposition with ADHD, I'll link an article I found discussing the cake that the former CEO baked for the company.
I'll be keeping "electric Mary Kay Batmobile" in my back pocket, bravo. Love it.
I have read an interview with Mathias Illgen on the topic, an expert of branding strategies and design of brands.
He speculates that the new brand is not addressed to the "old" European and US markets at all, but rather targets Asian markets, especially China, India and the Gulf states. And for those targets he doesn't find the campaign so odd or so extreme (except that it's a very clear cut from the old brand). He also said that with such a target it does make sense to completely ignore/erase the history of the brand, and only keep the name as a signal for "we already know how to build cars".
I could imagine Saudi princelings with more money than braincells buying these slabs of sausage meat to show off. I can't imagine China/India/Gulf States being impressed with advertisements of weird bald non-binary persons of coloured fatness. These are the same markets that movie studios cut out gay kissing etc. from their films in order to have them passed.
Now, *maybe* very rich Chinese in Hong Kong don't care about the multi-culti ads and instead want the new Jaguar because it's the latest thing, but I dunno. I would be very interested to know if they ran the same ads in Asia, rather than ones concentrating on the cars.
This article, for instance, doesn't seem too impressed:
https://jingdaily.com/posts/china-slams-jaguar-new-look
"Heated discussion has emerged on Chinese social media platforms, such as Xiaohongshu. One user’s (@啊～uncleBrownBrown) poll showed 93% of respondents favored Jaguar’s classic logo over the new one. This sentiment was echoed in comments, with netizens describing the design as overly simplistic and even likening it to a luxury fashion or hotel logo, rather than one for a heritage automaker. One Xiaohongshu user (@Amy.Y) mocked the redesign, saying it was more suited to a Giorgio Armani cushion foundation.
For many, the most contentious aspect is the departure from the iconic leaping jaguar emblem that has adorned the marque’s grille for decades. The new design trades the familiar feline imagery for a stylized “J” and “r,” which are subtly curved to suggest a jaguar’s tail. Yet, many have struggled to connect this abstract symbolism with the brand’s storied identity. Some disgruntled fans noted the change feels out of touch with the preferences of Jaguar’s core audience, with one user commenting, “Do you even know your market?” Many threatened that they will sell their Jaguars."
Yeah I saw a BBC thumbnail today and though: Wow, that looks like a pimpmobile cybertruck
A car for a Batman supervillain
If any villain showed up in Gotham in the likes of that, they'd be laughed out of town. Even the Jokermobile had more style by comparison:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokermobile
The Penguin’s ride in the series with Collin Farrell is styled better but has a similarly flamboyant color.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-best-baddie-cars-in-film
They are not just pictures - they made a concept car of this I think - there appeared to be physical models at the presentation, but they have have been impressive 3d holograms as per ABBA Voyage or similar
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/03/jaguars-electric-car-launch-type-00-miami
> I had not been aware, however, that Jaguar was pivoting to be all-electric. Or that the below would be their new cars.
> They're awful.
Wow. I was not prepared for how awful they are. The thing is, if that was just an artist's impression, the sane response would be to fire the artist and commission a new ad, not to publish that one.
Another classic brand committing suicide out of fear of dying.
My thoughts on the ad were "do they have no idea what kinds of people their brand appeals to?" and "did they not get the memo that woke is over?"
My thoughts on the images of the cars were "yuk" and "if they sell a thousand of these abominations, they can count themselves lucky."
Various people have been making the joke that Biden should pardon some random guy for whatever he did in November 1963. I just checked if llama 70b gets the joke; it does. Follow up questions so the AI is able to produce a secret history timeline, like you’ll see in a rpg sourcebook. I’m note sure I ought to be doing this…
Is... is this a Kennedy assassination joke or am I missing something?
It’s a Kennedy assassination joke.
Of course it is a reference to JFK.
Tho CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day (of natural causes) and the three of them have a philosophical discussion in Purgatory.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_Heaven_and_Hell_(novel)
> Biden should pardon some random guy for whatever he did in November 1963.
That would be a fairly nonrandom guy; 1963 is before my mother was born.
Surprisingly, I'm older than your mother. Doesn't, though, rule out me being your father..
1961.
What do people think about the Australia banning social media for those under under 16? As a parent of two tween girls, I am all for it. It would be very nice if there wasn't pressure for them to consume social media in order to stay in the loop with their friends. I asked some high schoolers from Australia, and not surprisingly, they were against the ban.
100% behind it. Don't want my kids exposed to brainrot, hooked into Meta's network effect or be social pariahs because I personally enforced my own ban. I also don't think any of the arguments against it carry any water.
Completely, 100% opposed to this. I seem to be one of the only people on earth who thinks children have rights to free speech.
But even if you don't care about that, which is utterly indefensible but clearly the mainstream position, you might care about:
1. How are kids being abused at home supposed to get support? How are kids being indocrinated by fundamentalist Muslims/Christians/extremists/etc supposed to find out about the world outside their bubble? The answer is apparently to throw them in a prison of their own abusers, with state support, all so other parents don't have to so much as take responsibility for their own children's upbringing. This is so evil I can barely find the words.
2. How are they going to enforce it? Apparently asking for government ID is prohibited. So, I guess they use mandatory facial recognition software? Or just demand a non-government ID? For all adults who want to use the internet? But hey, at least you don't have to actually monitor your own child, right? That's what *really* matters!
Shame on the entire Opposition, and every single person who signed away every morsel of concern for freedom the moment "protecting children" was invoked in a virtue signalling cascade. You are moral cowards of the highest order, and your names will live in infamy forever.
"I seem to be one of the only people on earth who thinks children have rights to free speech."
Apparently not, as kids have a constitutional right to free speech in the USA, just like adults. Even the UN gives kids the right to free speech. I don't know what you mean about the mainstream position. Parenting today is more focused on giving kids agency and encouraging their expression. Same with schools.
It will be a moving target, and the lines between what is and isn't social media will blur. Much of what is out there now is basically a web app with an integrated social element, which may or may not be central.
I'm of two minds. I guess this will be a litmus test for the rest of the world. Internet use in my youth could be just as bad, it just did not reach the same critical mass. I believe the problems transcend social media, such that it is a redundancy. We need a cultural shift away from the endless scroll.
Being proactive about alternatives seems more important in the grand scheme than limits imposed in arbitrary whack-a-mole fashion. It's also possible for *better* social media to come to fruition. Right now, it seems for example Mastodon is not very "toxic" on the whole.
<cynic>
Since most mechanisms for confirming age also rely on confirming identity, is Australia going to integrate in tracking of political dissidents from day 1?
</cynic>
I think it's going to be not great.
Imagine it works.
How are kids supposed to organize and socialize without social media. Especially if there is a pandemic and face to face contact isn't ok.
Then there is education in general.
For a lot of subjects, some of the best sources are random experts on social media.
And what is social media anyway? Does this comment section count?
> How are kids supposed to organize and socialize without social media.
As someone who was a kid before social media existed, I assure you this problem is solvable!
And even more soluble in a world with mobile phones and text messaging, which I do not think Australia is planning on forbidding to the younglings.
I have *some* sympathy for the idea that if one parent takes away their kid's smartphone or instagram account or whatever, in a world where all the other kids are using that to coordinate social activity, that one kid may wind up ostracized. But if you take social media out of the equation for everyone, that doesn't apply and we have all the known ways to organize and socialize without social media.
How are kids supposed to organize and socialize without social media?
My daughters use email and google messenger. Or they create a google doc with their friends. Or Whats APP. There are many ways to communicate without being fed thirty second videos selected by algorithms with the express intent of keeping you engaged in scrolling.
"The best sources are random experts on social media."
My feeling is that for every under 16 kid engaging with experts on social media, there are many more who are unawares engaging with pseudo experts or influencers, or just getting absorbed in the utter pile of trash content that is created non stop every day. There is a cost benefit calculation here. If they wait to 16 until they dive into Instagram and Reddit they still have access to things like this comment section. The big difference is companies like TikTok have figured out how to engage millions of kids in scrolling for hours a day, and many people think this is causing some problems with kids today.
The parallel I think of is smoking. Also bad for your health, also a social activity, also addictive. Did not need to be banned to completely drop out of favour with young people!
But it IS illegal to sell tobacco to kids. It is difficult to say "this is not good for kids" but then to make it legal for kids. The first step is adding some friction, ie cigarets are not sold to minors.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
—Commisioner Pravin Lal
My entire opinion is second-hand from my Australian girlfriend, who has rolled her eyes at it and observed that the criteria they use for 'social media' apparently include IRC. I can't judge, not having read the legalese, but I had a co-chuckle at the idea of getting age-verification into IRC. (Yes, of course the chuckles were had over IRC; no one else talks about IRC except for the people who still use it.)
>banning social media for those under under 16
We should be discouraging the use of social media by children (or, frankly, anyone). Making it a cool forbidden thing that only adults do will, of course, achieve the exact opposite.
No, making social media difficult to access will not make it more popular. Maybe kids had easier access to pot when it was illegal, because the black market was more robust. But I am assuming there will not be a black market in social media. The forbidden fruit effect exists, but it is incorrect that most teens are attracted to breaking the rules. A solid narrative that social media is bad for mental health will create buy-in.
Don't much like it. personally, it would (probably) require use of ID to make an account, and I don't want my legal name attached to my internet history.
"Officials plan to enforce the age cut-off by trialing an age-verification system that could include biometrics or government identification, which no other country has tried, raising privacy concerns." - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/australia-passes-landmark-social-media-ban-children-16-rcna181124
seems bad!
its likely, to me, that the benefits of whatever haidt-style mental health effects being gone is not worth those costs, plus this is only enforceable on places that require an account to view (afaik. reports on how Exactly they plan to do this seem confused). So, no Instagram, but yes to Youtube. Also Youtube is educational, so it gets an exemption anyway.
Not convinced this is well thought out and it would need to be very very well thought out to be either good or functional.
"“The social media ban legislation has been released and passed within a week and, as a result, no one can confidently explain how it will work in practice – the community and platforms are in the dark about what exactly is required of them,” DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said" -from https://apnews.com/article/australia-social-media-children-ban-safeguarding-harm-accounts-d0cde2603bdbc7167801da1d00ecd056
A lot of the push for this come from parents who's children committed suicide/were harmed by people they met online, some who explicitly name bullying as the cause. This is indeed a problem. But I notice that in many of the cases, the 'bullying' is uh, just a crime? like straight up already illegal? examples include 'sextortion' (sexual blackmail), and murder. I would like to be more sure than anyone seems to be that making it so being on social media is a cool and rebellious thing to do, that you do in secret, is a decent way to stop all that.
Also, a lot of what parents complain about (texting, gaming, etc) are not banned. So shouldn't we expect to see kids be even more invested in roblox and youtube instead of carefree innocent peaceful frolicking or whatever people expect kids to do?
TLDR: not well thought out enough to be a good idea and would be surprised if it works out well. Too much implied government surveillance for my taste. Good that someone is testing it out, I guess?
"not well thought out enough to be a good idea and would be surprised if it works out well."
For something novel like a social media ban, it makes sense to pass the law and then figure out how to enforce it. Otherwise you end up spending millions on consultants to design a regulation system, and no matter what they decide people will be screaming "it won't work." Companies like Facebook and Instagram are in the best position to figure this out, and only laws and government will motivate them to act. Plus these platforms are constantly changing, so the law should dictate what has to happen (no users under 16) rather than how it should happen.
I was thinking this through wrt England.
If the current default is that (making up numbers here) 1 in every 1000 kids isn't on social media, then that kid is just a pariah and you as the parent are actively harming your kid by insisting on it.
(Someone irl told me the other day that all her 8yo boy's friends have stopped talking to him because they're all in Minecraft and he's not. This isn't a hypothetical situation.)
There's some threshold - call it 1 in every 30 - where someone not having social is a common enough occurrence that your average kid understands it's a thing that can happen.
And at say 1 in 10, your average kid expects that if we're arranging to meet, there's probably one guy in the group who needs to be phoned up or otherwise invited through non-app-based means, and that's not an unreasonable effort to make. At that point I think the costs of being unconnected are pretty bearable.
And at that point I would hope the anti-smartphone movement will have won, because I hope that it will quickly become apparent how much stronger, brighter and happier the offline kids are and their lifestyle will become something aspirational that the online kids want to emulate.
I am very grudging about supporting a government ban, but I admit I can't think of a better way to effect group coordination on that level.
I doubt that it will end up working, and also recognize the tradeoffs. With that said I think we pretty desperately need to see some significant-sized jurisdiction try this for a while. We could really use a real-world test at scale [a control group] of the general argument that children being on social media is seriously net-negative for them.
Based on what I've read from Johnathan Haidt, it sounds like social media+smart-phones has been emotionally *disastrous* for a large percentage of teen/tween girls. But I'm not sure what's the best way to deal with it. I guess we'll soon see, in Australia, how well an outright ban will do.
Completely in favor of it. Also of banning drugs, piercings, tattoos etc under 16 but for different reasons. If other kids not on social media the cost to your kid of also not being in it is much less. Their brains are not capable of resisting those algorithms, in aggregate, on average. Am also completely fine if it's not enforced in any way.
It's the typical overbearing good intentions people that make life hell for the rest of us. If you don't like something, say your young kids being on social media, then don't let your young kids on social media. But I guess personal responsibility isn't fashionable any more, so instead the government has to step in and make the undesired (by the people who complain the loudest) thing illegal. Of course this is in Australia, so the whole prison colony theme is hardly a new development.
You oversimplify and therefore miss the problem. The price of "personal responsibility", ie unilaterally withdrawing your kid from social media, is making your kid a social pariah. Given those two options, I don't actually know which is worse for a child's development. But neither are acceptable for someone trying to be a good parent.
The value of a top-down enforced ban is that it effects group coordination. I despise government involvement as much as the next red blooded man, so if you have a better suggestion (that doesn't boil down to "let the bad things happen, I'm not a parent") then I would like to hear it.
It's totally fine if your kid isn't on social media. They can still make friends and actually do stuff, probably even better than the other kids. I just think the whole thing is a futile exercise in trying to shove all the demons back into Pandora's box. The only thing you get when the government tries to round up all the demons is most of the demons go free anyway, but they will crush the hope waiting in the bottom of the box. We live in a world where everyone is interconnected all the time, and we can't go back without some probably impossible culture shift.
Most of the kids will just use some way to get around the age verification and spread the means to do so among themselves. Making social media use, a thing they really want to do anyway, officially forbidden will only increase the social appeal of doing it. Some will be dissuaded on the margins, but that has to weighed against the costs of inculcating against privacy and self-responsibility.
> It's totally fine if your kid isn't on social media. They can still make friends and actually do stuff, probably even better than the other kids.
This is not true in any practical sense, and the ease with which you throw it out there leads me to believe that the rest of your post is more of the same bloviating.
we also happily deprived our teens of the anxiety of school shootings
I'm left questioning how they're expecting to enforce it. If the adults still have access, the kids still have access. Are they going to make the adults lock their smartphones in the gun safe?
It’s Australia, gun safes aren’t routine.
No, it means you are going to need ID to log in to social media. That's not quite as nefarious as it sounds: a lot of the lobbying for this originates from companies offering proof of age as a service. The purpose is profit, not spying.
And surely all of this collected personal info will be stored in a .txt file with a single password and inevitably hacked, if it isn't sold off outright.
I think assuming that there will be a password at all is overly optimistic.
Gosh, it sounds just like all the "you must be 18 to access this site" fanfiction sites back in the day. And I'm sure it will work just as well: "now, if you're under 18, you can't read any of these stories because that would be very naughty of you. You say you're at least 18? Well of course we believe you and welcome aboard!"
The same push is happening in the UK and Ireland as well, of course; though the justification is a bit different, the implementation and underlying motives remain much the same; e.g. https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2024/57/
The reason it won't work is a little different to the old-style "you must be 18" sites: these checks will be more robust, but families share devices and no-one ever logs out of anything so it'll only need one parent to do the check once for all the kids to get access to whatever they want.
Why would a kid want access to his dad's fishing group Facebook page or his mum's Mumsnet account? None of his friends are posting on there.
EDIT: to be clear, I dislike this from a data security government surveillance standpoint. My preferred outcome is we all abandon phones for non-work purposes and go back to having real hobbies and chatting in pubs for recreation.
…I see you were a good obedient rules-abiding teenager, rather than the regular sort that actually poked around inside folders titled “boring fishing stuff” on their dad’s PC.
Not even a parent; get an older sibling or friend's older sibling to log you in. If no 15 year old boy can work out a way to hack this, I'm going to be gravely disappointed in the upcoming generation.
If a kid reads reddit or accesses facebook it is no big deal. The problems I see are when they become heavy users and are posting and commenting all the time. If this is prohibited it will deter many and lower the network effect. Just the message that these sites are not for kids is going to be a big change. Many schools actively promote their insta and FB accounts to kids.
> If a kid reads reddit or accesses facebook it is no big deal.
I actually have no idea what proportion of the people who actively want this stuff would agree with that.
Personally, I'm all for software barriers between curious/horny/otherwise strongly motivated teenagers and internet content that may or may not be all it's cracked up to be but is already appealing simply because it is forbidden: this is where the next generation of engineers is going to come from.
Way back, Scott made a point (not sure where) about signalling spirals using the example of child pornography. What do you do when everyone's against actual child pornography and thinks it should be harshly punished, and you want to signal that you're even more virtuous by being even tougher? You start broadening the meaning of child pornography and viciously attacking anyone who disagrees as being pro-pedophilia. And so we reach a situation where in Canada, according to wikipedia, child pornography includes distributing any material, visual or written, that portrays anyone who is, or appears to be, under 18 (whether they be real or fictional) engaging in sexual acts. Taken on face value, this makes a large proportion of fanfiction, which frequently involves explict sex and in many popular fandoms like Harry Potter almost all of which happens amomg teenage characters, a crime. (It probably also makes a number of formally published teen romance novels illegal, but I'm less sure about this).
I see only three possibilities:
1. Wikipedia is misstating the law.
2. A significant part of the mainstream internet is illegal in Canada, but the laws are not enforced except on actual pedophile-adjacent things (e.g. portrayals of sex *between minors and adults*)
3. People actually go to jail for putting explicit fanfiction online in Canada
Anyone know which one it is? Remembering that this is a world where actual pedophiles often go free, or get outrageously lenient sentences, and the law goes after (probably mostly teenagers) writing about teenagers having sex with other teenagers. If it's anything but option 1, this does *so much* to discredit actual child pornography laws, and means that once someone (like me) discovers that this is how the law is sometimes written, they will take accusations of "child pornography" much less seriously until they know all the facts. Which of course will help protect the actual criminals. It also means that the laws will *have to* allow for leniency, to provide a way of ensuring the people "guilty" of made up versions of the crime don't go to jail, which of course can and will be used by judges as an excuse to go easy on the ones guilty of the actual, central example of the crime. Because God forbid we actually *distinguish* unlike things in the law!
I am so fucking sick of things like this. This particular example parallels age of consent laws that define two teenagers having consensual sex as raping each other, and I have huge issues with these infringememts on the rights of children and the disgusting adult hypocrisy of deeming a loving teenage couple having sex a crime while adults can have drunken orgies with strangers and must never ever be judged for it. (And I'm disgusted by how few people stand up for this position: they either want to lower the age of consent *for everyone* or they want to rigidly "enforce the laws" no matter how moronic those particular laws may be).
But more generally, I think this shows two things. First, all sane people need to commit to a universal principle of "nothing is X except actual X. No exceptions." Nothing is racism except actual racism. Nothing is rape except actual rape. Nothing is child porn, or communism, or fascism, or violence, except instances of those things. Or else, you are *not taking the actual X remotely seriously!*
And second, everyone needs to be willing to say to *the most horrible sounding things possible*, whether child porn, or nazism, or satanic human sacrifice, that "yes even *those things* are sometimes protected freedoms". If you don't do that, you've signed away all sanity forever on the endless redefinition signalling spiral treadmill.
possibility #4 (subclass of 2): The laws really _do_ make a large chunk of the internet illegal, and it is selectively enforced - probably against people who are politically out of fashion.
Mostly 2., but probably the occasional instance of 3.
If one isn't already taking accusations of "child pornography" (or relatedly, "pedophilia") with an eye-roll, it's unlikely that learning of the precise phrasing of this Canadian law is going to change one's mind.
Site note: you know teenagers get prosecuted for sexting, charged with "distributing child pornography" of themselves? This is not just hypothetical from reading the law as written; this actually happens.
> Nothing is racism except actual racism. Nothing is rape except actual rape. …
You'll find people will readily agree to this, and then argue that their experts' new, more expansive, definition is ACTUAL racism ("power + prejudice"), rape ("affirmative consent"), etc.
"I have huge issues with these infringements on the rights of children and the disgusting adult hypocrisy of deeming a loving teenage couple having sex a crime"
Children have rights appropriate to their age, and let's be real here: when the hormones are at their peak, it's not about being a loving couple, it's about being horny teens (and if I go by media reports, boys wanting the girls to recreate acts the boys have seen in porn).
I am going to take you at face value about being sincere on this, but in general I start getting uneasy when people start on about "the rights of children" and couple that with sex. Because how young do you mean by "child"? Under 18, so 17 and a half? 15? 12? 9?
The well has been poisoned by the genuine paedophiles using "rights of the child", "loving mature teens", etc. as the Trojan horse for "and of course it should be legal for a 30 year old to fuck a 6 year old".
"And second, everyone needs to be willing to say to *the most horrible sounding things possible*, whether child porn, or nazism, or satanic human sacrifice, that "yes even *those things* are sometimes protected freedoms".
Sounds great, I'm all for freedom of speech. Except. How about when the child porn drives a 12 year old girl to kill herself, then a year later her father commits suicide because he is so destroyed by her death, and it's all down to a guy who started this shit when he was 17?
https://www.psni.police.uk/latest-news/alexander-mccartney-sentenced-life-imprisonment-minimum-tariff-20-years
"In May 2018, Cimarron Thomas, a 12 year old girl from West Virginia took her own life. She shot herself with a legally held handgun during online contact with McCartney, the catalyst being that he was attempting to coerce her into involving her younger sibling. In March 2024 he pled guilty to a charge of manslaughter. This makes him the first person in the UK to be sentenced for manslaughter when the victim resided in a foreign jurisdiction.
Speaking about this tragic incident, her Grandparents have released a statement saying: “We all have been devastated by our Granddaughter’s passing. We know that nothing that we do or say will bring her back. But if we can help another family to not have to go through what we did, something good could come out of her death. Parents, please keep the doors of communication open concerning the evil of some people online.”
Cimarron pleaded for him to stop and said she would shoot herself, he simply replied “I don’t care”. He then started a countdown for her to comply with his sick requests or he would carry out his threat to send previously captured images to her contacts. It was during this countdown that the child shot herself.
Tragically her father took his own life in the aftermath of her death, never knowing the terrible truth of what really happened."
Nice guy, Alexander. Unknown number of victims; the news stories identify seventy but the total could be hundreds to thousands. Is child porn a right? Well, you know, we can debate that. Or we can lock this guy up. Is that "sign[ing] away all sanity forever on the endless redefinition signalling spiral treadmill"? If so, I'm clambering onto that treadmill!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/25/alexander-mccartney-northern-ireland-man-jailed-for-life-abusing-children-online
"Operating out of his bedroom in his family home outside Newry, the computer science student posed as a young girl on Snapchat, befriending girls who were gay or exploring their sexuality.
The judge told the court: “His choice of victim was particularly calculating and sinister because the fact that they were exploring homosexuality added an additional layer of security to his actions.”
Once McCartney had secured a picture from his victims, he would then reveal the “catfish” and blackmail them into taking part in sex acts. In some instances, he demanded his victims involve younger siblings, including victims of between three and five years old, O’Hara told the court.
McCartney was arrested several times between 2016 and 2019 but continued to offend despite bail conditions until he was remanded into custody."
"The well has been poisoned by the genuine paedophiles using "rights of the child", "loving mature teens", etc. as the Trojan horse for "and of course it should be legal for a 30 year old to fuck a 6 year old"."
I mean, it should be pretty easy to ask someone proposing more rights for children whether they mean "children having sex with other children, must always be completely legal" (=actual rights for children) or "let adults have sex with children" (=more "rights" for *adults*). Mandatory Romeo and Juliet law vs abolish age of consent. These aren't remotely difficult to distinguish.
Since my position is the first, and only the first, I can't see your unease, unless you mean "today it's the former, tomorrow it's the latter" slippery slope thinking. On the one hand, that's pretty much the exact toxic purity spiral I was talking about: if you don't agree to ban something that's obviously not itself any kind of pedophilia, you're *basically* pro-pedophilia. On the other hand, I do see your point since this sort of thing has indeed happened a dozen times with gay/trans/etc demands, and other progressive agendas. But in this case, there's no basis: they're called "Romeo and Juliet laws" for a reason; this isn't remotely a new thing. In fact, the new thing is the very thing you're defending, and the insane redefinition spiral that says "if you don't want someone on the sex offender registry because when he was 17 he slept with his 15-year-old girlfriend, then next thing you know you'll be allowing sex with 6-year-olds." Never mind that the antecedent of that sentence was basically non-existent anywhere until recently, and somehow the consequent didn't happen.
Meanwhile, the position I'm criticising was a creation of the same modern society that's given us a million new unprecedented-in-history developments, and more by the day. So which one is the slippery slope???
As for the rest of your comment...I started by pointing out the absurdity of defining equally as "child porn" things like explicit images of real children and things like written stories about teenagers having sex with other teenagers. And you reply that you disagree, we have to ban the fictional teenage stories, because here's a case of an adult who blackmailed a preteen girl into sending real images of herself, so child porn definitely exists and is harmful!
It's really hard not to see this as a bad-faith response, but I acknowledge I may be misunderstanding your point.
What does this have to do with outlawing Harry Potter fanfiction?
1) It's possible for some person to kill themselves over [thing] without being an argument that society should take [thing] seriously in general. If you have statistics over the rate of suicides, that might be the start of an argument.
2) It's quite possible that societies taboos about this kind of stuff contributed. Naked pics aren't blackmail material in a nudist society.
3) The Canadian law mentioned above doesn't seem to make a distinction between this cat-fishing and the non-catfish alternative where it really was 2 young girls.
4) If you get to the point where children are doing something illegal by sharing pictures of themselves, this gives the blackmailers a lot more power. "Those sexy pics you sent me were illegal, if you don't do as I say, you go to jail".
I don't know, Donald; I think if you trick a 12 year old girl into sending you topless photos, then blackmail her with "I'll tell everyone about these" and try to get her to send you similar photos of her 9 year old sister, and then laugh when she begs and pleads and says she'll kill herself, and then she really *does* kill herself when you start the countdown for "nudes of your 9 year old sister or else I push the button"- I sort of think that yeah, that is what made her do it and it's not really likely she would have just killed herself anyway.
But you know. It's really important that men in their 20s have the right to create and disseminate child porn. Right?
That wasn't what I was saying, you missed the point.
The point was more that you can't build good general policy out of anecdote. You need to look at statistics.
Because "it happened once" is almost never a good argument for banning something. The world is a big place, and lots of things happen once.
It's pretty clear that the person being described did something wrong. The question is what. And how to write laws that target cases like this, without indiscriminately banning everything.
For example, imagine a similar situation, but the blackmail was totally not sex related. (Ie he tricked the girl into breaking something valuable or killing a pet or something) Would this be any better?
Now imagine young girls sending each other flirtatious pictures and enjoying doing do. Is this a problem?
Can't we just have a law against blackmail or perhaps a law against pushing people to suicide? No laws against anything sex related required.
> But you know. It's really important that men in their 20s have the right to create and disseminate child porn. Right?
This is part of what the previous post was complaining about. The muddling between cases that are clearly harming a particular child. And the adults with pencils drawing fictional characters who are harming nobody.
You didn't actually address the point 4. If you change the law such that the girl also faces *legal* consequences for having shared the pictures of herself, would that make her less likely to kill herself?
Uhm, the cases you describe seem very out of proportion to me. The original post complained that the definition of child porn includes way too much. For example when it is a completely fictional text that does not relate to any real person.
You argue that child porn does exists and that there are bad instances. Yes, of course!?! No one ever denied that, or certainly not ascend in their original post.
...You do know that Romeo and Juliet laws exist in most countries, including Canada, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Romeo_and_Juliet_laws https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/clp/faq.html
> In Canada, the age of consent is normally 16, but there are two close-in-age exemptions: sex with minors aged 14–15 is permitted if the partner is less than five years older, and sex with minors aged 12–13 is permitted if the partner is less than two years older.
Also, fun fact: apparently the age of consent in Canada was 14 until 2008.
Also, the law as described in the OP seems to ban the original *Romeo and Juliet*, which definitely includes underaged (by modern Canadian standards) sex.
So, in Canada, if two fourteen-year-olds have sex, that's at least sometimes OK, but if someone writes a story in which two fourteen-year-olds have sex, under circumstances where it would be OK for actual adolescents to actually have sex, that's a felony?
Canada seems to be seriously messed up. Of course, they aren't the only ones.
My focus on Canada was limited to their definition of child pornography (again, according to wikipedia). I am not from Canada and was not limiting the rest of my argument to that country.
Yes, I am aware that close-in-age/Romeo-and-Juliet exceptions exist *in some jurisdictions*. If they exist across Canada, then it seems Canada is saner on that particular issue. But there are definitely a significant number of US states, a few Australian states, and I think the entire UK, where these exceptions do *not* exist. There was at least one case in the US (Utah I think) of two same-age teenagers being actually charged for this. I'm sure it's happened more than that.
And Neil Gaiman has an old blog post on the law being a blunt-edged instrument when it comes to all kinds of pornography and erotica...
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html
Of course, Neil is facing his own #MeToo type of sex scandal. Maybe I'm out of touch with current definitions of sexual assault and rape, but some of these accusations sound consensual...
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/08/01/exclusive-two-more-women-accuse-neil-gaiman-of-sexual-assault-and-abuse/
His New Zealand nanny said she had unwanted sex with him for 6 weeks. (Couldn't she have left? Police never filed charges.)
And he allowed a woman to live on his property in upstate NY as long as she would have sex with him. That seems like contractual sex.
But isn't the question about the definition of child porn and not necessarily statutory rape? I'm thinking of the Handly case. I had to go to Chat to refresh my memory cells...
"The Handley Case refers to the legal issues surrounding Christopher Handley, a U.S. manga collector who faced charges in 2006 under laws prohibiting the possession of obscene visual representations of minors. Handley was accused of importing and owning manga containing sexually explicit depictions of fictional characters that appeared to be minors. The case became significant as it involved not actual abuse but drawings, raising questions about the boundaries of freedom of expression and obscenity laws in the U.S."
You are conflating child pornography and obscenity, which are not the same. Obscenity must meet the Miller test, which is a very high bar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test. There is very little that is obscene under US law. Child porn is illegal even if it is not obscene, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_v._Ferber, but manga is not child porn in the US because it doesn't depict an actual child. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalition
If Handley was convicted under obscenity laws, the stuff he possessed must have been out there. Plus, mere possession of obscene material is not illegal in the US, He must have been convicted of importing or distributing it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_v._Georgia
The Utah case was a 12 and 13 year old. Technically not teens, though I guess that isn't really relevant. (Though, apparently 14-15 year olds having sex is only a misdemeanor.) https://www.denverpost.com/2006/12/05/girl-13-charged-as-sex-offender-and-victim/
Honestly, the only thing I really find upsetting about this is that they're wasting money on such an inconsequential case. Otherwise, this seems like a really low priority thing to be upset about.
"Otherwise, this seems like a really low priority thing to be upset about."
Until the 12 year old gets pregnant and then becomes the poster (literal) child for "abortion rights are under threat!"
I think it's easy for us as adults to say that. Similarly to dismissing concerns about authoritarian schools, or dismissing violent bullying with "kids will be kids". For my part, I remember being a teenager angry at the extreme lack of freedom in general, and I would rather more people would remember that and take it more goddamn seriously.
>while adults can have drunken orgies with strangers and must never ever be judged for it.
...you know it's illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person, right? Anything that inhibits the ability to say 'no' makes it a rape.
This is a great example of the "endless redefinition signaling spiral treadmill," but with with "rape" instead of "child pornography".
No it isn't, because it's false.
I didn't mean his claim about it being illegal, just the latter bit about "Anything that inhibits the ability to say 'no' makes it a rape."
"you know it's illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person, right?"
Wrong, in the US at least, it is illegal to have sex with an *incapacitated* person, but intoxicated!=incapacitated. From memory of reading the prosecutor's handbook on this, the line "there is no bright line test for incapacitation" sticks out. I am aware of at least one case in the military system where "blackout drunk" did not meet the standard for incapacitation (US vs Long? Could be wrong about the case name).
I can see where that would be the case, because "blackout drunk" doesn't mean "unconscious", it means "does not remember it tomorrow", and that's hard/impossible for others to know at the time. (I mention this because I had that misconception about the meaning for many years.)
It can also be impossible for the person themselves to know it at the time. Some anesthetics do the same thing, and I remember having a perfectly clear conversation with my late wife when she was being prepped for a surgery (_many_ years ago - at this point I don't recall which surgery) - and she had absolutely no memory of the conversation upon awakening after the surgery. Long term memory formation is a fragile thing!
You don't need any drugs at all to demonstrate that effect. If you wake someone up in the middle of the night, you may be able to have a lucid conversation with them that they don't remember.
Good point, Many Thanks!
> ...you know it's illegal to have sex with an intoxicated person, right?
No, it isn't, and there are many court cases making the point that it isn't. College orientation programs want it to be illegal, and they say it's illegal, but the law says the opposite.
Correct- if you look at actual guidelines for prosecutors, you have to be *really very* drunk to be unable to context, far beyond what most of us mean by 'intoxicated'.
I suppose, if this is really the case, you could remove "drunken" from my quoted statement and my point would stand. But I'm really not sure what your position is on my overall argument, or what your challenge to that particular statement has to do with my overall argument.
I made a fairly substantial argument, with multiple interelated points across multiple interrelated issues, and both you and anomie have responded with very short nitpicks of single sentences, both in a rathar snide way ("you do know, right?"), with no indication of what significance these nitpicks have to my argument or what part of my overall argument you disagree with.
With respect, I find this kind of response annoying.
Using a lot of words does not make the argument substantial. The whole thing boils down to "I don't like it," and an absurd claim that adults never get stigmatized for sexual activity.
It's illegal to have sex with children because children are not considered informed enough to give informed consent. It's also rare for anyone to prosecute children, because children are not considered informed enough to know the laws. So the answer is, "adults get prosecuted, kids don't."
Fanfiction would also have to specifically mention the characters' age, because a feature of children is they get older over time, and a time-advanced story with an adult version of the character is no longer child pornography, merely creepy.
Okay, I understand your objection now, but "adults never get stigmatized for sexual activity" was not at all my intended point. It was that the law creates an arbitrary line with no moral significance (as long as we're talking about two people the same age as each other) and deems the most wholesome instance on one side of the line a crime and the most debauched on the other side completely fine.
Another example would be: "in many workplaces, the politest most chaste indication of romantic interest is illegal, while outside the workplace, "wanna fuck?" is considered perfectly fine. Disgustingly backwards world". Obviously, this does not mean to imply that *every* non-workplace environment considers the latter fine. It's pointing out the extreme hypocrisy of the double standard.
To go further, there are many jurisdictions where the laws written seem to make sex illegal if there isn't consent clearly indicated by words or actions. People point out that married couples may have sex without such indication. Now in a sane world there'd be an absurdly easy fix: make an exception (for that particularly broad definition of consent) for marriage.
But we *can't* do that. Because there was a time when marital rape wasn't taken seriously. Never mind that such a law would allow for any normal case of marital rape to be charged, by applying the narrower consent definition, while protecting normal couples' basic freedom. No, we still can't do it, because such an exception *kind of looks* like we're taking marital rape less than maximally seriously, even if we actually are. And it doesn't actually matter how many innocent people potentially suffer, if the alternative is giving up to the slightest degree the opportunity to signal our extreme virtue and purity.
I hate people.
All laws are arbitrary lines, and the choice is which side of the problem you want to have; do you want to capture every instance of a thing, and probably capture some beyond it, or do you want to exclusively capture these instances, and probably miss some things?
Typically you want to write them so you capture every instance with overflow, because juries and prosecutorial discretion can minimize the overflow cases; meanwhile if you leave a gap, criminals will find it and endeavor to squeeze everything into the gap. If you say child porn is only images of real children, then someone digitally alters the kid's eye color and claims it's not a real person anymore, and now you have to draw a line about how much of the picture can be altered. So you just say fictional images are illegal too, and no longer have to deal with it.
...I really don't see what the orgies have to do with anything. I'm really having trouble understanding what your position is here: what kind of value system gets you to pro-children-having-sex and anti-orgy? I thought you supported sex among consenting peoples...
But anyways, if you want an answer that badly, the answer is 2, because like literally every other law it is applied selectively, and even if they wanted to convict every person who writes teen erotica, they physically do not have the resources to do so. The justice system is strapped for resources as it is. Also, you are going to VERY different answers on what "actual" racism/rape/CP/fascism/etc is depending on who you ask, so I really don't know what your point is there...
"I'm really having trouble understanding what your position is here:"
See his later comment about being an angry teen. It's the classic and perennial "It's so unfair how my horrible parents won't let me drink, smoke, take drugs, have sex, stay out late, and make me go to school, all 'justified' because 'you're only thirteen' and 'we're the adults' and 'yes we are the boss of you'. How dare they curtail my freedom like that!" complaints of teens down the years.
This is an over-simplification of many different laws in many different jurisdictions.
The law which applies in my Australian state includes the text "if the intoxication is self-induced, regard must be had to the standard of a reasonable person who is not intoxicated and who is otherwise in the same circumstances as that person at the relevant time". (Section 36B of the Crimes Act 1958, if you're interested).
I am not a lawyer and have no legal expertise, but I understand this to mean that if a married couple who regularly have sex go out to dinner, have a couple of glasses of wine, become mildly intoxicated, and go home and sleep with each other, they are each doing exactly what a reasonable person who was not intoxicated would do, and are therefore not raping each other.
Complicated further by the part where for anyone to look into it, someone has to be in a position to complain. To find out if the married couple is performing an illegal act, first one of them has to claim it was.
Or film themselves.
>Complicated further by the part where for anyone to look into it, someone has to be in a position to complain.
Surveillance creeps upward, year by year.
If the couple has an Alexa in their house, even today, are we _quite_ sure that there wasn't auditory evidence captured by it? And if, for instance, Amazon as a corporation or someone in Amazon with access was pissed at the couple for some reason, are we _quite_ sure that this can't be used against them?
By the sound of it, the law is trying to navigate the waters of "so I went clubbing Friday night, got totally wasted with the 'two for the price of one' shots offer in the club, hooked up with this guy, we ended up having sex but I don't remember too much about it because I was off my tits, and now the morning after I kinda regret it and kinda think it was maybe rape? At least my friends are all telling me I was unable to consent and he took advantage of me and he totally is a rapist?"
Steering between the Scylla of "no the guy should not have taken advantage of a drunk woman?" and the Charybdis of "nobody made you drink that much, you are a grown adult and did it all yourself (and he was nearly as drunk as you, anyway)".
Recieved an email from sort of rat/adjacent blog about avoiding the same mistakes, accidentally deleted it and can't find it for the life of me. I swear it was clearer thinking but I can find 0 mention of it anywhere on their website.
The post mentioned that people typically make the same mistakes because from their perspective the situation is different. It also mentioned that the only way for cycle to end is for the situation to change or for the person to change.
Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Google has been no help in tracking it down
Apparently the most popular Wikipedia page that cites SSC is My Immortal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Immortal_(fan_fiction)#cite_note-27
Matt Yglesias tweeted yesterday he thinks Kurt Godel's loophole in the US Constitution that would allow for a dictatorship is the POTUS' unlimited and unchecked ability to pardon. Says Yglesias, henchmen could literally murder members of congress in DC who don't obey the POTUS, then walk, rinse and repeat.
Is there a mechanism that would prevent that from happening? Sure, there's impeachment or the 12th Amendment but with murderous henchmen in the building people might have difficulty voting their conscience.
Even without the pardon power, couldn't either the amendment process or a constitutional convention allow any arbitrary change, including to a dictatorship? The POTUS can't do this unilaterally, but, if either the amendment or convention requirements are met, the POTUS could, ahem, enjoy the fruits of the change.
Whereupon fifty state governors appoint 535 new senators and representatives, who sensibly get together in Not The District of Columbia, declare Congress to be in session, and impeach the President. And anybody who tries to murder any of these governors, senators, or representatives will be committing felonies under *state* law, which the President can't pardon.
I mean, you can always fall back on "the President has more and bigger guns than the people who would try to arrest him and his thugs, so he wins", but then there's no point in the legal or Constitutional arguments in the first place. If you take it that e.g. the people who actually have the guns will tend to follow the law, then no, the Presidential Pardon isn't the cheat code that lets POTUS declare himself God-King or whatever.
I can think of several options that rely on the idea that two can play at the game of abusing the rules and doing things that are illegal or unconstitutional but can't necessarily be enforced.
1. The Vice President murders the President, succeeds to the Presidency, pardons himself, and offers up the Tyrannicide defense at any impeachment hearings. Or the Speaker of the House kills both the President and VP if the VP supports POTUS's reign of terror.
2. Congress can vote to adjourn to a different location. If that location is outside DC, then the state government can protect Congress with security forces that the President has zero authority to order to stand down. The National Guard isn't in this category, since the President has broad authority to call up NG units into Federal service, but several states have their own organized state militia that can't be federalized without state consent or explicit Congressional authorization, and every state has armed police.
2b. I don't think there's a rule saying that Congress has to meet inside the US.
3. For that matter, there is precedent (Jan 6, 2020) for state security forces deploying to DC to protect Congress without Presidential authorization. That precedent used Maryland and Virginia National Guard, which POTUS could theoretically have federalized and ordered to stand down, but Maryland and Virginia both have State Defense Forces that cannot be federalized unilaterally.
2 and 3 depend on senior officers of the federal military refusing to obey orders to clear the way for the President's goons to get to Congress, since in a fight between the 101st Airborne or the 3rd Infantry vs. the Maryland Defense Force or the California Highway Patrol, I'm betting on the regulars. But there's a good chance they'd decide "shoot at state militia/police who are defending Congress from my goons during an impeachment hearing" is an unlawful order.
In terms of whether or not the regulars would accept orders to intervene, 2 is likely to be on much firmer ground than 3, since the Maryland State Defense Force has a much clearer legal right to be in and around the Baltimore Convention Center or the Maryland Statehouse than the US Capitol Building.
As TasDeBoisVert points out, that isn't a loophole in any sense. If you're willing to kill the other side, then either they will kill you or you'll be in charge, and the rules will be whatever you say they are. Any rules that may or may not have existed beforehand are completely irrelevant to this.
>Is there a mechanism that would prevent that from happening?
Civil war? At one point, if a side of the political spectrum starts murdering the other and use the institution to cover themselve, the legal obligation of the targeted side fades quickly in favor of self-preservation.
But let's say these henchmen don't murder anyone if they can get a senator to change their vote by merely, as in the Godfather, making them an offer they can't refuse. The henchman could say "You know that even if I got caught murdering you, the POTUS would pardon me for it. So I've got nothing to lose here. It's your call how you vote. And don't go telling anyone about our little conversation, even off the record, because that action too would put you six feet under."
How many of our brave members of congress would stand up to such a credible threat when the alternative is to simply cast a vote differently? Wouldn't their changed vote amount to merely one more craven act in their political careers?
If the body count grows high and the press, should they be believed, figures out what's going on, yeah maybe some militias full of concerned citizens form and decide to take the law into their own hands. I'm imagining here that the POTUS would already have his own para-legal militia standing by in DC which could at least handle the Capitol Police.
But maybe there's no high body count, just a suspicious death here and there, which one side insists is murder while the other insists that's a crazy conspiracy theory...
> The henchman could say...
This would be a _staggeringly_ stupid conversation for the President to send his henchman to conduct.
If it happened on a Monday night the impeachment would be wrapped up by Tuesday afternoon, the President's criminal trial would start by Thursday, and the Supreme Court would reject any attempt to self-pardon by Friday.
Whatever law was being voted on that the President was trying to sway would be instantly dead, anyone even remotely close to them politically would be permanently radioactive, and no matter how hard they try to distance themselves - and they would try very hard - the President's party is going down hard electorally for the foreseeable future. State and federal.
B...b...but - what if there was dirt on that filthy craven politician?
That Senator could have the walls of their home filled with murder victims and absolutely no one would care compared to a President using goons to physically threaten lawmakers. You'd be handing the Senator a free pass on anything shady in their past and turning them into an overnight hero.
<Is there a mechanism that would prevent that from happening?
Yes. New constitutional amendment: In order to hold a high government office a candidate must demonstrate at least a basic grasp of Godel's argument.
It's stopped by the 2nd Amendment, where they run into a gun under every blade of grass. POTUS can pardon the corpse if he still wants to.
Certainly if the goon in question was using a predator drone, the targets ability to carry an automatic pistol would be pretty insignificant.
How is the President going to get someone to kill a Senator with a predator drone? The military would refuse the order, and the kind of mooks that would actually go along with this kind of plot don't know how to use a predator drone.
The Capitol Police would be legally obliged to defend them. Additionally, the representatives could simply leave DC and be under the protection of any state that would have them. Then if they were murdered the henchmen could be held under state charges. Additionally, states can pass laws to protect their representatives from murder just as they do with other lesser offenses. None have so far but if someone tried this every state would pass one in approximately 2 nanoseconds. At that point murder, even in DC, would create a state crime.
And if you're a legal realist this idea is obviously absurd.
You're right that the reps would simply leave and/or the Capital Police would simply kill the goons if they could.
New laws, however, I don't think would work. States can't pass laws giving themselves jurisdiction over federal land. Murder and ordering murder is already illegal in every state and states will generally cooperate with extraterritorial jurisdiction for common crimes, but the issue here is that everything supposedly happens under federal jurisdiction.
If they could affect such an arrest they wouldn't need new laws; if they can't under current laws then new laws wouldn't change the situation.
Jurisdiction means the right to go onto Federal land and arrest them as I understand it. So the goons would be safe so long as they never left Washington DC for the rest of their lives and no administration change happened that would be willing to hand them over. Not exactly a safe bet.
Your understanding is incomplete. Jurisdiction isn't just the right to make arrests, it's the general ability for a court to hear and rule on cases. As a rule states don't have jurisdiction for actions on Federal property.
States can try such cases depending on the circumstances, but it requires the feds / Congress to grant them the ability - and in this hypothetical where the President is offing Congresspeople and intimidating it from simply impeaching, it's fair to say that he/she isn't going to permit it.
A state cannot just grant itself that power. If they could, they could simply apply their existing laws against murder / conspiracy to commit murder. No special laws necessary.
(In practice, of course, one or more states may go ahead and do so anyway. We've already spent way too much time thinking about this inane hypothetical but there is no standard answer for how it would be resolved because it depends entirely on the President's support base and how far they're willing to go.
If the Supreme Court is against the President then they'll just rule the pardons unconstitutional, if the military is against the President they'll try him/her and the goons under a military tribunal, if the President has enough support to kick off a civil war and win then the new Congress will retroactively bless everything ((the same way they did with Lincoln's technically unconstitutional but emergency related actions)), etc. This is a naked force scenario, not a legal one.)
So to be clear federal officials can murder state officials and the state will have no recourse or pass any laws to protect them? That doesn't seem right. And there are multiple existing laws that protect state officials even out of state. How do those exist?
And even your insane hypothetical has an obvious answer: murder is a federal crime. If federal officials are murdering state officials in a way that only federal jurisdiction is involved, the federal government will prosecute them. Or grant jurisdiction to the state to prosecute them.
If you're asking what happens legally if the entire federal government supports and is part of the murder of the state officials: what do you think the legal situation remedy would be for the state?
Is this meant to be a gotcha against me or the concept of federal vs. state jurisdiction in the United States? Shocked though you may be at the outcomes in different contrived scenarios the facts can remain the facts. Would you care to reference a fact somewhere or gin up another completely ridiculous scenario?
When you find yourself starting a post with "So to be clear {insane_hypothetical}" maybe take a breath and ask yourself if the law is meant to deal with reality or to cover all edge cases from internet comments.
As I said, those laws exist because the Federal government can permit extraterritorial state jurisdiction on Federal property if it chooses.
> states can pass laws to protect their representatives from murder just as they do with other lesser offenses. None have so far but if someone tried this every state would pass one in approximately 2 nanoseconds. At that point murder, even in DC, would create a state crime.
Thanks. That's the kind of thing I was wondering about.
If you want to play it out a little further President Tyrannus could try to argue that it's a pre-emption of Federal power and it would go to the courts. But precedent tends to support that states can protect their officers even when they're out of state (which representatives qualify as).
And if you somehow got a Supreme Court ruling striking down the law we're in such extremity that things like a constitutional convention could happen. The states can get together and rewrite the constitution without the permission of the Federal government.
...I really don't think this is ever going to be relevant. There's no point in actually killing politicians when it's significantly less risky to just throw them in jail on bogus charges, even if it is technically less legal. What the law actually says doesn't matter, what matters is maintaining plausible deniability.
> There's no point in actually killing politicians when it's significantly less risky to just throw them in jail on bogus charges
I bet you don't even need *that.* Just imagine the dirt the NSA has on every single member of Congress. All it takes is a browser history, or text, photo, video, or phone geolocation that they don't want to explain to their family...
How dirty is the median politician in this sense? Are the majority having affairs or fucking hookers? What's on a browser history that would be so incriminating?
I'd be surprised if there isn't _something_ that a median politician could be convicted of. There are something like 3000 Federal crimes (and then the people trying to count them gave up...), and then there are State laws... And then there are all the dirt (or stuff that can be _construed_ as dirt) that isn't actually illegal, but that someone doesn't want exposed...
There’s a theory that it’s the corruptible ones that are encouraged into office.
Anyway everybody at Epstein’s island was, at the very least, aware of the substantial charges against Epstein long before he was suicided and still they went. Free booze.
Ive thought this too, but it would be *so* powerful that Im sceptical again. How *hasnt* this been abused yet? Why dont China/Russia blackmail democratic politicians everywhere on the regular? Or maybe just leak some information to stop a hostile candidates election? And I dont just mean that one time when the Really Bad politician was elected, but routinely.
Like I dont actually see *why* this isnt possible, but if it is, basically all of politics is fake.
I'm more interested in what would, could happen theoretically than what would happen pragmatically. (It might be Godel's Loophole, after all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_Loophole)
But I'm also interested in what might happen pragmatically if this were to happen theoretically.
You maintain plausible deniability by having sufficiently scary men threaten your political enemies into both action and silence. You only murder a few if you feel you have to, but the point is you are free to do so. You are free to order a massacre and unconditionally pardon the killers the next day.
...For the record, no one has any idea what Godel's Loophole actually is. He's definitely not the first person to realize that the constitution is far less than perfect, and it's honestly a miracle that democracy here has lasted as it long as it has. But again, if you're really gunning for a dictatorship, murder is a last resort. You do still need popular support and support of your party in order to make the transition go smoothly, and despite everything, killing in cold blood is still extremely unpopular with the entire electorate (especially if the victim is upper-class). On the other hand, people are pretty happy with the justice system as long as the outcomes are in their favor.
Serious question: do you think laws are magical incantations?
Can you think of any mechanisms, perhaps physical ones, that could counteract such an attempt at dictatorship?
Reversing the question: do you think there is any possible legal mechanism that could stop a POTUS that had the inclination and support to literally order the murder of members of Congress, issue pardons, keep doing it, and have their orders (murder and non-murder related) obeyed?
Sotomayor's dissent in Trump v. United States runs into the same problem: if the President has Seal Team Six willing to murder on his orders, you're already past the point where the judicial system can do anything to help. Who are you going to send to arrest him?
The judicial system doesn't enforce the laws. Its role is to interpret laws and ideally rule on some common sense things like "The President ordering Seal Team Six to assassinate opponents should probably be the kind of thing that can be criminally reviewable by courts." The deficiency in Roberts's majority opinion is that he fails to respond to this, and implicitly concedes that having a vigorous executive is more important than being able to prosecute a President for ordering an assassination.
> Reversing the question: do you think there is any possible legal mechanism that could stop a POTUS that had the inclination and support to literally order the murder of members of Congress, issue pardons, keep doing it, and have their orders (murder and non-murder related) obeyed?
Sure. Abolish pardons, and then the henchmen can be arrested and imprisoned, which makes them unwilling to be henchmen. Pardons are a necessary component of this scheme.
Realistically I don't think we get straight from Hunter Biden to having the President's above-the-law praetorian guard murdering at will. But maybe there's a series of steps that gets us there. Maybe the next step is that Trump, on his way out of office, decides to follow the "pardons for unspecified crimes" precedent to pardon his entire cabinet for anything they might have done in the period 2024-28, "just to prevent political prosecutions". Then maybe the next President decides to issue his cabinet a pardon for all future crimes as well.
> Pardons are a necessary component of this scheme.
No, they absolutely are not. The necessary component of the scheme is the President being able to order the murder and ongoing intimidation of Congress. The OP already knows the "legal" mechanism: impeachment.
If the President is willing to have members of Congress gutted like fish on the floor of Congress and use his heavies to prevent them from taking any response, the pardon power is meaningless. He can just have them pass laws making everything retroactively legal. Or similarly murder anyone else who objects. Or give him back the pardon power.
There is no One Weird Trick to dictatorship that we need to close the loophole on.
I don't understand your response. Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
Physical ones? Sure, law enforcement could go after the POTUS's personal militia. Then what happens? Maybe the militia can fight. I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
It's rather annoying that your "serious question" is obviously not one.
> It's rather annoying that your "serious question" is obviously not one.
It was a strange question but a serious one. There are millions of Wiccans and practitioners of other magical systems worldwide and the way you're describing the situation the law is acting like a binding spell, physically stopping actors in the system from taking actions. That's why I asked. I apologize if it gave offense.
> I don't understand your response. Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
I was asking you to ignore any existing laws and imagine a hypothetical law that could prevent what you're describing: an executive forming a death squad and murdering members of the legislature plus intimidating them into voting a certain way.
Can you craft such a law that could prevent an executive willing and able of forming a death squad and openly murdering members of the legislature from doing so?
>I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
...
> legally
...
> LEGALLY
The situation you're presenting is already extra-legal. Whether it's "legal" or not makes no difference, although I'm sure both sides will find some legal fig leaf for their action. Again: the law is not a precise magical spell, it is not self-replicating DNA, it is not code. There are endless ambiguities and general exceptions meant to cover emergencies.
The military will be getting involved when one branch of the government starts liquidating another.
In the United States, the President cannot legally have his political opponents murdered. The President cannot, in fact, legally order anyone to murder anyone. The President does not have the statutory authority to form goon squads and all of the existing armed groups he could use You could try a self-pardon to get around it but I think you'll find that how the law gets interpreted in that case depends entirely on who has the physical means to restrain their opponent.
The President also cannot send a goon squad to interfere with the operation of Congress. You answered your own question in the beginning by requiring that Congress is sufficiently frightened that they don't simply impeach the President. This is an ongoing crime. Presidents cannot pardon future crimes so unless he's running around constantly whipping out self-pardons I guess Congress could seize him and keep him from a pen long enough to hold a trial - except in your scenario Congress members are meekly getting double tapped in the back of the head then showing up to work the next day and saying "darn, he used the pardon loophole, guess there's nothing we can do, huh?" Then watching as anyone objects is also executed, then the next day coming in and saying "darn, he used the pardon loophole..."
You fundamentally misunderstand how government and the law function if you think this is any way a plausible scenario.
Your first question asked about "mechanisms", but from your details and in responses, you clearly mean legal mechanisms. But the fundamental issue is that *someone willing to murder political opponents* isn't going to care too much about "the law"; they are operating on pure power principles and thus don't care about "the law" (which partly makes the whole premise of the question stupid; someone who doesn't care enough about "the law" to choose to *murder political opponents* isn't going to care enough about "the law" to bother pardoning them) as an independent entity that must be obeyed.
To make an analogy: you are playing chess with an opponent. After you make a particularly brilliant move on your part, your opponent jumps across the table, holds you down, and proceeds to use a set of pruners to cut off the fingers of one of your hands. Your questions are the equivalent of you sitting back down at the table and trying to figure out the best way to achieve mate, not comprehending that _you are no longer playing chess_.
To answer @tk4213's hypothetical, it is very clear that in fact, yes, you do believe that laws are magical incantations that have power in and of themselves to bind people to actions, and not that they only have power where people choose to follow them.
The mechanism that most likely solves this hypothetical is the military launches a coup and removes President Tyrant. Before you ask, no, there's no "legal mechanism" for that, either!
When Matty G plays these games, I get he's doing them out of fun. You have asked somewhat similar questions previously, so this is a pattern, and I don't understand what you are getting out of them.
Are you a fan of Harry Potter, out of curiosity?
>Your first question asked about "mechanisms", but from your details and in responses, you clearly mean legal mechanisms. But the fundamental issue is that *someone willing to murder political opponents* isn't going to care too much about "the law"; they are operating on pure power principles and thus don't care about "the law"...
No, they would be using the law. The POTUS legally has the power to pardon someone for murder for any reason.
>Are you a fan of Harry Potter, out of curiosity?
Fuck you, man.
"No, they would be using the law."
But they don't have the power to order someone murder for any reason. That's the Gross Conceptual Error that you can't seem to get. You want a world where a) the President doesn't care about the law (in fact, *really* doesn't care about the law, because he orders people to murder political opponents, possibly the gravest norm in our entire political ethos) but b) then does care about the law (because he then pardons his killers who followed his orders). Again, it doesn't work that way: someone who is willing to do Step 1 here isn't going to care about Step 2.
Why is it hard to imagine a POTUS who:
1) Doesn't personally care about the law, and
2) Uses the law in every possible way to exert power
?
This is not an unusual combination historically. Psychopathic, manipulative leaders are common.
Picture a mafia-type scenario in which the head of the family makes every effort to avoid being caught "giving orders". He does give orders through a single person he trusts most in a manner to maximize plausible deniability. Meanwhile, he's well lawyered-up, so that if the authorities do come a knockin', he can use the law to protect him to its fullest extent.
So for instance in this wild hypothetical scenario (which I simply find interesting) the "henchmen" wouldn't likely walk the chambers of congress claiming the president sent them but approach them--let's make this cinematic--in restaurant bathrooms. Congressman A's taking a leak at The Palm, someone in a P-coat starts pissing at the urinal next to them and makes a threat about approving so and so or such and such. He waves a handgun around and says he means business. A car pulls up and rolls down the window while Congressman B waits for his Uber on the sidewalk. This driver too brandishes a gun and suggests how he might vote and fires a warning shot into the air to show he's serious. Letters arrive at the congressmen's DC apartments highlighting the president's ability to pardon anyone of anything. A militant-looking group starts demonstrating regularly, shouting how much they love the POTUS and how they will do anything for him. "We will do whatever it takes to make sure our POTUS succeeds!" One man tells a TV reporter. "Whatever it takes! We love our POTUS and we know he loves us. I'm not saying we will commit crimes, but if we did, we know that we would be given full pardons." The militant-looking group wears insignia that matches what the men who approached Congressman A and Congressman B wore. There are calls to The Washington Post saying that a group that calls themselves Y plans on taking violent action against any member of congress who doesn't vote with the party, particularly if they are members of the president's own party.
A week later Congressman A, who didn't vote the way he is supposed to, is found dead, poisoned. A week after that Congressman B is killed struck dead by a car as he crosses the street. The man behind the wheel is caught and jailed. He confesses he did it because he was loyal to the president and the congressman wasn't. After that he shuts up because his lawyer has instructed him to say nothing else.
Now we have a climate of fear and suspicion in the capitol. More congressmen are warned. There's more violence, more arrests. Nothing ties anything directly to the POTUS, but the worry in the air is that he is behind it all, and that the power he has over this group, beyond merely their loyalty and their generous cryptocurrency salaries, is his ability to pardon them.
> I don't see how the army could get involved legally.
Again, the word "legally" here suggests you think of laws as magical incantations binding people to inaction. If the president is openly having congressmen murdered, all that's out the window.
I don't know why you guys keep invoking "magical incantations". It's pure snark.
Of course the army *could* get involved. Would they? Who would lead them? Would the generals now be in charge of the government?
I think what Erusian suggests would be a more likely first and last response. The states would make it illegal to kill their officials and then you've got state police legally going into DC to make arrests. That seems much more likely than the US Army making an unconstitutional move.
> I think what Erusian suggests would be a more likely first and last response. The states would make it illegal to kill their officials and then you've got state police legally going into DC to make arrests.
You sure about that? What prevents the President in your wild hypothetical from pulling the murder-pardon two step with his goons on the state police?
Virginia and Maryland are right there and they already have state laws preventing murder. What's stopping Congress from physically relocating themselves to one of those states and meeting in a hotel conference room?
No, that was definitely a serious question, because your original comment seems to imply that laws are capable of stopping a murder from occurring. That would only be possible if they had magical force.
You seem to confirm as much here:
> Are there legal mechanisms? I don't know. That's why I'm asking the question.
You should know; anyone with a basic understanding of cause and effect does know. There is no legal mechanism that can stop a warlord from taking power. If he's able to kill his enemies, that's that. This is true regardless of what the laws say; the point of conquering somewhere is that you get to specify what the laws say afterwards.
What difference exists, in your mind, between Congress passing a law that prohibits the president from killing them, and France passing a law that prohibits the German army from killing them?
Still not serious, dude.
Can you articulate a model of the world in which your question makes any sense?
The only thing we can really say to you is that your questions strongly suggest that you have a hard time with the difference between imagination and reality. What do you want from us?
Nutrition is a field where I've thrown up my hands and declared complete ignorance beyond the very basics (e.g., eat fruits and vegetables, minimize intake of simple carbs and added sugars). For example, I'm vaguely aware that dietary cholesterol intake doesn't matter because your body regulates its cholesterol levels, but I couldn't tell you whether this is ironclad consensus that 99% of nutritionists believe, or if it's the sort of thing that seems reasonable and has some weak observational studies to support it, or whether it's a heterodox-but-reasonable theory, or a thoroughly discredited crackpot theory.
Is anyone aware of a good write-up for laymen that summarizes what's known with reasonable estimates of certainty?
This paper is fairly recent - https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.057642
The risk from consumption is probably statistically significant, but not necessarily great. Your liver produces something like 80% of your circulating cholesterol. A clean whole foods diet (more fiber, less added sugar) and moderating animal fat intake is probably most impactful. Saturated fat raises total cholesterol which is a risk factor.
There have been other write-ups but I can't remember them. Years ago, Denise Minger's blog made waves with her critique of the China Study which upset militant vegans. Was an interesting read.
What the most effective "fad" diets tend to have in common is a focus on vegetables and limiting processed foods & sugar. This is true of mediterranean diet, paleo, whole 30, keto, etc (and vegan or otherwise).
For a more specific tip: legumes are great. Start small, because the level of fiber can be difficult to digest at first.
Written by a physician who practices at a teaching hospital (therefore is more likely to be close to the current state of research): https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/a-basic-guide-to-cholesterol/ and https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/a-basic-guide-to-cholesterol-part-2-myths-misconceptions/ (the second one is probably what you are looking for)
But overall you don't need more than the very basics. If you aren't overweight you are already well ahead of the game. If you live in the developed world, its very unlikely you need to be overly concerned with micronutrients or things like cholesterol unless you have a diagnosed medical condition that will impact these or have family history that would make you concerned. Your primary care doctor is the best person to determine if you fall into either bucket.
About 10 years ago, I did a deep dive into nutrition research with a view toward optimizing my personal health. The universally agreed take-aways were basically what you wrote and match most people's naive understanding of a healthy diet:
(1) eat as many vegetables in as much volume as you can tolerate,
(2) eat sufficient protein (and it will be more than you think, esp if you are exercising a lot), (3) don't eat too many calories or too few (without precise agreement on exactly where the boundaries are)
(4) minimize sugar,
Aside from this list, I didn't find any other major items that were really clear, like your question about dietary cholesterol, or the evergreen question of whether wine is good or bad, etc.
At the time, examine.com was a good resource: https://examine.com/
Perhaps surprisingly, T-nation, a body-building/weightlifting site, was also very good. I think it has since been corrupted, but I'm not 100% sure.
I believe distilled water with a couple drops of interferon is still considered pretty safe.
You reckless fool, Gunflint! I can't believe you are trying to convince Jesse that dihydrogen monoxide is safe and harmless!
https://www.csun.edu/science/ref/humor/dhmo.html
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, _The Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century_, search the index for "diet" or "food".
Caveat: I suspect damn near anything about dietary health has been challenged, beyond the very rudimentary "humans need food", so I don't think there's anything that's "known". So your "with reasonable estimates of certainty" is doing work, and for that, well, see that book.
I recently launched a Substack called The Optimist's Barn, which applies a techno-optimist lens to the issue of farm animal welfare. It tries to figure out how we can use technology to improve animal welfare while also preserving abundance. There will be a mixture of pieces from high-level analysis (e.g. “Is High-Welfare Farming Scalable?”) to nitty-gritty technical analyses of technologies like in-ovo sexing and high-expansion nitrogen foam. I thought folks here might find it interesting or valuable!
https://optimistsbarn.substack.com/p/how-to-be-a-techno-optimist-for-animals
Question for the next time a classifieds thread happens: would it be ethical for me to post an ad for a job I currently have if I get a referral bonus for doing so? Would that be against the rules?
IMHO the rules are just heuristics for "does this benefit the ACX comunity".
The referral bonus makes it harder for you to judge this on your own.
I am a bit older now and my general impression is:
Great places to work make their employees refer their good friends without any artificial incentives. Less great places to work notice the below average quota of referrals. The artificial incentives then make employees spread the message among those "friends" they are not afraid to loose.
Given that, my preference would be to such ad either not posted at all, or stashed in a category/folder where we can easily skip them.
Friends of the hitchhiker:
"..why not share it with your friends?"
"Because I want to keep them!"
I think it would be enough for OP to state they get a referral bonus for advertising the job. That keeps it honest, and people like you can follow it with comments suggesting that there may be a reason why the company pays people to search for replacements, so that will be out in the open. If OP is in tech, there are a lot of people looking for tech jobs, some of whom would be happy to have any sort of new lead.
I should clarify: I'm not looking for a replacement. Near as I can tell, the company just wants to grow so much they're willing to incentivize current employees (ok technically contractors but whatever) to spread the word.
fully ok.
Given at what nesting level we are in this particular thread here.. i'd even say: throw us the link! whoever followed in here is most likely curious!
The usual classified thread is "--- EMPLOYMENT ---". And in there i usually find things that are more interesting than replication of job ads.
Having said that, give it a try!
Maybe you are just above-average-cautious and others would have neither hesitated at all; nor asked ACX peers for permission; nor considered asking their employer for approval.
You're probably right about me being above average cautious. Case in point: I don't even have the link in hand, and it may take me a few days to get it.
And if I don't get permission to write my own ad I'll just post about it without getting the bonus, perhaps even on a normal open thread since at that point it's no longer self promotion.
While I agree that your concern is a valid one, I'm not planning to evangelize the company with statements that aren't true to my experience, and I will write the text of the ad myself, hopefully without direct approval from the company (I will be checking into this -- if they don't let me write it myself I'm not doing it).
I will also clearly state that I'd be getting a referral bonus and mention a way to apply for the job without me getting the bonus (because I think this job has utility for the future of mankind according to my lazy reading of 80000 hours criteria).
>stashed in a folder where we can easily skip them
Otherwise known as the classifieds thread :)
I'm writing a Substack blog post and am having a hard time with formatting. When I google my questions, I get links to answers, often from Substack itself, that aren't accurate. Acc/to various scattered pieces of Substack info I should be able to change the font color of a post, to drag images to where I want them to go and have them stay there, to break the title into 2 lines. None of that is true -- or anyhow those things cannot be accomplished by following the instructions Substack gives Is there a central, reliable source of info about formatting a post? ( I am not interested in the peripheral stuff -- formatting notification emails, getting subscribers to pay, etc.). I *much* prefer written info to videos, but will tolerate videos if there's no choice.
Was wondering if it would be easier to write the post in Google Docs then copy and paste it into Substack. That's what I did when I put up my book review as a blog post, and as I recall the transfer was very easy, with no formatting problems. If the functionality and documentation of Substack formatting is bad, was wondering if that would be a good workaround.
Who's got advice?
It has been a long time since I've written a Substack post, but does the Substack WYSIWYG editor no longer include an option to flip over into 'raw' HTML and let you work with that directly or paste in HTML from other places? That was how I did all my posts: I just generate HTML from Markdown with Pandoc and paste in to avoid the editor entirely.
Thank you gwern. I don't know how to do any coding, though could have a friend or GPT4 help me with the html. But I've settled on making the entire title area, including title itself, in Photoshop, then just sticking that image at the top of the page. It's odd to hear from you that it's possible to modify the page via html. While nobody explained this clearly, I thought I had finally grasped why Substack won't let people set up the page however they like: It has to work both on a computer screen and on mobile. When shrinking and shaping the page for mobile it is easier for Substack to be able to rearrange it some -- for example, break the title into 2 lines if that's needed. So they want to user to just fill in the title in the title box, and leave Substack free to mess with its formatting as needed. But your info that it's possible to design one's own layout trashes that theory, so now I'm confused again.
There is one thing I still need to do in a customized way, though, and I'm wondering whether it's possible to do with html. From Substack's point of view my post won't have a title (because the title is just part of an image at the top of the page). I think that will make the post hard for people to find, and may mess up other things as well. So I was thinking I could avoid that problem putting the title in the spot Substack wants, using the Substack editor, but make the font white on a white page. Is that doable with html? No need to advise me on how, yes/no is enough.
This is a good use case for current free AIs. Try asking Claude or ChatGPT these questions.
I did. They gave me the instructions that I tried and that did not work. Also found the same instructions via google -- probably these were the ones the AI's were accessing.
I agree with anomie that Substack allows very little in the way of customized formatting. Everyone's Substack looks the same and that seems to have been the plan. Copy and pasting from Google Docs is probably what most people do.
I just looked back at recent Scott posts, and they do not have the illustrations I remember. For instance the recent post about crime and jail. There is now no image at the top, or anywhere near it. Didn't it used to have an image of a man looking out from behind bars up near the title?
...That's not part of the post. That's just the post thumbnail that appears on the home page and post archive, as well as social feeds. You can upload an image in the settings menu that appears on the bottom right when editing a post.
Yes, I know about that. But I thought many of his actual posts had images near the top. Maybe I just put the thumbnails and the actual articles together in my mind? Anyhow, I can get the post title layout I want by making full page-width image in Photoshop that includes the image I want on the left, and the 2-line title on the right, and just put the whole thing at the top of the post, so I guess I'll do that.
Well, this is what Gemini said in response to font color:
As of now, Substack doesn't offer direct control over font color within individual blog posts. However, you can customize the overall font and color scheme for your entire publication:
1. Customize Your Publication Theme:
Go to your Substack publication settings.
Under "Branding," click "Edit theme."
Here, you can choose from a variety of fonts and colors for your publication's titles, body text, and other elements.
While you can't directly change the color of specific text within a post, these overall theme settings will affect the appearance of your entire publication.
2. Use HTML and CSS (Advanced):
Substack allows you to embed custom HTML and CSS code into your posts. [Gemini double-checked this and found Substack support saying that custom HTML and CSS is not supported.]
This method is more technical and requires some knowledge of web development.
You could potentially use CSS to style specific text elements within your post, but this is not a straightforward solution and may not be supported by all browsers.
Remember:
Substack's primary focus is on content, not extensive design customization.
Excessive use of custom formatting can sometimes hinder readability.
It's generally recommended to keep your formatting simple and consistent for a clean and professional look.
If you're looking for more granular control over the appearance of your blog posts, consider using a platform that offers more advanced customization options. However, for most users, the basic theme customization provided by Substack should be sufficient.
I tried it myself, and I'm not sure what you're having trouble with? Dragging around images works just fine (though you can't have multiple of them in a row), and I don't know what you mean by breaking a title into two lines but that's what the subtitle is for. I don't see options for changing font color, so I assume that either the feature is deprecated or it's reserved for publications. I don't know why you'd need documentation, the editor really isn't feature-rich enough to justify one...
Problem with placement of images: I want one that's left-justified. Substack lets me drag it there, but when I let go it snaps it to the center.
Title broken into 2 lines: Want to do so that image is on the left, title is to right of image. Title is long enough that must be broken into 2 lines in order to fit in area to right of image. I'm pretty sure some of Scott's posts had a format of that type for the title and associated image.
Font color: Here's a link that gives instructions: https://substackcourse.com/how-to-change-font-on-substack/ But they don't work. That link's not from Substack itself, but earlier I found the same instructions that I think were from Substack.
About features being reserved for publications. I'm not sure what you mean. What I'm writing is a post on a Substack blog that I am in fact going to "publish" on Substack.
You could perhaps hack around the left-justified picture problem by Snipping a picture to add a bunch of empty space on the right, then leaving it centered.
Actually, I figured out a good workaround: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-358?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=79821624
Did you try [SHIFT] RETURN to break up the title?
No, but I will. But I have decided to just make the title/image layout I want at the top in Photoshop, including the font as part of the image -- then I'll just put the entire image at the top of post.
...Again, you can't do that. The site is designed to be read on mobile via the app, and they're not going to allow you to do any complex formatting that would break on mobile.
You can change stuff like the background color and font with the "edit theme" button in the settings, but they really don't offer much in the way of options. Apparently they used to allow people to use custom CSS, but I'm assuming they removed that because it would break the site every time Substack itself got updated. And also because they don't want people using ugly-ass "graphics design is my passion"-level CSS for their blogs. Or maybe it's just reserved for people who have contracts with Substack, who knows.
Well, anomie, you don't have any actual information about what is possible, and why online info from Substack itself is inaccurate, and why posts from Scott I looked at last night did have the features I'm describing, which you say would break on mobile. Seems like all you got is a free-floating conviction that not only is what I'm trying to do impossible, despite evidence to the contrary, it's also a dumb, irritating request from a maker of ugly-ass "graphics design is my passion" shit. Wutz the point of making this kind of response ?
Can you please just give me an example of a Scott post with said formatting? Because right now I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what you're trying to do...
I'm trying to help a friend find a post they remember from either ClearerThinking or a similar place. It was on the topic of making repetitive mistakes and how to avoid them. It included the idea that people keep making the same mistakes because either the situation hasn't changed or they haven't changed, so to break the loop one has to be changed first. Would anyone have any ideas which post this is?
About regional-specific mental illness, in Indonesia there's this thing called "masuk angin", literally "enter wind", where when people have a cold they believe that a non trivial amount of wind have entered their body and make them sick. One common symptom is that burping relieves the pain, enforcing the belief. So much that common treatment is anything that encourage burping, like scratching (hard) your back.
What's hilarious is that I totally suffer them often, and I can't think of any other explanation than exactly that! Imagine my surprise when encountering internet and finding out that it "isn't real". I still totally feel the connection between cause and effect!!
Perhaps it is evil spirits that entered you using wind. I'm not well-versed in such things, but it used to be commonly believed before germ theory. And it's the origin of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes, to attempt to stymie the evil spirit that may or may not be infesting you.
Wind itself, like getting cold or wet can reduce your bodies resistance to already existing pathogens and cause a cold.
"Enter Wind" sounds just as accurate as "A Cold".
Do you know that thing with "your tongue knows how everything feels"? That if you look at something and imagine yourself licking it, you can more-or-less picture the taste and the mouthfeel?
The common hypothesis is that's because babies tend to put a lot of things in their mouths and generally use taste as their main sensory channel for calibrating their world image.
One of my friends reported that he never had this effect and doesn't know what everybody is talking about. Interestingly, he had a trauma during birth that left him bedridden for the first few years of his life. I see this as a weak confirmation for the hypothesis.
When I was about seven years old, I put my tongue to a frozen door knob. I certainly learned how something felt. I can’t really explain what drove me to it.
If this is your sneaky way to trick a bunch of internet strangers into licking random objects, kudos :)
Encourage your friend to spend a year or so crawling on the ground licking random objects and see if he reports any change.
I think the window would close by three to five, but worth a try.
How is this different from the way I can look at anything and more-or-less picture how it would feel to touch with my fingers? The two seem equally accurate to me.
>The two seem equally accurate to me.
This is testable.
I've had enough soda cups filled with coffee to kill any belief that I can accurately taste something by looking at it.
I've had enough coffee cups filled with Starbucks.
It comes naturally to anticipate mouth feel, but I'm not sure that's a result of experience as a toddler. In adult life you end up having various non-foods in your mouth: You bite the part of the apple with the sticker on it, you hold cloth or a rubber band or a comb or whatever in your mouth in some situation where you need 3 hands and only have 2. And after a while you've had enough non-foods in your mouth that you're in a position to guess the texture of one that's novel. As for anticipating taste -- I don't feel able to do that. For ex, looking around me: don't have any expectation about what a varnished wood table would taste like, or the plastic surface of the air purifier, or my couch upholstery.
I know exactly what a varnished wood table would taste like.
Hi, are there any details about the ValueBase position? I couldn't find anything...
They don't have a page on jobs on their official website, but the TechCrunch article mentions that the company "employs just four people, who are spread across North Carolina, Virginia and Texas". So I think it'll probably be a remote (but USA-centric) job where you have to do much if not all of the work on your own.
EDIT: grammar
Just today: the new links post for Science Fictions includes an article published in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports. The twist? It's some kind of hoax/experimental short story about the personal and professional struggles of Saturnian neurosurgeons. Really delightful! I want to talk to the people who wrote it and learn what was going through their heads, and how this got through publishing. Maybe *real* short fiction these days is being published in the dark corners of small academic journals. Almost sounds like a Sam Kriss premise
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210261224009209
I'm working on a project to help people find where to move to (like Rationalist community's potential Berkeley exodus during pandemic). I want to better bring about https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ (freedom and ease to choose place and community most matching you), but I don't have the funds to keep working on it much longer. If there's anyone who would be interested in making a difference bringing this about (MVP exists) through a grant or investing, please reach out.
That is a great project. Have you tried reaching out to Zvi?
No, I didn't realize he's an angel investor or funds grants, although I know he was gunning for the Rationalist relocation to NY. If you think he's sometimes open to requests like this, I will.
Sounds quite interesting. Does it only cover the US or is it international? And how are you doing it, like comparing demographics of cities?
Only the US right now because it relies partially on government datasets, which would require 10x the effort to source most other countries in their respective languages.
Yes, comparing, filtering, and recommending based on attributes like demographics. It's at https://exoroad.com . (will remove if shouldn't link to personal projects)
...I feel like this is the absolute worst time to do this, considering that we're entering an age of political upheaval.
> we're entering an age of political upheaval.
Is this proposition really defensible? It seems to me that this could be said about pretty much any time in American history. Just going through the 20th century...
1910s: World War I
1920s: League of Nations
1930s: Great depression, New Deal, third Reich
1940s: World War II
1950s: Cold war
1960s: Vietnam war protests, civil rights movement
1970s: Energy crisis, stagflation, end of Bretton Woods system
1980s: Reaganomics
1990s: NAFTA
I'm noticing many people wanting to move because of the political upheaval. Do you mean that it's harder to move or working on the project is a bad time?
I mean that any data you collect now is very likely to become irrelevant in a few years. Local governments will change, populations will move... it's going to be a mess.
Do you think that things will change substantially more over the next four years than any other recent four-year period? My assumption is that things are likely to continue on as they have been.
That's a good point. I've already experienced that with the initial abortion laws quickly becoming out of date but have already updated with the latest. If there are rapid changes to prices, population, laws, etc. it makes the recent past a little less helpful about where to move in the future. But I think building out the systems to auto-update on yearly dataset releases will always be needed and can rectify this mostly.
Oh that is a really cool link. Pity there isn't a European version. Apparently my preferences would put me in the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Guess that is pretty precise.
I just published a Substack post on inside view and outside view that I thought might merit a presentation here. As I learned when researching this, the topic has been contentious since the beginning of rationalism. My post is linked below and refers to, among other things, an old exchange between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The reason I delved into this was that I like the concept of a "bird perspective", and that seemed similar to outside viewing. As it turns out, it's not the same, because "outside view", on LessWrong, specifically means reference class forecasting. I write about how, for example, the discovery of random coincidence is enabled by a sort of outside view which features no reference classes. I also explore a big tension: on the one hand, clearly outside views are a very powerful tool for better thinking; on the other, reference class forecasting is prone to misuse in practice (a historical accident, caused by a founder of rationalism? but in the Effective Altruism Forum they seem to like their dubious outside views as well, without referring to Hanson).
Admittedly, the average inside-viewer's exclamation "this time is different" hardly inspires confidence; but still, just pointing to a general superiority of outside views can't be sufficient in a debate. I note a very theoretical general scheme for the outside viewer to continue, roughly 1) argue for a probability that a certain line won't be crossed and deny the justification for "this time is different" for that case; 2) repeat step 1 for all interesting lines; 3) on the resulting construct, proceed with the consultation of the outside view. Does something like that scheme exist officially? (Not on LessWrong, as far as I can tell.)
https://birdperspectives.substack.com/p/bird-perspectives-and-outside-views
It's only my second post in 2024 but there will be a third one, a sister post to this one, on the theme of thinking people's surprise or lack of understanding that *other* people don't use outside views. My favourite example is philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen's view that people who insist that the Bible is the word of God can't "really" believe that. For think about it --- how could they believe that when an outside view, invoking other holy books such as the Quran, easily shows how arbitrary and therefore indefensible such belief would be?
"Lomez" provides a good example of what I call the right's double bubble problem:
"If you're on the right, you've spent your entire life surrounded by lefties. It is the water you swim in. You know everything they think. The left only sees the right as a critique of Fox News they read from some other lefty. They really don't get it at all."
https://x.com/L0m3z/status/1863659085893341538
Of course, the average right-winger has very much not spent his entire life surrounded by lefties. He lives in a mildly red suburb or small city or a strongly red rural area. Lomez is in the double bubble, red inside of blue inside of red.
My understanding is that (in partisan terms) Democrats are more geographically concentrated while Republicans are spread out. This gives an electoral advantage to the latter, as electoral votes partly depend on geography.
This is not a universal, and depends on the particular electoral coalition in question. Nate Silver has written a fair amount about this (under the heading of `electoral college advantage' and e.g. in 2012 it was actually Democrats who held the `electoral college advantage.' In 2016 and 2020 the electoral college favored Republicans, but in 2024 that advantage seems to have been significantly reduced, as Reps ran up the score in `safe states' like Florida, while Democrats won formerly safe states like New Jersey by smaller margins.
But with regards to the OP, the relevant `bubble' is probably not your physical neighbors, but the people that create/police the media you consume (not just newsmedia but also entertainment), your employers's HR department, your kids school etc.
I suspect that the population that Lomez is referring to is (top) college-educated conservatives, and for that population he's completely correct. Of course people in small town Kansas don't grow up drowning in Woke, but those people don't influence the national conversation.
And even for rural middle Americans, it's more-or-less impossible to isolate yourself from pop culture. Movies, reddit, youtube, etc. are all saturated with liberal attitudes and immediately punish any expression of conservative values.. There really hasn't been any escape for a good 30 years and conservatives are fucking sick of it. I know I am.
Considering that "merely acknowledging that same-sex relationships exist" only went from being "completely inappropriate for children's programming" to acceptable in the past 5 years or so, I think you're misremembering how long "conservative values" were still very prominent in media. (To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses).
Slightly further out, but the top comedy movie in 2008 headlined with a character in blackface.
"Wokeness" saturating media has really only been a thing for the past 5 or 10 years at most.
Personally, I don't want to see much romance of any sort in *children's* programming, at least if we define children's programming strictly, as something clearly aimed primarily at pre-teens.
Gay characters have been prominent in programming for teens and adults for a long time now. Will and Grace started in the late 90s.
I mean, you can "want" that all you want, but the fact of the matter is that romance subplots (and main plots!) are (and always have been) a mainstay of preteen programming. (As I mentioned elsewhere, it's the main plot of like half the movies Disney makes) If you think otherwise, it's solely because you didn't notice because of how heterosexual romance is the default.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that gay people exist isn't a topic that needs to be restricted to adults, or even to teens. That some boys like boys and some girls like girls is not a challenging topic for children; it's a challenging topic for *adults*.
I probably should elaborate a bit more on what I wrote in my first reply to you. I'm not sure how to edit comments here, so I'm writing a 2nd reply.
I don't dispute what you wrote about the role romance (sub)plots have played in children's programming. My point is that I think the impact of this has been... questionable, at least.
A lot of millenials and zoomers have very few if any friends. My impression is that there's a lot of loneliness out there, and it goes beyond romantic loneliness alone.
I suspect that part of the issue is that the stories we tell ourselves, our most popular stories, implicitly devalue platonic friendships. They devalue them through consistently giving romantic relationships greater focus and prioritization.
We humans are greatly impacted by the stories we watch, the stories we read, and the stories we tell ourselves. If romantic relationships are always the most focused-on and implicitly prestigious ones, then other types of relationships can get devalued. I have some on-line friends that generally struggle with the concept of non-romantic forms of love, it's actually alien to some of them. Part of this is feeling estranged from their families, but some of it is also that they haven't had a lot of friends in their lives.
Romantic/sexual relationships taking priority in stories for teens and adults is probably unavoidable, so I think it would be nice and beneficial if platonic relationships took priority in children's programming at least.
Now, this is just my opinion. I'm not looking to... join/start a movement, or anything like that. But I wanted it to be clear to you that I was literal and serious about what I said, and that this isn't about straight vs. gay for me.
I mostly replied on your other post, but I'll direct this response here:
Interesting thesis, but I'm not sure I buy it. It's pretty clear that the largest cause of the loneliness epidemic is the movement of third spaces to the online sphere - while I'm a big supporter of "online friends are real friends", even I recognize that far too many of our social interactions are ephemeral, and nothing substitutes for in-person socializing to our monkey brains.
As for lonely men (because I'm willing to bet some amount of money you're mostly talking about men you know here), the issue of prioritizing romance over platonic relationships is something the feminists have been pointing out the cause of even decades ago. To use the feminist term, it's toxic masculinity - men are taught not to be emotionally intimate with other men, because that's something they're only allowed to share with their romantic partner. (Women largely don't have this problem) Anything otherwise is made suspect, and quite frequently *mocked for suspicion of being gay*. Men are made to fear intimacy with other men *because* of fear of homosexuality. (The feminists say this toxic masculinity is because of the patriarchy; Bioessentialism, otoh, offers an answer that testosterone inherently makes it harder to be emotional compared to estrogen - ask any trans rationalist - so the cultural deficit is an emergent property of sex hormones)
So in other words, the solution to the problem you've identified isn't "don't show kids gay stuff", it's "show *more* to normalize it".
Did you think about sexual matters when you were 8 or 9? I didn't. I didn't get the impression that my peers at the time were thinking about that either.
There's no need for children's programming to deal with sexual matters.
I think there's value in promoting and prioritizing platonic friendships in children's programming, especially male/female platonic friendships. There's a lot of adults today who think that platonic friendships between men and women aren't truly possible. I wonder how big a role throwing romantic content into children's programming has had on this.
Gay romance isn't inherently sexual. Asserting otherwise is a conservative talking point, and frankly kind of gross even for conservatives. Again, the content of a g-rated Disney movie does not suddenly become gross or sexual or inappropriate just because you swap the man for a woman and make it gay.
But based on your other reply, I'll assume you *meant* romantic matters. In which case... I would ask that you re-examine your biases and what you think you know, because:
>Did you think about romantic matters when you were 8 or 9?
Obviously, trivially, yes! I knew my mommy loved my daddy, and it was romantic love. I played pretend on the playground with the other kids (when I was *6*) where we had the pink bunny marry the blue bunny, and made them kiss. We had a *yearly holiday* dedicated to romance, that was celebrated in schools (by having every student give candy to every other, but we all knew that the holiday romance for grownups). The 9 year old girls professed crushes on the boys, and some of the boys reciprocated. Half the cartoons I watched had subplots about crushes between characters. And, not to sound like a broken record, I watched Disney movies where "true love's kiss" was the main plot point. Our culture is *supersaturated* with references to (heterosexual) romance.
And none of these should have been considered inappropriate if they were about two people of the same gender instead of opposite genders.
Quite frankly, I think you're either lying to yourself or were particularly oblivious if you're claiming otherwise. Of course, I can't blame you for thinking so before doing some introspection - because the key thing is that (hetero) romance is so normalized, so default, that it's *unremarkable*. Until it's two men or two women kissing - because that provokes an unexamined disgust reaction and you suddenly notice it.
That's why I don't believe you when you claim above that it's not a gay vs. straight thing, because everything you've said doesn't sound like an argument from first principles, it sounds like reasoning backward from unexamined disgust for *specifically queer* romance that you don't have for straight romance, trying to justify being opposed to it.
Children, by the way, don't have those sorts of biases (all kissing is equally gross) but it's somehow unremarkable that we've decided to make them become tolerant with one but not the other.
I would ask you, Fang: how many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys? How many TV shows have you seen where they pray before eating? When was the last time you saw a show where homosexuality was condemned by anyone who wasn't a villain, or who wasn't shown to be in the wrong? Can you name a book on the New York Times bestseller list that overtly or covertly condemns fornication?
Popular culture is written by liberals, published by liberals, and distributed by liberals. Conservative media is subculture media, and has been for the last 30 years or so. Every day growing up when we turned on the television we did so knowing that we could not trust the lessons taught, we had to be critical of the moral of each story, and that people with out political views would not be appearing except as foils for the liberal main characters. You get used to it.
I have mixed feelings on this argument. On the one hand, I agree with your overall point that a lot of cultural elites, including Hollywood, are absurdly to the left of the average ordinary person on a lot of issues (though I suspect not on all issues) and that it's very important to keep that constantly in mind whenever anyone acts as though "both sides have their echo chambers" as if it's equal, or as though e.g. declaring your pronouns is in any way a normal thing to do. And not a sign of being either an extremist or living in a laughably out-of-touch bubble.
On the other hand, I think it's important not to overstate your case, and also not to use the same fallacious thinking that the woke do. And also, I don't think many conservatives appreciate the extent to which portraying current and past culture as more left-wing than it is actually often helps the left push their agenda, by letting them falsely say "this is nothing new, not extreme at all". A lot of the post 2010 trends need to be met with an uncompromising "THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL."
With that motivation, here's where I think your argument is wrong:
First, I can think of quite a few movies that do meet your criteria. The 90s remake of Miracle on 34th Street has Brian Bedford (pretty clearly the most heroic non-supernatural character in the movie) literally make a point of praying before a meal, against the habits of his cynical love interest and her daughter. I suspect this is common in Christmas movies though that's the only example I can think of right now. Black Robe (1991) has a priest as the main character. Knowing (2009) has the main character's father as a pastor. Several adaptations of Robin Hood have most of the main characters as explicitly Christian, and suffering at the hands of Muslims during the Crusades. The John Adams TV show has explicit Christian references I believe. Even The Simpsons has basically the whole town as Christian and regular church scenes; of course there are satires of it, but it's also frequently a neutral or vaguely positive backdrop for other stories. All these are just off the top of my head.
That doesn't include the much larger number of movies with heavy but not explicit Christ symbolism, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. The Matrix and Man of Steel are two that are often noted as particularly heavy handed about it.
Second, I think one of the top reasons for many movies not including explicit Christianity is not fear of offending non-Christians but fear of offending sectarian Christians. The more Christianity you include, the more you have to take a stance on what specific beliefs and practices you mean by "Christian" and that's going to make many Christians angry. In fact, my impression is that they are significantly more likely to be angry at such movies than atheists, similarly to how (at least in real life) the people who get angry at an exclamation invoking God or Christ are invariably Christians. This is where there's a strong similarity to wokeness: despite all the generic complaints about a lack of enough blacks or gays or other Official Minorities in media, it's the woke who are most likely to be furious at actual stories including those people, if they're not portrayed in the exact right way (which of course is different for every wokeist, and so you can't possibly win). Much safer to avoid such portrayals completely, and it's *not* because of the right. Similarly but vice versa for Christian portrayals.
Third, a lot of this is just a matter of sensible writing. See The Law of Conservation of Detail and Chekhov's Gun on TV Tropes: in a well-written story, if saying grace or Christian beliefs are included in a scene, it's because they're important to the story in some way. Same as why you don't usually see people showering (well one of the reasons...). And the decline of religious themes (at least before the 2010s when it became clearly political) could be related to a general decline in movie quality, such that the kinds of ambitious stories able to handle complex and nuanced takes on religion without devolving into preaching (one way or the other) are much less lilely to be attempted now.
But none of this is to suggest that Hollywood and media isn't absurdly out of touch with normal people (see: the election) or that bothsidesism of "liberal echo chambers and conservative echo chambers" isn't laughable.
What about video games? Aren't there popular conservative games? Maybe not conservative in The Little House on the Prairie sense but in the Rambo sense? Aren't video games bigger than movies now?
There are certainly lots of video games that center on various sorts of martial heroics, because that's sort of the lowest common denominator for mass popular entertainment. But how many high-profile video games are there where the martial heroes are fighting for a cause that the average liberal would disapprove of?
Because if your algorithm is, "I can make big bucks with a game about shooting guns at bad guys, now, where's the list of bad guys that liberals are OK with seeing shot?", then you just might be a liberal.
And for the non-combat video games out there, your "Little House on the Prarie" example brings up the memory of "Oregon Trail". That was certainly a culturally-conservative video game. From 1971. What is there more recent than that?
Several dozen deer hunting simulators?
Well, video games are obviously going to be more left-leaning due to their developers being heavily affiliated with the tech sector. And also a lot of games are made in Japan, where even the social conservatives don't have very high opinions of organized religion...
On the other hand, Japan is very much not-woke. So it balances out when it comes to conservatism. Less religion, more traditional values.
Literally yesterday I saw Conclave in which all the sympathetic characters are sincere, committed Catholics whose faith is portrayed positively.
Now the movie also takes for granted that the liberal reformist side of all the doctrinal disputes is the correct one that the audience will sympathize with. But do be careful not to overstate your case too much.
And so is "Silence" but I don't think of either of those movies as being particularly representative of popular culture in general.
>how many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys?
That's easy. Any movie that takes place during Christmas, the main characters are probably participating. Most movies where two characters get married, the wedding takes place in a church.
There's a bit of a double standard in what counts as "representation". Since gay people are unusual, literally any appearance, even just an offhanded mention that a character has two dads, gets counted as "liberal media." But people ignore similarly low-key appearances when it comes to mainstream Christianity or heterosexuality. People don't look at Harry Potter joining the Christmas celebrations at Hogwarts and think "Christian representation." People don't treat an offhand mention of "mom and dad" as "showing the audience they come from a heterosexual family," even though that line is doing exactly the same thing a line about "my two dads" would. But the representation is there, we just don't notice because it's so normal to us.
I dunno. 90% of American celebrate Christmas, but only 55% of them celebrate it as a "religious holiday" (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-aspects-of-christmas-are-declining-in-public-life/). Do the people in those Christmas movies *act* like Christians? In a great many of them there is quite a lot of fornicating, and nobody seems to have a problem with it.
When you see gay characters in media, do you ask "yeah, they're gay, but do they *act* like gay people?" Do you draw a distinction between "this character is mentioned to have two dads" and "two characters have on-screen gay sex", or do you consider both "gay representation"? Because there aren't actually that many movies with explicit gay sex.
Also, "only" 55%? You feel under-represented because your holiday is *only* properly religious 55% of the time? You're ignoring an entire genre that's devoted to your religion because only 55% of Americans think it's religious? Gay people are still fighting to appear onscreen at all, and you're complaining because you aren't getting enough explicit depictions of religion in the genre dedicated to your religion's holiday.
"Double standard" is the only way to describe this.
*act* like Christians??
Pray before a meal. Don’t Look Up. Near the end.
And tell me, would you say Don't Look Up is a movie that portrays Christianity in a particularly positive light?
Technically counts, but there's a scene in which they expose that character's backstory justifying why one of the good guys would ever know a prayer, further exposing for good measure that he hates his religious parents.
The prayer wasn’t addressed to Jesus. It was probably the respectful and sincere scene in the film though.
“Dearest Father and Almighty Creator,
we ask for Your grace tonight, despite our pride.
Your forgiveness, despite our doubt.
Most of all Lord, we ask for Your Love
to soothe us through these dark times.
May we face whatever is to come in Your divine will
with courage and open hearts of acceptance.
Amen.”
> How many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys?
While you're not wrong, I think this is *mostly* an effect of Hollywood's desire to be milquetoast and not offend anyone. How many can you name where *any* religious creed is explicitly espoused? The few examples are mostly going to be pandering (Though I suppose that supports your position more than mine) or something that is a specific trait of that character which distinguishes them from the WASP *default* everyone else is assumed to be. To that point, there's the example of Matt Murdoch in the 2015 deadpool show, who was explicitly catholic because it's an important part of his character.
(The other example that came to mind, but is out of our time window, is the 2002 Spiderman film where Aunt May literally recites the Lord's prayer - which stuck with me because it was where I learned that apparently the version I recited every week at church is longer than the Catholic one)
Kind of funny here that the "P" in "WASP" stands for "Protestant", i.e. Christian. I do get that the usage of an acronym doesn't actually have to line up with its etymology though.
My general impression is that most Christians don't do explicitly Christian things often enough that an accurate media depiction of them would actually make it clear they're Christian very often. Perhaps this is different in the US, but there are quite a few people who I only learnt were Christian after having known them quite a while.
That point isn't lost on me, and in fact I used it for exactly that reason; you'll note that the two Christian characters I picked *are Catholic* (i.e. *not* protestant), which specifically makes them non-default in the WASPy country - and allows it to be part of their identity.
Going down the IMDB top 250, listing movies I am familiar with (a relatively small subset of the full list) where I remember one or more protagonists being specifically portrayed as Christian:
The Godfather (1 and 2)
Pulp Fiction
It's a Wonderful Life
City of God
Braveheart
Ben Hur
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Sound of Music
Plus honorable mention to four movies (The LotR movies and The Big Lebowski) which have strong intentionally-Christian themes.
Although the Godfather movies are dubious as positive Christian representation, since Vito and Michael Corleone are dark tragic heroes at best and a good case can be made (especially in Michael's case) for them being villain protagonists.
Captain America from the MCU is likely Christian (which would make sense, being from 1945). He says at one point that there is only one God. He's also generally considered the most moral of the characters, almost like that's his actual defining aspect and/or superpower.
That said, his character arc strongly leans towards learning better than some of his outdated ways (there's a subplot in Age of Ultron about getting him to loosen up and swear).
To be fair, exactly one of those is from the past 30 years, and only just barely.
If you attend a Catholic church wedding, some of the Protestants attending will add the bit that Catholics omit at the end of The Lords Prayer. It’s sometimes a mildly awkward moment.
I've been Protestant all my life. My wife is Catholic. I was organist at a small Episcopal church around the time our youngest was a baby.
Watching her freeze at the end of "Our Father" and after "The Peace of the Lord be always with you . . ." never ceased to amuse. I do better in RC churches than she does in anything close to RC (Episcopal, the "High" versions of Lutheran, etc)
>While you're not wrong, I think this is *mostly* an effect of Hollywood's desire to be milquetoast and not offend anyone.
They don't seem to mind offending Christians so much!
"12 Years a Slave": A slaveowner reads passages of the Bible to his slaves, justifying his mistreatment of them.
"Edward Scissorhands": One of the antagonists is an evangelical Christian who is arrogant, judgmental, and acts like a crazy person.
"Misery", "Carrie", "IT", (most Stephen King adaptations, really) all feature crazy, evil, abusive, and explicitly Christian characters.
"The Da Vinci Code": Do I even have to say anything?
"V for Vendetta": the fascist British government is explicitly Christian
"Spider Man 3": Eddie Brock prays in a church asking God to kill Peter Parker
"Titanic" Rose is forced to worship and sing hymns, making Christianity part of the confining life she's trying to break out of.
"Dead Poets Society": The Christian boarding school is portrayed as oppressive, abusive, and materialistic. They act as the "bad guys".
"Contact": The religious are the "bad guys" as much as there are any antagonists in this movie.
"Sunshine": A overtly Christian character tries to kill the others with the goal of killing everyone on Earth.
Now is every movie hostile against Christians? No, of course not. Most try not to offend anybody. But, if you are going to offend someone then you offend the Christians.
It’s been a long time since I watched Contact, but my memory is while the suicide bomber guy is bad (hot take), her religious romantic interest is treated as wise and it’s the religious who recognize the truth of her experience at the end. I wouldn’t say the movie is straightforwardly pro Christian, but it’s a movie about an atheist scientist discovering faith.
If made for TV movies I saw over thanksgiving count, a Christmas Waltz in Paris has a bunch of throw away lines to let you know the main character is Christian.
Most of those movies are from the 80s and 90s.
No offense, but was this list generated by chatgpt (or, more likely, grok)? Because half of these seem to just be on here to pad the list and have the telltale signs of barely relating to the given topic.
> I would ask you, Fang: how many popular movies can you name where Christians are the good guys?
There's an entire genre of movies where that's the case: Christmas movies. Just because they're garbage doesn't mean they don't exist.
As others have noted, Christmas has become a largely secular holiday in the United States. Unless the characters attend a Christmas Mass, or at least say grace before the big dinner, it is not reasonable to assume they are Christians.
For that matter, is the inevitable Christmas music centered on "Jingle Bells" or "Come, All Ye Faithful"?
"To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses"
Yeah kids didn't usually want to see that.
...you may not have done, when you were a kid, but your experience is far from universal. Comics and cartoons have subplots about characters getting crushes on each other for a reason.
You mean little boys didn't. I'd feel confident in asserting that there have been little girls daydreaming about kissing prince charming since the dawn of Disney Princesses.
I meant they didn't want to see gay men kissing.
seconding anomie. bl is crazy popular among girls (less popular among boys as expected, but boys who like girl's love are also out there). My impression is 10-11 is not that unusual a time to start.
...Have you seen how popular BL manga is in Japan? There absolutely is a big audience for gay men kissing.
I disagree with this characterization and in my view you're cherry-picking completely unrepresentative examples. Cancelation runs one direction, and that kind of power is only downstream of near-complete ideological domination of culture. Woke cancelations only started 5-10 years ago but that was the culmination of a long process of power consolidation. It's not like the culture went from "perfectly balanced" to "90% left control" overnight. I remember a Bill Maher episode from 20 years ago (pre-Obama) where a white comedian was being excoriated for using the n-word even as a quotation. Charles Murray was cancelled in 1994!
> (To be clear, this is for the sort of things no one would bat an eyelash at even in the 50s for a heterosexual couple, like handholding and chaste kisses).
Oh? You don't remember Ricky and Lucy sleeping in separate twin beds? IIRC the first married couple to openly share a bed on TV was in the late 60s/early 70s.
> You're cherry-picking completely unrepresentative examples... that kind of power is only downstream of near-complete ideological domination of culture
My point isn't that there was no liberal influence - that would be a farce (it's called *Hollywood* liberalism for a reason). My point is that the dominance wasn't even *nearly* complete until quite recently, and that saying you couldn't have "any expression of conservative values" is easily proven by numerous counterexamples. If anything, you're the one cherry picking here and trying to claim things as the modal example.
> You don't remember Ricky and Lucy sleeping in separate twin beds?
Because the implication of them *sleeping together* was thought to be lewd. Which is why, if you read the words I wrote, I specified that I was talking about things which were *not* controversial. Plenty of pictures of Ricky and Lucy kissing on google images, and Popeye was getting plenty of kisses (to say nothing of Disney movies).
Not to mention the rather lewd nature of Bugs Bunny in his prime.
What I find really interesting is the fact that Ricky and Lucy would have been an "interracial couple" by today's standards, but nobody raised an eyebrow back then.
But…
"CBS and its sponsor, Philip Morris cigarettes, were adamantly opposed to this," says Brady. "They said that the American public would not accept Desi as the husband of a red-blooded American girl."
Ball told the network flatly that they'd have both of them or neither, and eventually CBS gave in, despite its reservations about Arnaz's Cuban heritage and his strong accent.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/15/276526212/love-in-technicolor-interracial-families-on-television
The average as opposed to stereotypical right-winger has attended university and remembers what that's like. His TV is not tuned to Fox News one hundred percent of the time, he watches the same entertainment as everyone else. If he reads a newspaper, it's whatever the local newspaper is. He shops in the same stores as everyone else.
>The average as opposed to stereotypical right-winger has attended university and remembers what that's like.
Im not sure I follow. I’ve been under a different impression. For instance, according to Pew, about two-thirds (64%) of American Republican voters never got a four-year college degree:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/12/10-facts-about-republicans-in-the-us/
I guess the question is how to average a person out. If 64% don't have a degree and 36% do then is it fair to say that the average person in the set has about two years of college?
I think what you say is right, the "everyone around me is a lefty" view can't be true of everyone just mathematically in a roughly 50-50 country.
But I think that it really is much closer to true for a lot of conservatives in certain particular areas/sectors like certain parts of the media, or in the case of the guy you're linking to, publishing.
Consider that this comment is made on Twitter, so the only people who will see it are also on Twitter. It's very likely true for the people on the right. No idea about the people on the left.
In the modern era, one's social bubble can be far more electronic than physical.
I am trying to find a short story that I think was mentioned in the ACX comment section, perhaps a year ago. It was a retelling of Borges's The Library of Babel, but the library walls were covered with pornography instead of books, with the inhabitants unable to escape. The story ended ambiguously, with the narrator uncertain whether the inhabitants had trapped themselves there, or if other parties had. Would anyone know where to locate this?
https://qchu.substack.com/p/slaanesh
Thanks!
I do a lot of translation to improve or at least slow the degradation of my language skills. Most of these are thrown away because they're just random passages or articles I'm doing for the sake of doing them. Is there anything more useful I can do with them? I haven't been able to think of anything but I figured I'd throw the problem out there. Feels like a waste to do all that and just have it get thrown in the bin.
If you're interested not only in writing but also in speaking, I'm pretty sure there are sites where you can sign up to converse with a native speaker of another language online, as practice.
Oh I see. Why not really go for it and try writing poetry or tiny fiction vignettes in the foreign language? Beowulf666, native english speaker, writes chinese poetry for recreation (at least I think I have that right).
Please—lucky eights, 888, not the mark of the devil, 666. ;-)
I translate Tang Dynasty poetry as a hobby. I've only gotten a couple published in 2nd tier literary journals.
Oops, sorry, I really know it's 888, but 666 is more salient to me than to most modern people because of my treating anxiety disorders. For lots of people with OCD, 6 is a "bad number" because of 666. (Most of these people are non-religious, but that doesn't make any difference. OCD is very illogical.)
I do do conversation practice of course. But that feels a little less like a waste because I'm talking to another human.
I looked into Project Gutenberg for volunteering and donating awhile back and they have a translation program, might still be active:
https://www.gutenberg.org/attic/website_translation.html
Also, wasn't somebody in SSC involved in translating old posts into other languages?
Thanks, I'll take a look.
Assuming these are both highly popular languages in which everything has already been professionally translated; there's still value in a second translation to compare-and-contrast with the official ones. It can be informative to see how two different people read and express the same words, it can help expose nuances that a single translation hides.
Fair point. Though that relies on both having rights and something of interest enough it will be read.
You could teach
I think that's probably a bigger commitment than I'm intending here.
You can always just translate wikipedia articles.
Good suggestion, thanks.
I've had two separate translator friends offer to translate my webcomic as a way of practice and also to demonstrate their capability. That can be quite a short job or a longer one, and it's fun, if you can find a willing creator to work with who needs the right set of languages.
If you want to link it I'll at least take a look.
Oh sorry, I wasn't clear. I'm not offering/asking for any of my webcomics specifically, I'm suggesting you find one you like*, and ask the creator if they'd be interested.
*Presuming such a thing exists - if not, I doubt this would be a good use of your time and skills anyway.
From which language, into which language?
I don't know whether this is fair to Harvard, but it's funny.
*****
A young man knocks on the door of a great Talmudic scholar.
"Rabbi, I wish to study Talmud."
“Do you know Aramaic?”
“No."
“Hebrew?”
“No."
“Have you ever studied Torah?”
“No, Rabbi, but I graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in philosophy, and received a PhD from Yale. I'd like to round out my education with a bit of Talmud.”
“I doubt that you are ready for Talmud. It is the broadest and deepest of books. If you wish, however, I will examine you in logic, and if you pass the test I will teach you Talmud.”
"Good. I'm well versed in logic."
"First question. Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
”The burglar with the dirty face."
“Wrong. The one with the clean face. Examine the logic. The burglar with a dirty face looks at the one with a clean face and thinks his face is clean. The one with a clean face looks at the burglar with a dirty face and thinks his face is dirty. So the one with the clean face washes.”
“Very clever. Another question please.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“We established that. The burglar with the clean face washes.”
“Wrong. Both wash. Examine the logic. The one with a dirty face thinks his face is clean. The one with a clean face thinks his face is dirty. So the burglar with a clean face washes. When the one with a dirty face sees him washing, however, he realizes his face must be dirty too. Thus both wash.”
“I didn’t think of that. Please ask me another.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“Well, we know both wash.”
“Wrong. Neither washes. Examine the logic. The one with the dirty face thinks his face is clean. The one with the clean face thinks his face is dirty. But when clean-face sees that dirty-face doesn’t bother to wash, he also doesn’t bother. So neither washes. As you can see, you are not ready for Talmud.”
"Rabbi, please, give me one more test.”
“Two burglars come down a chimney. One emerges with a clean face, the other with a dirty face. Which one washes his face?”
“Neither!”
“Wrong. And perhaps now you will see why Harvard and Yale cannot prepare you for Talmud. Tell me, how is it possible that two men come down the same chimney, and one emerges with a clean face, while the other has a dirty face?"
"But you've just given me four contradictory answers to the same question! That's impossible!"
"No, my son, that's Talmud."
Here's where I posted it to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02hY7DdQjYyTYyfep5MsE73F2eszhs8KzdLPvrpXfozJjaugDrejQSpFTfkfuw1db8l
The reference to studying philosophy and getting a PhD has a strange effect on this joke. At first, it goes for the knee-jerk response of "ha ha, people who studied philosophy at Harvard and Yale are stuffy idiots who take themselves too seriously and aren't as clever as they think." However, that's missing the equally strong stereotype that people with that background are exactly the type that would do what the rabbi does: never give a straight answer, have an explanation for all possible outcomes, over think, etc.
FWIW, while I won't claim a statistically valid sample, the latter stereotype is more accurate to the people I know with the background given. In fact, they'd probably launch into a lengthy preliminary debate about what it means for a face to be clean or dirty, what it means to clean a face, and possibly a side exploration of the logistics of entering a house via chimney.
Not sure how that's unfair to Harvard...?
The bit works exactly the same without even naming the places where the guy got his degrees.
Because Harvard is just as capable of preparing you for nonsense as the Talmud is.
The joke doesn’t have to involve Harvard or a potential student too confident is his knowledge. It’s also missing a punchline about the student asking the rabbi the same question.
In the final analysis…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uoetGnTIjWY
If you look carefully you can see Danny Gopnik mouth ‘Kaukonen’ when the Rabbi stumbles.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
I believe I overdosed on magic mushrooms for the first time. This happened three months ago during a beach vacation. I realized I was probably eating too much, but I wanted to see what would happen. After eating them, I went for a long walk down the boardwalk along the shore at sunset. Here's what happened:
1) I became hypersensitive to audio and visual stimulation. Having groups of people walk by me, and passing all the little shops with music blaring out of their front doors was very unpleasant. The volume on everything was turned up to 11. All of the neon signs were way too bright.
2) I lost most of my ability to understand speech. Many people were walking by me on the boardwalk, talking to each other, and most of it sounded like some indistinct Western European language. If someone very close to me said something simple and loudly, like "Hey, look at that!", it would register as English.
3) I realized that 99% of the Earth's surface is uninteresting to me--it's too hot, too cold, water, ice, open land, or junk buildings. Probably 95% of the humans on Earth also aren't interesting. I dislike 99% of entertainment products (movies, TV shows, music). Existence is an infinite plain of MEH punctuated by skinny little mountains of GOOD STUFF.
4) I had visual hallucinations:
a. Something like the color inversion shown at the beginning of this "Hellraiser" clip happened when I looked at the hexagonally tiled floor of a public bathroom.
https://youtu.be/4rjDx2v12TA?si=17M_xSQTKDEbOteK
b. I laid down on a public bench and looked up at the stars. I could see innumerable tiny, thin swirl patterns in the sky.
c. On the boardwalk, as people walked by me, their silhouettes looked monstrous out of the corner of my eye. Like, if two people were standing next to each other so their silhouettes were kind of like an "H" shape, I would visually process it as a horse or small elephant. This happened to me once before during a much more pleasant mushroom trip in a city.
5) I experienced time dilation. The walk back to my hotel from the end of the boardwalk literally seemed to take ten times longer than the walk down, before the mushrooms had fully kicked in. The same buildings seemed to repeat themselves again and again each block.
It sounds like you OD’d on external sensory experiences.
#3 is just Sturgeon's law with a different %.
It is almost impossible to overdose on magic mushrooms. What you are describing sounds like a standard experience for a more standard dose, while it sounds like you have mostly been microdosing before this. I'm sorry to hear you had a bad time!
It sounds like a standard dose mushroom trip, just with a rarer unpleasant outcome. How many grams did you take?
I didn't weigh it. Well over one gram. I've done smaller mushroom doses and they didn't lead to bad experiences like this.
AFAIK standard is more like an eighth, 3.5 grams. I've only done 1.75 gram and it sounds more intense than yours, but positive. You just got unlucky with a bad trip, or something with your psyche isn't comfortable or meshing well with standard dose. But when I hear "overdose" or "heroic dose" I'm thinking 5+ grams. Ya lots of people microdose little half grams, but until like 2015 most people were taking the "standard" dose knowing it was going to be a very intense experience.
The variability of dose on each physical mushroom is wild, several orders of magnitude. Even on different parts of larger mushrooms.
So if OP was having several small dried mushrooms rather than ones that had been blended / put into caps etc, they could have just got very 'lucky' with one or two unusually strong ones.
My monthly round up of worthwhile long form content is up again.
Highlights include evidence of pervasive genetic selection in modern humans, a couple of lengthy interviews with Stephen Wolfram, a deep dive into the spread of the dingo to Australia, a non-hysterical analysis of the impacts of the Trump win, a multi stranded analysis of how bureaucracies strangle societies, and a quick promo of my podcast interview with the cofounder of permaculture (DAVID HOLMGREN) about the untapped potential for plant breeding in permaculture.
https://open.substack.com/pub/zeroinputagriculture/p/the-long-forum-december-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Have you read/watched/listened to much about Wolfram's 'physics project'? The primary mathematical contributor (AFAIK/AFAICT) is Jonathan Gorard, who seems great at explaining all of the interesting results and connections to similar 'theory of everything' efforts.
I've been following both Wolfram and Gorard for years. The hostility of the broader community to the work has been really disheartening as I think they are doing interesting fundamental work comparable to Descartes in many ways.
I get the hate for Wolfram, tho I find it sad, but I feel lucky that I'm not aware of any hostility towards Gorard or his work (beyond the association with Wolfram).
I think it's exciting and interesting and it seems very promising, but I'm not sure how other members of the "broader community" SHOULD be feeling or behaving towards it. There's quite a bit of other 'quantum gravity' theories, or more radical 'theories of everything', and I'm not sure how they all stack up, or how they stack up compared to whatever the mainstream theory/theories is/are (e.g. 'string theory').
Today my bank called from a withheld number and expected me to authenticate to them, without them being willing to authenticate to me in any way. The same day, they sent an email with security advice, including "Criminals may contact you pretending to be from the police, the Bank or a trusted company that you have a relationship with. It is very important that you are vigilant on any calls you receive and under no circumstances must you provide them with any information."
I spoke to an employee - a fairly senior-sounding one, not a first-line call centre person - and tried to explain why it was a problem that their own staff were encouraging customers in very poor security practices, but he didn't seem very persuaded. He didn't quite seem to have the theory-of-mind necessary to understand that, just because *they* know it's legitimate when they call me, doesn't mean *I* know that, and from my POV they sound just like a fraudster (as their advice email correctly explains).
(He did acknowledge that if I'm not comfortable I should hang up and call them. And that is what happened when they called this morning. But, firstly, that's a big hassle and involves queuing, navigating phone menus, speaking to bots, etc, with no guarantee that you'll actually get back to the person or department that was trying to get hold of you, so it's not an appealing option and it's very tempting to just talk to the person who called you. Secondly, I shouldn't have to go out of my way to do that. The bank shouldn't be offering the insecure option as the default and making security available only to the most savvy and conscientious customers.)
But it is a fairly hard problem. I understand why, from their POV, they don't want to give authenticating information to any rando who answers the customer's phone.
I feel like there should be a solution involving information theory, zero-knowledge proofs, etc. And I would be potentially interested in working towards implementing it.
But I expect, in addition to the technical challenge, there would be huge business and regulatory hurdles that I have no idea about. If a random individual did implement a satisfactory solution, how would they go about persuading banks (and/or other huge corporations) to adopt it, consumers to trust it, regulators to approve (or at least not ban) it, etc? How would you even get started with that?
I've built systems that wrestle with these problems for banks and large government departments. The problem, broadly, is the same category of building rubbish bins in national parks that are bear-proof but not tourist-proof.
Good operators solve this problem by having outbound callers be able to go 'Absolutely, here is Bank XY's switchboard number, call them and ask to speak to me at extension 12345' - this cuts down shuffling / queue time and gets you to someone with context for the issue the bank or whoever is trying to solve. This only really works for orgs large enough to have a responsive switchboard.
Any more technically sweet system basically falls over at the 'don't inconvenience our customers so much they switch banks' hurdle, which is why there's such a mishmash of unsatisfactory approaches now.
> Good operators solve this problem by having outbound callers be able to go 'Absolutely, here is Bank XY's switchboard number, call them and ask to speak to me at extension 12345'
That doesn't solve the problem at all. It doesn't even address it. I need to get the bank's number from someone other than the con artist who wants me to give him all my money.
Verifying the caller via the bank's app is a standard feature in Australia now.
https://www.commbank.com.au/support/security/callercheck.html
This is probably emblematic of deeper issues with this bank, they do not understand security. I would consider switching.
I have this conversation with my bank about 3-4 times a year. Occasionally I get to talk to someone who sees the problem.
The best practical solution is to do exactly what you did, i.e. hang up and call THEM.
Yes, but I'm wondering about a broader systemic solution that doesn't require the individual customer to do that (and to endure the phone queues, menus, bots, etc).
Sadly, I'm not sure there is a broader systemic solution that's net positive. I prefer not using the phone particularly because it's so expensive (in time and irritation). Other people strongly dislike any _other_ form of communication or don't have (or aren't proficient using) a (smart)phone or computer.
It would be nice tho if, for these scenarios and for people that prefer to talk by phone, they'd provide some way to share a direct phone number with you via their app or web site.
I also hate using the phone. I was taking it as read that that part was unavoidable. If the interaction could be moved online, that would be even better!
(I'm currently trying to get Amazon to refund me for a recalled product, and the phone seems to be the only option they offer for that, and it involves wrestling with bots for 20 mins before getting to speak to a human, who sometimes then hangs up on you)
Ahhh – I wasn't sure what your preferences were!
Some companies are definitely better about providing non-phone ways to resolve most, if not all issues. I personally even prefer email over phone (or online text chat), because it's asynchronous, tho sadly some companies do not answer or reply to emails promptly (or at all).
It's nearly 2025 and app-based 2FA is rolled out to most customers of most banks. This suggests an obvious technical solution: instead of the current 2FA pattern where the customer has an app that displays a code for them to read out, for bank-initiated calls have the app display two codes, and tell the customer not to read the second one out until they hear the rep read the first one correctly.
An ambitious fraudster can circumvent this by being on the phone with the bank at the same time as with you.
Not sure I understand the attack. How do they make the bank call them instead of you?
This is for the case where you get a call from an unknown number claiming to be the bank. It's a typical "man in the middle" attack.
(1) Scammer calls you claiming to be the bank. (2) Scammer calls bank claiming to be you. (3) You ask scammer for the first code. They in turn ask the bank, then relay it back to you. (4) Scammer asks you for the second code, then relays it to the bank. (5) Scammer hangs up on the bank and proceeds with scamming you. Or, they hang up on you and ask the bank to transfer money from your account to theirs.
This fails in step (2) because when /the scammer calls the bank/, the bank's protocols for /the bank/ initiating a call do not kick in; the information the person in the bank's call center should be reading out is not made available to them, reading it out is not part of their script, and your app does not display its "yes, the bank really is calling you, here's the code the rep should quote to prove they're them" notification.
I'm distrusting 2FA more, because it seems likely companies are using it to farm phone numbers. Many will not use email as a second authentication.
You can't use a phone number for this purpose. The caller is already phoning you, so they already have your number, and if you don't already trust them nothing they recite that you receive a copy of only via that channel can or should make you trust them. Email + phone number is also a very likely combination of things to leak, and email origin just like telephone caller ID is super easy to spoof; so it can't be email either.
Whatever it is you are comparing to the information they use to make you trust them has to have been received by you via a route you already trust. The bank's app, as is currently done for bank transfers, online payments etc., is one such route. Hence my specifying "app-based 2FA".
Another option might be a secure physical key, e.g. a securid tag or similar - they read out numbers you should see on the display, wait 60s for them to roll over, then you read back the new ones, or some similar protocol; but those are entirely out of fashion, because banks have discovered getting people to install their app is way cheaper than sending out physical devices to everyone.
> email origin just like telephone caller ID is super easy to spoof
Well, sort of. As originally specced it is, because the original spec just calls for the honor system. But that caused enough problems that protections were implemented, and spam is now often flagged by its obviously faked origins. If you're curious about this, look into SPF and DKIM.
SPF and DKIM adoption is far from universal, and “often” is not “always”. I’ll trust email once DKIM (with a reject policy, not just report) is mandatory.
The simpler solution, if you're going to implement something in the app and expect your customers to have your app installed, is a little notification within the app that yes, "You are currently on the phone with Pajeet (Michael)"
>I feel like there should be a solution involving information theory, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.
"Thunder." "Flash."
The solution is trivial: they should just switch to VoIP.
Back in 2006, I got an email from an unfamiliar address asking me to fill out a form "to complete your application for US Government employment". There was a one-page form attached asking for, among other things, my name, address, date of birth, and social security number. I ignored it as an obvious and fairly lame phishing scam.
A week or so later, I got a phone call from a CIA recruiter asking why I hadn't filled out the form yet. I'd interviewed for a software engineering position with the CIA's science and technology office a couple months previously, and it had seemed to go well, but I assumed I didn't get the job when I didn't hear anything more from them. Turns out I had, and the wheels of government were just turning slowly and opaquely. I did fill out the form, and got an offer, but wound up turning them down in favor of an offer from Microsoft.
At the time, I felt like it explained quite a bit if the CIA was inadvertently filtering to only hire people who would provide their social security numbers in response to vague emails from unfamiliar addresses.
I had a similar experience around 2014 with the USDA's statistical service. I had procrastinated filling out a survey they sent me and later got a call from an unlisted number asking to fill it out over the phone. I went along with it at first, since I knew I had skipped the survey, but became increasingly suspicious as they kept getting vital information wrong - acreage, type of operation, etc., and I finally accused them of phasing and hung up after they mentioned a business partner whose name I had never heard of. They called up again a week later, irate that I had hung up, and were not very understanding when I explained what happened, so eventually I just filled out the form they had sent and that was the end of it.
Another idea that occurred to me that solves most of the problem and doesn't need any clever technical approach to authentication:
The bank employee says "I'm going to terminate this call. Please call back on the bank's official number (which you can get from the website rather than taking my word for it). Then enter the following sequence of digits / direct-dial code to get back to me and we can continue this conversation."
Then the customer can reconnect straight to the person who called them, without having to queue or navigate phone menus or bots; but the customer can be confident they're talking to a real bank employee, and can happily do a one-sided authentication to authenticate themselves to the bank.
But, again, how does a random individual who's not a bank executive go about getting something like that adopted?
The fundamental issue here is that it's easy to spoof phone numbers. I can call you from a Bank of America phone number, but you can't be sure it's actually Bank of America calling. This is the problem that SSL solves for websites. So, it should be pretty easy to piggyback off that existing solution to make sure the phone call you get is actually from Bank of America. When you get a phone call, submit some code at https://bankofamerica.com, and then have the service rep read it back to you. I'm sure there are lots of finicky implementation details, but I don't see why that shouldn't work in principle. As for whether or not that approach would ever actually catch on...
Having worked done some level of outward facing admin for a business before:
As long as one boomer/gen X with more lead in their hippocampus than a pencil still lives to gormlessly stare at you when asked to do a simple task they didn't learn before graduating highschool, there can be no solution to any problem. All problems must remain unsolved.
It's all Smartest Bear vs. Dumbest Human.
Hmm. My experience of the workplace isn’t that gen x are the problem. Boomers, I grant you.
It's mainly boomers, but I've never successfully trained a Gen-Xer,
when they receive an email from some institution saying that said institution needs confirmation of a large charge/ login change/ fraud verification,
To not immediately click the link and put in all their PID.
They either come in knowing it's a bad idea or will die having 30000 credit cards taken out in their name by dudes in Macedonia/ get our entire client database and accounts receivable ransomeware'd, and end up having to offer tribute because the boss (late gen x) failed to pay the bill for our offsite backup. Oops!
Very odd. Most of Gen x would have spent their adulthood in the Internet age.
Speaking as an older member of Gen X, my formative years started in the pre-commercial internet and crossed into the commercial-but-the-scammers-haven't-infested-the-place internet.
It wasn't difficult for me to transition to the new order, but I've always been more security-conscious than most. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of my colleagues just internalized the internet as a friendly safe space for nerds where you don't have to always be on guard.
Yes, or, on a smartphone, have the bank's app do that for you (so random non-tech-savvy customers don't have to go typing codes into websites).
What I want to know is how one might go about getting a bank to adopt that.
It's a fairly standard feature in other countries to use the bank's app to authenticate a caller, although not sure how helpful pointing that out would be in that sort of conversation.
https://www.commbank.com.au/support/security/callercheck.html
It has to make more back in saved fraud costs than the cost of rolling out the IT and telephone call script changes across the entire bank system.
Inside large banks there are people whose full time job it is to reduce fraud losses, people whose full time job it is to reduce costs, and some levels above them people whose full time job it is to decide how much to spend on one side to save on the other.
Since there are many ways to apply technology to solve this, I expect the real reason the status quo persists isn't lack of ideas; it's people doing the cost/benefit calculation and deciding it's not worth it yet.
I suggest trying to convince a smallish digital-only bank to deploy it. However, you might find they already did.
I'd guess that it's next to hopeless. My bank has *never* called me. Assuming my experience is representative, as a percentage of interactions, bank-initiated phone calls are probably small. So what do you accomplish by authenticating them first? Concerned customers will save some time by not having to hang up and call back. Everyone else will just be mildly irritated and maybe confused. Scammers will still fool people, because by the time old fashioned phone calls have gone out of fashion all together, a majority of folks probably *still* won't realize that legitimate banking institutions always go through the authentication rigamarole.
(I have no ideas about how one might convince banking as an institution that this is good policy.)
> He didn't quite seem to have the theory-of-mind necessary to understand that
The more reasonable explanation is that he isn't getting paid enough to care.
How do you authenticate yourself to the bank? (in your specific case, by phone)
Some or all of: giving details like name, address, DoB; giving pre-agreed passcodes (or a subset of digits/characters from them); naming a recurring payment that comes out of the account (like a mortgage) and roughly how much it is.
In Scandinavia at least, there are Bank ID apps for this kind of purpose. The bank sends a signal/message to the app and the user types in a code to prove his/her identity.
It could easily work in reverse too. You have the app generate a code, and the bank employee states that same code over the phone
Is the Far Out Initiative still active? They no longer respond to emails, and their website hasn’t been updated. As far as I can tell, it seems the FAAH and FAAH-OUT genes are not actually responsible for Cameron’s condition. It appears the initiative was based on an assumption that has since been disproven.
I'd like to do a little survey and ask people to rank the years 2015, 2019 and 2023 from most to least woke, in your overall perception. Please provide a ranking and a brief justification, i.e. what features were present or absent in each year relative to the others and why are these features the most important or salient parts of wokeness? Note that these are three individual years, so I'm looking for answers like "2019, 2023, 2015, based on number of people cancelled" or "2015, 2023, 2019, based on how much/little organised public opposition to wokeness there was" or whatever you think the situation was.
I'm asking because the question of whether Trump stops or enables wokeness comes up nearly every time he's discussed, with opinion seemingly split on whether it got worse or slightly better during his presidency, and vice versa when he left office, and getting some clarity on this factual question is a first step to understanding each other.
I'm using the third year of each presidency to give enough time for trends to manifest and policies to take effect, while excluding the election year and its associated bipartisan turmoil. Please interpret "woke" in the spirit of the question and don't rules-lawyer the definition or say you don't know what it means. And please don't respond to say that actually governments have no control over anything and every cultural trend is entirely predetermined by the march of history etc (an argument I've really heard enough times) without at least giving me a ranking anyway.
Thanks.
EDIT: I noticed using "worse" and "better" is a non-neutral framing, so feel free to interpret "better" as either "more woke" or "less woke" depending on your preference (or "golden mean of woke" etc etc). This is supposed to be a factual question.
Okay, my own answer.
Honestly, and I seem to be the only one, I would put 2015 at the top. Obviously it hadn't spread that far across society by that point, but what was terrifying about that time was how there was almost no pushback or opposition at all to wokeness in the places it was manifesting. Universities, media, many online spaces and many artistic spaces (and especially the overlap of the latter two) had basically everyone, including people with a history of support for free speech and reason, just jettisoning their principles overnight and whole-heartedly embracing the fasionable new insanity, and enthusiastically ganging up on anyone who in any way questioned embracing it. It was also rapidly gaining political traction at the highest levels, with Hillary Clinton directly adopting large parts of it in her campaign. And the whole ideology couldn't even be *named* yet, because its proponents (which at this point, was everyone, who wasn't already on the right) refused to accept any name or description other than "basic decency". Unprecedented abondonment of the most basic liberal norms, pushed with the zeal and total lack of nuance of the fanatical lynch mob, suddenly rising in many different places at once, as people from all backgrounds raced to sell their principles and their soul to this new movement cult, and any questioning was met, if not with immediate ostracism, then with "this what we've always been doing, this is just basic decency, we have always been at war with Eurasia". Absolutely terrifying, in every possible way, and no other time compares.
I strongly believe, though I can't prove it, that if Clinton had won it would have rapidly taken over all of society with barely a murmur. Instead of remaining a topic of intense debate, and enormous criticism from whole swathes of different people and demographics. At the very least, I think it's clear that in no other year of human history before or since could a presidential candidate utter the sentence "if we broke up the banks, would that end racism and sexism?" with a straight face.
Compared to that, 2019 and 2023 seem mostly tied to me. I think it was at its loudest in 2019, but that doesn't mean most powerful: there was also plenty of loud pushback by then. And while there were probably more cancellations in 2019 than in 2023, I think the self-censorship caused by fear of cancellation was far broader in 2023, possibly by a far greater magnitude than the reduction in actual cancellations, though I'm not sure. And how could we ever know?
So my ranking is 2015>>2019/2023, with *maybe* 2019 slightly higher if I had to choose.
Thanks for all the responses, and I'm still thinking about how to reconcile these very different impressions.
2019 highest in public perception. Torn between rating 2015 equivalent to 2023 with caveats, or 2023 as highest overall.
2019 was near-peak TDS-wokeness, lots of kindling around to spark in 2020.
For 2015 and 2023 being equivalent: I think *new* public expressions of wokeness are lower now, but that's partially due to market saturation and partially due to much of corporate wokeness being a ZIRP. It was still fresh in 2015 so one's memory of it has more emotional impact; now it's basically background friction.
For 2023 being higher/highest, it's entrenched in many important places, you've got the better part of a generation stewed in it, and it will be an Overturning Roe level legal slog to keep slapping Harvard et al down, especially when Roberts will keep writing them loopholes.
The mandatory DEI training I just had to sit through yesterday was much more annoying and intrusive than in any previous year. So I'm thinking that while the forces *driving* excessive wokeness may have peaked, it's built up too much momentum to stop and nobody is interested in seriously pushing back.
2023>2019>2015
The metric I use here is institutional penetration, and measure that as the probability an institution is doing a woke think that is not in the best interest of its primary stake holders.
I agree with many that various woke ideas have peaked and are less popular now but there is a momentum to this institutional penetration. They might be doing less absurd things, but more institutions are doing those things seemingly unaware their customers, users employees or whatever mostly hate it.
For me, wokism has really been going full-bore since circa 2008, which is when I first found it was no longer acceptable in polite liberal spaces to point out that a transsexual man is *clearly* still a man and not a woman, address him as such and talk about him as such, people started gabbling about "sex confirmation surgery" and similar weird anti-real euphemisms, etc.
This is an actual heliocentrism/Scopes Monkey Trial moment for the left. As long as stating obvious falsehood is considered obligatory and even enforced by law, we'll still be at peak woke. The rest, which race hucksters have the license to print free money today and so on, that's just quibbling at the margins.
Many Thanks! I'll be very interested in the responses, and your conclusion, and what happens over this coming Presidential term.
My memory isn't good enough to answer your question, unfortunately. I tend to remember a handful of specific incidents, but not enough to form a solid comparison across the three years. I remember e.g the incident where a howling Twitter mob cost Justine Sacco her job over one joke in poor taste in December 2013, so I tend to think of her as "victim 0" in the plague of cancel culture.
2019 >> 2015 >> 2023.
Although I’d prefer
2020 >> 2014 >> 2024
2014 was a local peak (Ferguson), it dropped off, but accelerated after Trump from 2016 into 2020 - that crazy summer. The election of Biden calmed it down again and the recent loss of ethnic voters might mean it’s done.
Bicycling in South Minneapolis was particularly crazy in the summer of 2020.
In order from most woke to least, imo -> 2019 >>> 2023 > 2015
I first noticed wokeness, as a way of thinking distinct from standard liberalism, in 2014. That's not to say wokeness started in 2014, just that this was the first year I personally encountered it. For me, the shift from liberalism to wokeness largely comes down to free speech. Before 2014, most liberals I knew were consistently pro-free speech, arguably moreso than conservatives. Starting in 2014, I noticed a shift here, with some on "the left" (broadly speaking) showing eagerness and desire to censor or drown out opinions they didn't like. I noticed this on social media and various pop culture sites.
So in 2015, wokeness was still in an early "feeling out" stage, at least in the social circles I frequented. It did get a boost from the Obergefell ruling and the rise of Caitlyn Jenner. But I still felt comfortable voicing opinions to the right of AOC when talking to friends, online friends, and family members.
By 2019, that comfort had greatly declined. I self-censored more, and I gradually found the mainstream media more and more unbearable to watch/read. The woke way of thinking seemed very dominant.
Wokeness hit its (current?) peak with the killing of George Floyd and the immediate aftermath of it, in 2020.
Here in 2023, things have improved a fair bit, in my opinion. Some prominent comedians have skewered wokeness in recent years, like Dave Chappelle and Bill Maher. They have had some impact at least. Substack has had a good impact as well. Credit to the owner of this blog, Scott Alexander, for his highly effective critiques of some aspects of wokeness, including egregious ones coming from The Atlantic. Freddie DeBoer sometimes took on wokeness in general, and particularly on the concepts of cultural appropriation and "punching down". I think Freddie did great on both specific points, and I get a sense the concept of cultural appropriation is thankfully starting to die some. Or at least moderate - I have a far left woke friend who now says that they only care about appropriation when people financially profit off of it, which would at least mean people get less grief for wearing certain costumes at Halloween or cooking certain foreign dishes for their own pleasure.
Still, while things are better, there is a residual heaviness to our culture that is greater than what was there in 2015, imo. I think people self-censor more now than they did in 2015. Echo chambers have in fact grown harsher in some places, like huge chunks of Reddit. Western-made video games might be more woke now than ever before, but the impact of this is lessened by Asian-made video games being largely non-woke and often very popular world-wide. While the reach of wokeness is probably less great now than it was in 2019, I also get the sense that it's deeply entrenched in certain spheres of great cultural importance.
Did Trump cause or exacerbate wokeness? He certainly did not cause it, as wokeness pre-dates his first election campaign. His 2016 win probably did exacerbate it some. Is his 2024 win exacerbating it now? Thankfully, I have yet to see much evidence of that, at least in my own life. My mom hates Trump, but her politics are a bit unusual - she's socially conservative, fiscally liberal. I've kept my mixed feelings on Trump mostly hidden from her. She vented to me the morning after he won, and I found specific points where I could agree with her. She hasn't mentioned Trump to me since, thankfully, as I don't like being dishonest with her, even if I do so in a way that's not voicing falsehoods.
I think I agree with this, except I don't like to talk about "wokeness" without defining it, as much of the Right defines woke as something like... "Left". I think I encountered the woke―the real ones, the ones who identified themselves as "woke"―on Medium around 2015, certainly before Trump. What they meant was that they "woke up" to the systematic and structural racism in society. Just how were they sure of their interpretation of reality? I guess it's the same way partisans reach any conclusion: that way of thinking appealed to them. Maybe they were right in some ways, but where they went off the rails politically, I think, was treating "privilege" as bad instead of good (like, shouldn't we want everybody to have privileges?) They complained about white people for not walking on eggshells in just the right way, seemingly disdainful of their lack of overt appreciation for *not* being systemically-discriminated-against, which I assume led to "cancel culture" where people Need To Be Fired if they say something that could be considered offensive. All this seems like it grew from the idea of "microaggressions"―of the supposed right not to hear anything that personally offends you. I guess at first the idea was to convince others of this Truth they had learned, not appreciating that actually they couldn't convince most people, and that their approach to politics was toxic to their own brand.
It's a shame because the idea of free speech I encountered as a youth was more reasonable than today's idea. People would talk about things like "is it okay to yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre, possibly causing a stampede" (no, and were people really sophisticated enough to visualize a world where fires are common enough that yelling fire causes a stampede?). There were moderation systems that hid bad comments by deleting the vowels, or emphasized the good stuff so you'd have to click something to see anything but the "best". People knew the First Amendment restricted government, not private, censorship. There was a norm to avoid censorship, but also a norm for reasonable moderation.
IMO there was a huge gaping hole in the discussion of free speech and moderation: as today, it wasn't considered all that important whether the things people said were true or false, or whether evidence and sources were given. Then as now, people across the political spectrum mistakenly thought they could tell which claims were fact/fiction just by hearing them, so they didn't need any protection from misinformation unless, of course, they immediately knew or suspected it was misinformation because it Sounded False when they heard it. "Alternative facts" wasn't a mainstream term yet―partly because Kellyanne Conway hadn't said it yet, but also because people were sorted nicely into bubbles, and it took Team Trump to introduce everyone to the "alternative facts". Before that, only enough "alternative facts" made the rounds to make people say "You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts."
When I hear the Right demanding Free Speech today, well... we have people who love Russia, the land where people held up blank signs in protest until even this was worthy of arrest, talking about Free Speech. Folks like that will allude to mythical rights like the right not to be censored by private companies, the right to spread lies, the right to be rude and obnoxious, the right to be picked by the Algorithm aka fairness doctrine 2.0, or even the right not to be criticized a.k.a. "free speech for me, not for thee". So I want the old free speech talk back.
"Maybe they were right in some ways, but where they went off the rails politically, I think, was treating "privilege" as bad instead of good."
Yes, you're likely correct there. It's *good* to not have to walk on egg-shells. Politeness and civility in a general sense are good, but that's different from expecting people to self-censor on any controversial opinion.
And I agree that a key factor with speech is how truthful it is. Some opinions and viewpoints are impossible to prove or disprove, but others are essentially confirmed by facts and some others are essentially wrong based on facts. The truth should be an absolute defense. If you can provide clear evidence backing up your opinion, then it should not be censored.
Still, slander and libel are real. I think Great Britain takes the concept of "incitement to violence" too far, but I think they're more correct on slander and libel than the US is. The standard for a statement being considered slander and libel in the US is quite high, probably too high, probably playing a role in some people being anti-free speech in order to combat statements that could reasonably be considered slander and libel. Some statements which are considered hate speech could reasonably be challenged simply for being slander or libel. I think more focus should be put on evaluating speech on the basis of how accurate/inaccurate it is.
If a statement is offensive to some, but is nonetheless true, well it's the truth. That's the most important thing. If a statement is offensive to some, and is a lie, well that might be libel or slander. It's fine to oppose that strongly.
Yup. However, we don't have good ways to clearly tell truth from falsehood. Everybody seems to think we do, but then people do not have good explanations for why ~49% of people believe P and ~51% believe not-P for so many political claims P ― and the generative AI disinformation shitstorm hasn't even started yet. I want a project to address this, e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fNKmP2bq7NuSLpCzD/let-s-make-the-truth-easier-to-find
I think "wokism" needs to be acknowledged as a bunch of overlapping trends for this to make sense. Some bits peaked five years ago, some are peaking now, others are still on an upwards trend. Some (like "xe/xim" gender exotica) will go away and everyone will deny that they were ever really a thing, while other things we'll be stuck with forever. If you want an example of something that is still trending upwards then I'd say the whole "land acknowledgement" thing.
Land acknowledgement is especially weird because it's so hostile to Israel, but the correct perspective on that appears to be "don't think about it".
Which is darkly funny, since the whole land acknowledgement thing might be woke politics at its most cynical/performative. I mean, it's not like anybody who voices such acknowledgement is even vaguely considering *giving the land back.* Do such land acknowledgements come with suggestions for reparations or even monetary donations to the victims of colonization? This is a sincere question, by the way. I haven't heard of such a case, but I'd have more respect for land acknowledgements if I'd heard of even one example of them being tied to some practical form of help/consideration.
Here in Australia we're further down this particular path and honestly yes, I do think that it's intended as a stalking horse for future demands of restitution from the descendants of those who were allegedly wronged rather than as a purely empty gesture.
It feels like the US left has shifted toward economic populism and away from identity recently- you see a lot fewer accusations of racism and misogyny and much more intense hatred of wealthy people.
Between 2015 and 2019, it's hard to say. I think racial politics was ratcheting up in intensity at the time among normal people, though I feel like some of the moral panics associated with "wokism" may have already been declining in popularity among intellectuals by then.
I'm not sure Trump influenced that rise and fall much in either direction. I think what he inspired on the left was mostly just very intense anti-Trumpism, and his attacks on leftist ideology were mostly met on the left with eye-rolls rather than backlash or retrenchment.
By "recently", do you mean less than month ago, since after the election? Because until then, they were definitely still all in on the racism, sexism, etc.
Less so than four or eight years ago, though. Or even twelve, sixteen, twenty years ago.
I don't remember the exact years, so I'm grouping the surrounding years together.
I would say 2019, then 2015, then 2023. 2015 was the big kickoff of the Trans movement, which I consider the birth of 'woke', and with the President issuing orders to side with them it really encouraged them to swing for the fences on their demands.
Then Trump got in and replaced Obama's blank check policy with anti-everything, and the movement gathered steam by telling themselves they were facing an existential threat. We get ever more radical demands for conformity, and the eventual 2020 riots.
2023 I'm not actually sure about, it might just be I stopped paying attention. But I feel like what happened is Trump left office, and without this massive external threat pressing everyone together they were left to judge the stances on their own merits, and have been losing support since.
...oh right, justifications. So 2015, executive orders https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/obama-public-schools-transgender-access-restrooms; 2019, riots in the streets; 2023, boring nothing.
>2023, boring nothing.
Umm... The antisemitic left flared up after the 10/7/2023 Hamas attack, and that part of the woke continued their attacks through 2024
Did the flare-up result in anything actually happening, or was it all just noise?
Many Thanks! It included physical harassment of Jewish students and faculty. I think it was mostly verbal harassment of Jews, though that takes its toll too.
There was also the surreal element of "Queers for Palestine". Do they have _any_ idea of how anti-LGBTQ the culture they are supporting is??
> which I consider the birth of 'woke'
Really? Gender dysphoria had already been a significant part of the culture wars for quite some years at the point when our host wrote https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ in late 2014.
2019 >>> 2023 > 2015 > 2026 (projecting)
Wokeness peaked the night the George Floyd protests turned into riots in June 2020.
Wokeness certainly got more entrenched under Trump, but it had clearly begun to slow down by the start of 2020, i.e. the 2nd derivative was negative. When that point of inflection was, I don't know exactly. Sometime after the 2018 midterms but before the start of COVID.
But it's important to remember that when a social movement has a critical mass, as wokeness certainly did by 2017 (due to the tumblr-ification of Twitter, and consequentially, the journalist/politico class), it's gonna take a while to slow down the speeding train.
For me it feels like 2019 > 2015 >>> 2023 based on my lived experience in liberal/center circles at those times. Explanations beyond this kind of feel like post-rationalization, but if I must:
2019 - BLM and Me too movements were reaching their apexes around this point. Trump victory had polarized a lot of liberal people away from the center on social issues.
2023 - anti wokeness had become pretty mainstream, musk had bought twitter, supreme court had overturned affirmative action, Desantis was extremely popular in Florida on a platform of anti-wokeness primarily and was the most likely person other than trump to be the republican nominee.
*apices.
I am unable to post a reply longer than four lines of text, Substack's brainless UI is being newly brainless. So sorry for this but....
I live and work deep in the heart of blue America and would concur with your rankings. In my professional circles 2018/2019 was when woke-ism really took center stage (literally, with people like Robin DiAngelo appearing as speakers at professional conferences).
Then came summer 2020 which put it in the headlines. By 2022 though, and even moreso 2023, those of us not bought in to the woke tantrum were no longer feeling like a doomed minority within the broader "blue" tent. I've noticed that even signaling as trivial as listing personal pronouns has died way back.
I don't work in academia which still appears to be woke-ism's core redoubt. But even there, my wife's professional experiences suggest at least a stalling post-2020.
2015 I wasn't old enough to know. 2019 and 2023 seem tied to me. If you had to ask me, the big outlier was 2020 and (to a lesser extent) 2021, for hopefully obvious reasons.
I think whether wokeness will decline or rise between now and 2028 is not so much about Trump as about social/news trends in general. After all, 2020!Trump had no way of foreseeing George Floyd and 2012!Obama had no way of foreseeing Trayvon Martin either.
Trayvon was killed in 2012
Workaround for page formatting bug: Using Firefox on a laptop, several replies I have attempted overlay the following post, and the "Post" button is no longer operational.
I have found this can be worked around by posting a single-word dummy reply, then editing this and pasting one's actual reply!
>I have found this can be worked around by posting a single-word dummy reply, then editing this and pasting one's actual reply!
Many Thanks!!!
ACX tweaks add-on also still broken. I may have to stop reading the comments sections.
Using firefox in private mode also fixes the bug for me.
The other way to do it is to press tab until the "Reply" button is highlighted, then press Enter. That works for me (also Firefox on a laptop). But yes, the interface has suddenly got a lot more annoying to interact with.
Same shit happens to me, and on firefox mobile tooltips are all clunky and off-center. It looks like the Substack team is not testing very well on Firefox.
Is everyone seeing the lines to the left of the comments (showing how many degrees nested the thread is) now gone, or is it only some browsers? If the former, please riot and revolt and make them change it back because this is unbelievably destructive and makes following long threads impossible. If the latter, I can perhaps just accept that I have a crappy or outdated browser.
> this is unbelievably destructive and makes following long threads impossible.
Frankly, I think traditional forums function better than comment threads. The nesting tends to enforce a cap on thread length, which is stupid.
I'm using the Safari browser and still have the lines
I still have all the lines.
The line only appears if the top level comment has at least one reply (Firefox)
My epi week 47-48 COViD update.
1. This is the 5th anniversary (1 Dec 2019) of Patient Zero, a 55-year-old man from Wuhan, developing symptoms of a then-unknown respiratory virus. There are contradictory accounts of whether he ever had direct contact with the Huanan wet market, but he resided in the same district as the market. He showed up at the hospital displaying symptoms of an unusual pneumonia on or around 8 Dec. He reportedly survived his bout with the new disease, but by the end of the month, there were 41 patients hospitalized with the same symptoms. There may have been several earlier cases in November of that year, but there's no serologic evidence to confirm this.
2. On 28 Dec 2019, Dr. Lili Ren, a virologist at Union Medical College in Beijing, submitted a complete sequence of SARS-CoV-2 to GenBank, but she failed to include the proper annotations, and so it wasn't made public. It wasn't until 10 Jan 2020 that a sequence was available on GenBank & GISAID.
Initially, the virus was christened 2019-nCoV (short for "2019 Novel Coronavirus"). The name SARS-CoV-2 (short for "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2") was officially assigned by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) on February 11, 2020.
By January, the virus had spread far and wide from Wuhan. The first recorded case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed on 20 Jan 2020. A man in his mid-30s from Snohomish County, Washington, tested positive for the virus after returning from Wuhan, China. He sought medical attention on 19 Jan 2020, and was hospitalized with pneumonia.
Despite the warnings of the National Health Commission of China that the virus was highly transmissible and the evidence showed that the virus was spreading via a respiratory vector, the WHO and CDC dismissed that idea since the scientific consensus at the time was that contagious diseases (with the exception of TB) couldn't spread easily via respiratory droplets (and they ignored several aerosol experts who warned them that it could spread via aerosols). So, fomites were thought to be its primary transmission mechanism. Thus the emphasis on handwashing and not touching one's face. The fomite theory was disproven in a few months, but it would be a couple of more years before the WHO or the CDC would admit that SARS-CoV-2's vector of transmission was primarily through respiratory aerosols.
3. The official death count of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic over the first four years was ~7 million. However, excess deaths worldwide suggest that COVID cases and deaths were undercounted and that actual deaths were between 19 and 36 million. Most of those deaths happened in the first two years of the pandemic. Vaccines and convalescent immunity have turned SARS-CoV-2 into an endemic disease. COVID is now killing fewer people than Malaria is—and, in the US, it's dropped to 14th place on the CDC's top 15 causes of death.
4. Most of the current indicators suggest that COVID-19 is on hiatus in the US. Wastewater numbers, ED visits, hospitalizations, and deaths are all at their usual interwave lows, and deaths are the lowest they've been since March of 2020. However, Biofire's proprietary surveillance system indicates a slight upward incline in SARS2 positivity in the past two weeks. This may be an indicator of a new wave revving up.
5. The last data we have from the CDC is 16 Nov. As a percentage of emergency department visits, influenza probably surpassed COVID last week. RSV is on the upward trend, too. Biofire's Syndromic Trends application tells a somewhat different story. Of the top 6 respiratory viruses, RSV is on a steep upward curve. And Rhinoviruses are surging. And HCov OC43 has shown a steep increase, too. I don't know how reliable the Biofire data is — nor how much these trends will affect ED visits — but their past SARS2 tracking has reflected actual case trends.
6. In A(H5) news: although there have been no known human cases of bird flu due to drinking raw milk (or pasteurized milk, for that matter), H5N1 was detected in a raw milk producer's products. CA banned their distribution.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-11-29/raw-farm-sales-suspended
Canadian health officials haven't been able to trace the source of the A(H5) virus that infected that BC child (who has been in critical care for the past 3 weeks). The sequence is closest to an A(H5) clade found in geese, though.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/avian-influenza-bird-flu/canadian-probe-teens-critical-h5n1-infection-finds-no-clear-source
And a California child contracted A(H5). Symptoms were mild, though. The CDC doesn't say whether this was contracted from birds or farm animals (or milk). But I think this is the 1st non-dairy worker to catch A(H5) in US this year (?).
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p1122-h5n1-bird-flu.html
Slides up on Threadreaderapp...
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1863401997048872968.html
And this... Great article in Stat about the competing theories of why US A(H5) cases have been so mild (so far).
https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/02/bird-flu-h5n1-mild-cases-mystery/
Michael Lewis wrote a book called The Premonition about people scattered around the US who early on figured out crucial stuff, and tried hard to make their knowledge and services available to the public & to the government, and mostly failed. All those things that were eventually figured out? (How it's transmitted -- the fact we clearly had community transmission early on -- how rapidly it was likely to spread -- how to do rapid tests -- how to reduce contagion . . .). There were people who had figured out that stuff by 3 mos in. It's a very illuminating book, also a fun read.
Nice summary. Consider this my up-vote!
I've seen good arguments that AI might be important. I've seen tolerable arguments that AI alignment is neglected.
What I have not seen is a good argument that the problem is tractable, or that previous alignment efforts have been directionally helpful.
Assume that I have read the OpenPhil briefings, have reasonable familiarity with Yudkowski and Zvi Mowshowitz, etc.
Would someone please be able to point me in the direction of someone making this argument well?
Many alumni of MATS have write-ups of research agendas that have promise. I'm potentially conflicted as I run a nonprofit that provides many of them with fiscal support, but the continued grants from places like Open Phil and the Survival and Flourishing Fund seem reasonable evidence indicating that there is useful work being done.
> What I have not seen is a good argument that the problem is tractable, or that previous alignment efforts have been directionally helpful.
I'll second Alex Z - I'm pretty plugged in here, and essentially nobody who believes the problem is important believes it's tractable at the moment.
On directionally helpful, it depends what things you're thinking of. MIRI? Yud has done more than probably anyone else in the world to articulate the problem and driven awareness in a lot of SV elites and Big 3 employees.
There are a number of advancements that have given people some hope - polysemanticity, lie detection, Golden Gate Claude, etc. But I don't think anyone believes these have really solved it, or even made the problem materially more tractable. They are more brief bright spots that indicate a solution might exist if we keep working hard at it and get lucky.
Has Yud been directionally helpful? Running around telling everyone something is -super powerful- and -super dangerous- and -the first one to get it will win the war- led to rapid development of and a subsequent arms race for more nuclear weapons. And we know that similar dynamics were at play around the founding of OpenAI, Anthropic, and the current AI boom. On the other side of the ledger, is there any evidence Yud contributed meaningfully to AI safety?
Is there anyone who thinks that it is serious and neglected, but also thinks that it is tractable or that we've made useful progress? MIRI seems to no longer think that it is tractable on short enough time scales to matter without significant government intervention to slow down AI development (https://intelligence.org/2024/01/04/miri-2024-mission-and-strategy-update/).
edit: or is that exactly what you're asking?
Can anyone recommend a good database/data source for comparing permitting latencies for various permit-required activities in different jurisdictions? I.e. if you want a permit to do X in county/state/country Y, what's the average, std dev, 90/95 percentile time from when you file your application to when the permit issues? Bonus points if the data also include number of permit applications per year, of each type, in each jurisdiction. Big bonus points if there are also estimates of the economic cost of delay across various cases.
Motivation: thinking about advocacy around permitting speedups as a pro-progress cause, wondering how much of the baseline "state of the world" data necessary for data-driven proposals and priorities has been collected already.
I think collecting this data would be a wonderful idea. You may want to contact Alec Stapp on Twitter since he talks about regulatory delays and could ask his audience if they know of any data source.
I wonder if any real estate developer trade groups have data on this. They might be able to help you understand the space better.
Do you need it for the whole country? Couldn’t you make a disproportionate impact by just focusing on the 20 largest cities? Presumably this data is public and I know for NYC it’s all available if you search for Buildings Information System.
I previously wrote a script to downloaded data on all SF crime in the past 30 days, so doing this sort of thing shouldn't be super difficult.
If there was a non-profit focusing on this, I’d donate to it.
You may already be familiar with him, but if anyone knows a good database on this it would be x.com/ThomasHochman. Just @ him directly and he will probably respond.
For those who don't think that Biden's pardon of his son for all crimes, including not paying millions of dollars in taxes, is deeply corrupt, could you explain what sort of standards you think would be reasonable to apply moving forward?
Hunter should have been punished for being a fuck up, but the Republican House Committees went too far subpoenaing him and the Bidens and lying about the evidence they found, but the blanket pardon goes too far to fix this. Even worse, Hunter is a loser and is not relevant to Democrat or anti Republican political goals. Biden should instead pardon people that are prosecuting Trump or who have been the target of his military tribunal threats, since this would actually contribute to actionable political gains.
Funnily enough, the very MAGA Americans I know were weirdly pro-Biden about this move. Why be freshly outraged when the corruption you know is there, turns out to be there? Their main takeaway was, "Well, I'd do the same for my boy," and, "Huh, guess the old man was human after all."
All that plus 4 years of random laws, never before applied in such ways as now, being used to put opposition into jail. Guess how sympathetic that makes people to attempts to put someone in jail in a case like that, even if it's someone adjacent to the current regime and thrown by it under the bus.
Not what you asked, but I'm always curious why people ask questions like this. I basically read it as "For people who I obviously disagree with, how do you respond to what I feel like is the most challenging way to defend your position? Fight me."
Like, why not just ask, "What do you think about the Hunter Biden pardon and why? What general principles do you think work for this and similar situations involving the other political party?
(Personally I was very disappointed in the pardon, as a Biden/Harris voter. Not surprised, but disappointed.)
The most powerful move one can often make is to ask others to defend their position. Asking questions is far more effective than talking others down.
Not that I think you should run around trying to dominate people in conversation or anything, but there it is.
I am not the best version of myself in this moment. I am a cynical voter who got tricked by a politician into believing them when they said explicitly, over and over, they would not do a thing I thought was bad when asking me to vote for who they wanted me to. I agree your formulation would have been better.
Yeah, that's understandable. Despite what people often think, politicians usually don't outright lie in their political promises, and this was a particularly brazen and immediate one.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trust-us-politicians-keep-most-of-their-promises/
Standards? Sure!
1. Don't let anyone hand out jail sentences for victimless crimes. In cases where such sentences are likely or mandated, don't get upset if someone pardons the perpetrator. (In particular, don't allow IRS to ruin anyone's life after the money owed has already been paid.)
2. Don't elect as president anyone who often doesn't know where he is or can't produce a coherent sentence. If someone like that ends up president, don't be surprised if his words don't match his actions.
EDIT: I do think the Biden family is deeply corrupt, but I'm more inclined to get upset at other things they did - such as shaking down foreign entities for money in exchange for favors. The pardon incident, especially by comparison with that, seems like a non-issue.
"1. Don't let anyone hand out jail sentences for victimless crimes."
So, if I decide to walk around with an unregistered loaded machine gun under my trenchcoat, and sell machine guns out of the trunk of my car to anyone who asks, no questions asked, I can't be locked up until *after* someone gets shot?
Good to know, though I'll want to double-check that with an actual lawyer first.
But Hunter Biden has plead guilty and is in fact guilty of a blatant violation of federal gun-control laws. It's a law that we *normally* plead out without jail time in cases like his; I think that's a good policy and it's one I would like to see actually codified in the law rather than left to prosecutorial discretion. But do you really want to be arguing for the policy that we don't enforce any gun control laws until there's been a shooting?
Thank you for the extreme example. I agree that maybe I should have been more careful with the wording. You will notice that the gun charges in this case don't look like your example at all, and, although the situation was not as safe as we'd like, it seems a lot less likely to cause someone harm (and is probably something that's been done by a lot of people who had neither been caught nor harmed anyone).
I said nothing about not enforcing laws, and I think we agree on how we think this should be enforced - without jail time (under normal circumstances). But if various sources aren't lying, he was facing 25 years in the gun case, and even if that wasn't likely to happen, I can't blame his father for worrying that it might and taking the easy way out.
For me, this was deeply in "I used to be appalled, now I try to be amused" territory.
In my personal case, I'd had a discussion with a friend about pardons a few weeks before the election, and I'd noted that Joe Biden hadn't pardoned his son, to which my friend replied "_Yet_". I duly congratulated him on his prediction when the news came out.
After all of the politically motivated prosecutions of Trump and his political allies, I literally did laugh out loud at the news.
I'm not happy about corrupt politicians, but we've survived Mayor Daley (Sr.), Tammany Hall, Boss Tweed, and a _long_ list of others.
If somebody is strongly against Biden pardoning his son, then they should strongly consider advocating for the removal of Presidential pardons.
I would encourage people to put themselves into Biden's shoes - your son, who you presumably love as your son, is in legal hot waters for... let's just say something less serious than murder of sexually assaulting a child. You have the power to easily and quickly pardon him, ending this cloud of legal concern. What half-decent father wouldn't do so?
I think it's expecting too much of people in general to not use this immense power - the power of the Presidential pardon - to bail out close family members and friends. Is doing so corrupt? Maybe, probably. Is it also deeply human? YES. If I was in Joe Biden's position, I'd rather be thought a corrupt politician than be thought an heartless father, and my conscience would eat me alive if I allowed my son to pay a serious penalty for a low/mid-level crime, when I had the ability to easily save him.
The Economist got it right when they wrote, "The president’s reversal is understandable, humane and wrong". https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/12/02/joe-biden-abused-a-medieval-power-to-pardon-his-son
Okay. Suppose Hunter *had* murdered someone or sexually assaulted a child. Do you think Biden would not have pardoned him then?
He said he would never pardon such a grave offence? Well, he already lied about pardoning Hunter.
What person would forgive that kind of crime? Why, the loving father who cherishes his kin rather than society, as we've been lectured by others about doing the same.
But it's a grave crime! Yes, and? Ordinary people who cheat on their taxes and lie to buy guns don't get the benefit of having well-connected family members who can wipe any prospect of jail time away. We've already seen established the principle of "rules are for the little people", now it's just a matter of degree.
Remember the hammering on about 34 FELONIES? Yeah, this makes it tougher to take seriously.
Hunter is not a dumb 17 year old who made a stupid mistake that has the potential to wreck his life, so let's be compassionate here. He's 54 year old soon to be grandfather who has been making dumb, life-wrecking mistakes for decades, and Daddy makes the consequences all go away. That's not love of any kind, that's ruining the guy. How about if Joe used his influence to make sure Hunter only gets the purest coke and guaranteed STI free hookers for the Internet videos? Would that be paternal love and taking care of his son? Sometimes punishment *is* the kinder thing.
> Okay. Suppose Hunter *had* murdered someone or sexually assaulted a child. Do you think Biden would not have pardoned him then?
You don't have to speculate. The pardon is for anything he may have ever done. If he has murdered someone, the pardon covers that. If he's murdered 400 people, the pardon covers that too. (Except that murder generally isn't a federal crime.)
I don't have a problem with Biden pardoning his son. It's corrupt, but this is the kind of corruption that it's better to have than not to have.
But I do have something of a problem with pardons, in general, that pardon unknown behavior. I feel that if you're going to pardon something, you should need to know what it is.
I get what you're saying. It is hypocritical for someone to talk a lot about the 34 FELONIES while giving the Bidens a pass. And you're right that Joe has enabled a lot of bad behavior by Hunter, and that's not really what a good father should do.
My point is that Presidential pardons are never going to be perfect, at least not without some sort of actual explicit limiting mechanism. As is, we just count on the President to be principled enough to not pardon people that shouldn't be pardoned. Even putting aside corruption (i.e. a President getting bribed to give a pardon), people are just too human to not pardon a close loved one, even if they shouldn't be getting a pardon.
So either take the good with the bad, try to limit the pardon, or get rid of it entirely.
By the sounds of it, there probably should be some limits on the pardon. At the very least "No, you can't pardon family members".
I'm not surprised Joe did this, as a large part of the problem is that he loves Hunter too much. All the stuff about "They only went after him because he's my son" is true, in part. But he'd be saying the same thing if Hunter *had* committed a murder - "he was provoked, it was self-defence, they're only pushing this because he's my son".
Like I said, I'm not surprised Joe said one thing and did another, as I think some of it is definitely "fuck you, how do you like this mess I left you?" to the party big-wigs that shoved him out the door. But it does mean that the Democrats haven't a leg to stand on when they engage in finger-wagging about morality. It won't stop them, of course, but maybe it'll be blatant enough that some people will stop blindly believing every lump of propaganda dropped by them.
Trump is uniquely corrupt? Nah pal, they're all corrupt. It's Chinatown, Jake.
This is a form of nepotism. Nepotism is not a bad thing in all cases, but it is in this one. If a public official has the moral obligation to pardon those close to him (or her) regardless of guilt, then that gives license to those close to the official to commit crimes up to that line in the sand.
The higher the office, the more an official must put the public good above personal betterment, including of loved ones. What Biden did was wrong, but legal.
How do you define deeply corrupt?
1. He purchased a gun and failed to admit he was a drug user. I'm sure that has never happened before in the history of US gun ownership. (continued...)
I define corrupt as 'abusing power granted to you by virtue of your elected office for personal gain, especially if done by deceit or outside the norm'
His sales pitch for a Biden-or-Harris second term / Trump alternative was that he would respect the law, and that he can be trusted not to be generally corrupt.
His son likely was paid millions of dollars for access to his father, which is fine, and then passed through to the rest of the family, which is also fine. And Biden promised over, and over, and over that he would not pardon his son for actions that did cross into criminality. And then as soon as the election was over when he is no longer politically accountable he showed everyone what those words were worth.
2. In 2018, he stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for the tax year 2015;willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 taxes *on time* despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes; failed to file his 2017 and 2018 tax returns on time; and when he did file them, they included false business deductions in order to reduce the very substantial tax liability he faced as of February 2020.
False business deductions in aid for felony were the crimes our soon-to-be-leader was convicted for. I'm outraged that the prosecutors requested his sentencing be put on hiatus until after his Presidency and that the judge allowed them to do this. Likewise, our future leader pardoned his father-in-law, who was convicted of similar tax crimes *plus* witness intimidation and is now getting a cushy ambassadorship to France.
Trump is a horrible human being. He shouldn't have done any of those things.
Joe Biden should also not have pardoned his son. It is both morally wrong to do so, and... I really hate how it makes Biden look just as corrupt as Trump.
I don't think there's really any comparison in magnitude or even kind, but giving the appearance you're just as bad as Trump is going to make future opposition to the corruption of the presidency enormously more difficult.
I really hated it when Clinton did the same sketchy as fuck things, BTW.
> Likewise, our future leader pardoned his father-in-law, who was convicted of similar tax crimes *plus* witness intimidation and is now getting a cushy ambassadorship to France.
Anyway, back to the pardoning of hunter Biden - right or wrong.
Had to look the guy up; he's not Trump's father-in-law, he's the father-in-law of Trump's daughter. And seemingly he did serve some time, which is more than Hunter did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kushner
The revenge porn thing is weird, but whatever family drama is going on there can't be blamed on Trump. I did like the bit about "Previously, he was a major Democratic party donor" and that the tax crimes involved the Democratic party:
"On June 30, 2004, Kushner was fined $508,900 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to Democratic political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so. In 2005, following an investigation by the United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, US Attorney Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with him, under which Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. The witness tampering charge arose from Kushner's retaliation against William Schulder, his sister Esther's husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators against Kushner."
Nobody can be throwing any stones, it's clear! And to tie in with the prison post, at least Kushner is willing to offer employment to former convicts:
"He has employed two fellow inmates with whom he became acquainted in prison."
I'm fine with it. As Biden said:
"No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son"
Hopefully, we can apply the same standard to Trump's supposed "civil fraud" and then put this idiocy behind us.
But isn't the DOJ that Biden accuses of being politicized his DOJ? His stance of moral superiority over Trump was in large part based on his proclamations that he believes in the justice system and that Trump is undermining it by accusing it of being a weapon. And now he's doing the same, and it makes less sense because he's been in charge of it for the last four years.
I kind of think not paying millions of dollars in taxes is the kind of thing someone ought to be prosecuted for. Maybe the gun and drug charges are a bit over-the-top, and wouldn't have been prosecuted if Joe weren't President.
Well, the gun stuff does touch the party of gun control, but they do seem to have pivoted on that. Did anyone else find it a little... shall we say, weird?... when Harris suddenly started talking about her Glock?
(Does anyone here *believe* she has a Glock and regularly shoots it?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd-wO4aq8g4&ab_channel=KamalaHarris
"My background is in law enforcement" - give me a break, she was never a beat cop. Unless San Francisco/California is *very* different and lawyers go around packing heat and having shoot-outs in the court room! "Yeah, sorry I'm late for trial, Your Honour, but I had to bust a cap in some perp's ass after he tried to pull a drive-by on me and my homies in the prosecutor's office".
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vxvzg34qwo
I think the reason nobody made a big deal out of "you think property is more valuable than life? you are bragging about being willing to kill disadvantaged minority people?" is part hypocrisy and part "yeah sure Kamala you got a gun and will shoot their asses (insert eyeroll)".
"After Donald Trump claimed during their presidential debate that she would "confiscate everybody's gun" if elected, Harris replied by reaffirming that she was a gun owner herself - like her running mate, Tim Walz.
"We’re not taking anyone’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff," she told Trump.
The following week, Harris added that she would be willing to use her gun if an intruder entered her home.
"If somebody breaks into my house, they're getting shot," she said during a livestreamed event with Oprah Winfrey."
Ahem. Speaking of Hunter and guns:
"Harris has also recently spoken in favour of more thorough background checks and so-called red-flag laws. These allow people to apply to a judge to confiscate another person's gun if they are deemed to be a risk to themselves or others."
So if Harris had won, Hunter would be facing jail time? 😁
Diane Feinstein famously had a snub-nosed .38, and she was arguably the most anti-gun politician in the Senate in her prime. So, yeah, I can easily believe Attorney General Kamala Harris had a Glock.
There's a long, long tradition of rich, powerful, politically connected liberals quietly keeping guns to protect themselves from the hoi polloi, while piously arguing that the hoi polloi should be disarmed (possibly allowing for an occasional .22 rifle or a double-barrel shotgun among the rural hoi polloi). I believe this was even somewhat true in the British Isles until fairly recently. The only silly part of the story is the one where anyone ever thought that Kamala Harris saying "I own a Glock!" would convince anyone anywhere in the gun-rights community that she would lift a finger to defend *their* right to keep and bear arms.
Well, I don't think it was "deeply corrupt" so I'll use it as a cop-out to allow myself to rant.
It was worse.
I voted for the fucker. And I reluctantly voted for his VP, because what? Trump? I need to be able to look in the mirror at least some of the time.
Well, turns out I still can't. Thank you for nothing President Biden, one small step for you, one giant step for the country, all toward the coveted Banana Republic status, and no, I don't mean a clothing chain out of SF. At least one side used to tell me "we need to trust our Judicial System, not like these crazy corrupt Republicans". Opps. "All politicians lie, but Trump is in a league of his own". Opps. "No one should be above the law, including President". Opps. Opps. Opps.
Nice republic you have here, but it could benefit from a helping of banana pudding, preferably in the face.
But look at the bright side: at least I now have one thing I agree with MAGA types on: Fuck Biden.
We're in the "lol, nothing matters" phase of American empire, I'm trying not to take anything personally.
Also I think it's perfectly reasonable as a partisan to be mad at the party organization that just massively lost an election, it doesn't make you a Republican any more than I'm a Yankees fan when I complain about my Mariners being terrible.
I think this is an overreaction. If you were to do a thorough examination of all the pardons granted by Trump and Biden, who do you think would come out looking worse?
Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 237 people while in office. Only 25 of those came from a recommendation by the Office of the Pardon Attorney. The rest had personal or political connections to Trump of some kind or were in position to get his attention. This included many people who worked for his campaign, health care executives who were convicted of Medicare fraud, and military officers convicted of war crimes (against the advice of the Department of Defense and military lawyers). The were hardly any Republicans in congress who said anything about these pardons.
Most of Biden's pardons have been for marijuana possession or as part of prisoner exchanges. As far as I can tell, this is the first pardon that had a personal connection to Biden and could be considered corrupt, yet this pardon is receiving more attention than any of Trump's. This is in part because many democratic lawmakers and liberal leaning news outlets like the New York Times have criticized him for it.
No, I again reject the whole premise. I'm not going to compare to this to Trump's pardons, or work into some kind of nuanced "well, if we look at it this way, with our eyes half-closed and the rose-tinted glasses firmly in place, we kind of can see that Biden isn't that much worse than Trump" thing. No. This sordid "I promised multiple times not to do this thing, but after some turkey on Thanksgiving, never mind" is firmly in the banana republic territory. And I reserve the right to be super-harsh on men with enormous power, especially the ones I voted for.
Last but not least - if Trump is now our morality yardstick we are truly and totally lost.
It's because Biden, with the backing of the Democratic Party, set himself up as Caesar's wife when it came to being seen to be above suspicion.
Turns out he meant he'd be Messalina.
Keep this up and you might achieve what both sides call "enlightened centrism": the realization that each side's claims to moral superiority over the other are bullshit.
I kind of reject the whole premise. We can walk and chew and the same time, one can dis/agree with a politician and judge his/her morals separately. Morality doesn't have a side. Some people act more morally than others. Trump is at the bottom, and now Biden has joined him there. May they both rot.
I read something once about Biden, in whom I had taken no prior interest - that he was all about "we Bidens stick together" or at least, Biden men stick together. He is assertively clannish. And obviously Hunter Biden has never had a job in his life - so with the loss of the older son - who likely would have continued his political career, and if that hadn't proved successful, his legal practice - the family business consists entirely of Biden's electability combined with Hunter's willingness to boldly seek favors/payola. This is what Biden men do. This is how they entered and remain in wealthy circles.
So I would have been surprised had Biden not pardoned his son, and I don't think it means anything at all, nor should it have anything to teach us. The meaning of it is foregone, and it would be strange to be outraged by the tail end of a long story of corruption.
Neither better nor worse than any other pardons - it's inherently about making sure criminals don't get punished because you like them or owe them favors.
The whole thing is ridiculous and should be removed (I imagine the idea is that kings could do this and the president is a kind of temporary king?). Until that happens - i.e. most likely never - it will certainly keep getting used and abused.
The point of having a pardon is that our judicial system is not perfect and sometimes people get chewed up in the gears, so to speak. We understand that despite doing our best sometimes someone will get condemned to a punishment they don't deserve, or that is grossly disproportionate to the crime. Pardoning makes it possible to correct such an injustice even if the judges and juries failed to do so.
Of course that is pardoning as an ideal. I think it has value, but everyone also can see the potential for corruption. The main check on that is that pardons are public and executives are elected, so a corrupt pardon makes it less likely you'll be re-elected. Which is not a problem for Biden, of course, so it's a weak check.
It seems inherently unlikely that the president can evaluate this better than the courts could.
There have been numerous cases where judges said something to the effect "I know this sentence is grossly unfair, but my hands are tied" in response to mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Of course we can say that the guidelines should be fixed so cases of injustice are righted. But politics can prevent even popular legislation from passing, let alone something that can easily be construed as being easy on crime. Sometimes having someone external to the machinations of the bureaucracy that created the problem is the only way it can be corrected.
Exactly. This is the entire point of the pardon power.
It's entirely par for the course. I think every president I've been alive for has pardoned their friends on the way out. Trump pardoned a whole bunch of his cronies in 2020
The pardon power is ridiculous and needs to be seriously reformed.
None of that is the fault of anyone named Biden though, and Joe has not done anything here that fits my definition of "corrupt". Hypocritical, sure -- he frankly should never have publicly promised _not_ to do it. And since Hunter ended up paying all the taxes he was billed for, his continued prosecution would be only political.
If the IRS tells me I haven't paid any of the $10 million in taxes, and I'm going to jail for it, shall I then write a check for $10 million and say, "Oopsie"? Why wouldn't everyone just wait for the IRS to calculate their taxes and pay it when they get around to it?
In this case, probably all the taxes, penalties, and interest were covered by some other party than Hunter Biden.
Why should the IRS be so special, compared to other entities you owe money to? If you owe someone else money, they keep hitting you with penalties and perhaps ruining your credit history until you pay. If you don't pay, they will eventually take you to court, but once you pay the bill and the penalties, you're in the clear.
The IRS is currently behaving as a state-sponsored mafia. One example that I was hit with: if you are late with your tax returns, even if you don't owe any money but expect a refund, the IRS will order the HR of your employer to list you, a married person, as single for the purposes of tax deduction and explicitly forbid them to ever change it. (In a normal world, shouldn't that be some kind of illegal?) They will claim that it's possible to appeal it, but among the dozen or so items required for appeal there will be some they know you do not possess - the amounts of tax refunds for the years you haven't filed taxes for yet. Our tax preparer told me that the IRS did a lot of this; I don't know if they are still doing it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing something similar or worse.
Hunter Biden may be a scumbag, but that doesn't change the fact that the IRS is a terrible organization that shouldn't be allowed to mess with people's lives as much as it currently does.
Seems like somebody else allegedly paid the taxes for Hunter, so we're *still* mired in influence peddling:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/s-kevin-morris-says-paid-hunter-bidens-back-taxes-rcna135277
Gosh, I wish *I* had a Fairy Godfather who'd pay ten million on my behalf! Scratch that, just let the money rest in my account and I'll make sure it gets to the Revenue Commissioners (eventually)!
"In an interview with House lawmakers and investigators last week, entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s financial benefactor, portrayed himself as someone who helped the younger Biden because he was moved by his struggles, not by a desire to help then-candidate Joe Biden win the presidency.
On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee released the transcript of Morris’ almost six-hour interview with the three committees conducting the impeachment inquiry into the president. The transcript provides the most detailed descriptions to date of how Morris met Hunter Biden, the more than $5 million in loans he gave him to cover expenses and pay his outstanding tax liabilities, as well as Morris' purchases of Hunter Biden’s art."
Is that part about his art real? I saw something elsewhere about him making art out of/with his own faeces, but I thought this was just, you know, online chatter and not real. Hunter really is An Artiste? 😁
Oh, it gets *better*. Fairy Godfather made the payments on a Porsche for Hunter!
"Morris said that he was first introduced to Hunter Biden in Brentwood, California, at a 2019 fundraiser for Biden's presidential campaign, held at the home of producer Lanette Phillips, who later asked through a mutual acquaintance if Morris would meet with Hunter Biden because he had some “entertainment-ish” issues, in his words. Morris began representing Hunter Biden after a five-hour conversation at the latter's home, and started loaning him money about six weeks later.
The loans were not made in the form of cash to Hunter Biden, but were largely direct payments to third parties. They included payments to the IRS for back taxes owed for the years 2016 through 2019, rent on a house, legal fees for other attorneys, payments to Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, child support and outstanding payments for a Porsche."
Well, of course Joe is going to pardon Hunter. Hunter has been a fuck-up all his life, but he's the only surviving child of his first marriage and I think the deaths around those family members have made Joe very close to, and protective of, Hunter.
Should he be pardoned? No, but it's understandable why. Joe shouldn't have declared "I will not pardon my son" but that was all political grandstanding to contrast with Trump's travails and accusations that he was favouring and enriching family members.
Does it contrast with the lawfare against Trump? Sure, but this is modern politics, baby. Hypocrisy is no longer a thing; it's okay if we do and bad if they do it, never mind which side is which.
It's clearly hypocritical, corrupt not so sure - the power to pardon is clear and unrestricted. And really, only a sociopath would not use whatever legal means were available to help their child get out of trouble.
Note that Hunter had apparently repaid the back taxes before the indictment- which doesn't excuse tax evasion, but it does make his inability to get a plea deal look suspiciously political.
Suppose we accept that both the tax and gun charges were examples of lawfare- using selective and unusually harsh enforcement of laws to reduce the Democrats' chances of winning- would that justify a pardon? I'm honestly not sure. One kind of corruption cancelling out another kind is still corruption and immoral in a deontological sense- though it seems like it could in principle be justified in a consequentialist sense.
Of course, what should count as unethical lawfare is very ambiguous. I think probably Tump's New York campaign finance conviction was an example of politically-motivated selective enforcement, while the conviction for lying to investigators about the classified documents probably wasn't. So, if we take the argument above as justification for Hunter's pardon, we'll also have to take it as justification if Trump uses corruption to get the NY charges dropped (I don't think he can pardon himself in that case), though I don't think it would apply if he pardoned himself for the federal charges.
There is also the precedent to think about. Trump misused the pardon to help people close to him pretty frequently, so that boat may have sailed. But this might still embolden Trump to take this form of corruption a step further, and probably makes a potential 2028 Democratic president more likely to also engage in it.
So, even if this pardon is mitigating the harm from another kind of corruption, it's another hammer-blow against our already cracking rule of law. I can't honestly blame the man on a personal level, but it's worrying.
> Trump misused the pardon to help people close to him pretty frequently, so that boat may have sailed.
That's always been the norm. The pardon episode of The West Wing was one of the better ones.
(1. The president announces to his staff that he wants to pardon some drug crimes, and they prepare a list. They also publicly announce that they're starting the process of pardoning a bunch of drug crimes.
2. He has them vet the list for anyone that might cast doubt on whether the pardons were cover for a political favor. They flag one guy, the son of major Democratic donors, and take him off the list.
3. The guy's mother hears about the pardon effort, and personally visits the president to beg for mercy.
4. The president sticks to his "convictions" and pardons everyone except that one guy.
5. He kills himself.)
Ah, "The West Wing", known for its unflinching commitment to portraying the reality of how politics happens. So the guy kills himself, huh? Luckily, it's only fiction and the writers could have had him emigrating to Sardinia and becoming an artisanal sheep grooming mogul had they wanted.
I'm tempted here to say "don't do the crime if you can't do the time". The president in that case was right to stick to his principles, and whatever the guilty person did was not on him. If he was likely to commit suicide rather than serve a jail sentence, then he would have done so in the episode where the president instead decided to issue a pardon for speeding offences and not drug crimes.
> The president in that case was right to stick to his principles
In the fictional case? His actual principles were to pardon that guy, because his idea was to pardon a class of crimes, not a list of political nobodies. Removing him and only him from the list of pardons was done for the sake of appearances.
> Ah, "The West Wing", known for its unflinching commitment to portraying the reality of how politics happens.
That _could_ be a fair criticism, but I presented this as an example of it "having always been the norm" for pardons to be used to help people close to the president, and I think it suffices as proof that this was popularly viewed as normal in the 90s. If you want non-fictional examples, I can remember that there was a scandal around Bill Clinton pardoning Marc Rich. Beyond that, I think I've advanced a thoroughly unsurprising theory with a decent amount of support, and it's on you to show that there's a problem with it.
In gaming, there’s a real appetite for establishing the meta—the dominant strategy—but once established, there’s a real boredom in adhering to it. Instead of optimizing a system of play, you’re just left optimizing your rank within it. This is characteristic of the grind.
One of the ways that games fight this and maintain player interest is with meta shakeups: periodic updates that rebalance currencies, weapons, abilities, resources, etc. This gives rise to a temporary period when the meta is unknown and players have the chance to reformulate it. Without these shakeups player bases often decline.
Maybe this reflects a fundamental inclination towards periodic systemic upheaval out of a preference for purposeful discovery and exploration over tedious rank optimization within a system even when that system is fair and in equilibrium. I think this is particularly true for young people.
I don’t know if this tendency could be leveraged outside gaming, but education reform seems like a natural place to try. Instead of making kids rank themselves against peers in a static system to achieve cumulative scores that are increasingly difficult to alter over time, you could frequently change the conditions and possible means of achievement and let kids discover the best ways to get there themselves. Then wipe the slate clean, shakeup and restart. Evaluators would probably hate it but it might improve engagement.
EDIT: For the few of you who also actually enjoyed Bostrom’s Deep Utopia, he talks about distantly related concepts to shakeups in regards to interest/boredom in Thursday Part II and Thursday Part III.
Am I the only person annoyed by the broadly useful term "meta" being reduced to "the winning strategy for a video game"?
It would be tolerable if it were only thusly used in obviously-gaming contexts, but I've been running into people who literally don't seem to know any other definition of the word.
This is a pet peeve I've been fighting for years.
It gets worse, because there's now a backronym: "most effective tactic available".
> One of the ways that games fight this and maintain player interest is with meta shakeups: periodic updates that rebalance currencies, weapons, abilities, resources, etc. This gives rise to a temporary period when the meta is unknown and players have the chance to reformulate it. Without these shakeups player bases often decline.
This is mostly just a mistake on the part of everyone. David Sirlin, long ago, had a good discussion of the phenomenon, including the observation that the metagame for the original Smash Brothers wandered all over the place, just as if it were getting patches that randomly rebalanced all the characters, despite the fact that of course the game itself was completely static.
But old games like chess do largely seem to have static meta, leading to 'draw death'. Is the argument just that it's unlikely for any decent game to reach equilibrium in a commercially-relevant period?
In the case of Smash, which applies to most of the internet-competition games that Woolery is talking about, I think the main thrust of the argument is that the metagame automatically and repeatedly makes itself obsolete, because different strategies gain or lose strength according to which other strategies are currently popular. This is a much harder case to make in chess.
The constant patching is driven by audience demand - during the covid lockdowns, Magic: the Gathering announced, for the first time ever, that "we're banning several cards to shake up the format. By all of our metagame metrics, the format is healthy and no bans are called for. But we wanted to give people a fresh experience".
I think the meta can only make itself obsolete in that way in hidden-information games. In Chess, if the Vienna system is popular, you can study it more, learn more lines of it, learn how to get to positions you're comfortable with, but you can't start playing "the tactic that counters the Vienna." A good chess strat is one that works even when the opponent knows it's coming, because you can't hide anything in chess.
On the other hand, if proxy builds get popular in Starcraft, you can start scouting specifically for proxies. The fact that the tactic is more popular means your scouting is more likely to find something, which means that the tactic really does make itself obsolete.
(There are still ways that the meta can be unpleasant even if it's theoretically "balanced," however. If the Terran player has to run themselves ragged preparing for 50 different cheese builds and the Protoss player's strategy is just "build a big deathball and attack lol," then one side is having a lot less fun even if the winrate is "balanced.")
Fighting games like Smash fall somewhere in the middle - most techniques are pretty well known, and new discoveries in Melee are unlikely when the game has been out for so long, but you still have to practice them a lot and it's possible for even an expert to be unprepared against an unusual character.
> I think the meta can only make itself obsolete in that way in hidden-information games.
Maybe, if you read the comments above yours, you'd think differently.
Or do you see Smash as a hidden-information game? Why the separate discussion of Smash, in that case?
You see this in every game where players must choose pieces before playing. That doesn't happen in chess. But if you ran a series of Magic tournaments with no hidden information, there would be just as much metagame instability as usual.
Bobby Fischer speaks of this [0]. TLDR -- modern chess sucks because it's all memorization, and no improv, no creativity, no exploration. Ergo, Bobby's promotion of Fischer Random [1]. I think Magnus tried it recently, against himself.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S4BU_AYJEs (n.b. The account which hosted the video that I originally remember, has unfortunately been deleted. unlucky. The original title was something like "Bobby Fischer and Paul Morphy on how opening theory destroyed chess".)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
The incorrect premise of your idea means it wouldn't work. It reflects resentment, not the cope you identified as a "fundamental inclination...". Usually those who whine about the meta gamers are just salty they're not as good at the game but prefer to blame that on the existence of the meta rather than accept that they're worse at the game and would likely continue to be worse regardless of any meta.
It would be similar with students. The rank order would remain similar through any systemic change except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability, which would defeat the whole purpose of education. And because the rank order wouldn't change, the resentment would remain until a system eventually arises that does not reward cognitive ability. In fact, such a systemic change is currently being endorsed by the left for that very reason: affirmative action, in which the change in conditions and means of achievement is "don't be Asian or white" and "be black or hispanic".
"The rank order would remain similar through any systemic change except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability, which would defeat the whole purpose of education. "
The WHOLE purpose of education, really? Perhaps this is naive, but I had thought that at least PART of the purpose of education was to...y'know...educate students. Ranking them by cognitive ability[1] could surely be done with much less time and expense than is usually invested into education.
Now, if I were to complain about all the ways in which modern educational systems do trade away "ability to effectively educate students" to better optimize "ability to legibly rank students against one another" I'd be typing all day. But while I'm not fully convinced Woolery's idea has merit, it at the very least seems to be trying to exploit the rank-students function in order to better execute the help-students-learn function, which is thinking the right direction, at least.
[1] Presupposing, of course, that "cognitive ability" is just one thing that can be summarized neatly, which seems dubious at best.
I can see where I was unclear.
"which would defeat the whole purpose of education"
was referring to
"except those that divorce the educational system from cognitive ability"
I wasn't saying that the whole purpose of education was to rank order students, but rather that systemic changes that make cognitive ability less relevant to education outcomes would be contrary to the purpose of education.
metagaming is supposed to refer to emergent behaviors. I.e. things that aren't hardcoded by the ruleset. I don't think Affirmative Action could reasonably be considered metagaming if it's literally encoded in the Law of the Land.
Metagaming includes players reacting (by changing their behavior) to changes in the rules.
yeah but like, "don't be asian" isn't really a voluntary behavior. (Unless we're going down the "race-fluid" road?) idk, I sense that one of us is misunderstanding something.
It's an open secret that Asian applicants applying to very competitive schools should do as much as possible to obfuscate their Asian-ness.
Eh... I mean, somehow I feel like lying/obfuscation is more along the lines of "gaming the system" than "metagaming vs your peers". But fair enough.
>Usually those who whine about the meta gamers are just salty they're not as good at the game but prefer to blame that on the existence of the meta rather than accept that they're worse at the game and would likely continue to be worse regardless of any meta.
I’m not sure I agree that people who prefer strategy formulation to rank optimization in games are probably butt hurt whiners who fail at everything they do. Maybe some are. On the flip side, maybe some people who crutch meta and stomp their feet at game re-balancing do so because change might force them to devise strategy instead of learning it ready-made from a guide.
Affirmative action is your idea in action already. It's already evident why people overrepresented in the educational clergy like systemic overhauls. What more proof do you need where your suggestion will lead? It's obvious that people (in this case the midwits in the education system) will abuse standardized systemic overhauls to enact systems that increasingly divorce cognitive ability with academic outcomes.
As an aside, meta gamers don't generally whine about nerfs or buffs in games where the cost of switching strategies is low because they're the least emotionally attached to strategies. Meta gamers meta game because they want to win more. If one strategy gets nerfed and another in turn becomes strong, meta gamers are most willing to switch because winning matters more to them than non-meta gamers, who tend to play less and whine more on gaming message boards.
You might be confused by the whining in games like MMOs that require significant investment into your character because they play a certain class that got nerfed, and meta gamers tend to be overrepresented among players of overpowered classes.
I’m confused how I adopted affirmative action and liberal politics by suggesting that meta shakeups might indicate kids favor exploration and discovery in education over rank optimization, and that children might then learn better that way.
I’m so tired of people attaching a bullshit, 1 DOF political spectrum to everything. I could tell you I don’t favor affirmative action but you’d just say I do (as you just did) and the last thing I want to do right now is defend a policy I don’t defend.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Sorry, I think my combative tone understandably led you to misunderstand me. I'm not saying you support AA. I'm saying the system you proposed would lead to AA and AA-like overhauls even in excess of what we've had so far.
Let me clarify. In sum, your proposal is that the education system should periodically and frequently enact systemic overhauls in order to improve student engagement and thereby learning. My counterpoint, albeit not very clearly put, was to consider who would be coming up with and implementing these systemic overhauls. The answer is obvious: those currently in the education system, probably higher ranking administrative staff. The problem then also becomes obvious: progressive rot is pervasive among these people, and so giving them a mandate to enact systemic overhauls only makes it easier for them to further degrade education.
I remember a very long time ago, reading a blogger talking about this problem with game design, and suggesting that politics suffers from a similar problem - as people "play to win" within the rules set by the constitution, they start to discover edge cases or degenerate behaviors, things that are technically legal but violate the norms that the original framers expected.
So my tongue-in-cheek proposal is that we should subtly randomize the rules for elections each time to prevent people from overlearning the "current meta." Hand out a couple extra electoral votes each year so that politicians aren't exclusively catering to the same few swing states every time. Randomize which justices hear a case to make it harder to rely on a friendly court supporting everything you do. And so on.
It's very important for politicians to make sure school performance can't be systematically compared (because then they might look bad).
Occasionally changing the school system, tinkering with the grading, and so on, ensures that it becomes much harder.
I've actually been working on a strategy videogame designed to not have much meta. The variables from game to game change enough that adhering to a meta is counterproductive (like the chess variants that randomize the back line)
I'm trying to get a high score in a high randomization game right now, and it's aggravating as hell. "Strategy" and "variables" are enemies. The meta becomes "save and reroll until it likes you."
In game random outcomes are different than what I'm talking about. Think of how the Catan board changes from game to game but stays the same once within the game. This prevents people from figuring out the best thing to do on the board before they see the map, but let's a player still reason and plan in a deterministic environment. (Catan has other randomness but you get the idea)
I claimed no meta but obviously there are going to be some high level stable "strategies" from game to game, like not suiciding all your units.
But that may just be bad design, and presumably Legionaire is trying to make a good game and not a bad game... Using randomization doesn't *have* to ever result in a net advantage or disadvantage for you and thus encourage save scumming. For example, Fischer Random chess where you play 2 games, 1 as black & 1 as white (thereby ensuring that any greater or less advantage of black is balanced by construction). Now it is hard to have learned much, if anything, about any given board position in advance (because there are so many), it is completely fair and balanced, and you can see everything from the start as it remains a perfect-information fully-observable game with no randomness or variables after the setup, and it is all up to you to play well or poorly; if you lose, it's all your fault.
And for other kinds of games, you can change the randomness to make good use of the randomness involve skill, so you are never 'doomed': you just didn't make good use of it. (Sampling-without-replacement mechanisms often achieve this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pffcsPkWwBPyLE6Ym/what-does-a-gambler-s-verity-world-look-like#6sr3Q7qsns4Cwznon Even if you 'get unlucky', that always makes you 'luckier' later on, so there is no such thing as net bad luck, there is just bad strategy.) This is a good test bed for meta-learning too, where you have to learn how to learn: what information to invest in early on so as to update optimally on the fly and learn to beat the current game.
YES! I've had that idea as well. You could easily program a game/environment to mutate from test to test, across many variables, and have a single agent train in this. In theory it should eventually converge on a model that is generally capable of behaving well across the space the environment variables covered. If the space covers enough, you could end up with some sort of very general agent.
Chess960 goes from 0 variables to 1, and still has meta, all the standard Chess strategies are still up and running. "Protect your king", "keep your pawns connected", "lead with your weaker pieces and back them up with the stronger ones". Openings are no longer reliable, but the Bongcloud Attack still loses every time. Poker has much higher randomization, and I think everyone understands Poker and other card games all have significant meta. It also has unwinnable hands.
Rollover luck is certainly more fun than truly random luck, but still falls into the same category. If it takes four shots to take down an enemy, and you miss one shot out of ten, the guy who misses on shot 1 loses to the guy who misses on shot 5, and that's just how that exchange will go.
For each variable, the meta will resemble Poker's options; either build around the average result so that you're okay in all circumstances, or build around a specific result so you win if it comes up and lose if it doesn't. I cannot imagine a variable that manages to get around this.
The 960 variant disolves one part of the meta, the board state. If you wanted to break the other strategies you described, you could randomly determine the attributes of the pieces (all paws can move 2, queens can't go diagonal, etc.) I've found excessive changes like this to be not fun. There's too much to learn and think about all at once, even in a game that takes hours. People like some consistency, but some change as well.
My game has technology that unlocks from a tech tree, but the tech tree is random from game to game and there are more techs than can be on the tech tree, so some techs will/won't be in a game with eachother. This creates a scenario where the timing and attributes of units vary wildly from game to game, but within the game you can predict it all
That's... not how it works. Even with random elements, there is going to be an optimal play for any given situation. A game doesn't need to be fully deterministic to have a meta.
Your definition of meta is too broad to be useful. For any game or any situation there is an optimal choice. Meta implies a known meta. The key to keeping the game interesting is keeping that unknown. Changing game rules or quantities accomplishes this and relates to the post of "shaking up the meta". Well shaking it up every single game is a game with no stable meta from game to game.
Additionally, if many or all of your choices are equally optimal, then it's hardly an interesting choice, a hallmark of good game design.
Don't schools already do this? Every 6 to 12 months all grades are finalized and a new class starts with a clean slate.
You are lumping multiple distinct groups into a single market segment. There are people that love finding/figuring out the meta/optimal play, and there are people who enjoy knowing the meta because they want to perform well with a casual investment.
Even if you did scoreboard wipes in school, the people who are better at certains subjects would stay better. Maybe one month you rank math higher than English and the next month the opposite but I don't see how that changes anyone's behavior.
>There are people that love finding/figuring out the meta/optimal play, and there are people who enjoy knowing the meta because they want to perform well with a casual investment.
That’s true.
Games need to be interesting, because being interesting is their only value. When's the last time you needed a shakeup for your chair, or your water pipes?
I think it's potentially a good idea for education, to prevent what Eliezer called "guessing the teacher's password". I think more commonly, teachers call it "teaching to the test".
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password
Ideally students are not spending so long on the exact same topic that a meta is able to form. How long is the class spending on the concept of heat conduction, before moving on to the next topic? A week? Less? And every time it gets brought up it will have a different example, with a different homework sheet to fill out. The children have no meta, only the teachers do.
A) My working model of epistemology indicates that finding truth is mostly a matter of A/B testing things from different angles and perspectives. If you only understand a topic from one angle, you probably don't understand it very well. (I think this is the main reason why exploration/experimentation is fun.) C.f. all the wailing over the U.S. Common Core. E.g. parents have been complaining that they can't help their kids with their multiplication homework, since the parents only know how to perform long-multiplication. Yet the Common Core curriculum is asking kids to show their work by other means, such as via lattice. My reaction to which, is:
> The Common Core methods look pretty straight-forward to me. In a sane world where these parents actually understood the *concept* of multiplication *intuitively* (and not merely as a rigid algorithm), the Common Core methods would be no big deal.
This isn't "shaking up the meta" in *precisely* the way that Woolery described. But it rhymes with a related idea, which I call "adversarial variance" (for lack of a better term), and I suspect Woolery might be using the whole "metagaming the ladder" idea as a crutch to gesture towards it. (I've been meaning to write a post which explains this in greater detail. Alas, it's been languishing in draft-hell for many moons now. But maybe this thread will motivate me to attend to it.)
B) I think it's not just about topic, but also about the style of presentation. E.g. in highschool, the vast majority of my peers simply committed the relevant buzzwords to memory just long enough to pass the next exam, only to quickly forget the material for all eternity. Like, they know it's going to be a multiple-choice, paper-&-pencil exam. And they know it's NOT going to be a project or demonstration with curveballs that might more-deeply probe their competency. The equilibrium is driven by both teachers and students.
Contrast this with The PSmith's book review [0] on Russian Math Circles (circle = club). The kids are given problems which may or may not have known solutions, and given a chance to really grind their noggins against them over the course of several months. The example given is where Zvonkin coaxes a bunch of 3-yr-olds (lol) to solve "5 choose 2" from scratch (lmao) by showering them with examples of the problem in different contexts. Now, can we incorporate any of this into public education? Well, replacing education with circles wholesale seems like a non-starter for a number of reasons. But I think there's a potential argument for at least aspiring in this direction of attacking things from different angles.
AFAIK, the current "teach to the test" metagame is being driven by uni admissions. Teachers feel that they don't have enough latitude to do anything different. But if, for example, the U.S. College Board tried to add a few curveballs to their precious scan-trons periodically (like how Google keeps SEO marketers on their toes by continually tweaking Page Rank), then maybe (just maybe!) students would be more incentivized to learn the material on a deeper level than "long-multiplication or bust".
(Although this is all assuming that the purpose of the education system is education. Which, as Anomie reminds us, is plainly not the case. Also, the implementation would be botched. 100%. It's inevitable. But one can dream. Also, <mumble mumble> "Seeing Like A State" <mumble mumble> "legibility".)
[0] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by
I am living your first paragraph right now with a really great RTS game called Beyond All Reason. It's literally killing my interest which sucks cause the game is exactly my personal jam.
By most people's presumed expectation, (children's) education is supposed to prepare a child for adult life. There's a yardstick for success there that is independent of test scores and teacher recommendations. A 1600 SAT and a glowing review from the superintendent at Eton does your child zero good if what the world needs is a biochemist and all your child knows how to do is write really good literary fiction.
Now, the world is rarely so regimented that it comes down to needing one specialty, and your kid is likewise going to have some skills outside of writing. Nevertheless, the market drives what's successful more than some arbitrary cabal of education reformers. They don't get to shake up the meta. That's reality's job. All the reformers can do is fail to keep up.
...Mate, meta shakeups are only enjoyable because there's almost no stakes involved. When it's a matter of life and death like school performance, it stops being fun.
The whole point of school is evaluation and filtering. Clearing records would defeat the entire purpose.
Parents are going to hate that. What they want are stable standards of success so they can determine if their kids are being evaluated fairly.
You might be right. I’m a parent, though, and I’d much rather see my kid get better at developing new strategies than simply memorizing old ones. He’s a top student but it’s clear that he’s prioritized rank optimization over exploration in academics, while when it comes to gaming, which he loves, he plays off meta for novelty until shakeups, then he has a blast finding the new optimal approach. Once he does, he’s back to off-meta.
Kids are going to hate it even more than their parents. The time of life one is most obsessed with fairness and how it shakes out with your peers is the time of life you are going to shake up and be "yeah we're being deliberately unfair, sucks to be you".
Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired. Good luck and have an enjoyable time!"
Also, have you *never* heard the amount of bitching about such meta shakeups by gamers? Suddenly trusty builds are nerfed, strategies no longer work, and the entire game is upended. Few to nobody goes "yippee, this is such fun!", the tendency is "they changed it now it's awful and I hate it".
I'm a parent too, and I'm torn. When I was my son's age, just entering college, I consciously prioritized exploration over getting the best grades, consistent with not failing the class. I got mostly B's. Later I came to think that was a mistake, and I should have balanced the two goals more equally.
There's another consideration: In life, there often isn't a dominant strategy, such that what there are multiple good ones, and which count as "good" in any given context is sensitively dependent on what other people are doing. It isn't even always best to be the highest performing individual around, there are institutional contexts in which that is a mistake. I'm a teacher, and most of us in my experience want to provide our students with multiple paths to an acceptable level of success. A "dominant strategy" is inconsistent with this.
"Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired. Good luck and have an enjoyable time!"
Hah! I've had several jobs like that. One of them in government.
>Imagine if you go in to work in the morning and this kind of shake up happened to you. "Okay, that was your job and role yesterday, but today is completely different and you have to figure out for yourself what we want you to do and how to do it. And if you can't, you get fired.
As far as I had any actual implementation of a shakeup in mind, this wouldn’t be it. What you describe here would be chaotic and counterproductive. What I was trying to suggest was more of a directional possibility than some kind of literal, absolute shakeup. Plus, I would hope the faculty would be the most important part of any such change so whatever shakeup occurred would be something they prepared for and implemented. And since the stakes are lower with more iterations I think the sense students would get of being “fired” could be far lower than it is from failing a semester is currently. But you being a teacher are the expert, and know students better than I do.
I was a poor student. I’m also not well educated (I got kicked out of the lowest admissions state school for poor grades). The argument for rank optimization is that it results in our best prospects rising to the top, I guess like the kids at Harvard, Columbia and other top schools who’ve received so much press lately. But I think it alienates the kids in the bottom half and causes them to disengage. This is how it’s always been and maybe it’s for the best. But if one of the goals of academics is to teach all students, regardless of their fortune or talent how to survive and be self sufficient in a changing world then maybe there’s some small lesson that can be learned from shakeups. Maybe not.
Edit: I mistakenly attributed the above quote to Victor. He was responding to the quote, not asserting it, as I wrongly indicated.
It was Deiseach's scenario, not mine. What I have experienced, more than once, and never as a teacher, was more on the order of "Your job description just changed, and now we want you to work on a project completely unrelated to what we hired you for." Which was sometimes exciting, but just as often aggravating.
Yep. There is no yowl quite like the collective rage of a game's regulars when its makers implement even a tiny nerf. And games which try to inoculate themselves against hard metas (e.g. randomized game maps from the get-go) don't build loyal regular player bases nearly as well.
Yep the yowl is loud about shakeups (and about the grind too) but still meta shakeups are increasingly standard practice in long-running games, and I’d guess it’s because many developers are convinced that under the right circumstances it increases engagement and/or player bases (the bottom line).
I’d personally choose periodic shakeups over rigorously adhering to the balance at launch and I think the increasing implementation of shakeups indicates that at least developers think it’s a useful tool.
This makes me think of Elite Overproduction Theory. The idea that if you have too many elites and not enough elite jobs, the surplus will make trouble.
If you have X noble fiefs in medieval France, but >X young nobles, the ones without anywhere to inherit will try and start a war to conquer land for themselves. Ruining everyone else's plans to spend their time hunting, jousting, and taxing the peasantry. Or if you have Y professorssorships of 19th century German Cinema, and >Y graduates with who are only qualified to be a professor of 19th century German Cinema. They will create DEI policies that demand the universities replace their current crop of old white professors.
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Where this differs from a gaming meta is that in games people who did well under the old meta get board and look forward to exploring the new. In this system people who did well under the old usually dislike the change.
"in games people who did well under the old meta get bored and look forward to exploring the new" -- that is very much not my experience across several game genres. I wish, frankly.
I was pretty active in EVE Online in the years leading up to its demise. The Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) were so satisfied with the existing stale meta that they happily resorted to doxxing and real-life harassment of opposing players in their attempts to preserve it.
Pandemic Legion, who had more-or-less a monopoly on the use of supercapital ships under the old system, complained quite loudly at the announced changes which would make them merely extremely powerful, as opposed to invulnerable (barring catastrophically stupid mistakes on their part).
I like this idea, especially since by varying the ranking structures you can reward achievement in a variety of disciplines, cultivating well-rounded students (e.g. tests first-quarter, then art projects second quarter, team-based charity work in a 3rd quarter, etc), in addition to more-engaged ones.
Since I keep seeing postings for programming jobs (I'm studying math and CS in college, but most employers only care about the latter), here's what I'm wondering: what DOES it take to be hired as a programmer, anyways?
I am a hiring manager for programmers.
My employer has recently cracked down on our old style of just asking programming questions and figuring out if you can program.
We now ask a bunch of formulaic questions with fairly obvious expected answers (at least to corporate-insiders) about how you engage with the workplace and colleagues, which you are incentivized to lie about rather than giving the most typical, honest answer "that's never come up" or "I just come to work and get my job done".
I dislike this style of interview question, but the amazing thing is... almost everyone answers reasonably honestly (I am guessing based on my judgement of their demeanor; if you are a sociopath you almost certainly could get past this by just lying).
And the sad thing for my position is: those mostly pretty honest answers end up doing a much better job of figuring out whether you'll work hard/not be an asshole/communicate clearly and honestly/actually test your code rather than pretending you tested it, than the old style of "just answer a bunch of simple coding questions" did.
So, yes, you want to be able to answer fizzbuzz. More, you want to be able to engage with *precisely the question that was asked*, not pattern match it to a thing you've memorized/done before. Know what you know, know what you're talking about, admit when you don't know, ask good questions, are basically what this is testing.
But after that... I'm afraid you want good answers to how you engage with colleagues, what are the corporate expectations of how to deal with a misbehaving colleague, what to do when a project is poorly planned/gets behind, and a dozen other questions in this vein.
These are actually kind of hard for a lot of people to just memorize, which is what makes them higher signal, although (gag) you could probably read 2-3 corporate management/self help style books and have good ideas for the types of questions here.
Oh, and one more thing: demonstrate that you have at least the vaguest interest in the position. Like, you've tried the team's product at least once, you've thought about it for more than 30 seconds, you have muted praise, ideas for how to make things better, but don't assume you know it'll be easy to introduce your favorite improvement. People like thinking their coworker is excited to work on their project, but if you're over the top about it it comes off as ass kissing.
This is an old article I saw recently that I thought was good. Apparently the stuff about the state of the job market isn’t so relevant, but the rest is.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
TL;DR, your job is not to be a programmer, but to Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue. Tailor your representations of yourself accordingly. Also, meet people who might know someone who might want to hire you; meet them in person and make sure to represent that you’d be a good hire. (This is called networking.)
> TL;DR, your job is not to be a programmer, but to Reduce Costs and Increase Revenue.
That’s banally true of every job. Tells you nothing.
This is a good article, thanks for sharing it. I agree with pretty much everything there.
Source: I've worked in the industry for about a decade.
For new college grads, employers are looking for 2 things
1) Can you actually program? This is more of a bar than you'd think - fizzbuzz is a very real filter. Being able to actually think through a problem and write code to solve it is the vast majority of what you actually do on the job. Whiteboards are generally testing for this and also serving as a proxy for general intelligence.
2) Can you function in a professional environment? This means following instructions, showing up, being pleasant to work with, being engaged in meetings, etc. Asking for help from your team is fine, lying about how much work you've gotten done is clearly not. Every workplace is a complex social environment and you need to be able to effectively navigate it, there's no real way around this.
Unfortunately, companies only have very noisy signals for determining 1 and 2 so it can be challenging to get your foot in the door in the industry. I think my best advice (although this may be out of date) is to try to go through a service that does coding-tests and screening upfront. I know Indeed used to have something like that but it may have been phased out. However, I'm sure there are other companies with similar products. I personally had a very high conversion rate from phone-screens to in-person interviews when I was job hunting but a very low conversion rate from applications to phone-screens and services that pre-screen candidates let me jump straight to phone-screens which saved me a lot of wasted time filling out applications.
There's also several other BS hurdles in the form of recruiters/resume keyword screens, etc. Referrals are highly coveted because they can often get you past all of this. Social networking is also very powerful since once you're established in the industry, people very often pull from their pool of former co-workers and how you were to work with in the past is the best possible signal of how you will be to work with in the future. Any future job hunting I do will probably pull from my former work connections first and I got my current position with a no-interview job offer from a former manager.
Happy to answer any questions or provide more specifics if you want to ask.
Sorry to interfere, but the chance to ask a question I have been pondering was just too tempting to pass up.
The question is: What level of LeetCode problem solving is actually needed to pass job interviews? Like do you solve something like an easy, a medium or a hard problem in half an hour?
I have spent some time on LeetCode, though I am actually a math/physics guy, and I actually got no real idea what my level in that esoteric art is compared to real programmers.
As an interviewer, I am not trying to gotcha you. I am trying to give you an opportunity to show off. What I want is to watch you solve a problem which is new to you. (If you say you're particularly good at some niche thing on your CV or have lots of experience in that thing, and it's possible to ask coding questions about that thing, expect to see questions about that thing!)
Different people have different approaches for exactly how to achieve that; personally, I tend to start with a very simple fizzbuzz level question, which also works as an ice-breaker, then add complications and/or ask progressively more complex things until we hit one you actually have to stop and think about. Then I try to persuade you to think out loud and/or we have a conversation as you work your way to the solution.
If you have trouble with the fizzbuzz level, that's a bit of a red flag, but after that point trotting out memorised answers will work against you, because I am deliberately looking for something you /haven't/ memorised the answer to.
Worst of all, though, are "oh, yeah, I've seen that problem before! I don't remember the solution, though" followed by no attempt to solve it, and "oh, yeah, I've seen that problem before!" followed by a memorised answer to a question which is slightly different to the one I asked. Please don't do that :)
What I /do/ expect is familiarity with common data structures and algorithms, and the knowledge of which ones are most appropriate for what kind of problem and why; and what the various tradeoffs are. I am also looking for awareness of what is happening one level of abstraction either side of whatever you are working with. Practicing leetcode problems does help internalise these things, if somewhat indirectly. If I haven't picked much of that up from you thinking out loud as you go, expect to be quizzed about why you did what you did when you're done.
The majority of whiteboards would be easy with some of the companies with a higher bar capping out at medium. Additionally, most whiteboards don't care about perfect syntax and you can often get away with handwaving parts of your implementation (although not always and getting called out on something and having no idea how to answer it isn't going to bode well for your chances).
Also some roles expect understanding architecture which isn't something leetcode will teach you although most entry level jobs don't have architecture questions.
The worst part of the whole thing is that 95% of programming work requires no understanding of any of the stuff you need to do well on leetcode/whiteboards.
I think whiteboards are just the industry-agreed upon proxy for (can you program + general intelligence) which are a proxy for job performance.
> Can you actually program? This is more of a bar than you'd think - fizzbuzz is a very real filter
Yes; I've fiddled around with Python, Swift, HTML, CSS, React, Svelte, and R (though I'm not an expert at any of them).
Consider not putting it that way anywhere a recruiter/employer might see or hear. Some of those aren't programming languages, and "fiddled around with" does not inspire confidence.
In the programming part of the interview you will be given a problem similar to the ones on leetcode.com, hackerrank.com etc. You will be expected to code up a solution to this in your preferred language, which ideally is also the language the place you are applying to uses. What the interviewer wants is to see you solve a problem from cold; they really want to see that you know a variety of data structures and algorithms, how to choose between them, how to combine them when trying to solve a problem, how to express what you want to happen, and how to debug the inevitable bugs you introduce.
Practice the problems on these and similar sites when you're "fiddling around". Consider doing advent of code.
Practice especially thinking out loud as you work the problem; the interviewer will be much happier with a stream of conscience than they will with half an hour of silent pondering.
Note that I'm describing what employers are looking for, not trying to understand your specific circumstances.
Speaking of your specific circumstances, it looks like you're at MIT. That's one of those places that should easily be able to provide an alumnus network and reputation strong enough to get you past most of the annoying entry-level barriers in the field. I'm sure the school has resources specifically for this. I would suggest using them.
Does anyone speak Latin and would they be willing to look over some lines in a screenplay I've written? I don't have absolute faith in the method I used, which amounted to pasting lines into Google Translate and kicking them until they stop moving.
It's supposed to be mediaeval scholarly Latin, not "original" Roman centurion Latin, and I have no idea if that makes any difference.
EDIT: cheers guys! I'm reading through it all now to note down where all the Latin bits are, then I'll PM you.
Can you pm in substack? How?
I have PhD level Latin btw and happy to look at your stuff
Awesome. And I was just gonna use the "Message" button that pops up onmouseover people's usernames. I don't know whether I can add you all to a group chat or if I have to do things individually.
I was an altar boy in the before times but had to use a cheat sheet for my responses so I can’t help you. But you might enjoy this bit of spoken Latin from Lost.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uuIb9rUNYZw
It does sound nice. I realised after writing my thing that Enochian would probably have been a better choice, but Latin just sounds nice. Also Unsong rather cheapened Enochian for me.
Sure, the more details you can give on who the person is the better.
Cheers! Will PM you presently. (Wish I could answer several people at once rather than copy/pasting the same message each time.)
I've spent some time in the modern Latin speaking communities, and would be willing to lend a hand.
Cheers! Will PM you presently. (Wish I could answer several people at once rather than copy/pasting the same message each time.)
I'm far from fluent, but I've gone to Mass in Latin for decades and have picked up a fair bit, so I'd be happy to take a look.
Hello - I sent everyone a PM last night, but the message included a link and I don't have much faith in Substack as a platform right now. Would you mind confirming it went through? (If you got the message but have changed your mind about reading the script, that's fine, I'd just like to know if it went through.)
Cheers! Will PM you presently. (Wish I could answer several people at once rather than copy/pasting the same message each time.)
mr Scott, I'm continuing my log(n)-ual market on your P(zoonosis). Last statement I know of is 90%, would you like to make a new statement?
https://manifold.markets/warty/what-will-be-scott-alexanders-pzoon-3e1affe0e987
Has anyone done research into the effectiveness of at home red light therapy masks?
My wife has been using a red light stick that she rubs on her face at night but wants a mask which seem to cost $200 to $400 dollars. It smacks of hokum to me and as I've been trying to research which is the best one to get I've run across claims about what it helps to cure that remind me of the "Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?" All that seems too good to be true but even the claims that it reduces wrinkles and fine lines seem solely based on anecdotes by people who are using lots of other creams and lotions in addition to the red light therapy.
I appreciate anyone sharing anything they've found while looking into this.
I second microneedling, and also tretinoin, and an estrogen based cream if she is going through peri-menopause. Those things actually work.
Poked around a bit using GPT, and best harvest was this article, which itself is not good but which does have a bunch of footnotes links meta-analyses of research. https://drruscio.com/red-light-therapy-pros-and-cons/
If your wife's main goal is to combat skin aging, I'm pretty sure the most effective tool currently is microneedling, done with a high quality device. My very brainy and research-oriented dermatologist agrees. Best source of good devices, as well as good general info, is website OwnDoc.com, which I have used and found trustworthy.
Peter Attia and his team did a literature review of the many claims about red mighty therapy recently. He covered many of the different sizes benefits and was mostly unimpressed by the quality of research.
For reduction of visible signs of skin aging he concluded the evidence from human data is "positive, but high likelihood of industry bias" and rates the possible magnitude if effect 1/5 "may have very modest benefits." However, this is not an area he focused on in great detail.
Overall, Attia isn't particularly impressed with red light therapy because of low quality evidence, dodgy studies, small effect sizes, and more cost effective alternatives being available for many of the claimed effects.
The episode/article is probably paywalled.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama65/
A fomer girlfriend of mine had one that she spent ~$100 on. She used it multiple times per week and said it made her skin firmer for a while, although I didn't reeeeeally notice a difference in how she looked, but then she stopped using it because she thought it wasn't working anymore. I dunno...homeostasis kicked in at some point, maybe? Just a guess. Anyway, based on her experience (and by extension, mine), I would say it's not worth it.
Totally unrelated, all my lights at home turn red after 7 PM and it feels great. Only issue is neighbors thinking we run a brothel.
What’s hard about IVF? I hear it referred to as uncomfortable but don’t know why or what that means
Multiple injections every day, some the of the medications burn. Intramuscular injections are scary to give to yourself. Maintaining intense behavior, medication, and sometimes food restrictions or diet (no sex! no orgasms! no painkillers!). Risk of illness after the procedure (I feel most women get this at least a little, its gross, look up OHSS). Moodiness, irritability, you aren't really yourself. Disrupted sleep. Severe constipation. You also spend every available moment on the phone with either the provider or your insurance company navigating and negotiating what is going on (little time for hobbies or friends or fun). You have to educate yourself on your procedure and understand the choices - which is another hobby in itself. Even great IVF providers fuck up all the time and you have to be really on top of what they prescribe, order, and charge you.
Some people mortgage or sell their houses to pay for this all. Some people take on extra jobs or switch jobs for the health insurance coverage. Even with coverage you will spend $thousands on additional costs. You probably have to do multiple cycles, so it like year(s) of your life. There is no guarantee. No one understands and says weird and inappropriate things to you.
Freddie Deboer has recently been ranting about his miserable experience with his wife's IVF stuff.
It is very stressful. The stakes are high and the results uncertain. And it's a huge hassle, especially for someone with a full time jobs. The woman has to drive in for an ultrasound at the beginning of every day while using the ovary-stimulating drug, generally in rush hour traffic. Once the eggs are ripe she has to take a day off, with 24 hrs notice, and get knocked out for the laparoscopic egg retrieval procedure. Most people wake up from that feeling like they were run over by a truck. Then there's a suspenseful wait to see whether the eggs are fertilized -- sometimes they're not -- then another to see whether they implant. And if one does the woman comes in for frequent early morning ultrasounds to check that the fetus is growing correctly. One time in 10 or so it is discovered during one of the checks that the fetus has died. 10/10 do not recommend discovering fetal demise as a way to start your day.
"What’s hard about IVF?"
Tell me you are not a female person without telling me you are not a female person 😁
IVF needs you to produce lots of eggs, then those eggs are harvested. These are invasive, not-fun procedures, and you may have to do a couple of rounds of these.
Just look up the basic routine and see for yourself.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ivf/what-happens/
Besides all that Marybeth says:
-- many of the injections require the non-egg-having partner to stick the egg-having partner with a needle in the buttocks at home, which is as awkward and scary as it sounds
-- after you go through all the extensive and expensive prep work for a cycle... most of the time it just fails and you have to try it all over again. And the knowledge that you're going to all that trouble for something with that high a risk of failure adds to the discomfort.
Man, I can't believe that the English language has never invented terms more succinct than "non-egg-having partner" and "egg-having partner".
I still remember my daughter's first words, she looked right up and said "egg-having partner".
I think women in relationships with women wayyy overindex on using IVF (often "reciprocally", where one gets pregnant using the egg from the other) so this is one place where I think it makes sense to be extra clear about roles.
Yes, that makes sense. "Non-egg-having partner" to refer to men and post-menopausal lesbians, "egg-having partner" to refer to either the women undergoing the treatment or to a lesbian partner who is not. Couldn't be clearer.
Expensive, takes a long time, requires many injections, the large doses of hormones can make you feel ill or emotional, the swelling of the ovaries is physically painful. Different people find different parts more or less challenging.
A friend of mine said she was charged $20K for a single round of the procedure. It failed. She didn't have the free cash to try another round.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that part. My insurance covered the procedure, but I had to swap job titles with a friend at the hospital where I worked in order to get the right kind of insurance. The drugs I injected cost so much per month -- thousands -- that I could actually bargain with pharmacies about how much of a deal they would give me.
Apologies if I'm being nosey, but was the procedure successful?
Fuck no. I had 8 procedures. About the 2nd or 3rd one I got pregnant, and started the routine of going in every morning for an ultrasound of the fetus. It looked like a lima bean. One day it had a little fast-twinkling star in it. That was its heart beating. Then a few days later there was no twinkle. Fetal demise. I was such an unbelievably bad shock that for the only time in my waking life I actually wondered for about 10 secs whether I was dreaming. Later procedures did not produce a pregnancy. But a couple years later I adopted my daughter, and now I'm at peace with how it all worked out. That nontwinkle was bad bad bad tho.
Thread on success rate of IVF by age and other factors: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1690117043172118529.
Thread showing increase in percentage of ART cycles that resulted in live births over time, broken down by age: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1678229628345786368.
Thread on varying success rates based on policies of different providers: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1708562560436371856.
Sorry that it was such a nightmare for you. I don't know what the success rate of IVF is, but my anecdata suggests it's low. Non of my friends who tried it were successful.
In an effort to find a solution for my intermittent insomnia (esp. mid-sleep awakening, but sometimes sleep onset insomnia), I have worked myself up into a state where it is harder than ever to sleep. I tried Trazodone (no luck) and Gabapentin (helpful, but I got spooked about staying on it long-term), Klonopin (ditto), and am now dabbling in various supplements (magnesium, pharmaGABA, 0.3mg melatonin, L-theanine, maybe apigenin or CBD/CBN next) trying to find the right mix. Yes I know about screen time, sleep hygeine, temperature, rituals, podcasts, relaxing music, progressive muscle relaxation, box breathing, blackout shades, ear plugs...and employ many of these tactics to little or no avail.
I'm male, 38 years-old and wondering if this is a normal ritual of aging (worsening sleep) as it seems like many of my male peers are experiencing (both with kids and without...I'm currently without). Alternatively, I've begun to wonder if this is all downstream from GAD -- maybe GAD is keeping me up at night worrying about the work week, my future, GAD is causing me to obsess over sleep and create an illusion of control, and all of the medication/supplement options are not really going to be a long-term solution.
Sorry for the info-dump. I usually get high quality responses here so I prefer to pose questions here before I speak to my psychiatrist about the same ideas.
Apologies if this was already asked/mentioned, but are you recording your actions and sleep quality daily?
I've found this to be the greatest help in solving insomnia. It helped me quickly catch onto some bad effects that I wasn't suspecting (eg. Beta blockers decreasing my sleep quality over a period of 2 months). There's just so many variables at play at the same time, I recommend going full Enlightenment empiricist on this.
I think most of those sleep hygiene things, such as having a bedtime ritual, are pretty weak interventions. There's one, though, that made a huge difference for me: Using the bed only for sleep (and sex). By the time life forced me to make this change, I'd ben using my bed as a couch for 15 years or so. I read in bed, talked on the phone there, studied, wrote papers as an undergrad and grad student, on a clipboard in my lap in bed. And I was a really bad sleeper. Had an especially bad time falling asleep.
So then I moved to another state to do my internship as a clinical psychologist, and worked 60 hour weeks, and did paperwork on weekends, and all of that just left me no time for hanging out in bed reading and chatting. I'd come home late , eat, slip into bed and turn off the light. My sleep was much better, but I thought that was because I was tired all the time from work. But after the internship was over I tried to resume my old ways, reading in bed with a cup of tea beside me, talking on the phone, etc. -- and I couldn't do it. Getting into bed, even though I was sitting up with pillows behind me, made me get very sleepy. I started craving a nap, even when I wasn't sleep deprived. I couldn't enjoy reading in bed because very soon I became too sleepy to feel any interest in the book.
So what had happened is that I had undone the association I had between bed and relaxed wakefulness. Bed now signaled sleep to some part of my brain I could not reason with. And my sleep continued to be much better, even though life after the internship was much less exhausting. So I say, try that. Do not read books, watch tv, or scroll shit on your phone in bed. Try not to even do any that in the bedroom. Put the TV in another room. Buy a cheap alarm clock to avoid having a reason to keep your phone by your bed. Get rid of the lamp by the bed that makes it easy to read. And retrain your brain that bed = sleep. If someone had told me to try that I would have refused, because I felt nice and relaxed while reading in bed, and that seemed like the ideal state to be in before turning off the light and going to sleep. I was wrong though. Give it a go. And if you are awake more than 15 mins, have something simple set up to do in another room til you feel sleepy. Do boring paperwork. Play solitaire, preferably with real cards. Wash the dishes.
I've been experimenting with the interesting things I can do (consciously) during my hypnogogic states before sleep. While researching other peoples' experiences, I came across the following article. If you're a person who experiences visual or aural effects during your hypnogogic state, this might be helpful. Continued...
Link here (because Substack is only allowing short replies)..
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GwGeksTkFQbm6Hbrx/how-to-use-hypnagogic-hallucinations-as-biofeedback-to
Have you tried regular intense exercise? Join a gym and swim 2000 yards every morning. That'll do wonders for your anxiety.
THC also works great for sleep for many people.
Second this - exercise was the one major intervention not on your list. If you exercise intensely, you sleep longer and sleep more deeply.
If you're in a State where it's legal, and in a job where it's allowed, and you have no family history of psychosis, a 5-10mg THC edible (or a quick smoke if you're old fashioned like that) before bed won't kill you and may help. At least it does for me.
Of course, there are some obvious issues with this so would only recommend if you check those boxes and have tried everything else.
I have never liked falling asleep stoned. There was always this zone of vivid chaotic imagery and ideas I had to go through before getting to sleep, and it was so intense it was a bit scary. My daughter has the same thing. We've both found that the only solution is just to plow through it to get to the sweet oblivion on the other side.
Why did you get scared of staying on gabapentin in the long-term? I tapered off of it a couple years ago after taking it for almost a decade, and other than being in horrible pain for a couple weeks, I was completely fine. ...Though, I did need to go back on it at a lower dose because my anti-depressants were causing me to be constantly anxious.
I acknowledge it is silly to fret about the dose I was taking (600mg at night only) but between the loose link to dementia (admittedly at higher doses) and the fear of rebound insomnia eventually, I decided to try to do it without. Yes, I know I am excessively worrying, since losing sleep is a big problem.
If I was you, I'd try going on hydroxyzine until I feel the sleep issues got straightened out. You shouldn't have any trouble getting that prescribed.
Yes, doing lots of things to improve sleep can actually worsen sleep because you worry and obsess about it too much. This is a reason why the CBT approach doesn't work for some people. People without insomnia don't do all these rituals and obsessive sleep hygiene stuff. Sleeping is a kind of letting go, the opposite of control and worry.
There is an alternative approach called Acceptance and Committment Therapy which I've found much more helpful.
There's an app called Sleep School (https://www.sleepschool.org/) that I found helped me improve my sleep, and it uses the acceptance and commitment therapy approach.
There is also the 'natto' approach by Daniel Erichsen (https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Natto-ready-journey-within/dp/B08WPG539G). He also has a youtube channel. I think it's getting at the same thing as acceptance and commitment therapy, but I didn't find it as helpful. But some people rave about it.
Also working on the GAD will probably help as well, but it is possible to sleep even without solving that.
I've never had any sleep issues, but I have noticed that having a bite to eat before bedtime helps me nod off faster. So maybe it would help to try throwing out all those chemicals and have a slice of buttered toast last thing instead.
Presumably it works because the body diverts blood to the stomach for digestion, leaving the brain with less, thus making you more dozy. (That said, I have also read that one should never eat shortly before bedtime, but it works for me! )
Warm milk was always the "going to bed" stereotype.
It's also the right season for turkey.
Make sure your melatonin is taken about an hour before bedtime.
Also, I'd recommend another dose of melatonin 5-7 hours before bedtime.
This is recommended for non-24 disorders, but it's still worth a try.
> 0.3mg melatonin
Hint: Try increasing your dose. I'm told that although ~0.1mg is the amount you need IN YOUR BRAIN, the amount you need IN YOUR MOUTH is a lot more because (as with many other drugs) most of the active ingredient gets lost in between your mouth and your brain. Personally, I used to microdose melatonin myself but my sleep schedule hasn't gotten any less erratic.
On melatonin dosing: https://lorienpsych.com/2020/12/20/melatonin/.
The "Reply" button started overlapping with the comment below while I typed this out. Weird. Someone at Substack should fix this
I'm starting to think I could be qualified to be a developer for Substack, given how incompetent they are
I had this same issue
Have you tried keeping track of what you eat and when? I've found if I have anything with refined sugar after about 4 PM I get anxious and don't sleep well.
I take about 30 mg of melatonin nightly without apparent ill effect.
I'm 24, so don't take me too seriously.
First of all, I'm so sorry you're going through this. I had intermittent insomnia for 15ish years, and then it got terrible after I had my first kid. I did these things, and now I sleep pretty well.
1. Easy things: sound machine, blackout shades, chilly room, limit total caffeine, no caffeine after noon. You're doing all that already.
2. Get your process S and process C cycles aligned via CBTI. Sleep is homeostatic AND daylight-driven, and you have to get those processes in sync. Decide when you need to wake up and go to bed 6 hours before that. Do not nap, read in bed, or wake up at different times. Keep doing that until you are falling asleep quickly and sleeping through the night. Then bring bedtime 15 minutes forward every week (e.g. midnight to 11:45, then 11:30, then 11:15), until you're getting 7-8 hours of sleep -- or whatever amount makes you feel rested.
3. Preserve your natural melatonin by wearing blue light-blocking glasses ~2 hours before bedtime. Melatonin is the "hormone of darkness."
4. Give yourself a clear circadian cue when you wake up with a sunlight lamp. These are cheap on Amazon. As soon as you're awake, turn that puppy on, so your daylight-driven sleep timing process knows that it is morning.
5. If you can't fall asleep at bedtime or you wake up in the middle of the night, get out of bed after ~15 minutes. Go lie on the couch, put on your blue light-blocking glasses before you turn on the light, read something dull, and take about a quarter of a Unisom. When you feel your eyes dragging, go back to bed. Repeat (sans Unisom) if needed.
6. De-catastrophize. Get an Oura ring so you can see that even on bad nights, you're getting a bit of sleep.
Good luck!!
Not to bring up another well known answer, but how much exercise do you get? Finding exercise I enjoy enough to do regularly for years really helped both my anxiety and insomnia. Then other methods you mentioned helped with the last mile so I can now fall asleep within 30-60 minutes of trying. For suggestions, both martial arts and rock climbing have been fun enough to keep me doing them. Depending where you live there may be popular hobby sports around you. All of these could double as a way to socialize if that could help the GAD as well. Best of luck!
I'm sure it may be different for everyone, but for me even just doing 20 pushups before bed (or in the middle of the night if I wake up and have trouble falling back asleep) can really help. Though getting exercise through the day is still important, and for reasons other than sleep as well.
> Yes I know about screen time, sleep hygeine, temperature, rituals, podcasts, relaxing music, progressive muscle relaxation, box breathing, blackout shades, ear plugs...and employ many of these tactics to little or no avail.
I don't see exercise in that list. Have you tried doing some intense cardio (e.g. some or all of an HIIT workout video from YouTube) about 4-6 hours before you try to go to sleep?
It looks like things are getting pretty crazy in Syria again, with the rebels making a major push and capturing Aleppo:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/2/syria-russia-forces-step-up-air-raids-in-a-bid-to-slow-opposition-advance
Does anyone know why this has happened all of a sudden? Does it have anything to do with the political transition in the US?
I know Tulsi Gabbard has been accused (don't know if it's fair or not) of being an Bashar-al-Assad-apologist, and the Trump/MAGA movement is generally sympathetic to Russia, the main ally of the Syrian government, and pretty isolationist.
Are the rebels trying to make one last push before the US government becomes less supportive of them? Or is the timing just a coincidence?
I saw one guy claim it could be related since Trump might remove support for the kurd, so the islamist rebels want to take territory to be prepared to turn against the kurds again later on.
Only very indirectly. Turkey has been revising the regional order in its favor at Russia and Iran's expense for some time. They think Ukraine and Palestine are going to settle down reasonably soon and they'd prepared this offensive for a while so they decided to go now while Iran and Russia are still distracted.
Israel has crushed Hezbollah, which is/was a main part of the military power behind the regime.
I don't have any inside info, but it seems pretty clearly a response to the weakness of Assad's allies: Russia, Iran, and Hezbolah.
From what I have read, it mostly has to do with Assad's supporters being either distracted (like Russia) or weaker (like Iran and Hezbollah). The rebels have also used the last few years, where a ceasefire was in place, to reform their military.
These rebels are not supported by the US; the main group within this coalition, HTS, is labelled a terrorist group by the US and the EU
The head of HTS, Jolani, gave an interview to Frontline a few years ago: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/abu-mohammad-al-jolani/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pr_k47E6zo. You can decide for yourself whether to trust his version more than that of whoever is in charge of designating groups terrorists in the US and the EU.
If I wanted to judge for myself, the last thing I'd look at is what the potential terrorist in question has said.
I'd look at his actions, and even then be very skeptical because terrorist groups have a track record of faking moderation then swerving hard once they have power.
If you look at this guy's interview, he's not doing a particularly good job of faking moderation. The best he's claiming is that he isn't particularly interested in attacking the US or Europe. If that's the best he can offer then I'll take Assad.
We all should take Assad as he’s the least worst option.
>We all should take Assad as he’s the least worst option.
Well, that _does_ make Trump v Harris look good in comparison...
It's fair to consider HTS to not be terrorists. I believe that the terrorist designation came because it formed as a splinter group of al-Qaeda, although since then they've fought al-Qaeda and many observers do not consider HTS to be terrorists. I don't know enough to have an opinion of these guys, but they do seem better than Assad's regime
If you believe that you've likely fallen for propaganda (Assad isn't that bad, he's just not our guy).
HTS are an Al-Qaeda cutout and are your run-of-the-mill radical Jihadists. I'll take the corrupt baathists, thank you very much.
Assad is not simply a corrupt baathiht, he's committed ethnic cleansing and several war crimes, including bombing civilians with chemical weapons. It's fine to believe that Assad's better, but do not water down his crimes
He's obviously not a good guy but I'm under the impression that many (but not all!) of the more sensationalist charges against him are atrocity propaganda more than anything else. If that's "watering down his crimes" so be it. Open to be proven wrong here. The last time I looked into this it was difficult to tell where the American propaganda ended and the Russian propaganda began.
Israel severely disrupted Hezbollah, which was also on the Assad regime's side in Syria. This created a vacuum into which the rebels in Syria could flow and take Aleppo.
This is my understanding as well; that Lebanese Hizballah (who provided large chunks of best fighters for the Assad regime) were too busy getting thoroughly mulched by the Israelis in Lebanon to contribute and that shifted the balance of power.
So to answer @MikeSaintaintoine's question, it's mostly a complete coincidence.
One thing I heard is that Erdogan recently came to a sort of understanding with US, allowing him to own both F-35 fighters and Russian C-400 AA systems (US was against the later deal, withholding the fighters), and there is a possibility that the price of that deal is whipping Turkey-supported rebels into a new offensive. This forces both Russia and Iran to come to Assad's defence, possibly easing things a bit for Israel and Ukraine.
Maybe. But the current offensive is a threat to the Kurds, and the Kurds are our closest allies in Syria. On paper it looks good for the US (Assad, Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are all losing status at the moment), but the effect on the Kurds and their autonomous region may become a net negative.
I think it is more likely that the current push is a result of the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, a weakening due to other considerations (Israel).
The Kurds are also planning an offensive against the Syrian government to take advantage of the current situation.
Source? The Kurds were allied with the Govt. against HTS last I checked but this war is a clusterfuck.
It is a clusterfuck but for now I think the Kurds are more anti-Assad than HTS. Take a look at the current state: https://syria.liveuamap.com/
SDF/Kurds aren't fighting HTS, they're taking territory from the government and possibly securing areas where HTS might repress people like minority Christians.
For a project I am looking for recommendations of psychedelic/surrealist short stories by female/non-cis-male authors. Something in the general direction of "Universal love, said the cactus person" by Scott Alexander himself, or Jorge Luis Borges. Classical, modern, released as a book or blog or whatever, this seemed like the place where people would know that kind of thing. Thanks and much appreciated!
Does https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XI2PfBuOwntslEmZVVc3TRNZpopj93-l/view?usp=sharing qualify as surrealist for your purposes?
This comically late but thanks for putting out your work (I assume it is that). It's not quite what I'm looking for for this program but interesting read nonetheless :)
Got it! Thanks for circling back. (Correctly assumed, by the way!) Good luck finding what you're looking for! :)
Alice Sheldon (wrote under the name James Tiptree jr.) has some really bizarre SF short stories, recommended
If you like old public domain stuff, here's some random stuff I found while trawling through wikisource (though you can probably get these from other places as well):
- Frankenstein (1831) by Mary Shelley
- A Few Hours in a Far-Off Age (1883) by Henrietta Dugdale
Maurice Leblanc was very much a man bro.
Fixed. I'm silly.
Anything by Cate Wurtz, specially ASSCASTLE, smokes and Microwave Planet. Their comics are generally great at giving you a sense of awkward and uncomfortable weirdness and exploring queer themes.
Also I'm really into them even though I'm a cis male because "I have no idea where I fit in the world" is also a pretty applicable theme.
Most things by Alicorn
Everyone I've recommended Piranesi to has loved it, though it's a short novel. Very Borgesian.
+1 to Piranesi, fantastic book
Shirley Jackson perhaps?
Good shout. Similarly Angela Carter.
* http://hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com/ can be thought of as a collection that has many of these, though it is also a bigger thing
* Catherynne M Valente does a lot of these; "The Melancholy of Mechagirl" is a good collection to jump in on
I am an old school programmer looking for a meaningful work in research of immunology. Thanks to crypto I don’t need to work, but half of my family have various autoimmune diseases and allergies, I would love to work for someone fighting it. I also feel that it is a field ready for a big breakthrough.
I am also very much into AI and machine learning.
Check out https://www.imprint.org/, a focused research organization supported by convergent research
Thanks! I’ve written to them
Questions:
1. I'm considering experimenting with low dose naltrexone, does anyone have any experience with this and recommendations for me, based on the context shared below?
2. I'm thinking of creating a bounty to try to solve my medical mystery. Does anyone have suggestions on where to post the medical bounty (perhaps just in this open thread) and how much might be needed (is $5,000 appropriate)?
context:
(mid 30s male, otherwise healthy, skinny and fit)
In 2021, I was running and biking a huge amount and all of a sudden, I went from doing weekly long runs of 20+ km and bike rides of 100 km at 30 km/h, to barely being able to run 5 km without needing to stop.
Since then, I've never fully recovered. While the symptoms come and go, something happened and I still get frequent "episodes".
These episodes take either two forms:
1) I get a mild cold (blocked nose, sore throat), often lasting one week. Afterwards, I start feeling quite fatigued, achy and often have a sore neck. My resting heart rate (per Garmin watch) will go up 15% for these days. Often with canker sores and sore lymph nodes. During this period, I have no actual symptoms of being sick, but do not feel well. Still functional as a human, but at reduced capacity and cannot do any cardio. This typically lasts a week, and then it's typically another week or two after this where I can begin running again, albeit at a reduced capacity than before the episode started.
2) I start feeling fatigued, sore neck, often canker sores + swollen lymph nodes. 15% increase in resting heart rate. This lasts for about a week or so where I feel bad, can’t exercise etc..
When I am not in these periods, I feel great, have high energy and am very active. Unfortunately, I can't get my cardio very high because I keep experiencing these setbacks.
I’ve seen many doctors and had tons of tests with still no answers. Every blood test I've taken as well as random things like MCAS testing, x-rays, ct scans and such, everything has come up healthy/normal.
I also have some other issues which are likely unrelated:
- Bad diaphragmatic breathing
- My feet and hands get very cold quite easily, and generally, i get colder than most
- I've become incredibly sensitive to alcohol and often feel ill after just one drink
- I have moderate sleep apnea but use a CPAP machine
(I’m reluctant to share this as I am quite confident its unrelated and know it can open a can of worms) I got the first covid vaccine a week or two before the symptoms initially started
- Prior to all of these symptoms starting, I got sick more frequently than most other people (around every 3 months or so, but recovered quickly and it didn’t impair exercise or take the form of what I experience now)
I have something similar. I am also skinny fit (biking) and have bouts of weird lethargy although unlike you it doesn't really affect athletic performance other than my willingness to go for it. Even when walking around I feel I could close my eyes and fall asleep and my limbs are heavy and stiff. I get headaches and a horribly stiff neck that lasts a few days but I feel it's something to do with a sort of symptomless (non snotty) sinusitis that spontaneously occurs. Or possibly a spontaneous spinal fluid leak? It used to happen often between 30 and 40, but now it happens more rarely. For me, reducing alcohol consumption, increasing sleep time, staying hydrated and sleeping on the opposite side if my face so anything drains away from the area and I don't block that nostril has helped me get it less often. I know it will happen if I have little sleep. Maybe sleep apnea is causing it.
Could it be something to do with permanent effects of a previous Lyme disease infection? Good luck and do post about it if you find a possible cause/solution.
Gradually increasing fatigue was a symptom of my relative's heart failure, which was eventually fixed with a bypass. Coldness, especially in the extremities, sounds to me like circulatory issues, and the alcohol thing could also be a blood problem, with your liver or kidneys not cleaning your blood as effectively.
Maybe you've already tested for those.
Do you have access to all of your consult notes, blood tests and scan results and feel comfortable posting them on an Internet forum?
The differential diagnosis is quite wide and includes autoimmune disease (Crohn’s and Behcet’s in particular are associated with aphthous ulcers), chronic infections (any exposure to farm animals or unusual pets, intravenous drug use, travel overseas or to tropical locations?) or less likely cancer (the time course doesn’t sound consistent but some lymphomas such as follicular lymphoma are quite indolent. Hodgkin’s lymphoma is known to make people feel ill when they drink alcohol.)
Anyway I wouldn’t be able to hazard guesses without a lot more info.
You sound like someone who might have an auto-immune disease (the sore neck seems to suggest AS, but I'm by far not an expert). I don't know how one goes about diagnosing these (in my experience, it's crazy hard), but you should really ask your PCP if that could be it.
Did you have children in ~2020? Now that my children are in (pre)school I find myself getting colds all the time, with more severe effect. I attribute the slow recovery to my lack of sleep.
I wish (no kids yet)!
Have you by any change got a new pet (cat or dog)? Or moved to a new home?
I don't have any pets and have experienced this in multiple different homes/locations/countries.
Ok, no easy answer, was worth a try. Any possible common allergens?
The reason I'm barking up this tree is that I experienced something quite similar many years ago when staying with a roommate in college, who happened to have a cat. My health took a nasty nosedive along the lines you're describing. I recovered after moving out of that arrangement for unrelated reasons several months later. I had no idea I was allergic to cats prior to this happening.
Some alcohols, such as red wine and ales contain quite large amounts of histamine, and some people (including perhaps you? ) are extra sensitive to it. From Google's AI overview:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=symptoms+of+histamine+intolerance
* Gastrointestinal: Bloating, diarrhea, constipation, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, etc
* Respiratory: Runny or stuffy nose, rhinitis, nasal congestion, sneezing, and dyspnea
* Skin: Itching, rash, hives, flushing, dry skin, and dermatitis
* Head and neck: Headache, migraine, and swelling of the lips, tongue, or throat
* Cardiovascular: Irregular or fast heart rate, low blood pressure, and hypotension
* Nervous: Nervousness, anxiety, sleep disturbance, unexplained fatigue, and brain fog
Another web search reveals that:
* low blood pressure could be what is making you feel cold.
* antihistamines can be bought over the counter (in the UK, and thus presumably in the US)
Vaccination coincidence aside: might a prior asymptomatic COVID infection, or other viral infection, be related? Have you talked to a long COVID specialist? This sounds so much like the "post exertional malaise" common to long COVID sufferers and probably also other post-viral syndromes.
The cold feet and hands thing sounds a lot like Raynaud's syndrome, indeed unrelated.
Personal bias disclosure: one parent of mine has long COVID and the other Raynaud's.
There's a fundraiser for the against malaria foundation happening! https://dailynous.com/2024/12/02/philosophers-against-malaria-a-fundraising-competition/