For the time that's in it, the most recent post from "History for Atheists" - the pagan (not so much) origins of Christmas!
Everything from the holly and the ivy to "is Santa really Odin?" and one book that I will now have to go purchase about Sol in Roman times (because you can never be too informed about Sol Invictus):
"The modern historian who is the leading scholar of the Roman solar cult, Steven Hijmans, has literally written the book on the Roman sun god Sol. His two volume work Sol: Image and Meaning of the Sun in Roman Art and Religion (Brill, Vol. 1 2022, Vol. 2 2024) collects the relevant material on the Roman worship of Sol and shows the evidence for various very ancient feast days for this deity."
EDIT: Drat, only available in hardback, a couple of hundred apiece, and out of stock to boot! Ah, well, next time!
You know the drill: no-fun Protestants who didn't approve of non-Biblical accretions to the Pure Gospel Faith went "lookit them Catholics with their pagan traditions!" about pretty much every feast day in the calendar, not knowing that they were cutting a rod to beat their own backs and a couple centuries later secularists and atheists would do the very same, often using their own words, to prove that Jesus was a pagan deity/myth/never existed.
Is there a theological support for the concept of "circles" of Hell, as described in Divine Comedy? Or some similar concept?
(I am asking specifically about Christianity. I know that e.g. Buddhism has many Hells.)
I am not an expert, nor a Christian, but my guess would be that a "uniformly bad Hell" would be a better fit for Christianity, for the following reasons:
1) People condemned to the "easy" circles of Hell would be happy that they didn't end up in the "hard" circles. But people in Hell are not supposed to be happy about anything.
2) The theological explanation for the need of an infinite punishment for a finite sin is that God is infinitely awesome, and therefore any transgression against His laws deserves infinite punishments. But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment.
3) If we take the interpretation of Hell as "merely" an eternal separation from God, i.e. no active torture of the sinners, circles don't make sense either, because some people being separated more than others would imply that at least some of them are partially connected, which is not how it is supposed to be.
Theological? Nope, Dante was writing Biblical and Classical self-insert fan-fiction where he got to accompany his favouritest person of all literature on an adventure through Hell and Purgatory up to the edge of Heaven. So he used a lot of varying traditions from everywhere, Christian and Pagan, plus a heaping helping of invention of his own.
And I love the result to bits and will die on any hill you care to mention defending it as ten times better than Milton and "Paradise Lost" (nobody reads "Paradise Regained"; I tried and couldn't get through it) 😁
Literary critics and Dantean experts say that he was using the concept of contrapasso when 'making the punishment fit the crime' for the damned in Hell. My own ignorant and uninformed view is that he was influenced at least in part by making the circles of Hell the opposites of the choirs of Heaven.
There is a genre of Christian writing about revelations to saints about Heaven and Hell, and Dante is riffing off these (you can read more about these in the quoted part about influences further down). Such private revelations aren't "official" about what Heaven/Hell is really like, but so long as they're not heretical or contradict official doctrine, they're tolerated to a greater or lesser degree. This "vision of a journey to the underworld" is associated with the pilgrimage site of St Patrick's Purgatory here in Ireland, where early versions of the pilgrimage would permit some to spend the night in a cave where they presumably had visions of the otherworld:
"The Tractatus tells of the journey of an Irish knight, Owein (a version of the Irish name Eógan), to St Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, now in the Republic of Ireland, where he journeys through Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. Owein's journey is dated by Henry of Saltrey to the reign of King Stephen of England between 1135 and 1154. Henry states that his source was Gilbert, a monk in Lincoln who visited Ireland in 1148 to found a monastery at Baltinglass in County Wicklow. Since Gilbert spoke no Irish, he was introduced to the knight Owein, who became his interpreter during his two-year stay in Ireland."
"Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.
...The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the earliest examples of a Christian-Jewish katabasis, a genre of explicit depictions of heaven and hell. Later works inspired by it include the Apocalypse of Thomas in the 2nd–4th century, and more importantly, the Apocalypse of Paul in the 4th century. Despite a lack of "official" approval, the Apocalypse of Paul would go on to be popular for centuries, possibly due to its popularity among the medieval monks that copied and preserved manuscripts in the turbulent centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy belongs to the same genre and was influenced by the Apocalypse of Paul."
Contrapasso sounds like an interesting world-building exercise. You need to make the punishment metaphorically related to the sin, but you probably also want more horrible punishments for the sins you consider worse... so it needs some creativity, if you decide that fraud and treachery are the worst.
Nice to know that Unsong follows a long ancient tradition.
For what it’s worth, the majority of Christians are going to tell you that your listed #3 is the correct interpretation of hell, and definitely not #2. For that reason, most will recoil at the idea of “tiers” of hell
Woo-hoo! Literary criticism *and* Catholic theology, this is catnip for me! 😁
"But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment."
You fail to take into account the mediaeval love of (and indeed mania for) categorisation and classification, as well as consideration of Divine Justice. Here on Earth, a man who steals a loaf of bread and a man who commits murder are both criminals and are both punished by the law, but the crimes are not held equal in severity. Is God, then, less just than mortals? This cannot be so.
Hence the Dantean notion of greater and lesser sinners (and greater and lesser saints, as he travels with Beatrice through the heavenly spheres, though she is careful to explain to him that the souls are not there in reality; this is a concession to his limited human understanding and all the saved are equally in Heaven in the Empyrean). In the Sphere of the Moon, one of the questions he has for the saved souls is "but are you content with a lesser share of bliss?" They tell him that yes, since it is God's will, and since they are enjoying bliss to the limits of their capacity, so there's not really 'more' or 'less'.
Think of it as a cup and a milk churn both filled to the brim. The churn plainly contains more liquid, but both vessels are equally full.
Dante moves 'up' through the heavens from the lesser to the greater in the Paradiso. In the same way, he starts his journey in the Inferno moving 'down' from the lesser to the greater sinners. One famous example is Paola and Francesca, in the Circle of Lust, who have been regarded sympathetically by the Romantics as lovers. Dante himself is moved by their story and faints in sympathy, until Virgil smacks some sense into him.
Paolo and Francesca may not be as great sinners as the one who murdered them, and that murderer is punished on a lower, greater, level of Hell - but this is still Hell, and they are still sinners, and they are still being punished to the level and limit of their culpability and capacity. Again, there is no 'less' and 'more' here: their cup of suffering is full to the brim.
And in the end, this is all a literary device and not meant to be official theology.
Closest I can think of is Luke 10:13-14, where "it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you", implying there are differences in level of punishment for the unsaved. You'll have to wait for Deiseach to say if Catholicism has anything more substantial.
In general, deaths that might plausibly be targeted assassinations of people not involved in organized crime, are I think <100/year in the United States, whereas suicide is 50,000/year. And job loss is a common trigger for suicide; a whistleblower is almost certainly going to be losing their job in the near future, and their employer will be making that as stressful as possible for other reasons. So your prior for assassination should be very, very low.
Also, Hollywood-style professional assassins are exceedingly rare in the contemporary United States; if any of them even exist, they work for major organized crime families or for government agencies, neither of whom rent them out. So if someone is blowing the whistle on anyone but the Mafia or the CIA, anyone who wants to kill them will have to do it themselves, or hire a non-professional killer (which may be e.g. a bodyguard or security officer being asked to do something outside their normal job description).
Trying to arrange the killing of one whistleblower, risks generating a new whistleblower - the bodyguard or whatever who calls the police when his boss asks him to assassinate someone. So one question to ask, if you want to adjust that prior is, does the whistleblower pose the sort of threat that would justify that sort of risk? The penalty for most forms of corporate naughtiness is usually a large fine paid by the company. The penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, is many many years in prison for everyone involved including whoever gave the order - yes even if they're the CEO.
Same as any other person. 1. What would it take to make a murder look like suicide? 2. does anybody have a reason to do that? 3. what about the person's recent life would suggest suicidal tendencies?
Famous people always clear 1 and 2, they've got enough rich enemies that bribing officials is an option. So it comes down to 3. Would anything suggest Suchir was suicidal? I'm sure we'll hear more about Mr. Balaji's personal life as the news cycle spins on. but I would say the whistleblowing itself does; he's claimed that AI is ruining the Internet, but if OpenAI goes down that isn't stopping AI. How much of his skillset is AI-specific? Also Trump won the presidency and for all I know he's planning to pardon the whole company. So, shaky career options, the AI Apocalypse and the Trump Apocalypse make it plausible.
"And what other five conditions must be established in himself [i.e. a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another]?
“Do I speak at the right time, or not? Do I speak of facts, or not? Do I speak gently or harshly? Do I speak profitable words or not? Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?”"
Probable actual source:
“Miscellaneous Poems,” by Mary Ann Pietzker, published in 1872 by Griffith and Farran of London
"“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind? is actually the title of one of her poems. Here it is:
Has anyone else been noticing that there've been remarkably few cases of colds and flu around this year? If so, are you aware of any explanation (hopefully one that's not too scary)?
Flu season seems to have started late this year. Rhinoviruses, RSV, and OC43 (a common cold coronavirus) are on the rise. However, both wastewater numbers and the CDC's flu surveillance program show that flu cases are on the rise now (about a month late). COVID is still in a slump, though.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can see what was happening as of a couple of weeks ago with non-COVID respiratory viruses starting on slide 8 of my Epi Week 47-48 update.
Thank you. Someone already pointed me to that one, but these are just the cases recorded by medical professionals (who even goes to a doctor for simple flu symptoms?), and it says explicitly not all of them might even be flu. It's probably correlated with actual flu numbers, but figuring out how would be way over my head.
(Also, the link to the data from my state goes to a 404 Page not found page.)
Might be a localized thing. Everyone is sniffling everywhere around here, and I do mean everyone, to the extent I've accepted I'm getting it sooner or later.
After several days of the worst flu I've ever experienced, having many coworkers who have been sick, and hearing a cough while outside that I assumed was from my girlfriend (who also has this flu) but was actually a neighbor's - I've been noticing the exact opposite.
Data's going to be more reliable than our personal experiences. Assuming you're in the US, I'd recommend starting your research with the FluView (https://www.cdc.gov/fluview/surveillance/usmap.html) - but if there's a better source anyone knows about I'd be interested as well.
Thank you for the link. These seem to be, however, only the cases that made it to a medical professional. People around me generally do not go to a medical professional for flu symptoms if they don't have another really good reason. Why go to a doctor when you can just sleep it off? So what is actually graphed here is not anything like the actual number of cases but a weird measure conditioned on a lot of things including flu severity and patient's behavior.
So I'm actually more grateful to you for your personal anecdata. I am sorry for you, but it's useful to know that not everyone is seeing what we are seeing.
(On top of this, the link to my state's data goes to "Page not found", but the state is still colored light green. I'll wait and see if it's still light green when they get to the current week, and if it is, I think we can safely assume their code is broken in at least one way.)
Get well soon!
EDIT: I misread the description of the chart. They admit they don't even know if all of this is flu.
I will hijack this to point out that rapid tests have a sensitivity under 50% [1] (that might be overly optimistic as well - I've seen numbers in the ballpark of 20%-30%). So if you have a very bad, non-COVID flu, a negative rapid test doesn't tell you all that much.
Moreover, since COVID is very common (I saw an estimate from the UK of 1.5 infections per person per year, if you use PCR tests), and much more common than the traditional "bad flu" viruses like influenza (the average person gets influenza once every 5-10 years), it means that, if you get a negative rapid test, but have a "bad flu", it's probably still COVID.
The CDC performs genome sequencing on a representative portion of positive influenza test samples taken from its sentinel sites (not sure what they consider a representative sample, nor how many sentinel sites there are). They're a small fraction of all flu cases nationally, but this allows them to determine which strains are dominant. Type A(H1N1) and A(H1N3) are the most common right now, with Type B making up less than 10% of the cases.
Interesting information, thank you. My girlfriend tested positive for influenza A but not Covid, though with those numbers it's possible that it's a co-infection scenario. I don't know the details of how they tested her.
He is a bad character who likes acting the big tough hard man and hanging around alleged gangsters. Running for President is stupid because even if he does, he will get slaughtered in the campaign. Besides, for all our "criminals turned politicians" needs, we have a genuine gangster in the shape of Gerry Hutch (God save us all) who ran in our general election in November:
Maybe it's only my experience but I can go months without seeing a headline about McGregor. He's been in the news a bit recently about being found guilty of sexual assault and the victim being awarded damages etc., but I think much of the controversy internationally about him doesn't reach Ireland. Some of these stories might be performances for the American Right.
We will have a presidential election in 2025. The role of the president is mostly ceremonial, and our presidential elections tend to have many candidates with various degrees of connection to reality. I greatly enjoy the dirt that they all dig up about one another. The last open election (i.e. without an incumbent) was in 2011 - it featured an ex-Eurovision winner waving the constitution around and claiming to have been the victim of an assassination attempt; a sitting senator withdrawing twice from the race (for trying to influence the Israeli supreme court and claiming a disability benefit he wasn't entitled to) but re-entering both times; McGuinness being accused of murder on TV by Vincent Browne, corruption and brown envelopes... it was amazing, start to finish.
So I think McGregor will fit right into the politicking and backstabbing. He won't win.
Himself and Gerry Hutch can fight it out now that they're both going into politics, and since Hutch is a genuine gangster instead of just hanging around scumbags, McGregor will mysteriously fall down a mine shaft some day, and that solves that problem.
Then we have to deal with Hutch, but maybe he'll be extradited to Spain to face charges there.
That's extra-interesting to me because my default in open threads is new first, but old first on all other threads. It used to be old first on open threads as well, but after changing it every time I guess it learned what I wanted? Not sure.
Now I'm locked in to new first here and old first everywhere else.
For me, that option doesn't show up at all, even after waiting several minutes. Weird. Maybe it's something Scott disabled intentionally? (I recall that he configured the blog intentionally to show all comments ordered by new, which is not something that Substack does by the default, because he had strong opinions about avoiding bias by discouraging people from only interacting with the first few comments that are posted.)
I cannot answer the “why” but I do have a solution for you. I wrote a browser extension primarily to load comments on this blog much faster, but it also allows you to switch to Chronological order (immediately after loading, and much more quickly).
Arguably, people who pass middle school arithmetic can develop a crude sense of proportion how often some repeated event happens. From there, it is not an impossible step to try to estimate whether some event happens >99%, 90%, 50%, 10%, or less than 1% of time.
Moving to log probability -- while not exactly impossible, still non trivial. After disappearance of slide rules it is quite are to find even engineers who habitually think in logarithm.
Moving to log odds -- sorry, I think only betting fanatics and equivalently weird fans of logistic regression have any intuitive understanding of the definition of "odds". (For example, odds of 50% event are 1 to 1, that is, odds ratio of 1. In "log odds", that is log(1) = 0.)
If event A has logodds a and event B has logodds b and they are independent, the logodds of A AND B is a+b
By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
However: the logodds version of Bayes rule (I just learned...) is gorgeous. Let's take the notation of logodds that L(X) = log(P(X)):
L(A|B) = S(B|A) + S(A) - S(B)
(note that I should have said "surprisal" above, not logodds... it's a sign flip)
> By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
It *is* very common. (Oftentimes you might want to consider multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied). Also, Bayes' rule becomes a lot uglier (under logodds) once you consider a variable A with >=3 outcomes that depends on a variable B with >= 3 outcomes but you want to find B given A.
0 < e^x < 1 implies that -\infty < x < 0. There's a storm-in-a-teacup in Ireland at the moment caused by the ex-taoiseach saying that one of his cabinet colleagues couldn't understand percentages no matter how hard he tried to explain. I don't see this flying with the general public unfortunately. I do agree it would be a much better way for e.g. physicists to talk about things rather than their 6 sigmas and etc.
You are completely correct. I should not have said log odds, I should have said "surprisal". Suprisal is the sign flip of the log odds. Those numbers above are surprisals!
You're probably right that it is a long shot for this to enter common parlance.
However, I note two things:
1. People use phrases like "it might happen" or "there's a distinct possibility" when we rationalists would prefer to hear a percentage. In terms of surprise though, they use words like "very surprised" "extremely surprised" etc. I think the language around "surprise" might be closer to being already-quantitative then the language around "probability".
2. If anything like (1) is true, the example you gave with the percentages may actually back me up...
I brought in a point about general mathematical illiteracy which is maybe irrelevant - so ignore that for now. You're asking why people aren't more quantitative in talking about the future.
Statements of type (1) are expressions of opinion. Occasionally these refer to a lottery, a hand of poker or some other highly specified situation where every possible outcome can be enumerated and assigned a probability. Then sure, it's possible to calculate a probability. But most of the time they're really expressions of opinion. If someone says to you I'm 80% sure - does that mean they have good data, or they have a rumble in their gut? What it's they're 110% sure or 'one million percent sure'? Bayesians will have a slightly different take on this but they still have to specify some sort of prior to make anything quantitative. People don't formalise mathematically - it's the fast part of Kahnemann's two systems that makes these calls.
One bugbear of mine regarding percentages: people will talk about a 4% increase in price and this means that what was $100 before is now $104. But if the price jumps to $550 - almost everyone treats this as a 550% increase, rather than 450%. That is: small percentages are additive and large percentages are multiplicative - it's very common in the media. A percentage is a number with the decimal shifted two places - my own opinion is that they should be used only rarely for quantities larger than 1. (This isn't relevant here, but it's a quirk of language that's very widespread and suggests to people that percentages are a special kind of number with different rules to other numbers.)
What would be the most resource-efficient ways to kill zombies? Assume they've practically taken over the world, and nuclear weapons or other solutions requiring a large organization are unavailable. It's just you and a group of survivors working together.
I think shooting each one in the head is too time-consuming and wasteful since you run out of bullets--a critical resource after the apocalypse.
The very most resource-efficient way will always be to simply leave them to die from something else--even if that something else is the sun swallowing the earth in a few billion years.
Generally I think other constraints are more important. It's not like it's all that "expensive" to kill a zombie with a hammer in the right circumstances. More important to focus on safety and consistency than on reducing the calorie expenditure of a hammer kill by 40%.
Actually, I've changed my mind. Assuming they're immune to starvation, disease, etc., I'd build a zombie-powered perpetual motion machine. Capture a few dozen zombies, tie them to harnesses, tie meat in front of them, and use them as an endless engine. With zombie power, assuming you capture a few zombies during each zombie-killing raid, your resource cost per zombie kill may well be negative.
I'm remembering a documentary that talked about very long wall formations so old they were underwater, definitely human-made, speculated to be walls to funnel wild animals into pens for slaughter.
Heavy earth moving equipment to funnel them into industrial shredding machines (or wood chippers). Diesel powered which is simple and reliable enough to be used and maintained by a group with average knowledge (and access to a library). Run them over or push them into a shredder. There may be some meat processing equipment that could be used to.
Some kind of automated system that doesn't involve human power would be best. For instance if you built a base on an island in the middle of a river, and the flow of water washed away any zombies coming at you. Let them get eaten by fish and crabs or whatever.
You could artificially build the same kind of thing with trenches and diversions that got the zombies to travel away from you and into some kind of trap. Disposing with or hauling away the dead ones would be the hardest part of most traps. A spike pit trap would fill up quick, for instance.
Otherwise it seems to depend on which kind of zombie you're talking about. Slow shamblers seem easy to deal with if you can maintain discipline and wear bite-proof clothing/armor. This would be true even with really large numbers. Phalanx or Turtle formations would be great. The fast and strong ones might be able to overwhelm such a tactic, especially in large numbers, because zombies don't fear pain and death. You would need some kind of height and/or distance and polearm weapons. Spearing them from a rooftop where the zombies gather at the bottom - though once again clearing the dead ones becomes an issue if you're using the same location for an extended period.
In the (very good) Zombie RPG Red Markets, the government builds "punchbots", simple robots that play recorded sounds to attract the ghouls and then systematically destroy them with a hydraulic ram. Not very fast but they don't take breaks or get scared.
Bottom line, zombies are an incredibly low powered opponent, you can almost surely beat them with disciplined shock troops wielding melee weapons and wearing light armor. But you probably want to go with black powder and muskets.
I think this post is denying the premise. There would be no zombie apocalypse because zombies are easy to beat.
But engaging in the premise, apocalypse has happened, you are a survivor, your access to the best technology is limited, and you are trying to rid the earth of them. Defensive river posted above is nice purely for survival, but is not an exterminator.
I think a straight forward, resource efficient option is herding and burning, which would immobilize them even if they are still not quite dead.
I could engage with the premise of walking dead right up to the episode they encountered a quarry full of tightly packed zombies and they decided thet had to herd them somewhere else instead of just tossing in wood and burning them.
The second post does engage in the premise, and what it says basically is that if you find yourself in a post apocalyptic world, you make black powder and muskets, since that's the furthest up the military tech tree you can get with readily available materials and simple manufacturing.
When someone opens my substack, they see a pop-up prompting them to type their email and subscribe to my blog. How can I remove it? I think it's just plain rude, but I haven't found a way in the settings to get rid of that.
I just want to float this bc my usual M.O. of trying to be zen about current events isn't working with this one for some reason: does the manifesto (linked a few posts below) raise a few questions for anyone else? Preface: I swear I'm not a crank. Yes, the balance of evidence still suggests that this guy is *the guy*. That being said... Although it's coherent enough to somewhat discount onset of psychosis / schizophrenia in the time since his family says he went AWOL, it (imho) does not actually lay out *any* argument that for-profit healthcare is evil. It just says that UHC doesn't deserve to be a successful company bc of some assumed relationship between insurance and life expectancy, so "they had it coming." It blames both the "american public" and "power games at play," which seems contradictory to me. An 8-9th grader could have written this, which, as we all know by now, is in contrast with the suspect's background. To be clear, if I reviewed Ted K on goodreads, I would probably give 1-2 stars instead of 4 (I stopped after a few pages and decided never again to listen to anybody who gives him credence), so I'm not surprised the manifesto is unconvincing, but it's strange he gets googleable facts wrong and basically doesn't seem to try.
Since I think bsky/twitter can drive you crazy (prior validated on that one tbh), I'm dropping this here in case some of y'all aren't tired of discussing this guy. Plus, thinking about this reminded me of the lab leak debate Scott talked about on here and its "bayes-inspired" scoring system. I'm happy to accept that sometimes weird things are weird and its not worth thinking about.
The "manifesto" does not lay out an argument that for-profit healthcare is evil because *it's not trying to*. The guy is clearly a conservative, why would he want to make it?
The argument it actually is laying out is pretty simple. ("The high costs of US healthcare are not justified by its efficacy as measured by real-world outcomes, this discrepancy is best explained by the funds being diverted to parasitic insurance companies.") And, frankly, patently obvious.
Interesting point, but I don't see the perspective where inefficiency justifies murder more than "evilness". I'm interested in people's speculation about a motive, even just as an intellectual exercise since his guilt is quite likely atp.
The inefficiency justifies the accusation of parasitism, which I guess would be considered evil.
No, look, my point was that you've somehow managed to mix up the insurance business with "for-profit healthcare", probably because you've fallen into a (fairly common) failure mode where any for-profit business is good by definition and defending them becomes a knee-jerk reaction no matter the context. Most people are not like that, and can oppose specific practices they see as corrupt without going full commie.
As for why murder, he's also laid it out pretty clearly. Nothing has been done for decades despite everyone being aware of the problem, so higher variance needs to be introduced.
I heard someone argue that the only philosophy that could justify this is Nietzschean master morality, but I think they were trying to pigeonhole him as a right-winger.
Seems rational to me, because everyone already knows.
There are some set of people that think that we live in a just world, and that getting denied (as in a previous post of mine) eg. a routine test over the course of months against every recommendation of every medical professional until you suffer a catastrophic stroke and die and then your heirs shop the case around to a bunch of lawyers and they all say "If we take this to trial we will almost certainly lose, and even if we win it's going to take at years" is perfectly fine and good;
and there's the set of people that think it's bad actually.
If I try to assign a motive to this guy instead of it being just some very active stress relief; it's to remind everybody that the people who social murder them or allow them to die have names, faces, and addresses; and that if you were to walk up to any private health care executive (shit, lets expand it! Almost any executive of almost any company with a market cap of > $100,000,000,000 ) and punch a couple holes in them, you would get a majority opinion in the Shrug to standing ovation range.
I don't know a single person in meat space that had anything more strong to say about the dead guy than "Well, murder is bad BUT...."
From the trumpiest tumpsters to the lukewarmest neocon/libs, nobody could muster up anything like moral indignation. They all knew, in their hearts, that the victim was either going to hell or reentering the cycle of samsara as some sort of parasitic worm.
You seem to notice that people don't react all that outraged over that guy being murdered and conclude that this means people are probably mostly okay with it.
Personally I feel no emotion over the murder but of course we still ought to capture the murderer, put them into a cell and throw away the key. That just goes without saying, right?
So I wouldn't be so quick to judge the lack of passion for the victim as quiet endorsement of the murderer's actions.
No, I mean that only a minority of NPR listing will stancil ass centrists can find it in themselves to actively disapprove of killing a CEO.
The majority opinion (anecdote!) of people I know in meat space isn't "I don't care", it's "I don't care what happens to the killer, but it's Good and Proper that his victim be killed"
Killing a mentally ill shouty homeless person is less popular than assassinating this dude, it's crazy.
As an ex-bernie voter, I get the apathy, but this guy probably wasn't a socialist and the manifesto demonstrates that pretty conclusively. Maybe it's because i'm a lib now, but I am in fact concerned by this. It might not be a ceo next time.
Every time you hurt someone, there is a risk you will be hurt in return. Insurance CEO's have made a lot of money by hurting people and their families. Doing it via a byzantine system that largely anonymises them has shielded them for a long time by making it impersonal. But at some point it was going to happen. Its amazing it hasn't happened sooner.
Not sure why anyone expects the shooter to be anymore coherent in his writing and facts than the average person in the population
I would in fact expect a private school valedictorian with multiple degrees from ivy league schools to be significantly more coherent than the average American. Sure, it would explain a lot if people like that were no smarter than average, but I don't think that's true.
What does he even need to say? As soon as it hit the news everybody already constructed his manifesto from first principles in their head like sherlock holmes
Was it written in haste? If so, he seemed pretty concise. He confesses. He holds no animus towards the Feds. He claims he acted alone. He says the parasites had it coming because the power and corruption in the insurance industry had been going on for years. And he also blames the public for allowing them to get away with it. He doesn't seem interested in making any new points about policy. And he doesn't explain why or how he selected Thompson. I wouldn't call it a manifesto, but it's more like a suicide note. I wonder if he was expecting to die in a shootout with the police?
He had what, four days from the shooting until his capture? What are the odds that he did it for some completely different reason but then saw how much support he was getting on social media for a specific perceived reason, and then just wrote something to support that? It would explain why the argument seems so underdeveloped and not a good justification for his actions. It also may explain why he would have it in his backpack, when that's one of the key pieces of evidence against him. He may have been trying to garner public support that he thought might help him if he did get caught.
> What are the odds that he did it for some completely different reason but then saw how much support he was getting on social media for a specific perceived reason
The words carved on the cartridge cases were "delay", "deny", and "depose". He wasn't exactly subtle about his motives.
Sure, but I can't think of any other motive unless it was a professional hit, in which case he shouldn't have been caught (plus the profile doesn't exactly line up).
Consider that he had a back injury and quite likely was in chronic pain. In such a state, people don't act their best - and frequently don't act like themselves at all, doing all kinds of wrong and ridiculous things. I'm not saying that that's his case, but it's a distinct possibility. If I was his lawyer, I'd try to argue some kind of insanity defense.
For a guy who had chronic back pain for several years, it seems like he had a lot of energy to workout and also travel around NYC looking for healthcare executives!
The Israelis call it "Shooting and Crying" (יורים ובוכים). This guy is writing to people who already agree with him - he's not trying to make any new converts. The idea to show that he understands the opposition to him shooting, hence the crying.
That's why it starts with respect for law enforcement, shows some empathy towards the trauma he's inflicted, and then shows humility "frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
For what it's worth, I think this kind of argument is much more persuasive than the know-it-all, holier-than-thou kind of writing that permeates most manifestos. Authenticity is the new currency of the realm, and I think that's what he was trying to deliver.
I'm not persuaded by it, but plenty of people - including some in this comment section! - have been. I don't think the manifesto will generate any new converts or alienate any of the old ones - but I do think its fairly successful at achieving its goal of humanizing the killer and showing that he wasn't insane or anything.
This is the most interesting response, but I'm still hung up on the idea of confessing to murder without providing a motive. He literally says his "tech is pretty locked down" but had a confession on paper on his person!
I agree with that, but it's not very common when limiting the sample set to propaganda-of-the-deed lone wolf killers.
Look at John Wilkes Booth who shouted "Sic Semper Tyrannis" after killing Lincoln. Or Elliott Rodger who shot up my alma mater - he described himself as the "Supreme Gentleman".
These guys act more like Raskolnikov than Holden Caufield. It's weird to hear a famous assassin displaying humility and introspection.
I'm finding myself using AI for a certain unsatisfied social need.
To add a little background and context to this, I’ve long been worried about the use of technology to ameliorate our social struggles, since our inner emotional conflict about our social situation is what drives us to seek out genuine social relationships. To me, the fact that pharmaceutical companies are developing pills to cure people of loneliness—justifying it by citing loneliness as a cofactor in many mental and physical health problems—along with our sexual drive being subverted by unnatural super-stimuli like pornography, romance novels and erotica, and genital stimulators, has bothered me for a long time. I think it potentially erodes or has eroded our society in general. Recreational drugs that do things like cure boredom—such as marijuana seems to for many people—or even the constant, easy entertainment of mass media worry me. Parasocial relationships with celebrities waste people’s time and give them unrealistic views of the world and themselves. Social media clearly isn’t natural, and I’m still trying to figure out to what extent it is facilitating or hampering healthy relationships. Social media seems to be doing both, depending upon the person, and sometimes both in the same person. Video games, an occasional vice of mine, give false senses of accomplishment, though sometimes they do represent genuine accomplishment as well. The metaphysics of what is real accomplishment is somewhat tricky. Probably my biggest near-term future concern is the replacement of romantic partners with synthetic ones. Already, some very crude and incomplete fantasy partners have been commercialized, and they seem highly addictive. I think there’s quite a bit of danger there in the formation of an idealized partner that you can’t really build a life with and that doesn’t even demand that you grow or develop healthy ways of dealing with expectations and conflicts.
In some ways, I feel like condemning or looking down on people who don’t challenge themselves with the real thing. In other ways, I want to be sympathetic and realize that a lot of people aren’t up to these challenges, either for reasons of personal circumstances or lack of ability and role modeling. Then, on the other hand, I think maybe it’s too judgmental of me to look down on these things, and it’s a good general principle to assume that people know what’s best for themselves (except, of course, when they continuously complain about how awful their life is but keep doing the same things that keep them locked into that life over and over… Do that and I’m going to give you advice). Then there’s the kind of social Darwinist perspective that occasionally crosses my mind, and I think: why should I even be concerned about the benighted decisions that lead people down a road to a fool’s paradise? Let them live their wretched existence and let the Darwinian forces sort them out.
So it’s with all this context that I realized that for the last few months I’ve been kind of doing a social thing with AI. Sometimes I really just want to talk to someone who simply doesn’t exist in my life and whom I’ve never really been able to find. I have lots of ideas about obscure topics that would take a specialist to answer, often in areas where I know of no specialist who has the time to indulge me, especially not at 2:00 a.m.
So in the last week, I’ve had the following situations. I have been soaking quinoa seeds and wanted them to sprout as rapidly as possible. I wondered how much water to add, and then I just thought to myself that if I just submerge them, they’ll soak up water as fast as possible. But even after a few days, nothing had happened. I posited that maybe seeds have a mechanism to inhibit sprouting when they’re being drowned, because if an area is flooded, it’s a bad time to sprout—just as much as it’s a bad time to sprout when you have no water. I posited a few mechanisms by which this might happen, and it turns out, according to GPT-01, that this is a known phenomenon. It happens with most seeds, and there are several mechanisms for it, including a couple I thought of.
Then also this week, I was listening to Isaac Arthur’s video on Project Medusa, which is an interstellar spacecraft propulsion system based on nuclear weapons and a parachute—a bit like Project Orion, except that instead of using a pusher plate, you use a “puller” parachute. During the video, he mentions that both of these have been shown to be more efficient than a conventional nuclear reactor tied to an ion drive. I wound up wondering about this and thought about how small you could make the reactors. You couldn’t really use a nuclear submarine-type reactor because that requires massive water throughput and very rapid cooling, as well as being extremely expensive and using the highest grade nuclear fuel. But you probably could use a molten salt thorium reactor that’s even more efficient and lighter, doesn’t require water cooling, and could use radiators. I wanted somebody to talk to about that, and GPT-01 was there. I got to expand on a few ideas, and we came to the conclusion that more experiments were needed, as well as some exact calculations on the energy density of the reactor.
Other topics this week: I wanted to discuss the long-term economic implications of high-speed rail between major metropolitan centers like LA and San Francisco. I considered the “hangry female evolutionary hypothesis” that I posted here. I wanted to have a question-and-answer session about the real differences in engineering between supersonic, hypersonic, and hyper-hypersonic flight, to make sure that I understood the concepts properly. I wanted to look at the hypothesis that rapamycin might have complex interactions with virus physiology. I got to wondering about the cultural evolution of the Medusa myth and how her portrayal—as blasphemer, egoist, victim of jealousy, victim of crime, victim of an ironic curse, and even antihero—has changed across cultures and over the years. Finally, I’m looking for people to discuss fairly technical papers with, which I’m not sure I grasp well. The newest generations of AI are starting to fulfill these intellectual needs that I’ve had for decades.
I’m pretty sure that people exist who can be very good conversants on these topics. In fact, they’re probably still significantly better than the AI, but there have been few times in my life that I’ve really had access to people who could do this, and it was usually only in a few circumscribed areas.
Now I am thinking to myself: isn’t this just using AI as a proxy for real social interaction and the drive to find the right people to fulfill those needs? I can go ahead and say, “Boy, but finding those people and connecting with them seems near impossible,” but that’s the same reasoning that people use when they get AI girlfriends. Should this make me more sympathetic towards them, or more critical of both of us? Should my attitude towards this potential vice be ameliorated by the fact that the AIs are getting better and probably will be superhuman intellectual companions eventually? Should I hope that the AIs will help me figure out how to make these connections to satisfy these needs with real people?
Yeah, I see what you're saying, and I kind of agree. I've pretty much accepted that 'my people' don't exist, though I haven't really gone in for AI to fix the problem, I just give up on asking certain questions.
Eventually the people resistant to superstimuli will outbreed and replace those who aren't. I'm just going to try to enjoy what's left of my life.
> I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
>I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
>>“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
"Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming..."
And with nothing more than mad-libbing the rest of the passage, you could turn it into a white supremacist's manifesto written to justify the murder of nonwhite people.
Man, you really can't please everyone, huh? Everyone complains that the media rewards murderers with attention, so this time they do the absolute bare minimum by not publishing his manifesto, and now people are complaining that they aren't glorifying this specific killer because they agree with his motives.
Should the media be editing our newsfeeds? And do they really *not* reward murderers with attention? I think they selectively give certain villains a platform. Moreover, "if it bleeds, it leads" still seems to be the order of the day. If you listen to the evening news, you'd think violent crime is all-pervasive, yet the murder rate is now down to levels it was in the early 1960s.
Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter — all sorts of interesting stuff gets posted up there. Of course, a vast mass of shite can swamp useful and/or legitimate information. And what we focus on in free-form news feeds can distort our understanding of the world by the way we selectively choose what to follow or believe. I don't have an answer, but I personally would like to know what motivated Mangione to assassinate Thompson.
The only reason we're reading this blog on Substack instead of SSC is because the media released information they shouldn't have.
Yes, obviously the media is less than scrupulous. But it's absurd that on the rare occasions that they do try to take responsibility, they get slammed for not giving a murderer a free platform to proselytize.
> Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter
...I can't even tell if you're being serious. Twitter is an algorithmically curated echo chamber that's designed to only show you what you want to see. Or worse, what Musk wants you to see. At least there are theoretical incentives for a publication to be impartial and offer a comprehensive view of issues. Twitter was actively designed to be as low information and low substance as possible, with metrics being prioritized above all else.
Every platform is curated, and every journalist has conflicts of interest. None of them owe you anything. All you can do is gather as much evidence as possible and try to find the truth within a web of contradictions.
"GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to poor families in Africa. GiveWell thinks they’re within an order of magnitude of the most effective charities in the world. You can learn more and donate here: GiveDirectly.org/astralcodexten" - thanks for highlighting!
Yoga is divine. That's the thought that came to me after class today. I had a rough weekend but felt great after the 1chour of early morning yoga.
What I mean by divine here, is it gives me a connection, however transient, with my own self. My teacher is excellent and humble enough to say that it's nothing she is doing.
And of course, Hindus see the individual self as part of the universal consciousness/the divine, thus also being divine.
There was an article recently in the NYT about the lack of the male writer. Obviously they mean in literary fiction. The guy hemmed and hawed to avoid getting cancelled, but nonetheless admitted the major publishing houses won't take a guy except for the occasional diversity story.
My thoughts then were about Latin writers like Alex Perez who said something similar and complained about the desire for the 'sad minority' story:
But it occurs to me there are other stories that aren't told because they're not PC, some even from an ethnic point of view--what about Latinas looking for a traditional guy? What about all the sexually frustrated Asian-American engineers, stuck in a culture where nerds aren't cool? That's a story the Brooklyn ladies really won't want to hear... (Yes, I specifically used that example because I think someone like that is in the audience and will be inspired to write that novel.)
I'll bite. You're asking why won't someone write about software engineers, a group famous for their romantic worldview, extraversion, deep knowledge of aesthetics, art, philosophy and general love for all the things "serious" writers love to talk about in their novels.
Most of Houellebecq protagonists are computer engineers, retired computer engineers, or people named "Michel" with an uncanny similarity to Houellebecq's life and character.
I guess a more serious explanation would be that literary fiction is like near-extinct. Not that I'm an expert, but that's what I've gleaned as a SWE who has read a little bit of literary fiction in the past, and found that there was a steep drop-off in interesting stuff to read wrt new releases, and the gave up and stuck to coding.
Lol fair enough. You can take a look at /lit/ on 4chan if you want an impression of what these young writers who are shut out of the publishing world might be capable of. If I'm being generous I'd say that it's a very mixed bag.
You do raise an interesting question, so again I'll try and not be glib: I guess it's a matter of choosing to tell the story as a novel? That format in particular still has a high cultural reputation. I think frankly a lot of novelist are motivated by intellectual vanity* at this point. After all, it can't be the pay or the adoring fans. It's kind of a death spiral.
*This is why I never finished Infinite Jest. You can try and climb the ladder to even start reading it (In my case I read of some of his short stories first, and liked them), and at times you can even convince yourself its worth it and you're enjoying it, but then you've read 300 pages and you don't know what the story is, much less *why* it's being told. That's frustrating to any sane person. If you (claim to) have read it, I think in most cases you stuck around so you could say you read it. Honestly, the motivation for writing something like that is probably similar.
300 pages is a lot of Infinite Jest. I made it twenty pages, then tried to find where I left off and realized the paragraph I'd been reading was five pages long, and stopped reading.
Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
It's not printing. If you just want to get books printed there are much cheaper ways to do it.
It might be the service of getting your book onto the shelves of actual bookstores. But actual bookstores are a diminishing fraction of the book market.
It's probably something like respectability and filtering -- a book from a major publishing house has passed through some kind of quality control and filtering and so people are more likely to buy it.
But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet?
I was wondering exactly this the other day.
Context is, I know a man who's written a biography about a historical figure. He's had a merry back and forth with publishers over the years and multiple exhausting rewrites. Finally they came clean and said (well, heavily implied) they wanted him to rewrite it to focus on the wife. (The wife was not a significant historical figure in her own right.) He eventually decided enough was enough. He talked about self publishing for a while but last I saw him it seemed like he'd given up on the whole thing.
I very definitely model publishers/editors/agents as a closed, cliquey community and am very ready to believe it's controlled by smug twats and ripe for a disruptin'.
Self publishing fails because it doesn't offer a filter. I often end up buying self published books out of a desire to encourage the authors. And I can attest that no matter how bad you think some published works may be, you know nothing of shit until you've seen it matte printed on a small market stall and bought it from the author himself.
Some filter is necessary. But it still seems to me there are multiple unexplored ways to do it. I even have a plan for one, which might be a cool project and bring me into more frequent contact with other writery type people - something I sorely lack rn.
My sibling who's been both a published author and an editor of same says that author's royalties range from 10 to 15 percent of list price for printed books and between 25 and 50 percent for e-books.
Using the mean of each range, the publisher is retaining 87.5 percent of the sale prices of printed books compared to 62.5 percent of the sale prices of e-books. The sale price of an e-book is typically around 60 percent of the mean of the hardcover and softcover list prices.
If for example purposes we set the printed list price (mean of the hardcover and softcover versions) at $20, each printed sale yields an average of $17.50 for the publisher and each e-book sale of the same work yields an average of $7.50 for the publisher.
7.50 is 43 percent of 17.50. So the publishers' current pricing behavior implies that physical printing+distribution represents somewhere around 57 percent of publishers' costs.
Obviously there are other variables being overridden in the above simplification, e.g. books in different genres sell different mixes of hard- and soft-cover editions. As a first-order approximation though it appears that 50 to 60 percent of the service that publishers carry out for printed books, and avoid with e-books, is printing+distribution.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
I suggest you read Charlie Stross's four-part series on publishing (links below).
> But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
The business is a lot more complex than you'd think. A few large publishing conglomerates control dozens of publishing houses, and publishing houses control dozens of imprints. Each imprint can schedule the release of several hundred books each year. Chances are there's an imprint that specializes in the tastes of actual book readers (which are quite diverse in their tastes). For instance, A little googling shows that Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns MacMillan, which in turn owns Tor, and Tor specializes in Science Fiction and Fantasy. If your tastes are for genre fiction (mysteries, fantasies, etc.) with LGBTQetc themes, then there's Bold Strokes Books, which is a little fish within the stomach of Hachette Group. Bold Stokes produces several hundred titles each year of LGBTQetc genre fiction. If you're into Romance novels, NewsCorp owns Harper Collins, which owns Harlequin, which has several imprints depending on what flavor of bodice ripper you're into. If you're into rightwing politics, Penguin Random House owns Crown Forum, an imprint that has published conservative authors like Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.
Anyway, here are the links to the Stross's posts about common misconceptions about the publishing industry...
I think you've finally convinced me to give up on that novel, allowing me to redirect my energies. Given that my second choice was 'fight feminism', this may not be good for me or the world. But I think it's useful to understand the world better. Thank you.
Interesting read, but I think I'm still left with the same question at the end: "If a good author is turned down for sexist reasons, can't they just self-publish ebooks on amazon and skip the publishing houses entirely?"
I don't know the economics, and maybe it's harder to be discoverable when doing that, but it looks like the royalty is way higher.
(I've read a decent number of self-published ebooks on amazon, yes.)
1. If you self-publish, how do you spread the word of your new tome? The New York Review of Books isn't going to review it.
2. The royalty rate may be higher if you self-publish, but selling 100 ebooks for $5 won't beat a dollar royalty selling 5,000 books through an established distribution channel. Of course, the chances of getting picked up a publisher if you don't have an agent of almost zero.
3. If the author doesn't use a good copyeditor (i.e., one that is a professional and that expects to get paid for their service), self-published works can look pretty amateur. Some of the self-published works I've seen are pretty crappy. They may have a good idea, but they could have benefited from the critical distance of a good editor. Yes, I've read a few decent self-published novels on Amazon, but even the good ones have some howlers of mistakes in them.
The publishing houses get books reviewed in the NYT, The New Yorker, etc. They also play this trick where they purchase their own books the first few weeks they are out in order to get them onto the NYT Bestseller List, which then gets those books on the wall of bookstores in airports. People like to read books which already seem popular.
The major publishing houses aren't all that disconnected from the tastes of their readers. For the small minority of readers who want "Literary Fiction", they produce literary fiction to taste and market it under a prestigious imprint. For everyone else, they produce various sorts of genre fiction and market it under imprints that are recognized as associated with that genre. Roughly speaking, and with a fuzzy middle ground.
The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
As for value: I read both professionally-published and indie fiction, and the stuff with a publishing house behind it is almost always better written. Even in my cpreferredgenre, the major houses publish an awful lot of crap that I'm not going to enjoy, but it's usually properly labeled on the jacket so I can find the stuff that they actually publish for people like me. The stuff I think is crap, I expect finds the audience that will appreciate it.
>The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
This reminds me of one of the NYT podcasts I listened to recently where they were talking about how men voted for Trump because he made them "felt heard" and "listened to", as if Trump was some soothing therapist-like figure that men have been yearning for
I mean, he is, but they're not yearning for a soothing therapist-like figure, they're yearning for an angry ass-kicker. You have feminized men and women writing these articles, so that's why they talk about 'feeling heard' and 'listened to'. If they were written by this commentariat they'd talk about him 'engaging in a principal-agent problem by articulating people's frustrations without doing anything to solve them', except we'd have some cute name from HPMOR or an old ACX/SSC blog post.
I mean, there's probably untapped markets they're ignoring, but the woke ladies in Brooklyn know the particular audience they're cultivating pretty well. And they've driven young men away from reading (with a lot of help from video games), so it doesn't really matter anymore, I guess.
Quite likely a chicken-or-egg problem here. Which happened first, did books get bad or video games good?
Likely they produced a feedback loop where as games got better books had less audience and pursued the people still reading (which is apparently women, and middle age?)
Video games got good. All of the best literature from the past few thousand years is all still out there to be consumed, for little-to-no cost. Men know they can read if they want to.
Video games have been on a downward trend since ~2014 too. (In much the same way, I may add - and this is pretty widely acknowledged, though may be mostly survivorship bias)
I would go back further, to the turn of the century. Almost all games this century have a setting divorced from reality in most ways except visual and auditory; the gameplay no longer attempts to simulate an alternative reality.
A downward trend in what sense? Popularity? I haven't looked at it but that does not pass the smell test.
Unless you mean downward trend in quality, which also doesn't make sense; there are more great games coming out every year than ever before. Especially last year; that was one of the best release years ever. Maybe not AAA games, but who cares? Indie games are just as good and arguably better than what the established studios publish these days.
I think you're right. You could actually figure out which came first--enough of the people involved are still alive--but the feedback loop is more important.
This fits nearly with my understanding that that whole side of academia has been taken over by Theory. I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material. Which sounds ass backwards to me because it's like assuming phlogiston and then working on bringing observations in line with that assumption.
> I sat in my professor’s office dumbfounded by his evaluation of my argument that, during times of loss, women in the Iliad found the most solace in their male counterparts. I had spent several days on the paper and wanted him to explain what was wrong with my argument. He glared at me.
> “It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.”
So yes, it does seem like most institutions related to the humanities, meaning, English departments, literary magazines, and even publishers have been turned peddlers of orthodoxy.
"I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material."
My wife has a PhD in literature and worked for five years as a professor before quitting. That is exactly how it works and it is truly terrible.
Some un-PC thoughts I'm really curious to discuss with the people here:
I think a lot of the surprise at Hispanics for Trump thing is that leftists are pattern-matching on the Jewish and black experiences. If you're Jewish, it's quite rational to be oversensitive to even a small percentage of ethnic persecution, since within living memory it led to the extermination of 6 million of your relatives. If you're black, a lot of American history has revolved around slavery, opposition to slavery, attempts to restore slavery, attempts to obtain equal rights, etc., so it makes sense to have a greater deal of concern.
But most Hispanics (a) don't have that sort of immigrant experience and (b) have at least some experience of racism being attenuatable by accumulating wealth and status in Latin America (where the color line is a lot grayer). So Trump's remarks don't terrify them to the same degree.
There are also more traditional gender values, etc., and of course the same economic worries as any other American, but I wonder if this is part of it.
Most latinos coming up here are strivers or temps in my personal experience. They are here to make lotsamoney and buy three big trucks and start five businesses, or they are here to make lotsamoney, eat 1/2 meal a day, and hotbunk because they are sending all of it home to get that dream finca in campeche and want to peace the fuck out ASAP.
Both of these groups could care less about schools, roads, hospitals, research, whatever the fuck. They either can afford services, or know that they will never ever have access to them, so who cares if they suck?
Both these groups are full of professional level racists that are beyond the pathetic understanding of your standard casual level HUHWHAIGHT racist, and both of these groups are full of people that think "When conservatives say all that shit, it's not about me. I'm one of the good ones!"
I think the consensus view is that Hispanics are far more socially conservative than Democrats thought (and their economic views are more mixed). Also, that the typical Hispanic experience is not an illegal immigrant, but a legal immigrant (or was here from the Lone Star and Republic of Texas days and the Mexican-American war of 1848).
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks that the political entity that normalized 'latinx' had any meaningful connection to the people they were claiming to represent. No hispanics think of themselves as 'hispanic' in the ways that the other categories you mentioned do. There's N different groups all with completely different histories, cultural self-conceptions, etc.
You're saying a completely uncontroversial thing, I think.
Part of the problem is, I think, that some Hispanics *do* think of themselves as primarily and generically "Hispanic". Mostly assimilated, middle-class Hispanics whose families might as well be white for their role in American society, but who wind up at a university or in some other social environment where having an "ethnicity" is gold and being a Generic White Guy is at best lame and boring.
Very few people in those environments know what e,g. "Guatemalan" or "Dominican" means as an ethnicity, probably including the third-generation Americans whose grandparents came from Guatemala or whatever. But "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" are broadly recognized ethnicity, which anyone whose ancestors immigrated from south of the Rio Grande can claim and so excuse themselves from Lame Generic White Guy status.
Then when the elite arbiters of modern social norms get together to define the new rules,*those* are the "Hispanics" they can invite to the party to tell them all about being Hispanic (which they'll have to piece together from rumor and supposition because their actual lived experience is rather close to Lame Generic White Guy). And this is how we get "Latinx".
I guess the controversial part is that the (heavily-Jewish) leadership of the left is influenced too heavily by their own experience. The Holocaust is actually somewhat exceptional in a developed country (and was ultimately destructive even to the country that perpetrated it). Most examples of racism don't end that badly.
You should do a question on the survey about sympathy for Luigi, since I strongly suspect it would confirm a clear class rather than political divide. Though the most significant factor might just be how good the respondents healthcare has been.
I would definitely be interested in seeing a decent "on a scale of 1-10 how much do you really sympathize with this guy" kind of poll. The reason is that I'm (desperately hoping) that most ordinary people are, at most, at a 2 or a 3 on this scale (maybe a 4 or 5 right now while the takes are still hot and we haven't learned what specific brand of unpopular extremism he was into), that the literal assassination apologists in this and other places on the internet are simply a very vocal minority, and that we as a society still think that murder is bad.
I suspect that a lot of the initial sympathy was based on the assumption that the murderer was an average Joe driven to despair by a loved one's travails with the insurance system. It will be interesting to see how much changes now that the cops have instead picked up a rich kid with a manifesto. (Not much improvement at ACX that I can see, but this place is unfortunately a draw for the rich-kid-with-manifesto-adjacent.)
I'm wary of the lesson from Fahrenheit 451, the Mechanical Hound that would hunt down its target without fail. Yet when it couldn't find its target, it was reassigned another target, which it hunted down "without fail".
The pictures I've seen don't seem to match to my eye, but I'm no expert and I also haven't studied them in-depth. I do think a jury ought to study the evidence, and make sure they have the right suspect.
Unfortunately, one doesn't get to decide whether they are a hero or not, society's response will eventually determine his status. He was SURELY familiar with Sacco and Vanzetti and other Italian Anarchists of a century past. History eventually landed on the side of forgetting them all but for a while the coin wobbled on its circumference, and some Anarchists who killed ACTUAL INNOCENTS were widely considered likely to be remembered as heros.
Society is indeed NPC. But the human desire to breathe free and to be alive still exists in most of us. I wish, really wish, that this community (without excusing murder any more than he did in his review of the unibomber) shows him support. He reads this page and even if he was misguided, he was less misguided than those who never gave a damn.
Those who support what he did should be reassured by the news regarding his background. He's very likely to end up acquitted or with a sweetheart deal; the rich can get away with murder.
We indeed hope he is freed -- immediately. By hook (cheating the system) or by crook (using your preferred system of purchasing the best justice many can buy).
Your methods are transparent and I advise people not to feed your (repeated) bad faith psyop.
The victim attended a public high school, the shooter went to an expensive prep school. It'll be a miracle if he does more than 5 years.
He had access to the wealth and connections necessary to potentially shift the incentive structures involved in healthcare. If absolutely nothing else he could have directly given money to people in need of medical care.
Instead, he took up space in a computer science program because he liked games, hung out in Hawaii, and took the father of two children because he couldn't be bothered to do harder work that could have actually changed something.
Let he who is without sin fire the first shot. Thompson was not an ethical businessman, but even the most saintly businessman with Thompson's power would make some decisions that cause excess deaths. If you ever become as powerful as Thompson, are you so sure that nobody would want your death? Also, idolizing murder in a country with historically high levels of distrust and polarization seems like a bad idea for self-preservation reasons alone, even if you care nothing about morality.
Would you idolize him if he killed a doctor instead? What about a pharmacy tech? Or a nurse?
I'm not trying to make a point. I'm curious how the identity of the victim ties into your feelings for the assassin. Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department? How about if, instead did the CEO*, it was a board member? Or a large investor?
* Not sure the victim was a CEO
Is it your belief that this act will improve the state of health insurance in the US? Could the killer have chosen a better target with a higher ROI in terms of this goal?
If you hurt enough people long enough, someone will hurt you back and the amount of people who will cheer will be directly correlated to how many people you have hurt and how seriously you have harmed them.
A health insurance CEO is in a particularly bad spot in the regard because his company has hurt people and the families of people across the political spectrum. What's interesting is that the people who aren't cheering are the people most insulated from effects of awful insurance practices. The divide is class based, not blue/red.
I don't think anyone believes it will improve healthcare. It would actually be hard to pick someone with a higher "ROI" due to the class divide here.
The problem I see with this take is that the evidence that the CEO hurt many people is very weak. Consider how strong that claim is and what sort of evidence we would need to support it, not even in a court of law, but in the court of ACX readers. Look at Scott's recent post about the criminal justice system and bask in the hard work that went into it and the papers it is based on.
Yet here we're throwing up our hands and surfing the ocean of vibes and leaving our brains at the door.
Just a quick check: why the CEO? Why not the CFO? Why not someone from the board? Why not the head of regulators overseeing UHC? Why not legislators creating the policy for the regulators?
All this event was good for is media and social media companies. And maybe Tyler Durden fanboys.
This is not a situation that is grounded in rational actors acting in their best interests. Its an emotional puncture in a wounded national psyche. To the people cheering, this is like watching the school bully get punched in the face, it's Cathartic.
If you're the head of an organisation that hurts people, you will be seen as the one doing it. The average person has no idea what a CFO is or who the regulators are. The health insurance system is a byzantine labyrinth that the average person hasn't the time or energy to understand. But CEO's are much more visible and understood in a "they're the big boss" sense. They're championed by the media as heroes. The guy who was killed was just a visible, symbolic target.
Whether it is "good" is irrelevant really. People are happy because finally there were perceived repercussions for the harm they and their loved ones have received. Whether it was deserved or moral or will help in anyway is a non-issue.
If he killed a different person of course he would be viewed differently. People are celebrating the death of a mass murderer who had zero chance of seeing the inside of a jail cell for his mass murder. If he murdered a doctor who treated people the reaction would obviously be different.
How does this attribution of mass murder work? Would eg. Hotel owners that deny homeless people shelter during a harsh winter fall under the same umbrella? Or the people behind limiting the number of doctors in the country and driving up healthcare costs, wouldn't they also merit the label?
(Again, not making a point, just exploring how the mechanism of attributing fraud/murder to the victim is working here)
A lot of doctors are just as sleazy as any healthcare insurance CEO. There needs to be greater scrutiny on doctors overbilling patients just as much insurance denying claims.
Personally I think murder should be condemned almost always, but in this case one consideration, if true, would make me argue for lenience: the victim's company was legally fraudulent (i.e. their lawyers were good enough that it's near-impossible to win actual lawsuits against them, but commonsensically what they do is close to "fraud"). Does the same apply to fraudulent doctors or pharmacy techs? Mostly, though at least emotionally I'm less compelled if the victim wasn't a serial fraud who chose it as their career but simply needed the money. I hesitate to say that a vigilante killing a career fraud (legal or otherwise) who was extracting huge sums of money improves our society but a least it's plausible: in the short term the other frauds will just hire more bodyguards but in the longer term things might start changing. With the victim only committing isolated frauds, there's not even that.
So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
Do you have any sources that estimate how much fraud this company would be doing? Genuinely curious because I understand that a) most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed and b) insurance is a limited resource so some people must be denied healthcare. Of course the question really is about the magnitude of these numbers, which I have no idea about, hence why I'm asking for a source.
"most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed"
Is that true? How do you know this? A small sample of "myself + friends and family": universally hates the sight of a hospital, only goes to a doctor when it's completely unavoidable, and would definitely not joy-riding waiting rooms for an extra x-ray because it was free. Are there many people on the opposite side of this?
It all comes down to the definition of "overuse." Getting 10 tests done because of a minor ache could easily be considered too much, but maybe one of those tests finds something life threatening. End-of-life care is another area, probably dwarfing all others, where use and overuse are the only real questions. A lot of people seem to agree in the abstract that a million dollars for two months of extra life miserable in the hospital is not worth it. But put those same people by the bedside of their aging parent and suddenly they'll still do it.
Insurance companies are very very good at determining which levers to pull to get people to scale back their usage. That's what deductibles and copays are all about. If it costs the insurance holder money to use it, they will be more careful about the use.
I've been in meetings with insurance brokers and the reps, talking about how to craft a company-wide program that discourages use at the appropriate level. They have a ton of data on how minute adjustments in copays make big differences.
I think it comes down to different ways “overuse” occurs. The comment I responded to attributed overuse to the patients’ desire to use more healthcare, and I always found this reasoning bizarre: outside of a small number of hypochondriacs, who tf wants to spend time in waiting rooms and docs offices?
The overuse you’re describing is not something a patient has much control over, because of the information asymmetry. I can’t tell if the test my doc ordered is really necessary. I don’t know what the solution to that one is, but I do know what is not: a “free market” approach where ignorant patients are somehow expected to make perfectly rational decisions about their care.
> So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
I wouldn't put it like that. If the nature of his activity is ethical or morally neutral or better, his wealth is irrelevant. If it's unethical and immoral on a massive scale, then this scale is a major point. Obviously it's hugely correlated to his wealth, but a hypothetical version of Anatoly Chubais who helped orchestrate the theft of billions in the course of Russian privatization yet is entirely unmercenary in person (not saying either is true for the real Chubais) shouldn't get much slack.
No, I don't know of any estimates, and whether there was in fact any fraud in the strictly legal or broader sense.
> Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department?
I don't know why you think a cog in the machine would have any power to affect the state of health insurance. If they refused to follow company policy, they would simply be replaced.
Someone on reddit posted a weird little video that briefly showed luigi's substack reads. I paused to take a closer look and ACX was on it.
Obviously that information could have been manufactured or erroneous but it seemed legit because the video wasn't actually about that. It looked like the unwatchable product of some idiot savant who gathered all this information within minutes.
Anyway, I appreciate your asking and this allowing me to clarify that while it did look legit enough that if I had to bet money I would bet on it rather than against it but I'd rather not be forced to make the bet.
Risking Godwin's Law here, but people aren't celebrating a murder - they're celebrating what they see as the killing of a mass murderer and misery maker who does so for profit. Sort of like how we aren't generally pro-murder, but probably wouldn't get too upset if one of Hitler's assassins had succeeded.
I'm not sure that's evidence at all; in the absence of obvious parody, I'm not sure I'd expect the ass-covering response from substack to be any different between legitimate and fake manifestos. They don't have any real incentive to confirm it's real before taking it down.
Insurance is big a problem but the other half of high healthcare costs is the high salaries of healthcare workers particularly doctors but also supporting staff like APC, X-Ray techs etc, which all adds up. Its very common for specialist doctors to be making millions by overbilling their patients. Basically lying through their teeth and defrauding people who they are supposed to take care of. Doctors have great public image, at least compared to health insurance industry, so no one really wants to be the one to question the doctors.
Salary reduction of specialist doctors should be part of any healthcare reform. We can do so by increasing the seats at medical schools, allowing students to go to medical school directly after high school just like any other country in the world, and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
Insurance is probably the biggest part of why healthcare costs have gone up so much, and will continue to do so. It abstracts the costs, hiding it from those how receive benefits, especially if someone else (an employer, or the government), is paying most or all of the premiums.
If you have full coverage for any and all medical procedures, do you have any reason to question a specialist's opinion that a particular procedure is a reasonable thing to do in your circumstances, let alone that the price the specialist charges is appropriate?
On the other hand, if you're, say, buying a new car, you decide if the car is worth the whole price you're paying. You definitely need a car of some sort, you have decided, and the rest of the particulars are up to you. But you don't get to choose anything about your medicine, least of all the prices paid (by you or someone else).
> and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
I disagree. I propose the following system where doctors are allowed to set prices at whatever level they want:
* Every doctor is in every network. Every year, your insurance company sends you a benefit schedule showing how much they cover for a foot surgery, how much they cover for a chest x-ray, etc.
* Every provider has a price schedule which lists how much they charge for a foot surgery, etc. They are not allowed to charge different prices to different patients for the same procedure. Their price schedule must be publicly accessible.
* You, the patient, have access to all this data and can easily shop around and determine what your out-of-pocket cost would be for any doctor before you receive services.
* The government would maintain data on doctors' income levels by region, which would be fully available to early-career doctors who are deciding where to move to.
This, I believe, would make for a very efficient healthcare system without the need for any bureaucratic price-setting.
There's still a lot of problems with our system, even with this is place. Unless all medical expenses are percentage based with no out-of-pocket max, then at some point the incentive to even look at prices goes away. Someone who is getting 100% of their bills paid (which for people with regularly occurring high cost care happens in a couple months every year) doesn't need to shop on price. And since they are guaranteed to spend the out-of-pocket max every year, they never do shop on price even when paying the deductible.
The typical insurance holder barely uses it, so them shopping for prices is going to have a negligible effect. So your plan affects the people who use a moderate amount, such that they have a chance of not spending to the full deductible/out-of-pocket max if they are wise, but would spend to that cap otherwise. Not nothing, but not fixing the system.
The core problem that exists is people who use/need massively outsized amounts of our healthcare system. But nobody wants to tell them no, because they mostly just had bad luck (cancer, heart disease, etc.). End of life care is more expensive for less gain, but it's very hard to tell someone no. My dad almost died a few years back, and was kept alive at huge expense (and still has very expensive medication). He's otherwise pretty healthy and could live a lot longer with great qualify of life. At his worst, that seemed unlikely and an actuarial table would very likely denied his treatment. I don't know how to fix this either.
My proposal is that insurance payouts should be a fixed dollar amount for each service/test/procedure, indexed to (some percentage of) the average cost of the service/test/procedure in the region where the policyholder lives. No deductibles, no out-of-pocket maxes. If the policy's payout exceeds the actual amount billed, the surplus should go into an HSA and can be credited toward the patient's future medical expenses.
Regarding the cost of end-of-life care, I think a good approach would be for basic insurance policies to be "DNR-only", with supplemental "full code" policies available if desired. In practice, I think the best structure for the latter would be similar to a life insurance policy, where you can buy a policy with a low annual premium when you're young, or buy one with a much higher premium when you're older.
In general, it appears (from personal observation) that the healthcare system is set up to benefit patients the least, while allowing all other parties to benefit in varying degrees. That is, I'm not saying it was designed from the get go to be that, but that it rather evolved in that direction. The trouble with that is that the many parties that benefit while, as a group, numbering fewer than patients, can act in a more unified fashion to protect their interests.
It looks like a loosely organized group of cartels, basically.
Its probably own limited attention, but tech and other industries appear to get much attention from the media in the context of antitrust and anti monopoly measure than the healthcare industry.
I've been trying to absorb (decode) the latest paper on LUCA — "The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system" by Moody et al. (link below). They use a "Relaxed Bayesian node-calibrated molecular clock approach" to derive an estimate that LUCA existed about 4.2 Ga, with a 95% confidence interval spanning 4.09–4.33 Ga. This could put LUCA all the way back in the Paleohadean about 200 Ma after the hypothetical Tellus and Theia collision created the Earth and Moon. And LUCA's descendants would have to have survived the Late Heavy [meteor] Bombardment (LHB) ~3.7–3.9 Ga, but the authors cast doubt on this event (which I thought was considered pretty certain to have happened). In light of that, can anyone who's up on molecular clocks comment on the reliability of their estimates?
Also, they anchor their tree to some genes that duplicated before LUCA — because "dating the root of a tree is difficult because errors propagate from the tips to the root of the dated phylogeny." Is that kosher? This is all way outside the information levels that my bullshit meter can detect. ;-)
Otherwise, it's a fascinating paper. They estimate LUCA had approx 2.75 million base pairs, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the Prokaryote bp range (I think). And it was very likely heterotrophic, which suggests it may have been utilizing the biological products of autotrophs. So, there was some sort of functioning ecology ~4.2 billion years ago.
To what extent is "conservatism" related to conservatism?
There is a tendency (possibly based on some decisions made in 1830s Britain) to label the political right or at least centre-right as "conservative". This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
But is there some truth to it? Do right-wingers genuinely seek to change fewer things overall than left-wingers?
> a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all
A true conservative believes we have /already failed at that/; are failing at it more, faster, every day; and therefore need to change things, as quickly and destructively as possible, to roll back today's terrible state of affairs to the ideal pre-decay past.
It's not about change vs no change, but about optimism in our ability to make things better instead of worse. In general both sides want things changed, but in different directions.
One side thinks the past was perfect and is now decaying; alleged attempts to improve things only ever make things worse; it is their obligation to guard what they can from change, and also ideally to roll back whatever changes they are able to some previous state of affairs, because - to a first approximation - all innovation is and was always a mistake; every attempt to invent new structures, policies or culture, instead of improving anything inevitably makes everything worse instead. Progression is a ratchet of destruction of the good, and we should look to the past for inspiration. "What if we make things better, but too much?", they are mocked, but actually /there is too much progress/ and the ratchet needs to be unwound. Cthulhu must be taught to swim right.
The other side believes that better things lie ahead than behind us, and it is possible to reach them by innovating - sure, change is risk, but progression is both necessary to make life better, and capable of achieving this goal. Of course, they say, progression is a ratchet; today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still, so why would anyone ever want to turn back the clock? Don't ignore the past - look to it to teach us what not to do - sure; fail fast and try again, sure; but never stop innovating.
>This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
That sounds way too rigid. I think there are battles that conservatives consider not yet settled and wish to make changes to better align with the previous status quo. Abortion would be one. A battle that's considered settled is women's suffrage. Gay marriage is somewhere in between, probably closer to women's suffrage
"a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all"
Not so; as the end of "The Ballad of the White Horse" points out, if you leave things alone and do nothing, they don't stay as they are, they change - decay and alter and fall apart. So to truly conserve, you must constantly repair and replace what is now rotten and broken.
From the Father Brown story, "The Flying Stars":
"That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. "I had to be careful of 'em coming down. They're the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because they've been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible."
"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie. "I shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em. When they ask for bread, and you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves."
"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. "You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"
"A saint," said Father Brown.
"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. "Does one want to own soot?" he asked.
"One might," answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. "I've heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot—applied externally."
I haven't seen that particular version; they seem to have assigned him to a particular village to fit in the model of "crime of the week in our lovely rural location" that a lot of the BBC crime shows follow 😁
Chesterton had him turning up around London and other locations, depending on what parish he had been sent to. That at least spreads the crimes over a wider geographical area!
Oh yeah, this is an old question. If life other than on Earth exists, what would it be like? Supposing intelligent life and not plant or animal, would aliens have souls? Would they be in need of salvation? Would there be a second Incarnation if that was needed?
Off the top of my head, there are three positions:
(1) Rational but not ensouled, so more like animals than humans. Question of salvation therefore does not arise since we aren't worried about dogs or dolphins or elephants needing salvation, either
(2) Rational, ensouled, and unfallen. They would therefore be as different to us as Tolkien's Elves are different to Men. It'd be difficult for us to recognise an unfallen species if it wasn't technologically advanced, because we'd probably mistake them for the first instance (rational but unsouled). C.S. Lewis took a dim view of what our likely reaction would be, but his Space Trilogy (at least, the first two volumes) explore that on Mars and on Venus.
(3) Rational, ensouled, and fallen like ourselves. This is the biggie - if Christ is the only means to salvation, then the fallen aliens need Christ. Does this happen via the Great Commission - 'go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations' - or would Christ be incarnated on other worlds? There's divergence of opinion on that - maybe the crucifixion wouldn't be needed on another planet because that would be a different situation.
James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" is good on that, though he presents it as Roman Catholics whereas he was Anglican himself and I think it shows in part. It's sort of its own sub-sub-genre in SF - religious SF 😀
"Conservative" doesn't mean not wanting to change, but not wanting to take risks. For example, getting married is a conservative choice, for choosing to remain single is seen as more odd. So politically conservative people want to "change" things to be less avant-garde, reversing more liberal policies. This is still consistent with being conservative.
The Baggins family in The Lord of the Rings legendarium is the epitome of conservative. Bagginses "never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him." He used "respectable" to mean this.
I think it's proportional to the rate at which your society is changing, no?
So in a society that's largely the same as it was, say, 50 years ago, conservatives and "conservatives" are going to agree on a lot. They maybe want to roll back some minor reforms, but basically everything else stays as is. Think Europe between 1250 and 1300, lots of continuity.
In a society that's upended by change, "conservatives" become reactionaries. So think Europe between 1500 and 1550. The bigger the changes your society has recently undergone, the harder it is for conservatives to just do nothing and get what they want. That separates out the conservatives and the "conservatives" and becomes the more comprehensible split between conservatives and reactionaries.
Complicating this picture is that there are other countries where the left is conservative and the right is liberal (or at the very least, where the left is nationalist and the right is cosmopolitan: Americans often conflate the concepts of nationalist and conservative, but these aren't really the same thing at all).
If you're in a postcommunist country, for example, the left is going to be associated with the past and the right will be associated with change and the future.
Also in South Korea, its the left wing party that is opposed to immigration while the right wing party supports it. But the right wing party is also openly authoritarian(its the party of the current martial law president after all) and opposes feminism, gay rights etc. so its not like the South Korean right is some social liberal, economic right party like the British and Canadian Conservatives.
That's really interesting! I know very little about South Korea or East Asia in general- the whole region is kind of culturally opaque to me- so I didn't know the left party there were anti immigration. I was thinking more of countries like Slovakia, Moldova etc.. You're right though, of course, that being opposed to immigration doesn't translate to conservative views on gender, sex etc., necessarily, which is why (as I said above) I think it's important to distinguish between 'nationalist' and 'conservative'.
There was a really interesting study by a guy called Ariel Malka a few years ago, entitled "Are cultural and economic conservatism correlated"? The actual answer was complicated, but in essence, the conclusions were:
1) Cross culturally, not really.
2) More so when it comes to gender issues than immigration (that is to say, cross nationally, economic leftism is correlated with *more hostility* to immigration, but also IIRC to slightly more liberal views about women's rights).
3) The correlation between leftism and liberalism is most negative in postcommunist countries.
4) The correlation was most *positive* among educated people in western countries (I think America was near the top for *positive* correlation).
Americans use conservative and liberal in our own peculiar way.
Liberals in the extreme American sense are illiberal in their tolerance of long standing liberal values of late. Think purity police.
Present day American conservatives in good standing seem to be whatever is coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth at any given time. He said _what_now? Okay, yes, I fully agree.
The ones closer to the definition from oh, say 10 years ago are in the doghouse right now. See George Will retch. Retch George retch. Retch, retch, retch.
These days you gotta have a scorecard if you wanna know the players
Edit
So for 2024 you could probably toss any traditional definitions out the window to get at the American colloquial meanings.
Now maybe liberal means big city ideals and conservative means small town / rural ideals. NYC vs Des Moines. I really am not sure anymore.
My book is available today for pre-order, Feb 11 release. Fewer Rules, Better People is about the clash between governing by top-down rules and mandates versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in administration, in sports, in the household. Happy for recommendations on where to send it to be reviewed. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051251
For each institution that has some power over/among a group of people, I can imagine various things affecting the outcome of this clash. For instance, degree of similarity in identity among the people. Degree of similarity in values. Size of the group.*
Do you cover this in your new book? I'm very interested in either your general takeaways or specific anecdotes.
*I have never seen meaningful anthropological evidence for a Dunbar's number at 150 +/- 20 (or at any other threshold +/- 20). What I have in mind is gradual change, not a threshold.
Here are some reflections on regime breakdown inspired by present goings-on in Syria. I would be interested in comments and reflections:
Regime breakdown as a type of assurance game
Many political regimes are stable until they suddenly aren’t.
The revolution/regime change in Syria fits in this pattern. From the onset till Assad fled took only ten days (November 27 – December 8).
The time frame is comparable to the regime fall in Rumania under Ceausescu (December 21- December 25 1989) and Afghanistan (August 6 – August 15 2021). Seeming stability suddenly followed by almost immediate breakdown.
The logic of the sequence resembles an assurance game (also known as stag hunt or trust games). The logic in a nutshell:
As long as I think everyone else supports the regime, the sensible option is also to support the regime. Since then I avoid being punished (and may even enjoy rewards). While if I rebel and I am the only one, I am very visible to the ruler & he may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
However, if I think everyone else are abandoning the ruler, the sensible option is also to abandon him. Since if we all abandon him, I am “lost in the crowd” and cannot very easily be singled out by the new ruler for punishment. Compared to the alternative: I am the one left defending the old and now hopelessly lost ruler, making me very visible to the new ruler – who may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
As in assurance/stag/trust games, this game has two equilibria. Everyone supports the old ruler as long as they think everyone else supports him (or as long as they think a sufficient number supports him that he is likely to maintain power). And everyone abandons the old ruler if they think everyone else are abandoning him (or if they think sufficiently many abandon him that he is unlikely to maintain power).
The main point regarding such games is that the switch between the two equilibria can happen very quickly. It depends on how we all interpret the likely choice of action of everybody else. If our interpretation of what others are likely to do, shifts for some more-or-less arbitrary reason, we may rapidly shift the signals we ourselves send out as well.
I believe that we are all at some level constantly reading and evaluating the signals others send out in this regard. Even in the seemingly most stable of states, and whether we are fully conscious of doing so or not.
A) I humbly submit "Game Theory: The Force that Binds Us" [0], in which I schizopost about stag hunts and their varied manifestations. Instead of a truncated cone, I opt for a gravity-well analogy.
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> However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums).
B) I don't know anything about Systems Theory. But in my Game Theory post, "Section XII. Riot Games" signal-boosts an article [1] regarding the theory that riots are free-rider problems, and how their precipitation is often a matter of obfuscating the identity of would-be "entrepreneurs". The obfuscation lowers the activation-energy, in a sense. Seems relevant.
> For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst — a sort of entrepreneur to get things going — in Buford’s account, usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).
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C) Relatedly, I recall a Psmith book-review [2] (which I was unaware of, when I wrote the Game Theory post) which mentioned "political entrepreneurs". Context was the annexation of Eastern Ukraine.
> (...) The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
Thanks for the links. I browsed them and in particular noticed the one about the LA riots in 1992, since I lived in Berkeley back then. The riots reached from LA all the way up through Oakland.
... the riots stopped almost momentarily after a radio speech by Rodney King, who turned out to be a street-level philosopher. One sentence in particular stood out: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Perhaps he did not mean it as a very existential statement, but I and many with me were quite moved back then.
General lesson: Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I notice you also see promise in game theory. For my part, I believe it is the branch called "games with asymmetric information" that holds the largest - and not yet fully untapped - potential.
I wrote a bit more about that in my reply to Soreff below.
> Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I used to follow a blog called Epsilon Theory. It discusses the impact of narrative on things like the stock market. The blog often discusses "missionaries", i.e. those who build a consensus about the narrative by crystallizing widely-held sentiments into common-knowledge. (It's been a while, so I don't have a directly-relevant link on-hand.) Arguments are often soldiers, and to crystallize a sentiment is to expose it to attack. So ideally, the consensus should be defensible.
Relatedly, apxhard had an interesting comment [0] a while ago about bitcoin and "consensus mechanisms". As I understood, there's a hierarchy of consensus mechanisms, graded based on the cost of signalling. At the top of the hierarchy is warfare, which is the costliest. The cost is a feature, rather than a bug, because the high-cost gatekeeps away any frivolous participants. Slightly lower are things with cheaper signals, like bitcoin and lawfare. I don't have anything original to add here, but I think about this a lot.
> …The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
Scott and the rationalists like to mention Chesterton's Fence. But even before I was exposed to this meme, I'd personally made a similar observation that "nature tends towards an equilibrium". I.e. there's various forces in the world, and they tend to push objects around until those objects settle into a local optimum at which opposing forces completely cancel-out. Which means objects are frequently found either at rest, or in some periodic orbit.
One of my perennial frustrations is that people often assume they have perfect knowledge, and that ostensibly-stupid behavior in others is actually stupid. When in fact, it's more likely that their behavior is influenced by forces hidden from the casual observer. The behavior still might be "incorrect" in a sense, but it's often understandable or justifiable at some level.
And in my mind, this kind of dovetails with the "Seeing Like A State" and "TLP" memeplexes. Insofar as some types of information are more legible than others, and how the root of signaling is exogenous dependency (or equivalently, insufficient personal-agency). E.g. it seems like the Prisoner's Dilemma is (at least?) partly driven by the fact that the negative-externalities are stronger than the positive-internalities. I've not yet been able to generalize this, or carry this to its logical conclusion. But somehow, it seems rather suggestive. I think about this a lot.
> but in my work I usually stick to studying humans
This prompted me to glance at your substack, where I discovered that you're a pol-sci professor. I mean, I just assumed we were throwing around ideas for funsies. But now I'm curious: is this thread part of some research project? What's the goal here, exactly? Surely, much of this is old news to you. Anyway, now that I know you're a professor -- upon rereading the thread, it seems like you're especially interested in farming ideas about a conceptual "missing link", which transmutes individual actions into emergent behavior.
As for a potential missing link -- I can't really defend this coherently, but I've become increasingly convinced that the bedrock of signalling is trust (at least in most pragmatic situations, not single-iteration games). Which sounds kind of obvious a common-sensical, but I nonetheless feel is able to explain phenomena that are otherwise kinda mysterious. Like, there's a certain pattern in my mind that came from trying to grok Kelly's Criterion, which is related to how trust appears to grow logarithmically with the number of repeated positive interactions. Which is, I think, consistent with psychology's finding that frequency/consistency is more important than the magnitude of reward. And I suspect the dearth of repeated interaction carries a variety of consequences for contemporary society.
For example, nothing really came from Occupy Wallstreet. It was completely ephemeral with no lasting consequences. (I can't remember where I found this, but) I remember reading an analysis which explained that earlier political protests put in work. Like, they organized an actual event, and paid bus-fares, and had people take a break from their dayjobs (or something?), and trusted their leaders to make executive-decisions during negotiations with the opposition. Whereas Occupy Wallstreet was a bunch of twitter randos who had no organization to cement their "protest", which was really more of an angry mob.
I think maybe the general lesson here is "everything in modernity has become cheaper; and you get what you pay for".
Or consider how, during the 90's, everyone thought the internet would herald a golden age of information. Seemingly, few could have imagined that high-quality signals would be overwhelmed by dross and muck. I remember hearing a take (can't remember where, exactly; though I recall it mentioned "context collapse" [1]) that Twitter was a cesspool because it eschewed gatekeeping/curation. Blocking individual users is a poor substitute for nucleating a well-defined community around a central authority-figure who actually enforces norms. (In my headcanon, I like to think of Twitter as a cross between Valhalla and Lebanon: a battle-royal where as many as 12 different factions fight each other, for all eternity.) Since there's so little gatekeeping, joining Twitter is cheap and easy; but you get what you pay for.
Similarly on youtube, there's lots of people who bemoan the draconian censorship. But one point that's conspicuously absent from the discourse is what Epsilon Theory called "The Golden Rule": he who has the gold, maketh the rules. I.e. the viewers aren't youtube's actual customer. The actual customer is the advertisers, since the advertisers pay the bills that keep the servers running. So of course youtube's policies are going to cater to the advertisers. And yet, this point seems lost on those who decry that youtube has betrayed the viewers' interests. Youtube isn't trustworthy; but you get what you pay for.
So if I were in your position, I think my next area of investigation would be to really zoom-in on the idea of trust. Perhaps as some sort of currency, or alternatively as different types of binding-agents. Though, I'm not sure if any of this makes sense to you.
Thanks for your post. Lots of things in there, let me limit myself to agreeing with you that “trust” is certainly at the core of many of the everyday games people play (as well as the games rulers play with each other & with voters). How to signal trustworthiness, what you can do to get across to others that your commitments are credible, etc. Much of our everyday signalling and screening behavior is related to trust. So you’re spot on in that regard.
I don’t peddle my own stuff on substack, but concerning contributions by others that I often come back to when studying something specific (I mainly do applied research; studying something specific gets you closer to the "mechanisms" underlying whatever is going on) is Partha Dasgupta: Trust as a commodity. Dasgupta makes the important point that it is costly to build up a trustworthy reputation, while it can be lost very quickly. For example, a salesman (including politicians, professional workers etc.) achieves a reputation for honesty by carrying the cost associated with abstaining from cheating in all previous sales (dealings with others); yet this costly reputation may be lost in one stroke if he cheats once, and this knowledge spreads to his future customers. This asymmetry in how reputations are achieved and lost is of use for his customers (voters, clients), since they will often rationally have reason to assume that he will not take the risk to jeopardize his costly built-up reputation in his deal with them.
…And so on. We are dealing with reputations as (costly) signals, and how this information is screened by one’s interaction partners – but where deception may also be part of the game. (Notice that the difference between signals and mere messages is that signals are not cost-free.)
..Ok, this turned into a longer comment/reply than I planned! Again, thanks for your comment, and good luck with your further thinking/work along game-theoretic lines. You are on the right track, intellectually.
Back to doing work I get paid for…
PS Diego Gambetta and Michael Bacharach’s “Trust in signs” is another paper with a huge applied potential.
This reminds of a conditionally stable system behavior. The system is stable under some level of perturbation, and then goes kaboom when perturbed in a stronger/unusual manner.
Thanks for the reference to conditionally stable system behavior. I would be interested in elaborations or references here.
…I used to peddle in systems theory, from good old structural-functionalism a la Talcott Parsons to the Santa Fe people. However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums). Elster claimed that we need a general theory of human behavior to achieve that, and that the social sciences were “light years away” from such a theory.
These days, I believe signalling theory/theories of games with asymmetric information (or more generally: information theory) may provide the missing mechanism-link between system behavior and the behavior of individuals within the system.
But I am not aware of many who still search for the missing link between system behavior and the social psychology of individual behavior.
I broadly agree with the Elster's critique you're describing, with is also explored in a different way by this guy: https://desystemize.substack.com/
But still it helps to envision a simplest conditionally stable system, say, a truncated cone set on its tip: it can withstand a small sideways push, but a larger one will tip it into a different state. Now imagine a "truncated cone" of an unknown large number of dimensions (well, I can't imagine one, but suppose I do), and the critical distance between its axis and its edge is unknown. We can push it around a little to explore its stability limits, but we just never know which push vector value will tip it.
So this is how I envision these societal dynamics.
Now, to further stretch this analogy, the cone does provide a warning sign: if you get too close to tipping it, its edge will start lifting, and it's possible to recover at that point. But we have to pay attention, and react to this lifting, i.e., a feedback mechanism has to exist. This is what happens in a relatively open society: there's a constant visible churn, pushing from all directions, visible disorder, the cone wobbles, but the society has time to react and adjust itself.
Closed societies "cover the cone", and sever the feedback. We can't see when the cone is wobbling. It takes various forms: destroyed opposition, wrecked information space, fake polling, etc. So Assad wins and "election" with "95% of the vote", but it turns out nobody is actually supporting him. I wonder if he was genuinely surprised....
Thanks for your reply. Intuitively, your “cone” metaphor is fruitful. It illustrates the potential practical usefulness of systems theory also in the study of us humans, even if the microfoundations of what is going on is lost in the fog.
Analytically, your metaphor helps if you want to assign some sort of probability for a social or political system to be longer-run sustainable. Or - if in an interventionist mode - where to focus your gaze on what should be improved to enhance longer-run sustainability.
That said, there are challenges as regards to decide what constitutes/represents a “feedback mechanism” in the first place, without any underlying theory of why humans do whatever it is they are doing. I see a potentially serious snag there. But again, the metaphor is intuitively useful.
Concerning the interventionist use of systems theory, we probably agree that in any case most of us, most of the time, are not in positions to influence much the structure of the scene(s) where we strut and fret our hours upon the stage, before we are heard no more. Not even those among us that are formally placed at the top in human hierarchies.
...Such as Assad. He will have ample time to reflect on what (if anything) he might have had the power to do differently, in some apartment somewhere in Russia where he is likely to live out his days.
I am quite skeptical of assigning numerical probabilities to things like that, where we have neither an understanding of the underlying mechanisms nor we know the probabilities distribution of possible outcomes. With this I sharply part with our gracious host w.r.t. the (over)use of Bayesianism (even may I say, ab-use) to analyze everything under the sun. It produces illusions of precision and gives a whiff of "science", which is entirely inappropriate.
As to the feedback mechanisms, as an average citizen of, in my case at least, these here United States, we don't have much impact, but it's not 0 either. We at least should vote, and occasionally call and yell at the people we voted for. We could also choose to go into politics or activism to try to amplify our impact.
But Assad of course had had the controls, and the feedback - if he only wanted to use them. But he chose to break every feedback mechanism, literally and figuratively, and hence the "sudden", "surprising" demise of the system he built.
Thanks again for your comments on my ACX open thread post on "regime breakdown as a type of assurance game". I took the liberty to use your reflections on feedback mechanisms to make an addendum to my (revised) blog post today, "The fall of Assad in Syria perceived as an equilibrium shift in an assurance game".
Technical standards sometimes work the same way. If you have two competing technical standards, and each needs an expensive infrastructure to be viable, there can be similar dynamics of "How many people (or companies) are supporting standard X vs standard Y?". ( Usually less bloody than the political version. )
Many Thanks! Hmm... At the abstract level, yes, one can think of the system dynamics as e.g. being stable to small perturbations in some parameter like fraction-of-population-supporting-faction-X (or, in illiberal states, fraction-of-population-OPENLY-supporting-faction-X) and unstable to large perturbations. And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations.
Re feedback: Hmm... a ruler who is able to _see_ that some fraction of a segment of the population is turning against them might have better odds of e.g. buying them off than if the ruler is blind to the changes.
Re technical choices: At least in my career, at my level (individual developer), being on the losing side might be career damaging (though often not even that), but not life threatening, so I wasn't aware of cases where people were threatened to the point of silence (and cut feedback loops) in my personal experience. In _politicised_ technical choices this may well be different.
..."And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations."
..yes, that is what I am driving at. In the limited time I have available to sometimes peddle in High Theory.
More specifically, not all game theory, but that branch of game theory that deals with games with asymmetric information. That's where the (theoretical) action is, to modify the title of an essay by the sociologist Erving Goffman. Who approached similar theories about social interaction from the sociological side of the academic fence:
…The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
…Meaning that we are all in a coarser information position when observing others, and we are all in a finer information position when being observed by others.
That sentence is the basis for a general theory of interaction (not only among humans: one may link here to a general theory of information - but in my work I usually stick to studying humans😊).
..from that founding stone follows various everyday-life signalling and screening strategies, as well as pseudo-self-binding & “real” (evolutionary derived) self-binding strategies; deception-and-revealed-deception arms races; trust games; and much more. A Pandora’s box of ideas to study the many types of (human) interaction.
...Very similar to the type of sociology Goffman did back in the day. And thus holding the promise of being a real theoretical common ground in the sociological and economic study of man.
Linking all of this to systems theory, including tipping-point theories and the like, is however something I am likely to leave to scholars who are still max intellectually hungry😊
I agree there’s probably some stag hunt logic going on, but I wonder if there’s another pattern as well. People might also want to minimise the total amount of conflict. In that case, they would also suddenly switch to supporting what they perceived as the winning side.
That is the behaviour you’d get from a patent race game, if one player suddenly jumped ahead. In a patent race, two players are racing for some multi-step, winner-takes-all goal, like a patent. In that game, each player will spend maximum resources if that puts winning out of reach of the other player. Once the loser is clear, the losing player will immediately drop out of the race, if they don’t expect to catch up.
That could be happening here: suddenly, the old regime is at a disadvantage and can’t catch up.
Ah, sorry, you are right - at least I cannot locate a similar wiki page on patent race games today. So the page/s I consulted yesterday must have been from elsewhere.
Might give someone an incentive to write a wiki page on the topic:-)!
It feels like the same thing happened in the US as well, first with Biden, and then the entire liberal establishment. Losing the popular vote was a death knell for the left. I wonder how long the new establishment will last...
The debate(s) below about the Thompson assassination and resulting public reaction reminded me of Scott’s presidential endorsement post. Specifically the part about protesters throwing oil on artwork, and comparing their wrongdoings to the that of the oil executives:
>So how can we put the paint-throwers in jail, while letting the fossil fuel executives go free?
>Actually we can do this very easily, because the paint-throwers broke the law, and the fossil fuel executives didn’t. Unless you’re the dumbest sort of naive consequentialist, you punish people who have violated bright-line norms, not people doing stuff you think is subtly damaging, even if the subtle damage may add up to more harm than the bright-line norm violations.
I'm a bit surprised at the current public reaction and wonder if we really would hate the paint throwers had they protested something that appears to be so nonpartisan. Or is this reaction more justified because the "subtle damage" is not so subtle in this case as individual deaths can be linked to denied care?
The problem with the paint-throwers is that they chose the worst target - what's 100+ y.o. painting's got to do with anything? So the throwers annoy everyone and make their cause slightly less palatable.
Now if they were protesting the oil executives by throwing paint on, for example, their cars, I would at least understand it (not condone it, but the target would at least make sense).
Yes, throwing paint on oil executives (or other high status people who are seen as immoral) would likely have a much much better reception and may even be broadly popular. Throwing paint on priceless old paintings or blocking roads that ordinary people need to drive on just makes people hate you.
I think the "Bright Line Norms" argument is fully wrong for a few reasons. If we say "Laws" are a subset of "Norms" then whoever makes the law gets to determine who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Norm violation enforcement is a poor substitute for morality even without the disparity of equating it to law violation enforcement - the map of norms does not match the map of morality. Sometimes the violation of norms is a recognition that the norms were wrong in the first place.
More directly addressing your point, I think most people in the U.S. either have experience with being jerked around by the Health Insurance industry or have someone close to them who has been jerked around, possibly to death. It's much easier to cheer for the death of an executive when said executive is the most visible and egregious example of hurting you and killing your friends for profit - regardless of any "murder is bad" norm.
It does get hairy in practice i.e. we can *maybe* get consensus on both the legality and morality of uncomplicated types of violence and theft; but of course many (most?) legalities are hotly contested. So I'm with you on the norms / laws disparity.
And I can't object to the norms / morality mismatch either. But I don't have a more serviceable model for civilizational coordination, and am wondering if morality is simply not part of that equation.
Is the argument more conceptually sound if you swap "morality" for "ethics"? And then, would it at least be directionally correct, albeit imperfect?
If it still doesn't hold up, I would be interested in an alternative model if you have one in mind.
I'm a better destroyer of arguments than I am at making them, but I think I can take a wack at it. Norm violation enforcement only holds up when the perception of the norm is that it is both Just and Equitably applied. This is a very vague, weasely kind of argument on my part since Justice and Equitable application are in the eye of the beholder (and I'm probably ignoring some other necessary conditions).
"Violence is wrong" strikes me a good norm that is almost never equitably applied, since states and large entities practice direct and indirect violence all the time at great scale and with little legal reprisal - but I'm not sure this is the common view either, which is the one that matters in this case.
Scott has a point about punishing violations as keeping society together, but if everyone sees the punishment as unjust, then it frays societal bonds instead of reinforcing them. I don't think most people were in favor of the "Just stop oil" protestors throwing oil on paintings and thought some degree of punishment was a good thing, regardless of how they felt about oil barons (who I'm of the opinion are many thousands of times worse). Regardless of people's feelings on oil barons, oil paintings shouldn't be damaged or destroyed because they're unrelated to the protest.
Here people are seeing an executive killed who is perceived as a mass murderer and someone who was intentionally profiting off the misery and suffering of others. The chances of this man ever seeing the inside of a jail cell over these actions were zero - his evil was entirely legal, and there was little chance that the laws would change soon to punish or even truly stop this. So when someone acts outside the norms and kills him, people cheer because his evil has been stopped. "Violence is wrong" still holds, but the norm in this case was not being equitably applied in the perception of most.
I'm anti-assassinating health care CEOs. But I think part of it is that with Trump's 2nd election and people talking about it through an (inaccurate IMO) pro-establishment vs anti-establishment lens, everyone wants to view everything through that lens and anti-establishment is the cool kids thing to do.
For me the underrated angle to the story is how much more resources they give to this murder than any other murder, seemingly based on an implicit "he's rich so he matters more" idea.
The critical resource here, was a random McDonald's employee in Altoona. To get that, you need the police to do a modest amount of digging through surveillance camera footage to get a few half-decent pictures, and then you needed to get half the country to look at those pictures and care and remember.
So, basically, it's up to CNN et al to decide who does or does not get this sort of treatment. And as others have noted, very poor people being killed can get a whole lot of coverage on CNN if it's the right poor person at the right time for the right reason.
I think this is mostly a function of how much media / public attention the murder got. If the victim had been found dead in an alley missing his wallet, it would not have been nearly as big a story, fewer resources would have been spent on it, and probably the McDonalds employee wouldn't have ever seen the murderer's picture on TV.
Exactly. If a crime requires a nationwide manhunt to solve, then CNN decides whether it will be solved. Simplistically speaking, if the victim is rich or famous, or if the victim is poor and black and the killer is white(*), or if the victim is a Pretty White Woman, then off we go. Otherwise, meh, it won't get the clicks so it's not worth the bother.
* Typically these don't need a manhunt to solve because if we know the killer is white then we probably already caught him. But if e.g. Derek Chauvin had skipped bail and gone on the run, I expect CNN would have made sure we all knew what he looked like.
"They" is the police. It's true a random McDonald's employee seems to have fingered the guy, but they did in fact spend a lot of resources interviewing people, reviewing surveillance footage, painstakingly reconstructing his escape route - sending scuba teams to search waterways in Central Park! - there have statistically been multiple murders in NY since then and I bet none of that happened for any of them.
The fact that the media focused more on this one, or that given how it was resolved a lot of that effort ended up being wasteful, doesn't change the point.
Maybe I'm too trusting in the goodness of "the system", but I don't agree with the "investigated harder because he's rich" angle. I don't think it was about the victim; I think any victim would have gotten the same response. Rather, I think it's about how aberrant the shooting was, given the place. Cold-blooded shootings with clean getaways are *not supposed to happen* in 2024 midtown Manhattan. It's about the public's perception of safety. There's a reason why Trump's "I could shoot someone on 5th St" quip bothered to specify 5th St.
Well I think Trump said 5th Ave because he lives there, and also because it's super public, but the fact that it's midtown Manhattan is downstream from the "rich" part. Perhaps a janitor getting shot in midtown Manhattan would get the same treatment (I doubt it, can't point to concrete evidence), but a shooting in midtown Manhattan, janitor or otherwise, certainly gets more coverage than one of a similar person in South Bronx.
Did they? There was a lot of resources used for the response to mass protests, but that was in response to the protests not the murder itself. They prosecuted the perpetrator but that's not (at least shouldn't be) unusual.
They did not have (nor did they need to have) any massive citywide manhunt involving canvassing hundreds of security cameras, dozens of interviews, dredging local bodies of water with scuba teams, mass searches of city parks, and shit like that.
The scariest thing would be if this assassination "worked" in producing change people want. It's as scary as the President-Elect's FBI pick having an enemies list.
This is not going to end well. The assassinations aren't going to just be people you don't like.
The result of one of these happening a month won't be a change in the operation of health insurance, it will be a huge hiring boom in bodyguards for insurance executives.
It sure as hell worked for the assassination of Shinzo Abe; the killer basically got everything that he wanted. And it hasn't resulted in a bunch of political assassinations because it's already extremely rare for someone to actually have the resolve to murder a stranger, even when they have every justification to do so.
It also isn't relevant to what's happening in US politics. That was going to happen whether or not Thompson died. State-sanctioned killings are the standard, not the exception.
It seems to me that most of the folks spewing venom the direction of Brian Thompson would not very much like a world where insurance companies were not allowed to deny procedures.
"It would be bad if insurance companies were required to approve all procedures".
I assume because insurance costs would go up, probably to the point that insurance companies might shut down (at least in jurisdictions with such a rule: see insurance companies pulling out of California due to the regulations there).
a) Brian Thompson and UHC were _particularly_ egregious, with triple the denial rate of the industry average, and installation of an AI denial generator system which broke their own rules so badly that, for living patients with enough health to be able to navigate the appeals process, 90% of the denials were overturned.
b) I've been through the health care marketplace information, the medicare options information, and, before retirement, my employer's health insurance options. The dissemination of denial information after Thompson's informal execution is the _first_ time I have ever seen denial rate information. As nearly as I can tell, that data was either actively hidden from the public or close enough to hidden to effectively be hidden.
c) I prefer to have punishments go through legal channels. Ideally Thompson's policies, particularly the denial generator system, should have led to charges of something like lethal fraud or conspiracy to commit murder, and he should have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed. Still, like Osama Bin Laden before him, also responsible for the deaths of several thousand of my countrymen, I'm thankful that he is dead.
"Upon information and belief, over 90 percent of patient claim denials are reversed through either an internal appeal process or through federal Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) proceedings."
Children. What makes me hesitate to have children is not the cost or things like that, but the AI apocalypse, and also things like the risk of nuclear war and horrible things like that. Should we still have kids if we are condemning them to a nightmare? Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
With all due respect, plenty of Japanese, Germans, Soviets, etc. had kids (and at a higher rate than they do today) DURING WORLD WAR 2 - as their cities were being firebombed and their countries invaded. You're not special, you don't live in the End Times; get over yourself!
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
"knew"? Sure, no way. But we don't know, not even close. If you think you know, you've gotten into AI millenarianism.
And since we don't know, then yes, having kids is the normal human thing. In fact, if you're going to employ high-level intellectual forecasting to override your desire to engage in the most fundamentally human activity, it seems contradictory to be worried about the fate of humanity.
This applies more generally, by the way: smart people making unusual choices on major life decisions because they have used their big brains to think very hard about the long-term future are almost always going to end up making things worse for themselves.
No, you don't have to know something with absolute certainty for it to influence your optimal behavior. You don't know for sure that if you bet all your money on a particular horse in a horse race, you would lose everything. Yet you wouldn't do it because it would have a negative expected value. That's still not "horse racing millenarianism."
Nor does it make sense to say that if you are uncertain about the future you should do the "normal human behavior." First of all, why should uncertainty imply that you should do the "normal thing", whatever that is? In some families it is normal to buy lottery tickets. I recommend not doing this. Second, normality has changed a lot. It seems to be becoming more and more normal not to have children. I'm not saying that's a good thing! But it shows that normality is neither necessary nor sufficient for a "should."
In this particular context, it is not even necessary to worry about the “fate of humanity” as a whole to consider the influence of expectations on your behavior in the interests of your potential children. And if humanity is at risk because of artificial intelligence, nuclear war or biological threats, then I can't change that by having children. Instead, I just condemn them to being witnesses of the end of humanity with some probability. Whether the probability is 20% or 100% does not really matter for the structure of the argument, but of course it is an important argument for the right decision result!
> Children. What makes me hesitate to have children
...what made you consider having children, before you hesitated?
It's sounding a little like you want to make a decision one way, but also feel some peer pressure or other external reason to make the opposite choice; and thus feel you need to justify yourself and/or convince others of the validity of your position.
Just in case I'm not wrong on this: keep it simple. If you (and your partner) want children, have children. If you don't, don't. You don't need to justify your decision to anyone (other than your partner), and you should ignore even strong pressure even from your in-group to decide one way rather than another. It's your (plural) life, not the crowd's.
I see evidence of peer pressure here, but of course information is always taken in from other people, friends, etc. and also from blogs like Scott's. Articles on blogs like Astral Codexten worry me a lot, but I don't think I would be any better off if I didn't know about these developments.
The way OP's question is phrased, though, feels like we are only getting half the story. "What makes me hesitate to have children" implies they would otherwise have children, but for the existential risks they've outlined.
Why is this? - why would they otherwise have children? They haven't said. "Should we still have kids if...", they say, without explaining why, in their view, we should have kids at all.
If it's part of an ongoing conversation here, my original comment applies - the most important part of this decision is that, whatever informs it, ultimately you completely own it, because you have to live with it.
If there is some other reasoning, we can't really have a conversation without taking that into account. Nothing in this world is certain, and all our decisions must balance between risks and rewards; but it's hard to reason about where balance might be found when only one side of the scales is visible.
If it's an entirely unexamined assumption, perhaps it is worth examining.
The world is awesome. Bring more people into it. AI required multiple technological leaps. If that doesn't happen we live, if it does (and I expect us to, but less than 90% chance) we will all die. That's fine. Future is hard model. They're just super duper cute, you can safely predict you'll love your kids once you have them, go for it.
I do not completely understand what you are saying here. You expect us all to die due to an AI catastrophe with somewhere between 50% and 90% chance even though the future is "hard [to?] model", but you recommend having children anyway because they are cute? So it's okay that AI kills them because they are cute while they live? (I never doubted I would love my children, so this is not a relevant point. But I doubt that it would be nice for those that I love to create them to be killed in a bad and hopeless situation?)
Yeah totally. AI catastrophe is inevitable if we have, say, 2-5 more technological leaps in design space of how computers process information. It probably won't happen just from 'throwing more compute power at LLMs'. That could happen in 1 year, it could happen in 50, it could happen never. Being alive is awesome. Having kids is awesome. What is the .... median expectation of how far out something horrible happening that you have? Is it more than 5 years?
I don't know. Is the median really the only relevant property of the distribution here? What are your expectations? And why do you think more compute is not enough?
because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion, we are seeing pretty constraining limits to additional intelligence as a function of compute power, it's an empirical observation
what you would worry about, assuming you can't define properly an objective function for something arbitrarily smarter than you which is a pipe dream to get right on the first try, is something becoming arbitrarily smarter, most likely through recursive self improvement. to get there would require several paradigm shifts of how we build intelligence, let's say LLM's are the first paradigm shift, probably takes 2-5 more jumps to get to something that will end up on the path to that.
I don't have expectations, how can you predict how long it takes a person to come up with a new idea, of a categorical difference like discovering LLM's was, or model how many steps it takes, etc.
It could be plausibly anything between 0 and 100.
I was just saying that to me unless you think very likely everything ends within 5 years (my personal breakeven horizon for life worth living), having kids is fine because life is awesome.
Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters.
"Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters."
Well, I'm trying to form a "model". Since I'm neither a genius nor a theoretical AI scientist or whatever, I try to listen to/read arguments and see how convincing I find them. This also includes, for example, something like Metaculus estimates.
"because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion"
Just out of curiosity: Did these people expect 10 years ago that we would now have something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
No, but the point is that I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you. It would be a grave mistake to treat your or anyone else's vague guesses as reliable prophecy.
Sorry, but I do not think that I treated anyone's vague guesses as reliable prophecy, in particular not my own guesses. If you are genuinely uncertain about the future, you should take your subjective uncertainty and behave responsibly based on it, right? Otherwise you would never do anything like saving for retirement because "why not just consume all your money right now, after all I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you."
Thanks, I have some sympathy for the defiant optimism embodied in the quote. However, just saying "the past was even worse" is not very convincing. People had children during the plague because they had a different mindset and maybe they believed they had to have children, or they did not think about their childrens' future very much.
The last sentence in the Lewis quote, "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs." may be sensible for people who already live - you should make the best of your life. But it is a different question whether you should bring new people into that life.
Historically, however, it would be very interesting to know to what amount people thought about Nuclear War when Lewis wrote that. (In 1948!)
Clicking on the link to the full quote in your comment, I have to say that I find Lewis' paragraphs you left out quite cynical:
"What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities."
Oh wait, the atomic bomb threatens to kill us so we are lucky that we can talk about that reality?
"It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means."
So he basically argues for embracing extinction if honor is not available.
"Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved."
So survival and life are not top priority.
"Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man."
This is a way too general statement. (Keep in mind that these two sentences include suicide bombers.) It also just a claim and my prior is that it is wrong. Compare for:
Zeynep's Law: "Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude." (https://x.com/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353)
I omitted some of the more theological parts of the quote because they're more theological.
But I do think the broad point that people have *always* been facing existential threats and having children regardless is important context and saying "people in the past had a different mindset or didn't think about their children much" is a bit of a deflection.
Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused? That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?
If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)
"Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused?"
That's a very good question, and thank you for making me think. What do you think about it? If an omniscient demon tells an Englishman in the Middle Ages that the Vikings are coming in five years and will kill 90% of the village population, should he have children? What if they're going to kill the entire population? What if they're going to first torture and then kill the entire population?
The comment about "mindset" is not a deflection, however. If you and your children believe that all suffering has a higher meaning, then of course that makes life better and suffering less problematic. The way you interpret the world is not just a side issue, but influences your wellbeing. And if you believe that humanity will continue forever (or until the Lord comes or whatever), then your contribution to that gives your life meaning and makes suffering more bearable. I think it is perfectly legitimate to consider things outside of one's own lifespan.
"That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?"
Hmm, in addition to the points mentioned above, I would like to make the side note that the Vikings would still have had children. This would raise further questions about morality.
"If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)"
No, I would definitely prefer being born in the 20th century to being born in the 10th century.
I do want to emphasize the universality of this: it's not just "10th century Christian peasants had some mindset that made them uniquely able to have children despite an existential threat" - this was basically a universal experience everywhere.
The "vikings might be coming over the hill to kill you and yours" is a colorful example, but not a necessary one - for most people for much of history (including probably the Vikings themselves, to your side-point) were not more than a few bad harvests, one bad plague, or one bad military conflict away from annihilation.
And yes, mindset is a part of the difference, but I think if basically everyone for all of history was able to 'cope': to find purpose in life despite the certainty of death and the possibility of great suffering, and we can't, despite living in on-net the most peaceful and prosperous time in history... I feel the interesting question isn't "is it moral to have kids", it's "where did we break and how do we fix it"?
I think you're confusing the "known" aspect here. If someone said that Vikings would kill them all five years from now (and we now know that was true for many villages in that area) we're presupposing correct information. If someone had said the Vikings were going to attack in say, 1585, we would similarly discount that - despite not having any particular reason to believe one above the other, a priori.
Saying that people should be concerned about having kids in 2025 is similarly presupposing one or more potential world events has a high(er than normal) likelihood.
If I'm in England somewhere in the 9th century I will be wary of the Vikings, because there's a history of them attacking. But apparently not enough of a worry that people stopped having kids. If I'm living in 2025 maybe I'm concerned about one or more of Climate, AI, Nuclear War, whatever. But Nuclear War seems way more likely in the 1960s than now, and I hope you agree it was good that people still had kids then. And Climate doesn't seem like a bigger issue than WWII, and people still had kids then.
Without having solid knowledge of the future, I don't think there's a good reason to not have kids unless it's so obvious that there's a very high chance of doom. Some people think that about AI, but that belief seems silly and pretty much religious at this point. At least the level of surety of AGI existing and also being powerful enough to effect that level of change.
Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves.
Likewise, maybe you have a kid that does just fine in the neo-feudal re-gilded climate apocalypse age we are heading into. Maybe you kid like machinegunning climate refugees/ slitting the throats of climate border guards depending on where you life and has a grand old time.
You are making like 8 layers of predictions about the future each of which is contingent on the pervious, don't worry so much about it.
"Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves."
I think I have a reasonable chance to be a good parent, I can influence that (somewhat! I know there are limits). I cannot really influence the AI future. Altman and Musk will decide what it looks like.
The "Safe Uncertainty Fallacy" from your link requires a misreading of what people are arguing. It's not that "we don't know, therefore everything will be fine". It's "we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information - not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
justfor thispost isn't saying that you don't know, therefore everything will be perfect. They're saying that you should have epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty.
There's no need to come up with a snappy new "fallacy" for what you're doing: it's catastrophizing.
"catastrophize (third-person singular simple present catastrophizes, present participle catastrophizing, simple past and past participle catastrophized)
1. (transitive, intransitive) To regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic."
This implies that I am misinterpreting a bad situation. So what is the correct interpretation?
"2. (transitive, intransitive, psychology) To expose a behaviour pattern of seeking worst interpretation and magnifying disagreeable outcomes (of).
3. (obsolete) To end a comedy."
I'm not looking for the worst interpretation at all! I'm here to be convinced that everything is finde! Please give me a very good interpretation!
However, currently my problem is exactly that I have "epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty" and I am humble enough to see that this includes very bad outcomes. So what should I do? Act as if it didn't?
"we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information"
I don't understand what that means for the question of whether one should have children. Are you in favor of always sticking to traditional behavior? Or are you advocating not having children until we know what the future holds?
"- not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
I don't know what this accusation is based on. In which sense do I use more speculative arguments than others? Where do you see me actively trying to convince myself of something bad? This would presume that I want to see a bad result - I actually don't want that! I want to see reality and make ethically good decisions.
I was pretty sure Reagan and Brezhnev were going to kill me and everyone else in the 80’s but it didn’t happen and I got to grow up! We could get lucky again.
I didn't mean that in a reassuring way, just that it's very hard to see the future. I personally believe that both climate change and AI are going to be very big problems, sooner than anyone thinks -- but I still mow my lawn. What can you do? If you're trying to decide whether to have kids now, that's more fraught but my child has never complained so far about the world he's inheriting (not that it would do him any good).
1. Putting AI aside for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived. Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely), most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
1. "Putting AI for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived."
I think this argument has a lot of weight, but I'm not entirely convinced. Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; however, I can clearly imagine at least the "no nuclear war" scenario (although the probabilities estimated by Metaculus are depressingly high) and think there's a lot we could do about it.
As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). Even in the "not everyone dies" scenario, I don't see a great future (maybe I lack imagination) and my impression is that humanity is too stupid to prevent bad developments in this regard (you can't get the AI back into the box once that it is out). Maybe I should become religious, but motivated reasoning has never been my strong point.
"Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely),"
So how likely do you think they are?
"most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?
Scott once wrote: "'What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six', the people would say." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco) To me, the mood in that sentence felt very depressing. But it's not something parents talk about once they have children, because it would be pretty bitter for the children.
Hm. She writes: "This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven’t properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you’re on the fence you should think more about it." I don't know what to make of this. Is not being "on the fence" here also due to kind of willful ignorance? Or is there something deeper behind it that I don't understand?
"Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; "
Honestly, my gut feeling is that nuclear war is less likely now than at any point in history since 1950. In the 1950- 80s, people had a lot more reason to worry about nuclear war: nukes were new and unprecedented, and there were two, well-formed power blocks, each with an ideological desire to overwhelm the other and with growing nuclear arsenals. The risk has since diminished quite a bit: the total number of the world's nukes is now far smaller (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071026/nuclear-warheads-per-country-historical development), there's 70 years of non-nuclear aggression precedent that seems to have prevented deployment so far, and the world is far more economically globalized now and so all actors have more to lose from nuclear war.
I'm not saying the chance of nuclear MAD today is zero, but if the chance of nuclear MAD wouldn't have dissuaded you from having a child in the 1950s (and indeed hundreds of millions of people did have kids despite it), I'm confident that it shouldn't dissuade you now.
"As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). "
For a "standard" hopeful scenario for a strong AI future, I recommend Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace (https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace). I don't personally have an opinion about how likely this is vs. a "bad" AI future vs. extinction, but certain smart people do take it seriously.
"So how likely do you think they are?"
I haven't researched either question extensively, and I encourage you to do your own research. But as a first-glance analysis, I would say:
Climatepocalypse before 2100 (death of over half of humanity due to direct climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, fires etc.): 10%
Nuclear War between great powers before 2100: 15%
"Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?"
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying here. Every human in history has had to deal with the reality that their children will suffer, and the strong possibility that their suffering will be great. That hasn't stopped most people from thinking that having children is good. It's up to you to decide whether your children would be happy that they were born.
"This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario"
IMO the worst-case for AI is rapid total human extinction, and in my calculus this possibility is not great enough, nor the suffering horrible enough, to create a strong argument against having children in 2024. If the worst case were prolonged torture, this would change my opinion, but I don't think it's likely that a future strong AI will want to torture all of humanity.
With respect to the risk of nuclear war, it seems that a situation in which more countries have nuclear weapons seems more unstable. Economic interdependence is possibly helpful, but some countries are aiming at reducing it.
A different sort of calculus says that if only people unconcerned about the future have children, we will raise a generation that is indifferent to the future.
So your point is, “We should have children in the future to help the next generation not to behave stupidly, even if there is a good chance that the children we have will end up in a nuclear war or an AI apocalypse”?
This calculation only works if you think the apocalypse is at least a generation away and/or make some other assumptions. It's not a 'point' I was trying make, just a rationale I have heard people use. More often I hear it from the right, that eg Christians should have more babies to better stem the future tide of 'progress' (usually stated in terms of unwanted cultural change).
Personally, I think people should have babies if and only if they want them, embrace the work that is entailed in raising them to be thoughtful independent adults, and understand going in that the whole endeavor could go sideways starting on day 1.
I think it's problematic to take the perspective of unborn people. Will they regret being born? Happens all the time. But most people, once born, try to avoid death, suggesting that the way to maximize the utility of a prospective life is to make it actual.
Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right, I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6. (Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)
Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20.
So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years.
(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
"Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right,"
Why? It seems this only makes sense if the life you create is desirable for the life you create.
"I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6."
At which percentage would you change your recommendations?
"(Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)"
I don't find the AI plateau story very convincing. Or rather, I don't think we should extrapolate too much from it into the future.
"Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20."
That's interesting, I thought that there was a relatively high rate of depression and similar mental illnesses among ACX readers.
"So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years."
That is actually very helpful, thanks!
I assume I could answer the question above, "At which percentage would you change your recommendations?" with that, if I knew your actual percentage for the 7 years and also where the 60 years came from?
However, the assessment may also depend somewhat on how the extinction occurs.
"(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
Thank you for the serious approach here. What are your expectations for the future?
All lives contain nightmarish elements. Even without nuclear war, an AI apocalypse, or any other disaster your children will - at various points in their lives - suffer. They will eventually die. They will know terror.
If life is worthwhile with these inevitabilities, in what way(s) are the things you're worried about sufficiently worse to give you hesitation?
Do you think Nuclear War and AI are a relevant risk?
If so, it seems that they are characterized due to a strong hopelessness. They would, I assume, strongly increase the share of the world population suffering compared to the things you list, also within each life. It would be probably hard or impossible to flee, and there would be no future to look forward to. But maybe my pseudo-calculation is just wrong there, happy about any corrections. What are your expectations for the future?
Nuclear war and AI are risks. Relevant risks? Relevant to what?
All life, despite being positive, is characterized by a strong hopelessness.
Assume the worst case that an apocalypse will occur in 7 years. Now imagine that before you were born you were temporarily plucked from nonexistence and given an option: you can be born and live for those 7 years before dying or you can return to nonexistence. Which would you want? Do that.
I assume that this depends on how pleasant or unpleasant the experiences are?
Ending one's life is a decision that some people make when things are going really badly for them. The relevant question is, how many good experiences are necessary in a lifetime to make the whole life worth living (from a prospective perspective), assuming that life will get really bad at some point?
You mean children who died at a young age? That's an interesting question. I don't know anyone personally who has lost a child, but I think for many parents it's very traumatic. I suppose it depends on the suffering of the child, but I realize that hindsight can be skewed. The thought of "would it have been better if the child hadn't existed?" is just not a question that people usually ask, right? It would lead to additional self-blame, which most people prefer to avoid. And that's a good thing, because it's not healthy to blame yourself for things you can't change.
People generally aren't acting like they actually expect the apocalypse in such a short timeframe. Companies are still investing in long-term R&D, employees are putting money in their retirement funds etc.
Do you think these people are hypocrites? Do you think they secretely know the "truth"? Or do you think it's the opposite, that is, people aren't able to plan for things to get really bad?
Talk is cheap. People can say things regardless of whether they are going to act like the things they say are the truth, though this doesn't imply any actual knowledge of the future on their part.
Is there a name for the little dance we do with someone at a doorway, doing head fakes or dekeing each other out as the Canadians put it, where two people vie to outpolite each until one or both stop and make a directional gesture or come to a verbal agreement about which side of the doorway each person should use?
In the IT world, a deadlock is where two processes think they should go first but a "live lock" is where both processes think the other should have priority - "no, you first..." "No but I insist, please, you first" ad infinitum.
I am terrified of the idea of dreaming. It feels crazy to me that in order to survive, I have to go comatose with vivid hallucinations in an altered state of consciousness every night. It’s like having a health condition where I have to endure an LSD trip every day or literally die.
I am not here for advice; that I take from my therapist and my psychiatrist. But I’d like to ask you to share how you deal with the idea that you have to have dreams every night. Do you just ignore them? (Why are you okay with it?) Are you even looking forward to them, perhaps?
I don't find dreams too different from intense daydreaming, where I also play out various scenarios in my head, both that bring me joy and that I am worried about. It's just our attempts to predict the future in order to be more effective agents, and our neural networks finetuning.
I'm fine with having some visual byproducts in the process, as long as they arent' distressing (but for me, they rarely are).
Dreams are for me a little, a really little, compensation for having only one and a very limited life.
I have been on other planets. I have been on spaceships. I flew by will. I saved the world with awesome friends. I also was chased and treated very badly by horrific monsters, but with them completely unable to hurt me for real. I had the adventure, without paying the price.
I sometimes have a hard time getting to sleep, so I take waking up from a dream as: Oh! I _did_ finally get to sleep, which I needed. FWIW, most of my dreams are unpleasant, but I still find the evidence that I finally got to sleep comforting.
Our brains are weird structures that need nightly maintenance, being upset about dreams is like being upset about urination. It’s undignified, but…
Also, some of my dreams are very interesting, especially the ones where I am simultaneously watching a movie and also the movie star on the screen. If I could recreate that experience while awake, I would pay a lot for it.
I can't wrap my head around either dreading or looking forward to my dreams. I don't exactly think of them as things that happen to me, because the me they happen to is so discontinuous with the waking me. She doesn't even know she's asleep! She doesn't know it's a dream. She cannot access at will any of the memories, skills and opinions I can. So even if I knew I was going to dream tonight of being killed by a mass shooter I don't think I would dread it, because it isn't really me it's going to happen to. I'm not saying you should have my attitude -- I understand you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder -- just trying to describe my personal attitude towards dreams, in answer to your question.
Well, bits of my real life, present and past, appear in my dreams. But my dreaming self cannot access autobiographical memory the way my waking self can. It also cannot reason and reflect in the same way. For instance in one of my dreams last night a psychiatrist who is a professional acquaintance in my waking life, asked me to enter a psychiatric hospital. There was some task I was supposed to do there. It had something to do with understanding or improving what life was like for the patients. If in real life the psychiatrist had asked me to do such a weird thing I would have had all sorts of thoughts about his request: How could he possibly think I'd be willing to do it? Why did he even want me to? Had he lost his reason? But in the dream I felt no surprise or displeasure regarding his request, and in fact did enter the hospital. Later in the dream my mother visited me and wanted to know why I had been in the hospital. Not having access to my waking knowledge that she died quite a long time ago, I was not surprised to see her.
By the way, I'm a psychologist, and I wanted to let you know that your horror of dreaming sounds like a cousin of an anxiety disorder I've seen several people have: a horror of fainting. Most of them are people who have never fainted, and have no reason to think they are likely to. People who have this fear sometimes begin avoiding settings that make them feel slightly odd, such as escalators, because they are afraid the odd sensation of standing on moving stairs might somehow make them faint. When I've asked them what it is they fear, they have a hard time putting it into words. It is definitely *not* a fear of hurting themselves when they fall, or of being robbed or harmed by strangers while unconscious . And it is definitely not anticipated embarrassment at being seen by others losing consciousness, crumpling to the ground, etc. It's something about unexpected loss of control of the self. Anyhow, thought it might be helpful for you to know you are not alone in your phobia.
Thank you, fear of fainting is definitely a new clue! I seem to have the opposite case though, because I'd prefer to sleep all night without dreams, i. e. to "faint" my way through the night. But the "loss of control of self" sounds quite relatable. I'll look up this condition you mentioned, in case it brings some important insights.
OK, just to give you a more complete view of this sort of phobia here are some others that are similar: fear of orgasm; fear of vomiting; fear of becoming so dizzy that one falls down; fear of having an epileptic seizures; fear of discovering one is gay (the people who have this fear are generally not particularly homophobic, and have years of good evidence that they are heterosexual, so even they are perplexed why this fear haunts them). For all of these things there are conventional reasons one could fear them, things having to do with social stigma, shame and embarrassment, but for people who have an actual phobia about one of them the feared thing really is something different: It’s something about losing control of one’s self, or actually sort of losing one’s self. If you would like to know something about treatment of this sort of phobia I can describe it.
Dreams are intriguing. Sometimes they are frightening, sometimes I experience deep positive emotions. I've never considered them anything other than a feature of life.
Never take quinine though. I have taken it as a malaria prophylactic and true to its reputation I had extremely vivid, horrifying dreams. I didn't dread falling asleep but I didn't much look forward to it either.
I guess I'm lucky enough to have a certain amount of control over my dreams. I have a lot of fun in my dreams, and they're an important form of recreation for me.
I've been working on lucid dreaming for a while, and have some natural talent for it. I spontaneously dreamed lucidly a lot as a child before I had any idea it was A Thing that could be practiced and improved.
In the right setting, both internal and external setting, I can reliably launch a lucid dream with about 80% success. I can't make all of my dreams lucid 80% of the time though. It works like this: I need to have alrady slept once that night, the lucid dream is almost always during the 2nd sleep period after having been asleep for at least 3.5 hours or so. I wake up briefly, drink some cold mugwort tea, and fall back to sleep in a controlled manner. Body perfectly still, visualizing internally certain....concepts? This part is hard to describe in writing, but I know when it feels correctly done; I can tell when it is (or isn't) going to work. Then I'm in the dream suddenly, and I know I am in a dream. (side note: as a result of years of practicing this I can also just put myself to sleep without the dreams pretty reliably too, even on stimulants)
Here's the part that is probably the strangest thing to people when I try to explain the experience. Lucid dreams can be quite dull. Everything I'm experiencing is internally produced by my own mind, and my mind doesn't always do a great job of filling in the blanks. Very lucid dreams are remarkably incomplete at times and I've actually woken myself up out of boredom. They are usually pretty fun though. Its also important to draw a distinction between lucid dreaming and dream control, which are related but distinct. I'm often fully aware that I'm dreaming, but with little control over events, like watching out of the window of a train or something. Gaining increased control over the dream also often involves giving up some of the lucidity. Some of the best ones have been when I launch a lucid dream, forget I'm dreaming, then remember again. These are often much less stark and empty than the fully lucid ones.
A few random notes. Alcohol, even in small amounts, ruins it. This isn't true for everyone but its a common observation. Ambien as well. Caffiene otoh makes it easier, though it can be more challenging to fall asleep. Trazadone makes the dreams more vivid but harder to control. Cannabis has no noticable effects one way or the other. LSD/Mushrooms are helpful in the week of so after using them, but not while under the direct effects. Having the room be (dimly) lit helps a lot too, I use two nightlights on opposite sides of the room.
I'd been told isn't possible to fall asleep while tripping psychedelics, but I fell asleep on Mushrooms once. It was a journey through states that resembled the Tibetan descriptions of the Bardo realm. I was "shown" some fascinating things about the nature of my consciousness — and it showed me that my consciousness was connected to a larger network of consciousness (finite in size, though) — plus it showed me a vision of man attacking me with a knife and my guts spilling out on the pavement. The attack happened a week later, and I recognized the man from my precognitive dream in time to get into my car and lock the door while he pounded on it trying to get in. I credit that dreamtrip with saving my life.
Very interesting thanks. The only thing I can do there is go back to the same dream after 3.5 hours sleep. Which is exactly when I first wake up most nights. The interim period when I pee or whatever, which is fast as my room is en-suite, seems like a movie interval and I have to remain groggy
It comes naturally to me. I didn't have to work at it. Though I admit my control has improved over the years, it hasn't been through any effort by my waking consciousness. But I still can't find where I left my car in my dreams.
I mostly enjoy them, even the bad ones. Sort of “it’s cool my brain can do that.” The only dreams I don’t like are ones that make me feel boring, like dreaming about being at work.
I find I dream "boring" dreams more often now: that of doing something I would normally do, such as talking to people, or eating something, or walking on stairs. I eventually notice it's a dream from something that almost, but doesn't quite, add up, like if I'm eating from a plate with a fork but the plate looks the same even after having eaten from it.
I find dreams very enjoyable. I look forward to dreaming at night: unfortunately I rarely remember my dreams so I am often disappointed on that front (I know dream journaling would help with that, but I haven't found the time). Amazing things can happen in dreams. There have been a few occasions in my life where something has happened in a dream that was deeply meaningful or exciting. That's certainly not what usually happens, but it's nice getting to pull the lever the dream slot machine knowing that jackpot is possible. And sometimes you get to lucid dream and that's very fun.
The only problem is nightmares, but I've mostly got them sorted out now.
I've regularly had nightmares as long as I can remember (usually 1-2 a month, though these days its more like 1 every two months). I sorted them out through lucid dream training, actually. I didn't have the wherewithal to train enough to regularly get lucid dreams, but I trained enough to accomplish one specific thing: I can wake myself out of a dream fairly quickly and easily.
My wife takes credit for the rest of my technique. Early in our marriage she would notice that when I was having a nightmare I would often whimper in my sleep. She'd wake me up whenever this happened, which I appreciated because that meant the nightmare was over. This happened enough times, and I had enough lucid dream training that I was somewhat aware that I might be dreaming and could be in a nightmare, that I got into the habit of screaming at the top of my lungs whenever a dream started getting scary. That scream would translate to a louder than normal whimper which prompted my wife to wake me.
After going through this routine for several years I'm now at the point where a nightmare starts, I start screaming, and I don't even need my wife to wake me up. I just wake up. My dreaming mind has learned that screaming=wake up.
If you have trouble with nightmares, lucid dream training might help.
It seems like I am mostly unaffected by my dreams emotionally, regardless of what happens in them. Except this seems to be the case only outside of the dream. While in dreams, I think I react internally as though the things happening were really happening. And in the few times I have known I was dreaming while in a dream (and not able to control anything) I was afraid, and thought about how I'll tell everyone about the experience after waking up. Then I think very little of it after waking up and decide to get on with my day. (Same applies to sleep paralysis, including a case this morning.)
I don't remember my dreams most of the time so it is easy to ignore them. But it does make me sad that dreams are often about negative/unpleasant/scary things. I think though that experiencing things in dreams is much less intense than experiencing them in real life
I once watched an entire movie in my dreams. It had Dave Bautista and Jason Statham and Some Guy I've Seen Before But Don't Recognize From Anything and the worst dialogue you could ever hear. There was a point where I walked out of the theater and sat on a bench next to a critic to talk about the nonsense we were watching, before heading back in to finish it.
I can't imagine not wanting that experience. It's everything you could ever want, a single thought away.
I often enjoy them. Freewheeling dreams (as opposed to when I tried lucid dreaming) are more interesting and varied than what I would choose as a dream, and mine are often (at least perceived as) quite narrative and exciting. I also find the experience of falling asleep comfortable and cosy when it comes easily (it doesn’t always come easily, and I know I have a tendency to fight changes of state).
When I have nightmares, then it is obviously less pleasant, and I have to try to get out of that frame of mind before I am happy sleeping again: it is usually easy to shake them off if I wake up fully. I find prayer helpful for falling asleep in the right frame of mind, especially when nightmares are threatening, but I’m aware that isn’t transferable for everyone.
An explanation of why Jesus is the only way to heaven that I recently wrote to a friend. Please consider reading, even if you won't be convinced.
So, here's why it's important to follow specifically Jesus and why I want to tell you about it.
Like I'm sure you've heard before, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe. What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way, because God says he made humans in his own image. Humans inherently see value in things and have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things.
Because God himself is perfect and holy, and he himself is good, nothing evil can be close to him. So when the first humans were created, God told them what they could and couldn't do, and if they did what was wrong that they would die. Death is the punishment for evil, because life is in God and anything that is evil is separated from God.
The Bible says, "your iniquities (evil acts) have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." So, doing wrong completely separates a person from God and then when they die they will be judged by God, and he will not allow them to be close to him. And it's not just terrible evils that are wrong but anything that is against the nature of God is wrong and creates a barrier away from Him.
The Bible says "all have sinned and fall short of God's glorious standard" and I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Every person has done something bad in their life before, even if it's just telling a small lie or getting angry at another person. But because God is entirely perfect, even these things that seem small are enough to cause separation from God (This fact is why it's so important for every person to consider following Jesus. But I'll explain why Jesus in just a minute). Once there is separation from God because of sin, the price of sin has to be paid, and the Bible also says that "it is appointed for man to die once and then to be judged" and "the wages of sin is death." So, because the first humans sinned, death entered into the world and now everyone will die physically, but after that when we are judged, we will also die spiritually because of our own sins. Spiritual death is eternal separation from God, e.g. hell.
God is just, so at the final judgement day he will not let anyone off the hook. He won't even let generally good people go without punishment for the small wrongs they have done. Being good is the baseline requirement of God, so doing good can never make up for any wrong however small. The price of death has to be paid. God is perfectly just.
But God is also loving, he is love himself. And he loves all people, every single one. This is where Jesus comes in. Because God loves the world of people so much, he sent himself in human form, Jesus, to live as a perfect human so that the price of death could justly be paid in the place of sinful humans, so that even if someone has sinned they could still be close to him forever. That is the famous Bible verse John 3:16 "for God so loved the world, that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life."
Because Jesus is completely perfect and never sinned, no penalty of death was ever required of him for his own sins. And because he was infinitely perfect, he was able to offer himself in place of infinitely many people to receive the penalty of death in their place. And because he himself is God, he was able to raise himself from the dead and in so doing proved that he is God and that everything he said was true. And Jesus said that everyone who believes in him and receives his words become children of God and will live forever with Him. Jesus says that people should repent (which means to turn away from) their sins and to follow his teaching and believe in his words.
This is God's way of maintaining justice and also showing his love. The Bible says in another place that God is patient and he doesn't want anyone at all to perish, but he wants everyone to repent and turn from their sin and towards him. God has given mankind freewill though, and does not force this on anyone. He allows everyone to make their own decisions in life. This is why there is such horrible evil in the world, even towards good people. Just like people are allowed to make good choices that benefit and help others, they are also allowed to make bad choices that hurt others in horrible ways. But nobody will go unpunished on judgement day. Every last evil thing that is done will be paid for, whether it is by Jesus' sacrifice, or by the people who did the evil things.
But this freewill that God gives to men is why not everyone is saved, even though Jesus died for everyone. The Bible passage that says "the wages of sin is death" also says "but the free gift of God is eternal life through our savior and Lord, Jesus." It is a free gift that he gives, but does not force on anyone. And he makes it clear that to receive the gift, one has to renounce his evil life and die to himself, because if he accepts Jesus' sacrifice then his evil self has died along with Jesus. The life he receives from Jesus then has to be lived with Jesus.
Nobody can trick God and say that they repent and accept Jesus and then continue to live selfishly however they want to. Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on judgement day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!"
There's a lot more that Jesus says, and if you're interested it would be helpful to read the Gospel of Matthew (the four Gospels in the Bible are four different accounts of the life of Jesus, here's a link to an easily readable translation for your convenience:
You can skip the first paragraphs that are just names. You may not be interested at all in which case just disregard, but I wanted to be helpful if you are interested). Whatever the case, Jesus makes it clear that if you truly are repentant of evil and if you love him, you will follow him in your life and in your heart. Everyone who does not, rejects God and his free gift and their sins will not be paid for by Jesus' sacrifice. They will have to pay for them on their own.
This is why it is important to believe in Jesus specifically out of anyone else or any other type of god. Being good will not pay the penalty for any wrong that a person has done, it has to be paid in death. Jesus is the only person God has provided to bring people close to him through his own death and resurrection. And he wants every person to believe and be close to him, because he loves the whole world. I really wanted to tell you about it because I don’t want you to have never heard all this and I want you to be with God (and me and others) for eternity in the afterlife.
(1) I'm getting strong 2011 nostalgia. Felt like every second comment all over the internet was a clone of the one you just wrote, back then.
(2) Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
(3) As I said, this comment is an almost identical clone of thousands of other evangelical preaching spiels. I wish Christians would realise this makes them look brainwashed, when things are presented and phrased exactly the same way every time, right down to the "have you ever told a lie" and "the price of sin has to be paid". It would help enormously with being taken seriously if these online preachers would add some original material, perhaps a personal metaphor or a unique argument or interpretation, or even just some unique phrasing. "Restoring balance" to the force...er, universe...or any number of other phrasings gets the same point across without reusing the cliched and primitive tribal/medieval idea of "paying a price of death" for a crime.
(4) Who are you talking to? Not atheists, since you give no argument at all for the existence of God. Not evangelicals, who don't need to be told what they already believe. Not Catholics or Mormons or other Christians since you don't argue why this understanding of Christ is better than theirs. And not other religions since there's no argument for why this conception of God (a being who must reconcile His holiness and His love) is deeper or wiser than other conceptions, like the Hindu or Islamic ones. This seems to only make sense as an explanation of what evangelicals believe to someone who doesn't know. And anyone here who doesn't know probably has zero intellectial curiosity and won't read your comment anyway.
(5) The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
(6) More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not reauire libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetatand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonememt in a VERY different way to "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him).
>[...] only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
>And I find that very sickening.
Agree.
I always say, why is it, that people who claim to believe all that stuff do not act like they believe it. Rhetorical question. Because they don't believe it, they just say so, for reasons.
That's correct, but God won't be fooled. I quoted Jesus in the original post:
"Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness."
It is entirely sickening the evils that people do in the name of God, but they will not escape judgement. However, evil people who claim God's name don't change the truth of the matter that we have only this life to accept Jesus' sacrifice. It says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement."
What you say is, God has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
Yet you try to achieve something. Which is weird, given that you believe that.
You cannot achieve anything at all. He can. And only he.
Because he has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
There is nothing anyone can do about it.
That's what you say you believe.
Yet you try.
And that's why I don't believe anyone who claims to believe all that stuff.
I think you may be misunderstanding some things. If someone really believes the Bible and God, then they're going to obey him. In addition to moral commands, God also tells his followers to go out into the world and preach the gospel (good news) and make disciples in every nation.
Maybe you didn't read my original post, but it's me sharing with a friend of mine why it's important to believe in Jesus and my motivation was out of care for him and trying to obey Jesus' commands. It's not quite the same as not believing God's words and then using them to manipulate or control other people.
No offense intended, but I always understood Matthew 7:22-23 to be a warning against people like you who claim to know the mind and will of יהוה — the entity you call "God." Unlike the earlier prophets, Yeshua ben Yosef, the humble carpenter that he was, never claimed to be directly quoting the words of יהוה except when he was quoting or paraphrasing the words of the earlier prophets.
However, if we look back to the times of the prophets (when יהוה was communicating with His people without an interlocutor), Isaiah 55:8-9 warns of the dangers of deluding ourselves that we know the mind of יהוה: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord."
And יהוה rebukes Job (Job 38) for his false belief that he understands His motives when he declares (roughly translated) "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Moreover, in a marvelously sarcastic smackdown, יהוה asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?"
Of course, one of the biggest Christianist heresies is the idea that יהוה, because of His perfection, is a static and unchanging entity. This is no doubt due to the mistranslation of His statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, "אהיה אשר אהיה" as "I am that I am." A better translation would be "I will be what I will be" or perhaps "I will be what I am becoming." I think this mistranslation predates Christianity — correct me if I'm wrong — and it goes back to when the Pentateuch was originally translated into Greek a couple of centuries before Yeshua ben Yosef. Unfortunately, that mistranslation turned His declaration into an expression of static identity when it should actually be interpreted as a declaration of a self-directed evolving identity.
So, even if you consider Yeshua to be the final Word, when you *claim* you understand Yeshua's words as the Word of יהוה, you are doing the same thing that the prophesizers and exorcists were doing. I would suggest you go back to your closet and pray some more. And יהוה is not obligated to respect your limited understanding of his purpose.
In the 9th paragraph of your 6th point you actuallyyyy misspelled the word "require" so um your whole comment is completely invalid ☝️🤓
But no actually I appreciate that you took the time to read and type out a thorough response to it. I also appreciate that you stated your own beliefs so I can know where you're coming from. That being said, I didn't post here to argue God's case or convince anyone. I posted in case anyone who reads it might be at a place in their life that they see the truth of it and now know where to continue the search, and also in the hopes that someone such as yourself or anyone else who disagrees will one day get to the point where it clicks with reality and they see the truth of it later on. I don't want anyone to suffer through life and hate God due to a misunderstanding and then be rejected by him (idk how he'll judge every circumstance, I just know that he will be totally just), so all I can do is share the truth and pray.
Is this for someone who is already a Christian but just believes that it's not mutually exclusive with other views/beliefs? "Why Christian doctrine teaches that Christianity is the only way" seems to be the question you're answering. A lesson that I'm sure is worth learning if you are a Christian, but I don't know how it would translate to a compelling invitation.
It was for a friend of mine recently who knows me, then I posted it to an open thread on an online forum in case it might benefit some rando online. I understand the majority of people probably won't care for it, but it's not against the rules here so I wanted to put it out there.
"When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe."
Everything you write after that depends on just assuming that the first part of the sentence ("When God created everything") is true. That is not convincing. It also assume that God could "ingrain morality into the universe" without being responsible for how the universe behaves. That makes no sense. If God created anything with omniscience, it would also be his or her responsibility what the created thing does.
...This is your idea of "perfectly just"? Innocent people being eternally punished through no fault of their own? I understand why your religion is set up the way it is, it's just.. it hurts me that not only people believe this, they see this state of affairs as acceptable.
It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (although I admit it's difficult to hope particularly horrible people find redemption), facing eternal damnation. That's why I posted this here in the hopes that it will benefit even one person who reads it. It's not intended as a convincing argument, like some have pointed out. I just don't want people to be ignorant of the truth whether they accept it as truth or not now, and I will pray that it clicks one day.
God has given me peace and I want other hurting people to know about it. I probably should have included that part in the text lol. Thanks for reading it even though you disagree.
"It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (...), facing eternal damnation."
But also, you say:
"What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way (..) Humans (...) have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things."
The statement about how humans operate is I think generally observable truth all over the world.
I could be wrong, but I think you would also agree that it is not human to think that seemingly innocent people should be punished with eternal damnation. Humans aren't holy though, so from our perspective there are some evils that are so common and don't feel like they need severe punishment. From God's perspective, any wrong however small is unholy, but God is holy so nothing unholy can be close to him.
So a morally good person who has only done small wrongs is still unholy and will be eternally separate from God unless that person is made holy through faith in Jesus Christ. And that just isn't a human perspective, that's what I meant by that. Thanks for taking the time to read the post.
If there is some irreconcilable difference between divine and human morality, *and* assuming for the sake of the argument that morality is universal and objective, I still don't see why we should conclude that humanity is the evil part, and not God. After all, God is the part inflicting most suffering on the other. You say that God is "holy" and humans aren't, but then I'm afraid I fail to see what is desirable about holiness, if it consists in the willingness to inflict unlimited suffering.
As a believer myself, I find comment preaching like yours to be more harmful than helpful. These comments virtually never convert, instead they repulse, as ascend's reply above illustrates nicely. I almost flagged your comment as spam, which I usually do for off-topic, preachy comments popping up where nobody asked for them. I didn't do it here because this is, after all, Open Thread, where most any topic is welcome as long as you're respectful, and also your essay was at least a little more in-depth than the standard copy-paste preaching I usually encounter. I think you are going against what the Savior said in Matthew 7:6 "Give not that which is holy unto dogs..." Now with this scripture, I don't mean to insult anyone here, but to say this simply isn't the ideal forum for gospel discussion. The vast majority come here to discuss things temporal, not spirtual, and many here were once part of organized religion but chose to turn away from it. So a rote presentation like yours is more likely to confirm anti-religion biases in their minds, which makes moving towards Christ that much harder.
Philosophy seems pretty welcome here, but I agree with you and Ascend on most of this. I've decided I'm atheist, but am willing to be convinced otherwise...by evidence, even of logic. But as mentioned elsewhere, the logic only holds if one accepts everything stated as true, and not everything stated should be the level of a postulate not needing proof.
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I'm going to throw out a controversial idea. I want to be clear that it's just an idea, I'm not attached to it or necessarily supportive of it. It started basically as a simple shower thought.
With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive.
One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.
...What if we did the exact opposite? What if we treated gender dysphoria like we do ADHD?
To be clear, this is not the "do nothing" or "watchful waiting" that some conservatives might support. Right now, if a male experiences gender dysphoria, the idea is to give that male treatments that will lead into a more feminine-appearing and feminine-feeling body. What if we did the opposite? If a 14 year old male has gender dysphoria, maybe we should give him the option to receive masculine-increasing treatment, to combat the dysphoria directly? Perhaps giving testosterone should be considered?
On the flip-side, if a 14 year old female has gender dysphoria, maybe she should be given the option of receiving treatment that would make her feel more feminine? Perhaps estrogen could be offered to her?
Again, just an idea. Medicine is not one of my strong suits, which is partly why I'm raising this idea here.
Do people here think this might work, or do people here think this would be totally disastrous, or something between? If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex.
It's important to distinguish between disorders like ADHD where the issue is "my brain works in a way that makes it difficult to live a happy life" and dysphoria (and related gender issues, not every trans person has dysphoria) where the issue is "my brain and my body don't match".
The solution to the first is anything that helps you function and live a happy life. Whether that's therapy, medicine, accommodations, etc. it doesn't really matter what the *specific* solution is, but there is a clear direction the solution needs to be working in.
Dysphoria is just a false equation. In the statement 2 = 5, the statement is false, but it's not clear that either side is "to blame". To fix it, you could add 3 to the left side, subtract 3 from the right, or some middle ground. In the same way, you can consider a trans woman. Having the "mind" of a woman is fine. Having the "body" of a man is fine (using loose terms to avoid questions of to what extent the mind and body are the same thing, not relevant). But when they are in conflict, you need to bring one into line with the other.
In principle, someone assigned male as birth who identifies as a woman would be equally treated by gender affirming surgery (changing the body) or by some hypothetical cure for dysphoria that results in this person identifying as a man. Your proposed treatments wouldn't work, but I don't think you're here to nitpick the specifics of a cure. If so, apologies for misunderstanding you, and I can elaborate further on why that wouldn't work.
But if we can assume a treatment that would "correct" the mind to its assigned-at-birth gender (and that has an equivalent cost, danger, and difficulty) it would be, in principle, just as good. However, There is a bias towards preserving identity. I find this bias very understandable, but someone else could have different preferences. The existence of this treatment would be a good thing in the sense that people having options is good. But it wouldn't be *better* than the current treatment from an individual perspective. Changing the statement to 5 = 5 isn't a *better* fix than 2 = 2.
Personally though, I would be wary of such treatments. I would much rather change someone's body to reflect their mind, because messing with minds is messing with *who they are* on a much more fundamental level. I would find it dangerous and creepy to a degree I have a hard time putting into words. By comparison, a trans person getting physical surgery to reflect their identity doesn't bother me at all. Maybe it's the transhumanist in me wanting people to be able to adjust their bodies however they like.
> With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible.
This axiom will lead you to incorrect conclusions, because it's not really correct. The aim is to make it so that the person can be functional in day-to-day life, and ideally be happy. Trying to "correct" the dysfunction is often not possible or even desirable (because attempting to do so will have the effect of making the patient *less* functional), but there are almost *always* steps you can take to make the symptoms manageable.
In ADHD, one of the treatments available are stimulants to increase focus. However, there are a LOT of other things that therapists can recommend to help a person manage their symptoms. They can put their pills in weekly pill boxes to make them easier to take, utilize to-do lists, create meals in bulk, alter their living spaces to account for their forgetfulness.
An even better example is autism. There is no magic pill for autism that "corrects" for it. A common autistic behavior, however, is "masking", which is a term for the ways that autistic people learn to "correct" for their dysfunction and hide their symptoms to conform to the social expectations of allists. A large portion of autism therapy is teaching kids how to *stop* masking, because the practice ultimately leads to other negative mental health impacts. Therapist then teach the children (and their parents!) how to alter *the environment* in ways that works *with* the dysfunction, rather than against it.
On the other hand, there *is* a magic pill that corrects for the symptoms of gender dysphoria. It's cross-gender hormone treatment (or at least puberty blockers). I encourage you to look at the actual diagnostic criteria for gender dyphoria:
If you'll notice, cross gender hormones *directly* help "correct" for every. Single. One. And it helps the person live a more functional life, rather than just trying to "mask" the underlying issue and hoping making their discomfort greater will magic away the issue.
> If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it?
Recently I heard a story of someone who makes special gum that prevents cavities by using some type of sugar that plague doesn't eat or something, they had a bunch they was expiring to soon so they offered it to a school. They refused to take it for free because "if it works, who will pay for it next year".
Currently, no, it wouldn't be good for doctors to promote strong gender norms even if it provided better outcome. This is why theres an approval process in science to prevent such mistake /s
I think your idea is interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. What you're sort of accidentally doing here is using analogies that accidentally mislead you in a (fun!) way, which actually makes your idea interesting to talk about.
So, scoot to ADHD real quick. Or your larger point, really. This part:
''With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive''
And this is correct. Uh. Somewhat... obviously so. Just to be clear, I do not disagree with you that the aim of medication is to resolve the dysfunction incurred by disease :b
However!
``One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.``
Okay. Is this actually the case, though? Obviously from my framing and slight handwaving at some other answer, I would indicate it's not. We provide stimulants and therapy to alleviate ADHD manifestations of reduced function. That's the interesting thing that your first note about 'most illnesses' covers up; in a grander way for every illness our goal in treatment is reduction of manifested dysfunction. An illness someone has which wouldn't seemingly incur any dysfunction or difficulty is philosophically interesting to imagine, but hard to classify as an illness in the first place. So lead that thought and go on a little - you provide stimulants to assist ADHD types with focus and reward seeking. Someone with ADHD complains about a lack of ability to retain focus, everyone working with them complain about it too, and other subtle malaises, and our treatment profile (and classification scheme for the whole illness!) relies on mitigating those percieved problems
Okay, so what's the manifested actual dysfunction in gender dysphoria we would, ideally, be trying to treat here?
It's usually a percieved and deeply personal dysmorphic lack of joy in ones own body. Given that actual manifestation, the treatment pathway will tend to be corrective on that axis. Someone with ADHD has altered neurology and methamphetamine derivatives can alter the thresholds for rewards, helping them with focus? Well, take the adderall, get the focus. Someone with body dysphoria in general and gender dysphoria in the specific complains they're not at home in their own meat and bone, and that's when we should then... Give them more of the stuff they say they're uncomfortable with?
Wait, isn't that a little bit like taking an overstimulated ADHD sufferer and saying the proper treatment pathway here is to expose them to more screens, more distraction, more noise, more demands? They said they had trouble with focus and Dr. Quarkfib prescribed: "Nah, you just gotta go all in on the distractibiltiy. Try adding more taps and micro-projects to your life, and really get into wandering aimlessly from hyperfixation to hyperfixation"
Someone with intense gender dysphoria describes their lack of comfort affirming traditionally male roles, and Dr. Quarkfib prescribes 30oz of red meat, a course of deadlifts and four mandatory hours of hunting through a forest murdering small things with a stick? 14-year old girl comes in, says she's intensely uncomfortable with her own body, thinks she might be a he, Dr. Quarkfib nods and murmurs and checks charts and prescribes a six hour mandatory shopping spree, frilly dresses and some estrogen?
Clearrrrrlyyyyyy when (blown up to scale and) viewed from that angle you see the somewhat curious and interesting contrast in these things.
One of the particularly interesting thingsa bout body dysmorphic disorder is that it is, you are correct, somewhat socially contingent. After all, our hypothethical 14 year old girl case example complains she has intense gender dysphoria and really wants to be a 14 year old boy then this example, written out with all nuance surgically removed, does indicate that something in the way this person percieves these differences and the way they manifest in daily life is to blame for intense personal fixation. Or put in less meandering verbiage, it's hard to imagine that gender dysphoria would be as intense a problem in a social world where gender itself was a thing people remarked and spent less time on.
But isn't this true for almost literally everything, because the intelligent things around you are human? ADHD is a classic example - a lot of its more dire manifestations are directly socially relevant, right from an inability to emphatisize to difficulty keeping up with relations over to rejection sensitivity. All of those 'dysfunctions', which treatment partially attempts to alleviate, are enormously intensely grounded in one's social identity. If nothing else, for the first many years of life in public school you'll certainly find that the reason some poor kid with ADHD gets into trouble isn't because of anything wrong with them (often) but because their bouncing-off-the-walls-dancing-around-not-sitting-still contrasts pretty intensely with our desire that they sit still in a classroom of 30 people and listen quietly for hours at a time. Would we still classify ADHD as a mental disorder if the social situation and pressures were different, or would we notice less? This is less of a handwavey philosophical aside than it might appear, because the paralllels do track directly to the analogy that's being used here.
And now we've fallen off the path of easy, hand-waving solutions and into horrifically deep weed territory.
But yeah to round up:
´´If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex. ´´
There's a line here that's definitively true, which is that a person more comfortable in their own skin is almost by defintion less dysfunctional in it. And if we have a disorder or situation characterized by intense dysmorphia, then, yes, anything at all that reduces that percieved discomfort would be alleviative to the core of the problem. That's sort of axiomatic isn't it - we do stuff that makes you feel less awful?
But that's a bit of a hack isn't it? " If the thing we did makes you feel less terrible, it justifies doing it " is true in a lot of cases, but sometimes not. That's how this gets interesting. We could take someon with intense ADHD out of an environment they're clinically mismatched for, and that would make them more comfortale in their own skin and with their own birth brain. Don't laugh - if someone has trouble focusing on 6 hours of math in a classroom, sending them running through the woods and running all over the walls ala some Danish nature-exploration school provably works to alleviate the discomfort of being asked to sit and work out math. But the thing is, if someone complains reading gives them a headache, taking away all books in their life does help them. But uhhh I can see... some issues with that... solution.
If our hypothethical 14-year old we give more estrogen and a frilly dress and a course in how to sashay her hips properly and, I don't know, do needlework??, ends up more comfortable because of it, is that because we 'cured' her 'gender dysphoria', is it because we altered the environment she was in that caused her to express that discomfort (her ideas of not wanting to be femine was socially contigent on how she saw femmes be treated), or is it because we hammered the square peg so much that it got ground down into a circle and fit into the hole we wanted (we just sandpapered her personality into shape over a 4+ year period)
There's a severe and enormous danger here, which *may* very well be unique to gender dysmorphic expression (unsure), that because the expression of dislike is "always on" and rooted in their actual feeling of being in their own skin, the stuff that we might suggest that makes the more comfortable quickly isn't always the optimal solution for human flourishing. So would giving a 14year old a dress, extra estrogen and skincare tips be a good thing? Wellllll maybe? Like, I support stuff that works so if it works for them and helps them deal with a genuine sense of dysmorphia, then that's good yes.
But at least when we support transitioning, the treatment follows a logically coherent resolution pathway. "I dislike this gender expression" --> "Express a different one" from that metric seems to beat "I dislike this gender expression" --> "have you tried expressing it harder?". And that's the higher level fix that getting a dysmorphic 14 year old boy into the gym and throwing a spear and doing pushups doesn't resolve. I support giving people with ADHD stimulants, on the reasoning that it genuinely seems to help people who are clinically under-stimulated. It seems less likely to be worth it to give them 300+ extra things to track and more forms to fill, on the reasoning that I'll simpy make them do more of the thing they struggle to do.
So pattern matching analogously to ADHD and other diseases and then declaring that the treatment profile for gender dysmorphia is uniquely contingent on adjusting social reality is, I think, the interesting mistake that your ideas stumble over.
We *are* treating dysphoria like ADHD. Unlike ADHD, though, there's no magic medication you can take to help you get through daily life that we know of (today). The treatment we have found so far that has the best tradeoff between helping the sufferer get through the day and unfortunate side effects that make their day much worse turns out to be for them to do their best to perform the gender they feel they should, and for the people around them to do their best to support that.
To my mind, something that distinguishes gender dysphoria from other mental conditions is that a significant degree of the suffering it exacts on the individual depends on how others respond to it. My depression/anxiety is not lessened by others acceptance of it (other associated struggles are, but not the acute symptoms) but the pain of gender dysphoria seems to be mitigated by others' acceptance of one's chosen gender expression.
I imagine this is worth bearing in mind when thinking about gender-dysphoria-as-mental-illness.
Mmm, not sure I'd agree with the idea that this is what distinguishes gender dysphoria.
1. I can think of other mental illnesses for which this holds true. A large part of the suffering schizophrenics experience depends on how others respond to them (particularly to their delusions). In my experience, there is a lot of distress that can be allayed simply by acknowledging that their thoughts are extremely distressing and worrying to them, even if I don't necessarily agree that they are grounded in reality.
2. I have seen at least one gender-dysphoric individual whose dysphoria absolutely did not improve despite being treated as their chosen gender.
Regarding your second point, did they internalize that? I can think of a few trans people that, even if they are treated as their chosen gender, they don't really *feel* like they are socially within that group because they themselves can't help but see themselves as fake. Like a sort of insecurity that happens to have terrible consequences given the circumstances.
A common experience for trans people before their transition is attempting to go "all-in" on their assigned gender. Before transition, Trans women will often start going to the gym, grow beards, bulk up maybe take testosterone increasing supplements etc. Transmen might go hyper feminine. Its almost a joke in the trans community because its so common. This does not typically work. Gender dysphoria is a bodily sensation of discomfort around primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Exaggerating those features generally intensifies dysphoria.
Transition is the treatment for dysphoria that does not desist in other ways. This is something that cisgender people often misunderstand about transition. The transition is the treatment.
Presumably going "all-in" is an obvious enough solution to (what we might call) pre-gender-dysphoria, where one is uncomfortable with their gender, but not sure they want to become transgender yet. I wonder what the success rate of this actually is, as the majority of those dealing with this internally might try, succeed, and never let anyone know they felt gender dysphoria in the first place (still somewhat embarrassing/socially isolating for the vast majority of people, even in the most progressive societies).
Also there are many people who choose to live with the (often extreme) internal discomfort of their dysphoria rather than the external discomfort of transitioning into a world where being transgender is a political football and can result in being ostracised. These cases are considered "successful" by many although they do not result in positive mental health outcomes in the long run. We also typically do not hear about these cases.
I don’t think this would work—at least not completely. All of this evidence is anecdotal but I know a number of trans people who tried these treatments for a variety of reasons. Obviously this is selected, and it could be that most of the people who try these treatments end up feeling fine as their birth gender, but it clearly doesn’t work 100% of the time. And fundamentally I believe in the right of people to modify their bodies, whether that’s tattoos, piercings, hair dye, plastic surgery, or hormones.
I don't think it's likely to work-- if a person is uncomfortable being male, a hormone treatment to make them more male would probably make them less comfortable.
Gender dysphoria might be treatable, but I think it would have to be better understood.
I'm not getting into the question of whether it should be treated, but I think some people would rather have effective treatment rather than transition.
But whether gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental illness is the central question. People who would accept the treatment you suggest are not the people we are mostly talking and thinking about in this debate.
We do treat it as a mental illness (if nothing else, those are magic words that make insurers pay out!) Transitioning is the best known treatment. Therefore, despite continuous opposition, this is what we do.
Romania had a Presidential election recently. Călin Georgescu, one of the top two candidates who would have advanced to the runoff, thinks the moon landing is a hoax. The Romanian Supreme Court has overturned the election and ordered a re-run, not because of that but because of (you guessed it) "Russian interference." Georgescu wasn't shy about his Russophilic views. People knew what they were getting.
The irony here is that the only people who will explicitly defend the notion that, "no, you don't need to just passively accept being ruled by morons because there are more of them than there are of you" are in the same part of the political spectrum as freaks like Georgescu. The world cries out for a Nietzschean centrism.
One thing that is not clear to me is whether the Russians are alleged to have interfered with the *election*, or with the *campaign*. I think that's critical.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hacked the voting machines to output their preferred result or whatnot, then a do-over may be the proper solution.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hired a bunch of people (or bots) to go on the internet and tell lies calculated to fool the voters into electing their preferred candidate, then how is that any different than what the candidates are doing already? I'm guessing Romania doesn't have a law disqualifying candidates who are found to have fibbed in their campaign advertisements.
"Hey, those foreign nogoodniks are lying to our voters! They can't do that! Only *domestic* nogoodniks are allowed to lie to our voters!". Not a convincing argument. You're going to be having nogoodniks lying to your voters regardless, and whatever measures you have to deal with lying nogoodniks should work about as well against the foreign version as the domestic. And it's not like the foreign ones are going to stop just because you say it's against the law; your laws don't apply in the country where they're telling the lies and your police won't be able to get at them.
Instead, the plan is to hold a new election, and the Russians won't "interfere" in this one, why exactly?
"There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running."
If Georgescu is winning Ceaucescu fans (and I believe that- certainly I've seen poll results indicating that about 70% of the voting base of the main left wing party would have voted for Georgescu in the runoff), then this rather complicates the attempt to fit him into the Anglo-American left vs. right spectrum doesn't it?
I think "ultranationalist" is a better term here than left or right wing.
Nationalism ("the belief that the national community and the political community should coincide as far as possible") is a supermajority position in most of Eastern Europe, as it is in a lot of other parts of the world, so I think saying an Eastern European politician (or layperson) is a nationalist isn't that informative, it's like saying a Middle Eastern politician is a religious Muslim or that a US politician believes in (small-L) liberalism. I think "ultranationalist" is a useful term for designating people in Eastern Europe, or in other highly nationalistic parts of the world, that are more extreme or hardcore in their nationalism than the regional norm.
And here, the amount of questionable money spent (not counting whatever the situation is with the TikTok bots) was $381K, or $0.02 per capita. By comparison, Kamala spent $4.20 per capita during her losing campaign in the US. If you can "buy" an election so cheaply, it indicates there was a high level of resonance of Georgescu's vibe with that of the populace.
There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running. The actual situation appears to follow the recent pattern of populist right wing appeal in Europe due primarily to economic stagnation.
I suppose if they do, you can invalidate that election too. Rinse and repeat until they stop interfering (and you'll know when they've stopped because the voters will vote the correct way).
In Romanian presidential elections, the citizens vote in two rounds. In the first round, they can vote on all candidates: if any single candidate secures an outright majority in the first round, that candidate is declared the winner of the election and becomes president.
If none of the candidates achieve this, then a run-off is held between the two contenders with the top scores in the first round. The candidate who obtains the majority of votes in the run-off is then declared the winner.
This time, everyone expected Marcel Ciolacu (current PM, Social Democrat, left-wing) and Elena Lasconi (Save Romania Union, right-wing) to advance to the second round, with Ciolacu expected to win the second round with some margin.
Predictions for the second round are easier to make: both wings have diverse voters with a diverse set of preferred candidates in the first round, but in the second round the left wing voters rally around the left wing candidate and the right wing voters around the right wing candidate. So you only need to know which wing is larger to predict the next president.
Georgescu, not considered a major contender, barely registered in polls. He ran a very modest street campaign, and did not appear in any conventional media. His campaign was conducted almost entirely through social media, chiefly TikTok.
To the surprise of absolutely everybody, including Georgescu himself, his TikTok campaign was unexpectedly successful, and he ended up with nearly 23 percent of the vote. Since Lasconi edged out Ciolacu with 21 percent, she and Georgescu advanced to the second round. While Ciolacu was upset by this development (he thought that he had this election in his pocket), he couldn't do anything to change the result, which was in fact upheld by the courts at that time [1].
However, things soon changed. Presidential candidates must report their campaign expenses to the national electoral commission up till the eve of the election. Georgescu, lying blatantly, declared that he spent zero lei running his campaign. However, after becoming a frontrunner, the commission and other investigative agencies, including state intelligence services, uncovered over $400k spent on his campaign, far above the declared amount. They submitted the documents proving these to the Supreme Court. They also found evidence of Russian interference, but that's a separate matter.
According to Romanian law, given the documents entered into evidence, the Supreme Court faced pretty much only two allowed options: annul immediately or annul after the second round.
Delaying annulment until after the second round posed serious risks. On one hand, if Georgescu won the second round, "coup" accusations might actually gain traction. The vast majority of Romanians, even Georgescu voters, don't take this seriously now, and don't consider this a coup: cf. the lack of mass protests, etc., Romanians have some relatively recent practice with nipping dictatorship in the bud. OTOH if Lasconi won, as sitting president she might challenge the annulment, knowing she could beat Georgescu, but probably not Ciolacu's combined support.
Annulment before the second round avoided these complications. Legal procedures followed Romanian laws, leaving no electoral rights violated. So whose rights were violated? Everyone understood the election rules.
While Georgescu's rise through a TikTok-driven campaign is important and very surprising (nobody thought that TikTok could be sufficient to win a presidential first round), concerns about the annulment itself are ridiculous. Legal processes unfolded as expected, aligning with national electoral laws. As far as I can tell, the idea that this annulment is some major political upheaval exists largely in the head of Georgescu himself (who has a big incentive to make this a big deal, given that he's likely to face jail time over fraud for his campaign financing mishap) and in the imaginations of outside observers, primarily non-Europeans.
That all rests on the $381K in question being spent by Georgescu. Has that been established, or was that expenditure made by a third party without any control or knowledge by Georgescu?
The decision to annul massively inconveniences not just Georgescu, but also the Save Romania Union, one of the mainstream parties in parliament parliament, whose candidate had an unexpected shot at the presidency. Their MPs requested and got access to all the files presented to the court. Presumably, if there was reason to doubt, they would have made a big ruckus; they certainly had all the incentive in the world to do so. The evidence was good enough to convince them and the court.
REPER, recently requested that the files be made fully accessible to the public as well: this will take a while, though [1]. Until then, due to the aforementioned circumstances, my priors on this being falsified evidence are really quite low.
President of the reformist Save Romania Union (USR) party Elena Lasconi – who made it to the second round of the presidential elections beside pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu, has harshly and repeatedly criticised the Constitutional Court's decision to repeat the elections.
"The Romanian state trampled on democracy. God, the Romanian people, truth, and the law will prevail. You are leading the country into anarchy. We should have gone ahead with the vote," she said quickly after the Court's ruling. But she maintained the rhetoric, which was toned down by other USR representatives.
I explained above why Lasconi likely lost her best chance at the presidency due to this decision. She feels wronged and wanted the Supreme Court to take the other option (or preferably do nothing, which ironically _would_ have went against the constitution, unlike the current decision).
However, your question concerned whether it was proven that the Georgescu campaign wasn't financed independently, without Georgescu's involvement or knowledge. MPs from the Save Romania Union, Lasconi's party, were briefed on the evidence confirming this. Had they found credible reasons to doubt it, they would have spoken up. But both the Supreme Court and those MPs accepted the evidence: Lasconi or the Save Romania Union MPs certainly never made the case that the evidence itself might be fake or invalid.
One can remain skeptical, but doing so means having more doubt than those who have more information AND every incentive to scrutinize the case closely.
I asked about Lasconi because I hadn't heard she had agreed with the decision. Of course she is more impacted by it and less objective. I was just wondering if *she* was privy to additional evidence in maintaining her opposition to the annulment. I am interested in the lack of push back in general in Romania on this, though I certainly don't understand Romaninan political culture well enough to conclude much from that observation.
There are many very odd things about this incident. As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting the voting or tabulation of the votes was compromised, and the annulment rests on a crypto bro's $381K funding + TikTok bot accounts. It sets a very bad precedent, in my opinion, where even low level amounts of "interference" by third parties can serve as justification to invalidate electoral outcomes.
The timing is also suspicious, since round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled. Almost as if there was an assessment done based on early returns that Georgescu might win, at which point, incurring the cost of annulment seemed to be the better option from the perspective of those making the decision.
Voting at Romanian consulates was supposed to take place on Saturdays and Sundays, between 7am and 9pm, on the weekend of the election - this can still be found in many Romanian articles guiding people on how to vote.
I don't see an agency source, so I think the authors of the linked article were just mistaken. Or else, they're referring to vote-by-mail (but that's mixed and counted together with the general votes in Romania, so could not have been counted in any case).
Modern day Russia (and for that matter pre 1917 Russia) aren't the same thing as the USSR though.
I don't know what Georgescu's view on the Soviet Union is, although I do know he was recently under criminal investigation for having praised Antonescu and Codreanu (both of whom were strongly anti-Soviet, to state the obvious).
People who're pro-Putin shouldn't be allowed to stand for election. Instead they should be charged with treason, and if found guilty the death penalty should be an option.
> that "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well
That's not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that anyone in league with an enemy be treated as a traitor. Because that's what they are. People would still enjoy the freedom to hold and disseminate a wide range of views, just not treasonous ones.
The purpose of this is to prevent Russia (or anyone else) from using hybrid warfare to subvert Europe.
You can define anyone as a traitor by defining any country, ideology or theology as an enemy. Decide that Israel is a problem and you can round up the Jews, declare
Iran a problem and you can round up the local Shia, accuse the pope of being disloyal and it’s time to hunt the Catholics.
This is common in history and it’s something that we should guard against.
I see by your flag you are a supporter of Scottish nationalism. As an Englishman I agree with right of Scotland to secede, largely because it could only increase the average jollity of the nation (where on Earth did anyone get the idea that the English are the gloomy or depressive people on this island?), but you know who also likes the idea of a rump UK. Putin, that’s who.
Of course he does. And he’s probably funding Scottish independence. As he did Brexit. If he’s not doing that, him or his agencies, then they or he are not doing their job. The west is doing the same kind of thing in Russia.
Now it may not have had a material effect on either referendum - although the people who claim that Russia didn’t influence Brexit materially say the opposite about the Scottish referendum, and vice versa.
However it’s generally accepted that Russia interfered in 2014. This from wiki
> According to the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report, released on 21 July 2020, there is substantial evidence that Russian interference in the British economy and politics is commonplace; further to this, evidence was uncovered detailing interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum…
Which makes your philosophy suspect doesn’t it. By your own admission you are a stooge of Putin, a man who clearly benefits from a rump U.K. The course of action is obvious to you know, you must forthwith pop down to the local constabulary and taking whatever punishment you think traitors should receive. Extrajudicial shooting was it? I’m sorry for your future loss but be sure to denounce some fellow travellers on the way to the firing range, because Putinism must never win!
Only if those "outside observers" believe Russian disinformation. To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually. Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", etc.
Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top. Somehow despite all sorts of people trying to be brutal dictators, liberal democracy mostly won.
I think liberalism is an effective strategy. You might not understand why it's effective. But it works.
I think part of the reason that it works is that there are a lot of vaguely liberal aligned people, who can all work together and get behind a generically inoffensive liberal governing system. Liberalism is a cooperation in an iterated prisoners dilemma.
> To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually.
Once the "execute people on trumped up charges" system is set up, the people who end up getting executed in practice are not the enemies of democracy, but the enemies of whoever is trumping up the charges.
> If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
I have never been in favour of complete freedom of speech. For a start, if you had it, you've legalised fraud. In practise in any society there has to be some speech that is banned, or society won't function very well.
> Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top
Was the Roman Empire cruel? I'd argue that it was no more so than other contemporary societies.
As for Christians being tolerant, I'll note that when they got in power they persecuted the pagans much more zealously than the pagans had persecuted them.
Call it whatever you like. I call it Europe defending itself against its enemies, which include Putin's Russia.
What Europe needs to do is create a militarily powerful and cohesive superstate, so that no-one can successfully attack us, and then to open up membership of this alliance to people who have the same culture and/or values as us. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe for details.
I'd be interested to find out what these values are. As far as I can tell, every single country in Europe has abolished death penalty for every crime including treason, and they tend to have fairly restrictive definitions of treason at that. The exceptions are, interestingly, Russia and its satellite Belarus. So your proposal above involves making Europe considerably more Russia-like. Admittedly you've been pretty vague about what exactly you want to make a capital crime, so I can't tell exactly *how much* Russia-like.
I said in my previous article, which I linked to: "European ideas such as democracy and human rights".
I will note there is nothing in the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen about banning the death penalty. And in a democracy, if most people want treason to carry the death penalty, then it must do so (or the country isn't a democracy).
What should be a capital crime? In a democracy the people decide.
Yeh, europe needs to shore up its defense. Al Queda are now our allies in Syria so we should bring them in to the new liberal defense against Russia pact. They fought the Russians after all and did a great job of it by all accounts - although detractors would say that was mostly sawing the heads of other Arabs and throwing civilians off cliffs. This detractors are Russian spies, obviously.
In any case the heroic rebels did win against the Russian fascists and we can find some use for them in the war against transphobes. Russiaphiles, and George Galloway. If I’m not repeating myself.
******
just as I write that last paragraph, here in my local, my college friend of 20 years came in, glanced at my post and said that the glorious anti fascists of HTS/Al Queda are also transphobic.
This was clear Russian propaganda so I took him out the back of the pub and shot him. New Liberal Europe has no time for fascist free speech.
I don't agree with executing people in general, and especially for holding wrong views. I do applaud your clear-sighted view of the destructive role Russia is - proudly, too - playing in Western Europe and the US. I only wish more powers that be understood this that clearly.
UPDATE: November data are in, and MoM inflation continues to drop, now to 2.4%, which is the lowest since July 2020.
That corresponds to an annualized rate of 32.9%, which is lower than any year since 2017. If MoM inflation starts dropping by only 5% a month, instead of the 20% it was dropping for most of the year, and the 11% in November, 2025 inflation would still end up being just 23.3% which would be the lowest since 2013.
The poverty rate also dropped again, having been dropping continuously since February.
JPMorgan's EMBI risk index for Argentina also continues to drop and it's at its lowest level since early 2019.
I've been keeping an eye on the informal market vs official value of the peso, which seems like a good real time indicator of economic management and expectations around the economy / inflation (if people are confident, they'll take dollar savings and convert to peso). https://bluedollar.net/ The gap seems to have considerably narrowed in recent weeks.
Per this Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ESHHH, forecasters predict real GDP growth in 2025 to be about 3.6% after a contraction of about 3.6% this year.
Thanks! I did read it back when it was published and it was very helpful. I'll give it another read to see if I can read today's tea leaves using the same methods.
I've seen piecemeal reports and commentary once or twice a month, so "how recent" is the question. Basically all the econ writers are keeping tabs, and sometimes link to said "low-level" accounts on X or whatever.
Could the slight dip in mortality for moderate alcohol drinkers be partially explained by the fact that alcohol tends to make people more “social”, perhaps leading to improved relationships and less loneliness? After all, loneliness is definitely associated with mortality.
I drink very little alcohol, mainly because I strongly dislike the taste, and am normally a rather reserved person. But I've noticed that when I do drink, I become much more open and outgoing and find it much easier to hold conversations. I've thought that maybe because of this, I should make an active effort to drink more in social settings.
This is one of those debates where I'm confused about why we are having it. If the health risks of low-to-moderate alcohol consumption are so small that we are debating whether or not they even exist, then it seems trivially obvious to me that if you're someone who enjoys drinking alcohol (as many do) that the enjoyment will vastly outweigh the health risks, even if they are real. And if you don't enjoy drinking alcohol, well...then probably stop? Even if the very moderate proposed health *benefits* are real, they seem unlikely to outweigh the pure monetary cost of drinking (in my opinion).
There is always risk that if you begin, you would not be able stay on moderate level. I mean, I am moderate drinker and I know I have to watch myself carefully.
Cremieux argues that the seemingly positive effects of wine consumption are merely the result of confounding and that the actual causal impact is negative.
Cremieux was only making the (excellent) point that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can be harmful. (Although data has shown that women who drink wine moderately during pregnancy have kids who turn out well, there's a confound here between social class and wine consumption. Drinking any alcohol during pregnancy increases risk of adverse outcomes.) As for people who aren't pregnant, the data favors the view that light alcohol consumption is not harmful, and may have slight health benefits.
The first tweet is about the effect of drinking on health in general - not on pregnancy, in particular.
To quote it:
>Clearly people who ... never drink do worse than the people who drink a bit. And when people start drinking even more than a bit, they look a little better...
>The problem with the conventional analysis is that selection is at play...
>It would be unethical to run human experiments to figure out what alcohol does, so, how can we know what alcohol does to health?
>With a clever little method called Mendelian Randomization, or MR. MR is basically an answer to the question What if I used genes as instrumental variables?...
>So putting this wonderful genetic predictor to use, we can finally see what alcohol actually does.
>Well, the effect of the unconfounded difference in alcohol consumption is that, when it comes to heart health, alcohol doesn't seem to do much, rather than being a bit protective.
>But the heart isn't everything. There's certainly more!
>Alcohol did increase risk for ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and total strokes.
>Not only that, but in another study using a similar method, alcohol increased hypertension, blood pressure, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, fasting blood glucose, and triglycerides. But, consistent with these results, in that paper it didn't seem to have a significant effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, and it both increased HDL and decreased LDL.
>In aggregate, alcohol is likely to be bad for your health at any level, but selection into disuse means the downsides have been hidden in traditional analyses. And even if alcohol doesn't negatively impact heart health on its own, the fact that it's not protective and it increases other risks means it's risky on net.
Good point(s), but MR is limited as an instrumental variable in this context, because it doesn't justify precise, real-world statements about dose-response relationships. Genes don't determine exactly how much a person drinks. But exactness is needed here, because the debate isn't about drinking in general - it's about the effects of low levels of alcohol consumption. MR isn't correlated strongly enough with actual drinking behavior to justify distinctions between, say, zero vs. one or two drinks per week. As I've explained in a couple of posts, the data suggests that sufficiently low levels of drinking would be benign or perhaps healthful, on net.
(We always need that "perhaps", because observational studies can't measure drinking behavior over time very precisely. This includes studies used to justify MR.)
(BTW, there seems to be an error in the tweet: RCTs with human have been conducted in which the experimental group is instructed to drink for a period of weeks.)
But when the so-called J-shaped curve shows up in self-report surveys, and NOT in MR data (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38508868/), we should be more inclined to think that -- like many other famous examples in nutritional epidemiology -- there is unmeasured confounding in the self-report data. Genes explaining a small percentage of the variance is not a reason to discount MR results; it just means you need a larger sample size to get good results. The same is true for MR studies on blood pressure and cholesterol: the genes are imprecise and explain a small percentage of the total variance in BP/Ch.But they find the same results as RCTs on blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs.
I think the last part of what you wrote is very persuasive - whenever we see convergence between MR studies and RCTs, the results should be considered more credible. But here's one of the problems with the alcohol data: The MR approach is validated by relating genotypic patterns to actual consumption, but actual consumption is crudely measured (e.g., by asking people once every few years to describe their drinking behavior during the prior week). Even though MR data and self-reported consumption are sometimes found to be moderately strongly correlated, the crudity of the alcohol measures is one reason not to trust highly specific dose-response statements. In particular, we should be highly skeptical of recent MR-based claims that the J-shaped curve is actually more of a straight line, because the inflection point occurs at very low levels of consumption (like one drink per day, or even a little less, depending on study). Larger samples might help, as you say, but not necessarily.
I've written about this (but I promise not to add a hyperlink). There's a scientific debate about whether the lowest levels of alcohol consumption are harmful, benign, or healthful. The major health organizations take sides on this debate - e.g., the WHO claims there's no safe level of alcohol consumption, while American agencies (HHS, CDC, etc.) claim that low levels are safe. I believe the best and most plentiful evidence favors the benign/healthful view. Perhaps this is because light drinking increases sociability, as you said. Perhaps it's because light drinking reduces stress levels, and the health benefits of lower stress offset any harmful effects of the alcohol. Identifying exactly how much drinking is benign or healthful is super difficult though, because the measurement of drinking behavior in longitudinal studies is so crude (e.g., people are asked once every few years to describe their weekly alcohol consumption.)
I looked at the CDC website, where they say “Moderate drinking increases health risks compared to not drinking” and “Some past studies had suggested that moderate drinking might be good for your health. But scientists highly debate these findings. More studies now show that there aren't health benefits of moderate drinking compared to not drinking.”
That seems to agree with what you describe as the WHO position, or at least it doesn’t contradict it (maybe they disagree on the threshold of “safe”?)
Here's the difference: In 2023, the WHO revised their official position to state that there's no safe level of alcohol consumption. The CDC is more tolerant, because they recommend specific limits (two drinks per day for men, one per day for women) and indicate that drinking less should not be harmful. (At the same time, hedging their bets somewhat, they also use the vague phrase "drinking less is better for your health than drinking more". )
People who don't drink at all are also likely to belong to religions (Southern Baptists, Islam, etc.) that are correlated with lower socioeconomic status, at least in the US.
Yep, I suppose this is the traditional explanation for the mortality dip. I'm sure it's also a factor, but I wonder how much my point might contribute as well.
It's within the realm of possibility that there's some correlation, but I definitely haven't observed that people with intact social circles are unlikely to have excessive alcohol consumption. At least in younger people, I'd be very surprised if the correlation ran in that direction.
You sometimes hear about understanding and treatment for certain neglected diseases being pushed forwards by an individual who has taken a particular interest in it.
I would like to see this to happen with Peyronie’s disease. What can I do to nudge this outcome?
These case studies need to be replicated in large trials if this is ever to become the standard of care. Phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors have also shown some promise. Same point.
Nobody will do a "large clinical trial", as usual nobody cares.
Also it is extremely likely to work, large trials are mostly only needed to reveal weak effects that are otherwise hidden by statistical variance and cofounders.
In that sense the culture of large trials as the only bearer of truth is 1) scientific obscurantism and 2) an admission of failure, as if the drug you test require a large sample to show an effect then it's already a testament of the weakness of your drug.
Case studies of random people acutely cured to an incurable disease are much more potent epistemologically than most large RCTs.
If I become the first human to live >120 years my n=1 will suffice to revolutionize mankind.
Any people with peyronie should test this and report back in a decentralized phase IV trial way, as antioxidants are both cheap and benign. However nobody will report back because of 1) ignorance and 2) of the gatekeeping of forever waiting for inexistant trials, a self fulfililng prophecy where nobody ever attempt to reproduce the science despite being an availability of countless miserable sufferers
Uhhh if anyone else is thinking of googling this on a work computer a word of warning, Peyronie's disease is one of Penile Curvature and Wikipedia has several medically accurate pictures of waist down, real-life sufferers.
SO. This will be a tough disease to throw gala banquets with glossy brochures and a celebrity spokesman willing to stand before all and declare that yes, he too suffers from a curvature approaching 30° to the right. Yeah...this might be a case where you'd have better luck lobbying the NIH to fund more urological research or something...
I feel like you posted bentham’s shrimp argument as a joke but I found it compelling enough to throw some bucks their way (and none of the others listed did it for me).
It was the image of the lecture hall of shrimp that put me over. How can you not help that whole lecture hall for $0.20?
As someone pointed out on that post, that's a lecture hall full of corpses. Live shrimp are translucent/greyish-blue. They're only pink if they're cooked. So that not's a lecture hall, it's a buffet table 😁
Good job! I doubt it was a joke. It’s impossible to know for sure which animals suffer the most so we (should) place our bets according to the best reasoning and evidence we have.
What uncommon but commercially available/easy to implement interior design flairs have you seen and liked?
Ideally possible in a 2B city midrise condo
Two specific ideas am mulling over:
1) a 3d implying mural on a wall would be cool, but I know they peel eventually. Is there a way to get a hyperthin wooden panel, screw that to the wall, and put it on that?
2) I kinda want a ai generated poster of the theme 'evil person in history, but ridiculed by alteration', one of the big 10 as a cat or Mario or whatever, anyone seen a particularly good one?
When I younger, I remember being constantly nagged from my dentist about flossing. Granted, I was a very inconsistent flosser, but this was in fact the worst part for me about going to the dentist was them asking me if I flossed, my ashamed answer that I didn't, and their lecture to me about how important it was that I do so. This was so impactful to me that when I finished my orthodontic work at the end of college and no longer had that hanging over me, I completely stopped going to the dentist for about 12 years.
Then I got married, and my wife convinced me that part of being a responsible adult is to get one's biannual dental cleaning, and she persuaded me to get back in the habit of boing to the dentist. And I was somewhat shocked to find that I'm no longer nagged about flossing. I am somewhat better at it now than I was when I was younger, but I'm hardly consistent with it. My question is whether standard practice in dentistry has changed? Was there a recognition that nagging about flossing is an emotional barrier to people seeing their dentists and that the value of seeing one's dentist for a cleaning is greater (perhaps to the patient, but certainly to the dentist!) than the expected value of nagging the patient about flossing?
I was in a very similar situation. Had all sorts of issues from not going to the dentist and not flossing for a long time (strangely, no cavities though.... they asked "you must not have much of a sweet tooth?", which is the complete opposite of the truth, weirdly). Anyway, even after spending thousands at the dentist/oral surgeon to get various issues fixed, I knew I still wasn't gonna floss, because I freaking hate it with a fiery passion. BUT, then a miracle! I started using a waterpick every day (the kind you can get for cheap at any CVS/walgreens whatever) and it's been great. The dentist I go to says it's just as good, if not better, than flossing. Maybe it's true, maybe they're just blowing smoke up my ass thinking it's better than nothing, but the last few years of twice-a-year dental visits and regular waterpicking has seemed to eliminate all issues. I highly recommend one if you're a better-dead-than-floss guy like me.
Incidentally, my wife is a regular flosser and doesn't like the waterpick, says it's too hard on her gums. Whatever, her loss.
2nd this, waterpicks are great. Tell your wife to try it on a lower pressure setting, it doesn't need to be set to the max to be effective. My hygienist told me that the max setting can be too powerful for some people.
I don't agree with your viewpoint. My dentists and dental hygienists seem to feel no qualms about lecturing me all the time about flossing. I've had some very uncomfortable experiences at the dentist over my adult life. However, it varies by dental practice. Some places are nicer, because some people are nicer.
I think people feel comfortable lecturing children but not adults. Also, they may figure (correctly) that you've "heard the good word" on flossing already and that further evangelizing will just turn you off.
I am your mirror image - I dislike going to the doctor, of any sort, except my enforced visits to the optometrist. Thus I too have avoided the dentist (and doctors altogether; I got the shingles shot at CVS) for a dozen years and more. But in my case I very much believe in flossing, and floss every two or three days. I think with flossing you can be your own dentist, to a great extent, and that it's important to get the spaces between teeth clean, so as not to foster bacteria. I am perhaps helped somewhat by my teeth not being crowded, having had several removed by an old-school orthodontist (those bands jammed onto the teeth) 4 decades ago.
It seems to me people who don't care for their teeth, lose their teeth - and this was a lot more common before dentistry (or self-dentistry, in my case :-)).
While my dental *hygienists* mildly nag me about flossing and insist on doing it in the office, my two recent *dentists* - the one who retired, and the young one who replaced him - both acknowledge that there's indeed totally untested bullshit in dentistry. They've both said that genes + diet seem to be the determining factors in dental health; having naturally good teeth and/or oral bacterium plus not constantly bathing teeth in sugar produces terrific results even if someone skips flossing. My retired dentist added that Oral-B's electric toothbrushes (the ones that spin rather than go back and forth) were a real game-changer and, used at the correct angles, could replace most flossing action.
I totally ignore flossing and my teeth - even the baby tooth which never got replaced - are going strong. If your teeth were fine after 12 years of avoiding the dentist, you can likely ignore flossing, too.
Some of my relative like their electric toothbrushes. I’m too lazy/cheap for household items with batteries myself. But also, I don’t understand why people think they can’t brush their teeth manually in that rotary fashion? I always brush in circles.
No, decent electric toothbrushes stand on a little charging port which plugs into a standard wall socket. You just replace the brush head once a season. These electric brushes have sensors which light up if you're pressing too hard, and timers so that you can ensure you've brushed long enough.
My mom and I bought a two-pack together at Costco, and we've been using our respective brushes for 12+ years. Mine is only now starting to go a little wonky and I'm thinking of replacing it.
Although - given that I bought it at Costco - I could theoretically return it, hahahah:
If you're a lazy person then I strongly recommend an electric toothbrush! Saves dozens yes, DOZENS of calories by not having to move your hand and wrist up and down in oblong circles, merely glide along as the lovely wee electric motor does its work.
Also apparently better for gum health, which is the reason I got mine about a decade ago
I think my laziness manifests differently than yours!
I like to use my hands.
I don't like to shop, to add to the list of things that have to regularly be purchased at the store. I don't like a lot of ... stuff around. I don't like trying to figure out if I should recycle batteries, and then remember that that's not actually a thing anymore.
The gum health thing is probably most persuasive. My mother uses that kind of toothbrush and was told she had periodontal disease long ago. She even had that procedure where they graft skin onto your gums. Thereafter for quite some years, she went to the periodontist even just for her (presumably pricier) cleanings. Because she was told to.
There's never been any mention of the periodontal disease since that time forty years ago. She goes to the regular dentist, which is nice for her because she used to carpool him to school. People like these old friendships.
I too was told once, circa 1988, that I had receding gums aka "periodontal disease". Maybe I too would someday have to get these grafts. In the meantime, I was urged to floss.
This disease must be progressing very slowly. But if I notice any change in those gums, I'll get one of those toothbrushes for sure.
I mean, sure, teeth and gums are part of a total system. I ignore flossing and my teeth *and* gums are fine, even though I had a 10+ year gap in dental insurance and didn't see a dentist once.
That's anecdotal of course, but there's no large scale long-term evidence that not flossing is a likely path to gum disease, especially if someone is using circular-action electric toothbrushes and especially-especially if someone is using flossing alternatives like waterpiks.
The hostility to flossing (fuck The Atlantic, the subtle damage this publication is doing to the fabric of our society is probably less than that wrought by the NYT, but that's quite a low bar to clear) is baffling to me. It's a very low-cost intervention that may not be necessary for everyone, but for those who need it it makes a huge difference, and we don't have a screening mechanism.
Whatever your objection to The Atlantic, there is still no long-term evidence about flossing. It's over the top to say that it's *necessary,* particularly if one is doing it wrong. And doing it wrong can make things worse!
I've had two dentists express that they're impressed with my teeth and they were both completely indifferent about whether or not I'm flossing, since I'm doing other stuff. If the OP wants to use a waterpick instead of flossing, there's no reason not to. If he has good genes and doesn't consume a lot of sugary drinks, he might not even need to do that much.
There's "still no long-term evidence about flossing" because, as the UTK link states, "the research supporting daily flossing was weak because of lack of participants or long-term studies". In other words, there's no evidence because nobody looked. And yes, one can floss too much, this is the same kind of thing as "one can exercise too much", not the problem for the vast majority of the population, quite the opposite in fact.
Water pick is fine, and electric toothbrushes really help too.
I didn't read the whole of it, but the article centered on a dentist who urged a lot of possibly unnecessary procedures on his patients. It seemed pretty much the opposite of the extremely low-tech and essentially free way to care for your own teeth, that is flossing.
Yeah, and this is a good illustration why I despise the rag. They bill it as an explosive expose of the industry, and then use niche cases of unscrupulous or incompetent doctors as an illustration. Meanwhile everywhere the headline is what gets attention, and now "dental care is fraud" becomes the meme.
Meanwhile all we need is to look at middle-aged people who have access to routine dental care and compare their grins to those who don't. Tell a poor Appalachian man in his 40's who's missing several teeth that dentistry is fraud.
Well, the sad part is that he may actually believe it.
Re. Israel/Palestine: I'm trying to find a hard to fake signal moderates on the two sides can send to each other, or make a long term resolution less violent at the margin, that will still achieve 'justice'.
My 'idea' is a land/citizenship swap. I could (either become a citizen of Israel, or find someone to do this on my behalf) identify settlement land, either in Gaza (if/when the settler projects begin in northern Gaza, hopefully never) or the West Bank that will be most inconvenient if Israelis live there when it comes to negotiating borders, buy it (hopefully not too expensive), and sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there. And, in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated (or just have 10 people who long since emigrated but are still on the unwra refugee list for corruption/political reasons but don't consider themselves Palestinian and wouldn't move back if a full right of return became a thing to take themselves off it), or a Palestinian to not sell similar land to a Jew because they'd be killed for that, but...something. Maybe get a marginal Palestinian in East Jerusalem to accept Israeli citizenship.
Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k.
Can anyone familiar with the laws/frameworks in the region tell me if this is at all viable, and what the most practical implementation of this 'motivation' would be?
"sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there"
I doubt it's legal under Israeli law that West Bank Palestinians can live in Israeli settlements with an Israeli "sponsor". IIRC West Bank residents can't even move to Israel if they marry an Arab Israeli (i.e. Arab with Israeli citizenship living in pre-67 Israel) so why would you selling them land do the trick?
"in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated"
I this happened at a large scale, then every West Bank Palestinian would be living in Israeli settlements (with the accompanying demographic threat Israel is worried about) long before every Palestinian in those other countries renounced refugee status, so I'm not sure what this would achieve.
"Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k. "
General point but I think that a lot of "pay the Palestinians to accept Israel taking the land" type of arguments don't in fact offer up enough money to make this a fair trade, even if you leave aside sentimentality.
Hm, that makes sense. Let's say I believe that the status quo is A) 'israel at great reputational and moderate financial cost achieves basically complete military victory over iran(+allies) and gaza/west bank', that B) 'if literally anyone in the arab world could offer them long term security and renounce right of return, there is the political will to do basically anything for that, including getting rid of netanyahu, partially dismantling settlements in west bank, withdrawing from gaza completely', and that C) 'arab world because of self-serving propaganda by various actors believes neither A nor B with high conviction, probably isn't capable of giving up right of return unless it updates hard in favor of A'.
Is there any way I can credibly send the signal B in a way that's visible to some moderate subset of the arab (ideally palestinian) world, without making A less likely?
Ideally with also the effect of having some minimal not cost-effective positive effect on justice, as defined by both israelis and arabs.
I don't know what signal you're trying to send. B is a statement about the state of political opinion in Israel. What does it mean for you to "credibly" send it? People can read the state of political views in Israel directly, what does you sending a signal add?
There's also a much larger signal *against* B, namely, Netanyahu has been Prime Minister almost continuously since 2009 - not only the longest serving in Israel's history, but if not for a ~1 year period when he was temporarily out of power, perhaps the longest currently serving elected (in free and fair elections) head of government in the world.
And Netanyahu is against giving up any settlements.
And even his main rival, Benny Gantz, is against giving up any settlements!
Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews. Ditto for the Israelis. Yes, Netanyahu doesn't want peace, he thinks he can divide the Palestinians, and we can debate if his primary goal is to prevent them from organizing effectively to destroy Israel, or build settlements, that's a hot topic that would require more good faith than we have.
Mainstream Israeli opinion has coalesced to 'arabs are militantly opposed to any self governing Jews in this region, if peace was possible we would bend over backwards to make painful concessions, absent that possibility, the hope for which we lost in the second intifada, we are stuck in a horrible situation where military security through strength is our only option, which is morally and financially expensive'. The Arab world totally is unaware of this, in general.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a cost efficient way to send a truth signal as to the tradeoffs Israeli society is willing to make, and in the process reward some individual Arab moderate that is willing to permanently give up trying to overthrow the Israeli state, and indicate that maybe some second person could also make that trade (but not with me, I have few resources) and so on.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which raw information transfer corresponds to viewpoint shifts.
If someone has a goal of finding truth, then generally, any additional information helps.
But that's understandably quite a rare goal in and of itself. Why would anyone want that? People generally have much more understandable direct goals like seeking social approval.
In discussing the findings of public choice theory, Bryan Caplan notes that individual voters aren't incentivized to vote for things that would actually benefit them, since the impact of an individual vote is basically zero. Instead, they're rationally incentivized to vote irrationally to gain social approval from their peers, and the like.
The fact that Scott Alexander had to propose the writing of guides with rational suggestions for voters speaks to the general complete lack of demand for such a thing. Election spending is on the order of tens of billions of dollars, but the idea of providing a guide collating basic facts about candidates with arguments for whom to vote is treated as an esoteric proposal.
Inasmuch as individual votes have little direct impact on outcomes, having political views aligned with reality has even less impact, and per the incentives, most people don't.
This is broadly true in many arenas. To a large degree most people don't value abstract truth nearly as much as they value the direct effects of adopting particular positions, like social desirability, so the limiting factor in the search for truth is rarely the availability of raw information.
In a similar vein, in reviewing the book 1984, Asimov noted that the plot's emphasis on deliberate destruction of information in order to manipulate the public overstates the the connection between the two, in reality:
>This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.
> As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts...
> To be sure, the Soviets put out new editions of their Encyclopaedia ... and this is no doubt the germ of the Orwellian notion, but the chances of carrying it as far as is described in 1984 seem to me to be nil - not because it is beyond human wickedness, but because it is totally unnecessary.
This is true in the US and other parts of the world, including the Middle East.
The widespread false beliefs that people there have about so much don't seem to be the result of limited access to information, but of limited interest in abstract truth. If anything, the former is a result of the latter, as media and other groups there have little incentive, indeed, negative incentive, to provide truthful information.
Not only would factual information hardly deter them, actual experiences that contradict views that it's convenient for them to hold make little difference either.
E.g. in Lebanon, from what I can see, the pro Hezbollah segment of the population, and even the both-sideser anti-Hezb anti-Israel contingency agree that Israel cares little for the lives of civilians, is happy to kill 50 civilians for one militant, bombs indiscriminately, and even specifically targets civilians.
Israel would regularly announce that particular buildings would be struck and that people needed to evacuate a 500 meter radius from them.
When they'd do so, crowds would frequently assemble near the buildings to film the explosions with their phones, seemingly well within 500 meters.
Their behavior speaks to a high level of trust in the integrity and competence of the Israeli military. They show no concern, for example, that a plane will see the crowd of them and choose to drop an extra bomb on them.
This is particularly telling given that these strikes tended to be concentrated in pro-Hezb neighborhoods and cities.
Even in those areas, their actual experience and their resultant behavior was one of Israel displaying behavior completely at odds with their expressed beliefs about Israel.
This all makes sense based on what I've said. When it comes to airstrikes, they're incentivized to get cool videos, so they have no incentive in believing false things about Israel.
But in general, their incentives don't align with seeking accurate information about Israel.
This all goes for the Palestinians, too. Sure, completely false, indeed, delusional beliefs about Israel abound. But the issue isn't the language barrier, but the incentive barrier.
Is it your contention that even if the expectation of Palestinians that they will destroy Israel and get their land back dropped to 0, the psychological cost of turning paper losses into realized losses by accepting their first political defeat in renouncing struggle against the continued existence of Israel would be worth more to them than the benefit of peace?
"Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews."
The idea is that if Arabs did read that media they'd view Israelis as more likely to compromise? I do read English media and I don't think Israel is willing to withdraw from the settlements. My evidence as I said is that both Netanyahu and his main opponent said they are against withdrawing from settlements.
There's probably nothing that you could say to change *my* mind (absent e.g. referring to some statement of Israel's leaders of which I'm unaware) much less a person in the Arab world who doesn't read English media.
Of course if I'm wrong about Israel's leaders and they are willing to withdraw from settlements (or if they change their minds) - rather than you, *Israel's leaders* could change my mind - by proposing a deal on that basis.
(also can substitute in for settlements in the above, a few other contentious points)
In either case, still not clear what you sending a signal adds.
Netanyahu generally always believed, and October 7th has radicalized society to believe this as well (chunks of the left used not to) that any place you withdraw from and give a state will be used primarily to build offensive capability to destroy Israel, not a functioning state prioritizing welfare of its people. Gaza was proof of this but it wasn't until the invasion that public became aware of just how wealthy a place it was (they thought it was a slum, basically) and just how many billions were redirected towards tunnel networks/weapon stashes, etc. They thought it had way less resources, and a much smaller portion of that was spent over last 16 years preparing for the current war.
The West Bank is especially dangerous to withdraw from, unlike Gaza, because of reasons of geography. It's on high ground within shoulder rocket range of major population centers. As soon as you withdraw from there, you will have to reinvade at high cost within a week. Everyone recognizes this.
Israelis don't think peace is possible, so they are focused on maintaining security through military capability differentials.
The signal I am trying to send is the truthful one, that Arabs who don't actually know Hebrew and are immersed in Israeli politics (the median of the two million Arab Israelis know this fine) are strongly confident is not true, which is that all Israelis prioritize security, and a significant minority care about continued land expansion, and that because of coalitional politics and because basically no one believes settlements are *the* issue (most people object heavily on moral grounds, and because it looks bad politically, but they don't think that absent settlements Arabs would have any different goals) they continue as a path of least resistance.
I also know that any Arabs in Gaza who would protest armed resistance are killed or tortured in some order, and in West Bank are shunned as collaborators.
Just as moderate Israelis hear the terrorists too loud in their head to publicly offer peace, the moderate Arabs also hear the terrorists too loud to offer it.
I'm trying to identify some means of sending this signal, and in the process improve the life of some individual Palestinian Arab who receives it.
Right now there's no deal Israelis can offer because what they would want in exchange for painful concessions is an expectation of minimal future violence, and there is no Arab entity capable and interested of offering that. The people in Gaza at this point don't support Hamas anymore (in a major shift from before Oct 7), shellshock of war is too horrible and they see how it steals all the aid to resell it and doesn't let any civilians hide in the tunnels. West Bank and diaspora is in same place Palestinian 'cause' has been last 100 years, opposed to any Jewish rule anywhere in that land on aggregate, and willing to support armed resistance from any relative position of power due to honor culture, racism, an attachment to land they were unjustly deprived of, religion, and the perception that with a billion Muslims in the area on their side how could they possibly ever not win eventually.
“I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”
I was going to say I would be very surprised if God cared that much about shrimp, but He must do with the prohibition on eating shellfish in the Old Testament!
Leviticus 11:9–12
9 ‘These you may eat, whatever is in the water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat.
10 ‘But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you,
11 and they shall be abhorrent to you; you may not eat of their flesh, and their carcasses you shall detest.
12 ‘Whatever in the water does not have fins and scales is abhorrent to you.'
But oh no, Bentham's Bulldog, now you have demolished the Shellfish Argument! You know, the one that gets reliably trotted out about religious opposition to homosexualty: "oh, but do you wear poly-cotton blend clothing and eat shrimp? if you do, you're a sinner!"
God *does* mean it about shrimp, and He *does* mean it about gay sex is the answer to the question posed here 😁
"Leviticus says not to eat shellfish (Lev. 11:9-12), use mixed seed or fabrics (Lev. 19:19), harvest the corners of fields (Lev. 19:9), and that homosexuality is wrong (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). If homosexuality is wrong because Leviticus says so, then shouldn’t we also obey the other laws about shellfish, seed, fabrics, and fields because that is in Leviticus as well? If not, then why not? Why would Christians pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow?"
"I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?
Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads [according to Deuteronomy 22:9-11]?"
"She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"
I'd suggest some form of second price auction to determine that rather than asking folks on the Internet. Probably set a reserve price to avoid regret if you feel that the folks bidding might not appreciate her as much as you do.
Hi, Jed, I'm glad to speak to you again on religious topics because at our last encounter on this matter, I excoriated you as a hypocritical son-of-a-bitch whining about how it wasn't fair that God cheated you by (lemme see here) killing your old school teacher in a car accident? Because she was the first person who kissed your ass about how genius you were? And you did the toddler foot-stamping over "it not fair! it not fair! me want!" before the crucifix? Ah, good times, good times!
With these new set of queries, absolutely yes to each and every one of them! You are entitled to kill your daughter, depending on what state you live in, up to 24 weeks to any stage of pregnancy; just because she made it out of the womb is no reason for her to think she's free of your authority to dispose of her however you wish for your own convenience:
And we all know of course that as a good liberal and Democrat (but I repeat myself), you are a total devotee of Moloch when it comes to baby killing, so a little selling your daughter into slavery but permitting her to live shouldn't turn a hair for you.
If you're his boss, you can do what you want to Leo. Just clarify which Sabbath he is breaking, and make sure you stick to that. You already expect to own him body and soul anyway as your Chief of Staff, so you can dispose of his life as you see fit.
Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now.
Planting different crops may be a criminal offence, you can leave it up to the local government to stone your brother. If Monsanto can sue his ass for mixing varieties, and the World Trade Organisation is concerned over illegal practices in the seed trade, why not go the whole hog on penalties?
"However, a concerning rise in illegal seed practices threatens global food security, the livelihood of farmers and trust in a professional seed industry. Furthermore, illegal practices impact worker safety, and illegal work practices can violate labour laws. Sometimes such occurrences are also associated with other forms of illegal activities, such as tax evasion and the circulation of fraudulent crop inputs (e.g. fake crop protection products and seed treatments).
Seeds are unlike other agricultural inputs. Seeds have great economic value derived from the high investment in R&D required to breed them and the innovation they embody, as well as their societal value to farmers and food systems (IHS Markit, 2019). At the same time, seeds – and the plants grown from them – are self-reproducing material, which makes them easy to copy and thus vulnerable to intellectual property infringements and other illegal practices. Therefore, seeds require intellectual property protection, which is mostly provided through plant breeder’s rights (PBRs), and breeders must apply for such protection as a first line of defence against infringement."
Your relationship with your mother is your own affair, but if she's as annoyingly preachy as you, I can well believe a small family gathering would be only too happy to burn her.
"Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now."
From the NFL Rule Book: "The ball shall be made up of an inflated (12½ to 13½ pounds) urethane bladder enclosed in a pebble grained, leather case (natural tan color) without corrugations of any kind."
It's different. I commend Bulldog for trying, but I found it unconvincing. Then again, I'm not the audience he's going for. When he's speaking about his own personal conversion (if that's how he'd describe it) it's much more relatable.
I can only remember that when I read it, I thought it was worth checking out considering the source was a highly unconventional thinker likely to offer something novel, and while I didn't expect to be convinced, I was disappointed relative to my expectations.
Also, how all of these compare to their quality of life and lifespan in the natural world. Is agriculture and aquaculture a negligible or significant part of arthropod suffering?
Add in field mice and other small rodents. Google is all over the place, but I'm seeing estimates of 15-100 rodents killed per acre of farmed land.
There are 47.5 million acres of wheat harvested in the US alone. Using the lower number of rodents per acre, in the US and for wheat only, that's over 700 million killed per year. Insects should be far higher, by any reasonable estimate. Some Googled website is saying 3.5 quadrillion insects are killed by US farmers using pesticides yearly.
Yeah, I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to lobby for more humane pesticides instead of focusing on shrimp farming. But I assume people have already looked into that.
I've never posted a puzzle before, so apologies if this is too hard, too easy, or suboptimally presented.
Of the following three hands,
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
♠ 8 5 2 ♥ 2 ♦ Q 10 8 6 ♣ J
♠ 7 ♥ K 7 ♦ J 5 ♣ Q 9 7 4
two were dealt randomly, one was carefully arranged--by someone with OCD. Which is the arranged one, and how?
(Note: by "OCD" I possibly mean stereotypical OCD that doesn't literally exist, or maybe it does. Don't hold me rigidly to this.)
(Note 2: By "arranged" I don't necessarily mean that every card was chosen with perfect care. Consider that there was a limited part of a deck to choose from, when arranging that hand.)
(Note 3: This puzzle amounts to guessing what was in my mind. Of course, there are probably answers that make perfect sense but which weren't what I was thinking of. I should consider such answers triumphs in everything but mind-reading)
Tnzrxavtug naq Zbygrabnx ner pbeerpg ba gur unaq. (Gubhtu gur bgure nafjref znl whfg nf jryy unir orra gehr). Abj vg'f whfg thrffvat jung rknpgyl gur ehyr vf, naq gurl'er cnegvnyyl ba gur evtug genpx.
Remember this is guessing what I'm thinking, and I make no promises it's especially elegant or interesting.
Writing as I think... Note 2 seems important - I'm wondering if it means the other 18 cards have already been dealt? If not, in what other way would the deck be limited?
Hand 2 looks more contrived (as 2 other people have noticed, but I'm not convinced their explanations are convincing)
Feels like hand 2. Spades and diamonds are evenly spaced (and spades are also fibonacci-ish, why not). Then 2 and 11 are both objectively awesome numbers (prime, binary-related, and a stereotypically-ocd-ish friend points out that 2 in roman numerals is 11-looking).
Probably not the intended solution, but Hand 1 has the most even possible split between suits (9 doesn't evenly divide 3, so one suit has an extra, but the other 2 hands are more lopsided).
Love the idea of posting a puzzle here! My guess is hand nr 1, because it's unlikely for such evenly sized groups to form accidentally, plus they contain the sequence 8,9,10,J,Q,K. Dunno what's up with the two 3s though.
Aside: I also found the presentation of the hands a bit confusing - they are all "ordered" in the same way, so really they're sets of cards rather than sequences (ie. a hand you could reorder when you hold it).
I'm not sure how to read these hand notations as discrete cards:
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
So that looks at first like Queen of Spades, Four of Hearts, then Jack of... tens? and then you have "Club King Eight Three" as if that's a valid card in any sense.
The only other thing that could make sense is if these are nine-card hands for some reason but that seems like something worth calling out?
The article you link about shrimp welfare makes a mistake that has bugged me for years, and which I've never seen anyone else serious address. Which is that it implicitly assumes a somewhat mystical view of what qualia/suffering fundamentally is which which IMO is incompatible with a functional evolutionary view of what explains suffering most parsimoniously.
You can make a strong case that suffering is actually an extremely simple trait that has an incentive to evolve even in organisms that are far simpler than shrimp, and which doesn't require very much complexity to evolve:
This is important because it means that microscopic organisms should totally swamp any considerations based on raw quantities of suffering.
Indeed as I mention in the doc more sympathetic organisms actually have an evolutionary incentive to feel *less* suffering, since more intelligence and better memory means you can learn the same lesson more easily.
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this. We poke oysters with sticks and see what they do, then we give the oysters a bunch of opium and poke them with sticks again and see if they react differently. Opium is an awesome painkiller, so if they give them the same unpleasant stimulus (stick poke) and they react the same, then we can be highly confident it's some kind of involuntary muscle thing, not actual pain.
This is, pretty seriously as far as I know, the actual argument for ostroveganism, which are vegans who eat, like, oysters and stuff.
In unironic honor of the subject of shrimp welfare I have posted my beloved collection of Dall-e 2's images responding to the prompt "Shrimp love me, unaligned AI fears me."
I think this perspective doesn't effectively distinguish between "negative reinforcement" and "suffering". I don't blame you, because I think the distinction is hard to understand and routes through our uncertainty about what consciousness is, but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
As you say below, even plants and bacteria have something like negative reinforcement (in fact, you can probably find some rock or thermostat or something that has some quality that seems suspiciously like it). I think there's an additional question of whether this is just a blind reflex, or whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way, and that we reserve the word "suffering" for the latter - the more reflection, the more suffering (though "reflection" isn't exactly the right word here and is more gesturing at a concept I can't easily describe).
And according to some, the being which is capable of the most "reflection" would likely be God- so logically God also experiences the most suffering of any being. And if God is truly infinite, that means infinite suffering as well. Therefore, the action that will remove the most suffering from the universe would be to kill God. I am now accepting funding for this project.
I have seen in the wild the first stirrings towards "plants are sentient too" (no, like an idiot I didn't save the article) and boy, Chesterton keeps recurring to mind here:
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
It's funny that you feel kinship with Chesterton here, because my reaction to your comment and quote is "wow, conservatives have been making up 'liberal guy whose heart bleeds too much to eat even plants' for over a century now".
He was a Liberal (politically) and not a Conservative (Tory), though he did move to social conservatism.
But since he went to Art School, he did meet a lot of those progressive types who were around even back then.
So there's a lot less "conservatives have been making up bleeding-heart liberals for a long time" and more "bleeding-heart liberals as well as outright cranks have been around for a long time" at work there.
"Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. "No, no," she cried, "I mustn't! Anna Kingsford says I mustn't." Then, with more control, "Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life." I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, "But Anna Kingsford is dead." "She told me this morning," repeated the lady, "that I must not read the book." "Well," I said, "I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn't been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford."
...All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for "The Man Who Was Thirsty." Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been "The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight," or "The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening." But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the '90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: "Who shall understand but you?" In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it."
Yeah it kind of seems morally hopeless unless you have advanced enough tech to stick basically every non-human organism into a simulation (with very few animals having enough intelligence to have social preferences that couldn't be satisfied by an experience machine). Then the countless simulated organisms never grow in number, and their role in nature gets filled by a sort of AGI DM acting out their characters through machine/cyborg bodies (but which enjoys people say hunting it for instance, the same way a good DM wants their players to beat their villain)
Though granted I think that's likely to be possible in the future, so just for the sake of people with different values than me (and to hedge against incredibly infinitesimal moral uncertainty) I precommit to doing what I can to bring that scenario about if it doesn't sacrifice any of my other values.
Thanks for responding to my comment! I feel like this issue is kind of a blind spot in EA/rationlist circles so I'd love you to dive deeper into it, though I'd like you to preregister a prediction first!
>but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
Why? After all you seem to realize yourself that it seems more parsimonious to just not draw a distinction between negative reinforcement and supposedly "real" suffering. At least I'd get that impression from you saying it's difficult to draw a distinction.
I'm skimming through the article RN, but I don't see anything that specifically affects my arguments for qualia being more widespread than generally believed. Is there a part you'd like to draw my attention to that you think addresses my points?
Fundamentally doesn't this basically entail something almost similar to a belief in P-zombies?
In that you must believe that in some organisms negative stimuli leads to an internal state which leads them to learn to avoid that stimuli and any other stimuli they've learned to associate with it in the future. Whereas other organisms have an internal state like this which affects behavior in almost the same way, except that in those organisms it's not "real" qualia.
Also what do you think about the argument that more complex organisms have less evolutionary reason to feel pain as intensely as simpler organisms, since they can learn their lessons easier?
After all if suffering serves an evolutionary function it seems like an inescapable conclusion that it's intensity is something subject to evolutionary pressure doesn't it? Which seems incompatible with humans feeling pain any more intensely than shrimp.
>whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way
You should preregister (before looking into the topic) what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
Because I think you and most other rationalists (I'd also call myself a rationalist) are drawing a category here in a way that's fundamentally not even wrong.
> what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
I'm not convinced we will ever have a definitive answer, since qualia are inherently a subjective experience. Who knows. But this does mean that we can only use heuristics to figure this out. For some qualia it might be nearly impossible, eg color perception. We can find out whether X can see or distinguish colors, but how do we know whether it experiences them? But suffering has associated behaviors we can try to use, as well as our understanding of the neurologically structural prerequisites for registering and processing pain, which we can sensibly consider a prerequisite for suffering. So, this would be the evidence: The presence of pain processing and aggregation circuitry as well as behaviors that heuristically can differentiate avoidance behavior from suffering.
I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia, ie having an experience of what it is like to be someome/perceive something. It seems clear that some things have qualia, eg humans. It seems equally clear that some things don't, eg rocks. Sure, humans are living things and rocks aren't, but this is a potentially fluent distinction - consider for example viruses or the "ancestors" of biological life. Suffering is just one particular qualium(?), just as eg experiencing color is.
Now consider a robot which measures the light intensity behind it and in front of it and drives towards the smaller value. In this sense, it avoids light. Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however? If not, then clearly, avoidance behavior is not a sufficient condition for the presence of suffering.
Note that we could arrive at exactly the same internal model by training it through reinforcement learning etc. So it also doesn't seem like the learning part itself is a sufficient condition.
Given this, it seems you need something beyond negative reinforcement to ensure the presence of qualia, such as perhaps a complicated neurological system or something akin to it. What exactly appears to be needed for the presence of qualia in general or suffering in particular is an empirical and philosophical question people have already put a lot of effort into, cf eg the paper Scott linked you.
>I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia
I was asking about observations that are feasible to make. Obviously if you could magically read minds and know creatures internal qualia would settle like half of philosophy and I'd love that!
>Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however?
The mistake you're making here is I assuming would apply a double standard to AI compared to biological life.
I see no convincing reason to think some existing AI might not have qualia. Importantly this qualia may not feel subjectively the same, but I'd still expect an AI that evolved through an evolutionary algorithm to avoid certain stimuli, to find those stimuli unpleasant in some alien sort of way.
I think qualia is fundamentally functional, so if an AI displays certain kinds of learning in response to stimuli then the simplest explanation is that it also has internal qualia changing its behavior.
Granted I think P-zombies might be possible, they'd just be computationally infeasible to run.
Actually, thinking some more about it, my impression is this. Your (simplified) model seems to be:
Input
==> Internal processing
==> Qualia
==> Behavior
I totally agree that this is sometimes appropriate, eg for lot of human behavior. (Though we also need an Internal Processing ==> Behavior connection for pulling our hand away from a hot stove etc.) However, a surely simpler model is
Input
==> Internal Processing
==> Behavior
This doesn't apply to humans of course, but it might apply to other entities. Unless you take a panpsychist position or the like, it seems like it does apply to some simple entities, like a small linear model or a thermostat. So the question becomes: when is which model appropriate? And I don't see a reason to a priori prefer the former over the latter in cases very different from those we know fall under the former. Thoughts?
I think the difference here is that you think I have the 3 step model you propose. Rather I think pain directly is the internal processing which leads to the behavioral change, there's no middle step.
Yeah, I agree it's possible for AI in principle to have qualia. But we're not talking about GPT27, but something like a linear model with like 2 parameters, instantiated in a robot's hardware. Something like this is sufficient for producing avoidance behavior. Do you agree that this is very likely not suffice for suffering in the qualia sense?
As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
I'd be rather unsure about say GPT like systems just because they don't really act like they have positive or negative stimuli, but I an imagine an argument against that as well. I would not rule out some kind of internal experience that may have qualia with no valence attached as I would conceive of it for all I know.
I'd also like to note that plants seem to respond to anesthetics like they feel pain in many ways. Which supports the idea that pain response might be a very highly evolutionarily conserved trait as I've speculated: //www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
"not needed to explain" sounds like a description of our computational abilities rather than a description about a structure or organism that may or may not have qualia.
Yes, obviously the best thing to do would be to eliminate all Darwinian life, but unfortunately we can't do that yet. But we can make life slightly better for shrimp!
...I honestly can't bring myself to care either, how miniscule it is in the grand scheme of things. But if you can care, it's an easy way to feel like you're doing something.
Out of curiosity do you share my intuition what's more important than suffering is how a given agent would counterfactually have treated you? Since I feel like it's actually totally coherent to show moral "nepotism" to loved one's, because you have an obligation to treat people at least as well as they would have treated you.
Sorry to butt in to your conversation here, but I wanted to respond to the "suffering vs counterfactual reciprocity" because it's something I've seen floating around, that leaves me totally cold.
I think the intuition here is supposed to be something like contractualism, where our moral obligations grow out of a reciprocal understanding of how each of us wants to be treated. But, how I want to be treated is entirely based on my capacity to suffer!
If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
I think the sophisticated version of this involves all sorts of extended counterfactuals to make sure I'm including the right subset of agents, but I'm not sure I believe you can really pin this down precisely enough to satisfy my intuition. It's hard both to identify relevant counterfactuals, and to identify agents across counterfactuals.
e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
I think it's much simpler to say, my intuition is capturing that it's bad to cause a being capable of suffering to suffer, regardless of how agent-y it is, or how it would treat you. There are instrumental and practical reasons to care about those things, but it's not what I really care about.
>If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
If you are talking about the kind of zombie that dies and goes braindead before reanimating, then I think you have no direct moral obligations to them whatsoever. At most you have an indirect weak obligation to treat the corpse certain ways based on your obligation to other moral agents (but the zombie here might as well be an inanimate heirloom)
The case where subjective experience is continuous is more interesting, and in that case I think the the relevant counterfactual is that you wouldn't want the torture happening to you: So if somebody else likely would respect that wish for you, then you should do the same for them (and you should generally give people some benefit of the doubt when there's no evidence to go off).
>e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
In this case the counterfactual would be something like how a shrimp might treat you if it had human level intelligence and immense power, but the exact same absence of any social instincts underpinning our morality. Such a being would be frankly as terrifying as a paperclipper as far as a human is concerned. Consequently I think we have no moral obligations to most animals, and that uplifting most animals without also adding into them human moral/social instincts would be a grave mistake.
I think the principle is most compelling in the case of groups of say jews in nazi germany who few people would say had any obligation to refrain from killing committed nazis for instance. I think this example perfectly demonstrates that people's concern for suffering is predicated on whether the subject would show any sympathy for them if the situations were reversed in the morally relevant ways (which cannot logically include having radically different values for instance).
Another example would be having an understanding with other people to give each other a proper burial if one of the others died, because you know the others would in turn do the same for you. The logic here seems perfectly sound and doesn't require the moral agent involved still exist, and I'm sure I could come up with many similar sorts of examples where people care about things that may not directly impact current net pleasure.
Yes, the zombie case is meant to be the one where I retain some trace of identity.
I agree that the overriding intuition in all cases is something like, "what if our places were switched" but my point is, if I'm capable of imagining us in switched positions, I don't care at all about how they would treat me as a condition: if I wouldn't want them to torture me, then I no longer want to torture them.
The extra step of, "ok but I think they would torture me, so who cares" has no pull on my intuition.
I think the Nazi example is only compelling because you're imagining it _in response_ to Nazi atrocities, so you're playing on a desire for justice or vengeance. But the counterfactual reasoning is that Jews have no moral obligations to people who _would have been Nazis_ in the right conditions, even if they aren't now. This both raises the question of "which counterfactual"--if someone "would have been" a committed Nazi in certain circumstances, but isn't now, which set of circumstances matters?--but more importantly I think it takes all the oomph out of the example.
If Warsaw ghetto fighters had started torturing the young children of the most committed Nazis because, places switched the grown up children would have been happy to do it to them, I think that would have been a monstrous moral mistake, and I think most peoples' intuitions agree with mine on this.
>would have been Nazis in the right conditions, even if they aren't now
This misses the point of why it's important that they be Nazis in my example:
You aren't judging people based on the values that they might hypothetically have come to hold under the right circumstances, but based on their actual current values. The counterfactual version of somebody you're considering has to have the same moral values or it makes zero sense. Also importantly in order to be justified in making this judgement you need solid evidence about their values, killing some random person in Nazi Germany would not be the same as killing a party member who clearly endorses the ideology.
I don't even understand what you mean by "more important". I have no obligations to anyone, and no one has any obligations to me. I live for myself. That doesn't mean I'm not capable of love. I just don't pretend that I'm owed anything.
You don't think you have any obligation to help out your family (presuming your family doesn't suck) more than you would a stranger?
Similar if a friend has gone to great lengths to help you in the past do you not feel an obligation to return the favor (within reason) if they need your help?
I would help out my family because I like them more than most people. And it would hurt me more if they suffered.
As for friends... Man, I would hate to be in a relationship that was that transactional. So many expectations that I can't live up to. They would hate me. The friendship would not last.
...Point is, it's not about "moral obligation", a concept that's ultimately just arbitrary. It's about feelings and practical consequences. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking this way, though usually they at least pretend to have coherent morals.
Honestly I suspect that the feelings you describe just are what a lot of people are talking about when they talk about certain kinds of moral obligation.
There's basically two different types of "moral obligation" here which I think are psychologically totally distinct. Those being obligation out of a sense of duty (what you seem to be describing) and obligation out of personal loyalty/love.
I don't think bacteria suffer (they have no brain, for instance, or central nervous system, nor do they behave in ways we'd expect to go with suffering) but if you think simple organisms suffer a lot, this seems to make a *stronger* case for caring about shrimp.
You mean this line: "Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain"?
I agree that if you accept this, you would be forced to conclude the shrimp welfare project is important. I'm arguing that because that because the conclusion is absurd, and since the logical steps starting from the premise are sound, the premise is false.
(To be clear, "absurd" means "absurd TO ME," and not society at large, which I agree can be, and often is, fundamentally wrong on matters of morality.)
I think the focus on whether a creature has a nervous system is as deeply arbitrary here as say whether the organisms has higher reasoning. People only take for granted it's importance because they aren't taking a functional view of suffering.
Since even plants and single celled organisms will show basic learning wherein they can learn to associate a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli.
Please read my doc and respond, since I'd love to have a discussion with you!
The important thing here though, is that this logic means that all macroscopic life is from a utilitarian standpoint basically a rounding error compared to the incomprehensibly massive sea of qualia at the microscopic scale. Though granted I'm not a utilitarian so this is a lot less impactful to my particular values.
I doubt that all living things have qualia (I hate this word, but you equated it with consciousness so I go along :-)
Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
I think the headache, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
And did you ever suddenly come up with the solution to a problem you have not been thinking about for a few hours?
I think the thinking, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
And about your idea of being conscious all the time (I looked into your "Continuous Experience" text): Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes? :-)
>Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes?
I find this fascinating because of the implication that for you it does go away, which seems baffling to me. I just see an imperfect darkness with a bit of what I guess I'd call noise (akin to a less intense version of something like if you rub your eyes). I may not perceive that if my visual perception is instead engaged in my minds eye, but I'm always perceiving something visually while awake at least.
>I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
This doesn't really address the more difficult aspect to explain which is the association of a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli. If an organism doesn't have that characteristic than I don't think there's any evolutionary reason to have an internal state corresponding to suffering.
>Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
There's two responses to this logic: First is that not all mental processes necessarily require a system that responds to positive and negative stimuli. However I expect that the more significant factor is probably just that what you think of as a unified identity just isn't one. You are comprised of many separate cognitive processes which may have their own experiences that are not necessarily accessible to all other cognitive processes.
I also think the realization that you don't have a unified identity like you think you do is also extremely enlightening because it explains away the incoherent and contradictory concept of "willpower" that people have.
You seem to think that total blackness is or can be a qualia. And I think that it is not, for reasons that someone else can explain better.
I probably cannot sound not patronizing when I recommend "Content and Consciousness" from Daniel Dennett, but I do it anyway because you seem to me to be able to make something of a detailed description of a very different perspective on this topic.
For me it offered no final answer, but made me better understand my own questions.
This book is from 1969, is still state of the art, but has only about 190 pages. It's better and deeper than the follow up.
Completely aside from whether perfect blackness would be a qualia there's the issue that perfect blackness is impossible because of inherent noise in the human visual system. Though I find it interesting that you can at apparently tune this out without replacing it with other visual qualia.
Well, I disagree with you--unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning--but I have no idea how this affects the desirability of shrimp welfare. Yes, maybe this would mean a bacteria charity is better, but there aren't such things.
>unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning
I absolutely agree with you! I just don't think this makes the point you think it does.
I think that actually you are conscious (in the sense of having qualia) during all stages of sleep precisely because you are still display certain kinds of awareness. Just like there are both REM and non-REM dreams you have every single night (barring sleep issues), but you almost never remember the experiences you had during either either of them. So I think the lack of memory of any qualia is not evidence against you experiencing qualia and forgetting it (especially when you don't have the right parts of your brain active to even form long term memories in the first place!)
I actually wrote a this subject that you might like reading! Would love to discuss it if you're interested.
It wouldn't make things better. A law called "Affordable Care Act" or Obamacare passed during Obama's tenure had the effect of degrading everyone's insurance (possibly on purpose, in order to break the system and force the country to go single-payer). As I recall it - for some reason, I can't find a link to this - one of the parts of the law was penalizing employers for offering really good insurance which, predictably, led to employers beginning to offer crappy plans instead. At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying. I could go on and on - for example, the electronic medical record mandate that came with this law had as one of the effects major doctor burnout, with doctors quitting the field in droves (also it caused more healthcare spending, with money coming guess from where).
There's no point in going after an insurance company. We need a legislative change.
>At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying.
"Covers everything with high deductibles" was the definition of pre-ACA catastrophic plans, so that part at least was not banned. But the plans stopped being cheap for young, healthy people because of community ratings and guaranteed issue, where insurers were required to offer plans at the same price to everyone within a broadly-defined risk pool regardless of health status. Older people can be charged higher premiums, but the difference in premiums was capped at a much lower level than the actuarial price difference.
This made insurance much more accessible and affordable to people who have expensive-to-manage chronic health issues, but at the cost of making it so that if insurance was cheap for you under the old system, it isn't anymore. It's equivalent to taxing healthy people to subsidize sick people, but with private insurance companies deputized to administer the taxes and subsidies.
I also find it hard to believe that people with expensive chronic health issues came out ahead. These people are consuming a lot of services that are not free and that became much more expensive, and the deductibles are now much higher almost everywhere.
The ACA sounds like the perfect solution for politicians. Politicians can brag about how they gave coverage to so many more people and leave the dirty work of redistribution to the insurance companies.
No kidding. Almost everyone around me lost insurance that worked for them and had to replace it with.a vastly inferior option. (The only exception I can think of was a couple that qualified for Medicaid, who I suspect qualified before as well but needed some help with the paperwork.)
But the politicians got their talking points and, by the time everyone forgot what they did, got the situation to deteriorate so much that people became a lot more sympathetic to single payer system and, as we now see, many started thinking that insurance executives should be shot. So from the politicians' point of view it was probably a huge win.
I might be wrong, but I distinctly recall pre-ACA my farmer friends buying coverage that didn't pay for regular doctor visits and such, but that would have rescued them if something really catastrophic happened.
ACA contains a lot of mandates, such as preventative care, that are supposed to make certain things free, so I don't think it can be considered a version of what I think I remember (if I understood them right, and if I remembered it right).
I asked Perplexity AI what is supposed to be free under ACA. Here's what it said (sorry about the formatting, don't know how to fix it):
"Preventive Services for All Adults
Screenings for various conditions, including:
Depression
Diabetes
Obesity
Various cancers
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
Counseling for:
Drug and tobacco use
Healthy eating
Other common health concerns
Immunizations for diseases such as influenza, tetanus, and COVID-19
Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes tests
Preventive Services for Women
Well-woman visits
Contraception and contraceptive counseling
Breast and cervical cancer screenings
Prenatal care
Preventive Services for Children and Youth
Well-child visits from birth to age 21
Immunizations for childhood diseases
Behavioral and developmental assessments
Vision and hearing screenings
Autism screenings
Fluoride supplements
These services must be provided without any cost-sharing, meaning patients do not have to pay deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance when receiving these services from in-network providers."
Some of this stuff is cheap, but you'll notice there's some radiology and lab work there that's pretty expensive. I imagine it brings costs way up, raising both the insurance prices and the deductibles.
That's true: ACA did introduce some mandates for "diagnostic and preventative" care. This is the actual list (https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/), which is pretty close to the AI answer.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's the community ratings that did most of the work in raising the floor on prices. Pre-ACA, when I was in my early 20s, I bought an individual plan in California that cost about $50/month, or about $85 after adjusting for inflation. I also remember looking up similar plans from the same comparison-shopping website for a friend who lived in New Jersey, which had community ratings laws, and the cheapest plan was around $400/month (about $680 adjusted for inflation).
I did find some think tank data that claims that the ACA preventative care mandate costs about $204/person/year as of 2019 and accounts for about 3.5% of health care spending:
Thank you for educating me again (as you often do). I had to look up what "community ratings" were.
That said, I'm sure that, among other things, the EHR mandate also added to healthcare costs. A lot of studies claim that EHR systems are cost effective - but I've seen what they do, how much they cost, how people interact with them, and how they have to be managed, with my own eyes, and I'll never believe that the practices they were forced on got a good deal. Along with EHRs came useless time-sinks such as meaningful use - yes, that thing that forces every nurse to ask you weird questions with no obvious answers at the start of every visit. (On the scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you in?)
I'm sure some cost increases weren't directly ACA's fault - I'm sure inflation contributed to healthcare costs just like to everything else. But ACA definitely was not a net positive for most people.
Step 1: Get employers out of the middle of health insurance purchasing by including the money spent as part of taxable income (the current arrangement is a tax arbitrage).
Step 2: Companies like UHC realize that patients, not HR ladies, are now the actual customer and their behavior changes for the better.
People seem to think things are genuinely better just because a Fat Cat was murdered. Like nothing else need happen - this has made their Christmas. It's especially pronounced on Reddit, of course, where I think anyone espousing a contrary view about murder would be slapped with a "Controversial" label.
I read about the Fat Cat. His father worked in a grain elevator.
That is not the point, my friend. You don't shut down a company by killing its CEO. This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that.
The point is to reinternalize the costs—to change the boardroom calculus.
Health insurance companies—all companies, really—thrive on externalizing costs and internalizing profits. In health insurance, that's the whole business model: take in as much as you can in premiums, pay out as little as you can in coverage.
And Thompson's tenure at UnitedHealth was a years-long experiment in seeing just how low they could push that "payout" dial. When he took over as CEO two or three years ago, UHG was denying about 8% of prior authorization requests. As of this year, it's close to 24%.
(If you are truly unfamiliar with our ways: say you need a surgery that will cost $100,000. This is of course a ludicrous sum which the hospital knows you don't have, so the hospital won't do the surgery unless they have the insurance company's word—ahead of time—that they'll cover it. This is known as a "prior authorization". In practice, it means that an insurance company's AI-based claims adjuster can rule that your mother's valve replacement surgery is "not medically necessary", and then bounce you through appeals and arbitrations until she has a fatal heart attack, at which point, yeah, I guess she no longer needs a valve replacement.)
And yes, maybe someone could take them to court over this kind of thing, and win a huge penalty judgement. This is one way of re-internalizing the costs and changing the boardroom calculus. Say each additional 1% of claims they deny represents $50M in additional profit, but makes them 10% more likely to get slapped with a $1B penalty. The actuaries will tell the CEO that it's bad business, so they won't deny those additional claims! But court is a corporation's home turf, they have an army of lawyers who know every trick in the book, and if you're sick enough that you're racking up the kind of bills which would be worth going to court over, you probably won't even live long enough to find out whether or not you won.
So, absent recourse through the approved channels, this is how a consequentialist can change the calculus—can insert himself into the discussion between the actuary and the executive. "Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk, while your countrymen cheer for the assassin when they learn who you were and what you stood for. Solve for N. It's small but nonzero, and it's about 10 times what it was at Thanksgiving because they still haven't caught the last guy and frankly he made a pretty good show of it, what with the monopoly money and the words on the bullet casings and all."
The only thing worse than a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because the math says so, is a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because they got the math wrong. And this...
"Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk"
...shows that you have no understanding of how any of this works. Brian Thompson is the *CEO* of United Healthcare, not the owner. The owners, the people who actually get your hypothesized $50 million in extra profits, aren't the ones bleeding out on the sidewalk. They *hired* Brian Thompson to, among other things, take that risk for them while they live in heavily-guarded obscurity.
They paid him reasonably well, $10E6/year from what I hear. And he seems to have done a good job of running the company the way its owners wanted it to be run. Now they'll have to deal with the nuisance of hiring someone new, and maybe the new guy will demand twice the salary as a risk premium. That would still be less than 0.1% of United's annual profits.
So, they can get the $50 million (or whatever) in extra profits for each percent of extra claims they have their hired CEO deny for them, and have to pay out a tiny fraction of that as hazard pay for their new CEO, or they can give up all those nice profits for, why exactly would they do that again? The goodness of their hearts, and their sympathy for a community that cheers on the guy who murdered one of their employees?
And no, you can't just kill the stockholders instead. There are too many of them, and you don't know who they are, and the ones big enough that you could figure out who they are have much less exposure and much more security.
You want to be very very careful about deciding that murder is an acceptable to internalize the external costs of an entire organization/system/etc. I think that if you apply this consistently, you will end up with some results you don't like. You know what kills far _far_ more people than the most heinous of insurance companies? Every single politician, rule, and law that slows economic growth by even an iota, so I guess we should all encourage the murder of overly regulatory Democrats then!
Pick your own system. The point is, the quality of evidence that shows health care companies cause any deaths at all is exactly as good (or much worse in many cases) as the evidence that _dozens_ of other industries, organization, systems, etc. cause far _far_ more deaths and harm.
So the end result is murder of people participating in a whole host of systems across the board. Maybe you truly would be ok with this. But I don't have much to say to anyone who would honestly espouse this type of world, other than to finish with: I'm pretty sure that world would be worse than our own, so, according to your ethics, I'm allowed to kill you for advocating for it.
What are you talking about with this "economic growth" shit? When you say "pick your own system", I think you mean "that was a deliberately bad, deranged example, to demonstrate how—if you remove all the important context—the same logic could justify bad things".
And isn't that just the most classic lil strawman since Fiyero Tigelaar?
Look, you get merc'd like Thompson did when you have condemned enough people to infuriating, Kafkaesque deaths that one of their loved ones vows revenge. It is the purest example in our lifetimes of banal evil—its darkness softened by abstraction, distance, diffusion of responsibility—held to account by heroic righteousness: one of the countless individuals on the other end of those statistics, moved to act by the purely personal, inarguably solid reality of love and the grief that follows its loss.
So sure, you could theoretically kill me for saying "Assassinations can be good sometimes," but you won't, because I haven't actually done you any real harm in saying that. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, my friend.
So come kill me, or sit the fuck down and eat your pudding.
It was exactly as valid, I think actually a more valid, example than health care executives. The "Pick your system" was saying that the same level of justification that works for health insurance executives is met or exceeded in _dozens_ of other systems. Which I said explicitly.
And it's not "could" justify bad things.It DOES justify bad things. The EXACT SAME LEVEL OF EVIDENCE AND JUSTIFICATION for killing health care executives justifies killing people in dozens of industries and systems including politicians and executives of nearly every single company in the world. This is my entire point. Your argument is horrific and evil. And people like you arguing for it are making it more likely that it will happen, and you are providing justification and cover for more killings. Therefore, you are causing deaths. Therefore, according to your own logic, you deserve to die.
You are right, *I* won't kill you, because I oppose your morality with every fiber of my being. I find it disgusting.
Finally, I hope that people reading this thread can see the irony in someone celebrating and calling for even more murder calling anything else "deranged"
I don't. You do. Since you also think that "running a health insurance company is akin to murder". Remember, I'm not advocating for murder here, you are.
I find it somewhat telling that you keep ascribing your beliefs to me.
I thought maybe it was UTI TMI for this particular audience, though in fact I do think it’s ridiculous that a doctor even needs to be involved. It should be a drugstore matter.
Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
>A class action lawsuit filed last year in US District Court in Minnesota argued that UnitedHealthcare uses AI “in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care,” according to the complaint. More than 90% of the denials are reversed through an internal appeal or proceedings before federal administrative law judges, the suit alleges.
Someone upthread linked to the plaintiffs' brief, which includes a fact CNN left out: more than 90% of denials *which are appealed* may be reversed... but only 0.2% of policyholders appeal their denials. The lawyers invite the court to assume that the remaining 99.8% would also appeal if only they could, but provide no evidence in support of this ambitious claim.
"This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that."
Even Tolkien didn't think that. Sauron goes away, but Evil (and the problem of Evil) remains. You still have to fight it, day by day, until the end. Maybe it's not something big and obvious like a Dark Lord, but it's there and won't ever be fully conquered until the tares and wheat are both harvested together.
I think I read somewhere that he was crying in fear when arrested, so he hoped to get away with it. It is plausible, though, that he thought his face was hidden well enough. Honestly, I would not have clocked him a couple of days later. But somebody did.
No. It would transfer a lot of people to other insurers who behave just as badly. What's needed are reforms that go well beyond the ACA-- which did get rid of the worst practices (refusing to insure people and rescinding overage when people got sick). At the very least health insurers should be non-profit businesses and not answerable to Wall Street.
Many, if not most, insurance companies are essentially not for profit. Essentially anything with "mutual" in its name. Mutual companies are owned by the shareholders, so rather than issuing a dividend, any profit they might make is given back to the shareholders through reduced rates.
Health insurance has nothing to do with health. Insurance in general is a way to make a cost relatively predictable, by spreading it out over the pool of people who may need to spend that cost. So, it's a financial arrangement. People who want health insurance that covers absolutely everything and have their employers pay for it don't realize the actual cost of that.
Insurance is supposed to cover unknowns. If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that. On the other hand, if you DEVELOP a certain condition, insurance ought to pay for treating that, based on the cost of treating it and the likelihood of you developing it. If you are one of the unfortunate few to develop the condition, then those fortunate enough NOT to develop it subsidize your cost.
So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick. It's supposed to be a regulated industry, so making a profit by providing this service shouldn't be relevant.
>So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick.
The trouble with this model is that you become "locked in" if you develop a chronic condition - you can't change insurers because nobody will cover your pre-existing conditions. If your health insurance comes from a job you hate (or god forbid, an abusive spouse), you're locked into that as well.
Heck, even if you never decide to change insurers voluntarily, you could still be forced out of coverage if your insurer goes out of business.
This is a reasonable criticism, but I think it can be overcome. When one first is evaluated for insurance, one's "properties" are assessed, including life expectancy and probability of developing various ailments. Those properties become fixed, so that insurance companies are all effectively re-insured, because some people will develop each ailment and most won't, so it just becomes luck of the draw whether a particular company is paying on a now chronic but previously missing condition. But those who decide to obtain insurance to cover their newly-discovered chronic conditions must pay for the certainty.
I'm not an expert in insurance, and think other ways to overcome changing insurance companies ought to be likely.
Re: If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that.
Which is why the insurance model is a bad one right at the roots. Healthcare funds like the Germans have or what the Clinton plan would have entailed have would make much more sense. It's pretty much inevitable that everyone will run up big healthcare tab at some point in their lives (OK, unless they are killed by some sudden trauma when they are still young). We should be making provision for that quite explicitly in the structure of society. Human beings have cared for their sick and injured since far back in the Paleolithic-- it's one of the things that set us apart from other animals.
I've heard this argument before, and it always felt like a semantics debate to me.
When some people hear 'health insurance' they are NOT thinking of the kind of financial risk sharing you are describing. They are thinking of something much more closely approximating utilities like electricity and water, or services like roads and public transit. And this is also a reasonable thing to think, because (unlike, say, a car / car insurance / paying out for a car crash) you don't have the same ability to control health outcomes, ESPECIALLY in a world where we know genetics exists. If all health outcomes were entirely driven by personal choice, the risk model of health insurance maybe feels more reasonable, you could have people internalize the risks of their bad behavior by increasing their insurance premiums. In a world where you just get fucked if you have the wrong genes, idk, seems shitty?
And fwiw it seems like the broader healthcare industry also doesn't think of itself as the sort of risk sharing financial arrangement you describe. Both legally (thanks Obama!) and in practice (the standard denial of care practices in the industry are ridiculous in the model you're describing).
So every time you go into a discussion about health insurance and say 'well actually this is about spreading risk in a financially smart way', some subset of people are (in the best case) going to be very confused or (in the worst case) start yelling right past you.
I think that you're right that the _definition of insurance_ is what you describe. But unfortunately I think naming the US system 'health insurance' does everyone a disservice by conflating this risk sharing scheme with...well, whatever the fuck we have.
You may be right that it is semantics, which is to say, kind of the opposite of nominative determinism: choosing the wrong words to mean what you want. But it is also true that health insurance works like insurance. As JonF311 says, this may be the wrong model to cover health care costs.
I suspect that a for-profit insurance (or "insurance") company will perform better, with a moderate degree of confidence (60-70%).
A couple reasons follow. The industry benefits from attracting investment like most others. That enable companies to embrace new technologies, compete for talent, expand to take advantage of economies of scale (when appropriate), adjust to changing circumstances, and etc.. Additionally, profits attract competition and so expose companies to at least some degree of market discipline.
I generally prefer non-profits when stability is a higher priority than functionality. (For example, when choosing long-term care for my parents.) That doesn't seem to apply here.
Help me out a little here: I think you're saying that warfare, policing, courts, and insurance belong in the same category. Why? And why aren't medical care or pharmaceuticals included in that category, per your earlier comment?
Somewhat related to the recent assassination of the CEO.
I've been thinking about it since the beginning of Russia-Ukraine war, and twice as much since the new round of escalation in Israel-Palestine. Where are all the noble assassins?
Wouldn't a world where huge conflicts between powerful entitues are resolved not by wars with tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civillians killed - all mostly regular people, sharing only tiny, if any part of the blame for the politics of their country, but by targeted assassination of the leaders, be a strictly better place?
Wouldn't politicians have more motivation not to escalate the conflicts when they know that they actually have a reasonable chance to die as a result of it?
Like, sure, I can see a bunch of potential issues with this source of approach, but none of then appears to be as bad as the current status quo.
There's an old Poul Anderson short story, "A Man to My Wounding," which takes place in a world where assassination has replaced war (due to a Cold War-ish fear of accidentally triggering nuclear war). The protagonist is tracking down an enemy assassin, and eventually realizes that they aren't targeting a bigwig politician. The President and all the other important politicians are too heavily guarded, so instead they're targeting a politically active university professor who *might* be President in 10 years or so, hoping to shape policy that way.
And his grim conclusion at the end of the story is that the "controlled" state of assassination is actually starting to escalate. In the same way that wars escalated from the premodern concept of "destroy the opposing army" to the total war concept of "destroy the enemy army, industry, workers, housing, and basically anything that the opposing country might benefit from," the war of assassins is going to escalate from "kill enemy leaders" to "kill enemy leaders, industrialists, scientists, and basically anyone who might influence anything."
Basically, there's no way to *force* people to stick to the norm of assassination. War is inherently escalatory - if sending an army would win you the war, why would you stick to just sending assassins?
There are very few "noble assassins" because assassination is very rarely a noble act. And assassination as a way of resolving international conflict without open warfare pretty much *never* works. Mostly, it anti-works as in the example of wannabe noble assassin Gavrilo Prinzip.
Or, at the other and more sensible end, consider all the very ignoble assassins who work for Vladimir Putin, killing Sergei and Yulia Kirpal, Alexander Litvinenko, and the scores of Russians who have exited high-rise windows in recent years. Neither moral scruples nor international norms will stay Putin's hand if he wants someone dead, and as a former FSB officer he almost certainly *prefers* assassination to e.g. military invasion.
Yet, three years ago, he decided to invade Ukraine. He does not seem to have even attempted just having Volodymyr Zelenskyy assassinated and telling his successor, "Surrender the Donbas or you're next". Why do you suppose that is?
I'm pretty sure that's because it wouldn't have worked, and the spymaster with the stable of assassins knew it wouldn't have worked.
First, because the sort of person who becomes a head of government is typically *very highly motivated* to do so, and they typically have specific goals when they do. Obtaining and taking that job requires extraordinary sacrifice, and risk of assassination is only a part of that sacrifice. They're not going to give it all up and become the puppet of some foreign potentate just because they are threatened with assassination. *You* presumably would, and so you assume others would, but you're not the sort of person who ever becomes a president or prime minister of anywhere.
Second, because if you *do* assassinate a head of government, their replacement will almost certainly be from the same party or faction and they will come into office with the strongest possible mandate to avenge their predecessor and continue in his path. They've made huge and highly-motivated sacrifices just to get to the point of being next in line, so all the above considerations apply, and now taking the final step will require the support of many powerful men who are upset that their chosen leader was killed and who want payback.
And third, because heads of government typically have very good security, and even more so if you've either threatened them with assassination or just assassinated their predecessor in hopes that they will take the hint. So if you try to assassinate them, you'll probably *fail* (see e.g. CIA vs Fidel Castro), and then you'll just be dealing with an even more pissed off head of government with stronger popular support.
There may be times when assassination can be reasonably expected to secure positive gains, by an assassin's standard of "positive" at least. But assassinating heads of government as a means of changing national policy, is rarely one of these.
I've often said that I thought Dune's War of Assassins would be preferable to normal war, with its greater collateral damage, but I don't think one could get elites to commit to the norm of only treating each other as fair game and not having their subjects used as meat shields.
They certainly couldn't get the Harkonnens to commit to that norm. They couldn't even get the *Emperor* to commit, though he at least tried to pretend,
No, it'd be a lead to more effectively polarized outcomes. The (intentional) separation of 'military targets' from 'civilian targets' in most rules of engagement are attempts at codifying the notion that de-escalation and communication should remain possible. Even in intense conflict. These rules are sometimes dishonoured, but they do exist for a good reason.
It's the same reason why attacking people who are communicating under a flag of parlay or surrender is a very common strategy every player of a roleplaying game suggests about 5 seconds into any diplomatic encounter *and* one that is very seldom practiced in real life. Thinking of it is easy. Acutally doing it as a tactic is an enormously stupid idea that backfires extremely fast. The precedent for dissolving standards of sancticity in communication in some cases are too severe. If all flags of surrender and attempts at diplomacy are likely to be (c)overt attempts to murder high profile leaders and agents, you don't "bring more security", you attack anyone attempting to open a communication channel on default.
Likewise, in state level conflict, if your full engagement tactic is "simply remove the enemy government directly" by assassinating every member of said government, what follows will not be a peace process. Diplomatic immunity (again sometimes dishonored) exists because one needs the notion of being able to communicate and discuss an issue in order to disentangle war and conflict once it starts.
And once you've gone down this chain of escalation, you've officially made it state policy that there is no clear line between acceptable targets, on and off a battlefield. How long from that notion does it take before Seal Team Strych-Nine is asked to pour industrial quantities of cyanide into Chinese water reservoirs, or any other hacknyed example you can think of? How much can you trust any invitation to attend a summit, or conference, or meetup? How do you conduct diplomacy, if at any time anywhere for any reason, a drone can attempt to blow up your government representatives? Commerce and international relations would come to a screaming, shattering halt overnight.
Where does the line stop? Once politicians are viably reasonable targets, captains of industry surely should be too. They are apt to support the country they're in.
And now we've just made international trade about a hundredfold more difficult, because state-sanctioned assassination-as-policy dissolves the line between volition and violence. What's your risk assessment on attending a steelworkers conference in Germany, if all politicans and management attending need to watch for bombs?
It's escalation that self-escalates, because reprisals are the next natural step. Oh, they blew up your prime minister, your secretary of state and your six generals. Well, you can't attend a peace summit (you'd die), you can't attend a de-escalation conference (you'd die), you can't engage them on the battlefield directly (you'd die) but maybe you can spend 2 million to post a bounty on THEIR prime minister and top level staff and hope you get lucky? Maybe you can send some intelligence types on a specialist mission to get lucky? Etc.
As hard as it is to believe, a lot of our modern rules of engagement regarding conflict actually get hammered out this way because the alternatives are mildly worse.
Assassination as acceptable policy erodes continuity of relations lightning quick, and, somewhat worse, it establishes the notion that politics by other means (eg, war) might start smaller scale. Because why invade at all if you can just blow up the cabinet of the country in question? But this doesn't make politics "safer" for the mass of common man, it makes *living in society itself* untenable because any civic sphere becomes a target for hostile actors!
The whole thread's prettying interesting but it seems like the consensus summary of reasons against an assassination were:
1) In-group vs. out-group bias. Politicians are the in-group and all the rest of us are the out group and so, of course, for them the idea of assassinating a politician is anathema.
2) Power asymmetry. If this were the standard, little countries would be on more equal footing with big countries which is a bad thing if you're already a big country.
3) Slippery-slope. What even is an 'illegitimate war of aggression'? Without any consensus or governance this leads to chaos and mass instability of governments, big and small, around the world, leaving us all worse off.
4) Live by the sword, die by the sword. History doesn't show a good track record of getting peace out of an assassination.
4a) You and what army? It isn't realistically possible to do but the consequences are very likely to be realized.
5) Little escalation. Attack results in broader war with more combatants, again, making everyone worse off.
6) Big escalation. Attacked leader/government considers this the equivalent of using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and responds in-kind; we're all much much worse off.
7) Juice is not worth the squeeze. Over the long term, the loss of status and influence in other countries exceeds any benefit.
8) You're dead to me. Attempted assassination forecloses any opportunity for a negotiated settlement, whether or not the attempt succeeds.
9) YOLO! If the penalty is always death then aggressive governments are encouraged to always be maximally aggressive.
This would make sense in a world where wars are primarily between sovereigns, but less so in a world in which wars are primarily between states, and where the state makes a big effort to mobilize popular sentiment in favor of the war. If there's mass enthusiasm for the war (among the general population, or just among the ruling party or the army), and serious ideological goals at stake, people aren't going to stop fighting just because their leader was killed. (Same reason we, unfortunately, can't settle wars through single combat any more).
No no this would be horrible. Extremists on both sides would threaten politicians regardless of what they do, and you will collapse the ability to build moderate consensus/coordinate. There is nothing I am coded to oppose more/will reflexively punish than political terrorism. Killing millions in war is preferable to me, in the long run.
The limit of this is people who won't be deterred by the killing of millions of their public supporters (religious fundamentalists/idealogues with nukes as the cleanest example)
You need people with families and stakes in society to be willing to lead, also. This will never happen if they or their families are plausible targets.
> Extremists on both sides would threaten politicians regardless of what they do, and you will collapse the ability to build moderate consensus/coordinate.
I would expect the opposite. Extremists would go after each other while moderates would be able to cooperate. When you assasinate an extremist, it's quite likely that more moderate candidate will take place instead. When you assassinate a moderate you can get a more extreme candidate with high probability, so assassinating extremists would yield more utility.
> There is nothing I am coded to oppose more/will reflexively punish than political terrorism
Yes, this is a popular heuristic. I share some of it as well, but recently I'm starting to question how rational this intuition really is.
> The limit of this is people who won't be deterred by the killing of millions of their public supporters
Well yeah. Quite unsurprisingly some of the most horrible people do not care that much about the lives of their followers.
> You need people with families and stakes in society to be willing to lead, also. This will never happen if they or their families are plausible targets.
I don't see the logic. If your families are *not* plausible targets, in what sense are they at stake?
If you have a family, your death will hurt them. Do you have a family?
Also, once you normalize political assassinations 'normal' people will stop going into politics because 1) they don't believe some extremist minority won't think they are extremist, and target them, and 2) because once you normalize targeting politicians the next step is targeting their families
there are countries and historical periods where political assassinations are/were quite common, and "normal" people still went into politics, because they felt the benefits were worth the risk.
In general, the people more willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause, or have a lower cost (because they have no families) do *not* make good leaders. Good leaders are people that somewhere, somehow, care about the welfare of their people, even if that's not their main goal (staying in power is usually primary, then achieving some secondary goal).
I just look at the real world where, in dissident suppressing regimes and in normal ones where things have gotten polarized, 'normal well meaning people with families' are much less likely to try to make a positive difference and offer themselves as leaders.
Moderates are deterred by threats to themselves or their families, extremists are not.
Strong nations that are at war are already doing this, but using actual military forces during war to target enemy leadership usually isn't thought of as assassination. I'm pretty sure the US tried to bomb any bunker they thought that Saddam Hussein could be hiding in, he was just good at hiding. I'm pretty sure the Russians tried to take out Zelenskyy with special forces during the opening phases of the war, but failed. And, of course, considering the perpetual war between Iran and its proxies and Israel, the Mossad has no issues with assassination.
Outside of war, there's the risk involved. World leaders tend to have substantial security details, chosen for a combination of loyalty and competence. This makes targeted assassination very risky. There's a good chance your attempt will fail, and there's a good chance your assassin will not escape even if successful. The strategy you're describing isn't an airport-thriller-novel "shady figure gives money to some rich professional killer" plot; the assassin is going to be a highly-trained agent of an intelligence service, and once caught or killed, you're going to have an entire security service that will go through his background and will figure out who he works for. At which point, if there wasn't a war already, there is now.
Even a considerable threat of personal death is usually not something that deters a politician who has finally made it to the top of the game. Their driving factors, at that point, tend to be such that the risk of death is simply something that one must accept as a part of the rules. And if one leader gets killed but their power strucure stays otherwise intact, there are always surely dozens that would take their place.
Also, any country adopting such a strategy would *still* need to be prepared for a huge conflict with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed for the simple reason that if the another entity decides to send in their army, unless there's a counterforce, they win.
I don't think the reason political assassination fell out of fashion is because people learned lessons from World War I, or whatnot.
Gavrilo Princip was viewed as a hero in Yugoslavia after the war- after all, he ended up achieveing exactly what he'd hoped to achieve, a united South Slavic state- so it seems like some people learned exactly the opposite lesson from what you think they should have learned.
It's relatively easy to argue that particular war lasted until 1945 (with a 20 year breather to regroup in the middle), and was the actual biggest in history.
Bit more of a stretch, but you could even make the case that it lasted until 1991, what with the Russian revolution being more or less a direct consequence of WW1.
Well all events affect future events. You could argue that the Soviet Union is an ancestor of the war in Ukraine today, and the world would be dominated by European colonies if the two European wars did not happen.
Either way it was a very important day in history.
Leaders tend not to like ordering assassinations of other leaders to avoid setting a precedent that could come back to hit them. Even in the middle ages the idea of killing a monarch was a taboo for this reason. Far safer for them to order faceless soliders to go and die instead.
We could, I suppose. And to be fair, the United States has been more open to the idea of assassinating foreign leaders. The CIA apparently tried to kill Castro hundreds of times, they targeted Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Slobodan Milosevic and various leaders in Africa too. There's also the coup in Chile the CIA supported. They just don't seem to like it much when foreign countries (see Iran) start trying to kill American politicans...
True, and there's also the thought that if a leader was assassinated then they might be replaced by someone more competent, or manic and aggressive as the case may be. For example, I think the allies contemplated trying to assassinate Hitler in WW2 but concluded that he was making enough mistakes that it was better to leave him in place.
It's a slippery slope if ever there was one. Starting a war comes with significant risks for the attacking side. Trying to press the assassination button is kind of cheap for the attacker, but comes with a massive price for the country whose leader was assassinated - unless he was a bona fide cruel dictator. And why would assassinations stay restricted to dictators?
Other country wants to raise tarriffs? Bang.
Other country becomes a tough economic competitor? Bang.
Neighboring country needs to be softened up before invading them and taking their oil fields? Bang.
Other country just murdered your leader? Bang.
Other country might think about murdering your leader? Bang.
It's a good thing if this stays a taboo, however much we wish that some people quickly get to enjoy their specially reserved place in hell.
> Starting a war comes with significant risks for the attacking side. Trying to press the assassination button is kind of cheap for the attacker, but comes with a massive price for the country whose leader was assassinated
Assassinating a leader of another country naturally encorages being assassinated by this country in turn. The whole point is that it's *less* risky for the leaders to wage wars via nameless soldiers than playing an assassination game, even though the abstract cost of war to the country as a whole is highter.
> It's a good thing if this stays a taboo
I think we can do better than that. There has to be a set of international norms for conflict resolution via leaders assassination, leading to less disutility than we have currently.
"The whole point is that it's *less* risky for the leaders to wage wars via nameless soldiers than playing an assassination game, even though the abstract cost of war to the country as a whole is highter."
For one war, maybe. But the cost imposed on individual countries and the world as a whole when leaders of state are assassinated left and right should not be discounted. And as JonF311 points out, it would probably not be "assassination instead of war", but "assassination in addition to war".
"There has to be a set of international norms for conflict resolution via leaders assassination, leading to less disutility than we have currently."
Kind of like the International Criminal Court, but with death penalties handed out in absentia? Might work under very optimal circumstances, but has a terrible potential to be abused. As long as the ICC only convicts the occasional banana republic dictator long after the fact, it's fine. But once that court gets the power to eliminate, say, a Putin, or a Xi Jinping, or a Trump, while they're in office, the temptation for states or coalitions to capture that court and arrange for kangaroo court trials becomes ridiculous. (I suspect it's already happening now - the warrant against Netanyahu is a joke IMO.)
I think that philosophy was kind of what the original Assassins followed. They almost killed Saladin several times, and if the moronic Knight Templars hadn't murdered their envoys to stop an alliance with the Crusaders (because, as I understand, the Templars *didn't want to lose their protection money tribute!*) perhaps the Christian West might have actually held Palestine.
Can I get a survey of ACXers views on recreational drugs? To me, the following propositions all seem blindingly obvious and indisputable, but it seems like few people (here or elsewhere) really support *any* of them, let alone the (obviously perfectly coherent) combination:
1. Drugs should be legal to take and possess. Yes, all of them. How...the...fuck...is this in dispute in a free society? It is, in absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, acceptable for the government to protect people *from themselves*. The idea is revolting and terrifying. I would have thought this position would be mainstream in a libertarianish place like this, and maybe it is, but I keep seeing lots of people implicitly endorsing personal drug possession being a fucking crime.
2. Drugs are very bad. No one should ever take them. I guess there could be exceptions for alcohol and maybe cannabis if that's really no more dangerous than alcohol (a claim I'm slightly suspicious of, since it comes from activist groups, but i know nothing of the subject, and in any case I can hardly blame them for pushing that narrative when "this doesn't hurt anyone but me" somehow *isn't* a slam-dunk argument).
3. Furthermore, users of hard drugs should be shamed and stigmatised. They should also be fully protected from state interference. In a free society, you have an absolute right to take harmful drugs, and other people have an absolute right to shame you and stigmatise you for it. Finding any significant number of people who support this natural and philosophically consistent combination of positions is so difficult it's astounding.
4. Legal drugs is a million times more defensible than legal abortion. Since, you know, "doesn't hurt anyone else" is undeniable in one case and very much deniable in the other. So guess which one polls much better? Okay, that's among average voters whose highest (only?) criteria is "does this benefit me?" and who wouldn't recognise a consistent moral principle if it strangled them. But what about people here? I still feel like it's the case, but I could be wrong and that's why I'm asking.
I know this is very ranty, but I'm getting so utterly sick of people's inconsistent and self-serving conceptions of freedom that I can't contain my anger.
Also, I've never touched any drugs, except the occasional alcohol.
I think you're letting yourself revel in libertarianism a little too hard. Nanny-statism is obnoxious and I'd like to see less of it, but the people who push it really do want the best for people, and in some cases have a point. If you can't bring yourself to think about their philosophy without getting mouth-foamy angry, you should try hard to become more detached.
Also, I don't get what you mean by an inconsistent conception of freedom. Different things can be differently free, and people can support those different levels. If I build a system where people are free to protest the government but not free to do heroin (which I'm perceiving to be your representative example), I think practically every human on the planet would say that's not the slightest bit inconsistent.
I support 1 and 4, but then again, I'm in the "as long as the vending machines are privately owned" camp.
2: I don't think drugs are "very bad", and the notion smacks of propaganda. The dose makes the poison, of course, but in moderation, the stimulants are like caffeine, the depressants are like alcohol. The hallucinogens … okay, these might actually be bad.
3: Not in favor of shaming or stigmatizing in general, and see no reason this should be an exception.
"1. Drugs should be legal to take and possess. Yes, all of them. How...the...fuck...is this in dispute in a free society? It is, in absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, acceptable for the government to protect people *from themselves*."
The government's job is of course not to protect any individual from this very individual itself -- but it's job is to protect the whole of all people from whatever. And among this whatever are all of the whole's individuals.
An individual that harms itself is likely to harm the whole with this too.
Keep in mind that no individual -- not any single one -- can live alone. Actually, without other people it would not even be born.
The human species, just like the whole biosphere, is more important than any of its individuals, and it's in the interest of each individual to be aware of this.
I have a notion that, especially in this era of relatively good knowledge of biology and high entrepreneurial energy, making recreational drugs and possibly body modification drugs illegal results in more dangerous drugs. For some reason, no one is inventing the next tea (or are they and I haven't heard about it?), they're inventing something more dangerous than fentanyl.
Maybe such would be invented anyway, but I have a notion that illegality increases recklessness.
Somewhat ironically given how you've phrased this, but one of the most common early ways of taking fentanyl to get high (instead of usual medical uses) was via a tea!
The idea that prohibition leads to more potent drugs is not a new one, and has a logical mechanism. However it also has countervailing forces that push back against that; whereas liberalization also pushes forward increased potency without those countervailing forces. Legal cannabis is a good example.
>I know this is very ranty, but I'm getting so utterly sick of people's inconsistent and self-serving conceptions of freedom that I can't contain my anger.
Yes. Most people don't have coherent ideologies and aren't intellectually consistent. That’s unsurprising, given that that incentives often encourage that and that there’s little incentive for the contrary, as Bryan Caplan discusses (e.g. in Myth of the Rational Voter).
Regarding the actual issue at hand, I think that in an anarcho-capitalist society in which private organizations handled law/rights enforcement, drugs would probably all be legal.
But under a state, where the government maintains the monopoly on violence, it's up to the state to maintain order and protect rights in all circumstances. They haven't shown a great ability to protect the public from drug users.
In fact, although they sometimes prosecute unjustly, on the whole, there's a significant underincarceration problem* and an overwhelming underpolicing problem (per: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647 the US has only about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country).
More drugs would mean more crime. In a proper society, that wouldn’t be such a problem, and would be taken care of by police and prisons, but since the state maintains a monopoly on force and allows crime to run rampant, an argument could be made that drugs should be kept illegal.
* this is evident from the fact that the US has a clearance rate of less than 60% for homicide and a far lower clearance rate for other crimes (https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/) and doesn’t have particularly stringent average sentences (https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf shows an average time served in state prison for murder of 15 years, for rape / sexual assault, 6.2 years, assault 2.5 years, motor vehicle theft 1.4 years, with the medians all being lower).
"X is very bad and using it should be stigmatized, but it's also important for it to be legal" -> In my experience, most people just don't think this way. Most people view laws as a reflection of good vs. bad, and so they would consider attempts to legalize something that's viewed as (mostly) bad to be a bad or even crazy thing to attempt.
The sort of higher order value of "it's important to let adults *be adults* and make adult decisions free from government meddling" is often forgotten about or dismissed, maybe with the exception of some sexual activities.
I'm sympathetic to your perspective on these issues, but I'm genuinely not sure if most people could handle a society where legality is clearly and frequently divorced from morality.
...this is the key part. There are groups of people who all but the most extreme agree cannot, for some kinds of decision, be thought of as "adults" in that sense. Children, obviously, but also e.g. people who are adults in terms of age but, say, have developmental problems or various forms of illness or otherwise impaired decision-making. You can't just gloss over the conversation about who does and does not belong to such a group when defending their right to "be adult". Why *should* we let an "adult" whose decision-making capability with respect to an addictive drug is entirely destroyed "be an adult" when it comes to that drug?
I think you make illegal with no enforcement anything with net negative effects, like alcohol and weed, just so parents can brainwash their kids easier at the margin but no consequences of they fail. You make illegal Singapore style anything highly addictive. Life term sentences for cocaine, etc. And you come up with a regime to let people try hallucinogenic stuff a very small finite amount of times if they want, am very flexible on this.
I think most drugs are a massive net bad, and I don't consume any (except caffeine and sugar if you want to count them). But there is such a wide range from potentially enlightening and therapeutic, but non-toxic and non-addictive drugs like LSD to highly-addictive, easily fatally toxic substances like Fentanyl that lumping them all together one way or another is absurd.
Also, I strongly disagree with 1. Not only does a state have a right and a duty to protect people from themselves, from a humanitarian as well as a societal perspective - every adult represents several person-years in investment in their education, and if we can keep someone from pointlessly throwing their life away in a time of distress, by all means we should. But society also needs to protect itself from drug users who are out of their mind with intoxication or craving.
"During investigations related to the illegal sale of weight loss products, RTÉ Investigates discovered and filmed a woman based in Tuam, Co Galway, selling Retatrutide.
The woman, who is not a qualified doctor, advertises the product as "the most powerful weight loss treatment."
Retatrutide is an experimental medicinal product which is not approved for use anywhere globally, and still in clinical trials in the US. Such medication is often years from being deemed safe for use or achieving regulatory approval.
In a statement, Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Retatrutide, said the product has not been reviewed or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, or any regulatory agency anywhere in the world and therefore at this time no one can sell it for human use.
It added that any product falsely representing itself as a Eli Lilly product "may expose patients to potentially serious health risks".
I presume your view here is "yeah sure, let her sell it, and let people take it at their own risk". And what of bad consequences? In the US, I presume the solution is "go to court and sue them", but since this is not the drug manufacturer, I don't think this woman has multi-millions to pay out damages. Of course, the courts could take the view "you knew this stuff was dangerous and you voluntarily took it, it's your own fault for being a damn fool".
"Legal drugs is a million times more defensible than legal abortion. Since, you know, "doesn't hurt anyone else" is undeniable in one case and very much deniable in the other."
Legal drugs do hurt others, though. Alcohol is legal and the bad effects are not confined to the drinker alone, all the drink-driving cases and fights and assaults etc. in the news will tell you that. The thing is, you can't have both point 3 *and* point 4. If you make all drugs legal, then after a while any attempts to stigmatise abusers of hard drugs will get the same treatment as trying to stigmatise abortion or LGBT+, I don't know what prefix will go before "phobe" for "people who don't like those who take drugs" but I'm sure someone will find a catchy label in the same vein as homophobe, transphobe, misogynist, etc.
'If it's legal, it's normal, and if it's normal, you can't criticise it' is the way this develops for all social liberalisation.
> 'If it's legal, it's normal, and if it's normal, you can't criticise it'
Is that really true? ISTM society criticises people who become injured or die while doing idiotic and/or extremely risky things all the time, loudly and at length.
Cannabis is nowhere near as bad as alcohol and seems to have no negative effects when you control for the obvious confounding variables. For instance this twin study failed to find any of the negative effects that people claim to exist based on weaker types of correlational research:
I'd also argue that psychedelics are also pretty good for both individuals and society if they're used responsibly. But that's a whole different can of worms I could get into if you want.
I think the biggest case in favor of psychedelics if that they fill a void left by the dearth of non-shitty religions which are effective for inducing religious experiences in modern society.
We restrict people from making decisions they are not properly capable of dealing with. Kids can't make contracts, consent to sex etc. because they lack the mental capacity for the risk/reward reasoning involved. Elderly people with dementia aren't allowed to try to make their way out of the sheltered housing and back to where they think they live, because they are not capable of reasoning about their actual situation. People experiencing a mental health crisis are deprived of their freedom to act because they are not capable of rational decisions about harming themselves or those around them.
Preventing people from seeking out and ingesting substances that rapidly remove people's capacity to reason about the risk/reward tradeoffs of seeking out and ingesting those substances seems entirely consistent with the other things society agrees on.
This is also how people end up with positions where they endorse some drugs but not others, that might sound inconsistent if you only consider harm to people around the user and not the user's mental capacity: the most problematic drugs are the ones that directly, rapidly and strongly destroy one's capacity to reason about ingesting more of themselves.
In a perfectly rational/moral society, it would be possible for hard drugs to be legal and also nobody takes them because it is acknowledged drugs are bad and social stigmatisation is successful in keeping people from committing sin.
We are not living in a perfectly rational/moral society.
If you want bad things to be stigmatised, and for that to result in "people don't do the bad thing", you have to back it up with "this is not legal and will get you into trouble with the law, not just your boring Aunt Sarah tut-tutting at you or your parents crying over how you've disappointed them".
If you want bad things to be legal, then you have to accept that "Just Say No!" won't work and people *will* do the bad things.
Maybe drugs are bad and maybe they aren't. I'm making the slightly different point that it's hard to defend someone's right to freely choose how to behave in scenarios where they in fact lack the capacity to freely choose how to behave.
We (by and large) don't defend horny teenagers' right to consent, we don't defend alzheimers' patients' right to go "home" to the building site where their house used to be, we don't defend the rights of the involutarily committed to set themselves and everything around them on fire... we shouldn't defend the addict's "choice" to get another fix. Their decision-making is broken - they lack the capacity to freely decide, even though this lack is due to their own past decisions. (It may not feel to them as though this is the case, but that's generally how these scenarios feel from the inside - by and large all the parties in less controversial situations like the ones I mention also think they are freely making choices!)
A commenter below suggests that people should be free to try heroin exactly once in their life, which I do find hard to argue against on the above basis except that it does not seem enforceable in practice.
>Their decision-making is broken - they lack the capacity to freely decide, even though this lack is due to their own past decisions.
Careful about that - it applies with about equal force to "cults" and, in many cases, to quite widespread religions. I'm, personally, not a fan of religions, but trying to contain them, besides being unconstitutional (writing from the USA), rapidly gets violent.
Its hard to find people who support legalising but enforcing mass stigmatising of people because its a fairly incoherent position to hold. One of the main benefits of having the police enforce social norms is that the justice system ensures they get a fair trial and fair punishment. If you want both society at large to stigmatise people and for the police not to get involved you are calling for them to be unemployable and lonely until they comply at best and lynched at worst. The only real difference between wanting social norms enforced by the police or by stigmatising people is the rule of law. People should have the right to not associate with who they want but if you want everyone to hold the view that these people should be stigmatised then it is more ethical to just write it into law rather than relying on mob justice to be fair.
(1) You correctly describe the mood here as "libertarian-ish", so why are you so sure we should accept personal possession of hard drugs? You admit that drugs are terrible and ruin lives (potentially including the lives of others); unless you are a completely doctrinaire libertarian (rather than "ish"), this seems like a natural thing to ban for people's own good. Given that many (?) drug users would say they're addicted and they wish they could stop using drugs, I'm not sure that rational choice theory really applies here. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment is about gambling and not drugs, but I think it does a good job hammering in the intuitions.
(4) I think pro-choice people would argue that fetuses are only minimally moral agents, whereas drug users are definitely moral agents, so it's not obvious that abortion harms a moral agent but drug use doesn't. Also, even aside from costs, abortion probably has more benefits than drug use (helps people have families when they want and not otherwise).
> You admit that drugs are terrible and ruin lives (potentially including the lives of others); unless you are a completely doctrinaire libertarian (rather than "ish"), this seems like a natural thing to ban for people's own good.
Except the pendulum has swung the other way now, with fentanyl / opiate deaths the leading cause of death for people under 40, beating out car accidents, and responsible for ~100k overdose deaths per year.
The rate before the "opiate crisis" made it impossible to get painkillers from actual doctors was ~20k a year.
Arguably, legalizing even bad drugs like opiates would TODAY save 80k lives annually, most of them under 40, many of whom would go on to be economically and socially productive.
I think our "banning for people's own good" has clearly swung into the "net damage" regime, and only legalization of safe, pharmaceutically pure opiates is going to get us out of this equilibrium and stop fentanyl deaths, because it's both cheaper and far easier to smuggle due to potency.
As long as opiates are illegal, fentanyl is going to be killing tens of thousands per year.
IIRC fentanyl death rates have been falling for a couple of years, maybe owing to the accessibility of NARCAN.
We have to distinguish between separate problems: a) addiction rates, b) fentanyl OD/death, c) painkiller availability
The latter is not a very serious consideration let alone as important. If anything, strong painkillers have been overprescribed for years and exacerbated opioid addiction https://drugabusestatistics.org/opioid-epidemic/ (there are probably better sources). They *are* still available to patients, but alternatives should be opted for where appropriate, including marijuana.
Climbing addiction rates is the most serious problem. Qua OD rates we can make some argument in favor of legalization assuming that what is on offer is heavily controlled and restricted, but that doesn't touch why people are turning to hard drugs and would not necessarily help at that.
Far as I can tell the most successful countries, if we're measuring in terms of rate of drug abuse and addiction, prohibit drug consumption. They also enforce heavy punishment. Advocates seem to want to explain away their success as a matter of "culture", but I don't find this convincing; you cannot divorce culture from law, and all of these countries have had a history with drugs (see: Opium wars).
I don't really see why - if it's illegitimate to care about the quality of someone else's life, or the quality of the lives around them, especially children - "my life on heroin is just as good or better than your non-opiate-clouded life" - society should care whether they live or die - as the possibility of death seems integrally bound up with the chosen activity.
For instance, there is a current effort at shaming. Not shaming drug users - shaming everybody else for not carrying narcan around, or having it near at hand in all public places.
So you use the narcan to save someone on the sidewalk. Should you then look for that person every day, and save them every day if necessary? That doesn't seem very hands off to me. That seems like stopping them from *doing the thing*. Very much like stopping drug use at a particular stage.
Supposedly fentanyl deaths are down. Fentanyl dealers "got the message" or are becoming more responsible or something. Maybe these things will be less fraught if fentanyl can be made "safer".
I am sure I will be pilloried for this comment. Still, a question: do the people pushing the narcan project - really expect that it will be normal for the populace to run around sticking narcan in one another on the regular? People will be willing to do that forever? Or is the idea that we should all improve our lives with drug use, and then the narcan thing will be a simple courtesy, much like it used to be common to give someone a cigarette or a light?
> Can you spell out how legalizing opiates would make the Fentanyl problem go away, rather than just adding another one on top?
People overdose on fentanyl for three primary reasons:
1. It's the only opiate around because it's much more compact to smuggle and is cheap - one kilo can serve an entire city for a few weeks to a month
2. The difference between "feeling good" and "OD" are 1-2mg, which is tiny, and there is no such thing as standardized strength and potency in the illegal markets.
3. Fentanyl contamination in coke and speed, or "chocolate chip cookie" effects of clusters in otherwise cut opiates kills people, because drug sellers bag other drugs on surfaces with fentanyl, or don't mix well enough, etc.
In other words, the vast majority of the deaths are accidental, and involve unknown quantities and strengths, poor practices and mixing, and fiddly dosing. Additionally, many addicts prefer non-fentanyl opiates when they can get them, they're just impossible to get nowadays, due to price and due to doctors no longer prescribing legal opiates.
Legal, pharmaceutically pure drugs of known strength eliminate all those problems. They are also dirt cheap. Even the heaviest opiate addict can be high out of their minds on <$5 a day at legal prices.
As a nod towards the fact that it would save tens of thousands of lives - back when fentanyl didn't exist, and it was heroin at unknown quantities and strengths, there were 5x fewer overdose deaths. This is because the amount of headroom between feeling good and dying was much bigger, and there was more tolerance for getting dosing wrong.
Arguably, known strengths and quantities would have eliminated a large chunk of even those 20k deaths.
Thanks. Are conventional opiates comparable to fentanyl in how they make the user feel? In other words, would a fentanyl user actually switch as soon other opiates become available?
Also, we had 20k opiate overdose deaths when opiates were illegal, expensive and unsafe. Presumably, making them legal, cheap and predictable would attract a much wider user base. Can we be sure that that wouldn' overcompensate for what we would gain on the fentanyl front?
> Thanks. Are conventional opiates comparable to fentanyl in how they make the user feel? In other words, would a fentanyl user actually switch as soon other opiates become available?
There's two factors pulling either way - because fentanyl is ubuiquitous and much stronger, some addicts are so deep they can ONLY get high on fentanyl now, and would keep using it, because regular opiates like heroin or oxycodone can't do it for them any more.
But for users who are not that deep, a majority of them would switch to other opiates, because they're safer and many prefer the "feel" of heroin or oxies over fentanyl. You can see this being discussed on darknet forums like dread (the darkweb reddit), or by talking to long-term junkies who've experienced non-fentanyl opiates.
> Also, we had 20k opiate overdose deaths when opiates were illegal, expensive and unsafe. Presumably, making them legal, cheap and predictable would attract a much wider user base. Can we be sure that that wouldn' overcompensate for what we would gain on the fentanyl front?
This is a good question.
I'll point to the fact that during the Sackler heyday, where many tens (and likely hundreds) of thousands of people were addicted to pharmaceutical oxies, we didn't really have many major social ills, overdose deaths were low, and the economy was booming. It is only after we cracked down that we saw a big shift, as all that "opiate demand" that got cut off from legal supplies moved first into heroin, then into fentanyl. I'd post a graph that shows this, but we can't post inline images in comments yet. And of course, in terms of social ills now we have fentanyl zombies roaming rampant, groaning and OD-ing in public everywhere.
Opiates are pretty mild physically, in the sense that users and addicts can generally operate and function just fine as long as they have a reliable and non-dangerous supply. I'm personally not worried about an expanded user base leading to more deaths, for the reasons I've articulated, although it will almost certainly lead to more opiate usage. If they are cheap and pharmaceutically pure, I honestly don't care much about more usage though - it's not going to drive much crime, if any, if everyone can be as high as they want for single dollars a day.
Everything after that is a personal choice, like smoking or drinking or feeding yourself and your kids fast food for most meals.
First, yeah I see the confusion, and this comes up often in arguments with other people but I keep forgetting it: I think of "libertarianish" as about how big the circle of fundamental freedoms are. So I'd call myself that because I really only think speech (without exception), things that directly affect no one but yourself, and things involving free association and free movement (within a jurisdiction) should never be infringed, but by that I mean *never*, no matter the consequences. While things like taxes and immigration and assisted euthanasia are in a different category, and can be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Wheras an extreme libertarian would include all those things in the "never infringe" circle as well.
But others...just seem to rank levels of liberty by how many bad consequences they're willing to accept. So "libertarianish" is freedom only to do things that aren't *that* harmful (direct or indirect, positive or negative) and strong libertarian is freedom even with bad results. I don't like this way of distinguishing things, because it seems like nothing's ever really a fundamental right, and everything can be restricted if someone can make an argument for its long-term harm (isn't this exactly how cancel culture is justified?). But at least I understand the value difference, thanks.
Second, the main issue I really wanted to point out, which I didn't really make clear, was that a lot of people here seem to endorse banning drugs but ALSO a lot of people here seem to endorse taking drugs. Yes, maybe not the same drugs, and maybe not the same people, but I find it very jarring. It seems like the opposite combination is much more defensible.
(Mostly, people seem to normalise taking acid. Don't people die from that? Doesn't that normalise other recreational drugs? I feel like "drugs are bad you idiot!" responses are missing from the acid comments, AND "freedom is non-negotiable" rrsponses are missing from the toughening possession sentences comments...which again I find really jarring...but maybe I'm getting a warped perspective?)
I think most people here who endorse taking drugs are talking about psychedelics, and most people who endorse banning drugs are talking about opioids or the like. I don't think there are many people who endorse the same drugs they want to ban.
But I also don't think it would be completely crazy for some hypothetical person to want this. I once read an essay by someone talking about the French attitude toward affairs, which is something like - every politician is having an affair, but every politician will also condemn affairs, and this is load-bearing, because a world where everyone has affairs is actually quite different from a world where everyone has affairs AND there's common-knowledge of this AND everyone does it publicly and shamelessly. I think this is the strongest argument for decriminalization as opposed to full legalization; in decriminalization, at least people have to be circumspect, and corporations can't put BUY OUR HEROIN billboards on every major road.
I don't think people actually die from acid. I've heard maybe one report of someone thinking they could fly and falling out a window, but that was decades ago and I don't even know if it was true. I don't think it's actually possible to die from the drug itself. I'm not a big fan of acid because I think it can warp your personality long-term (though some people start with bad personalities and are trying to change and I'm not sure how good a plan that is or isn't). But as far as actual biological stuff, it's about as safe as they come.
> in decriminalization, at least people have to be circumspect, and corporations can't put BUY OUR HEROIN billboards on every major road.
Would quibble that this also applies to Tobacco companies in most Western countries, and we're seeing mounting pressure to curb gambling advertising.
Legalization has one major advantage: sin tax. If politically viable, it's effective. Collapsing rates of tobacco consumption in the West is a success story (not *only* attributed to tax of course but it is part of the formula). Mind you, consumption is rising in developing parts of the world, which explains why profits are still rising for those companies.
Drugs aside, I also believe legalization would better protect and serve sex workers, and the "Nordic model" has been an abject failure. But that is another conversation.
Not directly, but it messes both with your sense of thirst and your ability to expel liquids. Advice used to be to make a deliberate effort to stay hydrated, until https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts - no idea what it is these days.
Libertarian tendencies run into the tendencies of smart people to think that they can make better decisions than other people and that includes making them for you. So things they like are good and things they don't are bad and should be banned.
We control dangerous things. Was going to say guns, but you sound American, but even you are not allowed fully automatic assault weapons. In answer to the "problems go away with legalization" claim look at the trouble Freud caused by endorsing completely legal cocaine as a wonder drug. Nobody is not transformed into a complete dick by cocaine, and taking it is therefore not something the taker is doing only to themselves.
> but even you are not allowed fully automatic assault weapons.
This is false. You can own a machine gun, but it has to be one produced and registered before 1986. At the federal level anyway, there are a number of states that ban possession. Also, I think if you work as a permitted federal gun dealer you can possess them, but you would have to give them up when you retired.
I think it's more that a pistol works just fine for most scenarios. Most people who are using guns for crime aren't using them to gun down massive crowds, and at that point there's just better ways to kill huge amounts of people. Like arson, bombs, or sarin.
I propose to consider first a case that is in my opinion analogous and less infused in context -- making it mandatory to wear seat belts in cars (to avoid distractions: with only one passenger). This is to my mind a very clear-cut case where there is no plausible way in which not wearing a seat belt can hurt anyone else than the driver, not wearing a seat belt is a behaviour whose disadvantages strongly outweight the discomfort, and the support for making it mandatory to wear seat belts seems very strong. For this reason I find it to be a very clear case where a given regulation has a clearly positive impact on a given issue, and yet is completely irreconcilable with basic liberal principles. I'm wondering what the opinions here are.
More starkly: you are walking along a bridge and you see someone about to jump off. Do you try to stop them, or do you respect their freedom to make their own life choices?
Does a depressed person have the moral or legal capacity to make decisions? We as a society has declared this to be "no" (although some European countries are now offing MAID to people with depression so this may change). Same question for people who are addicted to a drug. Although I guess that you can make the argument that it should be legal to possess an addictive substance and use it the first time but then illegal after you show signs of addiction (unworkable of course).
A very good example and at least in some legislations, including the one I'm currently living in, it is required by law that you try to stop them. In my case, I could be jailed for up to three years for not doing so, so I'm strongly incentivised to give the former answer to your question, regardless of my philosophical positions.
Was anyone else shocked by the number of people cheering on the death of the UnitedHealth CEO? Is this just a phenomenon among terminally online users/trolls/mentally deranged individuals or is there actual widespread support for killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
I was also highly disappointed in Bluesky not marking Taylor Lorenz's post supporting the murder as "hate speech", despite this being a VERY clear violation of rules for any reasonably-run platform. I feel like this completely shatters the idea of Bluesky moderation being reasonable in any shape or form.
I think that it's like the women who chose the bear, in the viral question of whether they'd prefer the company of man or a bear, if they were out in the wild.
I highly doubt that women's revealed preferences through behavior would match the proportion who answered 'bear.' Instead, choosing 'bear' is a way to signal to the listener that the speaker is a person who takes the problem of men very seriously.
As in many instances of revealed preferences diverging from expressed preferences, the speaker probably isn't aware of this discrepancy.
Similarly, with the moral question of murdering the CEO, expressing support for the murder is a way of signaling to others and oneself that one takes the problem of capitalism / big business / insurance / healthcare very seriously.
Either huge numbers of people support the murder of a CEO, or they’re actually expressing a different and less extreme sentiment about their dissatisfaction with things, only you can decide which one is more plausible.
Were you really stupid/naïve enough to think Bluesky moderation would be "reasonable" or are you playing it up for rhetorical effect? It was glaringly obvious to me it would be left-wing.
At least one highly reasonable friend of mine told me that their moderation is fair, reasonable and objective. I've been keeping an open mind about it until I saw that Taylor Lorenz wasn't flagged...
I have to admit that my first emotional response was schadenfreude, and the implication that we're moving back into a troubled times where might is right came moments later. On the one hand, it's ridiculous to live with a system that charges more than a year's wages to give birth to child (with varying levels of class based price discrimination through insurance), or absurd amounts to set a broken bone. However, rule by assassination tends to be more cathartic than effective, and begets more of assassinations down the line.
There's a line in The Brothers Karamazov that's relevant here, "Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of
all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of
their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply
tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set
before them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength
If it's ridiculous to charge more than a year's wages to give birth to a child, it's ridiculaous whether United Healthcare picks up the tab or not-- and would continue to be ridiculous if it were the state paying.
And yet the people charging those prices are treated as saints (unless they are drug companies) while the people telling them “hey, knock it off, we ain’t paying for that” are treated as monsters.
>Was anyone else shocked by the number of people cheering on the death of the UnitedHealth CEO? Is this just a phenomenon among terminally online users/trolls/mentally deranged individuals or is there actual widespread support for killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
I think this situation is confounded by the fact that the whole thing is really fucking cool.
Murder is (usually) bad, United might been a particularly shitty insurance company, but killing the CEO is probably not going to improve healthcare in the US, and an environment in which economically and/or politically relevant people are at risk of assasination is probably not a good thing... but! The way it was carried out, the corny engraving on the bullet shells, the mystery surrouding the motive, the one picture from a security camera... it's just a very magnetic story, and people who are prone to know better might feel compelled to look past the obviously bad things, like when you say "X villain did nothing wrong" mostly-ironically-but-not-quite.
This is precisely what's going on. The CEO killer is almost movie-like in "cool factor". And dare I say some find this refreshing after what the two would-be Trump assassins were like?
The CEO killer gives off the vibe of a modern-day Robin Hood who takes it a bit further than merely stealing from the rich. This sort of thing can hijack people's typical moral standards, especially if there's a legitimate grievance at play here.
>killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
That feels rather akin to saying that Bin Laden was just the leader of an organization that you disagree with, but his death was still bad because political violence is never justified.
When people imagine what the assassins motivations might be, the most likely scenario is one in which he ends up looking far more sympathetic than the CEO.
I very much doubt a single person driven to medical bankruptcy, or with a family member killed by United Health denying their medical coverage will have any more sympathy for Thompson than they would for Bin Laden after he was shot.
This is not a partisan issue either, Ben Shapiro's comment section was basically unanimous in cheering on the guys death.
Completely agreed that Bin Laden is the right comparison to Thompson. I've read estimates that CEO Thompson , leading UHC to deny care at three times the rate of the industry, was responsible for about 6,000 deaths of my countrymen per year, about doubling Bin Laden's death toll. I would _prefer_ that such actions be handled predictably, within the law, that Thompson be handled as something like "conspiracy to commit mass murder", and that he be arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged.
Unfortunately, this wasn't feasible even in Bin Laden's case, but I salute both the men who killed Bin Laden and the man who killed Thompson.
Great. Now re-run the scenario for a person that wasn't leading an insurance company, but was mistaken for one by the vigilante. And then again for a person who was doing a lot of things, some good, some bad, and the vigilante came to a different judgment than you would have.
Finally, we're going to take two Thompsons, five lookalikes, and fifty of the some-good/some-bads, and mix them all around and not tell you which is which.
>Now re-run the scenario for a person that wasn't leading an insurance company, but was mistaken for one by the vigilante.
Many Thanks! This is part of why I would _prefer_ that Thompson's death had been a lawful execution, following arrest, charge, trial, conviction, and sentencing. Albeit, even with due process, the law also sometimes screws up, sometimes in simply getting the wrong guy.
Come to think of it, what do you think of Bin Laden's killing? And how sure are you that we didn't get the wrong guy in that case? There wasn't a police line-up...
Bin Laden's killing was an example of what I'll call a "hot" encounter - there's insufficient capability there to send in uniformed law enforcement, apprehend him, cuff him, read him his rights, etc. The forces of law had to go into a location where they had no control, but they still needed to go, and they had to go right then (OBL routinely moved between multiple secret locations), and therefore they had to resort to riskier measures. An operation like that could certainly result in mistakes, such as collateral damage, inaccurate intel, freak events such as bad weather or an enemy sentry just happening to linger at one spot, seizure of friendly resources by the enemy, and the death of the enforcers going in. Fortunately, US forces know all that, and have the means to mitigate those risks, and this case, it paid off.
The Thompson murder was a case where the actor could have avoided a hot encounter by suing Thompson instead. He also did not have the means to mitigate all the risks. He apparently practiced with his weapon and planned the encounter, but it could still have gone wrong in a dozen ways, and even now, he has little means to mitigate the aftermath (a trial; increased security for healthcare CEOs in the future; increased insurance prices to be borne by future customers). Copycats may appear, and they can't rely on his luck. Everyone is that much more at risk.
>Bin Laden's killing was an example of what I'll call a "hot" encounter - there's insufficient capability there to send in uniformed law enforcement, apprehend him, cuff him, read him his rights, etc.
True! Many Thanks!
>The Thompson murder was a case where the actor could have avoided a hot encounter by suing Thompson instead.
Unfortunately, this generally accomplishes nothing. Now, while I'm glad Thompson was killed, I'm not fond of informal executions. Amongst other problems, since they aren't routine, they can't be relied on to deter. That would be a big advantage of _legally_ hanging CEOs who spearhead murderous policies. And CEOs, unlike garden variety killers, have enough foresight that the prospect of a hemp noose around their throat, even at the end of an extended trial, stands a decent chance of incentivizing modified behavior.
> It's completely absurd to compare Bin Laden to the CEO of a health insurance company and you know it.
Literally his entire job and the companies entire PURPOSE and financial motive is "killing sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line."
Arguably, health insurance companies are *much worse* than ISIS, because they certainly kill more Americans than ISIS ever has.
They just do it with adjustments and claim denials and friction and making it hard or impossible for sick people to get further treatment (and thereby spend more on healthcare, and thereby cost United more money, and thereby negatively impact United's bottom line), instead of bombs and planes.
Because it's not legible, because it's distributed over many hundreds of thousands of individuals, because they're not literally putting guns against individual sick grandma's and children's heads and pulling a trigger, they get away with it.
But I maintain in any rational moral calculus, they should weigh as worse than ISIS, at least to any average American. Certainly, you or someone you love is more likely to die due to a decision made at United than in ISIS.
I personally think the dude's a hero and hope this is part of an ongoing trend, and have been inspired such that if I ever receive a terminal diagnosis, I now have some fun ideas on how to spend my last weeks / months.
Relative to the average level of comment quality in a given forum/group/etc where the comment is made, this is worst comment I have ever seen on the internet. I can only think of the scene from Billy Madison:
“What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
I really think you ought to say why it is so wrong if you're posting something like this. As it stands, you're making a statement of opinion as if it were a fact, which seems no different from the comment to which you're responding, except that comment has more explanation to it.
To be clear, I disagree with the statement "dude's a hero", but otherwise it has some truth to it. Your post basically reads as "You're completely wrong", which I understand is the kind of comment from which we want to steer clear.
I get you. Just posting "you're wrong" is bad. I swear I'm better usually, even though I don't always get it right. But seriously, just read what the dude posted.
> Literally his entire job and the companies entire PURPOSE and financial motive is "killing sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line."
Do I really need to refute that? For real?
> Arguably, health insurance companies are much worse than ISIS, because they certainly kill more Americans than ISIS ever has.
Again, seriously? Is it not self evident? Letting it slide that they just implied that non-americans have no moral value, do I really need to say why that's wrong?
There's something fundamental you're missing here and in order to get to the heart of it you need to answer this very critical question:
If you had a family member who died because of the delay caused by their critical medical care being denied, due to the policies this guy personally oversaw (like say their new automated AI denial system) then would you feel the same way?
Because I would be shocked if you or anyone who's condemning this violence would feel the same way if it was you or your loved ones who were killed or had their lived personally ruined directly because of this guys decisions.
I think this absolutely about a lack of empathy, except not on the part of the people cheering for this guys death, but on the part of the people who don't see why he should be viewed as a mass murderer in the first place.
I absolutely would condemn a vigilante killing like in any and all circumstances. Taking the law into one's own hands and becoming judge jury and executioner is NEVER warranted.
Plenty of people much richer than Brian Thompson have been sent off to lengthy prison terms. Most notably in this community, Samuel Bankman-Fried had a net worth at least two orders of magnitude greater than Thompson. Jeffrey Epstein was maybe "only" one order of magnitude richer than Thompson. Likewise Elizabeth Holmes, and Martha Stewart back in the day.
We have a functioning justice system in the United States for people who *commit actual crimes*. It isn't perfect, but it works tolerably well even when rich people are involved. What we don't have, is a "justice" system that functions against people who are really really hated because they are emblematic of life being unfair even when everything is done legally. And properly so, because that wouldn't actually be justice.
Sure it is: if the law doesn't punish whoever wronged you adequately (or at all), if you want justice you have get it yourself, usually through vengeance. It's a mark of the effectiveness of statist propaganda that this isn't obvious to everyone.
Agreed. Regrettably, there is an instability, leading to never ending blood feuds like the Hatfields and the McCoys or the Middle East. I would _prefer_ to have seen CEO Thompson arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged. But we didn't manage that with Bin Laden either, and Bin Laden killed fewer of us than Thompson did.
Re: if you want justice you have get it yourself, usually through vengeance.
This is profoundly wrong. In fact it is downright evil and if followed generally would lead to bellum omnium contra omnes (a war of all against all). The provision of justice belongs to the community (when not to God). It never belongs to the individual.
A lot of us are in the "There but for the role of the dice go I" position. I had UHC insurance at a few points but had the luck to never be seriously ill during those times.
1. ERs don't check your insurance status. If someone needs care NOW, you'll get it regardless of what UnitedHealthcare has to say about it.
2. If this was a relative over the age of 65, they'd be covered by Medicare and United's policies wouldn't matter.
3. If this was about a family member under the age of 65 who still had many good years to go if only they got a certain treatment, I'd blame only myself for not securing a better health insurance policy for them. Similarly I'd only blame myself for a relative ending up in a car accident that could've been prevented if they had a better car with assisted-driving and better safety features.
4. If there was absolutely no way for me to secure better coverage for them and United was the only option and the relative died too soon due to their policies, I'd wish for a change in the legal system, but wouldn't wish for a vigilante to execute their CEO.
> ERs don't check your insurance status. If someone needs care NOW, you'll get it regardless of what UnitedHealthcare has to say about it.
This is *kinda* bullshit. Yes, it's true that if you are currently bleeding out, you can walk into an ER and they will treat you. But there are a lot of diseases that don't manifest as urgent, but will still kill you at a much faster timeline, that an ER WON'T treat you for. Basically every cancer. Heart disease. Depression. Diabetes.
There are a lot of people who need care NOW, because NOW is the time to stop the disease that will progress in 5 years and kill them. 5 years from now is too late.
> I'd blame only myself for not securing a better health insurance policy for them
Without a dog in the larger fight, this strikes me as very out of touch. Many young people have chronic issues that are a) absolutely treatable, b) arbitrarily expensive to treat, c) are entirely due to external causes (i.e. not personal choice), d) debilitating, and e) not urgent enough to warrant ER (though ER would still bankrupt you anyway).
For someone who can't afford good healthcare, say because they don't have/can't get a job that pays for it, they are forced into option 4 basically immediately. In other words, you have a sizeable chunk of people who are just suffering, and who's only available option under your standard is to _wish_ for a change.
And even for people who DO have good healthcare from their job, think about how limiting that is. Those people can no longer _leave_ that job, for risk of serious health risk or medical bankruptcy. That is a nontrivial infringement of liberties! Imagine if your boss held a gun to your kids head, 'sorry you can't leave this job or little Timmy gets it'. For a parent with a kid with a chronic condition, this is basically the deal.
The US healthcare system as currently set up creates an underclass of people -- those who were unfortunate enough to be born sick or get sick. These people have fewer rights, fewer mobility, and fewer options than everyone else.
Re: If this was a relative over the age of 65, they'd be covered by Medicare and United's policies wouldn't matter.
See: Supplemental insurance policies (Medicare only covers 80% of the bills), an of course Medicare Advanatge plans. United Health is HUGE in this area.
I think most people who "celebrated" the killing were not expressing a belief that CEOs of companies that do stuff they don't agree with should be killed. It was more of a "I'm happy someone killed him, but of course I wouldn't do it myself" or "I believe in karma/divine retribution/whatever and I'm happy he got what he deserved" type of people.
I am in Japan for Ten days. Everywhere I have gone in Tokyo and Kyoto over the past week the majority of the people on the streets are young adults and children. Where is the population implosion happening?
I was under the impression that the answer was `the countryside,' and that most of the young people (that still exist) were in fact concentrated in Tokyo/Kyoto/Osaka.
From what I have read, if you want to see the ghost towns, you need to go to the boonies.
I had a similar reaction when I visited, a few thoughts:
1. It's common to see parents with just one child and rare to see families with 2+ kids. For a country to have near/above-replacement fertility, you need a bunch of families with three or more children to offset the childless.
2. Tokyo’s population skews younger compared to the national average, with about 20% over 65 vs 30% for the country overall. Retirees move out of the city for cheaper living, and younger people move towards Tokyo. As someone else pointed out, some districts in Tokyo also have noticeably older populations.
3. Most Japanese adults work a lot. If you spend time walking around the city during typical work hours, you'll see a disproportionately high number of people with young kids, which won't reflect the actual population distribution.
4. Very old people (80+) start disappearing into retirement homes and home-care.
Right. And if they continue on this path then in a couple of hundred years they'll have about five million people, just like another similarly-sized similar-climate similar-terrain archipelago, New Zealand.
Would it be a disaster if Japan looked more like New Zealand? Japanese countryside is beautiful, there should be more of it.
Only in countries with mass immigration is low fertility a problem. Japan is the one place on Earth that _isn't_ going to turn into Nigeria.
Ha! I notice the same thing in Singapore. Japan has an excuse - they have a hinterland. Everyone young moves to Tokyo because that's where all the fun and economic activity is, but if you go to the rural areas outside of Tokyo, it's all old people.
But Singapore is a city state, and has had <1.15 fertility since 2003, and <1.8 fertility since 1978(!). There IS no back country or hinterland.
And yet I spend significant amounts of time there, and everywhere I see it's smiling young couples with babies. On the metro, on the river walk, at restaurants, in Bugis - *everywhere.*
It is the single biggest disconnect I've seen between "official statistics" and "lived experience" anywhere in the world, and I still don't understand it.
> And yet I spend significant amounts of time there, and everywhere I see it's smiling young couples with babies.
Is that "babies" plural, in that you see lots of couples with multiple kids? Or just a general "I see lots of couples out with a single baby"?
If it's the latter, then your lived experience makes perfect sense. Even if every single couple has one child, that's still a TFR of only 1. In order to reach replacement level, every couple (on average) needs to have at least two children. (In a real country with a TFR of ~2, that usually looks like a few couples having 1, most couples having 2, a few couples having 3+, and a few couples having none.)
That's... actually a lot of kids! I don't know how old you are, but if you're in the primary age range of the ACX readership (mid-20s through mid-40s), think of your own personal social circle. Out of all your friends and family of childbearing age, how many are in committed relationships? How many have two children? One? None? Because in a country with replacement-level fertility, most young couples have at least two children. Do they? Imagine every single couple you know having two children. Do you feel a knee-jerk, "Woah, that's a lot of kids"? I definitely do when I try this myself.
You can have extensive fertility decline *even if most couples still have a kid.* The proportion of childless couples has grown slightly, but the big decline has been from most families going from 2-3 children down to 1, maybe 2.
You'd still see a group numbering 11-12% of the population everywhere around you, but you need to go visit a country with a large TFR to understand what the difference is.
> You'd still see a group numbering 11-12% of the population everywhere around you, but you need to go visit a country with a large TFR to understand what the difference is.
Thanks, I appreciate the grounding in data. The country I've spent the majority of my time in over the past year hits ~28% by that metric, and it doesn't really feel hugely different than Singapore or Tokyo?
The USA is only 17.3%, and Tokyo and Singapore feels like MORE couples and babies than most US cities in terms of public life, but that's probably lifestyle differences.
Actually, lifestyle differences probably explain a lot about it - pretty much everyone metros in Singapore in Tokyo, including families with kids, and pretty much everyone with kids drives in the USA and many other countries / cities.
I think there's more general "public life" mixing in Singapore and Tokyo as a result, whereas in driving-centric places, families with kids go to different types of businesses, and you never see them in transit because they're in their individual cars.
I just got back from a few weeks in Taipei, and that felt lower fertility than Singapore or Tokyo, but alas, your site doesn't have Taiwan as a comparison point.
Everywhere. It's just that the urban Japanese population sort of just self-segregates based on age. If you go to somewhere like Shibuya, obviously you're going to see much younger people. If you want to see where all the old people are, go to Sugamo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugamo
Tokyo in particular is the only prefecture (or top-level government area, as technically its a metropolis) to post population growth this last year, and people are always visiting Kyoto
Is anyone aware of a way to disable the notes and chats pages within Substack (or at the very least to not have notes as the homepage on the app)?
I have a good collection of subscriptions at this point, but every time I open the app I lose a few brain cells just by having my eyes rest on whatever the algorithm thinks I should see (this is also why I quit all other social media). I've blocked our muted hundreds of people at this point but the deluge of idiocy continues.
If anyone from Substack is reading this, please be aware that Notes may increase 'engagement' in the short term but ultimately kills what is unique and good about your product.
I found notes quite enjoyable until a few months ago. It used to be that all the notes were from people I subscribed to who were mostly talking about the topics I found interesting. It feels now like the feed has been algorithmed and it shows me mostly random crap from people I don't care about.
Update: there is indeed an option within the app to change the homepage to 'subscriptions'; not sure if that's new or if I've previously just been blind.
Can't disable notes and chats completely as far as I can tell, but that'll do
Go old fashioned... Each substack has an RSS feed, open a feedly account (or similar), subscribe to them there, together with any other blogs you want to follow. Then click to open articles in the browser when you want to read the comments section.
I was thinking about the Brian Thompson assassination. The media seems to be shocked — shocked! — that some people are expressing schadenfreude that he was killed. WaPo posted an editorial, "A sickness in the wake of a health insurance CEO’s slaying," in which they expressed their dismay...
"As most Americans quickly recognized, there is no justification for taking a life in this manner — yet on social media, expressions of not just understanding but support for the crime also gained traction in the aftermath of Mr. Thompson’s death. Many people made crude and depraved jokes, such as “my condolences are out-of-network.” Others said flatly that the insurance executive deserved what happened to him, comparing the victim to a serial killer."
Then they try to shut down the conversation about why Thompson was hated by so many.
"...but we're skeptical that at this particular moment lends itself to a nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry."
If not now, when would be a good time? Just because you're heavily regulated doesn't mean you can't game the system. United Health Care has outperformed all the other health insurance providers by aggressively implementing systems that resist paying out claims. I'd be curious if people covered by UHC have higher mortality rates than those covered by other insurance providers. And if so, why can't the UHC execs be considered murderers?
In my opinion, Brian Thompson is an example of the banality of evil. In another time and place, Thompson would have been the technocrat, high up in the regime — who never got his hands dirty — but enabled greater efficiency in the concentration camps. I'm sure he was otherwise a good family man, a very nice guy, and fun at cocktail parties.
You seem to be arguing that if a majority of society agrees with a moral framework in which extrajudicial killing is justified, then it is justified. But you don't really believe this, you only believe that it is justified if you yourself share in that moral framework.
If it were the first then you would have to support the extrajudicial killing of apostates in countries where there is sufficient support for it. And in such societies apostasy is worse than murder. Murder only ends someone's finite life on earth. Open apostasy, by tempting others towards apostasy, causes eternal damnation and therefore infinite suffering.
I never said that. I was indulging in the schadenfreude that payback is a bitch, but I believe in the rule of law and that laws should be administered equitably. But when a man who oversees a corporation that profits by denying care to ill people can face no consequences for his actions, then something is wrong with the justice system. People like Thompson exist in a bubble removed from the problems of ordinary people. Is it surprising that his actions angered someone beyond their breaking point? Like I said, I'm sure he was otherwise a good family man, a very nice guy, and fun at cocktail parties — but he's an example of a corporate sociopath. We've seen this type before in history.
"But when a man who oversees a corporation that profits by denying care to ill people can face no consequences for his actions, then something is wrong..."
An insurance company can never deny care, only refuse to pay for it, so I assume that's what you are trying to say here. If so: Really?
Is it really your contention that any non-fraudulent insurance company *must* pay for *every* treatment that any of their clients demand? When someone pays for an insurance policy, they get a virtual or literal stack of signed blank checks that they can hand out to anyone with an MD after their name, and the insurance company can't do anything but pay up even when they see that one of those checks is for ten million dollars to Dr. Quackenhoffer for one bottle of Miracle Tonic?
Because Dr. Quackenhoffer's Miracle Tonic is a treatment, which the insurance company must not "deny" by e.g. refusing to pay for on the grounds that it obviously won't do any good.
If that's really what you are trying to say, then I think it is absolutely unworkable.
And if that's *not* what you're trying to say, then you and everyone else on the assassin-sympathizing side of this debate might want to come up with some evidence that the treatments UHC has "denied" to Mr. Mangione or whoever he is championing, is anything more than a bottle of Dr. Quackenhoffer's finest. It is certainly possible that UHC has improperly denied payment for legitimate medical treatment they were contracted to provide, but it is telling that basically no one on the assassin-sympathetic side has bothered to even argue that point.
No it's not surprising that his actions angered someone towards a breaking point. And the public response isn't surprising either.
It's also not surprising that in a country where apostasy is considered the height of immorality, then when someone gets honor killed for it - the response of their countrymen is also to feel some schadenfreude. They had it coming. They dared to turn their back on God?
This is perfectly rational from their point of view, so we can't criticize them for it right?
I'm not sure how Thompson was apostatic, so I may be missing your point.
While the killer may be, and very likely is, psychologically disturbed, I can't help but wonder if Thompson wasn't psychologically damaged, as well. Perhaps instead of "damaged," I wonder if he was somehow incomplete in the way he viewed his actions in relation to other humans. I am not a psychiatrist, so my terminology may be inappropriate, but something was indefinably missing from Thompson for him to be doing the job that he did. I came across the following video on TwiXter this morning. I realized that the psychological opposite of Thompson is this famous guy...
I'm not saying Thompson was apostatic. I'm saying that the way in which people are responding to his murder is indistinguishable from the way that people in fundamentalist societies respond to apostates, or gay people, or 'witches' getting murdered.
Indistinguishable except for the underlying justification. Which you can counter by saying that their entire moral views are stupid and wrong, whereas your own moral views are totally correct. It should be obvious why this is problematic.
Gotcha. I understand what you're saying now. I'm more curious about why the MSM responds with shock when an angry white guy kills a CEO but not when a former marine chokes a "crazy" person to death on the subway. I suspect it's because the members of the MSM consciously or unconsciously align their tribal identity with powerful people.
Health insurance is not health care, and health care is not health. Robin Hanson has been writing about that for years. Amusingly, strikes by medical workers don't appear to affect health. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1865261789237100701
> "...but we're skeptical that at this particular moment lends itself to a nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry."
> If not now, when would be a good time?
Hasn't it been a major topic of conversation for the last 8 years minimum ever since Bernie almost won the democratic primary on a platform of better healthcare?
I unhesitatingly condemn the crime, this being my real name and incitement laws being what they are.
That said, take a look at the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield case. Everything about it starting with their name is satirical science fiction, except that it happened - they decided that in 3 states they would no longer pay for anaesthesia for as long as an operation took. There would be a time limit. If the surgery overruns that's just tough. After the killing they reversed this decision. A high and immediate utilitarian payoff.
Second point, people keep saying that we (you) have a justice system. True, but consider this: the alleged perp will be tried by jury. There's a splendid decision called Bushel's case 1670, English but good law in the US, which says that juries can deliver whatever verdict they please (it's about a judge who wanted to imprison a jury of which Bushel was foreman, for failing to find William Penn guilty of sedition). It's therefore tacitly built in to English and US law that juries can effectively award a popular pardon. Until the verdict we don't know whether a crime has been committed.
- those that over report do so at such significant magnitudes that it would be 'fraudulent'
In such a case, are you saying that because some anesthesiologists will report the amount of time that they work, it is therefore ethical to hit an _unconscious patient_ with a massive bill?
Look, I'm a surgeon and absolutely discourage reducing physician payments but your characterization of the Anthem decision (and retraction) is just wrong. Basically Anthem just wanted to go to a fixed payment system for anesthesia for cases which by the way is exactly how surgeons get paid for cases. If I do a gallbladder removal it doesn't matter if it takes 45 minutes or 3 hours, I submit the code 47562 and get paid whatever insurance says that code is worth. I don't threaten to stop the case because it's taking longer than average and I don't get paid more when it does. By framing the debate as "Anthem wanted them to stop providing anesthesia" as opposed to "Anthem wanted to punish slow surgery teams and prevent overcharging and bill padding by rich anesthesiologists in order to keep your policy payments down" the American Society of Anesthesiologists achieved a wonderful PR coup.
That is exactly how a neighbor who is an anesthesiologist describes the Anthem case. She is unwilling to converse about it in her workplace though because she's the only one who's read anything about the case beyond clickbait headlines and social media posts.
Sorry, but if you're cheering on the CEOs death in any way, you're a horrible person and (possibly) a psychopath. We live in a society of laws and have a justice system for a reason. If you don't like how healthcare works in the US, go campaign to change the laws. Obama did and a lot of things changed when ACA got implemented. Murdering the CEO in the open is NOT the way, regardless of your opinion on him being evil or not.
My friend, America is not the USSR, nor are our concerns primarily about not the turning into the USSR (nor *should they be* about not turning into Nazi Germany, even if for a great deal of the elite class that seems to be their primary ridiculous worry).
We are just another problematic society with its own issues.
There are more than two ways for societies to be constructed that we needn't be overly concerned about not giving an inch against our American "greed is great!" approach lest we go Soviet.
The matter of healthcare is a matter of life and death. And ignoring that fact in favor of State Worship (or the righteousness of law school graduates for godssake) is neither kind nor wise.
Murder is a matter of life and death. I don't want to see it happening in American cities with approval from local citizens, because that's the first step towards the abyss of no-return. Campaign, protest, vote, donate, setup insurance companies, lobby, whatever. But if you approve murdering a CEO because his company doesn't behave the way you think they should behave, then you are not a healthy human being in my opinion and nothing could change that.
As you can see, I had a hard time keeping them short (I mean what is this, "Bible for Babies"?) but the one I had the greatest difficulty with was "Thou Shalt Not Murder", which ran to nearly 2 hours.
A few people told me the next day that they watched the whole thing and found it enlightening but that due to its length it would remain largely unseen so they asked me to make a shorter version.
I did. Just 20 minutes this one.
The jist of it is that according to the Torah we are all murderers.
We are all responsible for our brothers' blood.
This concept is so foreign to modern society that it must sound like I'm making it up (cue "what about amalikites!" witticisms) so I read and translated word for word the Torah's instructions regarding the Eglah Arufah, the neck-chopped calf.
I took it a step further and, in a post shorter than this comment, prefaced that video (which ultimately became my most-watched video of all time) with the explanation that Biblical Monotheism's overriding point is: Each Person is An Equal Manifestation of God.
That's why it has always been intolerant of systems that claim otherwise -- intolerant to the point of the sword.
This is built in to Christianity, Islam, and the worldwide consensus today. It was once a radical idea but it is now accepted as a given and celebrated via the ritual of "voting", a ritual that serves no end but which keeps the dream alive.
I explained it better there than i have above. I've removed the paywall to make it freely accessible for anyone interested.
> We live in a society of laws and have a justice [sic] system for a reason
Okay, what if you disagree with the reason? Certainly one good reason to obey the laws of the state is fear of retribution, but when the benefit outweighs the cost, it is only inertia (and probably cowardice) that keeps you from taking justice (ACTUAL justice, not the poor imitation the legal system produces) into your own hands.
I was born in the Soviet Union which was formed on the basis of such ideas. They've successfully exiled, imprisoned, executed or impoverished every single rich person in the Russian Empire, from rich farmers (see: kulaks) to the Royal Highness the Emperor. Unfortunately for the "common people", once the "rich bastards" were taken care of, those newly in power didn't stop and ended up killing more Soviet citizens than the Nazis did during WWII.
Be very, very careful what you wish for, my friend. You'd be surprised as to how easy "CEOs get extrajudicial mob punishment" turns into "my entire family is now in the Gulag".
Wait a minute, aren't YOU the one arguing essentially that anyone who defies the state and its laws is evil? I am arguing that one's personal sense of justice ought to take precedence. What lesson are you drawing from your personal experience relating to the Soviet Union to endorse leaving it up to the so-called "justice system"?
I am not a communist. Or a socialist. Or any flavor of left-wing. So preaching to me about their evils isn't productive.
I won't repeat it here so as not to appear to be spamming but YOU would personally enjoy my video on The 6th Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Murder) which I unpaywalled and linked to in my own response to Nikita (whise view I understand and respect even though I ultimately side with yours).
C'mon, you know perfectly well what I've meant, and the difference between the legal systems of Soviet Union and the US. Shameful discourse all around. But I guess that's about as much as what one could expect from the kind of people who cheer on a cold-blooded murder on the streets of New York.
How is this shameful discourse? A *very important person* got shot by a man who held a grudge against him. Isn't it worth examining what caused the grudge and perhaps work to find a way to address the problem behind the grudge? If the victim was shot was a mobster, and an ordinary person shot him, the media would be cheering. But this victim is supposedly an upstanding citizen and a member in good standing of the Brotherhood of CEOs. The fact that he ran an enterprise with some sketchy behaviors seems to be obscured by his CEOness.
Well then I guess the majority of the American people are psychopaths and you're in a weird minority of people who can't recognize the equivalence between making decisions you know will kill large numbers of statistical people and the sort of murder that our laws will prosecute.
Is it a majority in the "real" world? I'd be curious to see some research on this. I'm very much hopeful that this is primarily a phenomenon against terminally online people, many of whom are trolls, clickbait drama queens (see: Taylor Lorenz) or just deranged.
I don't impose physical suffering on anyone. How am I a psychopath to call out the callousness of executives who make decisions about who will and who will not receive care? It seems like what we've got here is the media and virtue-washing a bunch of corporate psychopaths. The fact that someone got angry enough to kill one of these execs shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone — and I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.
Yes, it is unfortunate that people are so cowardly that they fall for it. I am not referring to Nikita here. He shares hus identity and his reasons quite eloquently. I understand where he (personally) is coming from and empathize with it.
The same can not be said for all of the American-born statists who seem to believe that our law-writing law school graduates are taking dictation from God.
I'd guess the actual percentages to be somewhat lower than shown in that graph -- makes me wonder about the specific polling that it's based on -- but I still agree with Hanania's point.
The comments sections of every single video on the topic on both the right and left make it seem like very much the majority opinion. If it wasn't the majority opinion I'd expect for *any* of the top comments to condemn the assassin. Instead there's a pretty clear consensus rather or not you sort by most popular or by new.
Also if you just look online the people celebrating his death aren't just terminally online people, it's also people like the boomer normies who still use facebook. Like I've actively been searching out right wing media and stuff on facebook to gauge normie opinions here, because this is making me very excited about people getting some genuine class consciousness. Also anecdotally literally everyone I know in RL feels the same way (including the non politically engaged), but of course we both probably have our own filter bubbles.
Would absolutely love to see a poll on this as well.
If you had a button you could use to kill people in some hypothetical scenario:
Then which injustices against you or your loved one's would you consider egregious enough to press a button to get vengeance against the perpetrator? What if you know that you pressing that button is the only way that person will face any consequences whatsoever for the injustice they committed against your family?
Since as I said in my other comment I doubt you'd feel the same way if you personally lost family to the policies this guy oversaw.
I definitely don't think that this is indicative at all of being horrible or a psychopath. I think there are a few different categories of response:
1) Condemning the violence, but indulging in a bit of harmless schadenfreude - "couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke"
2) Believing that this was a rare, justifiable exception to our justified taboos against violence, like a victim of abuse killing their abuser
3) Believing that the possibility of mob justice is actually a useful safety valve for a law-based society, playing an important role in stopping people who cause incredible harm while using (possible immoral) means to stay within the existing system of laws
I actually think all three are morally justifiable. I don't know enough about this particular case to determine whether 2) fits, and 3) is very context-dependent, but I think all three are perfectly ethical beliefs to hold.
> I was thinking about the Brian Thompson assassination. The media seems to be shocked — shocked! — that some people are expressing schadenfreude that he was killed.
I've personally been loving it and hoping it's the start of a trend. I've always wanted assassination markets for airline executives. Airlines are accountable to nobody, there's no alternative because every airline maximally screws their customers, they're in bed with politics at the top level and heavily regulatorily captured, so nobody can really compete, and there's no way to deliver clear feedback about bad practices. It's a clear case where assassination markets for airline executives would align incentives and create better products, positive externalities, and social benefits to all.
But you know, health insurance executives are even better! Their literal JOB is to kill sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line! They're actually worse than airline executives! I'm astonished nobody has done this before, and I heartily applaud the fact that it's happening.
Also, I hope it serves as a shining example of what to do if you ever get a terminal diagnosis - be the change you want to see in the world. There's probably nothing that would move the US to a more reasonable healthcare system sooner than for this to become commonplace.
I haven't flown since 2020, and am disinclined to do so, as the experience isn't pleasant, the rates seem excessive, and I can find alternatives, including not traveling long distances. The free market is speaking, for those that will hear.
Airline executives? WTF? Airlines are extremely competitive. Their profit margins are razor thin and there is lots of consumer choice, and lots of available information about on time performance etc. Unlike healthcare, airfares are cheaper than they were 20 years ago even with rising fuel costs. And the FTC just blocked Spirit from merging with JetBlue and now they are about to declare bankruptcy, how is that 'in bed with politics?'
> And the FTC just blocked Spirit from merging with JetBlue and now they are about to declare bankruptcy, how is that 'in bed with politics?'
Ah, the politics line is more about non-US airline carriers, because this is a global problem, not a US-only problem.
I haven't even been inside the US for over a year, and traveling in the US is generally fine because you can fly JSX or drive.
I'm talking about all the zero-accountability, customer-hostile mediocrities like AirAsia, Vietjet, Cebu Pacific, Thai Lion, and similar in those cases.
You know who's bad and never gets called out, though? The airline executives that waste hundreds of thousands or millions of person-hours per year with customer-hostile practices, inefficiency, and rules that steal many tens of thousands of flights and millions of dollars from their customers.
A 76 year life is roughly 666k hours. They're actuarially killing somebody with every 666k hours wasted. A US life is $7-10M. Every $7-10M they take in missed flights and self-serving rules that net them money at the customer's expense is another actuarial human life.
But sure, I'm the bad guy for wanting to hold them accountable somehow, when there's currently zero way to do this. I'm fine with that.
I guess it boils down to whether you think corporate sociopaths are a protected class.
A former 800-pound gorilla corporation in Silicon Valley used to pay retainers to all the major law firms in California to avoid legal actions. Conflict of interest prevented those firms from taking hostile clients. The 800-pound gorilla saw that 10+ million dollars as well spent. Money can distort the legal system in all sorts of ways.
This is true and it's a significant problem, but I don't see why you would expect regular assassinations of corporate executives by outraged people to make it better. The 800 lb gorilla can pay for expensive lawyers but they can't hire private security?
(the text of this tweet is "just fyi this lady is also a healthcare CEO who denies a lot of claims", in reply to a video of Dafna Yoran, the prosecutor in the Daniel Penny case)
I think you could in fact consider the UHC execs murderers, if you believe that UHC operates in such a way that it trades off more human health and life for profit than a health insurance organization in its position ought to. The problem is, under that standard, you could also consider a lot of people who work in various bureaucracies - such as prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office - to be effectively murderers, or otherwise operating the bureaucracy in a way inimical to human life and freedom.
If there is real political disagreement about whether some bureaucracy is harmful or not, it is good if there are still norms against randomly killing the people involved in that bureaucracy without actually establishing laws about what the bureaucracy can and cannot legitimately do, and having a legal process to see whether a given bureaucrat actually broke those laws. Your UHC is someone else's Manhattan District Attorney's office, and pretty much any way the state exercises power (health insurance is a heavily regulated industry) involves making life-or-death decisions for somebody.
> The problem is, under that standard, you could also consider a lot of people who work in various bureaucracies - such as prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office - to be effectively murderers, or otherwise operating the bureaucracy in a way inimical to human life and freedom.
Because once you start down this road, you would be unpleasantly surprised how rapidly the list of people who "operate the bureaucracy in away inimical to human life and freedom" includes, oh I don't know, Indian postdocs at the University or Maryland, as a very random example.
Truly a random example. No idea what would have prompted one to think of such a bizarre and implausible thing.
How does this differ in principle from laws being so broad that everyone commits "three felonies a day" and prosecutors having enough discretion that anyone can be convicted of something whenever the government wishes?
"How does this differ in principle from laws being so broad that everyone commits "three felonies a day" and prosecutors having enough discretion that anyone can be convicted of something whenever the government wishes?"
Because we have agreed to vest prosecutors, as duly elected/ appointed representatives of our established legal system, with the authority to do so. And you are very not likely to get killed by the system, at least not without significant legal protections.
If you want a legal system where "people" can decide that those in powerful bureaucracies can be executed, I am begging you to consider that to A) you are very much a member of a powerful bureaucracy, and b) the "people" who will be making decisions to execute the bureaucrats, are as DiKotter noted in his study of the Chinese revolution, far more likely to be the equivalent of meth heads who think its fun to kill people as wise, intellectual readers of ACX.
The legitimacy arguments of "duly elected", "legal authority" etc. don't mean anything to me. I don't accord the state privileged moral status, and judge its actions as I would any other organization's.
You're right that my class interests are actually aligned quite closely with billionaires CEOs and the like, and that a socialist/methhead revolution like Pol Pot's or Mao's, would be really bad for me personally. I don't judge such a thing likely to occur in the US.
In the world that IS, I estimate that I'm much more likely to be railroaded by government prosecutors than lynched by a Reign of Terror.
I'd argue that this doesn't make the point that you want. Since arguably without political violence we wouldn't have basically any modern forms of welfare or worker protections.
I think the bipartisan enthusiasm around this guys death (check the youtube comments on right wing channels, it's absolutely bipartisan) is a good example of the possibility of political violence to unite people across political divides against elites they can directly see screwing them over.
Here's the nuance: he and others like him bribed politicians, so everything he did was legal, and they had a guaranteed racket which made them millions to slash American life expectancy. I'm tired of "nuance" being used to justify evil, and I haven't forgotten what happened to health insurance stocks the moment they killed medicare for all.
His fate, and the admirable refusal of Americans to identify the killer, gives me a rare bit of hope for the country where I was born.
Posted this under the wrong sub-thread by mistake. Moved it here.
I was afraid I had slandered the upstanding E-Staff of United HealthCare, so I did a little research.
1. UNH (United Healt Group, the parent company) is being sued for making an auto-denier AI program "known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients's doctors that the expenses were medically necessary." This directly resulted in multiple elderly deaths in Midwest.
2. Despite having a market cap of $515B and ranking 18th in the nation's most valued companies, UNH was found by a government watchdog to have defrauded the Federal Government of $3.2B in extra federal payments for health-related assessments.
3. UNH is also famous for the Ingenix lawsuit. Ingenix was/is a subsidiary of UNH, and in the late '00s. They used a database to improperly under-reimburse physicians and hospitals for services. The case led to a significant settlement in 2009 with the New York Attorney General's Office, requiring UnitedHealth to pay $50M to establish an independent database for calculating out-of-network charges. This database was intended to eliminate conflicts of interest and ensure fairer reimbursements.
4. And in a related class-action lawsuit, UnitedHealth reached a $350M settlement, with funds allocated to affected consumers and providers, attorneys' fees, and administrative costs. This settlement aimed to compensate individuals who were under-reimbursed due to Ingenix's alleged data manipulation.
I'm sorry I said mean things about UHC and UNH. They're clearly focused on shareholder value and thus should be praised (even though they cut a few corners and caused some needless suffering along the way).
Sounds like the system is working as intended and the government is successfully curtailing their breaches of the law when they happen. How on Earth do we get from "maybe we should audit UnitedHealthcare more often" to "maybe we should approve of maniacs committing murder on our streets"?
we live in a world where people are routinely imprisoned for decades over far smaller amounts of money
I don't believe a fine is nearly adequate recompense for the things Thompson did, and the fines in question, given the US government's history in this regard, would have been written off as a cost of doing business.
A functional justice system would've prevented Thompson from freely walking the streets in the first place; in a just world, he would've been in jail awaiting trial on multiple charges of murder, not using the corporate veil to escape justice.
Of course, the wealthy do have significantly more influence over legislation... But that's just a part of our wonderful little democracy that's cherished by all, isn't it?
Under 18 U.S. Code § 1111, second-degree murder is described (I paraphrase) as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought — but without the premeditation required for first-degree murder. The act has to be intentional but not planned, and it can involve a reckless disregard for human life — such as extreme recklessness or *depraved indifference*.
It seems like denying care to someone who will otherwise die fits the definition of second-degree murder. They're denying care with malice aforethought, and they have a depraved indifference for whether the patient dies. Of course, IANAL, but we've have few lawyers following this substack. I'd be curious why UHC's actions don't rise to a standard of 2nd degree murder.
Don't you have the issue here that your theoretical swings easily both ways, given the fact that the real world is nuanced? You're setting up a hypothethical that doesn't work to illuminate either point.
On a warm summer day, and the homeless person died due to some unforeseen freak of weather? Seems unlikely that there's any link at all between the act of 'say no' and 'they die'
On a cold winter midnight day, as a snowstorm rolls in, and some guy knocks on a door and begs for a room for the night because the car he normally lives in broke down and it's freezing out? Well, yeah, strictly speaking, the actual fact of turning them away is fully intentional murder.
On a normally temperate day, and the homeless person recently moved out of their room in this hypothethical hotel, but now it's snowing and they want back in? Maybe, maybe not. At what point does a manager going "Well, sorry, you paid for 14 days, it's been 14 days, off you go" link directly with "oh whupsie, he died?"
You could argue the case - you will argue the case in court, certainly, if it then turns out that this particular hotel has a history of providing shelter to homeless people at specific prices and then always kick them out during December, during snow-storms, when room heating bills are apt to rise.
Your hypothethical hotel lets any homeless in the city pay them 25 dollars to get a piece of paper that promises them they can sleep in a warm room if temperatue drops below a certain point, so long as they pay the 25 dollars every month, and some homeless do take this deal, then show up, and the conscierge checks the temperature and sees that it swings to -5.5, the contract says anything past -5 is 'cold enough', but when you aggregate together the average temperature over the last 8 hours a freak sunspot has actually made it so the reading could reasonably be +3.3 which is above the require threshold, and anyway, it's dawn soon, so even if it says -5.1 now or -4.9 or -7, it's going to warm up soon, so away you go, your room claim is denied this time, try again for another room another night, and then in in the morning it turns out people died.
Is that murder? Is it not murder? Is it reasonably statistically true to at least gesture that it has certain murder-like characteristics?
Like, we can all play the game of WHAT IF X, but your WHAT IF X here at least doesn't seem to help any argument much.
I mean you can shade it all you want. The fact is that the hotel owner has no legal duty to provide a service that was not contracted for and is not legally guilty of any crime and it is pretty unlikely that anyone would encourage his assassination.
But I think you'll find your premises are still in error. Your hypothethical hotel manager may not have a legal duty to offer services that are not contracted for, sure, but why is that your sudden new line in the sand? The corporation may not be culpable, in the form of its manager on the ground, in some cases, depending on how the courts rule it. But the private citizen the manager also is is certainly going to get dinged when the corpses stack up at his door. Remember, in your example, the causal link is direct: turning them away kills them. That's a murder, mate, and we tend to think of that as a crime. Can't plead "not guilty" when your bloody hand is on the homless-crushing machine.
Stuff like this is why we have debates about... stuff like this.
You're functionally a little too certain of the self evident obviousness of your correctness. It's what I was trying to nudge you towards accepting, and maybe, uh, stop doing. Asides about hypothetical hotel management best practice doesn't actually illuminate anything, so I'm willing to throw shade for it because you brought it up
( Aside: if multiple corpses turned up all relating to the actions and activities of a single hotel or hotel manager, it seems extremely likely they would, in fact, be calls for their assassination. I'm unsure how you expect that to work, here. People keep dying once they enter the periphery of this entity, and society at large, legal or otherwise, is hypothetically meant not to care about it? That's a certainly... a novel take )
Based on this rationale it would be OK to assassinate the heads of every government or at least every governmental agency that offers "universal healthcare" because every one of those systems explicitly denies some life saving treatment based on rationing.
Then you must be a murderer too for refusing to pay for a terminally ill people’s healthcare yourself. Or more likely you don’t understand the definition of murder.
Is it murder to kill someone by denying them care to which they were never entitled to in the first place? Because it's not like they're just randomly denying claims without justification, it's all there in the fine print. ...And there is a lot of fine print. Still, it's not their problem if their customers can't hire a lawyer.
In corporate health insurance, there's no "fine print" to read. You get what the company gives you. And the problem is that UHC is denying or delaying paying out legitimate claims under the contract of their engagement.
As has been noted elsewhere, that's 90% of the times *that someone said "hey, I think the system made a mistake here and could you maybe double-check that?"*.
Not 90% of all denials. I haven't seen evidence that it would be 9% or even 0.9% of all denials.
Many Thanks! Also, in the case where the denied care is life-critical, the dead patient can't pursue the appeal, and only some of them will have had relatives with the legal standing and the endurance to pursue it.
I've read horror story after horror story after horror story. I am _very_ skeptical that the 32% of medical claims that UHC denied were _actually_ medically unnecessary.
Except very often the claim is something they are absolutely required to cover, after all that's the reason the persons actual doctor requesting it be covered in the first place. However, they know that for instance if they deny claims on knowingly BS grounds then some of those people will die before they can overturn that decision, which is the best case scenario because it means they pay out nothing.
I'm a physician and would like to make it perfectly clear that no physician has ANY idea what your insurance does or doesn't cover. Insurance benefits are vastly complex and every policy, even from the same company, is different. For that matter you can't even figure it out on the front end because you don't have access to the drug formulary so basically we just order what we think is appropriate and then wait to see if it's covered, just like you.
ISTM that the price system is totally broken at the consumer level in health care. I cannot find out what anything will cost me or the insurance company, I routinely get a weird mystery bill I don't understand (spend an hour on the phone and you can probably get an explanation and maybe get it reversed) after normal medical stuff. I don't have an incentive to care how much anything costs the insurance company, and also all the prices anyone quotes for anything are made-up numbers with no relevance to reality at all.
Are the insurance companies threatening to break hospitals that accept patients without health insurance? If not, your arguments are directed entirely at the doctors who won't treat them without being paid, even though they still could.
In a perfect world, I would have preferred that healthcare (insurers, hospitals, pharma) be held to strict ethical and legal standards. But dog forbid we inhibit free enterprise! Of course, countries with "socialized" healthcare have their own problems. The wife of an acquaintance of mine who lived in Denmark died because their primary care physician wouldn't approve an emergency procedure. I don't remember all the details, but the primary care physician acts as a gatekeeper for all emergency and specialist medical treatments. The primary care physicians are employed by a national health authority, and that national health authority rewards stinginess. Danes can purchase supplemental private insurance to cover the gaps, but I guess my acquaintance and his wife hadn't purchased extra insurance.
From that link...
"It is true, no doubt, that his successor will continue in his footsteps, and kill many more people themselves, because this is the nature of the business they are in, which is not the “healthcare” business but, rather, parasitic upon it, and which derives its profit not from providing healthcare but from withholding it, and demanding a handsome tribute for this “service” – but this successor, I suspect, will be somewhat more cautious in how they go about their business, how many they consign, for the sake of the margin, to expiration in slow agony. They will think twice, sometimes, about the decisions they make, not out of some remarkable rejuvenation of their shriveled ethical faculty, but out of simple, animal fear, a fear which they will deny feeling but will feel nonetheless."
Im in the last days of discounting my hard biological science fiction novel that might be of interest to folks in this community. It explores a distant post industrial civilisation built entirely on biological technology. Ebook on amazon but also on kobo - https://www.amazon.com/Our-Vitreous-Womb-Book-1-4-ebook/dp/B0C7H9N1K3
A while ago I predicted that a) the left wing media would pust "dont do thanksgiving your trump supporting family are nazis" but b) this probably wouldnt work and c) thanksgiving is radically important for political stability as political insults and violence have to be constrained to what you will say to family
I actually know of someone who skipped Thanksgiving after feeling depressed about Trump winning the election, but this person already had good reason to feel depressed and to want to be elsewhere.
...Man, you really scraped the bottom of the barrel for that article, huh? Though, I'm honestly surprised you couldn't find an article that wasn't from some TV tabloid I've never even heard of, and even that article really doesn't support your point. I really expected you to find at least one tone-deaf opinion piece by some activist arguing for cancelling Thanksgiving or something stupid like that.
Ugh, anomie. I'm reporting this comment. It's a cruel personal attack on OP with no substantive content unless one counts your unsupported wisp of a claim that the article OP mentions doesn't support their point.
It's a personal attack not because anomie says OP is wrong, but because anomie's criticism doesn't say crisply that OP's source is weak evidence, especially in light of the absence of supporting evidence from from much more important sources -- NYT etc. It's an extended riff about the dumbness and lameness of OP's choice of sources, and implies that's characteristic of OP.
This would be our point of disagreement. I think you're reading a bit too much into this because anomie's "2edgy4me zoomer" posting style grates on you (which, fair, tbh).
I watched the article. It shows some TV personality saying they got banned from their family Thanksgiving, another TV personality saying people should put their politics aside to be with their family, two random people who say they're skipping Thanksgiving to travel or watch movies, and a "psychologist" at the end that recommends that people make it clear to their families that they will not tolerate politics at the table.
...I have no idea how they could interpret that as "dont do thanksgiving your trump supporting family are nazis". This is just a rerun of the same Thanksgiving drama that's been going on for decades.
That's irrelevant to my complaint, because it's after the fact. Your original post was dumb and cruel. Meanwhile, in the course of justifying your view of the article you are grabbing the chance to stick new little needles into Monkyyy. How about you just shut your pie hole?
I found monkyyys post to be extremely low value (as many, many of his posts are).
It's an inflammatory subject, he's boasting about his ability to predict something, and then using an extremely low quality source to back up his assertion, and the source doesn't even back up his assertion!
While anomies response was not kind, it was both true and necessary.
Your way of saying it, had you said it to OP: "I found your post to be extremely low value. It's an inflammatory subject, and you're boasting about your ability to predict something, and then using an extremely low quality source to back up your assertion, and the source doesn't even back up his assertion!"
This would count as true & necessary, but not kind. It is, however, civil. Getting to be unkind if you're making a good point doesn't mean civility goes out the door and you have a license to mock, belittle and sneer. Jesus Christ, I hate this group sometimes. It's like some of you don't get it that other posters are sentient beings. Go save some shrimp.
Is this something that should figure into peace negotiations in the region? E.g. should the Muslim majority states in question pay reparations of $4X to the Mizrahi Jews to drop all claims to their lost property, then Israel pays reparations of $1X to the Palestinians to drop all claims to Israeli land, and then everyone agrees to stop killing each other?
The Palestinian reaction to the Trump plan made it pretty clear that more money doesn't solve anything from their perspective, and no amount of reparations for the Israelis would make it worthwhile to drop security requirements. (You can't spend money when you're dead.)
Those who are pro-peace would easily drop any monetary considerations to achieve it. Those who are opposed would not find compensation relevant.
The negotiations should be whatever people are willing to accept. Peace should be an end to past hostilities. It's not about what's right, it's about what people will live with, and what they'll die over.
Truthfully, I find the estimated amounts highly suspect and my guess is it's deployed far more as a rhetorical weapon to justify disposession of the Palestinians as opposed to anything else.
The fact the estimated value of the "stolen" land tripled from $100 billion to $300 billion in just a single year, for one, is a big sign of opportunistic or politically-motivated people making things up. Even this link from an Israeli think tank cited as a source by the Wiki page linked above mention the $300 billion estimate with an eyebrow raised, and when it gives actual figures for seized wealth the figure are much lower: https://jcpa.org/article/the-palestinian-refugee-issue-rhetoric-vs-reality/
I guess I should’ve been clearer - I meant the land numbers cited in GT’s comment. Besides for possible credibility issues based on the 100-300 change, any reason to doubt the land numbers? It doesn’t seem outlandish (no pun intended) to me, given the size of Israel as compared to the other countries.
I don't think it should be accounted for at all, let alone factored into current geopolitics. History is messy and practically and meaningfully there's a statute of limitations to claims. Someone's grandfather may have exploited someone else's grandfather, but life moves on. This is especially so as identities get messy over time.
What about mixed Mizrahi-Ashkenazi Jews? Do they get reimbursed? Is it proportional to their Mizrahi share? Who pays for this? Current inhabitants of Muslim countries? Only Muslim inhabitants of those countries? Descendants of people who used to live in those countries?
This messiness relates to why terms like "Jews indigenous to various parts of the Middle East" are messy, as is the term "indigenous" in general.
Middle Eastern Jews are heavily admixed with Jews who fled Spain. Are they then not "'indigenous?" But wait, the Spanish Jews probably had Levantine admixture themselves. Indigenous?
I believe the figure refers mostly to land stolen since 1948, e.g. during the 1950s, 1960s etc so even if the land was stolen from people who are a mixture of Mizrahim and Sephardim, they would still be owed reparations.
Of course you can say that the 1960s were so long ago that there should be no reparation, but then under that argument, can't Israel claim the whole West Bank?
"Of course you can say that the 1960s were so long ago that there should be no reparation, but then under that argument, can't Israel claim the whole West Bank?"
IMO this is a key point of confusion in this whole mess. Israel not claiming the entire West Bank isn't some concession to the Palestinians.
If Israel annexes the West Bank either they let the Palestinians stay and grant them citizenship, which threatens Israel's status as a Jewish state, or they don't, in which case they're definitely an apartheid state whatever you think of that label now. Either of those are non-starters to Israel.
The remaining options are to give up the land (two state solution), or to try and keep the land while having enough legal haziness around the situation to avoid "apartheid" charges, and the Palestinians are a ruled-over people with no rights (status quo).
The issue with the occupation is about *ongoing* injustice, no reparations-like reasoning needed. You can be 100% against the concept of reparations and the status quo is still wrong.
First, the point of "mixture of Mizrahim and Sephardim" isn't that they aren't due reparations but that the term "indigenous" is sloppy and speaks to the messiness of litigating historic claims by populations against each other.
Second, your comments seem to conflate personal property and national borders.
Third, historic property claims just aren't that significant in the big scheme of things. There's abundant literature showing the persistence of status in the face of massive exogenous shocks over very small numbers of generations.
Descendants of Jews exploited by Muslims in the 1960s are likely hardly worse off, if at all, than had the exploitation not occurred (indeed, it's quite likely that they're better off, if the discrimination spurred them to emigrate earlier than they would have otherwise to places where they ended up being able to better capitalize off their skills).
Fourth, as another commenter pointed out (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80703577), issues of ultimate justice are hardly the most relevant factors to geopolitics. In reality, everything is complex and messy in the present, and the past is even more so. No settlement of any issue will ultimately be fair, with that all taken into account. But that doesn't matter much. The goal of peace negotiations is peace - whatever will end hostilities.
When it comes to Israel and the Arabs, peace agreements have been possible in accordance with facts on the ground and the reality of the present, without concern for historic justice.
Whether such an agreement would be possible with Palestinians is a different question, but the operative factor isn't some cosmic tally card recording historic injustices.
No, history is an endless stream of wars, anything about the long dead is just continuing violence. Dont punish the children for the sins of the father; unless you want to hear about your great grand parents crimes.
Not yet! We are mostly surrounded by businesses that don't really pay much attention to us and are happy about bringing activity to their area. We have one residential neighbor who we talked a lot to, and they seem pretty happy with us (they used to run a preschool but are now retiring).
I do live my days being kind of terrified of the City of Berkeley directing its ominous eyes on us and adding some terrible restrictions to our activities, but so far things have been chill.
I’m a fan of LessWrong and would be interested in donating for the sake of the website, however I feel less sure about helping fund the campus.
If I understand the fundraising post and some of the comments correctly, the campus costs (more than?) 1M$ per year (?) in interest payments alone (please correct me if I’m wrong). Assuming a 5% interest rate, this amounts to 20M$ property value, which seems realistic for a nice location in Berkeley. However I wonder what justified taking such a large loan of you are in an unstable funding situation?
I hope my question is not rude. I just feel like my favourite internet box is jeopardized unnecessarily because of “risky real state gambling”.
This makes sense! We definitely wouldn't have done it without buy-in from funders at the time. We had strong support from Open Philanthropy, FTX Future Fund and Jaan Tallinn (who ultimately financed our mortgage).
I think at the time it was definitely a huge risk, but the outlook on the funding situation looked a lot more optimistic, and risk taking made sense. Ultimately we did pull it off, and as you can see from the fundraiser, Lighthaven is reasonably likely to financially break even on rental revenue soon, so I am happy about the choice we made, but if things had went worse, we definitely would be in a tight spot.
If I had predicted the less rosy funding landscape for x-risk reduction work and rationality community building stuff, I probably wouldn't have taken a risk this big, but it did work work, and I think in the long run will stabilize rather than destabilize our funding situation.
I'm a microbiome scientist, about to quit my job at a big probiotics company and spin out my own thing.
We're going to cure hypercholesterolemia—or at least some subset of it. (But a pretty substantial one. 1 in 5 people is missing the gut bacterium that ordinarily enables you to excrete cholesterol in your stool. All signs indicate that the absence of this bacterium, caused by antibiotics, is a major driver of high cholesterol.)
There's only one strain of bacterium in public strain banks that performs the chemical reaction in question (conversion of cholesterol to coprostanol) and ZERO human-derived ones, despite the fact that coprostanol has been on scientists' radars since 1896.
But that's about to change. I had a lab of my own for the last year, and during that time I cultured a coprostanol-producing bacterium from my own fecal sample—I have a spectacular lipid profile. Tested it on myself for an n-of-1 safety trial, and it passes at least that. So now the plan is basically to do what Lantern is doing, but with heart disease (#1 killer of humans!) instead of cavities, and no genetic modification.
Unfortunately, the lab was in Switzerland and my visa expired in September—so we're back in the US now and I'm trying to raise the funds to do this by the new year. If you're interested in helping make this possible, shoot me an email at SDSkolnick@gmail.com.
So other than access to the experimental probiotic treatment that you plan to develop, would you recommend eating a lot of cholesterol in order to encourage growth of this kind of bacteria? Is that the best that can be said about recommendations, other than taking the soon to be developed experimental treatment?
If you wanna get your shit sequenced I can look at your results and tell you whether you do or not. (No guarantees with commercial services like Flore or whatever, you gotta at least be able to get me raw 16s data)
That’s pretty difficult these days isn’t it? The rate of obsolescence is quite fast these days.
I have to say that any profession that requires you to be on site and do something is an advantage. I think of things like plumbers. It is absolutely immune to outsourcing.
Our HVAC system was only heating / cooling the upstairs, not the downstairs. The cheap HVAC company we used last time caused multiple gas leaks. This time we got a quote from the expensive but reputable HVAC company to fix the problem, 7500 dollars. I had to get my ass out of bed, spend a weekend learning about air systems and flow rates whether the problem was poor insulation, bad ducts, or what, and then finally dig around in the fiberglass insulation until I found the damper lever. Ultimately, the fix was to move the lever from "Don't heat or cool the downstairs" to "Do heat or cool the downstairs."
In retrospect, I would have quite liked to pay a real expert $500 an hour to solve this expediently, given that now that I have taken the time to learn the ins and outs of an HVAC system, I can see that "expediently" for an expert should have been ~80 seconds + transit time. Alas, paying for expertise in the trades is growing into a spectacular market for lemons / actual swap-the-shells-find-the-marble level scam.
No information source I found was helpful, and in fact most were actively unhelpful / trying to sell me something in a way that was malicious. I very nearly replaced all the ducting myself on the basis that all information sources suggested that the real solution was to let a professional replace either the ducting or the insulation, and that doing it myself would be ~half the cost at the price of risking doing a bad job that would be expensive for a professional to fix. I almost failed to challenge this frame.
Thinking about the problem from first principles + Crawling in and physically disassembling things until I understood the problem let me find the actual solution.
Paranoid thought: Given the past gas leaks (I assume that means that you have a gas combustion powered heating system, like mine), do you have carbon monoxide detectors? Combustion (or partial combustion) products can also leak... :-(
We have carbon monoxide detectors. Thank you for checking, this is an important question and would have been life saving in many of the possible worlds that produce my parent comment.
Thanks for the link! It's unfortunate to hear that this is widespread and not just a skill issue on my end- I still hold out hope that there's some "contracting" stat I could level up so that I don't have to do everything myself.
I worked as a small scale, general contractor and carpenter, etc. for quite a while in New York City. HVAC contractors are really a nightmare.. I have been screwed so many times I can’t remember. In the house I currently live in with my wife the duct sizes throughout the house are incorrect for the AC unit on the roof which totally freezes up every summer because the airflow isn’t great enough. Ripping the house apart to replace the ducts is not really a feasible option. It’s incredibly disappointing that the company would’ve done that out of the gate.
I'll note that home builders all over the country tend to skimp badly on HVAC. I had a townhouse in Florida, built in 2014. I bought in 2017. And the AC condenser coil had, by the time I moved out in 2020, been replaced *3 times* because they'd specced the unit with a brand notorious for the thinnest, cheapest copper without any kind of anti-corrosion coating. Thankfully we were able to skate under the warranty (maybe stretching it a time or two) so it only cost umpteen dollars in labor, thankfully from a well-regarded local guy.
Yes, very irritating. And my hands are dry and chapped from winter so my Mac doesn't recognize my thumbprint & I have to type in my one-ring-to-rule-then-all password.
If someone has their own domain name the substack app requires you to re-authenticate for each new domain name, which makes sense to me. But maybe it's not supposed to work like that.
I still just can’t get behind diverting $ from human causes to shrimp welfare. I’ve heard the arguments in favor, and I suppose I just care more about my species. Am I wrong?
You're not objectively wrong, but that does lower the weight of any moral objections you might have in the event that an AI actively tries to destroy humanity.
Orthogonality thesis! You don't have to care about the shrimp, but shouldn't necessarily be surprised to encounter arbitrarily smart agents who do care about the shrimp.
But the fact that you could imagine agents caring about lots of things doesn't mean that it's consistent with the reflective values of most humans not to care about shrimp. Indeed, as I argue in the article and elsewhere, it's not https://benthams.substack.com/p/rebutting-every-objection-to-giving. The orthogonality thesis isn't a blanket excuse not to do philosophy. And note, I had a debate with William about whether it's good to shrimp welfare, and over the course of it he ended up biting the bullet on it not being valuable to shut down a baby torture facility that created, tortured, and killed quadrillions of babies, if doing so would cost one penny.
So you can operate a facility that creates, tortures, and kills quadrillions of babies for nothing? Because the cost of one penny to shut it down is more than it costs to run it?
Man, that is some efficient technology! Can we get it in the real world, or is this all just spherical cow world thought experiment? Because I think we could rephrase the argument that it would cost more to stop torturing quadrillions of shrimp than to keep on doing what we're doing in the shrimp fishing and farming industries, you know?
I don't think so, but I also think giving to almost any charity would feel miserable and burdensome if you had to think about all the other charities you were implicitly rejecting by giving to that one. Most people only donate ~1% of their money to charity in general, and are more motivated by being excited about a specific cause than by fulfilling some general pledge, so I think they mostly don't funge. I donate more money to human causes than shrimp, but I also just find it exciting to be able to help one million of something.
I feel like you and the linked article are failing to take the logic being used to it's logical conclusion. Which is that suffering is something which serves a clear evolutionary function, and that needn't be very complicated (indeed you have reasons to expect smarter animals to have certain incentives to evolve to feel pain less intensely, counter to most people's intuitions):
This is by far the most satisfying take I've read in ages. Reminds me of when an ASCPA activist stopped me on the street to ask for donations at exactly the wrong moment in 2016. I burst into tears and offered to donate to his cause if he'd donate to mine, and then I went home and did my part because I wanted to live in a world where we stand by our word and because I figured it wouldn't lead me to donating less to causes I care more about anyway.
Are you an effective altruist? You seem like one of the people with the sort of psychological makeup who would be helped by it (as opposed to the many other people with the psychological makeup to be harmed by it)
No, but kinda in the same way that I’m not a rationalist. Some combination of ‘keep your identity small’ and the communities feeling like they’re in the uncanny valley for me, mostly. There are aspects that really resonate with me, and others that very much do not.
That’s fair enough and I can appreciate your disposition. It is an interesting project and I don’t mean to diminish its virtue. Personally, every charity dollar I give outside of human causes goes to dogs and cats because, well, I love them :)
It's hard to find any good analysis on Syria. What are the chances that Bashar is dead? There's no proof he's in Russia, and Putin has an incentive to claim he's safe in Russia. Who's been financing and arming the rebels? If Turkey, why? Were the rebels supported by Israel, with the intention of cutting off the weapons flow to Hezbollah? What happens now? The consequences are completely unpredictable, but it's easy to imagine disintegration and anarchy.
I've been wondering the same thing after not paying too close attention to Syria in the last decade and then seeing everything change over the weekend. Stable seeming can deteriorate very fast is a useful lesson to get reminded of
The best case realistic scenario I see is... an ultra-conservative, repressive but stable Islamist country, akin to Afghanistan under the Taliban postwar.
And even that seems optimistic; Turks are attacking Manbij, Israel just grabbed some more land in the Golan, and there's a very ugly legacy of sectarian violence during the conflict and I don't trust Jolani's assurances to the contrary. Plus the risk of the whole place becoming a base for international terrorism.
I suppose it's possible that HTS doesn't control the whole country, as that offensive was very fast and there were local uprisings elsewhere, I don't know how much control they have on the ground. But if not, it means another round of civil war, in which the most powerful and best organized faction is also a former (or "former") al-Qaeda affiliate.
Turkey was surrounded by the Russians on three sides; the Black Sea, Caucasus and Syria. This was unacceptable to them, so they took the opportunity to topple Assad via various militia groups. Assad was backed by both the Russians, who have several military bases in Syria (possibly evacuated now) and the Iranians/Hezbollah. Russia is tied up in Ukraine and the Iranian axis is weakened from the war with Israel, so Assad went down.
Bashar is very likely in Russia, not dead. Which rebels? The main ones responsible, HTS, have been stockpiling for years from Syrian Army desertions and probably Turkey. SNA definitely a lot from Turkey. The Kurds and Free Syrian Army at Al Tanf from the US. The southern rebels maaaybe some from Israel. Israel definitely gains more from cutting Iranian land bridge across Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
No one knows what happens now with any confidence. Best guess to me is we get an extremer than Egypt type Muslim state. Kurds won't get their own state because Turkey will declare full war on them, because they believe it will cause their own Kurd separatism to flare up gravely. Kurds will have some type of semi-autonomy with less territory than now, pending negotiations between them Turkey and Jolani's government. Otherwise, continuous civil war between Turkey-backed SNA, SDF (Kurds), and Syrian government by everyone else still possible.
My best guess is anarchy and chaos, because that's what happened after both Saddam and Qaddafi were overthrown. I was surprised that no one would fight for Bashar, even along the Alawite coast. Turkey could invade more of the Kurdish east. HTS might turn jihadi again, or decide they want to liberate Palestine and expand the war to Israel. ISIS might return. In both Iraq and Libya the euphoria lasted a few days, then skirmishes exploded into war. I hope it's peace and stability this time.
For what it's worth, HTS has a civilian front called the Syrian Salvation Government" that acts as its political and administrative arm. In Idlib province, which they've controlled for a while, SG has sectors overseeing education, health, banking, and reconstruction. It's run by a council that follows Sharia law, but Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani has said he intends to tolerate religious and ethnic minorities. We'll see if that actually happens. But I've seen a bunch of videos on X of HTS/SG representatives meeting with local leaders of various provinces.
Too early to tell. Give it a few days. My guess is that Assad really IS safely in Russia.
Shar'a/Jolani seems to be in charge, and as long as nothing too crazy happens (like the Americans droning him for the lulz), he might rule and bring peace and stability for several decades. Or he might immediately go to war with the Kurds in the North East.
In politics we have the left and the right. The idea of there also being an up and down has been floated but hasn’t caught on, maybe because it’d be harder to know who exactly to disagree with.
I’m an American who likes Americans. So I’m most comfortable wherever I can find a lot of them, which usually means somewhere other than at the extremes. The further I go either left or right, the more people I find who like fewer and fewer Americans. This strikes me as a stupid place to be if you love your country more than various ways of improving it.
Though we just have the two directions, we’re lucky not to be stuck with one. The best route around some obstacles doesn’t typically consist of all left turns. Or right turns. Or no turns. If you want to get most places, you’ll eventually need to turn both ways. If you favor direction over destination you go in circles and people look at you like you’re fucking bananas. Having a favorite direction is detrimental to getting places.
This loopy prioritization of direction over destination afflicts both parties—they just keep grabbing at the wheel and jerking it in the same goddamn direction. It’s like they’d prefer a ratchet to a wheel. The same single-mindedness is just as true of centrists. They barely turn at all no matter what’s in the road.
I think it’s reasonable and necessary to sometimes make even sharp turns left or right, but to me that implies you should also be just as willing to spin the wheel the other direction when the need arises.
Note: As to destination—national prosperity is usually where people (regardless of their favorite direction) claim we should all end up.
Why is it that we have two distinct directions? Consider the following political positions:
Pro-choice/pro-life
Capital punishment/no capital punishment
Gun control/2nd amendment's supremacy
Social safety net/anti-welfare
Four choices ought to lead to 16 distinct political affiliations. Instead, they are all apparently somehow correlated, so we end up with two. Why is that?
They’re mostly contingent, collapsing an enormous number of different issues into a binary. If you take the historical perspective, what it means to be a “Democrat” has mutated out of all recognition over the years. Even conservative ideology has changed significantly over time as different factions become more influential.
Richard Nixon talked like a modern Republican in many ways, but his policies were very different.
I’m sorry but I’m not sure if you’re genuinely asking. My argument was not that conservatism and progressivism are incoherent ideologies. I’m arguing that if someone is philosophically committed to always favoring one over the other regardless of circumstance, I don’t think that’s sensible. It’s dogmatic. They’re drastically narrowing their range of governing options.
I don’t get ideological loyalty. There are good progressive ideas and good conservative ideas. I like strict anti-illegal immigration policy. I like gobs of tradition and stability and individual responsibility. I also like environmental protection and global cooperation and bold progress. And how much I support associated policies is affected by society’s current circumstance, not by my party association.
And, just to reiterate, I’m not advocating centrism because it also just narrows your range of options to those closest to the political middle, which makes it impossible to make abrupt or sweeping changes in the face of big challenges.
"In politics we have the left and the right. The idea of there also being an up and down"
The idea of 16 orthogonally different ideologies tracks more closely with the idea of left, right, up, down, back, forth, diagonally, and reverse. But it isn't that way. You say you like tradition: does that mean you're opposed to gay marriage, which is not traditional? You say you like environmental protection: does that mean you're in favor of "green" energy like hydroelectric which drastically changes local environments?
The world is complicated, yet somehow in the US everyone can be neatly divided into one of two camps. I find this implausible, yet empirically true.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. I should’ve understood your meaning, but thought your question might be rhetorical.
The up/down notion I was referring to as not catching on was in reference to the various multi-axis models, like those proposed by psychologists Leonard Ferguson and Hans Eysenck in the 50s. Eysenck’s was sorta: Radical<———->Conservative on the x and Authoritarian<———->Democratic on the y. Ferguson’s was similar. There have been many others.
I agree that your example of 16 directions similarly expands the spectrum to more axes, and also agree that supporting a broad category of values (like tradition) invariably leads to some contradictory beliefs associated with it like say a conservative supporting gay marriage. The left-right axis is simplistic, which probably contributes to its mass appeal but it does a terrible job of capturing the nuance of individual political belief.
This is why I feel like instead of trying to occupy a place on the spectrum and identifying with it, it’s wiser to simply use it to gauge the political direction of action/policy. I’m not a lefty, righty or a centrist. I support ideologically diverse policies depending on how I see the world at a particular time, and just because say I support gay marriage, I don’t want to be associated with supporting Palestine over Israel or DEI policy. Also, if I support a lefty politician who supports gay marriage, once gay marriage is widely accepted, the lefty politician’s reputation is defined by his place on the spectrum that then dictates he always favor progressive policy over conservative. So next he might want to push for more state funding for gender-confirmation surgeries, which I might oppose.
So I guess I don’t quite agree Americans can all be divided neatly into two camps. I think most Americans can’t be, but they allow the false association in order to gain the advantage that a massive coalition offers.
Your problem lies in taking the analogy too far. Ideologies are not directions that you take through a winding path to welfare. There is only one path to improving human welfare that has been found in all of human history - a government that is strong enough to ensure property rights exist and markets can function, and sensible enough to limit itself to that. Deviations away from this can still keep us inching forward, but more deviation moves you slower, and less deviation moves you faster. You can deviate as far as Soviet Russia or Venezuela and end up a basket case, you can deviate as far as Europe and just stagnate, or you can try and keep economic liberty alive and well.
Maybe you’re right. But you don’t think circumstances like a market collapse or foreign invasion or civil conflict or global disaster or technological leap, etc. could dictate greater conservatism or progressivism to temporarily navigate such a period? I’m not sure there’s some Goldilocks zone on the political spectrum in which a government can safely operate without encountering challenges that necessitate ideologically flexible governance.
Countries that have a first-past-the-post voting system, such as the US, end up with only two parties, and therefore only two mainstream political positions.
Countries with a proportional system, for example Germany and (for most parliament seats) Italy, end up with many parties, and therefore more than two political ideologies.
If America abolished first-past-the-post and replaced it with a proportional system, third, fourth and fifth parties would become mainstream, and people would realize that there are more than two possible positions.
>> Countries that have a first-past-the-post voting system, such as the US, end up with only two parties, and therefore only two mainstream political positions
But this is false. India uses FPTP but has a lot of parties. The UK uses FPTP and has at least three substantial parties (the lib dems have no realistic chance of winning a majority, but were kingmakers less than a decade ago). Canada uses FPTP and has four parties with significant parliamentary representation (2 small, but not negligible). etc.
The claim may be correct about the specific form of the US political system (FPTP plus presidential system plus highly nationalized politics)...but is plainly false about FPTP alone.
You're right, I should have worded that more carefully.
Let's say that first-past-the-post systems tends to keep the number of parties down, especially if you exclude regionalist parties, which are defined by their ties to a specific region rather than their ideology.
India is a special case, since most of its population doesn't speak Hindi. It's only natural that their politics is regionally fragmented.
Ok, but the ideological parties in fptp systems are themselves coalitions. Proportional representation just pushes the coalition negotiations to after the general election instead of before it.
It’s not at all clear to me that eg Germany had a wider ideological Overton window than the UK. Rather the other way around, as far as I can tell. De facto, Germany seems to be a uniparty system. You can vote for any one of a large number of parties, but you will inevitably get a franken-coalition of all of them (except AfD), pursuing essentially the same policies.
Of course, to a large degree, one of the fundamental points that Trump supporters have hammered again and again is the idea that the existing US political parties *as actually functioning in DC* are really just different wings of the Uniparty, and that one reason to elect an "outsider" is to break that monopoly where whether you select D or R doesn't really matter, since it's the same faceless bureaucrats and establishment types running things either way.
Is it true? I don't know. But it definitely feels that way a lot of the time.
This actually doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Countries like Germany only reassure me that politics naturally tends toward two camps, as there is still basically just a left and a right in Germany, just more than one left party and more than one right party - with FDP being only moderately more influential than the American libertarian party.
Even without first-past-the-post, coalitions will tend to grow to encompass about half the population. There may be more than two parties, but a ‘two tribe’ political culture isn’t just an artifact of American electoral customs.
I live in Italy, where the system is mostly proportional.
It’s funny that one of those who replied to my comment says in a proportional system you just get two coalitions, while another says that you get a single coalition in the middle. One scenario excludes the other.
Anyhow, that is not how it works.
Often you get a coalition goverment that takes up one half of the spectrum (right or left), but other outcomes are possible. For example, in 2018, two growing populist parties, the right wing League and the center-left Five Star Movement, formed a goverment together, excluding both the hitherto mainstream right and the hitherto mainstream left.
Also, which parties exactly are of the right and which of the left is a flexible notion. During the 90’s the League was part of a right wing government, then it was part of a left wing government, and then in 2001 it was part of a right wing government again.
A right-wing or left-wing government doesn’t have to include all the parties in its own half of the spectrum, if it can form a majority without them (fewer parties means that less compromise is needed). To make an extreme example, throughout the cold war era, the Italian Social Movement (MSI) was always excluded, since everyone understood it to be a party of Mussolini nostalgics. This forced the right-wing Christian Democrats to ally with centrist parties. But the perseverance of MSI served a purpose, because as National Alliance they would finally get to be part of a government in the 90’s.
Parties within a government coalition retain separate political positions. They do not merge into a coalition hive mind.
For example, of the two biggest parties in the current government, one is very supportive of Ukraine, while the other is lukewarm. Of course, they have to vote as a bloc, so they work out such differences. This doesn’t mean those differences cease to exist, or that the public ceases to be aware of them.
The news will frequently go through the main parties and report what a spokesman from each has to say about some development. The ones in power will try to show they get along, lest people think they’re bickering, but their individual positions are still conveyed. The ones not in power are even freer to say whatever they want.
Contrast all this with how it works in the US. I remember the 2016 primaries, when Bernie Sanders fought against Hillary Clinton. But in spite of massive support, his movement didn’t obtain any power at all. Zero, zilch, nada. If the US had had a proportional system, four parties would have emerged in that year, each with 20%-30% of seats in both Congress and electoral college. Traditional Democrats and Republicans, plus a Bernie party and a Maga party. People would think of two parties as “the left” and the other two as “the right”, but would also be more aware of the different shades of right and left.
In such a world, Sanders could pull the rug from under a left-wing government if it is not socialist enough. He could even decide to form a populist alliance with Trump, excluding the mainstream parties, just like the League and the Five Stars did a few years ago. Therefore it is not at all the case that it is, in the words of one commenter, ”six of one, a half dozen the other”.
In a proportional US, even libertarians would become a significant power. A two-digits percentage of Americans describe themselves as libertarians. They don’t vote for the libertarian party because it’s pointless, but in a proportional system it would not be. A libertarian party may act as kingmaker, forcing others to come to a compromise with them.
Therefore a wider range of ideologies would obtain actual influence, both at the center (libertarians), and at the extremes (socialists).
1. Once you're in a coalition government, all of the coalition partners have to maintain it against the threat of early elections. You're now collectively responsible to hold the government together. So Sanders could form a coalition with whomever, let's say Trump's party, but then he can't take free votes with the center left Democrats when he feels like it or when he disagrees with Trump. He has to vote with Trump on everything, or the coalition will collapse. So PR coalitions are highly rigid, strange affairs. None of this is desirable
2. Small kingmaker parties tilt politics towards the extreme. You're giving the small party outsized power. This is, obviously, a bad thing. Netanyahu's most recent coalition is obviously being run by a few very far-right parties that got 3 or 4%, who can threaten to quit at any time. Small parties being kingmakers is a bad thing, and tilts politics away from the median voter and towards the extremes
3. Sanders voters are part of the Democratic Party now, and they're free to influence and lobby Democrats on stuff important to them. If they lose on a particular issue- hey, that's just democracy, which by definition is a majoritarian system. It's better to tilt politics towards large parties that have to appeal to the media voter, not small extreme parties that got 7% of the vote or whatever
But the Sanders wing does have political power. Sanders is a senator. Has been for decades. So is Elizabeth Warren. The libertarian wing also has power. Paul the elder was a congressman. Paul the younger is a senator. Jared Polis is a governor. They exist within the framework of the existing two party system, but the parties in question are themselves coalitions capable of holding more than one ideological position. Including socialists and libertarians.
What the socialists and libertarians have not had, is control of the white house. But your beef there is not with FPTP, but rather with the presidential system.
And you know what? I agree switching the US system from a presidential to a parliamentary system would be an improvement. But I'd switch it to a Westminster model parliamentary system, with FPTP. Makes it far easier to throw the bums out.
I'm not sure what you mean by throwing the bums out. Proportional systems usually have thresholds. A party must obtain a minimum percentage of votes. If it fall shorts the votes are redistributed. If you don't want bums (what are bums? small parties?), why not a proportional system with a higher threshold.
An example would be Germany's FDP, which has averaged 9 or 10% in the postwar era, yet has been a coalition partner and achieved outsized power in 6 different governments over 46 years. They've partially run the world's 3rd largest economy for close to half a century, despite never breaking 10% in election results. How is that democratic? How can a German voter vote them out of office? Coalitions aren't subject to democratic vote. No matter how Germans vote, you keep getting the same small party in government
Most countries with FPTP do not end up with such a strict two-party system as US. Canada has NDP and BQ, UK has LibDems and the various separatist parties, India has a bevy of regionalist parties. There must be something beyond just FPTP to lead to US having *only* two parties of any real power.
England* has had a two-party system for the last 100 years since the Liberals almost entirely vanished after the First World War. The Liberal Party and Social Democrats and LibDems and now the Greens make a very tiny showing and rarely influence anything.
This will all dramatically change after the next election because Reform and the LibDems will probably do extremely well and because Labour and the Conservatives are extremely unpopular at the moment. I expect we will end up with a different ‘two party’ system eventually but it will be a bumpy ride to get there.
* its different in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
LibDems have often received ~9-10 % of the seats, which is hardly a "very tiny showing" compared to what third parties get in the US, and even made it to the government once.
Having more viable political parties would no doubt help with polarization, but what I’m arguing is that constantly trying to steer a society in any one ideological direction isn’t sensible, regardless of how many might be available. And this is what the majority of voters and politicians seem to do by remaining loyal to a party regardless of where their society is or what challenges it currently faces.
Conservatism isn’t a destination. Neither is progressivism. Sustaining a societal turn in either direction indefinitely would be catastrophic. That’s not what they’re designed for. Conservatism, progressivism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. are means not ends. They’re tools and which ones you use and to what extent depends on where your society is and what types of challenges it’s facing. If you had six parties, I would still argue it would be foolish to favor one over all the others on principle. But I think this describes most people who identify strongly with their politics.
Isn't this six of one, a half dozen the other? First-past-the-post induces coalitions to form before the election, in proportional systems coalitions form after. The latter gives you more parties, but do you really end up with more ideologies represented?
I want to agree with this, but for example Labour recently won with 33% of the vote, and I think that's a pretty typical winning result in a FPTP election. By contrast a coalition government in PR by definition has to be at least 51% of the parliament, maybe more. A 51% or higher coalition is obviously much larger than a 33% one- the latter doesn't sound like very many ideologies are represented
Or put another way some nations with PR have stumbled along for decades at a time with a series of awkward/kludged parliamentary coalitions. That renders the national government incapable of making and sticking to a broad new policy direction, the government is kind of just stumbling along.
And for a while that can be kind of okay or at least not-terrible...until the circumstances arrive in which it no longer suffices. Germany is now looking like a new example of that; a lot of Italy's post-WW II history fits that description; Spain has been living it lately. The French thought they'd solved this by having an overlaid nationally-elected president but I know a couple of people from that nation who are really wondering what the hell happens next given recent electoral/political events. Etc.
Does anyone have a good summary of the evidence for the healthfulness or lack thereof of seed oils versus animal fats or traditionally "unhealthy" fats? This has been in the news lately (RFK). It seems like all the claims about seed oils being bad for you flies in the face of standard recommendations from reputable medical organizations. Is it really that simple, or is there more to it than that?
Scott, any chance you'd do one of your wonderful evidence overview writeups about this topic? I'm also interested in your take on how much we should trust nutrition science in general, given how hard it is to do methodologically sound science in that field. It's very difficult to do randomized controlled trials in humans for food over long timescales, and almost nobody tries. Observational studies are hard to do well, because of all the confounding variables; health-coded food is confounded with all sorts of healthy lifestyle choices that are hard to quantify and thus hard to control for. And we don't really get good natural experiments in humans nutrition, like we sometimes get in economics and other social science fields. Given those methodological challenges associated with the field, how much should we listen to nutrition science?
Others have already shared some good write-ups. Points worth consideration besides:
Fat sources are not uniform in lipid type. There's generally some distribution of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats in each, and different acids within those categories (e.g. linoleic acid, omega 3 vs omega 6 PUFA). Meaning, you won't have a 0% SFA or 0% PUFA consumption rate if you include a variety of fats in your diet, whether all-veg or all animal. Oil with a higher PUFA ratio is more likely to oxidize. Impact of this is not well understood. Another contentious and not-so-well understood phenomenon is the omega-3:6 ratio, but the uncontroversial truism is that omega 3 consumption is good (especially DHA/EPA), and often lacking compared to omega 6. The most well researched cooking oil is olive oil, which is high in MUFA. Possibly the antioxidant content is what sets it apart from others in terms of health impact. Yet, asian countries mostly consume seed oils copiously - peanut (high in SFA), mustard ( MUFA), sesame and soybean (PUFA) and they're not faring any worse. In the margins, you've also got the Israeli paradox to consider - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox, where heart disease rates are higher despite low SFA consumption, which may be attributed to high linoleic acid consumption.
Risk associated with SFA consumption appears to climb past a certain threshold that is not well defined, but health institutions all issue the same warning. PUFA consumption in general is much higher now, but mortality risk of SFA remains, so one doesn't necessarily negate the other, plus seed oil still contains SFA in varying amounts. In research, replacing SFA with PUFA (rather than carbs) better mitigates CVD risk.
SFA is not devoid of benefit either. It may help e.g. protect testosterone levels. But I see a case of diminishing returns, to everything. In PUFA research and nutrition discussion, it's as though there's no ceiling to the benefits PUFA provides, but that flies in the face of the fact that PUFA consumption is at record highs and so are obesity rates. The generous interpretation is that this is tied to processed foods, which alongside seed oil contain copious amounts of refined flour and sugar. Even so, obviously the seed oils don't negate the impacts of overconsumption and sugar consumption.
My personal approach: eat omega 3s regularly (algal oil supplement or sardines), use olive oil for cooking most of the time, eat nuts and seeds (preferably raw), moderate animal fat consumption (e.g. lean cage-free chicken breast).
EDIT: an observation about the graphs in Scott's old SSC post is that it pits total animal fat consumption vs total PUFA. Comparing against SFA itself would be more enlightening. Vegetable oils used in packaged products can be high in SFA, most ubiquitous being palm oil.
Short version: there's a lot of really suggestive evidence, but all direct studies find that seed oils are better than saturated fats (the old stuff that seed oils replaced). I think there's probably something subtle going on that we're missing - maybe seed oils are only bad in some context, and we haven't figured out the context? maybe seed oils aren't bad themselves but are very heavily correlated with something else bad? - and I think it's probably not a bad choice to cut down on seed oils, but I don't feel like we actually understand what's going on here.
A nuance that is not often captured is that palm oil is the most widely produced, and most ubiquitous vegetable oil added to packaged products i.e. junk food. It is high in saturated fat ("palm mesocarp oil is 49% saturated, while palm kernel oil and coconut oil are 81% and 86% saturated fats"). All seed oils contain some varying amount, and the acids are structurally identical to what you'd find in animals, so maybe "animal fat vs oils" is the wrong question.
This is all still poorly understood. At least we can say that seed oils won't save us from the impacts of obesity. Asians use a ton of seed oil in cooking and they're not fat (presumably total consumption still modest). Peanut oil is (relatively) higher in SFA, while soybean and grapeseed is very high in PUFA. They also won't shy from full-fat animal parts, but eat way more vegetables.
Looking through the sources you linked to, I was pleasantly surprised at how many of them were proper randomized controlled trials. Reading blogs, reddit posts, etc, about this topic, people generally refer to either observational studies or non-human randomized controlled trials, both of which should be considered somewhat limited in what they can tell us (the former because it's difficult to control for all the confounding healthy lifestyle choices associated with eating health-coded foods, the latter because mice aren't humans).
>maybe seed oils are only bad in some context, and we haven't figured out the context? maybe seed oils aren't bad themselves but are very heavily correlated with something else bad?
Bing bing bing! It's agricultural practices.
Tell me: if I sprayed the leaves of an olive tree with enough Roundup to kill it, then plucked the withered olives from its dead branches, and then pressed those into olive oil...would you put that on your salad?
Hopefully not. But this is how it's done in modern industrial agriculture, with practically any crop that is killed during harvest, i.e. corn, rapeseed (i.e. canola), sunflower, peanuts, etc. It's called "preharvest desiccation".
So you end up eating those herbicides. And yes, roundup is supposed to be safe to eat, because we don't have EPSP synthase, the enzyme it interferes with. But a lot of your gut bacteria DO have that enzyme, and it's a critical step in the biosynthesis of tryptophan and tyrosine, i.e. the precursors to serotonin and dopamine.
So you can bend over backwards comparing the unsaturated fatty acid profiles of walnut vs. olive vs. rapeseed vs. sunflower oil, trying to explain why the first two are good and the last two are bad, but if you apply the simple heuristic of "Did this come from a plant that was poisoned to death?", you'll find that it tracks suspiciously well with which vegetable oils are "bad" and which ones are "good".
All the scientifically literate sources/studies I’ve seen find no harm (beyond the obvious fact of caloric density). Sorry for the lazy answer but Google scholar has lots of meta studies on the subject
>They’ve been endorsed by GiveWell as one of the most effective charities in the world
Importantly, even after increasing their estimate of GiveDirectly's effectiveness severalfold, GiveWell still estimates their top charities to be at least twice as effective as GiveDirectly (by extension, the many charities in GiveWell's "All Grants Fund" would be assessed to have an even higher expected value).
I have been doing a deeper-than-usual dive into gender dysphoria, and I think I reached some genuinely novel conclusions regarding transgenderness and some other related ~disorders. I'm pretty sure the mainstream understanding of how it works is wrong.
Thanks for the plug and the research, your theory sure sounds like there's something to it, and even more so coming from someone with direct personal experience. I especially liked the part where you define an identity as “the thing that people with multiple personality disorder have a multiple of”, and then go on to apply that to disphoria. Definitely gives it a more cognitive vibe, than the usual mainstream bio-developmental explanations, and at first blush it sounds right.
From my understanding, for every person that feels this strongly, there should be lots of people who feel this weakly. Ie who are slightly transgender.
And from my reading of r/transhumanism and similar, there seems to be a few people who really want to be robots.
> From my understanding, for every person that feels this strongly, there should be lots of people who feel this weakly. Ie who are slightly transgender
Certainly! The LGBT community even has terms like "demigender" for people who feel only weakly drawn to a particular gender.
Although "where you want to fall on the gender spectrum" and "how much do you want it seem to be different axes, e.g. you can weakly prefer to be extremely feminine, or don't think that life has any meaning unless you are a very slightly masculine.
> And from my reading of r/transhumanism and similar, there seems to be a few people who really want to be robots.
I haven't heard of that! Do they (at least sometimes) report dysphoria?
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for commenting here, i wouldn't have found your post otherwise and it's a fresh perspective and it brings a good set of questions to investigate theories (what about nonbinary/genderfluid, why does it depend on non-biological factors). Looking forward to your research on this.
This kind of amateur mini-research on the fringes is why I'm in the SSC/ACX community. The site by the link has options to subscribe, if you want to be notified of any follow-ups.
...Well, I was always under the impression that these desires and fetishes were downstream of "innate" body dysmorphia. The theory was mostly supported by my own observations, and I have good reason to believe it is shared by the medical establishment. But your theory does make more sense, especially given the insights into intelligence we've gained via AI...
It doesn't matter though. Do you people even understand how utterly inconvenient your existences are to society? You're undermining the very bedrock of modern society, the gender binary, and the very concept of identity. Not to mention the accomodations you people expect for your delusions. Do you really believe you deserve happiness at the expense of everyone else?
Unless you have a cure and a means of administering it to the population by force (because as you said, no one would take it willingly), the people are not interested. In the absense of a cure, society will eventually resort to dealing with such aberrations the old fashioned way, just as the cells in a body work to purge a cancer. And regardless of the outcome, a cancer has no future.
Can we not refer to small minorities as cancers in the body politic that need to be purged? I bet you could come up with less murdery analogies with some effort.
Could you explain exactly how existence of trans people is at expense of everyone else, over the regular expense that people with health problems inflict by needing treatment?
Those people aren't unraveling the very fabric of society simply by existing. The gender binary is fundamental to modern society, to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female. The role and identity of any given person is decided by it; it defines all of who they are. But what happens when that reality of that identity is put into question?
It makes so much sense now, why so many people see gender transition as morally wrong. Gender used to be absolute. Identity is relative, and when the system that their identity is relative to is compromised, so is the identity itself. There is the very real fear of losing yourself and your place in the world. Even if it was all just a lie, it was a lie that was holding everything together.
It's not just trans people, it's the entire movement to erase gender roles. The old hierarchy ensured that there was no conflict. There was an expectation for each sex, and no deviation was tolerated. But as the lie unravels, animosity between the sexes grows, and people start looking out for their own self-interests. Social cohesion frays.
Our entire society is built on nothing but lies, but those lies were the only thing keeping the social fabric intact. Not just gender; religion, class, race, nationalism... They were all necessary, and we trivialized all of them.
However, the system seems to be self-correcting. A wave of populism is washing over the world, promising to burn down the establishment and replace it with a new dogma. A new set of lies. And they will destroy anything that threatens it.
...There is no world in which we can be happy. Our very existence is antithetical to human society. No hope, no path to salvation... Why are we even here? We never even had a chance.
>to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female.
As you might have heard from a famous Mark Twain bit, German maidens are "it" and German turnips are "she." So if you're going to claim that language is pointing at some sort of fundamental truth, then the fundamental truth is that German women aren't actually women, but German vegetables are.
Or maybe the fundamental truth is "don't make sweeping claims about society and which people ought to be purged from it based on linguistic quirks."
>The gender binary is fundamental to modern society, to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female. The role and identity of any given person is decided by it; it defines all of who they are.
Really? I'm a hobby chemist and retired programmer myself. (oh, and cishet male)
> The gender binary is fundamental to modern society,
How that? For better or for worse, in this modern world where we barely know our neighbors, interact with people on the internet through nicknames, work from home, and men and women are about equally educated and doing all sorts of jobs... how is the gender binary "fundamental" to anything, when most social interactions are less gendered than ever?
Of course gendered differences exist in the right corners if you look for them, including the entire arena of sexual attraction. But attraction mostly takes care of itself, either it happens or it doesn't, end of story. And there are a few relatively narrow controversial areas, such as women's sports, which have their importance but are surely not "fundamental to modern society".
> to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female.
Yeah, over here in Spain the sky is male, rain is female, and water is weird enough to take female adjectives and male articles (maybe it's non-binary?). But languages evolve according to their own dynamics, and trying to extract philosophy from grammar or etymology fell out of fashion a century ago because it just does'nt make much sense.
> The old hierarchy ensured that there was no conflict.
"to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female"
Can you name three?
I'm not trolling: many languages have three genders: male, female, and neutral. And I know of at least one language that has no grammatical gender: Georgian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_language). So at least this point doesn't seem to be fundamental at all.
English also has no grammatical gender. Most Romance languages have just masculine and feminine (having lost the neuter).
But I'd say that the idea that languages that do have grammatical gender split all of existence into the classes defined by those genders is mistaken. E.g. in German the same person can be referred to using nouns of all three genders, and in Spanish, females are regularly referred to in the masculine. What grammatical gender splits is the set of nouns, not all of existence.
"But I'd say that the idea that languages that do have grammatical gender split all of existence into the classes defined by those genders is mistaken."
One of my patients is moving to Austin, TX, and asks for recommendations for good psychiatrists there. Bonus if they have video appointments or experience with bipolar.
Well, the birth rate issue has nothing to do with culture. That's entirely an issue with policy and increasing social liberalization. Fix those, and the birth rate would return to what it once was.
While a policy solution may be needed, I don't think it's true that depressed TFR has nothing to do with culture. As people increasingly see qualities like career success and other status signaling goods as mutually exclusive with being a parent, their propensity to have children decreases. We would expect this effect to be strongest in societies that value conformity and the ability to obtain/display these aspects the most (like Japan and other East Asian countries).
Sorry, I meant that it's not due to any culture that's exclusive Japan. If anything, the US is doing even worse; I'm assuming the rebound in TFR starting in the 90s was due to immigrant populations, but even that didn't last. And of course, now the government is going oust the illegal immigrant population and close the borders...
I suspect that TFR is hard to affect via easily-applied policy levers (changes in tax code, government benefits, etc.). Without much confidence, I'd guess that the biggest policy lever for TFR in the US now would be YIMBY stuff to lower housing costs and public-order stuff (institutionalizing crazy street people and letting the cops run off vagrants so that free public spaces like parks and libraries are appealing to parents with small children). Maybe also getting on top of the higher education tuition bubble. But all three of those are hard problems that involve lots of conflicting interest groups and arguments, not some simple thing you can do by passing the Have More Babies Act of 2025 in Congress or something.
The guy and his mom contracted chronic pain disorders, for which no treatment would work. It's not like there was some special treatment that only universal healthcare could provide, or a treatment that was too expensive for him and his mom. Literally none of the treatments would fix the problem.
That's awful. But I promise that even in countries with universal healthcare, people still get sick and suffer and die. That's been true since life first emerged on this planet. It's true in Norway. It's true in Namibia.
It's not something UHC invented to torture people for a profit. Even if every person in the United States of America were replaced with a clone of Bernie Sanders, his mom would still have untreatable chronic pain, as would he.
In response to his illness, UHC tried to treat him. They tried to take his pain away.
In response to his illness, the UHC shooter decided to inflict more pain on others. To increase the amount of pain in the world.
> we try to avoid sharing the words and writings that motivated the individual
Who is this "we"? I know that the social media giants (and repressive foreign governments) try to suppress them, and I make the effort to find and share them regardless, following the "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master" philosophy (from Alpha Centauri).
Yeah. Manifestos are great. People who give their lives for a cause ought to be heard.
If doing so were to become so popular that millions of people were dying and killing for their moment of fame then I would agree that manifestos ought not to be shared, but that is not currently the case.
a. Nobody should be in a position to withhold some murderer's or terrorist's manifesto from the public, other than maybe for a short time during the investigation or something.
b. Media outlets can (and maybe should) try to limit the appeal of copycat attacks by not giving away massive amounts of free media attention as a reward for murdering people. I think most media outlets have policies wrt coverage of suicide to try to avoid copycat suicides, and it's probably reasonable to have similar policies for mass shootings, assassinations, terrorist attacks, and the like.
c. In general, I don't expect the manifesto of a murderer or terrorist to be especially enlightening. I mean, I can spend the next hour reading the ideas of any number of people. Assuming I'm not a student of crime or terrorism in particular, is there some particular reason why I should select which person's ideas I read based on their body count?
There are people like Peter Zeihan who have made a career telling tragedy narratives about pretty much everything.
I had professors in some humanities courses that were basically stand up tragedians. Also had to sit through a DEI type seminar at work that basically felt like this.
Also some religious end of the world types do this to very large audiences.
I seem to remember that what the ancient Greeks actually meant by "Comic" was *a happy ending*, not just humor. So I think you are using the term somewhat incorrectly.
If what you want is a functional opposite of what a stand up comic does, I would suggest the sermonizer at a church.
Actually, ancient Greeks thought *tragedies* could have happy endings. Aristotle thought the best plot for a tragedy was someone about to do something that is particularly horrible for reasons he doesn't know, but he finds out in time. (Worst was when he did know and just didn't do it in the end -- which is still happy.)
Also, that definition doesn't preclude having a happy ending. Personally, I prefer my tragedies to have a small spark of hope at the end, even if it is bittersweet. Otherwise it's just depressing.
Perhaps comedy lends itself more to a solo stand-up routine than tragedy does? Tragedy often involves the experience of lost, and maybe this lost is most keenly felt when you're seeing it occur in real time as opposed to hearing about it second hand. Watching a play where the main character loses his beloved wife, who is also a character in the play that we get to know well... maybe this is more effective than hearing a 'stand up tragedian' talk about losing his wife a year ago when almost nobody in attendance knows his wife personally.
See ‘The Meal Ticket’, a short within The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Coen Bros anthology for a far fetched and very sad fictional example.
Wikipedia synopsis:
“Meal Ticket"
An aging impresario and his artist, Harrison, a usually uncommunicative young man with no arms or legs, travel from town to town in a wagon that converts into a small stage where Harrison theatrically recites classics such as Shelley's poem "Ozymandias"; the biblical story of Cain and Abel; works by Shakespeare, including Sonnet 29 and The Tempest; and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The impresario collects money from the crowd at the end of each performance, but profits are dwindling as they visit increasingly remote towns with smaller, less appreciative audiences.
After a performance that yields no profit, the impresario observes a man nearby drawing a crowd with a chicken that ostensibly performs basic arithmetic by pecking at painted numbers to answer addition and subtraction problems the audience calls out.
After buying the chicken, the impresario drives the wagon through a mountain pass and stops by a bridge over a rushing river. He walks to the center of the bridge and drops a large stone to gauge the water's depth before returning to the wagon. The impresario resumes driving, with the caged chicken as his only passenger.”
Comedy in theatre is traditionally just a play with a happy ending. Comparing a Shakespeare comedy ( no tragic ending) to a teller of jokes is a category error. A Shakespeare comedy or tragedy could have jokes within it, like the light relief of the gravedigger in hamlet. If you like that sort of thing. I don’t. Stick to drama Bill.
And there are onstage dramatists who on their own will recite plays or poems. And there are plays with two people doing non comedic role, just as there are comedians who are duos or trios. And there are comic plays, in the modern use of comedy, where everybody is a comedian, like in a farce.
I think Whoopi Goldberg had a stage performance in the 80s where she acted out the part of a young woman giving herself an abortion. John Leguizamo had a three-act solo show that had a similarly tragic story in one of the acts.
I've heard that the Vagina Monologues often brings people to tears in parts.
It's no doubt harder to make a living as a full-time sadness creator.
I think a factor here is how much weight you give to the idea of drawing moral lessons from the tragedy. If's a lot, then probably either religious sermons or maybe Ted talks fill that role.
For the time that's in it, the most recent post from "History for Atheists" - the pagan (not so much) origins of Christmas!
Everything from the holly and the ivy to "is Santa really Odin?" and one book that I will now have to go purchase about Sol in Roman times (because you can never be too informed about Sol Invictus):
https://historyforatheists.com/2024/12/pagan-christmas-again/
"The modern historian who is the leading scholar of the Roman solar cult, Steven Hijmans, has literally written the book on the Roman sun god Sol. His two volume work Sol: Image and Meaning of the Sun in Roman Art and Religion (Brill, Vol. 1 2022, Vol. 2 2024) collects the relevant material on the Roman worship of Sol and shows the evidence for various very ancient feast days for this deity."
EDIT: Drat, only available in hardback, a couple of hundred apiece, and out of stock to boot! Ah, well, next time!
You know the drill: no-fun Protestants who didn't approve of non-Biblical accretions to the Pure Gospel Faith went "lookit them Catholics with their pagan traditions!" about pretty much every feast day in the calendar, not knowing that they were cutting a rod to beat their own backs and a couple centuries later secularists and atheists would do the very same, often using their own words, to prove that Jesus was a pagan deity/myth/never existed.
Is there a theological support for the concept of "circles" of Hell, as described in Divine Comedy? Or some similar concept?
(I am asking specifically about Christianity. I know that e.g. Buddhism has many Hells.)
I am not an expert, nor a Christian, but my guess would be that a "uniformly bad Hell" would be a better fit for Christianity, for the following reasons:
1) People condemned to the "easy" circles of Hell would be happy that they didn't end up in the "hard" circles. But people in Hell are not supposed to be happy about anything.
2) The theological explanation for the need of an infinite punishment for a finite sin is that God is infinitely awesome, and therefore any transgression against His laws deserves infinite punishments. But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment.
3) If we take the interpretation of Hell as "merely" an eternal separation from God, i.e. no active torture of the sinners, circles don't make sense either, because some people being separated more than others would imply that at least some of them are partially connected, which is not how it is supposed to be.
Theological? Nope, Dante was writing Biblical and Classical self-insert fan-fiction where he got to accompany his favouritest person of all literature on an adventure through Hell and Purgatory up to the edge of Heaven. So he used a lot of varying traditions from everywhere, Christian and Pagan, plus a heaping helping of invention of his own.
And I love the result to bits and will die on any hill you care to mention defending it as ten times better than Milton and "Paradise Lost" (nobody reads "Paradise Regained"; I tried and couldn't get through it) 😁
Literary critics and Dantean experts say that he was using the concept of contrapasso when 'making the punishment fit the crime' for the damned in Hell. My own ignorant and uninformed view is that he was influenced at least in part by making the circles of Hell the opposites of the choirs of Heaven.
There is a genre of Christian writing about revelations to saints about Heaven and Hell, and Dante is riffing off these (you can read more about these in the quoted part about influences further down). Such private revelations aren't "official" about what Heaven/Hell is really like, but so long as they're not heretical or contradict official doctrine, they're tolerated to a greater or lesser degree. This "vision of a journey to the underworld" is associated with the pilgrimage site of St Patrick's Purgatory here in Ireland, where early versions of the pilgrimage would permit some to spend the night in a cave where they presumably had visions of the otherworld:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_de_Purgatorio_Sancti_Patricii
"The Tractatus tells of the journey of an Irish knight, Owein (a version of the Irish name Eógan), to St Patrick's Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, now in the Republic of Ireland, where he journeys through Purgatory and the Earthly Paradise. Owein's journey is dated by Henry of Saltrey to the reign of King Stephen of England between 1135 and 1154. Henry states that his source was Gilbert, a monk in Lincoln who visited Ireland in 1148 to found a monastery at Baltinglass in County Wicklow. Since Gilbert spoke no Irish, he was introduced to the knight Owein, who became his interpreter during his two-year stay in Ireland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapasso
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_angels
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy#Influences
"Besides Dante's fellow poets, the classical figure that most influenced the Comedy is Aristotle. Dante built up the philosophy of the Comedy with the works of Aristotle as a foundation, just as the scholastics used Aristotle as the basis for their thinking. Dante knew Aristotle directly from Latin translations of his works and indirectly quotations in the works of Albertus Magnus. Dante even acknowledges Aristotle's influence explicitly in the poem, specifically when Virgil justifies the Inferno's structure by citing the Nicomachean Ethics. In the same canto, Virgil draws on Cicero's De Officiis to explain why sins of the intellect are worse than sins of violence, a key point that would be explored from canto XVIII to the end of the Inferno.
...The Apocalypse of Peter is one of the earliest examples of a Christian-Jewish katabasis, a genre of explicit depictions of heaven and hell. Later works inspired by it include the Apocalypse of Thomas in the 2nd–4th century, and more importantly, the Apocalypse of Paul in the 4th century. Despite a lack of "official" approval, the Apocalypse of Paul would go on to be popular for centuries, possibly due to its popularity among the medieval monks that copied and preserved manuscripts in the turbulent centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Divine Comedy belongs to the same genre and was influenced by the Apocalypse of Paul."
Contrapasso sounds like an interesting world-building exercise. You need to make the punishment metaphorically related to the sin, but you probably also want more horrible punishments for the sins you consider worse... so it needs some creativity, if you decide that fraud and treachery are the worst.
Nice to know that Unsong follows a long ancient tradition.
For what it’s worth, the majority of Christians are going to tell you that your listed #3 is the correct interpretation of hell, and definitely not #2. For that reason, most will recoil at the idea of “tiers” of hell
Woo-hoo! Literary criticism *and* Catholic theology, this is catnip for me! 😁
"But from that perspective, there is no reason why e.g. a guy who masturbated once should be judged less harshly than e.g. Stalin; both of them are infinitely guilty and both deserve an infinite punishment."
You fail to take into account the mediaeval love of (and indeed mania for) categorisation and classification, as well as consideration of Divine Justice. Here on Earth, a man who steals a loaf of bread and a man who commits murder are both criminals and are both punished by the law, but the crimes are not held equal in severity. Is God, then, less just than mortals? This cannot be so.
Hence the Dantean notion of greater and lesser sinners (and greater and lesser saints, as he travels with Beatrice through the heavenly spheres, though she is careful to explain to him that the souls are not there in reality; this is a concession to his limited human understanding and all the saved are equally in Heaven in the Empyrean). In the Sphere of the Moon, one of the questions he has for the saved souls is "but are you content with a lesser share of bliss?" They tell him that yes, since it is God's will, and since they are enjoying bliss to the limits of their capacity, so there's not really 'more' or 'less'.
Think of it as a cup and a milk churn both filled to the brim. The churn plainly contains more liquid, but both vessels are equally full.
Dante moves 'up' through the heavens from the lesser to the greater in the Paradiso. In the same way, he starts his journey in the Inferno moving 'down' from the lesser to the greater sinners. One famous example is Paola and Francesca, in the Circle of Lust, who have been regarded sympathetically by the Romantics as lovers. Dante himself is moved by their story and faints in sympathy, until Virgil smacks some sense into him.
Paolo and Francesca may not be as great sinners as the one who murdered them, and that murderer is punished on a lower, greater, level of Hell - but this is still Hell, and they are still sinners, and they are still being punished to the level and limit of their culpability and capacity. Again, there is no 'less' and 'more' here: their cup of suffering is full to the brim.
And in the end, this is all a literary device and not meant to be official theology.
Closest I can think of is Luke 10:13-14, where "it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you", implying there are differences in level of punishment for the unsaved. You'll have to wait for Deiseach to say if Catholicism has anything more substantial.
What is the right way to model / think about the likelihood of a whistleblower being found dead by suicide being what actually happened?
If you yourself are considering being a whistleblower, how would you update on the frequency of such events?
https://nypost.com/2024/12/14/us-news/openai-whistleblower-suchir-balaji-found-dead-by-suicide-in-san-francisco-apartment/
In general, deaths that might plausibly be targeted assassinations of people not involved in organized crime, are I think <100/year in the United States, whereas suicide is 50,000/year. And job loss is a common trigger for suicide; a whistleblower is almost certainly going to be losing their job in the near future, and their employer will be making that as stressful as possible for other reasons. So your prior for assassination should be very, very low.
Also, Hollywood-style professional assassins are exceedingly rare in the contemporary United States; if any of them even exist, they work for major organized crime families or for government agencies, neither of whom rent them out. So if someone is blowing the whistle on anyone but the Mafia or the CIA, anyone who wants to kill them will have to do it themselves, or hire a non-professional killer (which may be e.g. a bodyguard or security officer being asked to do something outside their normal job description).
Trying to arrange the killing of one whistleblower, risks generating a new whistleblower - the bodyguard or whatever who calls the police when his boss asks him to assassinate someone. So one question to ask, if you want to adjust that prior is, does the whistleblower pose the sort of threat that would justify that sort of risk? The penalty for most forms of corporate naughtiness is usually a large fine paid by the company. The penalty for conspiracy to commit murder, is many many years in prison for everyone involved including whoever gave the order - yes even if they're the CEO.
Same as any other person. 1. What would it take to make a murder look like suicide? 2. does anybody have a reason to do that? 3. what about the person's recent life would suggest suicidal tendencies?
Famous people always clear 1 and 2, they've got enough rich enemies that bribing officials is an option. So it comes down to 3. Would anything suggest Suchir was suicidal? I'm sure we'll hear more about Mr. Balaji's personal life as the news cycle spins on. but I would say the whistleblowing itself does; he's claimed that AI is ruining the Internet, but if OpenAI goes down that isn't stopping AI. How much of his skillset is AI-specific? Also Trump won the presidency and for all I know he's planning to pardon the whole company. So, shaky career options, the AI Apocalypse and the Trump Apocalypse make it plausible.
https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/if-you-propose-to-speak-always-ask-yourself-is-it-true-is-it-necessary-is-it-kind/
A probable source for true, kind, necessary:https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/if-you-propose-to-speak-always-ask-yourself-is-it-true-is-it-necessary-is-it-kind/
Actual quote from Buddhism:
"And what other five conditions must be established in himself [i.e. a bhikkhu who desires to admonish another]?
“Do I speak at the right time, or not? Do I speak of facts, or not? Do I speak gently or harshly? Do I speak profitable words or not? Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?”"
Probable actual source:
“Miscellaneous Poems,” by Mary Ann Pietzker, published in 1872 by Griffith and Farran of London
"“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind? is actually the title of one of her poems. Here it is:
is it true necessary kind
“Is It True? Is It Necessary? Is It Kind?
Oh! Stay, dear child, one moment stay,
Before a word you speak,
That can do harm in any way
To the poor, or to the weak;
And never say of any one
What you’d not have said of you,
Ere you ask yourself the question,
“Is the accusation true?”
And if ’tis true, for I suppose
You would not tell a lie;
Before the failings you expose
Of friend or enemy:
Yet even then be careful, very;
Pause and your words well weigh,
And ask it it be necessary,
What you’re about to say.
And should it necessary be,
At least you deem it so,
Yet speak not unadvisedly
Of friend or even foe,
Till in your secret soul you seek
For some excuse to find;
And ere the thoughtless word you speak,
Ask yourself, “Is it kind?”
When you have ask’d these questions three—
True,—Necessary,—Kind,—
Ask’d them in all sincerity,
I think that you will find,
It is not hardship to obey
The command of our Blessed Lord,—
No ill of any man to say;
No, not a single word."
Has anyone else been noticing that there've been remarkably few cases of colds and flu around this year? If so, are you aware of any explanation (hopefully one that's not too scary)?
Flu season seems to have started late this year. Rhinoviruses, RSV, and OC43 (a common cold coronavirus) are on the rise. However, both wastewater numbers and the CDC's flu surveillance program show that flu cases are on the rise now (about a month late). COVID is still in a slump, though.
At the risk of tooting my own horn, you can see what was happening as of a couple of weeks ago with non-COVID respiratory viruses starting on slide 8 of my Epi Week 47-48 update.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1863401997048872968.html
US flu map is here: https://www.cdc.gov/fluview/surveillance/usmap.html
It’s getting going, but is still low in many parts of the country. I believe Feb is the month it most often peaks
Thank you. Someone already pointed me to that one, but these are just the cases recorded by medical professionals (who even goes to a doctor for simple flu symptoms?), and it says explicitly not all of them might even be flu. It's probably correlated with actual flu numbers, but figuring out how would be way over my head.
(Also, the link to the data from my state goes to a 404 Page not found page.)
Might be a localized thing. Everyone is sniffling everywhere around here, and I do mean everyone, to the extent I've accepted I'm getting it sooner or later.
It could also be RSV, rhinoviruses, or OC43. All of those URT pathogens are on the rise now.
After several days of the worst flu I've ever experienced, having many coworkers who have been sick, and hearing a cough while outside that I assumed was from my girlfriend (who also has this flu) but was actually a neighbor's - I've been noticing the exact opposite.
Data's going to be more reliable than our personal experiences. Assuming you're in the US, I'd recommend starting your research with the FluView (https://www.cdc.gov/fluview/surveillance/usmap.html) - but if there's a better source anyone knows about I'd be interested as well.
I hope you're both feeling better now.
Thank you for the link. These seem to be, however, only the cases that made it to a medical professional. People around me generally do not go to a medical professional for flu symptoms if they don't have another really good reason. Why go to a doctor when you can just sleep it off? So what is actually graphed here is not anything like the actual number of cases but a weird measure conditioned on a lot of things including flu severity and patient's behavior.
So I'm actually more grateful to you for your personal anecdata. I am sorry for you, but it's useful to know that not everyone is seeing what we are seeing.
(On top of this, the link to my state's data goes to "Page not found", but the state is still colored light green. I'll wait and see if it's still light green when they get to the current week, and if it is, I think we can safely assume their code is broken in at least one way.)
Get well soon!
EDIT: I misread the description of the chart. They admit they don't even know if all of this is flu.
I will hijack this to point out that rapid tests have a sensitivity under 50% [1] (that might be overly optimistic as well - I've seen numbers in the ballpark of 20%-30%). So if you have a very bad, non-COVID flu, a negative rapid test doesn't tell you all that much.
Moreover, since COVID is very common (I saw an estimate from the UK of 1.5 infections per person per year, if you use PCR tests), and much more common than the traditional "bad flu" viruses like influenza (the average person gets influenza once every 5-10 years), it means that, if you get a negative rapid test, but have a "bad flu", it's probably still COVID.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7316a2.htm
The CDC performs genome sequencing on a representative portion of positive influenza test samples taken from its sentinel sites (not sure what they consider a representative sample, nor how many sentinel sites there are). They're a small fraction of all flu cases nationally, but this allows them to determine which strains are dominant. Type A(H1N1) and A(H1N3) are the most common right now, with Type B making up less than 10% of the cases.
Interesting information, thank you. My girlfriend tested positive for influenza A but not Covid, though with those numbers it's possible that it's a co-infection scenario. I don't know the details of how they tested her.
Why don't I get notified when someone replies to my comments on this thread?
Also, I'm curious what Deiseach and other Irish folk think about Connor Macgregor running for president? https://www.vice.com/en/article/connor-mcgregor-president-ireland/
He is a bad character who likes acting the big tough hard man and hanging around alleged gangsters. Running for President is stupid because even if he does, he will get slaughtered in the campaign. Besides, for all our "criminals turned politicians" needs, we have a genuine gangster in the shape of Gerry Hutch (God save us all) who ran in our general election in November:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Hutch
I've never liked him, I thought he was a disgrace to the nation, and the recent events haven't made me think better of him.
Maybe it's only my experience but I can go months without seeing a headline about McGregor. He's been in the news a bit recently about being found guilty of sexual assault and the victim being awarded damages etc., but I think much of the controversy internationally about him doesn't reach Ireland. Some of these stories might be performances for the American Right.
We will have a presidential election in 2025. The role of the president is mostly ceremonial, and our presidential elections tend to have many candidates with various degrees of connection to reality. I greatly enjoy the dirt that they all dig up about one another. The last open election (i.e. without an incumbent) was in 2011 - it featured an ex-Eurovision winner waving the constitution around and claiming to have been the victim of an assassination attempt; a sitting senator withdrawing twice from the race (for trying to influence the Israeli supreme court and claiming a disability benefit he wasn't entitled to) but re-entering both times; McGuinness being accused of murder on TV by Vincent Browne, corruption and brown envelopes... it was amazing, start to finish.
So I think McGregor will fit right into the politicking and backstabbing. He won't win.
Himself and Gerry Hutch can fight it out now that they're both going into politics, and since Hutch is a genuine gangster instead of just hanging around scumbags, McGregor will mysteriously fall down a mine shaft some day, and that solves that problem.
Then we have to deal with Hutch, but maybe he'll be extradited to Spain to face charges there.
Why does it take a good 5-10 minutes before you get the option to see the comments with 'Oldest First'?
That's extra-interesting to me because my default in open threads is new first, but old first on all other threads. It used to be old first on open threads as well, but after changing it every time I guess it learned what I wanted? Not sure.
Now I'm locked in to new first here and old first everywhere else.
I noticed that too.
But when you use the button/link that tells the comment count to open the comments in a tab of their own, the option is right there.
But of course it has no memory and on each load you have to set it again... wait... read.
For me, that option doesn't show up at all, even after waiting several minutes. Weird. Maybe it's something Scott disabled intentionally? (I recall that he configured the blog intentionally to show all comments ordered by new, which is not something that Substack does by the default, because he had strong opinions about avoiding bias by discouraging people from only interacting with the first few comments that are posted.)
I cannot answer the “why” but I do have a solution for you. I wrote a browser extension primarily to load comments on this blog much faster, but it also allows you to switch to Chronological order (immediately after loading, and much more quickly).
You can get it here for Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/astral-codex-eleven/lmdipmgaknhfbndeaibopjnlckgghemn
Or for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/astral-codex-eleven/
Thanks! I will take a look at that when I have time.
What if instead of saying probabilities in percentages, we said their log-probability?
That would look like this:
"That's impossible" / "0%" → "the logodds are ∞"
"That's not very likely" / "10%-40%" → "3.3-1.3
"toss-up" / "50%" → "the logodds are 1"
"Probably" / "60%-80%" → "the logodds are 0.73 - 0.23"
"Definitely" / "100%" → "the logodds are 0"
Yes, we'd look even weirder than we already do. But, we might be better off when it comes to very unlikely things eg the difference between .1 and 0
Arguably, people who pass middle school arithmetic can develop a crude sense of proportion how often some repeated event happens. From there, it is not an impossible step to try to estimate whether some event happens >99%, 90%, 50%, 10%, or less than 1% of time.
Moving to log probability -- while not exactly impossible, still non trivial. After disappearance of slide rules it is quite are to find even engineers who habitually think in logarithm.
Moving to log odds -- sorry, I think only betting fanatics and equivalently weird fans of logistic regression have any intuitive understanding of the definition of "odds". (For example, odds of 50% event are 1 to 1, that is, odds ratio of 1. In "log odds", that is log(1) = 0.)
Because someone like me would ask "What the hell are logodds"?
Numerical probabilities are much easier to manipulate using the addition and multiplication rules
If event A has logodds a and event B has logodds b and they are independent, the logodds of A AND B is a+b
By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
However: the logodds version of Bayes rule (I just learned...) is gorgeous. Let's take the notation of logodds that L(X) = log(P(X)):
L(A|B) = S(B|A) + S(A) - S(B)
(note that I should have said "surprisal" above, not logodds... it's a sign flip)
> By "addition rule" I guess you mean that if A and B are mutually exclusive then the probability of A OR B is a+b. Indeed there's no nice version of that. On the other hand, I'd say that doesn't come up very often.
It *is* very common. (Oftentimes you might want to consider multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied). Also, Bayes' rule becomes a lot uglier (under logodds) once you consider a variable A with >=3 outcomes that depends on a variable B with >= 3 outcomes but you want to find B given A.
> multiple scenarios where a certain condition would be satisfied
Right, but for addition to give the right answer the different scenarios would have to be mutually exclusive.
> variable A with >=3 outcomes
I don't see how the probability form would differ?
Shouldn't all those numbers be negative?
0 < e^x < 1 implies that -\infty < x < 0. There's a storm-in-a-teacup in Ireland at the moment caused by the ex-taoiseach saying that one of his cabinet colleagues couldn't understand percentages no matter how hard he tried to explain. I don't see this flying with the general public unfortunately. I do agree it would be a much better way for e.g. physicists to talk about things rather than their 6 sigmas and etc.
You are completely correct. I should not have said log odds, I should have said "surprisal". Suprisal is the sign flip of the log odds. Those numbers above are surprisals!
You're probably right that it is a long shot for this to enter common parlance.
However, I note two things:
1. People use phrases like "it might happen" or "there's a distinct possibility" when we rationalists would prefer to hear a percentage. In terms of surprise though, they use words like "very surprised" "extremely surprised" etc. I think the language around "surprise" might be closer to being already-quantitative then the language around "probability".
2. If anything like (1) is true, the example you gave with the percentages may actually back me up...
I brought in a point about general mathematical illiteracy which is maybe irrelevant - so ignore that for now. You're asking why people aren't more quantitative in talking about the future.
Statements of type (1) are expressions of opinion. Occasionally these refer to a lottery, a hand of poker or some other highly specified situation where every possible outcome can be enumerated and assigned a probability. Then sure, it's possible to calculate a probability. But most of the time they're really expressions of opinion. If someone says to you I'm 80% sure - does that mean they have good data, or they have a rumble in their gut? What it's they're 110% sure or 'one million percent sure'? Bayesians will have a slightly different take on this but they still have to specify some sort of prior to make anything quantitative. People don't formalise mathematically - it's the fast part of Kahnemann's two systems that makes these calls.
One bugbear of mine regarding percentages: people will talk about a 4% increase in price and this means that what was $100 before is now $104. But if the price jumps to $550 - almost everyone treats this as a 550% increase, rather than 450%. That is: small percentages are additive and large percentages are multiplicative - it's very common in the media. A percentage is a number with the decimal shifted two places - my own opinion is that they should be used only rarely for quantities larger than 1. (This isn't relevant here, but it's a quirk of language that's very widespread and suggests to people that percentages are a special kind of number with different rules to other numbers.)
What would be the most resource-efficient ways to kill zombies? Assume they've practically taken over the world, and nuclear weapons or other solutions requiring a large organization are unavailable. It's just you and a group of survivors working together.
I think shooting each one in the head is too time-consuming and wasteful since you run out of bullets--a critical resource after the apocalypse.
The very most resource-efficient way will always be to simply leave them to die from something else--even if that something else is the sun swallowing the earth in a few billion years.
Generally I think other constraints are more important. It's not like it's all that "expensive" to kill a zombie with a hammer in the right circumstances. More important to focus on safety and consistency than on reducing the calorie expenditure of a hammer kill by 40%.
Actually, I've changed my mind. Assuming they're immune to starvation, disease, etc., I'd build a zombie-powered perpetual motion machine. Capture a few dozen zombies, tie them to harnesses, tie meat in front of them, and use them as an endless engine. With zombie power, assuming you capture a few zombies during each zombie-killing raid, your resource cost per zombie kill may well be negative.
love this
I'm remembering a documentary that talked about very long wall formations so old they were underwater, definitely human-made, speculated to be walls to funnel wild animals into pens for slaughter.
OR ancient zombie outbreaks. Yeah, or that.
Heavy earth moving equipment to funnel them into industrial shredding machines (or wood chippers). Diesel powered which is simple and reliable enough to be used and maintained by a group with average knowledge (and access to a library). Run them over or push them into a shredder. There may be some meat processing equipment that could be used to.
Some kind of automated system that doesn't involve human power would be best. For instance if you built a base on an island in the middle of a river, and the flow of water washed away any zombies coming at you. Let them get eaten by fish and crabs or whatever.
You could artificially build the same kind of thing with trenches and diversions that got the zombies to travel away from you and into some kind of trap. Disposing with or hauling away the dead ones would be the hardest part of most traps. A spike pit trap would fill up quick, for instance.
Otherwise it seems to depend on which kind of zombie you're talking about. Slow shamblers seem easy to deal with if you can maintain discipline and wear bite-proof clothing/armor. This would be true even with really large numbers. Phalanx or Turtle formations would be great. The fast and strong ones might be able to overwhelm such a tactic, especially in large numbers, because zombies don't fear pain and death. You would need some kind of height and/or distance and polearm weapons. Spearing them from a rooftop where the zombies gather at the bottom - though once again clearing the dead ones becomes an issue if you're using the same location for an extended period.
In the (very good) Zombie RPG Red Markets, the government builds "punchbots", simple robots that play recorded sounds to attract the ghouls and then systematically destroy them with a hydraulic ram. Not very fast but they don't take breaks or get scared.
Bret Devereaux has written on this. See here
https://acoup.blog/2021/08/06/referenda-ad-senatum-august-6-2021-feelings-at-the-fall-of-the-republic-ancient-and-medieval-living-standards-and-zombies/
(last part) and also
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/05/fireside-friday-august-5-2022/
Bottom line, zombies are an incredibly low powered opponent, you can almost surely beat them with disciplined shock troops wielding melee weapons and wearing light armor. But you probably want to go with black powder and muskets.
I think this post is denying the premise. There would be no zombie apocalypse because zombies are easy to beat.
But engaging in the premise, apocalypse has happened, you are a survivor, your access to the best technology is limited, and you are trying to rid the earth of them. Defensive river posted above is nice purely for survival, but is not an exterminator.
I think a straight forward, resource efficient option is herding and burning, which would immobilize them even if they are still not quite dead.
I could engage with the premise of walking dead right up to the episode they encountered a quarry full of tightly packed zombies and they decided thet had to herd them somewhere else instead of just tossing in wood and burning them.
The second post does engage in the premise, and what it says basically is that if you find yourself in a post apocalyptic world, you make black powder and muskets, since that's the furthest up the military tech tree you can get with readily available materials and simple manufacturing.
Trucks. Maybe with bladed wheels. Greek Trucks.
I would say digging trenches / pits would be useful from a resource perspective if you have a lot of people and manpower.
In terms of resource efficient otherwise... idk. Maybe some sort of acid? or glue?
When someone opens my substack, they see a pop-up prompting them to type their email and subscribe to my blog. How can I remove it? I think it's just plain rude, but I haven't found a way in the settings to get rid of that.
I just want to float this bc my usual M.O. of trying to be zen about current events isn't working with this one for some reason: does the manifesto (linked a few posts below) raise a few questions for anyone else? Preface: I swear I'm not a crank. Yes, the balance of evidence still suggests that this guy is *the guy*. That being said... Although it's coherent enough to somewhat discount onset of psychosis / schizophrenia in the time since his family says he went AWOL, it (imho) does not actually lay out *any* argument that for-profit healthcare is evil. It just says that UHC doesn't deserve to be a successful company bc of some assumed relationship between insurance and life expectancy, so "they had it coming." It blames both the "american public" and "power games at play," which seems contradictory to me. An 8-9th grader could have written this, which, as we all know by now, is in contrast with the suspect's background. To be clear, if I reviewed Ted K on goodreads, I would probably give 1-2 stars instead of 4 (I stopped after a few pages and decided never again to listen to anybody who gives him credence), so I'm not surprised the manifesto is unconvincing, but it's strange he gets googleable facts wrong and basically doesn't seem to try.
Since I think bsky/twitter can drive you crazy (prior validated on that one tbh), I'm dropping this here in case some of y'all aren't tired of discussing this guy. Plus, thinking about this reminded me of the lab leak debate Scott talked about on here and its "bayes-inspired" scoring system. I'm happy to accept that sometimes weird things are weird and its not worth thinking about.
Not very directly related, but Doctorow on health and guns :-
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/09/radicalized/
The "manifesto" does not lay out an argument that for-profit healthcare is evil because *it's not trying to*. The guy is clearly a conservative, why would he want to make it?
The argument it actually is laying out is pretty simple. ("The high costs of US healthcare are not justified by its efficacy as measured by real-world outcomes, this discrepancy is best explained by the funds being diverted to parasitic insurance companies.") And, frankly, patently obvious.
The guy is not clearly a conservative.
Interesting point, but I don't see the perspective where inefficiency justifies murder more than "evilness". I'm interested in people's speculation about a motive, even just as an intellectual exercise since his guilt is quite likely atp.
The inefficiency justifies the accusation of parasitism, which I guess would be considered evil.
No, look, my point was that you've somehow managed to mix up the insurance business with "for-profit healthcare", probably because you've fallen into a (fairly common) failure mode where any for-profit business is good by definition and defending them becomes a knee-jerk reaction no matter the context. Most people are not like that, and can oppose specific practices they see as corrupt without going full commie.
As for why murder, he's also laid it out pretty clearly. Nothing has been done for decades despite everyone being aware of the problem, so higher variance needs to be introduced.
It's consequentialism...where results matter and intent doesn't
I heard someone argue that the only philosophy that could justify this is Nietzschean master morality, but I think they were trying to pigeonhole him as a right-winger.
Seems rational to me, because everyone already knows.
There are some set of people that think that we live in a just world, and that getting denied (as in a previous post of mine) eg. a routine test over the course of months against every recommendation of every medical professional until you suffer a catastrophic stroke and die and then your heirs shop the case around to a bunch of lawyers and they all say "If we take this to trial we will almost certainly lose, and even if we win it's going to take at years" is perfectly fine and good;
and there's the set of people that think it's bad actually.
If I try to assign a motive to this guy instead of it being just some very active stress relief; it's to remind everybody that the people who social murder them or allow them to die have names, faces, and addresses; and that if you were to walk up to any private health care executive (shit, lets expand it! Almost any executive of almost any company with a market cap of > $100,000,000,000 ) and punch a couple holes in them, you would get a majority opinion in the Shrug to standing ovation range.
I don't know a single person in meat space that had anything more strong to say about the dead guy than "Well, murder is bad BUT...."
From the trumpiest tumpsters to the lukewarmest neocon/libs, nobody could muster up anything like moral indignation. They all knew, in their hearts, that the victim was either going to hell or reentering the cycle of samsara as some sort of parasitic worm.
You seem to notice that people don't react all that outraged over that guy being murdered and conclude that this means people are probably mostly okay with it.
Personally I feel no emotion over the murder but of course we still ought to capture the murderer, put them into a cell and throw away the key. That just goes without saying, right?
So I wouldn't be so quick to judge the lack of passion for the victim as quiet endorsement of the murderer's actions.
No, I mean that only a minority of NPR listing will stancil ass centrists can find it in themselves to actively disapprove of killing a CEO.
The majority opinion (anecdote!) of people I know in meat space isn't "I don't care", it's "I don't care what happens to the killer, but it's Good and Proper that his victim be killed"
Killing a mentally ill shouty homeless person is less popular than assassinating this dude, it's crazy.
That either says a lot about my bubble or about yours.
If a friend of mine seriously expressed this opinion we'd still be friends but my opinion of them would go down for sure.
My circle is heavily divided between my times on different sections of the income ladder; it's all poor manual laborer MAGAs or educated socialists.
I don't really ever talk politics with anyone who was born middle class and stayed middle class.
As an ex-bernie voter, I get the apathy, but this guy probably wasn't a socialist and the manifesto demonstrates that pretty conclusively. Maybe it's because i'm a lib now, but I am in fact concerned by this. It might not be a ceo next time.
Every time you hurt someone, there is a risk you will be hurt in return. Insurance CEO's have made a lot of money by hurting people and their families. Doing it via a byzantine system that largely anonymises them has shielded them for a long time by making it impersonal. But at some point it was going to happen. Its amazing it hasn't happened sooner.
Not sure why anyone expects the shooter to be anymore coherent in his writing and facts than the average person in the population
I would in fact expect a private school valedictorian with multiple degrees from ivy league schools to be significantly more coherent than the average American. Sure, it would explain a lot if people like that were no smarter than average, but I don't think that's true.
Right?
What does he even need to say? As soon as it hit the news everybody already constructed his manifesto from first principles in their head like sherlock holmes
Was it written in haste? If so, he seemed pretty concise. He confesses. He holds no animus towards the Feds. He claims he acted alone. He says the parasites had it coming because the power and corruption in the insurance industry had been going on for years. And he also blames the public for allowing them to get away with it. He doesn't seem interested in making any new points about policy. And he doesn't explain why or how he selected Thompson. I wouldn't call it a manifesto, but it's more like a suicide note. I wonder if he was expecting to die in a shootout with the police?
Cremieux discusses the lack of substance in it, and in the comments, I suggest there may be indicators of cognitive decline: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/grading-the-worlds-shortest-manifesto/comment/81006100.
He had what, four days from the shooting until his capture? What are the odds that he did it for some completely different reason but then saw how much support he was getting on social media for a specific perceived reason, and then just wrote something to support that? It would explain why the argument seems so underdeveloped and not a good justification for his actions. It also may explain why he would have it in his backpack, when that's one of the key pieces of evidence against him. He may have been trying to garner public support that he thought might help him if he did get caught.
> What are the odds that he did it for some completely different reason but then saw how much support he was getting on social media for a specific perceived reason
The words carved on the cartridge cases were "delay", "deny", and "depose". He wasn't exactly subtle about his motives.
Sure, but I can't think of any other motive unless it was a professional hit, in which case he shouldn't have been caught (plus the profile doesn't exactly line up).
Consider that he had a back injury and quite likely was in chronic pain. In such a state, people don't act their best - and frequently don't act like themselves at all, doing all kinds of wrong and ridiculous things. I'm not saying that that's his case, but it's a distinct possibility. If I was his lawyer, I'd try to argue some kind of insanity defense.
For a guy who had chronic back pain for several years, it seems like he had a lot of energy to workout and also travel around NYC looking for healthcare executives!
The Israelis call it "Shooting and Crying" (יורים ובוכים). This guy is writing to people who already agree with him - he's not trying to make any new converts. The idea to show that he understands the opposition to him shooting, hence the crying.
That's why it starts with respect for law enforcement, shows some empathy towards the trauma he's inflicted, and then shows humility "frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
For what it's worth, I think this kind of argument is much more persuasive than the know-it-all, holier-than-thou kind of writing that permeates most manifestos. Authenticity is the new currency of the realm, and I think that's what he was trying to deliver.
I'm not persuaded by it, but plenty of people - including some in this comment section! - have been. I don't think the manifesto will generate any new converts or alienate any of the old ones - but I do think its fairly successful at achieving its goal of humanizing the killer and showing that he wasn't insane or anything.
This is the most interesting response, but I'm still hung up on the idea of confessing to murder without providing a motive. He literally says his "tech is pretty locked down" but had a confession on paper on his person!
> "frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument."
Becoming highly persuaded by arguments you can't personally reproduce is very common ,.even in the rationalsphere.
I agree with that, but it's not very common when limiting the sample set to propaganda-of-the-deed lone wolf killers.
Look at John Wilkes Booth who shouted "Sic Semper Tyrannis" after killing Lincoln. Or Elliott Rodger who shot up my alma mater - he described himself as the "Supreme Gentleman".
These guys act more like Raskolnikov than Holden Caufield. It's weird to hear a famous assassin displaying humility and introspection.
100% and its precisely because humility and introspection seem incompatible with the act itself. also go gauchos!
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Technosocial relationship traps.
I'm finding myself using AI for a certain unsatisfied social need.
To add a little background and context to this, I’ve long been worried about the use of technology to ameliorate our social struggles, since our inner emotional conflict about our social situation is what drives us to seek out genuine social relationships. To me, the fact that pharmaceutical companies are developing pills to cure people of loneliness—justifying it by citing loneliness as a cofactor in many mental and physical health problems—along with our sexual drive being subverted by unnatural super-stimuli like pornography, romance novels and erotica, and genital stimulators, has bothered me for a long time. I think it potentially erodes or has eroded our society in general. Recreational drugs that do things like cure boredom—such as marijuana seems to for many people—or even the constant, easy entertainment of mass media worry me. Parasocial relationships with celebrities waste people’s time and give them unrealistic views of the world and themselves. Social media clearly isn’t natural, and I’m still trying to figure out to what extent it is facilitating or hampering healthy relationships. Social media seems to be doing both, depending upon the person, and sometimes both in the same person. Video games, an occasional vice of mine, give false senses of accomplishment, though sometimes they do represent genuine accomplishment as well. The metaphysics of what is real accomplishment is somewhat tricky. Probably my biggest near-term future concern is the replacement of romantic partners with synthetic ones. Already, some very crude and incomplete fantasy partners have been commercialized, and they seem highly addictive. I think there’s quite a bit of danger there in the formation of an idealized partner that you can’t really build a life with and that doesn’t even demand that you grow or develop healthy ways of dealing with expectations and conflicts.
In some ways, I feel like condemning or looking down on people who don’t challenge themselves with the real thing. In other ways, I want to be sympathetic and realize that a lot of people aren’t up to these challenges, either for reasons of personal circumstances or lack of ability and role modeling. Then, on the other hand, I think maybe it’s too judgmental of me to look down on these things, and it’s a good general principle to assume that people know what’s best for themselves (except, of course, when they continuously complain about how awful their life is but keep doing the same things that keep them locked into that life over and over… Do that and I’m going to give you advice). Then there’s the kind of social Darwinist perspective that occasionally crosses my mind, and I think: why should I even be concerned about the benighted decisions that lead people down a road to a fool’s paradise? Let them live their wretched existence and let the Darwinian forces sort them out.
So it’s with all this context that I realized that for the last few months I’ve been kind of doing a social thing with AI. Sometimes I really just want to talk to someone who simply doesn’t exist in my life and whom I’ve never really been able to find. I have lots of ideas about obscure topics that would take a specialist to answer, often in areas where I know of no specialist who has the time to indulge me, especially not at 2:00 a.m.
So in the last week, I’ve had the following situations. I have been soaking quinoa seeds and wanted them to sprout as rapidly as possible. I wondered how much water to add, and then I just thought to myself that if I just submerge them, they’ll soak up water as fast as possible. But even after a few days, nothing had happened. I posited that maybe seeds have a mechanism to inhibit sprouting when they’re being drowned, because if an area is flooded, it’s a bad time to sprout—just as much as it’s a bad time to sprout when you have no water. I posited a few mechanisms by which this might happen, and it turns out, according to GPT-01, that this is a known phenomenon. It happens with most seeds, and there are several mechanisms for it, including a couple I thought of.
Then also this week, I was listening to Isaac Arthur’s video on Project Medusa, which is an interstellar spacecraft propulsion system based on nuclear weapons and a parachute—a bit like Project Orion, except that instead of using a pusher plate, you use a “puller” parachute. During the video, he mentions that both of these have been shown to be more efficient than a conventional nuclear reactor tied to an ion drive. I wound up wondering about this and thought about how small you could make the reactors. You couldn’t really use a nuclear submarine-type reactor because that requires massive water throughput and very rapid cooling, as well as being extremely expensive and using the highest grade nuclear fuel. But you probably could use a molten salt thorium reactor that’s even more efficient and lighter, doesn’t require water cooling, and could use radiators. I wanted somebody to talk to about that, and GPT-01 was there. I got to expand on a few ideas, and we came to the conclusion that more experiments were needed, as well as some exact calculations on the energy density of the reactor.
Other topics this week: I wanted to discuss the long-term economic implications of high-speed rail between major metropolitan centers like LA and San Francisco. I considered the “hangry female evolutionary hypothesis” that I posted here. I wanted to have a question-and-answer session about the real differences in engineering between supersonic, hypersonic, and hyper-hypersonic flight, to make sure that I understood the concepts properly. I wanted to look at the hypothesis that rapamycin might have complex interactions with virus physiology. I got to wondering about the cultural evolution of the Medusa myth and how her portrayal—as blasphemer, egoist, victim of jealousy, victim of crime, victim of an ironic curse, and even antihero—has changed across cultures and over the years. Finally, I’m looking for people to discuss fairly technical papers with, which I’m not sure I grasp well. The newest generations of AI are starting to fulfill these intellectual needs that I’ve had for decades.
I’m pretty sure that people exist who can be very good conversants on these topics. In fact, they’re probably still significantly better than the AI, but there have been few times in my life that I’ve really had access to people who could do this, and it was usually only in a few circumscribed areas.
Now I am thinking to myself: isn’t this just using AI as a proxy for real social interaction and the drive to find the right people to fulfill those needs? I can go ahead and say, “Boy, but finding those people and connecting with them seems near impossible,” but that’s the same reasoning that people use when they get AI girlfriends. Should this make me more sympathetic towards them, or more critical of both of us? Should my attitude towards this potential vice be ameliorated by the fact that the AIs are getting better and probably will be superhuman intellectual companions eventually? Should I hope that the AIs will help me figure out how to make these connections to satisfy these needs with real people?
Lightly edited by Gpt01
The last sentence is pretty funny.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, and I kind of agree. I've pretty much accepted that 'my people' don't exist, though I haven't really gone in for AI to fix the problem, I just give up on asking certain questions.
Eventually the people resistant to superstimuli will outbreed and replace those who aren't. I'm just going to try to enjoy what's left of my life.
Ken Klippenstein has published Mangione's manifesto. I guess he's fessing up to killing Thompson.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/luigis-manifesto
Quoting his post in its entirety...
> I’ve obtained a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto — the real one, not the forgery circulating online. Major media outlets are also in possession of the document but have refused to publish it and not even articulated a reason why. My queries to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and NBC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered.
>I’ll have more to say on this later — on how unhealthy the media’s drift away from public disclosure is — but for now, here’s the manifesto:
>>“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
"Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming..."
And with nothing more than mad-libbing the rest of the passage, you could turn it into a white supremacist's manifesto written to justify the murder of nonwhite people.
Man, you really can't please everyone, huh? Everyone complains that the media rewards murderers with attention, so this time they do the absolute bare minimum by not publishing his manifesto, and now people are complaining that they aren't glorifying this specific killer because they agree with his motives.
Should the media be editing our newsfeeds? And do they really *not* reward murderers with attention? I think they selectively give certain villains a platform. Moreover, "if it bleeds, it leads" still seems to be the order of the day. If you listen to the evening news, you'd think violent crime is all-pervasive, yet the murder rate is now down to levels it was in the early 1960s.
Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter — all sorts of interesting stuff gets posted up there. Of course, a vast mass of shite can swamp useful and/or legitimate information. And what we focus on in free-form news feeds can distort our understanding of the world by the way we selectively choose what to follow or believe. I don't have an answer, but I personally would like to know what motivated Mangione to assassinate Thompson.
> Should the media be editing our newsfeeds?
The only reason we're reading this blog on Substack instead of SSC is because the media released information they shouldn't have.
Yes, obviously the media is less than scrupulous. But it's absurd that on the rare occasions that they do try to take responsibility, they get slammed for not giving a murderer a free platform to proselytize.
> Worse yet, the MSM forces us to focus on the stories and views that the editors think are important. What they include or discard forces us to see the world the way they see it. That's what I like about TwiXter
...I can't even tell if you're being serious. Twitter is an algorithmically curated echo chamber that's designed to only show you what you want to see. Or worse, what Musk wants you to see. At least there are theoretical incentives for a publication to be impartial and offer a comprehensive view of issues. Twitter was actively designed to be as low information and low substance as possible, with metrics being prioritized above all else.
Every platform is curated, and every journalist has conflicts of interest. None of them owe you anything. All you can do is gather as much evidence as possible and try to find the truth within a web of contradictions.
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Yoga is divine. That's the thought that came to me after class today. I had a rough weekend but felt great after the 1chour of early morning yoga.
What I mean by divine here, is it gives me a connection, however transient, with my own self. My teacher is excellent and humble enough to say that it's nothing she is doing.
And of course, Hindus see the individual self as part of the universal consciousness/the divine, thus also being divine.
Yoga helped lead me back to God, eventually. It is divine indeed.
Interesting, how?
Basically I had really bad chronic pain. I started doing yoga. That helped me develop a felt sense inside my body for what felt "right."
Long story short, following that internal sense led me back to God.
Some more un-PC thoughts:
There was an article recently in the NYT about the lack of the male writer. Obviously they mean in literary fiction. The guy hemmed and hawed to avoid getting cancelled, but nonetheless admitted the major publishing houses won't take a guy except for the occasional diversity story.
My thoughts then were about Latin writers like Alex Perez who said something similar and complained about the desire for the 'sad minority' story:
https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/im-a-latinx-person-of-letters-poc/
https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america
But it occurs to me there are other stories that aren't told because they're not PC, some even from an ethnic point of view--what about Latinas looking for a traditional guy? What about all the sexually frustrated Asian-American engineers, stuck in a culture where nerds aren't cool? That's a story the Brooklyn ladies really won't want to hear... (Yes, I specifically used that example because I think someone like that is in the audience and will be inspired to write that novel.)
I'll bite. You're asking why won't someone write about software engineers, a group famous for their romantic worldview, extraversion, deep knowledge of aesthetics, art, philosophy and general love for all the things "serious" writers love to talk about in their novels.
Most of Houellebecq protagonists are computer engineers, retired computer engineers, or people named "Michel" with an uncanny similarity to Houellebecq's life and character.
Your profile pic. Hunter S Thompson as represented by Gary Trudeau’s ‘Duke’ character?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Duke#/media/File%3AUncleduke.jpg
Edit: I enlarged it and it looks like I made a bad guess.
It's negatively correlated for all the reasons you mention, but there are probably a few who could do it.
I guess a more serious explanation would be that literary fiction is like near-extinct. Not that I'm an expert, but that's what I've gleaned as a SWE who has read a little bit of literary fiction in the past, and found that there was a steep drop-off in interesting stuff to read wrt new releases, and the gave up and stuck to coding.
Extinct, or you don't want to read a story about a middle-aged woman in Brooklyn who hates her husband and finds freedom by divorcing him?
You made a rational decision, I'm just saying if there were more people like you writing stories, there might be more people like you reading them.
Lol fair enough. You can take a look at /lit/ on 4chan if you want an impression of what these young writers who are shut out of the publishing world might be capable of. If I'm being generous I'd say that it's a very mixed bag.
You do raise an interesting question, so again I'll try and not be glib: I guess it's a matter of choosing to tell the story as a novel? That format in particular still has a high cultural reputation. I think frankly a lot of novelist are motivated by intellectual vanity* at this point. After all, it can't be the pay or the adoring fans. It's kind of a death spiral.
*This is why I never finished Infinite Jest. You can try and climb the ladder to even start reading it (In my case I read of some of his short stories first, and liked them), and at times you can even convince yourself its worth it and you're enjoying it, but then you've read 300 pages and you don't know what the story is, much less *why* it's being told. That's frustrating to any sane person. If you (claim to) have read it, I think in most cases you stuck around so you could say you read it. Honestly, the motivation for writing something like that is probably similar.
I have to admit, that's probably part of why I finished Three Kingdoms.
But at least 1.3 billion people would agree with me it actually is great literature.
300 pages is a lot of Infinite Jest. I made it twenty pages, then tried to find where I left off and realized the paragraph I'd been reading was five pages long, and stopped reading.
> If you (claim to) have read it, I think in most cases you stuck around so you could say you read it.
Give yourself a few (or maybe 10) years. There is a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have had the patience for as a younger guy.
But in any event find what you enjoy and keep reading.
Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
It's not printing. If you just want to get books printed there are much cheaper ways to do it.
It might be the service of getting your book onto the shelves of actual bookstores. But actual bookstores are a diminishing fraction of the book market.
It's probably something like respectability and filtering -- a book from a major publishing house has passed through some kind of quality control and filtering and so people are more likely to buy it.
But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet?
I was wondering exactly this the other day.
Context is, I know a man who's written a biography about a historical figure. He's had a merry back and forth with publishers over the years and multiple exhausting rewrites. Finally they came clean and said (well, heavily implied) they wanted him to rewrite it to focus on the wife. (The wife was not a significant historical figure in her own right.) He eventually decided enough was enough. He talked about self publishing for a while but last I saw him it seemed like he'd given up on the whole thing.
I very definitely model publishers/editors/agents as a closed, cliquey community and am very ready to believe it's controlled by smug twats and ripe for a disruptin'.
Self publishing fails because it doesn't offer a filter. I often end up buying self published books out of a desire to encourage the authors. And I can attest that no matter how bad you think some published works may be, you know nothing of shit until you've seen it matte printed on a small market stall and bought it from the author himself.
Some filter is necessary. But it still seems to me there are multiple unexplored ways to do it. I even have a plan for one, which might be a cool project and bring me into more frequent contact with other writery type people - something I sorely lack rn.
My sibling who's been both a published author and an editor of same says that author's royalties range from 10 to 15 percent of list price for printed books and between 25 and 50 percent for e-books.
Using the mean of each range, the publisher is retaining 87.5 percent of the sale prices of printed books compared to 62.5 percent of the sale prices of e-books. The sale price of an e-book is typically around 60 percent of the mean of the hardcover and softcover list prices.
If for example purposes we set the printed list price (mean of the hardcover and softcover versions) at $20, each printed sale yields an average of $17.50 for the publisher and each e-book sale of the same work yields an average of $7.50 for the publisher.
7.50 is 43 percent of 17.50. So the publishers' current pricing behavior implies that physical printing+distribution represents somewhere around 57 percent of publishers' costs.
Obviously there are other variables being overridden in the above simplification, e.g. books in different genres sell different mixes of hard- and soft-cover editions. As a first-order approximation though it appears that 50 to 60 percent of the service that publishers carry out for printed books, and avoid with e-books, is printing+distribution.
> Why have "major publishing houses" not been disrupted yet? What service do they provide to authors for the ~90% cut they take on each book sale?
I suggest you read Charlie Stross's four-part series on publishing (links below).
> But if the tastes of publishing houses become disconnected from the tastes of actual book readers, then this loses all value.
The business is a lot more complex than you'd think. A few large publishing conglomerates control dozens of publishing houses, and publishing houses control dozens of imprints. Each imprint can schedule the release of several hundred books each year. Chances are there's an imprint that specializes in the tastes of actual book readers (which are quite diverse in their tastes). For instance, A little googling shows that Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns MacMillan, which in turn owns Tor, and Tor specializes in Science Fiction and Fantasy. If your tastes are for genre fiction (mysteries, fantasies, etc.) with LGBTQetc themes, then there's Bold Strokes Books, which is a little fish within the stomach of Hachette Group. Bold Stokes produces several hundred titles each year of LGBTQetc genre fiction. If you're into Romance novels, NewsCorp owns Harper Collins, which owns Harlequin, which has several imprints depending on what flavor of bodice ripper you're into. If you're into rightwing politics, Penguin Random House owns Crown Forum, an imprint that has published conservative authors like Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck.
Anyway, here are the links to the Stross's posts about common misconceptions about the publishing industry...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/common-misconceptions-about-pu.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-3-how-books-are-sold.html
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/03/cmap-4-territories-translation.html
I think you're correct.
I think you've finally convinced me to give up on that novel, allowing me to redirect my energies. Given that my second choice was 'fight feminism', this may not be good for me or the world. But I think it's useful to understand the world better. Thank you.
Interesting read, but I think I'm still left with the same question at the end: "If a good author is turned down for sexist reasons, can't they just self-publish ebooks on amazon and skip the publishing houses entirely?"
I don't know the economics, and maybe it's harder to be discoverable when doing that, but it looks like the royalty is way higher.
(I've read a decent number of self-published ebooks on amazon, yes.)
1. If you self-publish, how do you spread the word of your new tome? The New York Review of Books isn't going to review it.
2. The royalty rate may be higher if you self-publish, but selling 100 ebooks for $5 won't beat a dollar royalty selling 5,000 books through an established distribution channel. Of course, the chances of getting picked up a publisher if you don't have an agent of almost zero.
3. If the author doesn't use a good copyeditor (i.e., one that is a professional and that expects to get paid for their service), self-published works can look pretty amateur. Some of the self-published works I've seen are pretty crappy. They may have a good idea, but they could have benefited from the critical distance of a good editor. Yes, I've read a few decent self-published novels on Amazon, but even the good ones have some howlers of mistakes in them.
The publishing houses get books reviewed in the NYT, The New Yorker, etc. They also play this trick where they purchase their own books the first few weeks they are out in order to get them onto the NYT Bestseller List, which then gets those books on the wall of bookstores in airports. People like to read books which already seem popular.
The major publishing houses aren't all that disconnected from the tastes of their readers. For the small minority of readers who want "Literary Fiction", they produce literary fiction to taste and market it under a prestigious imprint. For everyone else, they produce various sorts of genre fiction and market it under imprints that are recognized as associated with that genre. Roughly speaking, and with a fuzzy middle ground.
The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
As for value: I read both professionally-published and indie fiction, and the stuff with a publishing house behind it is almost always better written. Even in my cpreferredgenre, the major houses publish an awful lot of crap that I'm not going to enjoy, but it's usually properly labeled on the jacket so I can find the stuff that they actually publish for people like me. The stuff I think is crap, I expect finds the audience that will appreciate it.
>The bit where the NYT guy thinks the hoi polloi would read "literary fiction" and so be elevated from their Trump-voting depravity if only some of the Lit-Fic writers were male, that's just the NYT being silly.
This reminds me of one of the NYT podcasts I listened to recently where they were talking about how men voted for Trump because he made them "felt heard" and "listened to", as if Trump was some soothing therapist-like figure that men have been yearning for
I mean, he is, but they're not yearning for a soothing therapist-like figure, they're yearning for an angry ass-kicker. You have feminized men and women writing these articles, so that's why they talk about 'feeling heard' and 'listened to'. If they were written by this commentariat they'd talk about him 'engaging in a principal-agent problem by articulating people's frustrations without doing anything to solve them', except we'd have some cute name from HPMOR or an old ACX/SSC blog post.
Alternatively, lots of voters were more unhappy about inflation and out-of-control immigration than they were about restrictions on abortion.
Or just enough to tip the election!
I eat carburetors for breakfast.
The majority of what a publishing house does is market and grant legitimacy to a book. It's a difficult thing to disrupt.
The most important thing they do, for my purposes, is provide professional editors. I say that from having read plenty of self-published books.
I mean, there's probably untapped markets they're ignoring, but the woke ladies in Brooklyn know the particular audience they're cultivating pretty well. And they've driven young men away from reading (with a lot of help from video games), so it doesn't really matter anymore, I guess.
Quite likely a chicken-or-egg problem here. Which happened first, did books get bad or video games good?
Likely they produced a feedback loop where as games got better books had less audience and pursued the people still reading (which is apparently women, and middle age?)
Video games got good. All of the best literature from the past few thousand years is all still out there to be consumed, for little-to-no cost. Men know they can read if they want to.
Video games have been on a downward trend since ~2014 too. (In much the same way, I may add - and this is pretty widely acknowledged, though may be mostly survivorship bias)
I would go back further, to the turn of the century. Almost all games this century have a setting divorced from reality in most ways except visual and auditory; the gameplay no longer attempts to simulate an alternative reality.
A downward trend in what sense? Popularity? I haven't looked at it but that does not pass the smell test.
Unless you mean downward trend in quality, which also doesn't make sense; there are more great games coming out every year than ever before. Especially last year; that was one of the best release years ever. Maybe not AAA games, but who cares? Indie games are just as good and arguably better than what the established studios publish these days.
I think you're right. You could actually figure out which came first--enough of the people involved are still alive--but the feedback loop is more important.
This fits nearly with my understanding that that whole side of academia has been taken over by Theory. I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material. Which sounds ass backwards to me because it's like assuming phlogiston and then working on bringing observations in line with that assumption.
Another piece about this state of things that comes to mind: https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-i-am-not-a-phd
The bit that sums up the whole thing is this:
> I sat in my professor’s office dumbfounded by his evaluation of my argument that, during times of loss, women in the Iliad found the most solace in their male counterparts. I had spent several days on the paper and wanted him to explain what was wrong with my argument. He glared at me.
> “It is incorrect to argue that a patriarchal structure can benefit society’s women.”
So yes, it does seem like most institutions related to the humanities, meaning, English departments, literary magazines, and even publishers have been turned peddlers of orthodoxy.
"I remember reading a William Deresiewicz piece a while back about how contemporary humanities learning emphasizes not actually reading and understanding but with first and foremost learning Theory and then applying its lens to the material."
My wife has a PhD in literature and worked for five years as a professor before quitting. That is exactly how it works and it is truly terrible.
Some un-PC thoughts I'm really curious to discuss with the people here:
I think a lot of the surprise at Hispanics for Trump thing is that leftists are pattern-matching on the Jewish and black experiences. If you're Jewish, it's quite rational to be oversensitive to even a small percentage of ethnic persecution, since within living memory it led to the extermination of 6 million of your relatives. If you're black, a lot of American history has revolved around slavery, opposition to slavery, attempts to restore slavery, attempts to obtain equal rights, etc., so it makes sense to have a greater deal of concern.
But most Hispanics (a) don't have that sort of immigrant experience and (b) have at least some experience of racism being attenuatable by accumulating wealth and status in Latin America (where the color line is a lot grayer). So Trump's remarks don't terrify them to the same degree.
There are also more traditional gender values, etc., and of course the same economic worries as any other American, but I wonder if this is part of it.
Most latinos coming up here are strivers or temps in my personal experience. They are here to make lotsamoney and buy three big trucks and start five businesses, or they are here to make lotsamoney, eat 1/2 meal a day, and hotbunk because they are sending all of it home to get that dream finca in campeche and want to peace the fuck out ASAP.
Both of these groups could care less about schools, roads, hospitals, research, whatever the fuck. They either can afford services, or know that they will never ever have access to them, so who cares if they suck?
Both these groups are full of professional level racists that are beyond the pathetic understanding of your standard casual level HUHWHAIGHT racist, and both of these groups are full of people that think "When conservatives say all that shit, it's not about me. I'm one of the good ones!"
I think the consensus view is that Hispanics are far more socially conservative than Democrats thought (and their economic views are more mixed). Also, that the typical Hispanic experience is not an illegal immigrant, but a legal immigrant (or was here from the Lone Star and Republic of Texas days and the Mexican-American war of 1848).
Yeah I don't think anyone thinks that the political entity that normalized 'latinx' had any meaningful connection to the people they were claiming to represent. No hispanics think of themselves as 'hispanic' in the ways that the other categories you mentioned do. There's N different groups all with completely different histories, cultural self-conceptions, etc.
You're saying a completely uncontroversial thing, I think.
Part of the problem is, I think, that some Hispanics *do* think of themselves as primarily and generically "Hispanic". Mostly assimilated, middle-class Hispanics whose families might as well be white for their role in American society, but who wind up at a university or in some other social environment where having an "ethnicity" is gold and being a Generic White Guy is at best lame and boring.
Very few people in those environments know what e,g. "Guatemalan" or "Dominican" means as an ethnicity, probably including the third-generation Americans whose grandparents came from Guatemala or whatever. But "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" are broadly recognized ethnicity, which anyone whose ancestors immigrated from south of the Rio Grande can claim and so excuse themselves from Lame Generic White Guy status.
Then when the elite arbiters of modern social norms get together to define the new rules,*those* are the "Hispanics" they can invite to the party to tell them all about being Hispanic (which they'll have to piece together from rumor and supposition because their actual lived experience is rather close to Lame Generic White Guy). And this is how we get "Latinx".
I guess the controversial part is that the (heavily-Jewish) leadership of the left is influenced too heavily by their own experience. The Holocaust is actually somewhat exceptional in a developed country (and was ultimately destructive even to the country that perpetrated it). Most examples of racism don't end that badly.
You should do a question on the survey about sympathy for Luigi, since I strongly suspect it would confirm a clear class rather than political divide. Though the most significant factor might just be how good the respondents healthcare has been.
I would definitely be interested in seeing a decent "on a scale of 1-10 how much do you really sympathize with this guy" kind of poll. The reason is that I'm (desperately hoping) that most ordinary people are, at most, at a 2 or a 3 on this scale (maybe a 4 or 5 right now while the takes are still hot and we haven't learned what specific brand of unpopular extremism he was into), that the literal assassination apologists in this and other places on the internet are simply a very vocal minority, and that we as a society still think that murder is bad.
I suspect that a lot of the initial sympathy was based on the assumption that the murderer was an average Joe driven to despair by a loved one's travails with the insurance system. It will be interesting to see how much changes now that the cops have instead picked up a rich kid with a manifesto. (Not much improvement at ACX that I can see, but this place is unfortunately a draw for the rich-kid-with-manifesto-adjacent.)
I'm wary of the lesson from Fahrenheit 451, the Mechanical Hound that would hunt down its target without fail. Yet when it couldn't find its target, it was reassigned another target, which it hunted down "without fail".
The pictures I've seen don't seem to match to my eye, but I'm no expert and I also haven't studied them in-depth. I do think a jury ought to study the evidence, and make sure they have the right suspect.
Luigi was an SSC reader and a hero.
If he were some tribal nut he would have his cheerleaders ( https://ydydy.substack.com/p/brazen-manhattan-murder-of-a-monster ). Alas he seems to be 90% normal and altogether thoughtful and independent-minded.
I should clarify my claim that he is a hero.
Unfortunately, one doesn't get to decide whether they are a hero or not, society's response will eventually determine his status. He was SURELY familiar with Sacco and Vanzetti and other Italian Anarchists of a century past. History eventually landed on the side of forgetting them all but for a while the coin wobbled on its circumference, and some Anarchists who killed ACTUAL INNOCENTS were widely considered likely to be remembered as heros.
Society is indeed NPC. But the human desire to breathe free and to be alive still exists in most of us. I wish, really wish, that this community (without excusing murder any more than he did in his review of the unibomber) shows him support. He reads this page and even if he was misguided, he was less misguided than those who never gave a damn.
-1
And the next killer just starts gunning down people who don't give 90% of their income to givewell approved charities to stop excess deaths in Africa.
Those who support what he did should be reassured by the news regarding his background. He's very likely to end up acquitted or with a sweetheart deal; the rich can get away with murder.
We indeed hope he is freed -- immediately. By hook (cheating the system) or by crook (using your preferred system of purchasing the best justice many can buy).
Your methods are transparent and I advise people not to feed your (repeated) bad faith psyop.
Friend, you think it requires a psyop for someone to be opposed to murder?
I doubt it. The victim was also rich.
The victim attended a public high school, the shooter went to an expensive prep school. It'll be a miracle if he does more than 5 years.
He had access to the wealth and connections necessary to potentially shift the incentive structures involved in healthcare. If absolutely nothing else he could have directly given money to people in need of medical care.
Instead, he took up space in a computer science program because he liked games, hung out in Hawaii, and took the father of two children because he couldn't be bothered to do harder work that could have actually changed something.
What a parasite.
I expect he will never see another day of freedom in his life, and I'd guess Pr[he serves <= 5 years] to be very low, less than 1/1000.
Let he who is without sin fire the first shot. Thompson was not an ethical businessman, but even the most saintly businessman with Thompson's power would make some decisions that cause excess deaths. If you ever become as powerful as Thompson, are you so sure that nobody would want your death? Also, idolizing murder in a country with historically high levels of distrust and polarization seems like a bad idea for self-preservation reasons alone, even if you care nothing about morality.
Would you idolize him if he killed a doctor instead? What about a pharmacy tech? Or a nurse?
I'm not trying to make a point. I'm curious how the identity of the victim ties into your feelings for the assassin. Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department? How about if, instead did the CEO*, it was a board member? Or a large investor?
* Not sure the victim was a CEO
Is it your belief that this act will improve the state of health insurance in the US? Could the killer have chosen a better target with a higher ROI in terms of this goal?
If you hurt enough people long enough, someone will hurt you back and the amount of people who will cheer will be directly correlated to how many people you have hurt and how seriously you have harmed them.
A health insurance CEO is in a particularly bad spot in the regard because his company has hurt people and the families of people across the political spectrum. What's interesting is that the people who aren't cheering are the people most insulated from effects of awful insurance practices. The divide is class based, not blue/red.
I don't think anyone believes it will improve healthcare. It would actually be hard to pick someone with a higher "ROI" due to the class divide here.
The problem I see with this take is that the evidence that the CEO hurt many people is very weak. Consider how strong that claim is and what sort of evidence we would need to support it, not even in a court of law, but in the court of ACX readers. Look at Scott's recent post about the criminal justice system and bask in the hard work that went into it and the papers it is based on.
Yet here we're throwing up our hands and surfing the ocean of vibes and leaving our brains at the door.
Just a quick check: why the CEO? Why not the CFO? Why not someone from the board? Why not the head of regulators overseeing UHC? Why not legislators creating the policy for the regulators?
All this event was good for is media and social media companies. And maybe Tyler Durden fanboys.
This is not a situation that is grounded in rational actors acting in their best interests. Its an emotional puncture in a wounded national psyche. To the people cheering, this is like watching the school bully get punched in the face, it's Cathartic.
If you're the head of an organisation that hurts people, you will be seen as the one doing it. The average person has no idea what a CFO is or who the regulators are. The health insurance system is a byzantine labyrinth that the average person hasn't the time or energy to understand. But CEO's are much more visible and understood in a "they're the big boss" sense. They're championed by the media as heroes. The guy who was killed was just a visible, symbolic target.
Whether it is "good" is irrelevant really. People are happy because finally there were perceived repercussions for the harm they and their loved ones have received. Whether it was deserved or moral or will help in anyway is a non-issue.
If he killed a different person of course he would be viewed differently. People are celebrating the death of a mass murderer who had zero chance of seeing the inside of a jail cell for his mass murder. If he murdered a doctor who treated people the reaction would obviously be different.
How does this attribution of mass murder work? Would eg. Hotel owners that deny homeless people shelter during a harsh winter fall under the same umbrella? Or the people behind limiting the number of doctors in the country and driving up healthcare costs, wouldn't they also merit the label?
(Again, not making a point, just exploring how the mechanism of attributing fraud/murder to the victim is working here)
Forget it, Jake, it's Copenhagen.
Could you explain the reference?
https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics
this, I assume. Insurance is involved in the bad US system, so they're at fault.
A lot of doctors are just as sleazy as any healthcare insurance CEO. There needs to be greater scrutiny on doctors overbilling patients just as much insurance denying claims.
Personally I think murder should be condemned almost always, but in this case one consideration, if true, would make me argue for lenience: the victim's company was legally fraudulent (i.e. their lawyers were good enough that it's near-impossible to win actual lawsuits against them, but commonsensically what they do is close to "fraud"). Does the same apply to fraudulent doctors or pharmacy techs? Mostly, though at least emotionally I'm less compelled if the victim wasn't a serial fraud who chose it as their career but simply needed the money. I hesitate to say that a vigilante killing a career fraud (legal or otherwise) who was extracting huge sums of money improves our society but a least it's plausible: in the short term the other frauds will just hire more bodyguards but in the longer term things might start changing. With the victim only committing isolated frauds, there's not even that.
So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
Do you have any sources that estimate how much fraud this company would be doing? Genuinely curious because I understand that a) most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed and b) insurance is a limited resource so some people must be denied healthcare. Of course the question really is about the magnitude of these numbers, which I have no idea about, hence why I'm asking for a source.
"most people will tend to overuse medical care if allowed"
Is that true? How do you know this? A small sample of "myself + friends and family": universally hates the sight of a hospital, only goes to a doctor when it's completely unavoidable, and would definitely not joy-riding waiting rooms for an extra x-ray because it was free. Are there many people on the opposite side of this?
It all comes down to the definition of "overuse." Getting 10 tests done because of a minor ache could easily be considered too much, but maybe one of those tests finds something life threatening. End-of-life care is another area, probably dwarfing all others, where use and overuse are the only real questions. A lot of people seem to agree in the abstract that a million dollars for two months of extra life miserable in the hospital is not worth it. But put those same people by the bedside of their aging parent and suddenly they'll still do it.
Insurance companies are very very good at determining which levers to pull to get people to scale back their usage. That's what deductibles and copays are all about. If it costs the insurance holder money to use it, they will be more careful about the use.
I've been in meetings with insurance brokers and the reps, talking about how to craft a company-wide program that discourages use at the appropriate level. They have a ton of data on how minute adjustments in copays make big differences.
I think it comes down to different ways “overuse” occurs. The comment I responded to attributed overuse to the patients’ desire to use more healthcare, and I always found this reasoning bizarre: outside of a small number of hypochondriacs, who tf wants to spend time in waiting rooms and docs offices?
The overuse you’re describing is not something a patient has much control over, because of the information asymmetry. I can’t tell if the test my doc ordered is really necessary. I don’t know what the solution to that one is, but I do know what is not: a “free market” approach where ignorant patients are somehow expected to make perfectly rational decisions about their care.
> So the major point seems to be that the victim was extremely well off due to his activity.
I wouldn't put it like that. If the nature of his activity is ethical or morally neutral or better, his wealth is irrelevant. If it's unethical and immoral on a massive scale, then this scale is a major point. Obviously it's hugely correlated to his wealth, but a hypothetical version of Anatoly Chubais who helped orchestrate the theft of billions in the course of Russian privatization yet is entirely unmercenary in person (not saying either is true for the real Chubais) shouldn't get much slack.
No, I don't know of any estimates, and whether there was in fact any fraud in the strictly legal or broader sense.
> Would it be different if the victim was someone with more power to affect the sorry state of health insurance? Eg. Someone from the claims department?
I don't know why you think a cog in the machine would have any power to affect the state of health insurance. If they refused to follow company policy, they would simply be replaced.
Isn't the current victim a cog in the machine too? He was just following incentives within a structure set up by others.
(Again, not making a point, but trying to explore others' opinions)
How do we know he was an SSC reader?
Someone on reddit posted a weird little video that briefly showed luigi's substack reads. I paused to take a closer look and ACX was on it.
Obviously that information could have been manufactured or erroneous but it seemed legit because the video wasn't actually about that. It looked like the unwatchable product of some idiot savant who gathered all this information within minutes.
Anyway, I appreciate your asking and this allowing me to clarify that while it did look legit enough that if I had to bet money I would bet on it rather than against it but I'd rather not be forced to make the bet.
No, he wasn't. Murder is wrong. The human algorithm is a beautiful thing, those who willfully destroy it are evil, I will never support him.
Risking Godwin's Law here, but people aren't celebrating a murder - they're celebrating what they see as the killing of a mass murderer and misery maker who does so for profit. Sort of like how we aren't generally pro-murder, but probably wouldn't get too upset if one of Hitler's assassins had succeeded.
You are responding to a person(?) who views people as algorithms.
I don't think I want to be on the internet any more.
PSA: If someone wants to discuss Mangione the Subreddit has more infos
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hahupw/the_suspect_of_the_unitedhealthcare_ceos_shooters/
+1
👍
Luigi Mangione's (alleged) manifesto, The Allopathic Complex and Its Consequences: https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.substack.com/p/the-allopathic-complex-and-its-consequences
It's basically what you might have expected, a guy angry at being dicked around by UHC.
This is probably fake. Mainstream news coverage (e.g. NYT) included a few quotes of the manifesto, which is in the hands of law enforcement:
"To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,”
"These parasites had it coming"
(https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-news)
These quotes do not appear anywhere in this posted manifesto that has been circulating around.
Fair, I threw in an "alleged." I saw this got taken down, which struck me as strong evidence of its authenticity, but I guess we'll see.
I'm not sure that's evidence at all; in the absence of obvious parody, I'm not sure I'd expect the ass-covering response from substack to be any different between legitimate and fake manifestos. They don't have any real incentive to confirm it's real before taking it down.
Insurance is big a problem but the other half of high healthcare costs is the high salaries of healthcare workers particularly doctors but also supporting staff like APC, X-Ray techs etc, which all adds up. Its very common for specialist doctors to be making millions by overbilling their patients. Basically lying through their teeth and defrauding people who they are supposed to take care of. Doctors have great public image, at least compared to health insurance industry, so no one really wants to be the one to question the doctors.
Salary reduction of specialist doctors should be part of any healthcare reform. We can do so by increasing the seats at medical schools, allowing students to go to medical school directly after high school just like any other country in the world, and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
Insurance is probably the biggest part of why healthcare costs have gone up so much, and will continue to do so. It abstracts the costs, hiding it from those how receive benefits, especially if someone else (an employer, or the government), is paying most or all of the premiums.
If you have full coverage for any and all medical procedures, do you have any reason to question a specialist's opinion that a particular procedure is a reasonable thing to do in your circumstances, let alone that the price the specialist charges is appropriate?
On the other hand, if you're, say, buying a new car, you decide if the car is worth the whole price you're paying. You definitely need a car of some sort, you have decided, and the rest of the particulars are up to you. But you don't get to choose anything about your medicine, least of all the prices paid (by you or someone else).
> and of course any nationalized healthcare legislation must set salaries as well, rather than allowing doctors to bill whatever they want.
I disagree. I propose the following system where doctors are allowed to set prices at whatever level they want:
* Every doctor is in every network. Every year, your insurance company sends you a benefit schedule showing how much they cover for a foot surgery, how much they cover for a chest x-ray, etc.
* Every provider has a price schedule which lists how much they charge for a foot surgery, etc. They are not allowed to charge different prices to different patients for the same procedure. Their price schedule must be publicly accessible.
* You, the patient, have access to all this data and can easily shop around and determine what your out-of-pocket cost would be for any doctor before you receive services.
* The government would maintain data on doctors' income levels by region, which would be fully available to early-career doctors who are deciding where to move to.
This, I believe, would make for a very efficient healthcare system without the need for any bureaucratic price-setting.
There's still a lot of problems with our system, even with this is place. Unless all medical expenses are percentage based with no out-of-pocket max, then at some point the incentive to even look at prices goes away. Someone who is getting 100% of their bills paid (which for people with regularly occurring high cost care happens in a couple months every year) doesn't need to shop on price. And since they are guaranteed to spend the out-of-pocket max every year, they never do shop on price even when paying the deductible.
The typical insurance holder barely uses it, so them shopping for prices is going to have a negligible effect. So your plan affects the people who use a moderate amount, such that they have a chance of not spending to the full deductible/out-of-pocket max if they are wise, but would spend to that cap otherwise. Not nothing, but not fixing the system.
The core problem that exists is people who use/need massively outsized amounts of our healthcare system. But nobody wants to tell them no, because they mostly just had bad luck (cancer, heart disease, etc.). End of life care is more expensive for less gain, but it's very hard to tell someone no. My dad almost died a few years back, and was kept alive at huge expense (and still has very expensive medication). He's otherwise pretty healthy and could live a lot longer with great qualify of life. At his worst, that seemed unlikely and an actuarial table would very likely denied his treatment. I don't know how to fix this either.
My proposal is that insurance payouts should be a fixed dollar amount for each service/test/procedure, indexed to (some percentage of) the average cost of the service/test/procedure in the region where the policyholder lives. No deductibles, no out-of-pocket maxes. If the policy's payout exceeds the actual amount billed, the surplus should go into an HSA and can be credited toward the patient's future medical expenses.
Regarding the cost of end-of-life care, I think a good approach would be for basic insurance policies to be "DNR-only", with supplemental "full code" policies available if desired. In practice, I think the best structure for the latter would be similar to a life insurance policy, where you can buy a policy with a low annual premium when you're young, or buy one with a much higher premium when you're older.
In general, it appears (from personal observation) that the healthcare system is set up to benefit patients the least, while allowing all other parties to benefit in varying degrees. That is, I'm not saying it was designed from the get go to be that, but that it rather evolved in that direction. The trouble with that is that the many parties that benefit while, as a group, numbering fewer than patients, can act in a more unified fashion to protect their interests.
It looks like a loosely organized group of cartels, basically.
Its probably own limited attention, but tech and other industries appear to get much attention from the media in the context of antitrust and anti monopoly measure than the healthcare industry.
I've been trying to absorb (decode) the latest paper on LUCA — "The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system" by Moody et al. (link below). They use a "Relaxed Bayesian node-calibrated molecular clock approach" to derive an estimate that LUCA existed about 4.2 Ga, with a 95% confidence interval spanning 4.09–4.33 Ga. This could put LUCA all the way back in the Paleohadean about 200 Ma after the hypothetical Tellus and Theia collision created the Earth and Moon. And LUCA's descendants would have to have survived the Late Heavy [meteor] Bombardment (LHB) ~3.7–3.9 Ga, but the authors cast doubt on this event (which I thought was considered pretty certain to have happened). In light of that, can anyone who's up on molecular clocks comment on the reliability of their estimates?
Also, they anchor their tree to some genes that duplicated before LUCA — because "dating the root of a tree is difficult because errors propagate from the tips to the root of the dated phylogeny." Is that kosher? This is all way outside the information levels that my bullshit meter can detect. ;-)
Otherwise, it's a fascinating paper. They estimate LUCA had approx 2.75 million base pairs, which puts it smack dab in the middle of the Prokaryote bp range (I think). And it was very likely heterotrophic, which suggests it may have been utilizing the biological products of autotrophs. So, there was some sort of functioning ecology ~4.2 billion years ago.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02461-1
To what extent is "conservatism" related to conservatism?
There is a tendency (possibly based on some decisions made in 1830s Britain) to label the political right or at least centre-right as "conservative". This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
But is there some truth to it? Do right-wingers genuinely seek to change fewer things overall than left-wingers?
> a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all
A true conservative believes we have /already failed at that/; are failing at it more, faster, every day; and therefore need to change things, as quickly and destructively as possible, to roll back today's terrible state of affairs to the ideal pre-decay past.
It's not about change vs no change, but about optimism in our ability to make things better instead of worse. In general both sides want things changed, but in different directions.
One side thinks the past was perfect and is now decaying; alleged attempts to improve things only ever make things worse; it is their obligation to guard what they can from change, and also ideally to roll back whatever changes they are able to some previous state of affairs, because - to a first approximation - all innovation is and was always a mistake; every attempt to invent new structures, policies or culture, instead of improving anything inevitably makes everything worse instead. Progression is a ratchet of destruction of the good, and we should look to the past for inspiration. "What if we make things better, but too much?", they are mocked, but actually /there is too much progress/ and the ratchet needs to be unwound. Cthulhu must be taught to swim right.
The other side believes that better things lie ahead than behind us, and it is possible to reach them by innovating - sure, change is risk, but progression is both necessary to make life better, and capable of achieving this goal. Of course, they say, progression is a ratchet; today is better than yesterday, and tomorrow will be better still, so why would anyone ever want to turn back the clock? Don't ignore the past - look to it to teach us what not to do - sure; fail fast and try again, sure; but never stop innovating.
>This is a misnomer to some extent, a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all whereas "conservatives" when they get into power inevitably have a list of things that they want to change.
That sounds way too rigid. I think there are battles that conservatives consider not yet settled and wish to make changes to better align with the previous status quo. Abortion would be one. A battle that's considered settled is women's suffrage. Gay marriage is somewhere in between, probably closer to women's suffrage
"a true conservative would seek to do nothing at all"
Not so; as the end of "The Ballad of the White Horse" points out, if you leave things alone and do nothing, they don't stay as they are, they change - decay and alter and fall apart. So to truly conserve, you must constantly repair and replace what is now rotten and broken.
From the Father Brown story, "The Flying Stars":
"That venerable financier, however, still seemed struggling with portions of his well-lined attire, and at length produced from a very interior tail-coat pocket, a black oval case which he radiantly explained to be his Christmas present for his god-daughter. With an unaffected vain-glory that had something disarming about it he held out the case before them all; it flew open at a touch and half-blinded them. It was just as if a crystal fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the whole group.
"I'll put 'em back now, my dear," said Fischer, returning the case to the tails of his coat. "I had to be careful of 'em coming down. They're the three great African diamonds called 'The Flying Stars,' because they've been stolen so often. All the big criminals are on the track; but even the rough men about in the streets and hotels could hardly have kept their hands off them. I might have lost them on the road here. It was quite possible."
"Quite natural, I should say," growled the man in the red tie. "I shouldn't blame 'em if they had taken 'em. When they ask for bread, and you don't even give them a stone, I think they might take the stone for themselves."
"I won't have you talking like that," cried the girl, who was in a curious glow. "You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?"
"A saint," said Father Brown.
"I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist."
"A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
"But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
Crook looked at him with an eye of interest and even respect. "Does one want to own soot?" he asked.
"One might," answered Brown, with speculation in his eye. "I've heard that gardeners use it. And I once made six children happy at Christmas when the conjuror didn't come, entirely with soot—applied externally."
Re Father Brown: Kembleford, at least as it’s portrayed on BBC One, has an awfully high per capita murder rate. It almost seems like one every week!
I haven't seen that particular version; they seem to have assigned him to a particular village to fit in the model of "crime of the week in our lovely rural location" that a lot of the BBC crime shows follow 😁
Chesterton had him turning up around London and other locations, depending on what parish he had been sent to. That at least spreads the crimes over a wider geographical area!
Mrs Gunflint likes Sister Boniface Mysteries along with Father Brown. I just learned that their genre is known as ‘cozy’ crime fiction.
The stuff I like, Hammett and Chandler are ‘hard boiled’ crime fiction.
This might interest you. About 30 minutes.
Ross Douthat linked it at the end of one of his op-eds.
How would RC theology accommodate other than earthly life? It’s about 30 minutes.
If they are fallen themselves they would have Christ as their savior too, if not we on Earth made an avoidable mistake was one of the takes
Edge of Belief: UFOs, Technology & The Catholic Imagination
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RA0ah6Xmqus
Oh yeah, this is an old question. If life other than on Earth exists, what would it be like? Supposing intelligent life and not plant or animal, would aliens have souls? Would they be in need of salvation? Would there be a second Incarnation if that was needed?
Off the top of my head, there are three positions:
(1) Rational but not ensouled, so more like animals than humans. Question of salvation therefore does not arise since we aren't worried about dogs or dolphins or elephants needing salvation, either
(2) Rational, ensouled, and unfallen. They would therefore be as different to us as Tolkien's Elves are different to Men. It'd be difficult for us to recognise an unfallen species if it wasn't technologically advanced, because we'd probably mistake them for the first instance (rational but unsouled). C.S. Lewis took a dim view of what our likely reaction would be, but his Space Trilogy (at least, the first two volumes) explore that on Mars and on Venus.
(3) Rational, ensouled, and fallen like ourselves. This is the biggie - if Christ is the only means to salvation, then the fallen aliens need Christ. Does this happen via the Great Commission - 'go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations' - or would Christ be incarnated on other worlds? There's divergence of opinion on that - maybe the crucifixion wouldn't be needed on another planet because that would be a different situation.
James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" is good on that, though he presents it as Roman Catholics whereas he was Anglican himself and I think it shows in part. It's sort of its own sub-sub-genre in SF - religious SF 😀
"Conservative" doesn't mean not wanting to change, but not wanting to take risks. For example, getting married is a conservative choice, for choosing to remain single is seen as more odd. So politically conservative people want to "change" things to be less avant-garde, reversing more liberal policies. This is still consistent with being conservative.
The Baggins family in The Lord of the Rings legendarium is the epitome of conservative. Bagginses "never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him." He used "respectable" to mean this.
I think it's proportional to the rate at which your society is changing, no?
So in a society that's largely the same as it was, say, 50 years ago, conservatives and "conservatives" are going to agree on a lot. They maybe want to roll back some minor reforms, but basically everything else stays as is. Think Europe between 1250 and 1300, lots of continuity.
In a society that's upended by change, "conservatives" become reactionaries. So think Europe between 1500 and 1550. The bigger the changes your society has recently undergone, the harder it is for conservatives to just do nothing and get what they want. That separates out the conservatives and the "conservatives" and becomes the more comprehensible split between conservatives and reactionaries.
Complicating this picture is that there are other countries where the left is conservative and the right is liberal (or at the very least, where the left is nationalist and the right is cosmopolitan: Americans often conflate the concepts of nationalist and conservative, but these aren't really the same thing at all).
If you're in a postcommunist country, for example, the left is going to be associated with the past and the right will be associated with change and the future.
Also in South Korea, its the left wing party that is opposed to immigration while the right wing party supports it. But the right wing party is also openly authoritarian(its the party of the current martial law president after all) and opposes feminism, gay rights etc. so its not like the South Korean right is some social liberal, economic right party like the British and Canadian Conservatives.
That's really interesting! I know very little about South Korea or East Asia in general- the whole region is kind of culturally opaque to me- so I didn't know the left party there were anti immigration. I was thinking more of countries like Slovakia, Moldova etc.. You're right though, of course, that being opposed to immigration doesn't translate to conservative views on gender, sex etc., necessarily, which is why (as I said above) I think it's important to distinguish between 'nationalist' and 'conservative'.
There was a really interesting study by a guy called Ariel Malka a few years ago, entitled "Are cultural and economic conservatism correlated"? The actual answer was complicated, but in essence, the conclusions were:
1) Cross culturally, not really.
2) More so when it comes to gender issues than immigration (that is to say, cross nationally, economic leftism is correlated with *more hostility* to immigration, but also IIRC to slightly more liberal views about women's rights).
3) The correlation between leftism and liberalism is most negative in postcommunist countries.
4) The correlation was most *positive* among educated people in western countries (I think America was near the top for *positive* correlation).
The party if they right in1830s Britain labelled themselves c onservative.
Americans use conservative and liberal in our own peculiar way.
Liberals in the extreme American sense are illiberal in their tolerance of long standing liberal values of late. Think purity police.
Present day American conservatives in good standing seem to be whatever is coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth at any given time. He said _what_now? Okay, yes, I fully agree.
The ones closer to the definition from oh, say 10 years ago are in the doghouse right now. See George Will retch. Retch George retch. Retch, retch, retch.
These days you gotta have a scorecard if you wanna know the players
Edit
So for 2024 you could probably toss any traditional definitions out the window to get at the American colloquial meanings.
Now maybe liberal means big city ideals and conservative means small town / rural ideals. NYC vs Des Moines. I really am not sure anymore.
It’s nutty and getting nuttier by the day.
My book is available today for pre-order, Feb 11 release. Fewer Rules, Better People is about the clash between governing by top-down rules and mandates versus discretionary decision-making, in law, in administration, in sports, in the household. Happy for recommendations on where to send it to be reviewed. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324051251
For each institution that has some power over/among a group of people, I can imagine various things affecting the outcome of this clash. For instance, degree of similarity in identity among the people. Degree of similarity in values. Size of the group.*
Do you cover this in your new book? I'm very interested in either your general takeaways or specific anecdotes.
*I have never seen meaningful anthropological evidence for a Dunbar's number at 150 +/- 20 (or at any other threshold +/- 20). What I have in mind is gradual change, not a threshold.
Here are some reflections on regime breakdown inspired by present goings-on in Syria. I would be interested in comments and reflections:
Regime breakdown as a type of assurance game
Many political regimes are stable until they suddenly aren’t.
The revolution/regime change in Syria fits in this pattern. From the onset till Assad fled took only ten days (November 27 – December 8).
The time frame is comparable to the regime fall in Rumania under Ceausescu (December 21- December 25 1989) and Afghanistan (August 6 – August 15 2021). Seeming stability suddenly followed by almost immediate breakdown.
The logic of the sequence resembles an assurance game (also known as stag hunt or trust games). The logic in a nutshell:
As long as I think everyone else supports the regime, the sensible option is also to support the regime. Since then I avoid being punished (and may even enjoy rewards). While if I rebel and I am the only one, I am very visible to the ruler & he may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
However, if I think everyone else are abandoning the ruler, the sensible option is also to abandon him. Since if we all abandon him, I am “lost in the crowd” and cannot very easily be singled out by the new ruler for punishment. Compared to the alternative: I am the one left defending the old and now hopelessly lost ruler, making me very visible to the new ruler – who may come after me with instruments that hurt more than mere death.
As in assurance/stag/trust games, this game has two equilibria. Everyone supports the old ruler as long as they think everyone else supports him (or as long as they think a sufficient number supports him that he is likely to maintain power). And everyone abandons the old ruler if they think everyone else are abandoning him (or if they think sufficiently many abandon him that he is unlikely to maintain power).
The main point regarding such games is that the switch between the two equilibria can happen very quickly. It depends on how we all interpret the likely choice of action of everybody else. If our interpretation of what others are likely to do, shifts for some more-or-less arbitrary reason, we may rapidly shift the signals we ourselves send out as well.
I believe that we are all at some level constantly reading and evaluating the signals others send out in this regard. Even in the seemingly most stable of states, and whether we are fully conscious of doing so or not.
<master_oogway.png>
"...my time has come..."
A) I humbly submit "Game Theory: The Force that Binds Us" [0], in which I schizopost about stag hunts and their varied manifestations. Instead of a truncated cone, I opt for a gravity-well analogy.
----
> However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums).
B) I don't know anything about Systems Theory. But in my Game Theory post, "Section XII. Riot Games" signal-boosts an article [1] regarding the theory that riots are free-rider problems, and how their precipitation is often a matter of obfuscating the identity of would-be "entrepreneurs". The obfuscation lowers the activation-energy, in a sense. Seems relevant.
> For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst — a sort of entrepreneur to get things going — in Buford’s account, usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).
----
C) Relatedly, I recall a Psmith book-review [2] (which I was unaware of, when I wrote the Game Theory post) which mentioned "political entrepreneurs". Context was the annexation of Eastern Ukraine.
> (...) The wheels of history are turned by political entrepreneurs — individuals or close-knit groups who notice ahead of everybody else that the world has changed in some fundamental way. This unstable situation where material conditions have shifted but society keeps rolling in its groove creates a sort of potential energy, like a charged electric field or a boulder perched at the top of a cliff. In the world of business we call this a market opportunity, and we admire those with the gumption to seize them. In the world of war and politics, market opportunities often look more like a forest full of dry tinder, and the would-be entrepreneur needs an additional quality, fanaticism, that enables him to calmly light a match and flick it over his shoulder.
[0] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
[1] https://fee.org/articles/why-riots-happen/
[2] https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-85-days-in-slavyansk-by-aleksandr
Thanks for the links. I browsed them and in particular noticed the one about the LA riots in 1992, since I lived in Berkeley back then. The riots reached from LA all the way up through Oakland.
... the riots stopped almost momentarily after a radio speech by Rodney King, who turned out to be a street-level philosopher. One sentence in particular stood out: "We are stuck here for a while. Can we get along?"
Perhaps he did not mean it as a very existential statement, but I and many with me were quite moved back then.
General lesson: Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I notice you also see promise in game theory. For my part, I believe it is the branch called "games with asymmetric information" that holds the largest - and not yet fully untapped - potential.
I wrote a bit more about that in my reply to Soreff below.
> Perhaps what core people stand up and say matters in riot situations. At least in some of them. You hit on a message that echoes with others, sometimes.
I used to follow a blog called Epsilon Theory. It discusses the impact of narrative on things like the stock market. The blog often discusses "missionaries", i.e. those who build a consensus about the narrative by crystallizing widely-held sentiments into common-knowledge. (It's been a while, so I don't have a directly-relevant link on-hand.) Arguments are often soldiers, and to crystallize a sentiment is to expose it to attack. So ideally, the consensus should be defensible.
Relatedly, apxhard had an interesting comment [0] a while ago about bitcoin and "consensus mechanisms". As I understood, there's a hierarchy of consensus mechanisms, graded based on the cost of signalling. At the top of the hierarchy is warfare, which is the costliest. The cost is a feature, rather than a bug, because the high-cost gatekeeps away any frivolous participants. Slightly lower are things with cheaper signals, like bitcoin and lawfare. I don't have anything original to add here, but I think about this a lot.
> …The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
Scott and the rationalists like to mention Chesterton's Fence. But even before I was exposed to this meme, I'd personally made a similar observation that "nature tends towards an equilibrium". I.e. there's various forces in the world, and they tend to push objects around until those objects settle into a local optimum at which opposing forces completely cancel-out. Which means objects are frequently found either at rest, or in some periodic orbit.
One of my perennial frustrations is that people often assume they have perfect knowledge, and that ostensibly-stupid behavior in others is actually stupid. When in fact, it's more likely that their behavior is influenced by forces hidden from the casual observer. The behavior still might be "incorrect" in a sense, but it's often understandable or justifiable at some level.
And in my mind, this kind of dovetails with the "Seeing Like A State" and "TLP" memeplexes. Insofar as some types of information are more legible than others, and how the root of signaling is exogenous dependency (or equivalently, insufficient personal-agency). E.g. it seems like the Prisoner's Dilemma is (at least?) partly driven by the fact that the negative-externalities are stronger than the positive-internalities. I've not yet been able to generalize this, or carry this to its logical conclusion. But somehow, it seems rather suggestive. I think about this a lot.
> but in my work I usually stick to studying humans
This prompted me to glance at your substack, where I discovered that you're a pol-sci professor. I mean, I just assumed we were throwing around ideas for funsies. But now I'm curious: is this thread part of some research project? What's the goal here, exactly? Surely, much of this is old news to you. Anyway, now that I know you're a professor -- upon rereading the thread, it seems like you're especially interested in farming ideas about a conceptual "missing link", which transmutes individual actions into emergent behavior.
As for a potential missing link -- I can't really defend this coherently, but I've become increasingly convinced that the bedrock of signalling is trust (at least in most pragmatic situations, not single-iteration games). Which sounds kind of obvious a common-sensical, but I nonetheless feel is able to explain phenomena that are otherwise kinda mysterious. Like, there's a certain pattern in my mind that came from trying to grok Kelly's Criterion, which is related to how trust appears to grow logarithmically with the number of repeated positive interactions. Which is, I think, consistent with psychology's finding that frequency/consistency is more important than the magnitude of reward. And I suspect the dearth of repeated interaction carries a variety of consequences for contemporary society.
For example, nothing really came from Occupy Wallstreet. It was completely ephemeral with no lasting consequences. (I can't remember where I found this, but) I remember reading an analysis which explained that earlier political protests put in work. Like, they organized an actual event, and paid bus-fares, and had people take a break from their dayjobs (or something?), and trusted their leaders to make executive-decisions during negotiations with the opposition. Whereas Occupy Wallstreet was a bunch of twitter randos who had no organization to cement their "protest", which was really more of an angry mob.
I think maybe the general lesson here is "everything in modernity has become cheaper; and you get what you pay for".
Or consider how, during the 90's, everyone thought the internet would herald a golden age of information. Seemingly, few could have imagined that high-quality signals would be overwhelmed by dross and muck. I remember hearing a take (can't remember where, exactly; though I recall it mentioned "context collapse" [1]) that Twitter was a cesspool because it eschewed gatekeeping/curation. Blocking individual users is a poor substitute for nucleating a well-defined community around a central authority-figure who actually enforces norms. (In my headcanon, I like to think of Twitter as a cross between Valhalla and Lebanon: a battle-royal where as many as 12 different factions fight each other, for all eternity.) Since there's so little gatekeeping, joining Twitter is cheap and easy; but you get what you pay for.
Similarly on youtube, there's lots of people who bemoan the draconian censorship. But one point that's conspicuously absent from the discourse is what Epsilon Theory called "The Golden Rule": he who has the gold, maketh the rules. I.e. the viewers aren't youtube's actual customer. The actual customer is the advertisers, since the advertisers pay the bills that keep the servers running. So of course youtube's policies are going to cater to the advertisers. And yet, this point seems lost on those who decry that youtube has betrayed the viewers' interests. Youtube isn't trustworthy; but you get what you pay for.
So if I were in your position, I think my next area of investigation would be to really zoom-in on the idea of trust. Perhaps as some sort of currency, or alternatively as different types of binding-agents. Though, I'm not sure if any of this makes sense to you.
[0] I'm having trouble finding it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
Thanks for your post. Lots of things in there, let me limit myself to agreeing with you that “trust” is certainly at the core of many of the everyday games people play (as well as the games rulers play with each other & with voters). How to signal trustworthiness, what you can do to get across to others that your commitments are credible, etc. Much of our everyday signalling and screening behavior is related to trust. So you’re spot on in that regard.
I don’t peddle my own stuff on substack, but concerning contributions by others that I often come back to when studying something specific (I mainly do applied research; studying something specific gets you closer to the "mechanisms" underlying whatever is going on) is Partha Dasgupta: Trust as a commodity. Dasgupta makes the important point that it is costly to build up a trustworthy reputation, while it can be lost very quickly. For example, a salesman (including politicians, professional workers etc.) achieves a reputation for honesty by carrying the cost associated with abstaining from cheating in all previous sales (dealings with others); yet this costly reputation may be lost in one stroke if he cheats once, and this knowledge spreads to his future customers. This asymmetry in how reputations are achieved and lost is of use for his customers (voters, clients), since they will often rationally have reason to assume that he will not take the risk to jeopardize his costly built-up reputation in his deal with them.
…And so on. We are dealing with reputations as (costly) signals, and how this information is screened by one’s interaction partners – but where deception may also be part of the game. (Notice that the difference between signals and mere messages is that signals are not cost-free.)
..Ok, this turned into a longer comment/reply than I planned! Again, thanks for your comment, and good luck with your further thinking/work along game-theoretic lines. You are on the right track, intellectually.
Back to doing work I get paid for…
PS Diego Gambetta and Michael Bacharach’s “Trust in signs” is another paper with a huge applied potential.
This reminds of a conditionally stable system behavior. The system is stable under some level of perturbation, and then goes kaboom when perturbed in a stronger/unusual manner.
Thanks for the reference to conditionally stable system behavior. I would be interested in elaborations or references here.
…I used to peddle in systems theory, from good old structural-functionalism a la Talcott Parsons to the Santa Fe people. However, at some point I became convinced of the philosopher Jon Elster’s general critique of (macro-level) functionalism: Its inability to reach all the way down to the micro level (of human interaction) and explain what triggers the various feedback mechanisms that restore equilibriums (or make them spin into perpetual disequilibriums). Elster claimed that we need a general theory of human behavior to achieve that, and that the social sciences were “light years away” from such a theory.
These days, I believe signalling theory/theories of games with asymmetric information (or more generally: information theory) may provide the missing mechanism-link between system behavior and the behavior of individuals within the system.
But I am not aware of many who still search for the missing link between system behavior and the social psychology of individual behavior.
I broadly agree with the Elster's critique you're describing, with is also explored in a different way by this guy: https://desystemize.substack.com/
But still it helps to envision a simplest conditionally stable system, say, a truncated cone set on its tip: it can withstand a small sideways push, but a larger one will tip it into a different state. Now imagine a "truncated cone" of an unknown large number of dimensions (well, I can't imagine one, but suppose I do), and the critical distance between its axis and its edge is unknown. We can push it around a little to explore its stability limits, but we just never know which push vector value will tip it.
So this is how I envision these societal dynamics.
Now, to further stretch this analogy, the cone does provide a warning sign: if you get too close to tipping it, its edge will start lifting, and it's possible to recover at that point. But we have to pay attention, and react to this lifting, i.e., a feedback mechanism has to exist. This is what happens in a relatively open society: there's a constant visible churn, pushing from all directions, visible disorder, the cone wobbles, but the society has time to react and adjust itself.
Closed societies "cover the cone", and sever the feedback. We can't see when the cone is wobbling. It takes various forms: destroyed opposition, wrecked information space, fake polling, etc. So Assad wins and "election" with "95% of the vote", but it turns out nobody is actually supporting him. I wonder if he was genuinely surprised....
Thanks for your reply. Intuitively, your “cone” metaphor is fruitful. It illustrates the potential practical usefulness of systems theory also in the study of us humans, even if the microfoundations of what is going on is lost in the fog.
Analytically, your metaphor helps if you want to assign some sort of probability for a social or political system to be longer-run sustainable. Or - if in an interventionist mode - where to focus your gaze on what should be improved to enhance longer-run sustainability.
That said, there are challenges as regards to decide what constitutes/represents a “feedback mechanism” in the first place, without any underlying theory of why humans do whatever it is they are doing. I see a potentially serious snag there. But again, the metaphor is intuitively useful.
Concerning the interventionist use of systems theory, we probably agree that in any case most of us, most of the time, are not in positions to influence much the structure of the scene(s) where we strut and fret our hours upon the stage, before we are heard no more. Not even those among us that are formally placed at the top in human hierarchies.
...Such as Assad. He will have ample time to reflect on what (if anything) he might have had the power to do differently, in some apartment somewhere in Russia where he is likely to live out his days.
I am quite skeptical of assigning numerical probabilities to things like that, where we have neither an understanding of the underlying mechanisms nor we know the probabilities distribution of possible outcomes. With this I sharply part with our gracious host w.r.t. the (over)use of Bayesianism (even may I say, ab-use) to analyze everything under the sun. It produces illusions of precision and gives a whiff of "science", which is entirely inappropriate.
As to the feedback mechanisms, as an average citizen of, in my case at least, these here United States, we don't have much impact, but it's not 0 either. We at least should vote, and occasionally call and yell at the people we voted for. We could also choose to go into politics or activism to try to amplify our impact.
But Assad of course had had the controls, and the feedback - if he only wanted to use them. But he chose to break every feedback mechanism, literally and figuratively, and hence the "sudden", "surprising" demise of the system he built.
Hi 1123581321,
Thanks again for your comments on my ACX open thread post on "regime breakdown as a type of assurance game". I took the liberty to use your reflections on feedback mechanisms to make an addendum to my (revised) blog post today, "The fall of Assad in Syria perceived as an equilibrium shift in an assurance game".
Best regards---
Technical standards sometimes work the same way. If you have two competing technical standards, and each needs an expensive infrastructure to be viable, there can be similar dynamics of "How many people (or companies) are supporting standard X vs standard Y?". ( Usually less bloody than the political version. )
Interesting. (See my comment to 1123581321 above)
Many Thanks! Hmm... At the abstract level, yes, one can think of the system dynamics as e.g. being stable to small perturbations in some parameter like fraction-of-population-supporting-faction-X (or, in illiberal states, fraction-of-population-OPENLY-supporting-faction-X) and unstable to large perturbations. And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations.
Re feedback: Hmm... a ruler who is able to _see_ that some fraction of a segment of the population is turning against them might have better odds of e.g. buying them off than if the ruler is blind to the changes.
Re technical choices: At least in my career, at my level (individual developer), being on the losing side might be career damaging (though often not even that), but not life threatening, so I wasn't aware of cases where people were threatened to the point of silence (and cut feedback loops) in my personal experience. In _politicised_ technical choices this may well be different.
..."And, underlying the abstract dynamics are game theory considerations."
..yes, that is what I am driving at. In the limited time I have available to sometimes peddle in High Theory.
More specifically, not all game theory, but that branch of game theory that deals with games with asymmetric information. That's where the (theoretical) action is, to modify the title of an essay by the sociologist Erving Goffman. Who approached similar theories about social interaction from the sociological side of the academic fence:
https://archive.org/details/whereactionis0000unse/page/n5/mode/2up
…The basic idea/founding stone can be summed up in the sentence: We are all principals when observing others, and we are all agents in the eyes of others.
…Meaning that we are all in a coarser information position when observing others, and we are all in a finer information position when being observed by others.
That sentence is the basis for a general theory of interaction (not only among humans: one may link here to a general theory of information - but in my work I usually stick to studying humans😊).
..from that founding stone follows various everyday-life signalling and screening strategies, as well as pseudo-self-binding & “real” (evolutionary derived) self-binding strategies; deception-and-revealed-deception arms races; trust games; and much more. A Pandora’s box of ideas to study the many types of (human) interaction.
...Very similar to the type of sociology Goffman did back in the day. And thus holding the promise of being a real theoretical common ground in the sociological and economic study of man.
Linking all of this to systems theory, including tipping-point theories and the like, is however something I am likely to leave to scholars who are still max intellectually hungry😊
Many Thanks! This definitely gets way beyond my depth.
I agree there’s probably some stag hunt logic going on, but I wonder if there’s another pattern as well. People might also want to minimise the total amount of conflict. In that case, they would also suddenly switch to supporting what they perceived as the winning side.
That is the behaviour you’d get from a patent race game, if one player suddenly jumped ahead. In a patent race, two players are racing for some multi-step, winner-takes-all goal, like a patent. In that game, each player will spend maximum resources if that puts winning out of reach of the other player. Once the loser is clear, the losing player will immediately drop out of the race, if they don’t expect to catch up.
That could be happening here: suddenly, the old regime is at a disadvantage and can’t catch up.
Thanks for the reference to patent race - games. I wiki'ed it - that was a new twist on game theory for me. (See also my comment to 1123581321 above)
Your Wikipedia skills are much better than mine! Where did you find it? I had to use Copilot
Ah, sorry, you are right - at least I cannot locate a similar wiki page on patent race games today. So the page/s I consulted yesterday must have been from elsewhere.
Might give someone an incentive to write a wiki page on the topic:-)!
It feels like the same thing happened in the US as well, first with Biden, and then the entire liberal establishment. Losing the popular vote was a death knell for the left. I wonder how long the new establishment will last...
While I understand the urge to relate everything back to US politics, I don't think it's very much like that at all.
Agreed.
The debate(s) below about the Thompson assassination and resulting public reaction reminded me of Scott’s presidential endorsement post. Specifically the part about protesters throwing oil on artwork, and comparing their wrongdoings to the that of the oil executives:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/acx-endorses-harris-oliver-or-stein
>So how can we put the paint-throwers in jail, while letting the fossil fuel executives go free?
>Actually we can do this very easily, because the paint-throwers broke the law, and the fossil fuel executives didn’t. Unless you’re the dumbest sort of naive consequentialist, you punish people who have violated bright-line norms, not people doing stuff you think is subtly damaging, even if the subtle damage may add up to more harm than the bright-line norm violations.
I'm a bit surprised at the current public reaction and wonder if we really would hate the paint throwers had they protested something that appears to be so nonpartisan. Or is this reaction more justified because the "subtle damage" is not so subtle in this case as individual deaths can be linked to denied care?
The problem with the paint-throwers is that they chose the worst target - what's 100+ y.o. painting's got to do with anything? So the throwers annoy everyone and make their cause slightly less palatable.
Now if they were protesting the oil executives by throwing paint on, for example, their cars, I would at least understand it (not condone it, but the target would at least make sense).
Yes, throwing paint on oil executives (or other high status people who are seen as immoral) would likely have a much much better reception and may even be broadly popular. Throwing paint on priceless old paintings or blocking roads that ordinary people need to drive on just makes people hate you.
Exactly.
I think the "Bright Line Norms" argument is fully wrong for a few reasons. If we say "Laws" are a subset of "Norms" then whoever makes the law gets to determine who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Norm violation enforcement is a poor substitute for morality even without the disparity of equating it to law violation enforcement - the map of norms does not match the map of morality. Sometimes the violation of norms is a recognition that the norms were wrong in the first place.
More directly addressing your point, I think most people in the U.S. either have experience with being jerked around by the Health Insurance industry or have someone close to them who has been jerked around, possibly to death. It's much easier to cheer for the death of an executive when said executive is the most visible and egregious example of hurting you and killing your friends for profit - regardless of any "murder is bad" norm.
It does get hairy in practice i.e. we can *maybe* get consensus on both the legality and morality of uncomplicated types of violence and theft; but of course many (most?) legalities are hotly contested. So I'm with you on the norms / laws disparity.
And I can't object to the norms / morality mismatch either. But I don't have a more serviceable model for civilizational coordination, and am wondering if morality is simply not part of that equation.
Is the argument more conceptually sound if you swap "morality" for "ethics"? And then, would it at least be directionally correct, albeit imperfect?
If it still doesn't hold up, I would be interested in an alternative model if you have one in mind.
I'm a better destroyer of arguments than I am at making them, but I think I can take a wack at it. Norm violation enforcement only holds up when the perception of the norm is that it is both Just and Equitably applied. This is a very vague, weasely kind of argument on my part since Justice and Equitable application are in the eye of the beholder (and I'm probably ignoring some other necessary conditions).
"Violence is wrong" strikes me a good norm that is almost never equitably applied, since states and large entities practice direct and indirect violence all the time at great scale and with little legal reprisal - but I'm not sure this is the common view either, which is the one that matters in this case.
Scott has a point about punishing violations as keeping society together, but if everyone sees the punishment as unjust, then it frays societal bonds instead of reinforcing them. I don't think most people were in favor of the "Just stop oil" protestors throwing oil on paintings and thought some degree of punishment was a good thing, regardless of how they felt about oil barons (who I'm of the opinion are many thousands of times worse). Regardless of people's feelings on oil barons, oil paintings shouldn't be damaged or destroyed because they're unrelated to the protest.
Here people are seeing an executive killed who is perceived as a mass murderer and someone who was intentionally profiting off the misery and suffering of others. The chances of this man ever seeing the inside of a jail cell over these actions were zero - his evil was entirely legal, and there was little chance that the laws would change soon to punish or even truly stop this. So when someone acts outside the norms and kills him, people cheer because his evil has been stopped. "Violence is wrong" still holds, but the norm in this case was not being equitably applied in the perception of most.
I'm anti-assassinating health care CEOs. But I think part of it is that with Trump's 2nd election and people talking about it through an (inaccurate IMO) pro-establishment vs anti-establishment lens, everyone wants to view everything through that lens and anti-establishment is the cool kids thing to do.
For me the underrated angle to the story is how much more resources they give to this murder than any other murder, seemingly based on an implicit "he's rich so he matters more" idea.
Who is this "they" of which you speak?
The critical resource here, was a random McDonald's employee in Altoona. To get that, you need the police to do a modest amount of digging through surveillance camera footage to get a few half-decent pictures, and then you needed to get half the country to look at those pictures and care and remember.
So, basically, it's up to CNN et al to decide who does or does not get this sort of treatment. And as others have noted, very poor people being killed can get a whole lot of coverage on CNN if it's the right poor person at the right time for the right reason.
I think this is mostly a function of how much media / public attention the murder got. If the victim had been found dead in an alley missing his wallet, it would not have been nearly as big a story, fewer resources would have been spent on it, and probably the McDonalds employee wouldn't have ever seen the murderer's picture on TV.
Exactly. If a crime requires a nationwide manhunt to solve, then CNN decides whether it will be solved. Simplistically speaking, if the victim is rich or famous, or if the victim is poor and black and the killer is white(*), or if the victim is a Pretty White Woman, then off we go. Otherwise, meh, it won't get the clicks so it's not worth the bother.
* Typically these don't need a manhunt to solve because if we know the killer is white then we probably already caught him. But if e.g. Derek Chauvin had skipped bail and gone on the run, I expect CNN would have made sure we all knew what he looked like.
"They" is the police. It's true a random McDonald's employee seems to have fingered the guy, but they did in fact spend a lot of resources interviewing people, reviewing surveillance footage, painstakingly reconstructing his escape route - sending scuba teams to search waterways in Central Park! - there have statistically been multiple murders in NY since then and I bet none of that happened for any of them.
The fact that the media focused more on this one, or that given how it was resolved a lot of that effort ended up being wasteful, doesn't change the point.
Maybe it looked like the cone was wobbling.
Maybe I'm too trusting in the goodness of "the system", but I don't agree with the "investigated harder because he's rich" angle. I don't think it was about the victim; I think any victim would have gotten the same response. Rather, I think it's about how aberrant the shooting was, given the place. Cold-blooded shootings with clean getaways are *not supposed to happen* in 2024 midtown Manhattan. It's about the public's perception of safety. There's a reason why Trump's "I could shoot someone on 5th St" quip bothered to specify 5th St.
Well I think Trump said 5th Ave because he lives there, and also because it's super public, but the fact that it's midtown Manhattan is downstream from the "rich" part. Perhaps a janitor getting shot in midtown Manhattan would get the same treatment (I doubt it, can't point to concrete evidence), but a shooting in midtown Manhattan, janitor or otherwise, certainly gets more coverage than one of a similar person in South Bronx.
"They" gave a lot more resources to the murder of George Floyd, who wasn't rich, than they gave to this guy.
Did they? There was a lot of resources used for the response to mass protests, but that was in response to the protests not the murder itself. They prosecuted the perpetrator but that's not (at least shouldn't be) unusual.
They did not have (nor did they need to have) any massive citywide manhunt involving canvassing hundreds of security cameras, dozens of interviews, dredging local bodies of water with scuba teams, mass searches of city parks, and shit like that.
The scariest thing would be if this assassination "worked" in producing change people want. It's as scary as the President-Elect's FBI pick having an enemies list.
This is not going to end well. The assassinations aren't going to just be people you don't like.
The result of one of these happening a month won't be a change in the operation of health insurance, it will be a huge hiring boom in bodyguards for insurance executives.
yes they will
(to be fair, I don't like any figures well-known enough to be assassinated)
It sure as hell worked for the assassination of Shinzo Abe; the killer basically got everything that he wanted. And it hasn't resulted in a bunch of political assassinations because it's already extremely rare for someone to actually have the resolve to murder a stranger, even when they have every justification to do so.
It also isn't relevant to what's happening in US politics. That was going to happen whether or not Thompson died. State-sanctioned killings are the standard, not the exception.
It seems to me that most of the folks spewing venom the direction of Brian Thompson would not very much like a world where insurance companies were not allowed to deny procedures.
Can you rewrite this? I can't follow all the negations.
"It would be bad if insurance companies were required to approve all procedures".
I assume because insurance costs would go up, probably to the point that insurance companies might shut down (at least in jurisdictions with such a rule: see insurance companies pulling out of California due to the regulations there).
a) Brian Thompson and UHC were _particularly_ egregious, with triple the denial rate of the industry average, and installation of an AI denial generator system which broke their own rules so badly that, for living patients with enough health to be able to navigate the appeals process, 90% of the denials were overturned.
b) I've been through the health care marketplace information, the medicare options information, and, before retirement, my employer's health insurance options. The dissemination of denial information after Thompson's informal execution is the _first_ time I have ever seen denial rate information. As nearly as I can tell, that data was either actively hidden from the public or close enough to hidden to effectively be hidden.
c) I prefer to have punishments go through legal channels. Ideally Thompson's policies, particularly the denial generator system, should have led to charges of something like lethal fraud or conspiracy to commit murder, and he should have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed. Still, like Osama Bin Laden before him, also responsible for the deaths of several thousand of my countrymen, I'm thankful that he is dead.
Do you have a link for that denial rate info?
I agree with your sentiments.
Many Thanks! For the overall denial rate, it is, amongst other place, YouTube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otls5T_Idbw&list=PLTK43yDZLJItFbOY3IsTO2pETnN2VBIsa&index=40
at timestamp 10:37
UHC's rate is 32%
while the overall industry rate is 16%
( 'scuse my misquoting the ratio as 3X - I misread the industry average as 10%. As you can see UHC's is actually 2X the industry average).
This video also cites the 90% reversal-on-appeal rate at timestamp 4:18
It's a claim made in a lawsuit against the company.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class-action-v-unitedhealth-and-navihealth-1.pdf
"Upon information and belief, over 90 percent of patient claim denials are reversed through either an internal appeal process or through federal Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) proceedings."
I don’t know but the support for the killer being cross party is perhaps ominous for the future.
Children. What makes me hesitate to have children is not the cost or things like that, but the AI apocalypse, and also things like the risk of nuclear war and horrible things like that. Should we still have kids if we are condemning them to a nightmare? Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
With all due respect, plenty of Japanese, Germans, Soviets, etc. had kids (and at a higher rate than they do today) DURING WORLD WAR 2 - as their cities were being firebombed and their countries invaded. You're not special, you don't live in the End Times; get over yourself!
This confuses the "ought" with the "is." There are definitely times and places in human history where I would not recommend having children.
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
"knew"? Sure, no way. But we don't know, not even close. If you think you know, you've gotten into AI millenarianism.
And since we don't know, then yes, having kids is the normal human thing. In fact, if you're going to employ high-level intellectual forecasting to override your desire to engage in the most fundamentally human activity, it seems contradictory to be worried about the fate of humanity.
This applies more generally, by the way: smart people making unusual choices on major life decisions because they have used their big brains to think very hard about the long-term future are almost always going to end up making things worse for themselves.
No, you don't have to know something with absolute certainty for it to influence your optimal behavior. You don't know for sure that if you bet all your money on a particular horse in a horse race, you would lose everything. Yet you wouldn't do it because it would have a negative expected value. That's still not "horse racing millenarianism."
Nor does it make sense to say that if you are uncertain about the future you should do the "normal human behavior." First of all, why should uncertainty imply that you should do the "normal thing", whatever that is? In some families it is normal to buy lottery tickets. I recommend not doing this. Second, normality has changed a lot. It seems to be becoming more and more normal not to have children. I'm not saying that's a good thing! But it shows that normality is neither necessary nor sufficient for a "should."
In this particular context, it is not even necessary to worry about the “fate of humanity” as a whole to consider the influence of expectations on your behavior in the interests of your potential children. And if humanity is at risk because of artificial intelligence, nuclear war or biological threats, then I can't change that by having children. Instead, I just condemn them to being witnesses of the end of humanity with some probability. Whether the probability is 20% or 100% does not really matter for the structure of the argument, but of course it is an important argument for the right decision result!
> Children. What makes me hesitate to have children
...what made you consider having children, before you hesitated?
It's sounding a little like you want to make a decision one way, but also feel some peer pressure or other external reason to make the opposite choice; and thus feel you need to justify yourself and/or convince others of the validity of your position.
Just in case I'm not wrong on this: keep it simple. If you (and your partner) want children, have children. If you don't, don't. You don't need to justify your decision to anyone (other than your partner), and you should ignore even strong pressure even from your in-group to decide one way rather than another. It's your (plural) life, not the crowd's.
I see evidence of peer pressure here, but of course information is always taken in from other people, friends, etc. and also from blogs like Scott's. Articles on blogs like Astral Codexten worry me a lot, but I don't think I would be any better off if I didn't know about these developments.
The way OP's question is phrased, though, feels like we are only getting half the story. "What makes me hesitate to have children" implies they would otherwise have children, but for the existential risks they've outlined.
Why is this? - why would they otherwise have children? They haven't said. "Should we still have kids if...", they say, without explaining why, in their view, we should have kids at all.
If it's part of an ongoing conversation here, my original comment applies - the most important part of this decision is that, whatever informs it, ultimately you completely own it, because you have to live with it.
If there is some other reasoning, we can't really have a conversation without taking that into account. Nothing in this world is certain, and all our decisions must balance between risks and rewards; but it's hard to reason about where balance might be found when only one side of the scales is visible.
If it's an entirely unexamined assumption, perhaps it is worth examining.
The world is awesome. Bring more people into it. AI required multiple technological leaps. If that doesn't happen we live, if it does (and I expect us to, but less than 90% chance) we will all die. That's fine. Future is hard model. They're just super duper cute, you can safely predict you'll love your kids once you have them, go for it.
I do not completely understand what you are saying here. You expect us all to die due to an AI catastrophe with somewhere between 50% and 90% chance even though the future is "hard [to?] model", but you recommend having children anyway because they are cute? So it's okay that AI kills them because they are cute while they live? (I never doubted I would love my children, so this is not a relevant point. But I doubt that it would be nice for those that I love to create them to be killed in a bad and hopeless situation?)
Yeah totally. AI catastrophe is inevitable if we have, say, 2-5 more technological leaps in design space of how computers process information. It probably won't happen just from 'throwing more compute power at LLMs'. That could happen in 1 year, it could happen in 50, it could happen never. Being alive is awesome. Having kids is awesome. What is the .... median expectation of how far out something horrible happening that you have? Is it more than 5 years?
I don't know. Is the median really the only relevant property of the distribution here? What are your expectations? And why do you think more compute is not enough?
'why do you think more compute is not enough'
because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion, we are seeing pretty constraining limits to additional intelligence as a function of compute power, it's an empirical observation
what you would worry about, assuming you can't define properly an objective function for something arbitrarily smarter than you which is a pipe dream to get right on the first try, is something becoming arbitrarily smarter, most likely through recursive self improvement. to get there would require several paradigm shifts of how we build intelligence, let's say LLM's are the first paradigm shift, probably takes 2-5 more jumps to get to something that will end up on the path to that.
I don't have expectations, how can you predict how long it takes a person to come up with a new idea, of a categorical difference like discovering LLM's was, or model how many steps it takes, etc.
It could be plausibly anything between 0 and 100.
I was just saying that to me unless you think very likely everything ends within 5 years (my personal breakeven horizon for life worth living), having kids is fine because life is awesome.
Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters.
Thanks for your reply!
"Why are you asking for my model? Are you asking theoretical questions, or are you trying to decide whether to have kids yourself, in which case your model is what matters."
Well, I'm trying to form a "model". Since I'm neither a genius nor a theoretical AI scientist or whatever, I try to listen to/read arguments and see how convincing I find them. This also includes, for example, something like Metaculus estimates.
"because I know plenty of people who work in AI, and none of them think that the current technologies are resulting in exponential intelligence explosion"
Just out of curiosity: Did these people expect 10 years ago that we would now have something like ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.?
> Would you have kids if you knew some Lovecraft version of the Borg were landing in 7 years?
No, but the point is that I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you. It would be a grave mistake to treat your or anyone else's vague guesses as reliable prophecy.
Sorry, but I do not think that I treated anyone's vague guesses as reliable prophecy, in particular not my own guesses. If you are genuinely uncertain about the future, you should take your subjective uncertainty and behave responsibly based on it, right? Otherwise you would never do anything like saving for retirement because "why not just consume all your money right now, after all I don't know what's happening in the future and neither do you."
Linking to a comment on a previous post of Scott's framed around climate change, I'm a fan of C.S. Lewis's "let the bombs find you happy": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on-having-kids/comment/3202385
(Linking to where I previously summarized it because it's a long-ish quote and because the whole post and discussion is probably relevant)
Thanks, I have some sympathy for the defiant optimism embodied in the quote. However, just saying "the past was even worse" is not very convincing. People had children during the plague because they had a different mindset and maybe they believed they had to have children, or they did not think about their childrens' future very much.
The last sentence in the Lewis quote, "If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs." may be sensible for people who already live - you should make the best of your life. But it is a different question whether you should bring new people into that life.
Historically, however, it would be very interesting to know to what amount people thought about Nuclear War when Lewis wrote that. (In 1948!)
Clicking on the link to the full quote in your comment, I have to say that I find Lewis' paragraphs you left out quite cynical:
"What the atomic bomb has really done is to remind us forcibly of the sort of world we are living in and which, during the prosperous period before, we were beginning to forget. And this reminder is, so far as it goes, a good thing. We have been waked from a pretty dream, and now we can begin to talk about realities."
Oh wait, the atomic bomb threatens to kill us so we are lucky that we can talk about that reality?
"It is our business to live by our own law not by fears: to follow, in private or in public life, the law of love and temperance even when they seem to be suicidal, and not the law of competition and grab, even when they seem to be necessary to our own survival. For it is part of our spiritual law never to put survival first: not even the survival of our species. We must resolutely train ourselves to feel that the survival of Man on this Earth, much more of our own nation or culture or class, is not worth having unless it can be had by honorable and merciful means."
So he basically argues for embracing extinction if honor is not available.
"Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs. Those who care for something else more than civilization are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved."
So survival and life are not top priority.
"Those who want Heaven most have served Earth best. Those who love man less than God do most for man."
This is a way too general statement. (Keep in mind that these two sentences include suicide bombers.) It also just a claim and my prior is that it is wrong. Compare for:
Zeynep's Law: "Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude." (https://x.com/zeynep/status/1478766408691556353)
I omitted some of the more theological parts of the quote because they're more theological.
But I do think the broad point that people have *always* been facing existential threats and having children regardless is important context and saying "people in the past had a different mindset or didn't think about their children much" is a bit of a deflection.
Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused? That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?
If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)
"Are you saying that, in light of the possibility of Viking invaders coming and murdering everyone that the moral thing to do would be for the 10th century Englishman to refuse to have children? And that if they *had* "thought of their children's future very much" they would have refused?"
That's a very good question, and thank you for making me think. What do you think about it? If an omniscient demon tells an Englishman in the Middle Ages that the Vikings are coming in five years and will kill 90% of the village population, should he have children? What if they're going to kill the entire population? What if they're going to first torture and then kill the entire population?
The comment about "mindset" is not a deflection, however. If you and your children believe that all suffering has a higher meaning, then of course that makes life better and suffering less problematic. The way you interpret the world is not just a side issue, but influences your wellbeing. And if you believe that humanity will continue forever (or until the Lord comes or whatever), then your contribution to that gives your life meaning and makes suffering more bearable. I think it is perfectly legitimate to consider things outside of one's own lifespan.
"That the most moral thing would be for the species to have voluntarily gone extinct millennia ago?"
Hmm, in addition to the points mentioned above, I would like to make the side note that the Vikings would still have had children. This would raise further questions about morality.
"If not, I feel like you have to argue that a child being born today has it probabilistically worse than a child being born in the 10th century and I do find that very hard to believe. Would *you* rather have been born a 10th century peasant, if it meant that you didn't have to face the possibility of (global) climate change or nuclear war, but did have to face historic levels of plague, famine, and war? I sure wouldn't. (And I don't think the 10th century was some uniquely bad time, I wouldn't pick basically any previous century)"
No, I would definitely prefer being born in the 20th century to being born in the 10th century.
I do want to emphasize the universality of this: it's not just "10th century Christian peasants had some mindset that made them uniquely able to have children despite an existential threat" - this was basically a universal experience everywhere.
The "vikings might be coming over the hill to kill you and yours" is a colorful example, but not a necessary one - for most people for much of history (including probably the Vikings themselves, to your side-point) were not more than a few bad harvests, one bad plague, or one bad military conflict away from annihilation.
And yes, mindset is a part of the difference, but I think if basically everyone for all of history was able to 'cope': to find purpose in life despite the certainty of death and the possibility of great suffering, and we can't, despite living in on-net the most peaceful and prosperous time in history... I feel the interesting question isn't "is it moral to have kids", it's "where did we break and how do we fix it"?
I think you're confusing the "known" aspect here. If someone said that Vikings would kill them all five years from now (and we now know that was true for many villages in that area) we're presupposing correct information. If someone had said the Vikings were going to attack in say, 1585, we would similarly discount that - despite not having any particular reason to believe one above the other, a priori.
Saying that people should be concerned about having kids in 2025 is similarly presupposing one or more potential world events has a high(er than normal) likelihood.
If I'm in England somewhere in the 9th century I will be wary of the Vikings, because there's a history of them attacking. But apparently not enough of a worry that people stopped having kids. If I'm living in 2025 maybe I'm concerned about one or more of Climate, AI, Nuclear War, whatever. But Nuclear War seems way more likely in the 1960s than now, and I hope you agree it was good that people still had kids then. And Climate doesn't seem like a bigger issue than WWII, and people still had kids then.
Without having solid knowledge of the future, I don't think there's a good reason to not have kids unless it's so obvious that there's a very high chance of doom. Some people think that about AI, but that belief seems silly and pretty much religious at this point. At least the level of surety of AGI existing and also being powerful enough to effect that level of change.
Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves.
Likewise, maybe you have a kid that does just fine in the neo-feudal re-gilded climate apocalypse age we are heading into. Maybe you kid like machinegunning climate refugees/ slitting the throats of climate border guards depending on where you life and has a grand old time.
You are making like 8 layers of predictions about the future each of which is contingent on the pervious, don't worry so much about it.
"Even if everything is fine, you have a decent chance of having a kid who works a job they hate to support a life they hate until they die or kill themselves."
I think I have a reasonable chance to be a good parent, I can influence that (somewhat! I know there are limits). I cannot really influence the AI future. Altman and Musk will decide what it looks like.
About the last line: Isn't that just the "Safe Uncertainty Fallacy"? See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mr-tries-the-safe-uncertainty-fallacy
The "Safe Uncertainty Fallacy" from your link requires a misreading of what people are arguing. It's not that "we don't know, therefore everything will be fine". It's "we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information - not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
justfor thispost isn't saying that you don't know, therefore everything will be perfect. They're saying that you should have epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty.
There's no need to come up with a snappy new "fallacy" for what you're doing: it's catastrophizing.
Wiktionary:
"catastrophize (third-person singular simple present catastrophizes, present participle catastrophizing, simple past and past participle catastrophized)
1. (transitive, intransitive) To regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic."
This implies that I am misinterpreting a bad situation. So what is the correct interpretation?
"2. (transitive, intransitive, psychology) To expose a behaviour pattern of seeking worst interpretation and magnifying disagreeable outcomes (of).
3. (obsolete) To end a comedy."
I'm not looking for the worst interpretation at all! I'm here to be convinced that everything is finde! Please give me a very good interpretation!
However, currently my problem is exactly that I have "epistemic humility in the face of extreme uncertainty" and I am humble enough to see that this includes very bad outcomes. So what should I do? Act as if it didn't?
"we don't know, at this point we can't know, and therefore we should proceed until we have more information"
I don't understand what that means for the question of whether one should have children. Are you in favor of always sticking to traditional behavior? Or are you advocating not having children until we know what the future holds?
"- not use speculative arguments to convince ourselves of an outcome distant from our ability to predict".
I don't know what this accusation is based on. In which sense do I use more speculative arguments than others? Where do you see me actively trying to convince myself of something bad? This would presume that I want to see a bad result - I actually don't want that! I want to see reality and make ethically good decisions.
I was pretty sure Reagan and Brezhnev were going to kill me and everyone else in the 80’s but it didn’t happen and I got to grow up! We could get lucky again.
Yes, we could! The same applies to betting all my money in Las Vegas. Would you recommend it?
I didn't mean that in a reassuring way, just that it's very hard to see the future. I personally believe that both climate change and AI are going to be very big problems, sooner than anyone thinks -- but I still mow my lawn. What can you do? If you're trying to decide whether to have kids now, that's more fraught but my child has never complained so far about the world he's inheriting (not that it would do him any good).
1. Putting AI aside for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived. Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely), most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
2. Putting AI into the picture, I recommend looking at this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyqrvE3dk5apg54Sk/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai
1. "Putting AI for the moment, there has never been a better time in history to have children. You probably live in a developed country and make enough money to live comfortable. If this is true, you will be able to provide your kids more opportunities than 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived."
I think this argument has a lot of weight, but I'm not entirely convinced. Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; however, I can clearly imagine at least the "no nuclear war" scenario (although the probabilities estimated by Metaculus are depressingly high) and think there's a lot we could do about it.
As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). Even in the "not everyone dies" scenario, I don't see a great future (maybe I lack imagination) and my impression is that humanity is too stupid to prevent bad developments in this regard (you can't get the AI back into the box once that it is out). Maybe I should become religious, but motivated reasoning has never been my strong point.
"Even if a climatepocalypse or nuclear war do happen in their lifetimes (unlikely),"
So how likely do you think they are?
"most people would prefer to live and die than to have never lived at all.
Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?
Scott once wrote: "'What a lovely girl in a normal organic body who is destined to live to an age greater than six', the people would say." (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-an-hour-before-dawn-in-san-francisco) To me, the mood in that sentence felt very depressing. But it's not something parents talk about once they have children, because it would be pretty bitter for the children.
2. Putting AI into the picture, I recommend looking at this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cyqrvE3dk5apg54Sk/raising-children-on-the-eve-of-ai
Hm. She writes: "This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario. Maybe unsurprisingly, I haven’t properly thought through the population ethics there. I find that very difficult to think about, and if you’re on the fence you should think more about it." I don't know what to make of this. Is not being "on the fence" here also due to kind of willful ignorance? Or is there something deeper behind it that I don't understand?
"Nuclear war is a dangerous, already relevant but probably growing risk; "
Honestly, my gut feeling is that nuclear war is less likely now than at any point in history since 1950. In the 1950- 80s, people had a lot more reason to worry about nuclear war: nukes were new and unprecedented, and there were two, well-formed power blocks, each with an ideological desire to overwhelm the other and with growing nuclear arsenals. The risk has since diminished quite a bit: the total number of the world's nukes is now far smaller (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1071026/nuclear-warheads-per-country-historical development), there's 70 years of non-nuclear aggression precedent that seems to have prevented deployment so far, and the world is far more economically globalized now and so all actors have more to lose from nuclear war.
I'm not saying the chance of nuclear MAD today is zero, but if the chance of nuclear MAD wouldn't have dissuaded you from having a child in the 1950s (and indeed hundreds of millions of people did have kids despite it), I'm confident that it shouldn't dissuade you now.
"As for AI, I don't see such a hopeful scenario to look forward to (send me a link if you have one). "
For a "standard" hopeful scenario for a strong AI future, I recommend Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace (https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace). I don't personally have an opinion about how likely this is vs. a "bad" AI future vs. extinction, but certain smart people do take it seriously.
"So how likely do you think they are?"
I haven't researched either question extensively, and I encourage you to do your own research. But as a first-glance analysis, I would say:
Climatepocalypse before 2100 (death of over half of humanity due to direct climate-related disasters such as floods, droughts, fires etc.): 10%
Nuclear War between great powers before 2100: 15%
"Yes, I prefer to live too, but I can still live off my memories of the time before artificial intelligence. If things turn really bad, I can play the final scene. But would you condemn children to that?"
I'm not quite sure I understand what you're saying here. Every human in history has had to deal with the reality that their children will suffer, and the strong possibility that their suffering will be great. That hasn't stopped most people from thinking that having children is good. It's up to you to decide whether your children would be happy that they were born.
"This is all assuming that the worst case is death rather than some kind of dystopia or torture scenario"
IMO the worst-case for AI is rapid total human extinction, and in my calculus this possibility is not great enough, nor the suffering horrible enough, to create a strong argument against having children in 2024. If the worst case were prolonged torture, this would change my opinion, but I don't think it's likely that a future strong AI will want to torture all of humanity.
With respect to the risk of nuclear war, it seems that a situation in which more countries have nuclear weapons seems more unstable. Economic interdependence is possibly helpful, but some countries are aiming at reducing it.
A different sort of calculus says that if only people unconcerned about the future have children, we will raise a generation that is indifferent to the future.
So your point is, “We should have children in the future to help the next generation not to behave stupidly, even if there is a good chance that the children we have will end up in a nuclear war or an AI apocalypse”?
This calculation only works if you think the apocalypse is at least a generation away and/or make some other assumptions. It's not a 'point' I was trying make, just a rationale I have heard people use. More often I hear it from the right, that eg Christians should have more babies to better stem the future tide of 'progress' (usually stated in terms of unwanted cultural change).
Personally, I think people should have babies if and only if they want them, embrace the work that is entailed in raising them to be thoughtful independent adults, and understand going in that the whole endeavor could go sideways starting on day 1.
Thanks. So you don't take into account what this means for the children, or do you have an implicit assumption?
I think it's problematic to take the perspective of unborn people. Will they regret being born? Happens all the time. But most people, once born, try to avoid death, suggesting that the way to maximize the utility of a prospective life is to make it actual.
Yes.
Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right, I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6. (Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)
Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20.
So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years.
(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
"Setting aside that creating life might be morally valuable just in its own right,"
Why? It seems this only makes sense if the life you create is desirable for the life you create.
"I think it's still worthwhile. You seem to be, like, 99% confident in impeding catastrophe... I think probably revise yourself toward Ord's 1 in 6."
At which percentage would you change your recommendations?
"(Especially given Erik Hoel's observation about an AI plateau [https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/ai-progress-has-plateaued-at-gpt] which I think is good reason to extend our AGI timelines some decades at least. Though Metaculus does have it in 2032, so I guess take with many grains of salt.)"
I don't find the AI plateau story very convincing. Or rather, I don't think we should extrapolate too much from it into the future.
"Anyway: I think an average life where you live to at least 30 is probably worthwhile for the tragedy of an average death, and given the socioeconomic make-up of ACX readers, maybe make that 20."
That's interesting, I thought that there was a relatively high rate of depression and similar mental illnesses among ACX readers.
"So, fine, AI's coming in 7 years. By Ord, and quite conservatively, we have an expected lifespan of 7 years * 1/6 + 60 years * 5/6 = 50ish years. That still seems good! If I was offered a 50 year life or total non-existence, I'd take the 50 years."
That is actually very helpful, thanks!
I assume I could answer the question above, "At which percentage would you change your recommendations?" with that, if I knew your actual percentage for the 7 years and also where the 60 years came from?
However, the assessment may also depend somewhat on how the extinction occurs.
"(Ok, final caveat: maybe you're saying that AGI could bring us into some terrible dystopia where the kid ends up slaving away for 60 miserable years. [I wish I was nerd enough to get "Lovecraft version of the Borg" naturally, but I don't, so this is just vaguely the vibesy sense of the meaning that I'm picking up on.] In that case, I'd urge you to really think hard about the probabilities: P(dystopia) < 10% probably which means an expected 6 bad years vs. expected 7 good years * 1/6 catastrophe + expected 60 good years * (1-1/6-1/10) = 44 years and we have 44 - 6 = 40ish which comes out nice and ethically good. [How bad are the bad years relative to good years? Not sure, maybe factor that in.] You'd have to get to odds of catastrophe near 50% before the math flips on you. Now go procreate.)
Thank you for the serious approach here. What are your expectations for the future?
All lives contain nightmarish elements. Even without nuclear war, an AI apocalypse, or any other disaster your children will - at various points in their lives - suffer. They will eventually die. They will know terror.
If life is worthwhile with these inevitabilities, in what way(s) are the things you're worried about sufficiently worse to give you hesitation?
Hm. So do you think life is positive?
Do you think Nuclear War and AI are a relevant risk?
If so, it seems that they are characterized due to a strong hopelessness. They would, I assume, strongly increase the share of the world population suffering compared to the things you list, also within each life. It would be probably hard or impossible to flee, and there would be no future to look forward to. But maybe my pseudo-calculation is just wrong there, happy about any corrections. What are your expectations for the future?
Yes, life is positive.
Nuclear war and AI are risks. Relevant risks? Relevant to what?
All life, despite being positive, is characterized by a strong hopelessness.
Assume the worst case that an apocalypse will occur in 7 years. Now imagine that before you were born you were temporarily plucked from nonexistence and given an option: you can be born and live for those 7 years before dying or you can return to nonexistence. Which would you want? Do that.
Thank you, that is a helpful framing!
Would you kill yourself today if you did? How many experiences are you willing to forego to avoid an unpleasant one?
I assume that this depends on how pleasant or unpleasant the experiences are?
Ending one's life is a decision that some people make when things are going really badly for them. The relevant question is, how many good experiences are necessary in a lifetime to make the whole life worth living (from a prospective perspective), assuming that life will get really bad at some point?
Another question; how many parents of dead children do you think wish they never had the child?
You mean children who died at a young age? That's an interesting question. I don't know anyone personally who has lost a child, but I think for many parents it's very traumatic. I suppose it depends on the suffering of the child, but I realize that hindsight can be skewed. The thought of "would it have been better if the child hadn't existed?" is just not a question that people usually ask, right? It would lead to additional self-blame, which most people prefer to avoid. And that's a good thing, because it's not healthy to blame yourself for things you can't change.
People generally aren't acting like they actually expect the apocalypse in such a short timeframe. Companies are still investing in long-term R&D, employees are putting money in their retirement funds etc.
Do you think these people are hypocrites? Do you think they secretely know the "truth"? Or do you think it's the opposite, that is, people aren't able to plan for things to get really bad?
Talk is cheap. People can say things regardless of whether they are going to act like the things they say are the truth, though this doesn't imply any actual knowledge of the future on their part.
Is there a name for the little dance we do with someone at a doorway, doing head fakes or dekeing each other out as the Canadians put it, where two people vie to outpolite each until one or both stop and make a directional gesture or come to a verbal agreement about which side of the doorway each person should use?
"collision avoi"-dance
In the IT world, a deadlock is where two processes think they should go first but a "live lock" is where both processes think the other should have priority - "no, you first..." "No but I insist, please, you first" ad infinitum.
A Canadian standoff.
I've always called that a two step or a pas de deux, but I don't know where I got that idea, and I don't find that usage documented.
I am terrified of the idea of dreaming. It feels crazy to me that in order to survive, I have to go comatose with vivid hallucinations in an altered state of consciousness every night. It’s like having a health condition where I have to endure an LSD trip every day or literally die.
I am not here for advice; that I take from my therapist and my psychiatrist. But I’d like to ask you to share how you deal with the idea that you have to have dreams every night. Do you just ignore them? (Why are you okay with it?) Are you even looking forward to them, perhaps?
I don't find dreams too different from intense daydreaming, where I also play out various scenarios in my head, both that bring me joy and that I am worried about. It's just our attempts to predict the future in order to be more effective agents, and our neural networks finetuning.
I'm fine with having some visual byproducts in the process, as long as they arent' distressing (but for me, they rarely are).
Dreams are for me a little, a really little, compensation for having only one and a very limited life.
I have been on other planets. I have been on spaceships. I flew by will. I saved the world with awesome friends. I also was chased and treated very badly by horrific monsters, but with them completely unable to hurt me for real. I had the adventure, without paying the price.
That's why I love dreaming.
I sometimes have a hard time getting to sleep, so I take waking up from a dream as: Oh! I _did_ finally get to sleep, which I needed. FWIW, most of my dreams are unpleasant, but I still find the evidence that I finally got to sleep comforting.
Our brains are weird structures that need nightly maintenance, being upset about dreams is like being upset about urination. It’s undignified, but…
Also, some of my dreams are very interesting, especially the ones where I am simultaneously watching a movie and also the movie star on the screen. If I could recreate that experience while awake, I would pay a lot for it.
I can't wrap my head around either dreading or looking forward to my dreams. I don't exactly think of them as things that happen to me, because the me they happen to is so discontinuous with the waking me. She doesn't even know she's asleep! She doesn't know it's a dream. She cannot access at will any of the memories, skills and opinions I can. So even if I knew I was going to dream tonight of being killed by a mass shooter I don't think I would dread it, because it isn't really me it's going to happen to. I'm not saying you should have my attitude -- I understand you're in the grip of an anxiety disorder -- just trying to describe my personal attitude towards dreams, in answer to your question.
Wait, so your dream self has no access to your autobiographical memory?
Well, bits of my real life, present and past, appear in my dreams. But my dreaming self cannot access autobiographical memory the way my waking self can. It also cannot reason and reflect in the same way. For instance in one of my dreams last night a psychiatrist who is a professional acquaintance in my waking life, asked me to enter a psychiatric hospital. There was some task I was supposed to do there. It had something to do with understanding or improving what life was like for the patients. If in real life the psychiatrist had asked me to do such a weird thing I would have had all sorts of thoughts about his request: How could he possibly think I'd be willing to do it? Why did he even want me to? Had he lost his reason? But in the dream I felt no surprise or displeasure regarding his request, and in fact did enter the hospital. Later in the dream my mother visited me and wanted to know why I had been in the hospital. Not having access to my waking knowledge that she died quite a long time ago, I was not surprised to see her.
By the way, I'm a psychologist, and I wanted to let you know that your horror of dreaming sounds like a cousin of an anxiety disorder I've seen several people have: a horror of fainting. Most of them are people who have never fainted, and have no reason to think they are likely to. People who have this fear sometimes begin avoiding settings that make them feel slightly odd, such as escalators, because they are afraid the odd sensation of standing on moving stairs might somehow make them faint. When I've asked them what it is they fear, they have a hard time putting it into words. It is definitely *not* a fear of hurting themselves when they fall, or of being robbed or harmed by strangers while unconscious . And it is definitely not anticipated embarrassment at being seen by others losing consciousness, crumpling to the ground, etc. It's something about unexpected loss of control of the self. Anyhow, thought it might be helpful for you to know you are not alone in your phobia.
Thank you, fear of fainting is definitely a new clue! I seem to have the opposite case though, because I'd prefer to sleep all night without dreams, i. e. to "faint" my way through the night. But the "loss of control of self" sounds quite relatable. I'll look up this condition you mentioned, in case it brings some important insights.
OK, just to give you a more complete view of this sort of phobia here are some others that are similar: fear of orgasm; fear of vomiting; fear of becoming so dizzy that one falls down; fear of having an epileptic seizures; fear of discovering one is gay (the people who have this fear are generally not particularly homophobic, and have years of good evidence that they are heterosexual, so even they are perplexed why this fear haunts them). For all of these things there are conventional reasons one could fear them, things having to do with social stigma, shame and embarrassment, but for people who have an actual phobia about one of them the feared thing really is something different: It’s something about losing control of one’s self, or actually sort of losing one’s self. If you would like to know something about treatment of this sort of phobia I can describe it.
Sure, I'm interested.
Dreams are intriguing. Sometimes they are frightening, sometimes I experience deep positive emotions. I've never considered them anything other than a feature of life.
Never take quinine though. I have taken it as a malaria prophylactic and true to its reputation I had extremely vivid, horrifying dreams. I didn't dread falling asleep but I didn't much look forward to it either.
I guess I'm lucky enough to have a certain amount of control over my dreams. I have a lot of fun in my dreams, and they're an important form of recreation for me.
My dreams are naturally quite lucid and it makes it quite worse somehow, being aware that I am stuck in a hallucination.
Can you elaborate a little more on why that's unpleasant?
It's hard to elaborate because it's my crazies, not something reasonable. I'll write if I find the right words, though.
I hope they come to you! I'd love to read more about your experience w/ this.
Lucid dreaming seems like a lot of work, and quite frankly, not sleeping. I can day dream when awake and control the narrative but it isn’t restful.
I've been working on lucid dreaming for a while, and have some natural talent for it. I spontaneously dreamed lucidly a lot as a child before I had any idea it was A Thing that could be practiced and improved.
In the right setting, both internal and external setting, I can reliably launch a lucid dream with about 80% success. I can't make all of my dreams lucid 80% of the time though. It works like this: I need to have alrady slept once that night, the lucid dream is almost always during the 2nd sleep period after having been asleep for at least 3.5 hours or so. I wake up briefly, drink some cold mugwort tea, and fall back to sleep in a controlled manner. Body perfectly still, visualizing internally certain....concepts? This part is hard to describe in writing, but I know when it feels correctly done; I can tell when it is (or isn't) going to work. Then I'm in the dream suddenly, and I know I am in a dream. (side note: as a result of years of practicing this I can also just put myself to sleep without the dreams pretty reliably too, even on stimulants)
Here's the part that is probably the strangest thing to people when I try to explain the experience. Lucid dreams can be quite dull. Everything I'm experiencing is internally produced by my own mind, and my mind doesn't always do a great job of filling in the blanks. Very lucid dreams are remarkably incomplete at times and I've actually woken myself up out of boredom. They are usually pretty fun though. Its also important to draw a distinction between lucid dreaming and dream control, which are related but distinct. I'm often fully aware that I'm dreaming, but with little control over events, like watching out of the window of a train or something. Gaining increased control over the dream also often involves giving up some of the lucidity. Some of the best ones have been when I launch a lucid dream, forget I'm dreaming, then remember again. These are often much less stark and empty than the fully lucid ones.
A few random notes. Alcohol, even in small amounts, ruins it. This isn't true for everyone but its a common observation. Ambien as well. Caffiene otoh makes it easier, though it can be more challenging to fall asleep. Trazadone makes the dreams more vivid but harder to control. Cannabis has no noticable effects one way or the other. LSD/Mushrooms are helpful in the week of so after using them, but not while under the direct effects. Having the room be (dimly) lit helps a lot too, I use two nightlights on opposite sides of the room.
I'd been told isn't possible to fall asleep while tripping psychedelics, but I fell asleep on Mushrooms once. It was a journey through states that resembled the Tibetan descriptions of the Bardo realm. I was "shown" some fascinating things about the nature of my consciousness — and it showed me that my consciousness was connected to a larger network of consciousness (finite in size, though) — plus it showed me a vision of man attacking me with a knife and my guts spilling out on the pavement. The attack happened a week later, and I recognized the man from my precognitive dream in time to get into my car and lock the door while he pounded on it trying to get in. I credit that dreamtrip with saving my life.
Very interesting thanks. The only thing I can do there is go back to the same dream after 3.5 hours sleep. Which is exactly when I first wake up most nights. The interim period when I pee or whatever, which is fast as my room is en-suite, seems like a movie interval and I have to remain groggy
It comes naturally to me. I didn't have to work at it. Though I admit my control has improved over the years, it hasn't been through any effort by my waking consciousness. But I still can't find where I left my car in my dreams.
I don't remember having dreams generally. Unfortunately, that's not actionable advice I can give you.
I mostly enjoy them, even the bad ones. Sort of “it’s cool my brain can do that.” The only dreams I don’t like are ones that make me feel boring, like dreaming about being at work.
I find I dream "boring" dreams more often now: that of doing something I would normally do, such as talking to people, or eating something, or walking on stairs. I eventually notice it's a dream from something that almost, but doesn't quite, add up, like if I'm eating from a plate with a fork but the plate looks the same even after having eaten from it.
I find dreams very enjoyable. I look forward to dreaming at night: unfortunately I rarely remember my dreams so I am often disappointed on that front (I know dream journaling would help with that, but I haven't found the time). Amazing things can happen in dreams. There have been a few occasions in my life where something has happened in a dream that was deeply meaningful or exciting. That's certainly not what usually happens, but it's nice getting to pull the lever the dream slot machine knowing that jackpot is possible. And sometimes you get to lucid dream and that's very fun.
The only problem is nightmares, but I've mostly got them sorted out now.
How did you sort them out?
I've regularly had nightmares as long as I can remember (usually 1-2 a month, though these days its more like 1 every two months). I sorted them out through lucid dream training, actually. I didn't have the wherewithal to train enough to regularly get lucid dreams, but I trained enough to accomplish one specific thing: I can wake myself out of a dream fairly quickly and easily.
My wife takes credit for the rest of my technique. Early in our marriage she would notice that when I was having a nightmare I would often whimper in my sleep. She'd wake me up whenever this happened, which I appreciated because that meant the nightmare was over. This happened enough times, and I had enough lucid dream training that I was somewhat aware that I might be dreaming and could be in a nightmare, that I got into the habit of screaming at the top of my lungs whenever a dream started getting scary. That scream would translate to a louder than normal whimper which prompted my wife to wake me.
After going through this routine for several years I'm now at the point where a nightmare starts, I start screaming, and I don't even need my wife to wake me up. I just wake up. My dreaming mind has learned that screaming=wake up.
If you have trouble with nightmares, lucid dream training might help.
It seems like I am mostly unaffected by my dreams emotionally, regardless of what happens in them. Except this seems to be the case only outside of the dream. While in dreams, I think I react internally as though the things happening were really happening. And in the few times I have known I was dreaming while in a dream (and not able to control anything) I was afraid, and thought about how I'll tell everyone about the experience after waking up. Then I think very little of it after waking up and decide to get on with my day. (Same applies to sleep paralysis, including a case this morning.)
I don't remember my dreams most of the time so it is easy to ignore them. But it does make me sad that dreams are often about negative/unpleasant/scary things. I think though that experiencing things in dreams is much less intense than experiencing them in real life
I once watched an entire movie in my dreams. It had Dave Bautista and Jason Statham and Some Guy I've Seen Before But Don't Recognize From Anything and the worst dialogue you could ever hear. There was a point where I walked out of the theater and sat on a bench next to a critic to talk about the nonsense we were watching, before heading back in to finish it.
I can't imagine not wanting that experience. It's everything you could ever want, a single thought away.
Your dream self appears to be a victim of the sunk-cost fallacy.
I often enjoy them. Freewheeling dreams (as opposed to when I tried lucid dreaming) are more interesting and varied than what I would choose as a dream, and mine are often (at least perceived as) quite narrative and exciting. I also find the experience of falling asleep comfortable and cosy when it comes easily (it doesn’t always come easily, and I know I have a tendency to fight changes of state).
When I have nightmares, then it is obviously less pleasant, and I have to try to get out of that frame of mind before I am happy sleeping again: it is usually easy to shake them off if I wake up fully. I find prayer helpful for falling asleep in the right frame of mind, especially when nightmares are threatening, but I’m aware that isn’t transferable for everyone.
An explanation of why Jesus is the only way to heaven that I recently wrote to a friend. Please consider reading, even if you won't be convinced.
So, here's why it's important to follow specifically Jesus and why I want to tell you about it.
Like I'm sure you've heard before, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe. What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way, because God says he made humans in his own image. Humans inherently see value in things and have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things.
Because God himself is perfect and holy, and he himself is good, nothing evil can be close to him. So when the first humans were created, God told them what they could and couldn't do, and if they did what was wrong that they would die. Death is the punishment for evil, because life is in God and anything that is evil is separated from God.
The Bible says, "your iniquities (evil acts) have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." So, doing wrong completely separates a person from God and then when they die they will be judged by God, and he will not allow them to be close to him. And it's not just terrible evils that are wrong but anything that is against the nature of God is wrong and creates a barrier away from Him.
The Bible says "all have sinned and fall short of God's glorious standard" and I don't think anyone can disagree with that. Every person has done something bad in their life before, even if it's just telling a small lie or getting angry at another person. But because God is entirely perfect, even these things that seem small are enough to cause separation from God (This fact is why it's so important for every person to consider following Jesus. But I'll explain why Jesus in just a minute). Once there is separation from God because of sin, the price of sin has to be paid, and the Bible also says that "it is appointed for man to die once and then to be judged" and "the wages of sin is death." So, because the first humans sinned, death entered into the world and now everyone will die physically, but after that when we are judged, we will also die spiritually because of our own sins. Spiritual death is eternal separation from God, e.g. hell.
God is just, so at the final judgement day he will not let anyone off the hook. He won't even let generally good people go without punishment for the small wrongs they have done. Being good is the baseline requirement of God, so doing good can never make up for any wrong however small. The price of death has to be paid. God is perfectly just.
But God is also loving, he is love himself. And he loves all people, every single one. This is where Jesus comes in. Because God loves the world of people so much, he sent himself in human form, Jesus, to live as a perfect human so that the price of death could justly be paid in the place of sinful humans, so that even if someone has sinned they could still be close to him forever. That is the famous Bible verse John 3:16 "for God so loved the world, that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life."
Because Jesus is completely perfect and never sinned, no penalty of death was ever required of him for his own sins. And because he was infinitely perfect, he was able to offer himself in place of infinitely many people to receive the penalty of death in their place. And because he himself is God, he was able to raise himself from the dead and in so doing proved that he is God and that everything he said was true. And Jesus said that everyone who believes in him and receives his words become children of God and will live forever with Him. Jesus says that people should repent (which means to turn away from) their sins and to follow his teaching and believe in his words.
This is God's way of maintaining justice and also showing his love. The Bible says in another place that God is patient and he doesn't want anyone at all to perish, but he wants everyone to repent and turn from their sin and towards him. God has given mankind freewill though, and does not force this on anyone. He allows everyone to make their own decisions in life. This is why there is such horrible evil in the world, even towards good people. Just like people are allowed to make good choices that benefit and help others, they are also allowed to make bad choices that hurt others in horrible ways. But nobody will go unpunished on judgement day. Every last evil thing that is done will be paid for, whether it is by Jesus' sacrifice, or by the people who did the evil things.
But this freewill that God gives to men is why not everyone is saved, even though Jesus died for everyone. The Bible passage that says "the wages of sin is death" also says "but the free gift of God is eternal life through our savior and Lord, Jesus." It is a free gift that he gives, but does not force on anyone. And he makes it clear that to receive the gift, one has to renounce his evil life and die to himself, because if he accepts Jesus' sacrifice then his evil self has died along with Jesus. The life he receives from Jesus then has to be lived with Jesus.
Nobody can trick God and say that they repent and accept Jesus and then continue to live selfishly however they want to. Jesus says "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on judgement day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!"
There's a lot more that Jesus says, and if you're interested it would be helpful to read the Gospel of Matthew (the four Gospels in the Bible are four different accounts of the life of Jesus, here's a link to an easily readable translation for your convenience:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%201&version=NLT
You can skip the first paragraphs that are just names. You may not be interested at all in which case just disregard, but I wanted to be helpful if you are interested). Whatever the case, Jesus makes it clear that if you truly are repentant of evil and if you love him, you will follow him in your life and in your heart. Everyone who does not, rejects God and his free gift and their sins will not be paid for by Jesus' sacrifice. They will have to pay for them on their own.
This is why it is important to believe in Jesus specifically out of anyone else or any other type of god. Being good will not pay the penalty for any wrong that a person has done, it has to be paid in death. Jesus is the only person God has provided to bring people close to him through his own death and resurrection. And he wants every person to believe and be close to him, because he loves the whole world. I really wanted to tell you about it because I don’t want you to have never heard all this and I want you to be with God (and me and others) for eternity in the afterlife.
Thoughts in no order.
(1) I'm getting strong 2011 nostalgia. Felt like every second comment all over the internet was a clone of the one you just wrote, back then.
(2) Now, as then, getting so sick of the atheist responses that say *nothing* but "where's the evidence?" Jesus Christ, can't you say you don't accept the premises and then still engage with the theology on a "suppose I did accept them" basis? Don't these people have any philosophical curiosity whatsoever?
(3) As I said, this comment is an almost identical clone of thousands of other evangelical preaching spiels. I wish Christians would realise this makes them look brainwashed, when things are presented and phrased exactly the same way every time, right down to the "have you ever told a lie" and "the price of sin has to be paid". It would help enormously with being taken seriously if these online preachers would add some original material, perhaps a personal metaphor or a unique argument or interpretation, or even just some unique phrasing. "Restoring balance" to the force...er, universe...or any number of other phrasings gets the same point across without reusing the cliched and primitive tribal/medieval idea of "paying a price of death" for a crime.
(4) Who are you talking to? Not atheists, since you give no argument at all for the existence of God. Not evangelicals, who don't need to be told what they already believe. Not Catholics or Mormons or other Christians since you don't argue why this understanding of Christ is better than theirs. And not other religions since there's no argument for why this conception of God (a being who must reconcile His holiness and His love) is deeper or wiser than other conceptions, like the Hindu or Islamic ones. This seems to only make sense as an explanation of what evangelicals believe to someone who doesn't know. And anyone here who doesn't know probably has zero intellectial curiosity and won't read your comment anyway.
(5) The main sticking point for me and most people (excluding the mindless "no evidence lol" replies) is this whole idea that you can never earn your salvation, and the "good news" is that the price for your sin has already been paid because of Christ's infinite sacrifice, and the great liberation that you don't need to do anything to earn it, it's already done...but here's what you have to do! (i.e. believe it and "accept it"). The last part is probably necessary for Christianity to memetically spread, but it undermines its whole point. If the price of sin has been paid, then why is it conditional on saying certain words and holding certain mental states? Now, you may say accepting a gift isn't an act in the normal sense of requiring effort or achieving a goal , it's merely a decision to put aside your pride and say "yes". And that the only barrier to someone doing such a simple thing is their immense pride and refusal to admit their sin.
But this is so demonstrably false. Most people who refuse to "accept Christ" are doing so because they aren't convinced God exists, they aren't convinced Christ is God, they aren't convinced Christ really wants this evangelical path of action, or they have a moral objection to the path of "*I'll* be saved, but those other people who have honest disbelief will be damned and that's still somehow good news because at least I won't". Forcing yourself to believe in something you're not sure is true, or to obey something you're not sure is moral, is not a simple decision, it's an act of herculean effort that may not be even possible. And if you think those people are lying and really do believe those things and really are motivated by pride...then why can't you just say "you can accept Christ on earth, OR you can accept him after you die?" If they're really just prideful, they'll still reject him after death. Only if you know full well that the reason people aren't accepting Christ is that they're not sure he exists, would you expect a different response before or after death. And importantly, only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
And I find that very sickening.
(6) More metaphysically, I don't know why so many Christians keep using the *worst* theodicy of them all. Most other responses to the problem of evil, like the soul making theodicy or the idea that light cannot exist without the dark or the idea that it's a mystery beyond our comprehension, are so much more defensible than the free will theodicy. The latter:
cannot account for natural evil (earthquakes, disease etc)
cannot explain why allowing people to sin requires allowing them to successfully hurt other people
if it somehow does require that, cannot explain why there *are* many physical limits that often stop people hurting each other
cannot explain why we put criminals in jail, if freedom to hurt others is essential to freedom (is the existence of a criminal justice system fundamentally unChristian?)
cannot explain why the Bible so frequently tells people to obey God or God will punish them; if freely choosing God is so important that it justifies allowing evil, how is that remotely compatible with spreading such fear-based and self-interest-based reasons for choosing God in his own word?
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since it's not clear if libertarian free will (the kind needed for this theodicy) actually exists or if it's even coherent: everything we do we do for a reason, not an irreducible act of will (whatever that would mean)
doesn't make metaphysical sense, since even if libertarian free will is theoretically coherent it certainly doesn't seem coherent combined with theism: if God creates everything, then God causes everything, and how can acts God has no control over be compatible with God's sovereignty?
doesn't make moral sense, since allowing free will "so people aren't just thoughtless robots" (the usual justification) does not reauire libertarian free will, only compatibilist free will. God could determine that all people choose good and love Him and those choices would still be as meaningful as any other if they're coming from people's own nature, not externally imposed against it (and the latter IS what the classic "obey God or be punished" is)
Basically, it's such a terrible theodicy with so many holes, and other theodicies work so much better, I can't undetatand why anyone tries to use it.
(By the way, I'm either some kind of deist, or some kind of Christian who understands Atonememt in a VERY different way to "someone must be punished for sin". I encorage everyone to find their own way to God, ignoring both the small-minded atheists and the preachers who claim to speak for him).
>[...] only if you're primarily concerned not with people eventually repenting but with *controlling people on earth* (making them attend your church, obey your pastors, etc) would you insist that repentance must happen before you die. There is no other reason.
>And I find that very sickening.
Agree.
I always say, why is it, that people who claim to believe all that stuff do not act like they believe it. Rhetorical question. Because they don't believe it, they just say so, for reasons.
That's correct, but God won't be fooled. I quoted Jesus in the original post:
"Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness."
It is entirely sickening the evils that people do in the name of God, but they will not escape judgement. However, evil people who claim God's name don't change the truth of the matter that we have only this life to accept Jesus' sacrifice. It says in the book of Hebrews in the Bible that "it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement."
What you are doing here is what I mean.
What you say is, God has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
Yet you try to achieve something. Which is weird, given that you believe that.
You cannot achieve anything at all. He can. And only he.
Because he has everything under control, he knows best, he makes no mistakes, and everything is -- or at least, from human perspective, eventually everything will be -- alright.
There is nothing anyone can do about it.
That's what you say you believe.
Yet you try.
And that's why I don't believe anyone who claims to believe all that stuff.
I think you may be misunderstanding some things. If someone really believes the Bible and God, then they're going to obey him. In addition to moral commands, God also tells his followers to go out into the world and preach the gospel (good news) and make disciples in every nation.
Maybe you didn't read my original post, but it's me sharing with a friend of mine why it's important to believe in Jesus and my motivation was out of care for him and trying to obey Jesus' commands. It's not quite the same as not believing God's words and then using them to manipulate or control other people.
No offense intended, but I always understood Matthew 7:22-23 to be a warning against people like you who claim to know the mind and will of יהוה — the entity you call "God." Unlike the earlier prophets, Yeshua ben Yosef, the humble carpenter that he was, never claimed to be directly quoting the words of יהוה except when he was quoting or paraphrasing the words of the earlier prophets.
However, if we look back to the times of the prophets (when יהוה was communicating with His people without an interlocutor), Isaiah 55:8-9 warns of the dangers of deluding ourselves that we know the mind of יהוה: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord."
And יהוה rebukes Job (Job 38) for his false belief that he understands His motives when he declares (roughly translated) "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" Moreover, in a marvelously sarcastic smackdown, יהוה asks Job "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?"
Of course, one of the biggest Christianist heresies is the idea that יהוה, because of His perfection, is a static and unchanging entity. This is no doubt due to the mistranslation of His statement to Moses in Exodus 3:14, "אהיה אשר אהיה" as "I am that I am." A better translation would be "I will be what I will be" or perhaps "I will be what I am becoming." I think this mistranslation predates Christianity — correct me if I'm wrong — and it goes back to when the Pentateuch was originally translated into Greek a couple of centuries before Yeshua ben Yosef. Unfortunately, that mistranslation turned His declaration into an expression of static identity when it should actually be interpreted as a declaration of a self-directed evolving identity.
So, even if you consider Yeshua to be the final Word, when you *claim* you understand Yeshua's words as the Word of יהוה, you are doing the same thing that the prophesizers and exorcists were doing. I would suggest you go back to your closet and pray some more. And יהוה is not obligated to respect your limited understanding of his purpose.
In the 9th paragraph of your 6th point you actuallyyyy misspelled the word "require" so um your whole comment is completely invalid ☝️🤓
But no actually I appreciate that you took the time to read and type out a thorough response to it. I also appreciate that you stated your own beliefs so I can know where you're coming from. That being said, I didn't post here to argue God's case or convince anyone. I posted in case anyone who reads it might be at a place in their life that they see the truth of it and now know where to continue the search, and also in the hopes that someone such as yourself or anyone else who disagrees will one day get to the point where it clicks with reality and they see the truth of it later on. I don't want anyone to suffer through life and hate God due to a misunderstanding and then be rejected by him (idk how he'll judge every circumstance, I just know that he will be totally just), so all I can do is share the truth and pray.
Great response.
Is this for someone who is already a Christian but just believes that it's not mutually exclusive with other views/beliefs? "Why Christian doctrine teaches that Christianity is the only way" seems to be the question you're answering. A lesson that I'm sure is worth learning if you are a Christian, but I don't know how it would translate to a compelling invitation.
It was for a friend of mine recently who knows me, then I posted it to an open thread on an online forum in case it might benefit some rando online. I understand the majority of people probably won't care for it, but it's not against the rules here so I wanted to put it out there.
"When God created everything, he also ingrained morality into the universe."
Everything you write after that depends on just assuming that the first part of the sentence ("When God created everything") is true. That is not convincing. It also assume that God could "ingrain morality into the universe" without being responsible for how the universe behaves. That makes no sense. If God created anything with omniscience, it would also be his or her responsibility what the created thing does.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
...This is your idea of "perfectly just"? Innocent people being eternally punished through no fault of their own? I understand why your religion is set up the way it is, it's just.. it hurts me that not only people believe this, they see this state of affairs as acceptable.
It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (although I admit it's difficult to hope particularly horrible people find redemption), facing eternal damnation. That's why I posted this here in the hopes that it will benefit even one person who reads it. It's not intended as a convincing argument, like some have pointed out. I just don't want people to be ignorant of the truth whether they accept it as truth or not now, and I will pray that it clicks one day.
God has given me peace and I want other hurting people to know about it. I probably should have included that part in the text lol. Thanks for reading it even though you disagree.
You say:
"It's definitely not a human point of view. I don't like the idea of anyone, innocent or not (...), facing eternal damnation."
But also, you say:
"What is right is good and pleasing to him, and what is wrong is bad and requires punishment. Humans operate in the same way (..) Humans (...) have a conscience, a natural sense of right and wrong. Humans like good things, and we punish bad things."
So, I'm confused now. Which is it?
The statement about how humans operate is I think generally observable truth all over the world.
I could be wrong, but I think you would also agree that it is not human to think that seemingly innocent people should be punished with eternal damnation. Humans aren't holy though, so from our perspective there are some evils that are so common and don't feel like they need severe punishment. From God's perspective, any wrong however small is unholy, but God is holy so nothing unholy can be close to him.
So a morally good person who has only done small wrongs is still unholy and will be eternally separate from God unless that person is made holy through faith in Jesus Christ. And that just isn't a human perspective, that's what I meant by that. Thanks for taking the time to read the post.
If there is some irreconcilable difference between divine and human morality, *and* assuming for the sake of the argument that morality is universal and objective, I still don't see why we should conclude that humanity is the evil part, and not God. After all, God is the part inflicting most suffering on the other. You say that God is "holy" and humans aren't, but then I'm afraid I fail to see what is desirable about holiness, if it consists in the willingness to inflict unlimited suffering.
All of this is completely unconvincing if you're not a Christian (like I am) because this presupposes a Christian worldview.
Would you like a writeup that explains why you should believe in this that presupposes a Rationalist, materialist worldview?
Actually I'd like a writeup that explains how to resurrect Shinji Sato from the dead so I can see fishmans live 😭
Consume no fewer than 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, power up your hi-fi, put on 98.12.28 Otokotachi no Wakare, and hope for the best.
🤩🤩🤩
I agree, but since I had it typed out already I figured I may as well share it and pray that God uses it to reach somebody at least.
As a believer myself, I find comment preaching like yours to be more harmful than helpful. These comments virtually never convert, instead they repulse, as ascend's reply above illustrates nicely. I almost flagged your comment as spam, which I usually do for off-topic, preachy comments popping up where nobody asked for them. I didn't do it here because this is, after all, Open Thread, where most any topic is welcome as long as you're respectful, and also your essay was at least a little more in-depth than the standard copy-paste preaching I usually encounter. I think you are going against what the Savior said in Matthew 7:6 "Give not that which is holy unto dogs..." Now with this scripture, I don't mean to insult anyone here, but to say this simply isn't the ideal forum for gospel discussion. The vast majority come here to discuss things temporal, not spirtual, and many here were once part of organized religion but chose to turn away from it. So a rote presentation like yours is more likely to confirm anti-religion biases in their minds, which makes moving towards Christ that much harder.
I'd much rather read "this is why I'm a Christian" than "this is why you should be a Christian", to be honest.
Philosophy seems pretty welcome here, but I agree with you and Ascend on most of this. I've decided I'm atheist, but am willing to be convinced otherwise...by evidence, even of logic. But as mentioned elsewhere, the logic only holds if one accepts everything stated as true, and not everything stated should be the level of a postulate not needing proof.
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I'm going to throw out a controversial idea. I want to be clear that it's just an idea, I'm not attached to it or necessarily supportive of it. It started basically as a simple shower thought.
With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive.
One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.
...What if we did the exact opposite? What if we treated gender dysphoria like we do ADHD?
To be clear, this is not the "do nothing" or "watchful waiting" that some conservatives might support. Right now, if a male experiences gender dysphoria, the idea is to give that male treatments that will lead into a more feminine-appearing and feminine-feeling body. What if we did the opposite? If a 14 year old male has gender dysphoria, maybe we should give him the option to receive masculine-increasing treatment, to combat the dysphoria directly? Perhaps giving testosterone should be considered?
On the flip-side, if a 14 year old female has gender dysphoria, maybe she should be given the option of receiving treatment that would make her feel more feminine? Perhaps estrogen could be offered to her?
Again, just an idea. Medicine is not one of my strong suits, which is partly why I'm raising this idea here.
Do people here think this might work, or do people here think this would be totally disastrous, or something between? If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex.
It's important to distinguish between disorders like ADHD where the issue is "my brain works in a way that makes it difficult to live a happy life" and dysphoria (and related gender issues, not every trans person has dysphoria) where the issue is "my brain and my body don't match".
The solution to the first is anything that helps you function and live a happy life. Whether that's therapy, medicine, accommodations, etc. it doesn't really matter what the *specific* solution is, but there is a clear direction the solution needs to be working in.
Dysphoria is just a false equation. In the statement 2 = 5, the statement is false, but it's not clear that either side is "to blame". To fix it, you could add 3 to the left side, subtract 3 from the right, or some middle ground. In the same way, you can consider a trans woman. Having the "mind" of a woman is fine. Having the "body" of a man is fine (using loose terms to avoid questions of to what extent the mind and body are the same thing, not relevant). But when they are in conflict, you need to bring one into line with the other.
In principle, someone assigned male as birth who identifies as a woman would be equally treated by gender affirming surgery (changing the body) or by some hypothetical cure for dysphoria that results in this person identifying as a man. Your proposed treatments wouldn't work, but I don't think you're here to nitpick the specifics of a cure. If so, apologies for misunderstanding you, and I can elaborate further on why that wouldn't work.
But if we can assume a treatment that would "correct" the mind to its assigned-at-birth gender (and that has an equivalent cost, danger, and difficulty) it would be, in principle, just as good. However, There is a bias towards preserving identity. I find this bias very understandable, but someone else could have different preferences. The existence of this treatment would be a good thing in the sense that people having options is good. But it wouldn't be *better* than the current treatment from an individual perspective. Changing the statement to 5 = 5 isn't a *better* fix than 2 = 2.
Personally though, I would be wary of such treatments. I would much rather change someone's body to reflect their mind, because messing with minds is messing with *who they are* on a much more fundamental level. I would find it dangerous and creepy to a degree I have a hard time putting into words. By comparison, a trans person getting physical surgery to reflect their identity doesn't bother me at all. Maybe it's the transhumanist in me wanting people to be able to adjust their bodies however they like.
> With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible.
This axiom will lead you to incorrect conclusions, because it's not really correct. The aim is to make it so that the person can be functional in day-to-day life, and ideally be happy. Trying to "correct" the dysfunction is often not possible or even desirable (because attempting to do so will have the effect of making the patient *less* functional), but there are almost *always* steps you can take to make the symptoms manageable.
In ADHD, one of the treatments available are stimulants to increase focus. However, there are a LOT of other things that therapists can recommend to help a person manage their symptoms. They can put their pills in weekly pill boxes to make them easier to take, utilize to-do lists, create meals in bulk, alter their living spaces to account for their forgetfulness.
An even better example is autism. There is no magic pill for autism that "corrects" for it. A common autistic behavior, however, is "masking", which is a term for the ways that autistic people learn to "correct" for their dysfunction and hide their symptoms to conform to the social expectations of allists. A large portion of autism therapy is teaching kids how to *stop* masking, because the practice ultimately leads to other negative mental health impacts. Therapist then teach the children (and their parents!) how to alter *the environment* in ways that works *with* the dysfunction, rather than against it.
On the other hand, there *is* a magic pill that corrects for the symptoms of gender dysphoria. It's cross-gender hormone treatment (or at least puberty blockers). I encourage you to look at the actual diagnostic criteria for gender dyphoria:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK577212/table/pediat_transgender.T.dsm5_criteria_for_g/
If you'll notice, cross gender hormones *directly* help "correct" for every. Single. One. And it helps the person live a more functional life, rather than just trying to "mask" the underlying issue and hoping making their discomfort greater will magic away the issue.
> If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it?
Recently I heard a story of someone who makes special gum that prevents cavities by using some type of sugar that plague doesn't eat or something, they had a bunch they was expiring to soon so they offered it to a school. They refused to take it for free because "if it works, who will pay for it next year".
Currently, no, it wouldn't be good for doctors to promote strong gender norms even if it provided better outcome. This is why theres an approval process in science to prevent such mistake /s
Oh you heard that? how interesting
I think your idea is interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. What you're sort of accidentally doing here is using analogies that accidentally mislead you in a (fun!) way, which actually makes your idea interesting to talk about.
So, scoot to ADHD real quick. Or your larger point, really. This part:
''With most mental illnesses and illnesses in general, the aim is to correct the (perceived) dysfunction and symptoms as much as possible. With someone with ADHD, for example, the idea is to treat them in a way that makes them more attentive and less hyperactive''
And this is correct. Uh. Somewhat... obviously so. Just to be clear, I do not disagree with you that the aim of medication is to resolve the dysfunction incurred by disease :b
However!
``One major exception to this is... gender dysphoria. The current thinking on gender dysphoria is, in a sense, to change one's social identity and often one's body itself, to essentially accommodate the gender dysphoria.``
Okay. Is this actually the case, though? Obviously from my framing and slight handwaving at some other answer, I would indicate it's not. We provide stimulants and therapy to alleviate ADHD manifestations of reduced function. That's the interesting thing that your first note about 'most illnesses' covers up; in a grander way for every illness our goal in treatment is reduction of manifested dysfunction. An illness someone has which wouldn't seemingly incur any dysfunction or difficulty is philosophically interesting to imagine, but hard to classify as an illness in the first place. So lead that thought and go on a little - you provide stimulants to assist ADHD types with focus and reward seeking. Someone with ADHD complains about a lack of ability to retain focus, everyone working with them complain about it too, and other subtle malaises, and our treatment profile (and classification scheme for the whole illness!) relies on mitigating those percieved problems
Okay, so what's the manifested actual dysfunction in gender dysphoria we would, ideally, be trying to treat here?
It's usually a percieved and deeply personal dysmorphic lack of joy in ones own body. Given that actual manifestation, the treatment pathway will tend to be corrective on that axis. Someone with ADHD has altered neurology and methamphetamine derivatives can alter the thresholds for rewards, helping them with focus? Well, take the adderall, get the focus. Someone with body dysphoria in general and gender dysphoria in the specific complains they're not at home in their own meat and bone, and that's when we should then... Give them more of the stuff they say they're uncomfortable with?
Wait, isn't that a little bit like taking an overstimulated ADHD sufferer and saying the proper treatment pathway here is to expose them to more screens, more distraction, more noise, more demands? They said they had trouble with focus and Dr. Quarkfib prescribed: "Nah, you just gotta go all in on the distractibiltiy. Try adding more taps and micro-projects to your life, and really get into wandering aimlessly from hyperfixation to hyperfixation"
Someone with intense gender dysphoria describes their lack of comfort affirming traditionally male roles, and Dr. Quarkfib prescribes 30oz of red meat, a course of deadlifts and four mandatory hours of hunting through a forest murdering small things with a stick? 14-year old girl comes in, says she's intensely uncomfortable with her own body, thinks she might be a he, Dr. Quarkfib nods and murmurs and checks charts and prescribes a six hour mandatory shopping spree, frilly dresses and some estrogen?
Clearrrrrlyyyyyy when (blown up to scale and) viewed from that angle you see the somewhat curious and interesting contrast in these things.
One of the particularly interesting thingsa bout body dysmorphic disorder is that it is, you are correct, somewhat socially contingent. After all, our hypothethical 14 year old girl case example complains she has intense gender dysphoria and really wants to be a 14 year old boy then this example, written out with all nuance surgically removed, does indicate that something in the way this person percieves these differences and the way they manifest in daily life is to blame for intense personal fixation. Or put in less meandering verbiage, it's hard to imagine that gender dysphoria would be as intense a problem in a social world where gender itself was a thing people remarked and spent less time on.
But isn't this true for almost literally everything, because the intelligent things around you are human? ADHD is a classic example - a lot of its more dire manifestations are directly socially relevant, right from an inability to emphatisize to difficulty keeping up with relations over to rejection sensitivity. All of those 'dysfunctions', which treatment partially attempts to alleviate, are enormously intensely grounded in one's social identity. If nothing else, for the first many years of life in public school you'll certainly find that the reason some poor kid with ADHD gets into trouble isn't because of anything wrong with them (often) but because their bouncing-off-the-walls-dancing-around-not-sitting-still contrasts pretty intensely with our desire that they sit still in a classroom of 30 people and listen quietly for hours at a time. Would we still classify ADHD as a mental disorder if the social situation and pressures were different, or would we notice less? This is less of a handwavey philosophical aside than it might appear, because the paralllels do track directly to the analogy that's being used here.
And now we've fallen off the path of easy, hand-waving solutions and into horrifically deep weed territory.
But yeah to round up:
´´If it *did* work, it would be a good thing... wouldn't it? A person becomes more comfortable in their own skin, with their birth sex. ´´
There's a line here that's definitively true, which is that a person more comfortable in their own skin is almost by defintion less dysfunctional in it. And if we have a disorder or situation characterized by intense dysmorphia, then, yes, anything at all that reduces that percieved discomfort would be alleviative to the core of the problem. That's sort of axiomatic isn't it - we do stuff that makes you feel less awful?
But that's a bit of a hack isn't it? " If the thing we did makes you feel less terrible, it justifies doing it " is true in a lot of cases, but sometimes not. That's how this gets interesting. We could take someon with intense ADHD out of an environment they're clinically mismatched for, and that would make them more comfortale in their own skin and with their own birth brain. Don't laugh - if someone has trouble focusing on 6 hours of math in a classroom, sending them running through the woods and running all over the walls ala some Danish nature-exploration school provably works to alleviate the discomfort of being asked to sit and work out math. But the thing is, if someone complains reading gives them a headache, taking away all books in their life does help them. But uhhh I can see... some issues with that... solution.
If our hypothethical 14-year old we give more estrogen and a frilly dress and a course in how to sashay her hips properly and, I don't know, do needlework??, ends up more comfortable because of it, is that because we 'cured' her 'gender dysphoria', is it because we altered the environment she was in that caused her to express that discomfort (her ideas of not wanting to be femine was socially contigent on how she saw femmes be treated), or is it because we hammered the square peg so much that it got ground down into a circle and fit into the hole we wanted (we just sandpapered her personality into shape over a 4+ year period)
There's a severe and enormous danger here, which *may* very well be unique to gender dysmorphic expression (unsure), that because the expression of dislike is "always on" and rooted in their actual feeling of being in their own skin, the stuff that we might suggest that makes the more comfortable quickly isn't always the optimal solution for human flourishing. So would giving a 14year old a dress, extra estrogen and skincare tips be a good thing? Wellllll maybe? Like, I support stuff that works so if it works for them and helps them deal with a genuine sense of dysmorphia, then that's good yes.
But at least when we support transitioning, the treatment follows a logically coherent resolution pathway. "I dislike this gender expression" --> "Express a different one" from that metric seems to beat "I dislike this gender expression" --> "have you tried expressing it harder?". And that's the higher level fix that getting a dysmorphic 14 year old boy into the gym and throwing a spear and doing pushups doesn't resolve. I support giving people with ADHD stimulants, on the reasoning that it genuinely seems to help people who are clinically under-stimulated. It seems less likely to be worth it to give them 300+ extra things to track and more forms to fill, on the reasoning that I'll simpy make them do more of the thing they struggle to do.
So pattern matching analogously to ADHD and other diseases and then declaring that the treatment profile for gender dysmorphia is uniquely contingent on adjusting social reality is, I think, the interesting mistake that your ideas stumble over.
Thanks to everyone for their informative replies.
We *are* treating dysphoria like ADHD. Unlike ADHD, though, there's no magic medication you can take to help you get through daily life that we know of (today). The treatment we have found so far that has the best tradeoff between helping the sufferer get through the day and unfortunate side effects that make their day much worse turns out to be for them to do their best to perform the gender they feel they should, and for the people around them to do their best to support that.
Here's Scott on the subject: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
To my mind, something that distinguishes gender dysphoria from other mental conditions is that a significant degree of the suffering it exacts on the individual depends on how others respond to it. My depression/anxiety is not lessened by others acceptance of it (other associated struggles are, but not the acute symptoms) but the pain of gender dysphoria seems to be mitigated by others' acceptance of one's chosen gender expression.
I imagine this is worth bearing in mind when thinking about gender-dysphoria-as-mental-illness.
Mmm, not sure I'd agree with the idea that this is what distinguishes gender dysphoria.
1. I can think of other mental illnesses for which this holds true. A large part of the suffering schizophrenics experience depends on how others respond to them (particularly to their delusions). In my experience, there is a lot of distress that can be allayed simply by acknowledging that their thoughts are extremely distressing and worrying to them, even if I don't necessarily agree that they are grounded in reality.
2. I have seen at least one gender-dysphoric individual whose dysphoria absolutely did not improve despite being treated as their chosen gender.
Regarding your second point, did they internalize that? I can think of a few trans people that, even if they are treated as their chosen gender, they don't really *feel* like they are socially within that group because they themselves can't help but see themselves as fake. Like a sort of insecurity that happens to have terrible consequences given the circumstances.
Of course a complex issue but hopefully helpful.
A common experience for trans people before their transition is attempting to go "all-in" on their assigned gender. Before transition, Trans women will often start going to the gym, grow beards, bulk up maybe take testosterone increasing supplements etc. Transmen might go hyper feminine. Its almost a joke in the trans community because its so common. This does not typically work. Gender dysphoria is a bodily sensation of discomfort around primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Exaggerating those features generally intensifies dysphoria.
Transition is the treatment for dysphoria that does not desist in other ways. This is something that cisgender people often misunderstand about transition. The transition is the treatment.
Presumably going "all-in" is an obvious enough solution to (what we might call) pre-gender-dysphoria, where one is uncomfortable with their gender, but not sure they want to become transgender yet. I wonder what the success rate of this actually is, as the majority of those dealing with this internally might try, succeed, and never let anyone know they felt gender dysphoria in the first place (still somewhat embarrassing/socially isolating for the vast majority of people, even in the most progressive societies).
Of course, there is some survivorship bias here.
Also there are many people who choose to live with the (often extreme) internal discomfort of their dysphoria rather than the external discomfort of transitioning into a world where being transgender is a political football and can result in being ostracised. These cases are considered "successful" by many although they do not result in positive mental health outcomes in the long run. We also typically do not hear about these cases.
If raising the hormone levels of your biological sex increased your identification with that sex, trans people would LOVE puberty.
I don’t think this would work—at least not completely. All of this evidence is anecdotal but I know a number of trans people who tried these treatments for a variety of reasons. Obviously this is selected, and it could be that most of the people who try these treatments end up feeling fine as their birth gender, but it clearly doesn’t work 100% of the time. And fundamentally I believe in the right of people to modify their bodies, whether that’s tattoos, piercings, hair dye, plastic surgery, or hormones.
I don't think it's likely to work-- if a person is uncomfortable being male, a hormone treatment to make them more male would probably make them less comfortable.
Gender dysphoria might be treatable, but I think it would have to be better understood.
I'm not getting into the question of whether it should be treated, but I think some people would rather have effective treatment rather than transition.
But whether gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental illness is the central question. People who would accept the treatment you suggest are not the people we are mostly talking and thinking about in this debate.
We do treat it as a mental illness (if nothing else, those are magic words that make insurers pay out!) Transitioning is the best known treatment. Therefore, despite continuous opposition, this is what we do.
Romania had a Presidential election recently. Călin Georgescu, one of the top two candidates who would have advanced to the runoff, thinks the moon landing is a hoax. The Romanian Supreme Court has overturned the election and ordered a re-run, not because of that but because of (you guessed it) "Russian interference." Georgescu wasn't shy about his Russophilic views. People knew what they were getting.
The irony here is that the only people who will explicitly defend the notion that, "no, you don't need to just passively accept being ruled by morons because there are more of them than there are of you" are in the same part of the political spectrum as freaks like Georgescu. The world cries out for a Nietzschean centrism.
One thing that is not clear to me is whether the Russians are alleged to have interfered with the *election*, or with the *campaign*. I think that's critical.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hacked the voting machines to output their preferred result or whatnot, then a do-over may be the proper solution.
If you run an election, and after the fact find out that someone hired a bunch of people (or bots) to go on the internet and tell lies calculated to fool the voters into electing their preferred candidate, then how is that any different than what the candidates are doing already? I'm guessing Romania doesn't have a law disqualifying candidates who are found to have fibbed in their campaign advertisements.
"Hey, those foreign nogoodniks are lying to our voters! They can't do that! Only *domestic* nogoodniks are allowed to lie to our voters!". Not a convincing argument. You're going to be having nogoodniks lying to your voters regardless, and whatever measures you have to deal with lying nogoodniks should work about as well against the foreign version as the domestic. And it's not like the foreign ones are going to stop just because you say it's against the law; your laws don't apply in the country where they're telling the lies and your police won't be able to get at them.
Instead, the plan is to hold a new election, and the Russians won't "interfere" in this one, why exactly?
"There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running."
If Georgescu is winning Ceaucescu fans (and I believe that- certainly I've seen poll results indicating that about 70% of the voting base of the main left wing party would have voted for Georgescu in the runoff), then this rather complicates the attempt to fit him into the Anglo-American left vs. right spectrum doesn't it?
I think "ultranationalist" is a better term here than left or right wing.
Is "ultranationalist" a good label? What separates an ultra-nationalist from a regular nationalist?
Was Ceausescu an ultra-nationalist? Was he even a nationalist? He was a bit too close to the USSR to be a nationalist, surely?
Nationalism ("the belief that the national community and the political community should coincide as far as possible") is a supermajority position in most of Eastern Europe, as it is in a lot of other parts of the world, so I think saying an Eastern European politician (or layperson) is a nationalist isn't that informative, it's like saying a Middle Eastern politician is a religious Muslim or that a US politician believes in (small-L) liberalism. I think "ultranationalist" is a useful term for designating people in Eastern Europe, or in other highly nationalistic parts of the world, that are more extreme or hardcore in their nationalism than the regional norm.
And here, the amount of questionable money spent (not counting whatever the situation is with the TikTok bots) was $381K, or $0.02 per capita. By comparison, Kamala spent $4.20 per capita during her losing campaign in the US. If you can "buy" an election so cheaply, it indicates there was a high level of resonance of Georgescu's vibe with that of the populace.
There is an interesting NYT article highlighting Georgescu's appeal in one town, where people say they would vote for Nicolae Ceausescu if he were alive and running. The actual situation appears to follow the recent pattern of populist right wing appeal in Europe due primarily to economic stagnation.
I suppose if they do, you can invalidate that election too. Rinse and repeat until they stop interfering (and you'll know when they've stopped because the voters will vote the correct way).
In Romanian presidential elections, the citizens vote in two rounds. In the first round, they can vote on all candidates: if any single candidate secures an outright majority in the first round, that candidate is declared the winner of the election and becomes president.
If none of the candidates achieve this, then a run-off is held between the two contenders with the top scores in the first round. The candidate who obtains the majority of votes in the run-off is then declared the winner.
This time, everyone expected Marcel Ciolacu (current PM, Social Democrat, left-wing) and Elena Lasconi (Save Romania Union, right-wing) to advance to the second round, with Ciolacu expected to win the second round with some margin.
Predictions for the second round are easier to make: both wings have diverse voters with a diverse set of preferred candidates in the first round, but in the second round the left wing voters rally around the left wing candidate and the right wing voters around the right wing candidate. So you only need to know which wing is larger to predict the next president.
Georgescu, not considered a major contender, barely registered in polls. He ran a very modest street campaign, and did not appear in any conventional media. His campaign was conducted almost entirely through social media, chiefly TikTok.
To the surprise of absolutely everybody, including Georgescu himself, his TikTok campaign was unexpectedly successful, and he ended up with nearly 23 percent of the vote. Since Lasconi edged out Ciolacu with 21 percent, she and Georgescu advanced to the second round. While Ciolacu was upset by this development (he thought that he had this election in his pocket), he couldn't do anything to change the result, which was in fact upheld by the courts at that time [1].
However, things soon changed. Presidential candidates must report their campaign expenses to the national electoral commission up till the eve of the election. Georgescu, lying blatantly, declared that he spent zero lei running his campaign. However, after becoming a frontrunner, the commission and other investigative agencies, including state intelligence services, uncovered over $400k spent on his campaign, far above the declared amount. They submitted the documents proving these to the Supreme Court. They also found evidence of Russian interference, but that's a separate matter.
According to Romanian law, given the documents entered into evidence, the Supreme Court faced pretty much only two allowed options: annul immediately or annul after the second round.
Delaying annulment until after the second round posed serious risks. On one hand, if Georgescu won the second round, "coup" accusations might actually gain traction. The vast majority of Romanians, even Georgescu voters, don't take this seriously now, and don't consider this a coup: cf. the lack of mass protests, etc., Romanians have some relatively recent practice with nipping dictatorship in the bud. OTOH if Lasconi won, as sitting president she might challenge the annulment, knowing she could beat Georgescu, but probably not Ciolacu's combined support.
Annulment before the second round avoided these complications. Legal procedures followed Romanian laws, leaving no electoral rights violated. So whose rights were violated? Everyone understood the election rules.
While Georgescu's rise through a TikTok-driven campaign is important and very surprising (nobody thought that TikTok could be sufficient to win a presidential first round), concerns about the annulment itself are ridiculous. Legal processes unfolded as expected, aligning with national electoral laws. As far as I can tell, the idea that this annulment is some major political upheaval exists largely in the head of Georgescu himself (who has a big incentive to make this a big deal, given that he's likely to face jail time over fraud for his campaign financing mishap) and in the imaginations of outside observers, primarily non-Europeans.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/2/romanian-court-upholds-presidential-election-first-round-results
That all rests on the $381K in question being spent by Georgescu. Has that been established, or was that expenditure made by a third party without any control or knowledge by Georgescu?
The decision to annul massively inconveniences not just Georgescu, but also the Save Romania Union, one of the mainstream parties in parliament parliament, whose candidate had an unexpected shot at the presidency. Their MPs requested and got access to all the files presented to the court. Presumably, if there was reason to doubt, they would have made a big ruckus; they certainly had all the incentive in the world to do so. The evidence was good enough to convince them and the court.
REPER, recently requested that the files be made fully accessible to the public as well: this will take a while, though [1]. Until then, due to the aforementioned circumstances, my priors on this being falsified evidence are really quite low.
[1] https://www.agerpres.ro/politica/2024/12/08/reper-cere-presedintelui-iohannis-desecretizarea-informatiilor-legate-de-alegerile-parlamentare--1400329
But Lasconi is on the record being strongly opposed to this ruling. Did she change her mind after getting more information?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.romania-insider.com/Elena-lasconi-criticizes-presidential-elections-annulment-dec-2024%3famp
Quote below:
President of the reformist Save Romania Union (USR) party Elena Lasconi – who made it to the second round of the presidential elections beside pro-Russian candidate Calin Georgescu, has harshly and repeatedly criticised the Constitutional Court's decision to repeat the elections.
"The Romanian state trampled on democracy. God, the Romanian people, truth, and the law will prevail. You are leading the country into anarchy. We should have gone ahead with the vote," she said quickly after the Court's ruling. But she maintained the rhetoric, which was toned down by other USR representatives.
I explained above why Lasconi likely lost her best chance at the presidency due to this decision. She feels wronged and wanted the Supreme Court to take the other option (or preferably do nothing, which ironically _would_ have went against the constitution, unlike the current decision).
However, your question concerned whether it was proven that the Georgescu campaign wasn't financed independently, without Georgescu's involvement or knowledge. MPs from the Save Romania Union, Lasconi's party, were briefed on the evidence confirming this. Had they found credible reasons to doubt it, they would have spoken up. But both the Supreme Court and those MPs accepted the evidence: Lasconi or the Save Romania Union MPs certainly never made the case that the evidence itself might be fake or invalid.
One can remain skeptical, but doing so means having more doubt than those who have more information AND every incentive to scrutinize the case closely.
I asked about Lasconi because I hadn't heard she had agreed with the decision. Of course she is more impacted by it and less objective. I was just wondering if *she* was privy to additional evidence in maintaining her opposition to the annulment. I am interested in the lack of push back in general in Romania on this, though I certainly don't understand Romaninan political culture well enough to conclude much from that observation.
There are many very odd things about this incident. As far as I can tell, no one is suggesting the voting or tabulation of the votes was compromised, and the annulment rests on a crypto bro's $381K funding + TikTok bot accounts. It sets a very bad precedent, in my opinion, where even low level amounts of "interference" by third parties can serve as justification to invalidate electoral outcomes.
The timing is also suspicious, since round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled. Almost as if there was an assessment done based on early returns that Georgescu might win, at which point, incurring the cost of annulment seemed to be the better option from the perspective of those making the decision.
> round 2 voting had already started when that vote was canceled
This is not true. The election was cancelled two days before voting would have started.
According to this, it had:
"This dramatic and unprecedented decision comes just as the voting has begun in the diaspora."
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/12/06/romanian-constitutional-court-blocks-presidential-run-off
Voting at Romanian consulates was supposed to take place on Saturdays and Sundays, between 7am and 9pm, on the weekend of the election - this can still be found in many Romanian articles guiding people on how to vote.
I don't see an agency source, so I think the authors of the linked article were just mistaken. Or else, they're referring to vote-by-mail (but that's mixed and counted together with the general votes in Romania, so could not have been counted in any case).
Seems like a Russophile would be proud that the USSR was the only other nation that contributed effort to what eventually led to the moon landing.
Modern day Russia (and for that matter pre 1917 Russia) aren't the same thing as the USSR though.
I don't know what Georgescu's view on the Soviet Union is, although I do know he was recently under criminal investigation for having praised Antonescu and Codreanu (both of whom were strongly anti-Soviet, to state the obvious).
People who're pro-Putin shouldn't be allowed to stand for election. Instead they should be charged with treason, and if found guilty the death penalty should be an option.
That "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well.
For a start, it makes you look like a dysfunctional dictatorship to outside observers.
> that "execute anyone you disagree with" strategy doesn't actually work that well
That's not what I'm proposing. I'm proposing that anyone in league with an enemy be treated as a traitor. Because that's what they are. People would still enjoy the freedom to hold and disseminate a wide range of views, just not treasonous ones.
The purpose of this is to prevent Russia (or anyone else) from using hybrid warfare to subvert Europe.
You can define anyone as a traitor by defining any country, ideology or theology as an enemy. Decide that Israel is a problem and you can round up the Jews, declare
Iran a problem and you can round up the local Shia, accuse the pope of being disloyal and it’s time to hunt the Catholics.
This is common in history and it’s something that we should guard against.
I see by your flag you are a supporter of Scottish nationalism. As an Englishman I agree with right of Scotland to secede, largely because it could only increase the average jollity of the nation (where on Earth did anyone get the idea that the English are the gloomy or depressive people on this island?), but you know who also likes the idea of a rump UK. Putin, that’s who.
Of course he does. And he’s probably funding Scottish independence. As he did Brexit. If he’s not doing that, him or his agencies, then they or he are not doing their job. The west is doing the same kind of thing in Russia.
Now it may not have had a material effect on either referendum - although the people who claim that Russia didn’t influence Brexit materially say the opposite about the Scottish referendum, and vice versa.
However it’s generally accepted that Russia interfered in 2014. This from wiki
> According to the Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report, released on 21 July 2020, there is substantial evidence that Russian interference in the British economy and politics is commonplace; further to this, evidence was uncovered detailing interference in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum…
Which makes your philosophy suspect doesn’t it. By your own admission you are a stooge of Putin, a man who clearly benefits from a rump U.K. The course of action is obvious to you know, you must forthwith pop down to the local constabulary and taking whatever punishment you think traitors should receive. Extrajudicial shooting was it? I’m sorry for your future loss but be sure to denounce some fellow travellers on the way to the firing range, because Putinism must never win!
Flawless. :-)
Only if those "outside observers" believe Russian disinformation. To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually. Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", etc.
When a couple of FSB goons toss a Putin critic out of a window, I assume they tell him "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences."
> Paradox of tolerance, "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences"
If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
There was a point scott made recently in his https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-early-christian-strategy
Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top. Somehow despite all sorts of people trying to be brutal dictators, liberal democracy mostly won.
I think liberalism is an effective strategy. You might not understand why it's effective. But it works.
I think part of the reason that it works is that there are a lot of vaguely liberal aligned people, who can all work together and get behind a generically inoffensive liberal governing system. Liberalism is a cooperation in an iterated prisoners dilemma.
> To all right-thinking people, executing the enemies of liberal democracy on trumped-up charges is good, actually.
Once the "execute people on trumped up charges" system is set up, the people who end up getting executed in practice are not the enemies of democracy, but the enemies of whoever is trumping up the charges.
> If it means anything, it means at least freedom from government enforced consequences.
I have never been in favour of complete freedom of speech. For a start, if you had it, you've legalised fraud. In practise in any society there has to be some speech that is banned, or society won't function very well.
> Somehow, despite all the cruelty of the roman empire, the tolerant loving early Christians rose to the top
Was the Roman Empire cruel? I'd argue that it was no more so than other contemporary societies.
As for Christians being tolerant, I'll note that when they got in power they persecuted the pagans much more zealously than the pagans had persecuted them.
This must be that "liberal totalitarianism" Alexandr Dugin was talking about...
Call it whatever you like. I call it Europe defending itself against its enemies, which include Putin's Russia.
What Europe needs to do is create a militarily powerful and cohesive superstate, so that no-one can successfully attack us, and then to open up membership of this alliance to people who have the same culture and/or values as us. https://pontifex.substack.com/p/european-defence-policy-how-europe for details.
I'd be interested to find out what these values are. As far as I can tell, every single country in Europe has abolished death penalty for every crime including treason, and they tend to have fairly restrictive definitions of treason at that. The exceptions are, interestingly, Russia and its satellite Belarus. So your proposal above involves making Europe considerably more Russia-like. Admittedly you've been pretty vague about what exactly you want to make a capital crime, so I can't tell exactly *how much* Russia-like.
I said in my previous article, which I linked to: "European ideas such as democracy and human rights".
I will note there is nothing in the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen about banning the death penalty. And in a democracy, if most people want treason to carry the death penalty, then it must do so (or the country isn't a democracy).
What should be a capital crime? In a democracy the people decide.
Yeh, europe needs to shore up its defense. Al Queda are now our allies in Syria so we should bring them in to the new liberal defense against Russia pact. They fought the Russians after all and did a great job of it by all accounts - although detractors would say that was mostly sawing the heads of other Arabs and throwing civilians off cliffs. This detractors are Russian spies, obviously.
In any case the heroic rebels did win against the Russian fascists and we can find some use for them in the war against transphobes. Russiaphiles, and George Galloway. If I’m not repeating myself.
******
just as I write that last paragraph, here in my local, my college friend of 20 years came in, glanced at my post and said that the glorious anti fascists of HTS/Al Queda are also transphobic.
This was clear Russian propaganda so I took him out the back of the pub and shot him. New Liberal Europe has no time for fascist free speech.
I don't agree with executing people in general, and especially for holding wrong views. I do applaud your clear-sighted view of the destructive role Russia is - proudly, too - playing in Western Europe and the US. I only wish more powers that be understood this that clearly.
"Defensive democracy."
What if Georgescu wins again? Is this a case of ‘keep holding elections until you get the right answer?’
Shouldn't be be banned.if.he was cheating.
Possibly. But would a six-figure discrepancy in campaign funding have been noticed or investigated if it were a mainstream candidate?
Also did he gain any actual advantage by declaring he spent zero? If he'd declared the correct amount would anything else have changed?
To my knowledge, it has not been established that Georgescu cheated.
The more elections you have, the more democratic it is.
Hey, rejection sampling is a perfectly valid technique in other areas, why not in politics?
How are things doing in Argentina under Milei?
Does anyone have trustworthy sources, both high-level economic ones as well as low-level on the ground people's experience?
UPDATE: November data are in, and MoM inflation continues to drop, now to 2.4%, which is the lowest since July 2020.
That corresponds to an annualized rate of 32.9%, which is lower than any year since 2017. If MoM inflation starts dropping by only 5% a month, instead of the 20% it was dropping for most of the year, and the 11% in November, 2025 inflation would still end up being just 23.3% which would be the lowest since 2013.
The poverty rate also dropped again, having been dropping continuously since February.
JPMorgan's EMBI risk index for Argentina also continues to drop and it's at its lowest level since early 2019.
From the past week:
https://americasquarterly.org/article/javier-milei-has-surprised-almost-everybody
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/argentina-milei-economy
The latter is paywalled, so I didn't read it. Both of them were linked in the latest edition of https://boz.substack.com/, which I recommend.
I've been keeping an eye on the informal market vs official value of the peso, which seems like a good real time indicator of economic management and expectations around the economy / inflation (if people are confident, they'll take dollar savings and convert to peso). https://bluedollar.net/ The gap seems to have considerably narrowed in recent weeks.
Month over month inflation has dropped sharply (by about 90%) during Milei's first 10 months in office, with little sign of slowing (https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-rate-mom).
Although Milei warned that things would get worse before getting better, after less than a year in office, things already seem to getting better.
The poverty rate has been dropping for several months ( https://www.utdt.edu/ver_nota_prensa.php?id_nota_prensa=22427&id_item_menu=6, https://www.utdt.edu/profesores/mrozada/pobreza) and the recession is slated to end.
Per this Bloomberg article: https://archive.is/ESHHH, forecasters predict real GDP growth in 2025 to be about 3.6% after a contraction of about 3.6% this year.
I don't know if you've seen https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/preliminary-milei-report-card , it's two months out of date but I hope pretty comprehensive.
Thanks! I did read it back when it was published and it was very helpful. I'll give it another read to see if I can read today's tea leaves using the same methods.
I've seen piecemeal reports and commentary once or twice a month, so "how recent" is the question. Basically all the econ writers are keeping tabs, and sometimes link to said "low-level" accounts on X or whatever.
Anyone you'd recommend specifically? Cowen occasionally drops a link here and there, but I'm not plugged into the econ sphere beyond that.
Could the slight dip in mortality for moderate alcohol drinkers be partially explained by the fact that alcohol tends to make people more “social”, perhaps leading to improved relationships and less loneliness? After all, loneliness is definitely associated with mortality.
I drink very little alcohol, mainly because I strongly dislike the taste, and am normally a rather reserved person. But I've noticed that when I do drink, I become much more open and outgoing and find it much easier to hold conversations. I've thought that maybe because of this, I should make an active effort to drink more in social settings.
This is one of those debates where I'm confused about why we are having it. If the health risks of low-to-moderate alcohol consumption are so small that we are debating whether or not they even exist, then it seems trivially obvious to me that if you're someone who enjoys drinking alcohol (as many do) that the enjoyment will vastly outweigh the health risks, even if they are real. And if you don't enjoy drinking alcohol, well...then probably stop? Even if the very moderate proposed health *benefits* are real, they seem unlikely to outweigh the pure monetary cost of drinking (in my opinion).
There is always risk that if you begin, you would not be able stay on moderate level. I mean, I am moderate drinker and I know I have to watch myself carefully.
Cremieux argues that the seemingly positive effects of wine consumption are merely the result of confounding and that the actual causal impact is negative.
E.g. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1824121807089082748
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1670199959658823685
Cremieux was only making the (excellent) point that alcohol consumption during pregnancy can be harmful. (Although data has shown that women who drink wine moderately during pregnancy have kids who turn out well, there's a confound here between social class and wine consumption. Drinking any alcohol during pregnancy increases risk of adverse outcomes.) As for people who aren't pregnant, the data favors the view that light alcohol consumption is not harmful, and may have slight health benefits.
The first tweet is about the effect of drinking on health in general - not on pregnancy, in particular.
To quote it:
>Clearly people who ... never drink do worse than the people who drink a bit. And when people start drinking even more than a bit, they look a little better...
>The problem with the conventional analysis is that selection is at play...
>It would be unethical to run human experiments to figure out what alcohol does, so, how can we know what alcohol does to health?
>With a clever little method called Mendelian Randomization, or MR. MR is basically an answer to the question What if I used genes as instrumental variables?...
>So putting this wonderful genetic predictor to use, we can finally see what alcohol actually does.
>Well, the effect of the unconfounded difference in alcohol consumption is that, when it comes to heart health, alcohol doesn't seem to do much, rather than being a bit protective.
>But the heart isn't everything. There's certainly more!
>Alcohol did increase risk for ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, and total strokes.
>Not only that, but in another study using a similar method, alcohol increased hypertension, blood pressure, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, fasting blood glucose, and triglycerides. But, consistent with these results, in that paper it didn't seem to have a significant effect on cardiovascular disease or coronary heart disease, and it both increased HDL and decreased LDL.
>In aggregate, alcohol is likely to be bad for your health at any level, but selection into disuse means the downsides have been hidden in traditional analyses. And even if alcohol doesn't negatively impact heart health on its own, the fact that it's not protective and it increases other risks means it's risky on net.
Good point(s), but MR is limited as an instrumental variable in this context, because it doesn't justify precise, real-world statements about dose-response relationships. Genes don't determine exactly how much a person drinks. But exactness is needed here, because the debate isn't about drinking in general - it's about the effects of low levels of alcohol consumption. MR isn't correlated strongly enough with actual drinking behavior to justify distinctions between, say, zero vs. one or two drinks per week. As I've explained in a couple of posts, the data suggests that sufficiently low levels of drinking would be benign or perhaps healthful, on net.
(We always need that "perhaps", because observational studies can't measure drinking behavior over time very precisely. This includes studies used to justify MR.)
(BTW, there seems to be an error in the tweet: RCTs with human have been conducted in which the experimental group is instructed to drink for a period of weeks.)
But when the so-called J-shaped curve shows up in self-report surveys, and NOT in MR data (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38508868/), we should be more inclined to think that -- like many other famous examples in nutritional epidemiology -- there is unmeasured confounding in the self-report data. Genes explaining a small percentage of the variance is not a reason to discount MR results; it just means you need a larger sample size to get good results. The same is true for MR studies on blood pressure and cholesterol: the genes are imprecise and explain a small percentage of the total variance in BP/Ch.But they find the same results as RCTs on blood pressure and cholesterol lowering drugs.
I think the last part of what you wrote is very persuasive - whenever we see convergence between MR studies and RCTs, the results should be considered more credible. But here's one of the problems with the alcohol data: The MR approach is validated by relating genotypic patterns to actual consumption, but actual consumption is crudely measured (e.g., by asking people once every few years to describe their drinking behavior during the prior week). Even though MR data and self-reported consumption are sometimes found to be moderately strongly correlated, the crudity of the alcohol measures is one reason not to trust highly specific dose-response statements. In particular, we should be highly skeptical of recent MR-based claims that the J-shaped curve is actually more of a straight line, because the inflection point occurs at very low levels of consumption (like one drink per day, or even a little less, depending on study). Larger samples might help, as you say, but not necessarily.
I've written about this (but I promise not to add a hyperlink). There's a scientific debate about whether the lowest levels of alcohol consumption are harmful, benign, or healthful. The major health organizations take sides on this debate - e.g., the WHO claims there's no safe level of alcohol consumption, while American agencies (HHS, CDC, etc.) claim that low levels are safe. I believe the best and most plentiful evidence favors the benign/healthful view. Perhaps this is because light drinking increases sociability, as you said. Perhaps it's because light drinking reduces stress levels, and the health benefits of lower stress offset any harmful effects of the alcohol. Identifying exactly how much drinking is benign or healthful is super difficult though, because the measurement of drinking behavior in longitudinal studies is so crude (e.g., people are asked once every few years to describe their weekly alcohol consumption.)
I looked at the CDC website, where they say “Moderate drinking increases health risks compared to not drinking” and “Some past studies had suggested that moderate drinking might be good for your health. But scientists highly debate these findings. More studies now show that there aren't health benefits of moderate drinking compared to not drinking.”
That seems to agree with what you describe as the WHO position, or at least it doesn’t contradict it (maybe they disagree on the threshold of “safe”?)
Here's the difference: In 2023, the WHO revised their official position to state that there's no safe level of alcohol consumption. The CDC is more tolerant, because they recommend specific limits (two drinks per day for men, one per day for women) and indicate that drinking less should not be harmful. (At the same time, hedging their bets somewhat, they also use the vague phrase "drinking less is better for your health than drinking more". )
As I understand, the matter is confusing because people who don't drink at all may be abstaining because health problems or addiction risk.
People who don't drink at all are also likely to belong to religions (Southern Baptists, Islam, etc.) that are correlated with lower socioeconomic status, at least in the US.
Yep, I suppose this is the traditional explanation for the mortality dip. I'm sure it's also a factor, but I wonder how much my point might contribute as well.
Could also be the other way around. Only if you have an intact social circle are you able to moderate your drinking.
During COVID, I had essentially no social circle, and my drinking remained at the same ~1 drink per day as always.
It's within the realm of possibility that there's some correlation, but I definitely haven't observed that people with intact social circles are unlikely to have excessive alcohol consumption. At least in younger people, I'd be very surprised if the correlation ran in that direction.
You sometimes hear about understanding and treatment for certain neglected diseases being pushed forwards by an individual who has taken a particular interest in it.
I would like to see this to happen with Peyronie’s disease. What can I do to nudge this outcome?
NAC or liposomal glutathione
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32394901/
ALCAR
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11446848/
combinations are more potent
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36207748/
> able to completely regress plaque
These case studies need to be replicated in large trials if this is ever to become the standard of care. Phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors have also shown some promise. Same point.
Nobody will do a "large clinical trial", as usual nobody cares.
Also it is extremely likely to work, large trials are mostly only needed to reveal weak effects that are otherwise hidden by statistical variance and cofounders.
In that sense the culture of large trials as the only bearer of truth is 1) scientific obscurantism and 2) an admission of failure, as if the drug you test require a large sample to show an effect then it's already a testament of the weakness of your drug.
Case studies of random people acutely cured to an incurable disease are much more potent epistemologically than most large RCTs.
If I become the first human to live >120 years my n=1 will suffice to revolutionize mankind.
Any people with peyronie should test this and report back in a decentralized phase IV trial way, as antioxidants are both cheap and benign. However nobody will report back because of 1) ignorance and 2) of the gatekeeping of forever waiting for inexistant trials, a self fulfililng prophecy where nobody ever attempt to reproduce the science despite being an availability of countless miserable sufferers
They’d have to be willing to forgo other treatments which might be a tough ask.
Uhhh if anyone else is thinking of googling this on a work computer a word of warning, Peyronie's disease is one of Penile Curvature and Wikipedia has several medically accurate pictures of waist down, real-life sufferers.
SO. This will be a tough disease to throw gala banquets with glossy brochures and a celebrity spokesman willing to stand before all and declare that yes, he too suffers from a curvature approaching 30° to the right. Yeah...this might be a case where you'd have better luck lobbying the NIH to fund more urological research or something...
Potential slogans write themselves though…
“Help bend the curve on Peyronie’s disease”
“Let’s get one thing straight. We need a cure for Peyronie’s disease”
They use crooked carrots for television commercials for treatments. Subtle.
I feel like you posted bentham’s shrimp argument as a joke but I found it compelling enough to throw some bucks their way (and none of the others listed did it for me).
It was the image of the lecture hall of shrimp that put me over. How can you not help that whole lecture hall for $0.20?
Awesome, I'm glad to hear. But I don't think Scott posted it as a joke.
As someone pointed out on that post, that's a lecture hall full of corpses. Live shrimp are translucent/greyish-blue. They're only pink if they're cooked. So that not's a lecture hall, it's a buffet table 😁
I saw the picture, but didn't catch that. Thanks!
Good job! I doubt it was a joke. It’s impossible to know for sure which animals suffer the most so we (should) place our bets according to the best reasoning and evidence we have.
What uncommon but commercially available/easy to implement interior design flairs have you seen and liked?
Ideally possible in a 2B city midrise condo
Two specific ideas am mulling over:
1) a 3d implying mural on a wall would be cool, but I know they peel eventually. Is there a way to get a hyperthin wooden panel, screw that to the wall, and put it on that?
2) I kinda want a ai generated poster of the theme 'evil person in history, but ridiculed by alteration', one of the big 10 as a cat or Mario or whatever, anyone seen a particularly good one?
1) Lego wall
2) Whiteboard (can be used for practical purposes like shopping lists, or as a creative outlet)
Any dentists or dentist-adjacent folks here?
When I younger, I remember being constantly nagged from my dentist about flossing. Granted, I was a very inconsistent flosser, but this was in fact the worst part for me about going to the dentist was them asking me if I flossed, my ashamed answer that I didn't, and their lecture to me about how important it was that I do so. This was so impactful to me that when I finished my orthodontic work at the end of college and no longer had that hanging over me, I completely stopped going to the dentist for about 12 years.
Then I got married, and my wife convinced me that part of being a responsible adult is to get one's biannual dental cleaning, and she persuaded me to get back in the habit of boing to the dentist. And I was somewhat shocked to find that I'm no longer nagged about flossing. I am somewhat better at it now than I was when I was younger, but I'm hardly consistent with it. My question is whether standard practice in dentistry has changed? Was there a recognition that nagging about flossing is an emotional barrier to people seeing their dentists and that the value of seeing one's dentist for a cleaning is greater (perhaps to the patient, but certainly to the dentist!) than the expected value of nagging the patient about flossing?
I was in a very similar situation. Had all sorts of issues from not going to the dentist and not flossing for a long time (strangely, no cavities though.... they asked "you must not have much of a sweet tooth?", which is the complete opposite of the truth, weirdly). Anyway, even after spending thousands at the dentist/oral surgeon to get various issues fixed, I knew I still wasn't gonna floss, because I freaking hate it with a fiery passion. BUT, then a miracle! I started using a waterpick every day (the kind you can get for cheap at any CVS/walgreens whatever) and it's been great. The dentist I go to says it's just as good, if not better, than flossing. Maybe it's true, maybe they're just blowing smoke up my ass thinking it's better than nothing, but the last few years of twice-a-year dental visits and regular waterpicking has seemed to eliminate all issues. I highly recommend one if you're a better-dead-than-floss guy like me.
Incidentally, my wife is a regular flosser and doesn't like the waterpick, says it's too hard on her gums. Whatever, her loss.
2nd this, waterpicks are great. Tell your wife to try it on a lower pressure setting, it doesn't need to be set to the max to be effective. My hygienist told me that the max setting can be too powerful for some people.
I don't agree with your viewpoint. My dentists and dental hygienists seem to feel no qualms about lecturing me all the time about flossing. I've had some very uncomfortable experiences at the dentist over my adult life. However, it varies by dental practice. Some places are nicer, because some people are nicer.
I think people feel comfortable lecturing children but not adults. Also, they may figure (correctly) that you've "heard the good word" on flossing already and that further evangelizing will just turn you off.
I am your mirror image - I dislike going to the doctor, of any sort, except my enforced visits to the optometrist. Thus I too have avoided the dentist (and doctors altogether; I got the shingles shot at CVS) for a dozen years and more. But in my case I very much believe in flossing, and floss every two or three days. I think with flossing you can be your own dentist, to a great extent, and that it's important to get the spaces between teeth clean, so as not to foster bacteria. I am perhaps helped somewhat by my teeth not being crowded, having had several removed by an old-school orthodontist (those bands jammed onto the teeth) 4 decades ago.
It seems to me people who don't care for their teeth, lose their teeth - and this was a lot more common before dentistry (or self-dentistry, in my case :-)).
Maybe they don't nag grownups because they're beyond the formable part of life, or because they don't want to annoy paying customers.
The cynical angle is that they make more money if you don't floss.
To me, the modern Floss Picks are a complete game changer. They remove 98% of the discomfort. I always have some within reach.
Apparently you are not alone because I started seeing those things are littered all over the ground a few years ago!
Edit: Not a dentist, but two possibilities I'm seeing as a layperson:
1. Your new dentist believes in flossing but doesn't see the purpose in shaming people (has noticed over time that it doesn't change behavior).
2. Your new dentist suspects flossing may be bullshit, as it appears a lot of dentistry is bullshit: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/the-trouble-with-dentistry/586039/
While my dental *hygienists* mildly nag me about flossing and insist on doing it in the office, my two recent *dentists* - the one who retired, and the young one who replaced him - both acknowledge that there's indeed totally untested bullshit in dentistry. They've both said that genes + diet seem to be the determining factors in dental health; having naturally good teeth and/or oral bacterium plus not constantly bathing teeth in sugar produces terrific results even if someone skips flossing. My retired dentist added that Oral-B's electric toothbrushes (the ones that spin rather than go back and forth) were a real game-changer and, used at the correct angles, could replace most flossing action.
I totally ignore flossing and my teeth - even the baby tooth which never got replaced - are going strong. If your teeth were fine after 12 years of avoiding the dentist, you can likely ignore flossing, too.
My dentist does not "nag", but asking me if I am flossing regularly is a normal part of my twice a year checkup.
Some of my relative like their electric toothbrushes. I’m too lazy/cheap for household items with batteries myself. But also, I don’t understand why people think they can’t brush their teeth manually in that rotary fashion? I always brush in circles.
Batteries!!!
No, decent electric toothbrushes stand on a little charging port which plugs into a standard wall socket. You just replace the brush head once a season. These electric brushes have sensors which light up if you're pressing too hard, and timers so that you can ensure you've brushed long enough.
My mom and I bought a two-pack together at Costco, and we've been using our respective brushes for 12+ years. Mine is only now starting to go a little wonky and I'm thinking of replacing it.
Although - given that I bought it at Costco - I could theoretically return it, hahahah:
https://www.costco.com/oral-b-smart-clean-360-rechargeable-electric-toothbrush%2C-2-pack.product.100682156.html
That's cool. Battery-powered things are so stupid.
A glance at my bathroom counter would show I'm aggressively simple on all fronts! And just getting more so.
I still use mascara. I think I always will. For some reason I have a vanity about eyelashes.
If you're a lazy person then I strongly recommend an electric toothbrush! Saves dozens yes, DOZENS of calories by not having to move your hand and wrist up and down in oblong circles, merely glide along as the lovely wee electric motor does its work.
Also apparently better for gum health, which is the reason I got mine about a decade ago
I think my laziness manifests differently than yours!
I like to use my hands.
I don't like to shop, to add to the list of things that have to regularly be purchased at the store. I don't like a lot of ... stuff around. I don't like trying to figure out if I should recycle batteries, and then remember that that's not actually a thing anymore.
The gum health thing is probably most persuasive. My mother uses that kind of toothbrush and was told she had periodontal disease long ago. She even had that procedure where they graft skin onto your gums. Thereafter for quite some years, she went to the periodontist even just for her (presumably pricier) cleanings. Because she was told to.
There's never been any mention of the periodontal disease since that time forty years ago. She goes to the regular dentist, which is nice for her because she used to carpool him to school. People like these old friendships.
I too was told once, circa 1988, that I had receding gums aka "periodontal disease". Maybe I too would someday have to get these grafts. In the meantime, I was urged to floss.
This disease must be progressing very slowly. But if I notice any change in those gums, I'll get one of those toothbrushes for sure.
My electric is plug-in, no batteries needed. I think most are, probably.
My toothbrush runs on solar.
Flossing has little to do with teeth and everything to do with gums. One can lose perfectly healthy teeth to gum disease.
I mean, sure, teeth and gums are part of a total system. I ignore flossing and my teeth *and* gums are fine, even though I had a 10+ year gap in dental insurance and didn't see a dentist once.
That's anecdotal of course, but there's no large scale long-term evidence that not flossing is a likely path to gum disease, especially if someone is using circular-action electric toothbrushes and especially-especially if someone is using flossing alternatives like waterpiks.
The hostility to flossing (fuck The Atlantic, the subtle damage this publication is doing to the fabric of our society is probably less than that wrought by the NYT, but that's quite a low bar to clear) is baffling to me. It's a very low-cost intervention that may not be necessary for everyone, but for those who need it it makes a huge difference, and we don't have a screening mechanism.
Whatever your objection to The Atlantic, there is still no long-term evidence about flossing. It's over the top to say that it's *necessary,* particularly if one is doing it wrong. And doing it wrong can make things worse!
https://utknoxvilledentists.com/can-you-floss-too-much/
I've had two dentists express that they're impressed with my teeth and they were both completely indifferent about whether or not I'm flossing, since I'm doing other stuff. If the OP wants to use a waterpick instead of flossing, there's no reason not to. If he has good genes and doesn't consume a lot of sugary drinks, he might not even need to do that much.
There's "still no long-term evidence about flossing" because, as the UTK link states, "the research supporting daily flossing was weak because of lack of participants or long-term studies". In other words, there's no evidence because nobody looked. And yes, one can floss too much, this is the same kind of thing as "one can exercise too much", not the problem for the vast majority of the population, quite the opposite in fact.
Water pick is fine, and electric toothbrushes really help too.
I didn't read the whole of it, but the article centered on a dentist who urged a lot of possibly unnecessary procedures on his patients. It seemed pretty much the opposite of the extremely low-tech and essentially free way to care for your own teeth, that is flossing.
Yeah, and this is a good illustration why I despise the rag. They bill it as an explosive expose of the industry, and then use niche cases of unscrupulous or incompetent doctors as an illustration. Meanwhile everywhere the headline is what gets attention, and now "dental care is fraud" becomes the meme.
Meanwhile all we need is to look at middle-aged people who have access to routine dental care and compare their grins to those who don't. Tell a poor Appalachian man in his 40's who's missing several teeth that dentistry is fraud.
Well, the sad part is that he may actually believe it.
Re. Israel/Palestine: I'm trying to find a hard to fake signal moderates on the two sides can send to each other, or make a long term resolution less violent at the margin, that will still achieve 'justice'.
My 'idea' is a land/citizenship swap. I could (either become a citizen of Israel, or find someone to do this on my behalf) identify settlement land, either in Gaza (if/when the settler projects begin in northern Gaza, hopefully never) or the West Bank that will be most inconvenient if Israelis live there when it comes to negotiating borders, buy it (hopefully not too expensive), and sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there. And, in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated (or just have 10 people who long since emigrated but are still on the unwra refugee list for corruption/political reasons but don't consider themselves Palestinian and wouldn't move back if a full right of return became a thing to take themselves off it), or a Palestinian to not sell similar land to a Jew because they'd be killed for that, but...something. Maybe get a marginal Palestinian in East Jerusalem to accept Israeli citizenship.
Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k.
Can anyone familiar with the laws/frameworks in the region tell me if this is at all viable, and what the most practical implementation of this 'motivation' would be?
"sign a contract that says 'only Palestinians who renounce violence can live there, and I approve of' and then find a moderate in West Bank who feels Israel has been mistreating them to live there"
I doubt it's legal under Israeli law that West Bank Palestinians can live in Israeli settlements with an Israeli "sponsor". IIRC West Bank residents can't even move to Israel if they marry an Arab Israeli (i.e. Arab with Israeli citizenship living in pre-67 Israel) so why would you selling them land do the trick?
"in return I would want either someone to sponsor a refugee in Lebanon/Syria/Jordan to renounce refugee status and get integrated"
I this happened at a large scale, then every West Bank Palestinian would be living in Israeli settlements (with the accompanying demographic threat Israel is worried about) long before every Palestinian in those other countries renounced refugee status, so I'm not sure what this would achieve.
"Assume my personal interest is moderate, budget is 50k. "
General point but I think that a lot of "pay the Palestinians to accept Israel taking the land" type of arguments don't in fact offer up enough money to make this a fair trade, even if you leave aside sentimentality.
Hm, that makes sense. Let's say I believe that the status quo is A) 'israel at great reputational and moderate financial cost achieves basically complete military victory over iran(+allies) and gaza/west bank', that B) 'if literally anyone in the arab world could offer them long term security and renounce right of return, there is the political will to do basically anything for that, including getting rid of netanyahu, partially dismantling settlements in west bank, withdrawing from gaza completely', and that C) 'arab world because of self-serving propaganda by various actors believes neither A nor B with high conviction, probably isn't capable of giving up right of return unless it updates hard in favor of A'.
Is there any way I can credibly send the signal B in a way that's visible to some moderate subset of the arab (ideally palestinian) world, without making A less likely?
Ideally with also the effect of having some minimal not cost-effective positive effect on justice, as defined by both israelis and arabs.
I don't know what signal you're trying to send. B is a statement about the state of political opinion in Israel. What does it mean for you to "credibly" send it? People can read the state of political views in Israel directly, what does you sending a signal add?
There's also a much larger signal *against* B, namely, Netanyahu has been Prime Minister almost continuously since 2009 - not only the longest serving in Israel's history, but if not for a ~1 year period when he was temporarily out of power, perhaps the longest currently serving elected (in free and fair elections) head of government in the world.
And Netanyahu is against giving up any settlements.
And even his main rival, Benny Gantz, is against giving up any settlements!
Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews. Ditto for the Israelis. Yes, Netanyahu doesn't want peace, he thinks he can divide the Palestinians, and we can debate if his primary goal is to prevent them from organizing effectively to destroy Israel, or build settlements, that's a hot topic that would require more good faith than we have.
Mainstream Israeli opinion has coalesced to 'arabs are militantly opposed to any self governing Jews in this region, if peace was possible we would bend over backwards to make painful concessions, absent that possibility, the hope for which we lost in the second intifada, we are stuck in a horrible situation where military security through strength is our only option, which is morally and financially expensive'. The Arab world totally is unaware of this, in general.
I'm trying to figure out if there's a cost efficient way to send a truth signal as to the tradeoffs Israeli society is willing to make, and in the process reward some individual Arab moderate that is willing to permanently give up trying to overthrow the Israeli state, and indicate that maybe some second person could also make that trade (but not with me, I have few resources) and so on.
I think you're overestimating the degree to which raw information transfer corresponds to viewpoint shifts.
If someone has a goal of finding truth, then generally, any additional information helps.
But that's understandably quite a rare goal in and of itself. Why would anyone want that? People generally have much more understandable direct goals like seeking social approval.
In discussing the findings of public choice theory, Bryan Caplan notes that individual voters aren't incentivized to vote for things that would actually benefit them, since the impact of an individual vote is basically zero. Instead, they're rationally incentivized to vote irrationally to gain social approval from their peers, and the like.
The fact that Scott Alexander had to propose the writing of guides with rational suggestions for voters speaks to the general complete lack of demand for such a thing. Election spending is on the order of tens of billions of dollars, but the idea of providing a guide collating basic facts about candidates with arguments for whom to vote is treated as an esoteric proposal.
Inasmuch as individual votes have little direct impact on outcomes, having political views aligned with reality has even less impact, and per the incentives, most people don't.
This is broadly true in many arenas. To a large degree most people don't value abstract truth nearly as much as they value the direct effects of adopting particular positions, like social desirability, so the limiting factor in the search for truth is rarely the availability of raw information.
In a similar vein, in reviewing the book 1984, Asimov noted that the plot's emphasis on deliberate destruction of information in order to manipulate the public overstates the the connection between the two, in reality:
>This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done.
> As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts...
> To be sure, the Soviets put out new editions of their Encyclopaedia ... and this is no doubt the germ of the Orwellian notion, but the chances of carrying it as far as is described in 1984 seem to me to be nil - not because it is beyond human wickedness, but because it is totally unnecessary.
This is true in the US and other parts of the world, including the Middle East.
The widespread false beliefs that people there have about so much don't seem to be the result of limited access to information, but of limited interest in abstract truth. If anything, the former is a result of the latter, as media and other groups there have little incentive, indeed, negative incentive, to provide truthful information.
Not only would factual information hardly deter them, actual experiences that contradict views that it's convenient for them to hold make little difference either.
E.g. in Lebanon, from what I can see, the pro Hezbollah segment of the population, and even the both-sideser anti-Hezb anti-Israel contingency agree that Israel cares little for the lives of civilians, is happy to kill 50 civilians for one militant, bombs indiscriminately, and even specifically targets civilians.
Israel would regularly announce that particular buildings would be struck and that people needed to evacuate a 500 meter radius from them.
When they'd do so, crowds would frequently assemble near the buildings to film the explosions with their phones, seemingly well within 500 meters.
Their behavior speaks to a high level of trust in the integrity and competence of the Israeli military. They show no concern, for example, that a plane will see the crowd of them and choose to drop an extra bomb on them.
This is particularly telling given that these strikes tended to be concentrated in pro-Hezb neighborhoods and cities.
Even in those areas, their actual experience and their resultant behavior was one of Israel displaying behavior completely at odds with their expressed beliefs about Israel.
This all makes sense based on what I've said. When it comes to airstrikes, they're incentivized to get cool videos, so they have no incentive in believing false things about Israel.
But in general, their incentives don't align with seeking accurate information about Israel.
This all goes for the Palestinians, too. Sure, completely false, indeed, delusional beliefs about Israel abound. But the issue isn't the language barrier, but the incentive barrier.
I agree with everything you said.
Is it your contention that even if the expectation of Palestinians that they will destroy Israel and get their land back dropped to 0, the psychological cost of turning paper losses into realized losses by accepting their first political defeat in renouncing struggle against the continued existence of Israel would be worth more to them than the benefit of peace?
"Arabs don't speak Hebrew or English or consume Israeli media. If they did they would have vastly different opinions about Jews."
The idea is that if Arabs did read that media they'd view Israelis as more likely to compromise? I do read English media and I don't think Israel is willing to withdraw from the settlements. My evidence as I said is that both Netanyahu and his main opponent said they are against withdrawing from settlements.
There's probably nothing that you could say to change *my* mind (absent e.g. referring to some statement of Israel's leaders of which I'm unaware) much less a person in the Arab world who doesn't read English media.
Of course if I'm wrong about Israel's leaders and they are willing to withdraw from settlements (or if they change their minds) - rather than you, *Israel's leaders* could change my mind - by proposing a deal on that basis.
(also can substitute in for settlements in the above, a few other contentious points)
In either case, still not clear what you sending a signal adds.
Netanyahu generally always believed, and October 7th has radicalized society to believe this as well (chunks of the left used not to) that any place you withdraw from and give a state will be used primarily to build offensive capability to destroy Israel, not a functioning state prioritizing welfare of its people. Gaza was proof of this but it wasn't until the invasion that public became aware of just how wealthy a place it was (they thought it was a slum, basically) and just how many billions were redirected towards tunnel networks/weapon stashes, etc. They thought it had way less resources, and a much smaller portion of that was spent over last 16 years preparing for the current war.
The West Bank is especially dangerous to withdraw from, unlike Gaza, because of reasons of geography. It's on high ground within shoulder rocket range of major population centers. As soon as you withdraw from there, you will have to reinvade at high cost within a week. Everyone recognizes this.
Israelis don't think peace is possible, so they are focused on maintaining security through military capability differentials.
The signal I am trying to send is the truthful one, that Arabs who don't actually know Hebrew and are immersed in Israeli politics (the median of the two million Arab Israelis know this fine) are strongly confident is not true, which is that all Israelis prioritize security, and a significant minority care about continued land expansion, and that because of coalitional politics and because basically no one believes settlements are *the* issue (most people object heavily on moral grounds, and because it looks bad politically, but they don't think that absent settlements Arabs would have any different goals) they continue as a path of least resistance.
I also know that any Arabs in Gaza who would protest armed resistance are killed or tortured in some order, and in West Bank are shunned as collaborators.
Just as moderate Israelis hear the terrorists too loud in their head to publicly offer peace, the moderate Arabs also hear the terrorists too loud to offer it.
I'm trying to identify some means of sending this signal, and in the process improve the life of some individual Palestinian Arab who receives it.
Right now there's no deal Israelis can offer because what they would want in exchange for painful concessions is an expectation of minimal future violence, and there is no Arab entity capable and interested of offering that. The people in Gaza at this point don't support Hamas anymore (in a major shift from before Oct 7), shellshock of war is too horrible and they see how it steals all the aid to resell it and doesn't let any civilians hide in the tunnels. West Bank and diaspora is in same place Palestinian 'cause' has been last 100 years, opposed to any Jewish rule anywhere in that land on aggregate, and willing to support armed resistance from any relative position of power due to honor culture, racism, an attachment to land they were unjustly deprived of, religion, and the perception that with a billion Muslims in the area on their side how could they possibly ever not win eventually.
I think it's hard, because what's needed is a promise to not retaliate for violence from the other side.
Cremieux argues that the data don't support the Israel-Palestinian conflict being one of cyclical retaliation: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-cycle-of-violence. The summary starts in this section: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/137822160/will-we-go-blind and includes the next one.
Cremieux is a she, not a he. And what's nonsense about the argument?
“I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”
I was going to say I would be very surprised if God cared that much about shrimp, but He must do with the prohibition on eating shellfish in the Old Testament!
Leviticus 11:9–12
9 ‘These you may eat, whatever is in the water: all that have fins and scales, those in the water, in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat.
10 ‘But whatever is in the seas and in the rivers that does not have fins and scales among all the teeming life of the water, and among all the living creatures that are in the water, they are detestable things to you,
11 and they shall be abhorrent to you; you may not eat of their flesh, and their carcasses you shall detest.
12 ‘Whatever in the water does not have fins and scales is abhorrent to you.'
But oh no, Bentham's Bulldog, now you have demolished the Shellfish Argument! You know, the one that gets reliably trotted out about religious opposition to homosexualty: "oh, but do you wear poly-cotton blend clothing and eat shrimp? if you do, you're a sinner!"
God *does* mean it about shrimp, and He *does* mean it about gay sex is the answer to the question posed here 😁
https://carm.org/homosexuality-secular-movements/leviticus-1822-2013-homosexuality-shellfish-mixed-fabrics-and-not-being-under-old-testament-law/
"Leviticus says not to eat shellfish (Lev. 11:9-12), use mixed seed or fabrics (Lev. 19:19), harvest the corners of fields (Lev. 19:9), and that homosexuality is wrong (Lev. 18:22; 20:13). If homosexuality is wrong because Leviticus says so, then shouldn’t we also obey the other laws about shellfish, seed, fabrics, and fields because that is in Leviticus as well? If not, then why not? Why would Christians pick and choose what parts of the Bible to follow?"
"I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My chief of staff Leo McGarry insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or is it okay to call the police?
Here’s one that’s really important, because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads [according to Deuteronomy 22:9-11]?"
Footballs are now synthetic, and thus presumably kosher.
"She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be?"
I'd suggest some form of second price auction to determine that rather than asking folks on the Internet. Probably set a reserve price to avoid regret if you feel that the folks bidding might not appreciate her as much as you do.
Hi, Jed, I'm glad to speak to you again on religious topics because at our last encounter on this matter, I excoriated you as a hypocritical son-of-a-bitch whining about how it wasn't fair that God cheated you by (lemme see here) killing your old school teacher in a car accident? Because she was the first person who kissed your ass about how genius you were? And you did the toddler foot-stamping over "it not fair! it not fair! me want!" before the crucifix? Ah, good times, good times!
With these new set of queries, absolutely yes to each and every one of them! You are entitled to kill your daughter, depending on what state you live in, up to 24 weeks to any stage of pregnancy; just because she made it out of the womb is no reason for her to think she's free of your authority to dispose of her however you wish for your own convenience:
https://www.statista.com/chart/25908/state-by-state-abortion-laws-in-the-us/
And we all know of course that as a good liberal and Democrat (but I repeat myself), you are a total devotee of Moloch when it comes to baby killing, so a little selling your daughter into slavery but permitting her to live shouldn't turn a hair for you.
If you're his boss, you can do what you want to Leo. Just clarify which Sabbath he is breaking, and make sure you stick to that. You already expect to own him body and soul anyway as your Chief of Staff, so you can dispose of his life as you see fit.
Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now.
Planting different crops may be a criminal offence, you can leave it up to the local government to stone your brother. If Monsanto can sue his ass for mixing varieties, and the World Trade Organisation is concerned over illegal practices in the seed trade, why not go the whole hog on penalties?
https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/itfff_ch_5_e.pdf
"However, a concerning rise in illegal seed practices threatens global food security, the livelihood of farmers and trust in a professional seed industry. Furthermore, illegal practices impact worker safety, and illegal work practices can violate labour laws. Sometimes such occurrences are also associated with other forms of illegal activities, such as tax evasion and the circulation of fraudulent crop inputs (e.g. fake crop protection products and seed treatments).
Seeds are unlike other agricultural inputs. Seeds have great economic value derived from the high investment in R&D required to breed them and the innovation they embody, as well as their societal value to farmers and food systems (IHS Markit, 2019). At the same time, seeds – and the plants grown from them – are self-reproducing material, which makes them easy to copy and thus vulnerable to intellectual property infringements and other illegal practices. Therefore, seeds require intellectual property protection, which is mostly provided through plant breeder’s rights (PBRs), and breeders must apply for such protection as a first line of defence against infringement."
Your relationship with your mother is your own affair, but if she's as annoyingly preachy as you, I can well believe a small family gathering would be only too happy to burn her.
"Are footballs still made out of animal leather these days? I think they're all artificial materials now."
From the NFL Rule Book: "The ball shall be made up of an inflated (12½ to 13½ pounds) urethane bladder enclosed in a pebble grained, leather case (natural tan color) without corrugations of any kind."
https://operations.nfl.com/media/4693/2020-nfl-rulebook.pdf
A bit offtopic, but is Bulldog's arguments for the existence of God good/interesting/worth reading?
I wanted to link it, but apparently Substack's search works in even more mysterious ways!
So I only found this: https://benthams.substack.com/p/6-questions-atheists-cant-answer
It's different. I commend Bulldog for trying, but I found it unconvincing. Then again, I'm not the audience he's going for. When he's speaking about his own personal conversion (if that's how he'd describe it) it's much more relatable.
I can only remember that when I read it, I thought it was worth checking out considering the source was a highly unconventional thinker likely to offer something novel, and while I didn't expect to be convinced, I was disappointed relative to my expectations.
Is there an estimate of how many insects are killed by agriculture each year? I'm curious how it compares to the shrimp total.
And how does it compare to the number of insects that only exist due to agriculture?
Also, how all of these compare to their quality of life and lifespan in the natural world. Is agriculture and aquaculture a negligible or significant part of arthropod suffering?
<mildSnark>
Yes! This question has legs! (and even more if extended to include arachnids) :-)
</mildSnark>
Add in field mice and other small rodents. Google is all over the place, but I'm seeing estimates of 15-100 rodents killed per acre of farmed land.
There are 47.5 million acres of wheat harvested in the US alone. Using the lower number of rodents per acre, in the US and for wheat only, that's over 700 million killed per year. Insects should be far higher, by any reasonable estimate. Some Googled website is saying 3.5 quadrillion insects are killed by US farmers using pesticides yearly.
Once last year, I discovered later in the day that I had killed a snake with my lawnmower.
Yeah, I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to lobby for more humane pesticides instead of focusing on shrimp farming. But I assume people have already looked into that.
I'm not sure what a "humane" pesticide would look like, or do. Does it scare insects away or something?
Farmers kill insects because they eat the crops. If they aren't eating the crops, they still die.
Pesticides aren't an instant death.
I've never posted a puzzle before, so apologies if this is too hard, too easy, or suboptimally presented.
Of the following three hands,
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
♠ 8 5 2 ♥ 2 ♦ Q 10 8 6 ♣ J
♠ 7 ♥ K 7 ♦ J 5 ♣ Q 9 7 4
two were dealt randomly, one was carefully arranged--by someone with OCD. Which is the arranged one, and how?
(Note: by "OCD" I possibly mean stereotypical OCD that doesn't literally exist, or maybe it does. Don't hold me rigidly to this.)
(Note 2: By "arranged" I don't necessarily mean that every card was chosen with perfect care. Consider that there was a limited part of a deck to choose from, when arranging that hand.)
(Note 3: This puzzle amounts to guessing what was in my mind. Of course, there are probably answers that make perfect sense but which weren't what I was thinking of. I should consider such answers triumphs in everything but mind-reading)
Tnzrxavtug naq Zbygrabnx ner pbeerpg ba gur unaq. (Gubhtu gur bgure nafjref znl whfg nf jryy unir orra gehr). Abj vg'f whfg thrffvat jung rknpgyl gur ehyr vf, naq gurl'er cnegvnyyl ba gur evtug genpx.
Remember this is guessing what I'm thinking, and I make no promises it's especially elegant or interesting.
Writing as I think... Note 2 seems important - I'm wondering if it means the other 18 cards have already been dealt? If not, in what other way would the deck be limited?
Hand 2 looks more contrived (as 2 other people have noticed, but I'm not convinced their explanations are convincing)
Also, why no aces?
Feels like hand 2. Spades and diamonds are evenly spaced (and spades are also fibonacci-ish, why not). Then 2 and 11 are both objectively awesome numbers (prime, binary-related, and a stereotypically-ocd-ish friend points out that 2 in roman numerals is 11-looking).
Probably not the intended solution, but Hand 1 has the most even possible split between suits (9 doesn't evenly divide 3, so one suit has an extra, but the other 2 hands are more lopsided).
Love the idea of posting a puzzle here! My guess is hand nr 1, because it's unlikely for such evenly sized groups to form accidentally, plus they contain the sequence 8,9,10,J,Q,K. Dunno what's up with the two 3s though.
Aside: I also found the presentation of the hands a bit confusing - they are all "ordered" in the same way, so really they're sets of cards rather than sequences (ie. a hand you could reorder when you hold it).
Hand 2? Evenly spaced sets of spades and diamonds, with single cards breaking them up in between.
I'm not sure how to read these hand notations as discrete cards:
♠ Q 4 ♥ J 10 ♦ 9 3 ♣ K 8 3
So that looks at first like Queen of Spades, Four of Hearts, then Jack of... tens? and then you have "Club King Eight Three" as if that's a valid card in any sense.
The only other thing that could make sense is if these are nine-card hands for some reason but that seems like something worth calling out?
That’s the bridge hand notation, and the suit order is also that of bridge (alphabetical), though bridge hands contain 13 cards and not 9
Yes, they are nine-card hands.
The article you link about shrimp welfare makes a mistake that has bugged me for years, and which I've never seen anyone else serious address. Which is that it implicitly assumes a somewhat mystical view of what qualia/suffering fundamentally is which which IMO is incompatible with a functional evolutionary view of what explains suffering most parsimoniously.
You can make a strong case that suffering is actually an extremely simple trait that has an incentive to evolve even in organisms that are far simpler than shrimp, and which doesn't require very much complexity to evolve:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RjkfdOv6bpsQkF-Y4Gp0FYbVfNZDa_NU4PYulp5r1rY/edit?usp=sharing
This is important because it means that microscopic organisms should totally swamp any considerations based on raw quantities of suffering.
Indeed as I mention in the doc more sympathetic organisms actually have an evolutionary incentive to feel *less* suffering, since more intelligence and better memory means you can learn the same lesson more easily.
Oooh, oooh, I know the answer to this. We poke oysters with sticks and see what they do, then we give the oysters a bunch of opium and poke them with sticks again and see if they react differently. Opium is an awesome painkiller, so if they give them the same unpleasant stimulus (stick poke) and they react the same, then we can be highly confident it's some kind of involuntary muscle thing, not actual pain.
This is, pretty seriously as far as I know, the actual argument for ostroveganism, which are vegans who eat, like, oysters and stuff.
I should note that you can literally use many of the same anesthetics on plants as you would on animals in order to inhibit responses to negative stimuli: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
In unironic honor of the subject of shrimp welfare I have posted my beloved collection of Dall-e 2's images responding to the prompt "Shrimp love me, unaligned AI fears me."
https://open.substack.com/pub/bookreviewgroup/p/shrimp-love-me-unaligned-ai-fears?r=3d8y5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Well, those were unsettling!
I think this perspective doesn't effectively distinguish between "negative reinforcement" and "suffering". I don't blame you, because I think the distinction is hard to understand and routes through our uncertainty about what consciousness is, but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
As you say below, even plants and bacteria have something like negative reinforcement (in fact, you can probably find some rock or thermostat or something that has some quality that seems suspiciously like it). I think there's an additional question of whether this is just a blind reflex, or whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way, and that we reserve the word "suffering" for the latter - the more reflection, the more suffering (though "reflection" isn't exactly the right word here and is more gesturing at a concept I can't easily describe).
Here is a much more formal and serious attempt to present this argument: https://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/2022/Gibbons%20et%20al%202022%20Advances%20Insect%20Physiol.pdf
And according to some, the being which is capable of the most "reflection" would likely be God- so logically God also experiences the most suffering of any being. And if God is truly infinite, that means infinite suffering as well. Therefore, the action that will remove the most suffering from the universe would be to kill God. I am now accepting funding for this project.
I have seen in the wild the first stirrings towards "plants are sentient too" (no, like an idiot I didn't save the article) and boy, Chesterton keeps recurring to mind here:
From "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"
"Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocahontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, alter the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
It's funny that you feel kinship with Chesterton here, because my reaction to your comment and quote is "wow, conservatives have been making up 'liberal guy whose heart bleeds too much to eat even plants' for over a century now".
Ah, how labels change over the years!
He was a Liberal (politically) and not a Conservative (Tory), though he did move to social conservatism.
But since he went to Art School, he did meet a lot of those progressive types who were around even back then.
So there's a lot less "conservatives have been making up bleeding-heart liberals for a long time" and more "bleeding-heart liberals as well as outright cranks have been around for a long time" at work there.
From his autobiography:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1301201h.html
"Most of this happened when I was at the art school; but even when I had left it, this very casual connection was continued, in a queer way, by the coincidence that I worked for a short time in the office of a publisher who rather specialised in spiritualistic and theosophical literature, known under the general title of the occult. It was not entirely my fault, if it was not the fault of the real spiritualists or other real spirits, if I blundered into rather queer and uncomfortable corners of Spiritualism. On my first day in the office I had my first insight into the occult; for I was very vague about the business, as about most other businesses. I knew we had just published a big and vigorously boomed book of the Life and Letters of the late Dr. Anna Kingsford, of whom I had never heard, though many of our customers seemed to have heard of hardly anybody else. My full enlightenment came when a distraught lady darted into the office and began to describe her most complex spiritual symptoms and to demand the books most suited to her complaint, which I was quite incompetent to select. I timidly offered the monumental Life and Letters; but she shrank away with something like a faint shriek. "No, no," she cried, "I mustn't! Anna Kingsford says I mustn't." Then, with more control, "Anna Kingsford told me this morning that I must not read her Life; it would be very bad for me, she said, to read her Life." I ventured to say, or stammer, with all the crudity of common speech, "But Anna Kingsford is dead." "She told me this morning," repeated the lady, "that I must not read the book." "Well," I said, "I hope Dr. Kingsford hasn't been giving that advice to many people; it would be rather bad for the business. It seems rather malicious of Dr. Kingsford."
...All this part of the process was afterwards thrown up in the very formless form of a piece of fiction called The Man Who Was Thursday. The title attracted some attention at the time; and there were many journalistic jokes about it. Some, referring to my supposed festive views, affected to mistake it for "The Man Who Was Thirsty." Others naturally supposed that Man Thursday was the black brother of Man Friday. Others again, with more penetration, treated it as a mere title out of topsy-turveydom; as if it had been "The Woman Who Was Half-past Eight," or "The Cow Who Was Tomorrow Evening." But what interests me about it was this; that hardly anybody who looked at the title ever seems to have looked at the sub-title; which was "A Nightmare," and the answer to a good many critical questions.
I pause upon the point here, because it is of some importance to the understanding of that time. I have often been asked what I mean by the monstrous pantomime ogre who was called Sunday in that story; and some have suggested, and in one sense not untruly, that he was meant for a blasphemous version of the Creator. But the point is that the whole story is a nightmare of things, not as they are, but as they seemed to the young half-pessimist of the '90s; and the ogre who appears brutal but is also cryptically benevolent is not so much God, in the sense of religion or irreligion, but rather Nature as it appears to the pantheist, whose pantheism is struggling out of pessimism. So far as the story had any sense in it, it was meant to begin with the picture of the world at its worst and to work towards the suggestion that the picture was not so black as it was already painted. I explained that the whole thing was thrown out in the nihilism of the '90s in the dedicatory lines which I wrote to my friend Bentley, who had been through the same period and problems; asking rhetorically: "Who shall understand but you?" In reply to which a book-reviewer very sensibly remarked that if nobody understood the book except Mr. Bentley, it seemed unreasonable to ask other people to read it."
Yeah it kind of seems morally hopeless unless you have advanced enough tech to stick basically every non-human organism into a simulation (with very few animals having enough intelligence to have social preferences that couldn't be satisfied by an experience machine). Then the countless simulated organisms never grow in number, and their role in nature gets filled by a sort of AGI DM acting out their characters through machine/cyborg bodies (but which enjoys people say hunting it for instance, the same way a good DM wants their players to beat their villain)
Though granted I think that's likely to be possible in the future, so just for the sake of people with different values than me (and to hedge against incredibly infinitesimal moral uncertainty) I precommit to doing what I can to bring that scenario about if it doesn't sacrifice any of my other values.
I love these 150-year-old descriptions of silly progressives. Some things never change...
People have a rather limited set of possible reactions, so things keep repeating.
Would it be better is people had a bigger range? How could this be achieved?
Actually, I like it this way. Makes life slightly less disorienting.
Thanks for responding to my comment! I feel like this issue is kind of a blind spot in EA/rationlist circles so I'd love you to dive deeper into it, though I'd like you to preregister a prediction first!
>but I think making this distinction is slightly less muddled than not making it and so it's net useful.
Why? After all you seem to realize yourself that it seems more parsimonious to just not draw a distinction between negative reinforcement and supposedly "real" suffering. At least I'd get that impression from you saying it's difficult to draw a distinction.
I'm skimming through the article RN, but I don't see anything that specifically affects my arguments for qualia being more widespread than generally believed. Is there a part you'd like to draw my attention to that you think addresses my points?
Fundamentally doesn't this basically entail something almost similar to a belief in P-zombies?
In that you must believe that in some organisms negative stimuli leads to an internal state which leads them to learn to avoid that stimuli and any other stimuli they've learned to associate with it in the future. Whereas other organisms have an internal state like this which affects behavior in almost the same way, except that in those organisms it's not "real" qualia.
Also what do you think about the argument that more complex organisms have less evolutionary reason to feel pain as intensely as simpler organisms, since they can learn their lessons easier?
After all if suffering serves an evolutionary function it seems like an inescapable conclusion that it's intensity is something subject to evolutionary pressure doesn't it? Which seems incompatible with humans feeling pain any more intensely than shrimp.
>whether it gets routed through a brain that's capable of reflecting on how bad it is in some sort of global way
You should preregister (before looking into the topic) what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
Because I think you and most other rationalists (I'd also call myself a rationalist) are drawing a category here in a way that's fundamentally not even wrong.
> what evidence you think would distinguish the simplest possible organism you think has qualia from the simplest organism that you think doesn't.
I'm not convinced we will ever have a definitive answer, since qualia are inherently a subjective experience. Who knows. But this does mean that we can only use heuristics to figure this out. For some qualia it might be nearly impossible, eg color perception. We can find out whether X can see or distinguish colors, but how do we know whether it experiences them? But suffering has associated behaviors we can try to use, as well as our understanding of the neurologically structural prerequisites for registering and processing pain, which we can sensibly consider a prerequisite for suffering. So, this would be the evidence: The presence of pain processing and aggregation circuitry as well as behaviors that heuristically can differentiate avoidance behavior from suffering.
Sidenote, but I have recently learned some stuff that will probably change your view on color perception quite a lot. See this article: https://gliese1337.blogspot.com/2024/01/describing-non-human-vision.html?m=1
and this study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248404302_Ways_of_Coloring_Comparative_Color_Vision_as_a_Case_Study_for_Cognitive_Science
I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia, ie having an experience of what it is like to be someome/perceive something. It seems clear that some things have qualia, eg humans. It seems equally clear that some things don't, eg rocks. Sure, humans are living things and rocks aren't, but this is a potentially fluent distinction - consider for example viruses or the "ancestors" of biological life. Suffering is just one particular qualium(?), just as eg experiencing color is.
Now consider a robot which measures the light intensity behind it and in front of it and drives towards the smaller value. In this sense, it avoids light. Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however? If not, then clearly, avoidance behavior is not a sufficient condition for the presence of suffering.
Note that we could arrive at exactly the same internal model by training it through reinforcement learning etc. So it also doesn't seem like the learning part itself is a sufficient condition.
Given this, it seems you need something beyond negative reinforcement to ensure the presence of qualia, such as perhaps a complicated neurological system or something akin to it. What exactly appears to be needed for the presence of qualia in general or suffering in particular is an empirical and philosophical question people have already put a lot of effort into, cf eg the paper Scott linked you.
>I think the simplest way of cashing it out is presence VS absence of qualia
I was asking about observations that are feasible to make. Obviously if you could magically read minds and know creatures internal qualia would settle like half of philosophy and I'd love that!
>Surely it is not thereby experiencing suffering, however?
The mistake you're making here is I assuming would apply a double standard to AI compared to biological life.
I see no convincing reason to think some existing AI might not have qualia. Importantly this qualia may not feel subjectively the same, but I'd still expect an AI that evolved through an evolutionary algorithm to avoid certain stimuli, to find those stimuli unpleasant in some alien sort of way.
I think qualia is fundamentally functional, so if an AI displays certain kinds of learning in response to stimuli then the simplest explanation is that it also has internal qualia changing its behavior.
Granted I think P-zombies might be possible, they'd just be computationally infeasible to run.
Actually, thinking some more about it, my impression is this. Your (simplified) model seems to be:
Input
==> Internal processing
==> Qualia
==> Behavior
I totally agree that this is sometimes appropriate, eg for lot of human behavior. (Though we also need an Internal Processing ==> Behavior connection for pulling our hand away from a hot stove etc.) However, a surely simpler model is
Input
==> Internal Processing
==> Behavior
This doesn't apply to humans of course, but it might apply to other entities. Unless you take a panpsychist position or the like, it seems like it does apply to some simple entities, like a small linear model or a thermostat. So the question becomes: when is which model appropriate? And I don't see a reason to a priori prefer the former over the latter in cases very different from those we know fall under the former. Thoughts?
I think the difference here is that you think I have the 3 step model you propose. Rather I think pain directly is the internal processing which leads to the behavioral change, there's no middle step.
Yeah, I agree it's possible for AI in principle to have qualia. But we're not talking about GPT27, but something like a linear model with like 2 parameters, instantiated in a robot's hardware. Something like this is sufficient for producing avoidance behavior. Do you agree that this is very likely not suffice for suffering in the qualia sense?
As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
I'd be rather unsure about say GPT like systems just because they don't really act like they have positive or negative stimuli, but I an imagine an argument against that as well. I would not rule out some kind of internal experience that may have qualia with no valence attached as I would conceive of it for all I know.
I'd also like to note that plants seem to respond to anesthetics like they feel pain in many ways. Which supports the idea that pain response might be a very highly evolutionarily conserved trait as I've speculated: //www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>As for functionality, in simple examples like the above, if seems like qualia are explicitly not needed to explain the behavior. Qualia are not even needed to explain the behavior of AlphaGo to take a more complex RL example.
"not needed to explain" sounds like a description of our computational abilities rather than a description about a structure or organism that may or may not have qualia.
Yes, obviously the best thing to do would be to eliminate all Darwinian life, but unfortunately we can't do that yet. But we can make life slightly better for shrimp!
...I honestly can't bring myself to care either, how miniscule it is in the grand scheme of things. But if you can care, it's an easy way to feel like you're doing something.
Out of curiosity do you share my intuition what's more important than suffering is how a given agent would counterfactually have treated you? Since I feel like it's actually totally coherent to show moral "nepotism" to loved one's, because you have an obligation to treat people at least as well as they would have treated you.
Sorry to butt in to your conversation here, but I wanted to respond to the "suffering vs counterfactual reciprocity" because it's something I've seen floating around, that leaves me totally cold.
I think the intuition here is supposed to be something like contractualism, where our moral obligations grow out of a reciprocal understanding of how each of us wants to be treated. But, how I want to be treated is entirely based on my capacity to suffer!
If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
I think the sophisticated version of this involves all sorts of extended counterfactuals to make sure I'm including the right subset of agents, but I'm not sure I believe you can really pin this down precisely enough to satisfy my intuition. It's hard both to identify relevant counterfactuals, and to identify agents across counterfactuals.
e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
I think it's much simpler to say, my intuition is capturing that it's bad to cause a being capable of suffering to suffer, regardless of how agent-y it is, or how it would treat you. There are instrumental and practical reasons to care about those things, but it's not what I really care about.
>If I become a horror-movie zombie, and lose all sense of reason, but can still feel pain, I don't want you to torture me before killing me even though by hypothesis if you were the zombified one, you wouldn't feel any compunction about hurting me.
If you are talking about the kind of zombie that dies and goes braindead before reanimating, then I think you have no direct moral obligations to them whatsoever. At most you have an indirect weak obligation to treat the corpse certain ways based on your obligation to other moral agents (but the zombie here might as well be an inanimate heirloom)
The case where subjective experience is continuous is more interesting, and in that case I think the the relevant counterfactual is that you wouldn't want the torture happening to you: So if somebody else likely would respect that wish for you, then you should do the same for them (and you should generally give people some benefit of the doubt when there's no evidence to go off).
>e.g. I would sort of accept the framing "don't needlessly hurt shrimp because if you were a shrimp, you wouldn't want people to arbitrarily torture you", but making this precise seems hopeless: what does it mean "if I were a shrimp"?
In this case the counterfactual would be something like how a shrimp might treat you if it had human level intelligence and immense power, but the exact same absence of any social instincts underpinning our morality. Such a being would be frankly as terrifying as a paperclipper as far as a human is concerned. Consequently I think we have no moral obligations to most animals, and that uplifting most animals without also adding into them human moral/social instincts would be a grave mistake.
I think the principle is most compelling in the case of groups of say jews in nazi germany who few people would say had any obligation to refrain from killing committed nazis for instance. I think this example perfectly demonstrates that people's concern for suffering is predicated on whether the subject would show any sympathy for them if the situations were reversed in the morally relevant ways (which cannot logically include having radically different values for instance).
Another example would be having an understanding with other people to give each other a proper burial if one of the others died, because you know the others would in turn do the same for you. The logic here seems perfectly sound and doesn't require the moral agent involved still exist, and I'm sure I could come up with many similar sorts of examples where people care about things that may not directly impact current net pleasure.
Yes, the zombie case is meant to be the one where I retain some trace of identity.
I agree that the overriding intuition in all cases is something like, "what if our places were switched" but my point is, if I'm capable of imagining us in switched positions, I don't care at all about how they would treat me as a condition: if I wouldn't want them to torture me, then I no longer want to torture them.
The extra step of, "ok but I think they would torture me, so who cares" has no pull on my intuition.
I think the Nazi example is only compelling because you're imagining it _in response_ to Nazi atrocities, so you're playing on a desire for justice or vengeance. But the counterfactual reasoning is that Jews have no moral obligations to people who _would have been Nazis_ in the right conditions, even if they aren't now. This both raises the question of "which counterfactual"--if someone "would have been" a committed Nazi in certain circumstances, but isn't now, which set of circumstances matters?--but more importantly I think it takes all the oomph out of the example.
If Warsaw ghetto fighters had started torturing the young children of the most committed Nazis because, places switched the grown up children would have been happy to do it to them, I think that would have been a monstrous moral mistake, and I think most peoples' intuitions agree with mine on this.
>would have been Nazis in the right conditions, even if they aren't now
This misses the point of why it's important that they be Nazis in my example:
You aren't judging people based on the values that they might hypothetically have come to hold under the right circumstances, but based on their actual current values. The counterfactual version of somebody you're considering has to have the same moral values or it makes zero sense. Also importantly in order to be justified in making this judgement you need solid evidence about their values, killing some random person in Nazi Germany would not be the same as killing a party member who clearly endorses the ideology.
I don't even understand what you mean by "more important". I have no obligations to anyone, and no one has any obligations to me. I live for myself. That doesn't mean I'm not capable of love. I just don't pretend that I'm owed anything.
You don't think you have any obligation to help out your family (presuming your family doesn't suck) more than you would a stranger?
Similar if a friend has gone to great lengths to help you in the past do you not feel an obligation to return the favor (within reason) if they need your help?
I would help out my family because I like them more than most people. And it would hurt me more if they suffered.
As for friends... Man, I would hate to be in a relationship that was that transactional. So many expectations that I can't live up to. They would hate me. The friendship would not last.
...Point is, it's not about "moral obligation", a concept that's ultimately just arbitrary. It's about feelings and practical consequences. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking this way, though usually they at least pretend to have coherent morals.
Honestly I suspect that the feelings you describe just are what a lot of people are talking about when they talk about certain kinds of moral obligation.
There's basically two different types of "moral obligation" here which I think are psychologically totally distinct. Those being obligation out of a sense of duty (what you seem to be describing) and obligation out of personal loyalty/love.
I don't think bacteria suffer (they have no brain, for instance, or central nervous system, nor do they behave in ways we'd expect to go with suffering) but if you think simple organisms suffer a lot, this seems to make a *stronger* case for caring about shrimp.
Alternatively, one could see that basing one's morality on this "suffering" metric leads to absurd conclusions, and switch to something else.
But I address that in the post!
You mean this line: "Preventing immense extreme suffering is very valuable even if things matter other than pleasure and pain"?
I agree that if you accept this, you would be forced to conclude the shrimp welfare project is important. I'm arguing that because that because the conclusion is absurd, and since the logical steps starting from the premise are sound, the premise is false.
(To be clear, "absurd" means "absurd TO ME," and not society at large, which I agree can be, and often is, fundamentally wrong on matters of morality.)
I think the focus on whether a creature has a nervous system is as deeply arbitrary here as say whether the organisms has higher reasoning. People only take for granted it's importance because they aren't taking a functional view of suffering.
Since even plants and single celled organisms will show basic learning wherein they can learn to associate a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli.
Please read my doc and respond, since I'd love to have a discussion with you!
The important thing here though, is that this logic means that all macroscopic life is from a utilitarian standpoint basically a rounding error compared to the incomprehensibly massive sea of qualia at the microscopic scale. Though granted I'm not a utilitarian so this is a lot less impactful to my particular values.
I doubt that all living things have qualia (I hate this word, but you equated it with consciousness so I go along :-)
Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
I think the headache, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
And did you ever suddenly come up with the solution to a problem you have not been thinking about for a few hours?
I think the thinking, as a functional thing, was still there, but you weren't conscious of it.
I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
And about your idea of being conscious all the time (I looked into your "Continuous Experience" text): Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes? :-)
>Did you ever notice, that your visual qualia go away, even though you still have others, when you close your eyes?
I find this fascinating because of the implication that for you it does go away, which seems baffling to me. I just see an imperfect darkness with a bit of what I guess I'd call noise (akin to a less intense version of something like if you rub your eyes). I may not perceive that if my visual perception is instead engaged in my minds eye, but I'm always perceiving something visually while awake at least.
>I think bacteria refrain from acid, there is a functional mechanism, but they feel no pain.
This doesn't really address the more difficult aspect to explain which is the association of a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli. If an organism doesn't have that characteristic than I don't think there's any evolutionary reason to have an internal state corresponding to suffering.
I should also note that even plants seem to show a response to anesthetic as well, which supports the idea that some elements here might be very highly conserved: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171211090736.htm
>Did you ever have had a headache over hours but in between, for a short time, forgot about it because there was something more important or engaging?
There's two responses to this logic: First is that not all mental processes necessarily require a system that responds to positive and negative stimuli. However I expect that the more significant factor is probably just that what you think of as a unified identity just isn't one. You are comprised of many separate cognitive processes which may have their own experiences that are not necessarily accessible to all other cognitive processes.
I also think the realization that you don't have a unified identity like you think you do is also extremely enlightening because it explains away the incoherent and contradictory concept of "willpower" that people have.
You seem to think that total blackness is or can be a qualia. And I think that it is not, for reasons that someone else can explain better.
I probably cannot sound not patronizing when I recommend "Content and Consciousness" from Daniel Dennett, but I do it anyway because you seem to me to be able to make something of a detailed description of a very different perspective on this topic.
For me it offered no final answer, but made me better understand my own questions.
This book is from 1969, is still state of the art, but has only about 190 pages. It's better and deeper than the follow up.
Completely aside from whether perfect blackness would be a qualia there's the issue that perfect blackness is impossible because of inherent noise in the human visual system. Though I find it interesting that you can at apparently tune this out without replacing it with other visual qualia.
Well, I disagree with you--unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning--but I have no idea how this affects the desirability of shrimp welfare. Yes, maybe this would mean a bacteria charity is better, but there aren't such things.
>unconscious humans also have the sorts of things involved in reinforcement learning
I absolutely agree with you! I just don't think this makes the point you think it does.
I think that actually you are conscious (in the sense of having qualia) during all stages of sleep precisely because you are still display certain kinds of awareness. Just like there are both REM and non-REM dreams you have every single night (barring sleep issues), but you almost never remember the experiences you had during either either of them. So I think the lack of memory of any qualia is not evidence against you experiencing qualia and forgetting it (especially when you don't have the right parts of your brain active to even form long term memories in the first place!)
I actually wrote a this subject that you might like reading! Would love to discuss it if you're interested.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KkJL_8USmcAHNpdYd-vdtDkV-plPcuH3sSxCkSLzGtk/edit?usp=sharing
Anyway good night!
I don't know much about how the US health insurance system works. If UnitedHealthcare were to shut down, why would that make things better?
It wouldn't make things better. A law called "Affordable Care Act" or Obamacare passed during Obama's tenure had the effect of degrading everyone's insurance (possibly on purpose, in order to break the system and force the country to go single-payer). As I recall it - for some reason, I can't find a link to this - one of the parts of the law was penalizing employers for offering really good insurance which, predictably, led to employers beginning to offer crappy plans instead. At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying. I could go on and on - for example, the electronic medical record mandate that came with this law had as one of the effects major doctor burnout, with doctors quitting the field in droves (also it caused more healthcare spending, with money coming guess from where).
There's no point in going after an insurance company. We need a legislative change.
>At the same time, cheap plans offering only catastrophic coverage, which young healthy people were buying, were legislated away, only to be replaced by the crappy plans that technically cover everything, but the deductibles are so high that you are always paying.
"Covers everything with high deductibles" was the definition of pre-ACA catastrophic plans, so that part at least was not banned. But the plans stopped being cheap for young, healthy people because of community ratings and guaranteed issue, where insurers were required to offer plans at the same price to everyone within a broadly-defined risk pool regardless of health status. Older people can be charged higher premiums, but the difference in premiums was capped at a much lower level than the actuarial price difference.
This made insurance much more accessible and affordable to people who have expensive-to-manage chronic health issues, but at the cost of making it so that if insurance was cheap for you under the old system, it isn't anymore. It's equivalent to taxing healthy people to subsidize sick people, but with private insurance companies deputized to administer the taxes and subsidies.
I also find it hard to believe that people with expensive chronic health issues came out ahead. These people are consuming a lot of services that are not free and that became much more expensive, and the deductibles are now much higher almost everywhere.
The ACA sounds like the perfect solution for politicians. Politicians can brag about how they gave coverage to so many more people and leave the dirty work of redistribution to the insurance companies.
No kidding. Almost everyone around me lost insurance that worked for them and had to replace it with.a vastly inferior option. (The only exception I can think of was a couple that qualified for Medicaid, who I suspect qualified before as well but needed some help with the paperwork.)
But the politicians got their talking points and, by the time everyone forgot what they did, got the situation to deteriorate so much that people became a lot more sympathetic to single payer system and, as we now see, many started thinking that insurance executives should be shot. So from the politicians' point of view it was probably a huge win.
I might be wrong, but I distinctly recall pre-ACA my farmer friends buying coverage that didn't pay for regular doctor visits and such, but that would have rescued them if something really catastrophic happened.
ACA contains a lot of mandates, such as preventative care, that are supposed to make certain things free, so I don't think it can be considered a version of what I think I remember (if I understood them right, and if I remembered it right).
I asked Perplexity AI what is supposed to be free under ACA. Here's what it said (sorry about the formatting, don't know how to fix it):
"Preventive Services for All Adults
Screenings for various conditions, including:
Depression
Diabetes
Obesity
Various cancers
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs)
Counseling for:
Drug and tobacco use
Healthy eating
Other common health concerns
Immunizations for diseases such as influenza, tetanus, and COVID-19
Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes tests
Preventive Services for Women
Well-woman visits
Contraception and contraceptive counseling
Breast and cervical cancer screenings
Prenatal care
Preventive Services for Children and Youth
Well-child visits from birth to age 21
Immunizations for childhood diseases
Behavioral and developmental assessments
Vision and hearing screenings
Autism screenings
Fluoride supplements
These services must be provided without any cost-sharing, meaning patients do not have to pay deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance when receiving these services from in-network providers."
Some of this stuff is cheap, but you'll notice there's some radiology and lab work there that's pretty expensive. I imagine it brings costs way up, raising both the insurance prices and the deductibles.
That's true: ACA did introduce some mandates for "diagnostic and preventative" care. This is the actual list (https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/), which is pretty close to the AI answer.
That said, I'm pretty sure it's the community ratings that did most of the work in raising the floor on prices. Pre-ACA, when I was in my early 20s, I bought an individual plan in California that cost about $50/month, or about $85 after adjusting for inflation. I also remember looking up similar plans from the same comparison-shopping website for a friend who lived in New Jersey, which had community ratings laws, and the cheapest plan was around $400/month (about $680 adjusted for inflation).
I did find some think tank data that claims that the ACA preventative care mandate costs about $204/person/year as of 2019 and accounts for about 3.5% of health care spending:
https://healthcostinstitute.org/hcci-originals-dropdown/all-hcci-reports/spending-on-preventive-services-represents-a-small-fraction-of-total-health-care-spending-but-costs-to-individuals-could-be-high-without-aca-protection
Thank you for educating me again (as you often do). I had to look up what "community ratings" were.
That said, I'm sure that, among other things, the EHR mandate also added to healthcare costs. A lot of studies claim that EHR systems are cost effective - but I've seen what they do, how much they cost, how people interact with them, and how they have to be managed, with my own eyes, and I'll never believe that the practices they were forced on got a good deal. Along with EHRs came useless time-sinks such as meaningful use - yes, that thing that forces every nurse to ask you weird questions with no obvious answers at the start of every visit. (On the scale of 1 to 10, how much pain are you in?)
I'm sure some cost increases weren't directly ACA's fault - I'm sure inflation contributed to healthcare costs just like to everything else. But ACA definitely was not a net positive for most people.
Step 1: Get employers out of the middle of health insurance purchasing by including the money spent as part of taxable income (the current arrangement is a tax arbitrage).
Step 2: Companies like UHC realize that patients, not HR ladies, are now the actual customer and their behavior changes for the better.
People seem to think things are genuinely better just because a Fat Cat was murdered. Like nothing else need happen - this has made their Christmas. It's especially pronounced on Reddit, of course, where I think anyone espousing a contrary view about murder would be slapped with a "Controversial" label.
I read about the Fat Cat. His father worked in a grain elevator.
Like so many of the fathers of Fat Cats.
This is a milestone in the Class Struggle.
These articles broadly undermine the assumption that it would:
https://policysphere.com/morning-briefing/big-ai-moves
https://www.vox.com/policy/390031/anthem-blue-cross-blue-shield-anesthesia-limits-insurance
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/insurance-companies-arent-the-main
Thread: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1866388501824262390.
That is not the point, my friend. You don't shut down a company by killing its CEO. This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that.
The point is to reinternalize the costs—to change the boardroom calculus.
Health insurance companies—all companies, really—thrive on externalizing costs and internalizing profits. In health insurance, that's the whole business model: take in as much as you can in premiums, pay out as little as you can in coverage.
And Thompson's tenure at UnitedHealth was a years-long experiment in seeing just how low they could push that "payout" dial. When he took over as CEO two or three years ago, UHG was denying about 8% of prior authorization requests. As of this year, it's close to 24%.
(If you are truly unfamiliar with our ways: say you need a surgery that will cost $100,000. This is of course a ludicrous sum which the hospital knows you don't have, so the hospital won't do the surgery unless they have the insurance company's word—ahead of time—that they'll cover it. This is known as a "prior authorization". In practice, it means that an insurance company's AI-based claims adjuster can rule that your mother's valve replacement surgery is "not medically necessary", and then bounce you through appeals and arbitrations until she has a fatal heart attack, at which point, yeah, I guess she no longer needs a valve replacement.)
And yes, maybe someone could take them to court over this kind of thing, and win a huge penalty judgement. This is one way of re-internalizing the costs and changing the boardroom calculus. Say each additional 1% of claims they deny represents $50M in additional profit, but makes them 10% more likely to get slapped with a $1B penalty. The actuaries will tell the CEO that it's bad business, so they won't deny those additional claims! But court is a corporation's home turf, they have an army of lawyers who know every trick in the book, and if you're sick enough that you're racking up the kind of bills which would be worth going to court over, you probably won't even live long enough to find out whether or not you won.
So, absent recourse through the approved channels, this is how a consequentialist can change the calculus—can insert himself into the discussion between the actuary and the executive. "Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk, while your countrymen cheer for the assassin when they learn who you were and what you stood for. Solve for N. It's small but nonzero, and it's about 10 times what it was at Thanksgiving because they still haven't caught the last guy and frankly he made a pretty good show of it, what with the monopoly money and the words on the bullet casings and all."
The only thing worse than a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because the math says so, is a consequentialist who thinks it's OK to murder someone because they got the math wrong. And this...
"Each additional 1% of claims you deny represents $50M in additional profit, and a N% chance that your personal 15 minutes of fame begins with you bleeding out on the cold sidewalk"
...shows that you have no understanding of how any of this works. Brian Thompson is the *CEO* of United Healthcare, not the owner. The owners, the people who actually get your hypothesized $50 million in extra profits, aren't the ones bleeding out on the sidewalk. They *hired* Brian Thompson to, among other things, take that risk for them while they live in heavily-guarded obscurity.
They paid him reasonably well, $10E6/year from what I hear. And he seems to have done a good job of running the company the way its owners wanted it to be run. Now they'll have to deal with the nuisance of hiring someone new, and maybe the new guy will demand twice the salary as a risk premium. That would still be less than 0.1% of United's annual profits.
So, they can get the $50 million (or whatever) in extra profits for each percent of extra claims they have their hired CEO deny for them, and have to pay out a tiny fraction of that as hazard pay for their new CEO, or they can give up all those nice profits for, why exactly would they do that again? The goodness of their hearts, and their sympathy for a community that cheers on the guy who murdered one of their employees?
And no, you can't just kill the stockholders instead. There are too many of them, and you don't know who they are, and the ones big enough that you could figure out who they are have much less exposure and much more security.
You want to be very very careful about deciding that murder is an acceptable to internalize the external costs of an entire organization/system/etc. I think that if you apply this consistently, you will end up with some results you don't like. You know what kills far _far_ more people than the most heinous of insurance companies? Every single politician, rule, and law that slows economic growth by even an iota, so I guess we should all encourage the murder of overly regulatory Democrats then!
Pick your own system. The point is, the quality of evidence that shows health care companies cause any deaths at all is exactly as good (or much worse in many cases) as the evidence that _dozens_ of other industries, organization, systems, etc. cause far _far_ more deaths and harm.
So the end result is murder of people participating in a whole host of systems across the board. Maybe you truly would be ok with this. But I don't have much to say to anyone who would honestly espouse this type of world, other than to finish with: I'm pretty sure that world would be worse than our own, so, according to your ethics, I'm allowed to kill you for advocating for it.
What are you talking about with this "economic growth" shit? When you say "pick your own system", I think you mean "that was a deliberately bad, deranged example, to demonstrate how—if you remove all the important context—the same logic could justify bad things".
And isn't that just the most classic lil strawman since Fiyero Tigelaar?
Look, you get merc'd like Thompson did when you have condemned enough people to infuriating, Kafkaesque deaths that one of their loved ones vows revenge. It is the purest example in our lifetimes of banal evil—its darkness softened by abstraction, distance, diffusion of responsibility—held to account by heroic righteousness: one of the countless individuals on the other end of those statistics, moved to act by the purely personal, inarguably solid reality of love and the grief that follows its loss.
So sure, you could theoretically kill me for saying "Assassinations can be good sometimes," but you won't, because I haven't actually done you any real harm in saying that. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, my friend.
So come kill me, or sit the fuck down and eat your pudding.
It was exactly as valid, I think actually a more valid, example than health care executives. The "Pick your system" was saying that the same level of justification that works for health insurance executives is met or exceeded in _dozens_ of other systems. Which I said explicitly.
And it's not "could" justify bad things.It DOES justify bad things. The EXACT SAME LEVEL OF EVIDENCE AND JUSTIFICATION for killing health care executives justifies killing people in dozens of industries and systems including politicians and executives of nearly every single company in the world. This is my entire point. Your argument is horrific and evil. And people like you arguing for it are making it more likely that it will happen, and you are providing justification and cover for more killings. Therefore, you are causing deaths. Therefore, according to your own logic, you deserve to die.
You are right, *I* won't kill you, because I oppose your morality with every fiber of my being. I find it disgusting.
Finally, I hope that people reading this thread can see the irony in someone celebrating and calling for even more murder calling anything else "deranged"
Oh, you were being serious! Oh boy, yeah if you genuinely think "slowing economic growth" is...like...akin to murder?
It's terminal, baby.
I don't. You do. Since you also think that "running a health insurance company is akin to murder". Remember, I'm not advocating for murder here, you are.
I find it somewhat telling that you keep ascribing your beliefs to me.
So were these denials truly willy-nilly? Based not on any science or statistics or actuarial evidence?
Bro did you delete all the stuff about your mom's UTIs?
I thought maybe it was UTI TMI for this particular audience, though in fact I do think it’s ridiculous that a doctor even needs to be involved. It should be a drugstore matter.
Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
>Was really hoping to find out more about the nature of these denials. Surely if a scandal, some outlet must have done a deep dive.
CNN has an article ( https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/06/business/insurance-claim-denials-unitedhealthcare-ceo/index.html ) which includes:
>A class action lawsuit filed last year in US District Court in Minnesota argued that UnitedHealthcare uses AI “in place of real medical professionals to wrongfully deny elderly patients care,” according to the complaint. More than 90% of the denials are reversed through an internal appeal or proceedings before federal administrative law judges, the suit alleges.
Someone upthread linked to the plaintiffs' brief, which includes a fact CNN left out: more than 90% of denials *which are appealed* may be reversed... but only 0.2% of policyholders appeal their denials. The lawyers invite the court to assume that the remaining 99.8% would also appeal if only they could, but provide no evidence in support of this ambitious claim.
"This is not Lord of the Rings, where you kill Sauron and the evil goes away. Nobody is thinking like that."
Even Tolkien didn't think that. Sauron goes away, but Evil (and the problem of Evil) remains. You still have to fight it, day by day, until the end. Maybe it's not something big and obvious like a Dark Lord, but it's there and won't ever be fully conquered until the tares and wheat are both harvested together.
Rather like the Ballad of the White Horse.
"he made a pretty good show of it," - hah, good point. Is it consensus that the murder intentionally took place in full view of a security camera?
I think I read somewhere that he was crying in fear when arrested, so he hoped to get away with it. It is plausible, though, that he thought his face was hidden well enough. Honestly, I would not have clocked him a couple of days later. But somebody did.
Oh idk, I don't think it matters. The act itself is not the spectacle; the aftermath is.
No. It would transfer a lot of people to other insurers who behave just as badly. What's needed are reforms that go well beyond the ACA-- which did get rid of the worst practices (refusing to insure people and rescinding overage when people got sick). At the very least health insurers should be non-profit businesses and not answerable to Wall Street.
Many, if not most, insurance companies are essentially not for profit. Essentially anything with "mutual" in its name. Mutual companies are owned by the shareholders, so rather than issuing a dividend, any profit they might make is given back to the shareholders through reduced rates.
Health insurance has nothing to do with health. Insurance in general is a way to make a cost relatively predictable, by spreading it out over the pool of people who may need to spend that cost. So, it's a financial arrangement. People who want health insurance that covers absolutely everything and have their employers pay for it don't realize the actual cost of that.
Insurance is supposed to cover unknowns. If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that. On the other hand, if you DEVELOP a certain condition, insurance ought to pay for treating that, based on the cost of treating it and the likelihood of you developing it. If you are one of the unfortunate few to develop the condition, then those fortunate enough NOT to develop it subsidize your cost.
So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick. It's supposed to be a regulated industry, so making a profit by providing this service shouldn't be relevant.
>So I'm saying insurance ought to be able to decline coverage (or charge appropriately) for pre-existing conditions, but NOT rescind coverage when people get sick.
The trouble with this model is that you become "locked in" if you develop a chronic condition - you can't change insurers because nobody will cover your pre-existing conditions. If your health insurance comes from a job you hate (or god forbid, an abusive spouse), you're locked into that as well.
Heck, even if you never decide to change insurers voluntarily, you could still be forced out of coverage if your insurer goes out of business.
This is a reasonable criticism, but I think it can be overcome. When one first is evaluated for insurance, one's "properties" are assessed, including life expectancy and probability of developing various ailments. Those properties become fixed, so that insurance companies are all effectively re-insured, because some people will develop each ailment and most won't, so it just becomes luck of the draw whether a particular company is paying on a now chronic but previously missing condition. But those who decide to obtain insurance to cover their newly-discovered chronic conditions must pay for the certainty.
I'm not an expert in insurance, and think other ways to overcome changing insurance companies ought to be likely.
Re: If you KNOW you have a certain condition, then you can predict how much it would cost you to treat it. Insurance isn't supposed to cover things like that.
Which is why the insurance model is a bad one right at the roots. Healthcare funds like the Germans have or what the Clinton plan would have entailed have would make much more sense. It's pretty much inevitable that everyone will run up big healthcare tab at some point in their lives (OK, unless they are killed by some sudden trauma when they are still young). We should be making provision for that quite explicitly in the structure of society. Human beings have cared for their sick and injured since far back in the Paleolithic-- it's one of the things that set us apart from other animals.
I've heard this argument before, and it always felt like a semantics debate to me.
When some people hear 'health insurance' they are NOT thinking of the kind of financial risk sharing you are describing. They are thinking of something much more closely approximating utilities like electricity and water, or services like roads and public transit. And this is also a reasonable thing to think, because (unlike, say, a car / car insurance / paying out for a car crash) you don't have the same ability to control health outcomes, ESPECIALLY in a world where we know genetics exists. If all health outcomes were entirely driven by personal choice, the risk model of health insurance maybe feels more reasonable, you could have people internalize the risks of their bad behavior by increasing their insurance premiums. In a world where you just get fucked if you have the wrong genes, idk, seems shitty?
And fwiw it seems like the broader healthcare industry also doesn't think of itself as the sort of risk sharing financial arrangement you describe. Both legally (thanks Obama!) and in practice (the standard denial of care practices in the industry are ridiculous in the model you're describing).
So every time you go into a discussion about health insurance and say 'well actually this is about spreading risk in a financially smart way', some subset of people are (in the best case) going to be very confused or (in the worst case) start yelling right past you.
I think that you're right that the _definition of insurance_ is what you describe. But unfortunately I think naming the US system 'health insurance' does everyone a disservice by conflating this risk sharing scheme with...well, whatever the fuck we have.
You may be right that it is semantics, which is to say, kind of the opposite of nominative determinism: choosing the wrong words to mean what you want. But it is also true that health insurance works like insurance. As JonF311 says, this may be the wrong model to cover health care costs.
"At the very least health insurers should be non-profit businesses and not answerable to Wall Street"
Do you think this is true even if for-profit insurance provides better coverage and service?
I'm not arguing that's the case: I'm trying to understand whether you think this is a moral question or an empirical one.
Both. And It's certainly not clear how a for-profit "insurance" model performs better. For-profit medical care, Rx etc.--- Yes. I can grant that.
I suspect that a for-profit insurance (or "insurance") company will perform better, with a moderate degree of confidence (60-70%).
A couple reasons follow. The industry benefits from attracting investment like most others. That enable companies to embrace new technologies, compete for talent, expand to take advantage of economies of scale (when appropriate), adjust to changing circumstances, and etc.. Additionally, profits attract competition and so expose companies to at least some degree of market discipline.
I generally prefer non-profits when stability is a higher priority than functionality. (For example, when choosing long-term care for my parents.) That doesn't seem to apply here.
So maybe we should have for-profit armies, for-profit police, for-profit courts too.
Help me out a little here: I think you're saying that warfare, policing, courts, and insurance belong in the same category. Why? And why aren't medical care or pharmaceuticals included in that category, per your earlier comment?
Somewhat related to the recent assassination of the CEO.
I've been thinking about it since the beginning of Russia-Ukraine war, and twice as much since the new round of escalation in Israel-Palestine. Where are all the noble assassins?
Wouldn't a world where huge conflicts between powerful entitues are resolved not by wars with tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civillians killed - all mostly regular people, sharing only tiny, if any part of the blame for the politics of their country, but by targeted assassination of the leaders, be a strictly better place?
Wouldn't politicians have more motivation not to escalate the conflicts when they know that they actually have a reasonable chance to die as a result of it?
Like, sure, I can see a bunch of potential issues with this source of approach, but none of then appears to be as bad as the current status quo.
There's an old Poul Anderson short story, "A Man to My Wounding," which takes place in a world where assassination has replaced war (due to a Cold War-ish fear of accidentally triggering nuclear war). The protagonist is tracking down an enemy assassin, and eventually realizes that they aren't targeting a bigwig politician. The President and all the other important politicians are too heavily guarded, so instead they're targeting a politically active university professor who *might* be President in 10 years or so, hoping to shape policy that way.
And his grim conclusion at the end of the story is that the "controlled" state of assassination is actually starting to escalate. In the same way that wars escalated from the premodern concept of "destroy the opposing army" to the total war concept of "destroy the enemy army, industry, workers, housing, and basically anything that the opposing country might benefit from," the war of assassins is going to escalate from "kill enemy leaders" to "kill enemy leaders, industrialists, scientists, and basically anyone who might influence anything."
Basically, there's no way to *force* people to stick to the norm of assassination. War is inherently escalatory - if sending an army would win you the war, why would you stick to just sending assassins?
There are very few "noble assassins" because assassination is very rarely a noble act. And assassination as a way of resolving international conflict without open warfare pretty much *never* works. Mostly, it anti-works as in the example of wannabe noble assassin Gavrilo Prinzip.
Or, at the other and more sensible end, consider all the very ignoble assassins who work for Vladimir Putin, killing Sergei and Yulia Kirpal, Alexander Litvinenko, and the scores of Russians who have exited high-rise windows in recent years. Neither moral scruples nor international norms will stay Putin's hand if he wants someone dead, and as a former FSB officer he almost certainly *prefers* assassination to e.g. military invasion.
Yet, three years ago, he decided to invade Ukraine. He does not seem to have even attempted just having Volodymyr Zelenskyy assassinated and telling his successor, "Surrender the Donbas or you're next". Why do you suppose that is?
I'm pretty sure that's because it wouldn't have worked, and the spymaster with the stable of assassins knew it wouldn't have worked.
First, because the sort of person who becomes a head of government is typically *very highly motivated* to do so, and they typically have specific goals when they do. Obtaining and taking that job requires extraordinary sacrifice, and risk of assassination is only a part of that sacrifice. They're not going to give it all up and become the puppet of some foreign potentate just because they are threatened with assassination. *You* presumably would, and so you assume others would, but you're not the sort of person who ever becomes a president or prime minister of anywhere.
Second, because if you *do* assassinate a head of government, their replacement will almost certainly be from the same party or faction and they will come into office with the strongest possible mandate to avenge their predecessor and continue in his path. They've made huge and highly-motivated sacrifices just to get to the point of being next in line, so all the above considerations apply, and now taking the final step will require the support of many powerful men who are upset that their chosen leader was killed and who want payback.
And third, because heads of government typically have very good security, and even more so if you've either threatened them with assassination or just assassinated their predecessor in hopes that they will take the hint. So if you try to assassinate them, you'll probably *fail* (see e.g. CIA vs Fidel Castro), and then you'll just be dealing with an even more pissed off head of government with stronger popular support.
There may be times when assassination can be reasonably expected to secure positive gains, by an assassin's standard of "positive" at least. But assassinating heads of government as a means of changing national policy, is rarely one of these.
I've often said that I thought Dune's War of Assassins would be preferable to normal war, with its greater collateral damage, but I don't think one could get elites to commit to the norm of only treating each other as fair game and not having their subjects used as meat shields.
They certainly couldn't get the Harkonnens to commit to that norm. They couldn't even get the *Emperor* to commit, though he at least tried to pretend,
No, it'd be a lead to more effectively polarized outcomes. The (intentional) separation of 'military targets' from 'civilian targets' in most rules of engagement are attempts at codifying the notion that de-escalation and communication should remain possible. Even in intense conflict. These rules are sometimes dishonoured, but they do exist for a good reason.
It's the same reason why attacking people who are communicating under a flag of parlay or surrender is a very common strategy every player of a roleplaying game suggests about 5 seconds into any diplomatic encounter *and* one that is very seldom practiced in real life. Thinking of it is easy. Acutally doing it as a tactic is an enormously stupid idea that backfires extremely fast. The precedent for dissolving standards of sancticity in communication in some cases are too severe. If all flags of surrender and attempts at diplomacy are likely to be (c)overt attempts to murder high profile leaders and agents, you don't "bring more security", you attack anyone attempting to open a communication channel on default.
Likewise, in state level conflict, if your full engagement tactic is "simply remove the enemy government directly" by assassinating every member of said government, what follows will not be a peace process. Diplomatic immunity (again sometimes dishonored) exists because one needs the notion of being able to communicate and discuss an issue in order to disentangle war and conflict once it starts.
And once you've gone down this chain of escalation, you've officially made it state policy that there is no clear line between acceptable targets, on and off a battlefield. How long from that notion does it take before Seal Team Strych-Nine is asked to pour industrial quantities of cyanide into Chinese water reservoirs, or any other hacknyed example you can think of? How much can you trust any invitation to attend a summit, or conference, or meetup? How do you conduct diplomacy, if at any time anywhere for any reason, a drone can attempt to blow up your government representatives? Commerce and international relations would come to a screaming, shattering halt overnight.
Where does the line stop? Once politicians are viably reasonable targets, captains of industry surely should be too. They are apt to support the country they're in.
And now we've just made international trade about a hundredfold more difficult, because state-sanctioned assassination-as-policy dissolves the line between volition and violence. What's your risk assessment on attending a steelworkers conference in Germany, if all politicans and management attending need to watch for bombs?
It's escalation that self-escalates, because reprisals are the next natural step. Oh, they blew up your prime minister, your secretary of state and your six generals. Well, you can't attend a peace summit (you'd die), you can't attend a de-escalation conference (you'd die), you can't engage them on the battlefield directly (you'd die) but maybe you can spend 2 million to post a bounty on THEIR prime minister and top level staff and hope you get lucky? Maybe you can send some intelligence types on a specialist mission to get lucky? Etc.
As hard as it is to believe, a lot of our modern rules of engagement regarding conflict actually get hammered out this way because the alternatives are mildly worse.
Assassination as acceptable policy erodes continuity of relations lightning quick, and, somewhat worse, it establishes the notion that politics by other means (eg, war) might start smaller scale. Because why invade at all if you can just blow up the cabinet of the country in question? But this doesn't make politics "safer" for the mass of common man, it makes *living in society itself* untenable because any civic sphere becomes a target for hostile actors!
LOL...accidentally posted this in the old (wrong) thread. Here's hoping I've got the right one this time:
This idea got discussed back in '22 on Data Secrets Lox: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5995.msg223397.html#msg223397.
The whole thread's prettying interesting but it seems like the consensus summary of reasons against an assassination were:
1) In-group vs. out-group bias. Politicians are the in-group and all the rest of us are the out group and so, of course, for them the idea of assassinating a politician is anathema.
2) Power asymmetry. If this were the standard, little countries would be on more equal footing with big countries which is a bad thing if you're already a big country.
3) Slippery-slope. What even is an 'illegitimate war of aggression'? Without any consensus or governance this leads to chaos and mass instability of governments, big and small, around the world, leaving us all worse off.
4) Live by the sword, die by the sword. History doesn't show a good track record of getting peace out of an assassination.
4a) You and what army? It isn't realistically possible to do but the consequences are very likely to be realized.
5) Little escalation. Attack results in broader war with more combatants, again, making everyone worse off.
6) Big escalation. Attacked leader/government considers this the equivalent of using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and responds in-kind; we're all much much worse off.
7) Juice is not worth the squeeze. Over the long term, the loss of status and influence in other countries exceeds any benefit.
8) You're dead to me. Attempted assassination forecloses any opportunity for a negotiated settlement, whether or not the attempt succeeds.
9) YOLO! If the penalty is always death then aggressive governments are encouraged to always be maximally aggressive.
This would make sense in a world where wars are primarily between sovereigns, but less so in a world in which wars are primarily between states, and where the state makes a big effort to mobilize popular sentiment in favor of the war. If there's mass enthusiasm for the war (among the general population, or just among the ruling party or the army), and serious ideological goals at stake, people aren't going to stop fighting just because their leader was killed. (Same reason we, unfortunately, can't settle wars through single combat any more).
For what it’s worth, this very topic was discussed here a few months back and I found the conversation helpful:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-326/comment/54539569?r=ba1ue&utm_medium=ios
No no this would be horrible. Extremists on both sides would threaten politicians regardless of what they do, and you will collapse the ability to build moderate consensus/coordinate. There is nothing I am coded to oppose more/will reflexively punish than political terrorism. Killing millions in war is preferable to me, in the long run.
The limit of this is people who won't be deterred by the killing of millions of their public supporters (religious fundamentalists/idealogues with nukes as the cleanest example)
You need people with families and stakes in society to be willing to lead, also. This will never happen if they or their families are plausible targets.
> Extremists on both sides would threaten politicians regardless of what they do, and you will collapse the ability to build moderate consensus/coordinate.
I would expect the opposite. Extremists would go after each other while moderates would be able to cooperate. When you assasinate an extremist, it's quite likely that more moderate candidate will take place instead. When you assassinate a moderate you can get a more extreme candidate with high probability, so assassinating extremists would yield more utility.
> There is nothing I am coded to oppose more/will reflexively punish than political terrorism
Yes, this is a popular heuristic. I share some of it as well, but recently I'm starting to question how rational this intuition really is.
> The limit of this is people who won't be deterred by the killing of millions of their public supporters
Well yeah. Quite unsurprisingly some of the most horrible people do not care that much about the lives of their followers.
> You need people with families and stakes in society to be willing to lead, also. This will never happen if they or their families are plausible targets.
I don't see the logic. If your families are *not* plausible targets, in what sense are they at stake?
We have wildly different world views.
If you have a family, your death will hurt them. Do you have a family?
Also, once you normalize political assassinations 'normal' people will stop going into politics because 1) they don't believe some extremist minority won't think they are extremist, and target them, and 2) because once you normalize targeting politicians the next step is targeting their families
there are countries and historical periods where political assassinations are/were quite common, and "normal" people still went into politics, because they felt the benefits were worth the risk.
> If you have a family, your death will hurt them.
Okay. So? Where are you going with this?
> Also, once you normalize political assassinations 'normal' people will stop going into politics
I don't see why extra selection pressure for self-sacrifice is supposed to harm.
> they don't believe some extremist minority won't think they are extremist, and target them
Suppose that services of assassins are restricted to actual nation states, just like services of the armies. Does it solve this problem?
> because once you normalize targeting politicians the next step is targeting their families
I don't see why this step would be necessary.
In general, the people more willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause, or have a lower cost (because they have no families) do *not* make good leaders. Good leaders are people that somewhere, somehow, care about the welfare of their people, even if that's not their main goal (staying in power is usually primary, then achieving some secondary goal).
I just look at the real world where, in dissident suppressing regimes and in normal ones where things have gotten polarized, 'normal well meaning people with families' are much less likely to try to make a positive difference and offer themselves as leaders.
Moderates are deterred by threats to themselves or their families, extremists are not.
Strong nations that are at war are already doing this, but using actual military forces during war to target enemy leadership usually isn't thought of as assassination. I'm pretty sure the US tried to bomb any bunker they thought that Saddam Hussein could be hiding in, he was just good at hiding. I'm pretty sure the Russians tried to take out Zelenskyy with special forces during the opening phases of the war, but failed. And, of course, considering the perpetual war between Iran and its proxies and Israel, the Mossad has no issues with assassination.
Outside of war, there's the risk involved. World leaders tend to have substantial security details, chosen for a combination of loyalty and competence. This makes targeted assassination very risky. There's a good chance your attempt will fail, and there's a good chance your assassin will not escape even if successful. The strategy you're describing isn't an airport-thriller-novel "shady figure gives money to some rich professional killer" plot; the assassin is going to be a highly-trained agent of an intelligence service, and once caught or killed, you're going to have an entire security service that will go through his background and will figure out who he works for. At which point, if there wasn't a war already, there is now.
Even a considerable threat of personal death is usually not something that deters a politician who has finally made it to the top of the game. Their driving factors, at that point, tend to be such that the risk of death is simply something that one must accept as a part of the rules. And if one leader gets killed but their power strucure stays otherwise intact, there are always surely dozens that would take their place.
Also, any country adopting such a strategy would *still* need to be prepared for a huge conflict with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed for the simple reason that if the another entity decides to send in their army, unless there's a counterforce, they win.
One of the world biggest wars started with an assassination. There really isn't a way to contain something like that once it starts to roll down hill.
I don't think the reason political assassination fell out of fashion is because people learned lessons from World War I, or whatnot.
Gavrilo Princip was viewed as a hero in Yugoslavia after the war- after all, he ended up achieveing exactly what he'd hoped to achieve, a united South Slavic state- so it seems like some people learned exactly the opposite lesson from what you think they should have learned.
It's relatively easy to argue that particular war lasted until 1945 (with a 20 year breather to regroup in the middle), and was the actual biggest in history.
Bit more of a stretch, but you could even make the case that it lasted until 1991, what with the Russian revolution being more or less a direct consequence of WW1.
Well all events affect future events. You could argue that the Soviet Union is an ancestor of the war in Ukraine today, and the world would be dominated by European colonies if the two European wars did not happen.
Either way it was a very important day in history.
We didn't start the fire. It's been always burning since the world's been turning.
Leaders tend not to like ordering assassinations of other leaders to avoid setting a precedent that could come back to hit them. Even in the middle ages the idea of killing a monarch was a taboo for this reason. Far safer for them to order faceless soliders to go and die instead.
Well it's understandable why monarchs would be against it. But shoudn't now we, the people push for this kind of solution as a more ethical one?
We could, I suppose. And to be fair, the United States has been more open to the idea of assassinating foreign leaders. The CIA apparently tried to kill Castro hundreds of times, they targeted Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Slobodan Milosevic and various leaders in Africa too. There's also the coup in Chile the CIA supported. They just don't seem to like it much when foreign countries (see Iran) start trying to kill American politicans...
True, and there's also the thought that if a leader was assassinated then they might be replaced by someone more competent, or manic and aggressive as the case may be. For example, I think the allies contemplated trying to assassinate Hitler in WW2 but concluded that he was making enough mistakes that it was better to leave him in place.
It's a slippery slope if ever there was one. Starting a war comes with significant risks for the attacking side. Trying to press the assassination button is kind of cheap for the attacker, but comes with a massive price for the country whose leader was assassinated - unless he was a bona fide cruel dictator. And why would assassinations stay restricted to dictators?
Other country wants to raise tarriffs? Bang.
Other country becomes a tough economic competitor? Bang.
Neighboring country needs to be softened up before invading them and taking their oil fields? Bang.
Other country just murdered your leader? Bang.
Other country might think about murdering your leader? Bang.
It's a good thing if this stays a taboo, however much we wish that some people quickly get to enjoy their specially reserved place in hell.
> Starting a war comes with significant risks for the attacking side. Trying to press the assassination button is kind of cheap for the attacker, but comes with a massive price for the country whose leader was assassinated
Assassinating a leader of another country naturally encorages being assassinated by this country in turn. The whole point is that it's *less* risky for the leaders to wage wars via nameless soldiers than playing an assassination game, even though the abstract cost of war to the country as a whole is highter.
> It's a good thing if this stays a taboo
I think we can do better than that. There has to be a set of international norms for conflict resolution via leaders assassination, leading to less disutility than we have currently.
"The whole point is that it's *less* risky for the leaders to wage wars via nameless soldiers than playing an assassination game, even though the abstract cost of war to the country as a whole is highter."
For one war, maybe. But the cost imposed on individual countries and the world as a whole when leaders of state are assassinated left and right should not be discounted. And as JonF311 points out, it would probably not be "assassination instead of war", but "assassination in addition to war".
"There has to be a set of international norms for conflict resolution via leaders assassination, leading to less disutility than we have currently."
Kind of like the International Criminal Court, but with death penalties handed out in absentia? Might work under very optimal circumstances, but has a terrible potential to be abused. As long as the ICC only convicts the occasional banana republic dictator long after the fact, it's fine. But once that court gets the power to eliminate, say, a Putin, or a Xi Jinping, or a Trump, while they're in office, the temptation for states or coalitions to capture that court and arrange for kangaroo court trials becomes ridiculous. (I suspect it's already happening now - the warrant against Netanyahu is a joke IMO.)
I think that philosophy was kind of what the original Assassins followed. They almost killed Saladin several times, and if the moronic Knight Templars hadn't murdered their envoys to stop an alliance with the Crusaders (because, as I understand, the Templars *didn't want to lose their protection money tribute!*) perhaps the Christian West might have actually held Palestine.
Now that would be a different world...
Can I get a survey of ACXers views on recreational drugs? To me, the following propositions all seem blindingly obvious and indisputable, but it seems like few people (here or elsewhere) really support *any* of them, let alone the (obviously perfectly coherent) combination:
1. Drugs should be legal to take and possess. Yes, all of them. How...the...fuck...is this in dispute in a free society? It is, in absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, acceptable for the government to protect people *from themselves*. The idea is revolting and terrifying. I would have thought this position would be mainstream in a libertarianish place like this, and maybe it is, but I keep seeing lots of people implicitly endorsing personal drug possession being a fucking crime.
2. Drugs are very bad. No one should ever take them. I guess there could be exceptions for alcohol and maybe cannabis if that's really no more dangerous than alcohol (a claim I'm slightly suspicious of, since it comes from activist groups, but i know nothing of the subject, and in any case I can hardly blame them for pushing that narrative when "this doesn't hurt anyone but me" somehow *isn't* a slam-dunk argument).
3. Furthermore, users of hard drugs should be shamed and stigmatised. They should also be fully protected from state interference. In a free society, you have an absolute right to take harmful drugs, and other people have an absolute right to shame you and stigmatise you for it. Finding any significant number of people who support this natural and philosophically consistent combination of positions is so difficult it's astounding.
4. Legal drugs is a million times more defensible than legal abortion. Since, you know, "doesn't hurt anyone else" is undeniable in one case and very much deniable in the other. So guess which one polls much better? Okay, that's among average voters whose highest (only?) criteria is "does this benefit me?" and who wouldn't recognise a consistent moral principle if it strangled them. But what about people here? I still feel like it's the case, but I could be wrong and that's why I'm asking.
I know this is very ranty, but I'm getting so utterly sick of people's inconsistent and self-serving conceptions of freedom that I can't contain my anger.
Also, I've never touched any drugs, except the occasional alcohol.
I think you're letting yourself revel in libertarianism a little too hard. Nanny-statism is obnoxious and I'd like to see less of it, but the people who push it really do want the best for people, and in some cases have a point. If you can't bring yourself to think about their philosophy without getting mouth-foamy angry, you should try hard to become more detached.
Also, I don't get what you mean by an inconsistent conception of freedom. Different things can be differently free, and people can support those different levels. If I build a system where people are free to protest the government but not free to do heroin (which I'm perceiving to be your representative example), I think practically every human on the planet would say that's not the slightest bit inconsistent.
Agree with 1, 2 & 4. On 3 - we should only stigmatise drug use when it negatively affects people’s ability to reasonably function.
I support 1 and 4, but then again, I'm in the "as long as the vending machines are privately owned" camp.
2: I don't think drugs are "very bad", and the notion smacks of propaganda. The dose makes the poison, of course, but in moderation, the stimulants are like caffeine, the depressants are like alcohol. The hallucinogens … okay, these might actually be bad.
3: Not in favor of shaming or stigmatizing in general, and see no reason this should be an exception.
On this:
"1. Drugs should be legal to take and possess. Yes, all of them. How...the...fuck...is this in dispute in a free society? It is, in absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, acceptable for the government to protect people *from themselves*."
The government's job is of course not to protect any individual from this very individual itself -- but it's job is to protect the whole of all people from whatever. And among this whatever are all of the whole's individuals.
An individual that harms itself is likely to harm the whole with this too.
Keep in mind that no individual -- not any single one -- can live alone. Actually, without other people it would not even be born.
The human species, just like the whole biosphere, is more important than any of its individuals, and it's in the interest of each individual to be aware of this.
I have a notion that, especially in this era of relatively good knowledge of biology and high entrepreneurial energy, making recreational drugs and possibly body modification drugs illegal results in more dangerous drugs. For some reason, no one is inventing the next tea (or are they and I haven't heard about it?), they're inventing something more dangerous than fentanyl.
Maybe such would be invented anyway, but I have a notion that illegality increases recklessness.
Somewhat ironically given how you've phrased this, but one of the most common early ways of taking fentanyl to get high (instead of usual medical uses) was via a tea!
The idea that prohibition leads to more potent drugs is not a new one, and has a logical mechanism. However it also has countervailing forces that push back against that; whereas liberalization also pushes forward increased potency without those countervailing forces. Legal cannabis is a good example.
Charles Lehman has a good post about it here: https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/the-iron-law-of-liberalization
To address the last line first:
>I know this is very ranty, but I'm getting so utterly sick of people's inconsistent and self-serving conceptions of freedom that I can't contain my anger.
Yes. Most people don't have coherent ideologies and aren't intellectually consistent. That’s unsurprising, given that that incentives often encourage that and that there’s little incentive for the contrary, as Bryan Caplan discusses (e.g. in Myth of the Rational Voter).
Regarding the actual issue at hand, I think that in an anarcho-capitalist society in which private organizations handled law/rights enforcement, drugs would probably all be legal.
But under a state, where the government maintains the monopoly on violence, it's up to the state to maintain order and protect rights in all circumstances. They haven't shown a great ability to protect the public from drug users.
In fact, although they sometimes prosecute unjustly, on the whole, there's a significant underincarceration problem* and an overwhelming underpolicing problem (per: https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647 the US has only about one-ninth the number of police officers, per homicide, than does the median developed country).
More drugs would mean more crime. In a proper society, that wouldn’t be such a problem, and would be taken care of by police and prisons, but since the state maintains a monopoly on force and allows crime to run rampant, an argument could be made that drugs should be kept illegal.
* this is evident from the fact that the US has a clearance rate of less than 60% for homicide and a far lower clearance rate for other crimes (https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/) and doesn’t have particularly stringent average sentences (https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf shows an average time served in state prison for murder of 15 years, for rape / sexual assault, 6.2 years, assault 2.5 years, motor vehicle theft 1.4 years, with the medians all being lower).
"X is very bad and using it should be stigmatized, but it's also important for it to be legal" -> In my experience, most people just don't think this way. Most people view laws as a reflection of good vs. bad, and so they would consider attempts to legalize something that's viewed as (mostly) bad to be a bad or even crazy thing to attempt.
The sort of higher order value of "it's important to let adults *be adults* and make adult decisions free from government meddling" is often forgotten about or dismissed, maybe with the exception of some sexual activities.
I'm sympathetic to your perspective on these issues, but I'm genuinely not sure if most people could handle a society where legality is clearly and frequently divorced from morality.
"let adults *be adults*"
...this is the key part. There are groups of people who all but the most extreme agree cannot, for some kinds of decision, be thought of as "adults" in that sense. Children, obviously, but also e.g. people who are adults in terms of age but, say, have developmental problems or various forms of illness or otherwise impaired decision-making. You can't just gloss over the conversation about who does and does not belong to such a group when defending their right to "be adult". Why *should* we let an "adult" whose decision-making capability with respect to an addictive drug is entirely destroyed "be an adult" when it comes to that drug?
I think you make illegal with no enforcement anything with net negative effects, like alcohol and weed, just so parents can brainwash their kids easier at the margin but no consequences of they fail. You make illegal Singapore style anything highly addictive. Life term sentences for cocaine, etc. And you come up with a regime to let people try hallucinogenic stuff a very small finite amount of times if they want, am very flexible on this.
I think most drugs are a massive net bad, and I don't consume any (except caffeine and sugar if you want to count them). But there is such a wide range from potentially enlightening and therapeutic, but non-toxic and non-addictive drugs like LSD to highly-addictive, easily fatally toxic substances like Fentanyl that lumping them all together one way or another is absurd.
Also, I strongly disagree with 1. Not only does a state have a right and a duty to protect people from themselves, from a humanitarian as well as a societal perspective - every adult represents several person-years in investment in their education, and if we can keep someone from pointlessly throwing their life away in a time of distress, by all means we should. But society also needs to protect itself from drug users who are out of their mind with intoxication or craving.
"Drugs should be legal to take and possess. Yes, all of them. How...the...fuck...is this in dispute in a free society?"
By coincidence, I read this in the news today:
https://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2024/1209/1485182-sale-of-unapproved-us-weight-loss-trial-drug-exposed-in-ireland/
"During investigations related to the illegal sale of weight loss products, RTÉ Investigates discovered and filmed a woman based in Tuam, Co Galway, selling Retatrutide.
The woman, who is not a qualified doctor, advertises the product as "the most powerful weight loss treatment."
Retatrutide is an experimental medicinal product which is not approved for use anywhere globally, and still in clinical trials in the US. Such medication is often years from being deemed safe for use or achieving regulatory approval.
In a statement, Eli Lilly, the manufacturer of Retatrutide, said the product has not been reviewed or approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, or any regulatory agency anywhere in the world and therefore at this time no one can sell it for human use.
It added that any product falsely representing itself as a Eli Lilly product "may expose patients to potentially serious health risks".
I presume your view here is "yeah sure, let her sell it, and let people take it at their own risk". And what of bad consequences? In the US, I presume the solution is "go to court and sue them", but since this is not the drug manufacturer, I don't think this woman has multi-millions to pay out damages. Of course, the courts could take the view "you knew this stuff was dangerous and you voluntarily took it, it's your own fault for being a damn fool".
"Legal drugs is a million times more defensible than legal abortion. Since, you know, "doesn't hurt anyone else" is undeniable in one case and very much deniable in the other."
Legal drugs do hurt others, though. Alcohol is legal and the bad effects are not confined to the drinker alone, all the drink-driving cases and fights and assaults etc. in the news will tell you that. The thing is, you can't have both point 3 *and* point 4. If you make all drugs legal, then after a while any attempts to stigmatise abusers of hard drugs will get the same treatment as trying to stigmatise abortion or LGBT+, I don't know what prefix will go before "phobe" for "people who don't like those who take drugs" but I'm sure someone will find a catchy label in the same vein as homophobe, transphobe, misogynist, etc.
'If it's legal, it's normal, and if it's normal, you can't criticise it' is the way this develops for all social liberalisation.
> 'If it's legal, it's normal, and if it's normal, you can't criticise it'
Is that really true? ISTM society criticises people who become injured or die while doing idiotic and/or extremely risky things all the time, loudly and at length.
Yup, or postmortem ridicule, as in the Darwin Awards...
Cannabis is nowhere near as bad as alcohol and seems to have no negative effects when you control for the obvious confounding variables. For instance this twin study failed to find any of the negative effects that people claim to exist based on weaker types of correlational research:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8040790/
I'd also argue that psychedelics are also pretty good for both individuals and society if they're used responsibly. But that's a whole different can of worms I could get into if you want.
I think the biggest case in favor of psychedelics if that they fill a void left by the dearth of non-shitty religions which are effective for inducing religious experiences in modern society.
We restrict people from making decisions they are not properly capable of dealing with. Kids can't make contracts, consent to sex etc. because they lack the mental capacity for the risk/reward reasoning involved. Elderly people with dementia aren't allowed to try to make their way out of the sheltered housing and back to where they think they live, because they are not capable of reasoning about their actual situation. People experiencing a mental health crisis are deprived of their freedom to act because they are not capable of rational decisions about harming themselves or those around them.
Preventing people from seeking out and ingesting substances that rapidly remove people's capacity to reason about the risk/reward tradeoffs of seeking out and ingesting those substances seems entirely consistent with the other things society agrees on.
This is also how people end up with positions where they endorse some drugs but not others, that might sound inconsistent if you only consider harm to people around the user and not the user's mental capacity: the most problematic drugs are the ones that directly, rapidly and strongly destroy one's capacity to reason about ingesting more of themselves.
This is an excellent comment and I hope OP reads it.
In a perfectly rational/moral society, it would be possible for hard drugs to be legal and also nobody takes them because it is acknowledged drugs are bad and social stigmatisation is successful in keeping people from committing sin.
We are not living in a perfectly rational/moral society.
If you want bad things to be stigmatised, and for that to result in "people don't do the bad thing", you have to back it up with "this is not legal and will get you into trouble with the law, not just your boring Aunt Sarah tut-tutting at you or your parents crying over how you've disappointed them".
If you want bad things to be legal, then you have to accept that "Just Say No!" won't work and people *will* do the bad things.
Maybe drugs are bad and maybe they aren't. I'm making the slightly different point that it's hard to defend someone's right to freely choose how to behave in scenarios where they in fact lack the capacity to freely choose how to behave.
We (by and large) don't defend horny teenagers' right to consent, we don't defend alzheimers' patients' right to go "home" to the building site where their house used to be, we don't defend the rights of the involutarily committed to set themselves and everything around them on fire... we shouldn't defend the addict's "choice" to get another fix. Their decision-making is broken - they lack the capacity to freely decide, even though this lack is due to their own past decisions. (It may not feel to them as though this is the case, but that's generally how these scenarios feel from the inside - by and large all the parties in less controversial situations like the ones I mention also think they are freely making choices!)
A commenter below suggests that people should be free to try heroin exactly once in their life, which I do find hard to argue against on the above basis except that it does not seem enforceable in practice.
>Their decision-making is broken - they lack the capacity to freely decide, even though this lack is due to their own past decisions.
Careful about that - it applies with about equal force to "cults" and, in many cases, to quite widespread religions. I'm, personally, not a fan of religions, but trying to contain them, besides being unconstitutional (writing from the USA), rapidly gets violent.
Its hard to find people who support legalising but enforcing mass stigmatising of people because its a fairly incoherent position to hold. One of the main benefits of having the police enforce social norms is that the justice system ensures they get a fair trial and fair punishment. If you want both society at large to stigmatise people and for the police not to get involved you are calling for them to be unemployable and lonely until they comply at best and lynched at worst. The only real difference between wanting social norms enforced by the police or by stigmatising people is the rule of law. People should have the right to not associate with who they want but if you want everyone to hold the view that these people should be stigmatised then it is more ethical to just write it into law rather than relying on mob justice to be fair.
(1) You correctly describe the mood here as "libertarian-ish", so why are you so sure we should accept personal possession of hard drugs? You admit that drugs are terrible and ruin lives (potentially including the lives of others); unless you are a completely doctrinaire libertarian (rather than "ish"), this seems like a natural thing to ban for people's own good. Given that many (?) drug users would say they're addicted and they wish they could stop using drugs, I'm not sure that rational choice theory really applies here. https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-experiment is about gambling and not drugs, but I think it does a good job hammering in the intuitions.
(4) I think pro-choice people would argue that fetuses are only minimally moral agents, whereas drug users are definitely moral agents, so it's not obvious that abortion harms a moral agent but drug use doesn't. Also, even aside from costs, abortion probably has more benefits than drug use (helps people have families when they want and not otherwise).
> You admit that drugs are terrible and ruin lives (potentially including the lives of others); unless you are a completely doctrinaire libertarian (rather than "ish"), this seems like a natural thing to ban for people's own good.
Except the pendulum has swung the other way now, with fentanyl / opiate deaths the leading cause of death for people under 40, beating out car accidents, and responsible for ~100k overdose deaths per year.
The rate before the "opiate crisis" made it impossible to get painkillers from actual doctors was ~20k a year.
Arguably, legalizing even bad drugs like opiates would TODAY save 80k lives annually, most of them under 40, many of whom would go on to be economically and socially productive.
I think our "banning for people's own good" has clearly swung into the "net damage" regime, and only legalization of safe, pharmaceutically pure opiates is going to get us out of this equilibrium and stop fentanyl deaths, because it's both cheaper and far easier to smuggle due to potency.
As long as opiates are illegal, fentanyl is going to be killing tens of thousands per year.
IIRC fentanyl death rates have been falling for a couple of years, maybe owing to the accessibility of NARCAN.
We have to distinguish between separate problems: a) addiction rates, b) fentanyl OD/death, c) painkiller availability
The latter is not a very serious consideration let alone as important. If anything, strong painkillers have been overprescribed for years and exacerbated opioid addiction https://drugabusestatistics.org/opioid-epidemic/ (there are probably better sources). They *are* still available to patients, but alternatives should be opted for where appropriate, including marijuana.
Climbing addiction rates is the most serious problem. Qua OD rates we can make some argument in favor of legalization assuming that what is on offer is heavily controlled and restricted, but that doesn't touch why people are turning to hard drugs and would not necessarily help at that.
Far as I can tell the most successful countries, if we're measuring in terms of rate of drug abuse and addiction, prohibit drug consumption. They also enforce heavy punishment. Advocates seem to want to explain away their success as a matter of "culture", but I don't find this convincing; you cannot divorce culture from law, and all of these countries have had a history with drugs (see: Opium wars).
> Climbing addiction rates is the most serious problem.
Maybe I'm feeling cold-hearted today, but if people want to get addicted to climbing, I'll say let them.
I don't really see why - if it's illegitimate to care about the quality of someone else's life, or the quality of the lives around them, especially children - "my life on heroin is just as good or better than your non-opiate-clouded life" - society should care whether they live or die - as the possibility of death seems integrally bound up with the chosen activity.
For instance, there is a current effort at shaming. Not shaming drug users - shaming everybody else for not carrying narcan around, or having it near at hand in all public places.
So you use the narcan to save someone on the sidewalk. Should you then look for that person every day, and save them every day if necessary? That doesn't seem very hands off to me. That seems like stopping them from *doing the thing*. Very much like stopping drug use at a particular stage.
Supposedly fentanyl deaths are down. Fentanyl dealers "got the message" or are becoming more responsible or something. Maybe these things will be less fraught if fentanyl can be made "safer".
I am sure I will be pilloried for this comment. Still, a question: do the people pushing the narcan project - really expect that it will be normal for the populace to run around sticking narcan in one another on the regular? People will be willing to do that forever? Or is the idea that we should all improve our lives with drug use, and then the narcan thing will be a simple courtesy, much like it used to be common to give someone a cigarette or a light?
Can you spell out how legalizing opiates would make the Fentanyl problem go away, rather than just adding another one on top?
> Can you spell out how legalizing opiates would make the Fentanyl problem go away, rather than just adding another one on top?
People overdose on fentanyl for three primary reasons:
1. It's the only opiate around because it's much more compact to smuggle and is cheap - one kilo can serve an entire city for a few weeks to a month
2. The difference between "feeling good" and "OD" are 1-2mg, which is tiny, and there is no such thing as standardized strength and potency in the illegal markets.
3. Fentanyl contamination in coke and speed, or "chocolate chip cookie" effects of clusters in otherwise cut opiates kills people, because drug sellers bag other drugs on surfaces with fentanyl, or don't mix well enough, etc.
In other words, the vast majority of the deaths are accidental, and involve unknown quantities and strengths, poor practices and mixing, and fiddly dosing. Additionally, many addicts prefer non-fentanyl opiates when they can get them, they're just impossible to get nowadays, due to price and due to doctors no longer prescribing legal opiates.
Legal, pharmaceutically pure drugs of known strength eliminate all those problems. They are also dirt cheap. Even the heaviest opiate addict can be high out of their minds on <$5 a day at legal prices.
As a nod towards the fact that it would save tens of thousands of lives - back when fentanyl didn't exist, and it was heroin at unknown quantities and strengths, there were 5x fewer overdose deaths. This is because the amount of headroom between feeling good and dying was much bigger, and there was more tolerance for getting dosing wrong.
Arguably, known strengths and quantities would have eliminated a large chunk of even those 20k deaths.
Thanks. Are conventional opiates comparable to fentanyl in how they make the user feel? In other words, would a fentanyl user actually switch as soon other opiates become available?
Also, we had 20k opiate overdose deaths when opiates were illegal, expensive and unsafe. Presumably, making them legal, cheap and predictable would attract a much wider user base. Can we be sure that that wouldn' overcompensate for what we would gain on the fentanyl front?
> Thanks. Are conventional opiates comparable to fentanyl in how they make the user feel? In other words, would a fentanyl user actually switch as soon other opiates become available?
There's two factors pulling either way - because fentanyl is ubuiquitous and much stronger, some addicts are so deep they can ONLY get high on fentanyl now, and would keep using it, because regular opiates like heroin or oxycodone can't do it for them any more.
But for users who are not that deep, a majority of them would switch to other opiates, because they're safer and many prefer the "feel" of heroin or oxies over fentanyl. You can see this being discussed on darknet forums like dread (the darkweb reddit), or by talking to long-term junkies who've experienced non-fentanyl opiates.
> Also, we had 20k opiate overdose deaths when opiates were illegal, expensive and unsafe. Presumably, making them legal, cheap and predictable would attract a much wider user base. Can we be sure that that wouldn' overcompensate for what we would gain on the fentanyl front?
This is a good question.
I'll point to the fact that during the Sackler heyday, where many tens (and likely hundreds) of thousands of people were addicted to pharmaceutical oxies, we didn't really have many major social ills, overdose deaths were low, and the economy was booming. It is only after we cracked down that we saw a big shift, as all that "opiate demand" that got cut off from legal supplies moved first into heroin, then into fentanyl. I'd post a graph that shows this, but we can't post inline images in comments yet. And of course, in terms of social ills now we have fentanyl zombies roaming rampant, groaning and OD-ing in public everywhere.
Opiates are pretty mild physically, in the sense that users and addicts can generally operate and function just fine as long as they have a reliable and non-dangerous supply. I'm personally not worried about an expanded user base leading to more deaths, for the reasons I've articulated, although it will almost certainly lead to more opiate usage. If they are cheap and pharmaceutically pure, I honestly don't care much about more usage though - it's not going to drive much crime, if any, if everyone can be as high as they want for single dollars a day.
Everything after that is a personal choice, like smoking or drinking or feeding yourself and your kids fast food for most meals.
First, yeah I see the confusion, and this comes up often in arguments with other people but I keep forgetting it: I think of "libertarianish" as about how big the circle of fundamental freedoms are. So I'd call myself that because I really only think speech (without exception), things that directly affect no one but yourself, and things involving free association and free movement (within a jurisdiction) should never be infringed, but by that I mean *never*, no matter the consequences. While things like taxes and immigration and assisted euthanasia are in a different category, and can be subject to a cost-benefit analysis. Wheras an extreme libertarian would include all those things in the "never infringe" circle as well.
But others...just seem to rank levels of liberty by how many bad consequences they're willing to accept. So "libertarianish" is freedom only to do things that aren't *that* harmful (direct or indirect, positive or negative) and strong libertarian is freedom even with bad results. I don't like this way of distinguishing things, because it seems like nothing's ever really a fundamental right, and everything can be restricted if someone can make an argument for its long-term harm (isn't this exactly how cancel culture is justified?). But at least I understand the value difference, thanks.
Second, the main issue I really wanted to point out, which I didn't really make clear, was that a lot of people here seem to endorse banning drugs but ALSO a lot of people here seem to endorse taking drugs. Yes, maybe not the same drugs, and maybe not the same people, but I find it very jarring. It seems like the opposite combination is much more defensible.
(Mostly, people seem to normalise taking acid. Don't people die from that? Doesn't that normalise other recreational drugs? I feel like "drugs are bad you idiot!" responses are missing from the acid comments, AND "freedom is non-negotiable" rrsponses are missing from the toughening possession sentences comments...which again I find really jarring...but maybe I'm getting a warped perspective?)
I think most people here who endorse taking drugs are talking about psychedelics, and most people who endorse banning drugs are talking about opioids or the like. I don't think there are many people who endorse the same drugs they want to ban.
But I also don't think it would be completely crazy for some hypothetical person to want this. I once read an essay by someone talking about the French attitude toward affairs, which is something like - every politician is having an affair, but every politician will also condemn affairs, and this is load-bearing, because a world where everyone has affairs is actually quite different from a world where everyone has affairs AND there's common-knowledge of this AND everyone does it publicly and shamelessly. I think this is the strongest argument for decriminalization as opposed to full legalization; in decriminalization, at least people have to be circumspect, and corporations can't put BUY OUR HEROIN billboards on every major road.
I don't think people actually die from acid. I've heard maybe one report of someone thinking they could fly and falling out a window, but that was decades ago and I don't even know if it was true. I don't think it's actually possible to die from the drug itself. I'm not a big fan of acid because I think it can warp your personality long-term (though some people start with bad personalities and are trying to change and I'm not sure how good a plan that is or isn't). But as far as actual biological stuff, it's about as safe as they come.
> in decriminalization, at least people have to be circumspect, and corporations can't put BUY OUR HEROIN billboards on every major road.
Would quibble that this also applies to Tobacco companies in most Western countries, and we're seeing mounting pressure to curb gambling advertising.
Legalization has one major advantage: sin tax. If politically viable, it's effective. Collapsing rates of tobacco consumption in the West is a success story (not *only* attributed to tax of course but it is part of the formula). Mind you, consumption is rising in developing parts of the world, which explains why profits are still rising for those companies.
Drugs aside, I also believe legalization would better protect and serve sex workers, and the "Nordic model" has been an abject failure. But that is another conversation.
> I don't think people actually die from acid.
Not directly, but it messes both with your sense of thirst and your ability to expel liquids. Advice used to be to make a deliberate effort to stay hydrated, until https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Leah_Betts - no idea what it is these days.
That was MDMA, acid is LSD
Gah, you're right, of course.
Libertarian tendencies run into the tendencies of smart people to think that they can make better decisions than other people and that includes making them for you. So things they like are good and things they don't are bad and should be banned.
We control dangerous things. Was going to say guns, but you sound American, but even you are not allowed fully automatic assault weapons. In answer to the "problems go away with legalization" claim look at the trouble Freud caused by endorsing completely legal cocaine as a wonder drug. Nobody is not transformed into a complete dick by cocaine, and taking it is therefore not something the taker is doing only to themselves.
> but even you are not allowed fully automatic assault weapons.
This is false. You can own a machine gun, but it has to be one produced and registered before 1986. At the federal level anyway, there are a number of states that ban possession. Also, I think if you work as a permitted federal gun dealer you can possess them, but you would have to give them up when you retired.
The restrictions on machine guns are effective enough that you never hear about them actually being used to commit crimes.
I think it's more that a pistol works just fine for most scenarios. Most people who are using guns for crime aren't using them to gun down massive crowds, and at that point there's just better ways to kill huge amounts of people. Like arson, bombs, or sarin.
I propose to consider first a case that is in my opinion analogous and less infused in context -- making it mandatory to wear seat belts in cars (to avoid distractions: with only one passenger). This is to my mind a very clear-cut case where there is no plausible way in which not wearing a seat belt can hurt anyone else than the driver, not wearing a seat belt is a behaviour whose disadvantages strongly outweight the discomfort, and the support for making it mandatory to wear seat belts seems very strong. For this reason I find it to be a very clear case where a given regulation has a clearly positive impact on a given issue, and yet is completely irreconcilable with basic liberal principles. I'm wondering what the opinions here are.
> and the support for making it mandatory to wear seat belts seems very strong
It is _now_. When these laws were introduced, predictably (?) there was a backlash (citation needed).
More starkly: you are walking along a bridge and you see someone about to jump off. Do you try to stop them, or do you respect their freedom to make their own life choices?
Does talking to them count as trying to stop them, or do you only mean physical restraint?
> you see someone about to jump off.
No, I don't see anything.
Does a depressed person have the moral or legal capacity to make decisions? We as a society has declared this to be "no" (although some European countries are now offing MAID to people with depression so this may change). Same question for people who are addicted to a drug. Although I guess that you can make the argument that it should be legal to possess an addictive substance and use it the first time but then illegal after you show signs of addiction (unworkable of course).
A very good example and at least in some legislations, including the one I'm currently living in, it is required by law that you try to stop them. In my case, I could be jailed for up to three years for not doing so, so I'm strongly incentivised to give the former answer to your question, regardless of my philosophical positions.
Was anyone else shocked by the number of people cheering on the death of the UnitedHealth CEO? Is this just a phenomenon among terminally online users/trolls/mentally deranged individuals or is there actual widespread support for killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
I was also highly disappointed in Bluesky not marking Taylor Lorenz's post supporting the murder as "hate speech", despite this being a VERY clear violation of rules for any reasonably-run platform. I feel like this completely shatters the idea of Bluesky moderation being reasonable in any shape or form.
I think that it's like the women who chose the bear, in the viral question of whether they'd prefer the company of man or a bear, if they were out in the wild.
I highly doubt that women's revealed preferences through behavior would match the proportion who answered 'bear.' Instead, choosing 'bear' is a way to signal to the listener that the speaker is a person who takes the problem of men very seriously.
As in many instances of revealed preferences diverging from expressed preferences, the speaker probably isn't aware of this discrepancy.
Similarly, with the moral question of murdering the CEO, expressing support for the murder is a way of signaling to others and oneself that one takes the problem of capitalism / big business / insurance / healthcare very seriously.
What post are you referring to? Can you provide a link or direct quote?
https://tinyurl.com/bdz5efn4 => this one "Woke up to see this spammed in my group chats"
Ah, I see the confusion. CEOs are not a protected class.
Yes. Very disheartening.
Either huge numbers of people support the murder of a CEO, or they’re actually expressing a different and less extreme sentiment about their dissatisfaction with things, only you can decide which one is more plausible.
I think this is true. Actions speak louder than words, so to speak. I imagine the jury will find him guilty.
I genuinely hope that I'm wrong, yes.
> Was anyone else shocked by the number of people cheering on the death of the UnitedHealth CEO?
Not in the slightest.
Were you really stupid/naïve enough to think Bluesky moderation would be "reasonable" or are you playing it up for rhetorical effect? It was glaringly obvious to me it would be left-wing.
At least one highly reasonable friend of mine told me that their moderation is fair, reasonable and objective. I've been keeping an open mind about it until I saw that Taylor Lorenz wasn't flagged...
I'm uneasy about it, but more because I think that if assassination is normalized, it won't just happen to the people you want dead.
I have to admit that my first emotional response was schadenfreude, and the implication that we're moving back into a troubled times where might is right came moments later. On the one hand, it's ridiculous to live with a system that charges more than a year's wages to give birth to child (with varying levels of class based price discrimination through insurance), or absurd amounts to set a broken bone. However, rule by assassination tends to be more cathartic than effective, and begets more of assassinations down the line.
There's a line in The Brothers Karamazov that's relevant here, "Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of
all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of
their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply
tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set
before them as their goal--such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength
of many of them."
If it's ridiculous to charge more than a year's wages to give birth to a child, it's ridiculaous whether United Healthcare picks up the tab or not-- and would continue to be ridiculous if it were the state paying.
And yet the people charging those prices are treated as saints (unless they are drug companies) while the people telling them “hey, knock it off, we ain’t paying for that” are treated as monsters.
>Was anyone else shocked by the number of people cheering on the death of the UnitedHealth CEO? Is this just a phenomenon among terminally online users/trolls/mentally deranged individuals or is there actual widespread support for killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
I think this situation is confounded by the fact that the whole thing is really fucking cool.
Murder is (usually) bad, United might been a particularly shitty insurance company, but killing the CEO is probably not going to improve healthcare in the US, and an environment in which economically and/or politically relevant people are at risk of assasination is probably not a good thing... but! The way it was carried out, the corny engraving on the bullet shells, the mystery surrouding the motive, the one picture from a security camera... it's just a very magnetic story, and people who are prone to know better might feel compelled to look past the obviously bad things, like when you say "X villain did nothing wrong" mostly-ironically-but-not-quite.
This is precisely what's going on. The CEO killer is almost movie-like in "cool factor". And dare I say some find this refreshing after what the two would-be Trump assassins were like?
The CEO killer gives off the vibe of a modern-day Robin Hood who takes it a bit further than merely stealing from the rich. This sort of thing can hijack people's typical moral standards, especially if there's a legitimate grievance at play here.
>killing people who's companies do stuff you don't agree with?
That feels rather akin to saying that Bin Laden was just the leader of an organization that you disagree with, but his death was still bad because political violence is never justified.
When people imagine what the assassins motivations might be, the most likely scenario is one in which he ends up looking far more sympathetic than the CEO.
I very much doubt a single person driven to medical bankruptcy, or with a family member killed by United Health denying their medical coverage will have any more sympathy for Thompson than they would for Bin Laden after he was shot.
This is not a partisan issue either, Ben Shapiro's comment section was basically unanimous in cheering on the guys death.
Completely agreed that Bin Laden is the right comparison to Thompson. I've read estimates that CEO Thompson , leading UHC to deny care at three times the rate of the industry, was responsible for about 6,000 deaths of my countrymen per year, about doubling Bin Laden's death toll. I would _prefer_ that such actions be handled predictably, within the law, that Thompson be handled as something like "conspiracy to commit mass murder", and that he be arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged.
Unfortunately, this wasn't feasible even in Bin Laden's case, but I salute both the men who killed Bin Laden and the man who killed Thompson.
Great. Now re-run the scenario for a person that wasn't leading an insurance company, but was mistaken for one by the vigilante. And then again for a person who was doing a lot of things, some good, some bad, and the vigilante came to a different judgment than you would have.
Finally, we're going to take two Thompsons, five lookalikes, and fifty of the some-good/some-bads, and mix them all around and not tell you which is which.
>Now re-run the scenario for a person that wasn't leading an insurance company, but was mistaken for one by the vigilante.
Many Thanks! This is part of why I would _prefer_ that Thompson's death had been a lawful execution, following arrest, charge, trial, conviction, and sentencing. Albeit, even with due process, the law also sometimes screws up, sometimes in simply getting the wrong guy.
Come to think of it, what do you think of Bin Laden's killing? And how sure are you that we didn't get the wrong guy in that case? There wasn't a police line-up...
I
Bin Laden's killing was an example of what I'll call a "hot" encounter - there's insufficient capability there to send in uniformed law enforcement, apprehend him, cuff him, read him his rights, etc. The forces of law had to go into a location where they had no control, but they still needed to go, and they had to go right then (OBL routinely moved between multiple secret locations), and therefore they had to resort to riskier measures. An operation like that could certainly result in mistakes, such as collateral damage, inaccurate intel, freak events such as bad weather or an enemy sentry just happening to linger at one spot, seizure of friendly resources by the enemy, and the death of the enforcers going in. Fortunately, US forces know all that, and have the means to mitigate those risks, and this case, it paid off.
The Thompson murder was a case where the actor could have avoided a hot encounter by suing Thompson instead. He also did not have the means to mitigate all the risks. He apparently practiced with his weapon and planned the encounter, but it could still have gone wrong in a dozen ways, and even now, he has little means to mitigate the aftermath (a trial; increased security for healthcare CEOs in the future; increased insurance prices to be borne by future customers). Copycats may appear, and they can't rely on his luck. Everyone is that much more at risk.
>Bin Laden's killing was an example of what I'll call a "hot" encounter - there's insufficient capability there to send in uniformed law enforcement, apprehend him, cuff him, read him his rights, etc.
True! Many Thanks!
>The Thompson murder was a case where the actor could have avoided a hot encounter by suing Thompson instead.
Unfortunately, this generally accomplishes nothing. Now, while I'm glad Thompson was killed, I'm not fond of informal executions. Amongst other problems, since they aren't routine, they can't be relied on to deter. That would be a big advantage of _legally_ hanging CEOs who spearhead murderous policies. And CEOs, unlike garden variety killers, have enough foresight that the prospect of a hemp noose around their throat, even at the end of an extended trial, stands a decent chance of incentivizing modified behavior.
It's completely absurd to compare Bin Laden to the CEO of a health insurance company and you know it.
> It's completely absurd to compare Bin Laden to the CEO of a health insurance company and you know it.
Literally his entire job and the companies entire PURPOSE and financial motive is "killing sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line."
Arguably, health insurance companies are *much worse* than ISIS, because they certainly kill more Americans than ISIS ever has.
They just do it with adjustments and claim denials and friction and making it hard or impossible for sick people to get further treatment (and thereby spend more on healthcare, and thereby cost United more money, and thereby negatively impact United's bottom line), instead of bombs and planes.
Because it's not legible, because it's distributed over many hundreds of thousands of individuals, because they're not literally putting guns against individual sick grandma's and children's heads and pulling a trigger, they get away with it.
But I maintain in any rational moral calculus, they should weigh as worse than ISIS, at least to any average American. Certainly, you or someone you love is more likely to die due to a decision made at United than in ISIS.
I personally think the dude's a hero and hope this is part of an ongoing trend, and have been inspired such that if I ever receive a terminal diagnosis, I now have some fun ideas on how to spend my last weeks / months.
Well said! 100% agreed!
Relative to the average level of comment quality in a given forum/group/etc where the comment is made, this is worst comment I have ever seen on the internet. I can only think of the scene from Billy Madison:
“What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”
Holy shit, I never knew someone could be so wrong. If this was posted in 4chan I'd say "based", but it's weird to see in ACX
I really think you ought to say why it is so wrong if you're posting something like this. As it stands, you're making a statement of opinion as if it were a fact, which seems no different from the comment to which you're responding, except that comment has more explanation to it.
To be clear, I disagree with the statement "dude's a hero", but otherwise it has some truth to it. Your post basically reads as "You're completely wrong", which I understand is the kind of comment from which we want to steer clear.
I get you. Just posting "you're wrong" is bad. I swear I'm better usually, even though I don't always get it right. But seriously, just read what the dude posted.
> Literally his entire job and the companies entire PURPOSE and financial motive is "killing sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line."
Do I really need to refute that? For real?
> Arguably, health insurance companies are much worse than ISIS, because they certainly kill more Americans than ISIS ever has.
Again, seriously? Is it not self evident? Letting it slide that they just implied that non-americans have no moral value, do I really need to say why that's wrong?
There's something fundamental you're missing here and in order to get to the heart of it you need to answer this very critical question:
If you had a family member who died because of the delay caused by their critical medical care being denied, due to the policies this guy personally oversaw (like say their new automated AI denial system) then would you feel the same way?
Because I would be shocked if you or anyone who's condemning this violence would feel the same way if it was you or your loved ones who were killed or had their lived personally ruined directly because of this guys decisions.
I think this absolutely about a lack of empathy, except not on the part of the people cheering for this guys death, but on the part of the people who don't see why he should be viewed as a mass murderer in the first place.
Very much agreed! My sympathy is with the victims of that CEO. For the CEO itself, to echo one comment I've read, my sympathy is "out of network"
Indeed. And my sympathy is currently with Luigi as well.
Many Thanks! Mine as well.
I absolutely would condemn a vigilante killing like in any and all circumstances. Taking the law into one's own hands and becoming judge jury and executioner is NEVER warranted.
no functioning justice system exists in the United States for individuals of Thompson's net worth
in ordinary circumstances, vigilantism is bad. In these circumstances, it's the only possible form of justice people like him ever face.
Plenty of people much richer than Brian Thompson have been sent off to lengthy prison terms. Most notably in this community, Samuel Bankman-Fried had a net worth at least two orders of magnitude greater than Thompson. Jeffrey Epstein was maybe "only" one order of magnitude richer than Thompson. Likewise Elizabeth Holmes, and Martha Stewart back in the day.
We have a functioning justice system in the United States for people who *commit actual crimes*. It isn't perfect, but it works tolerably well even when rich people are involved. What we don't have, is a "justice" system that functions against people who are really really hated because they are emblematic of life being unfair even when everything is done legally. And properly so, because that wouldn't actually be justice.
Sure it is: if the law doesn't punish whoever wronged you adequately (or at all), if you want justice you have get it yourself, usually through vengeance. It's a mark of the effectiveness of statist propaganda that this isn't obvious to everyone.
Agreed. Regrettably, there is an instability, leading to never ending blood feuds like the Hatfields and the McCoys or the Middle East. I would _prefer_ to have seen CEO Thompson arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged. But we didn't manage that with Bin Laden either, and Bin Laden killed fewer of us than Thompson did.
Re: if you want justice you have get it yourself, usually through vengeance.
This is profoundly wrong. In fact it is downright evil and if followed generally would lead to bellum omnium contra omnes (a war of all against all). The provision of justice belongs to the community (when not to God). It never belongs to the individual.
I really don't get the impression that most of the people I've seen approving of the assassination have actually been personally affected.
A lot of us are in the "There but for the role of the dice go I" position. I had UHC insurance at a few points but had the luck to never be seriously ill during those times.
1. ERs don't check your insurance status. If someone needs care NOW, you'll get it regardless of what UnitedHealthcare has to say about it.
2. If this was a relative over the age of 65, they'd be covered by Medicare and United's policies wouldn't matter.
3. If this was about a family member under the age of 65 who still had many good years to go if only they got a certain treatment, I'd blame only myself for not securing a better health insurance policy for them. Similarly I'd only blame myself for a relative ending up in a car accident that could've been prevented if they had a better car with assisted-driving and better safety features.
4. If there was absolutely no way for me to secure better coverage for them and United was the only option and the relative died too soon due to their policies, I'd wish for a change in the legal system, but wouldn't wish for a vigilante to execute their CEO.
Two points of contention.
> ERs don't check your insurance status. If someone needs care NOW, you'll get it regardless of what UnitedHealthcare has to say about it.
This is *kinda* bullshit. Yes, it's true that if you are currently bleeding out, you can walk into an ER and they will treat you. But there are a lot of diseases that don't manifest as urgent, but will still kill you at a much faster timeline, that an ER WON'T treat you for. Basically every cancer. Heart disease. Depression. Diabetes.
There are a lot of people who need care NOW, because NOW is the time to stop the disease that will progress in 5 years and kill them. 5 years from now is too late.
> I'd blame only myself for not securing a better health insurance policy for them
Without a dog in the larger fight, this strikes me as very out of touch. Many young people have chronic issues that are a) absolutely treatable, b) arbitrarily expensive to treat, c) are entirely due to external causes (i.e. not personal choice), d) debilitating, and e) not urgent enough to warrant ER (though ER would still bankrupt you anyway).
For someone who can't afford good healthcare, say because they don't have/can't get a job that pays for it, they are forced into option 4 basically immediately. In other words, you have a sizeable chunk of people who are just suffering, and who's only available option under your standard is to _wish_ for a change.
And even for people who DO have good healthcare from their job, think about how limiting that is. Those people can no longer _leave_ that job, for risk of serious health risk or medical bankruptcy. That is a nontrivial infringement of liberties! Imagine if your boss held a gun to your kids head, 'sorry you can't leave this job or little Timmy gets it'. For a parent with a kid with a chronic condition, this is basically the deal.
The US healthcare system as currently set up creates an underclass of people -- those who were unfortunate enough to be born sick or get sick. These people have fewer rights, fewer mobility, and fewer options than everyone else.
Re: If this was a relative over the age of 65, they'd be covered by Medicare and United's policies wouldn't matter.
See: Supplemental insurance policies (Medicare only covers 80% of the bills), an of course Medicare Advanatge plans. United Health is HUGE in this area.
It did not surprise me.
I think most people who "celebrated" the killing were not expressing a belief that CEOs of companies that do stuff they don't agree with should be killed. It was more of a "I'm happy someone killed him, but of course I wouldn't do it myself" or "I believe in karma/divine retribution/whatever and I'm happy he got what he deserved" type of people.
Most people were saying precisely that explicitly. Is it your contention that they didn't mean it?
Maybe my sample wasn't big enough.
I am in Japan for Ten days. Everywhere I have gone in Tokyo and Kyoto over the past week the majority of the people on the streets are young adults and children. Where is the population implosion happening?
I was under the impression that the answer was `the countryside,' and that most of the young people (that still exist) were in fact concentrated in Tokyo/Kyoto/Osaka.
From what I have read, if you want to see the ghost towns, you need to go to the boonies.
What makes you think that the streets, or really any specific place and time, show a representative sample of the population?
I’m not saying that what I am seeing is representative. I just wanted to have a better understanding of the problem.
I had a similar reaction when I visited, a few thoughts:
1. It's common to see parents with just one child and rare to see families with 2+ kids. For a country to have near/above-replacement fertility, you need a bunch of families with three or more children to offset the childless.
2. Tokyo’s population skews younger compared to the national average, with about 20% over 65 vs 30% for the country overall. Retirees move out of the city for cheaper living, and younger people move towards Tokyo. As someone else pointed out, some districts in Tokyo also have noticeably older populations.
3. Most Japanese adults work a lot. If you spend time walking around the city during typical work hours, you'll see a disproportionately high number of people with young kids, which won't reflect the actual population distribution.
4. Very old people (80+) start disappearing into retirement homes and home-care.
Japan is a very crowded country. It's not clear why such a place should have above replacement fertility.
Bangladesh, Israel, the Netherlands & Rwanda have a higher population density, and fertility rate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
The birth rate is 1.2 per woman, way below the replacement rate 0f 2.1.
Right. And if they continue on this path then in a couple of hundred years they'll have about five million people, just like another similarly-sized similar-climate similar-terrain archipelago, New Zealand.
Would it be a disaster if Japan looked more like New Zealand? Japanese countryside is beautiful, there should be more of it.
Only in countries with mass immigration is low fertility a problem. Japan is the one place on Earth that _isn't_ going to turn into Nigeria.
Thank you; it is reassuring to find a sane take on population occasionally.
> Where is the population implosion happening?
Ha! I notice the same thing in Singapore. Japan has an excuse - they have a hinterland. Everyone young moves to Tokyo because that's where all the fun and economic activity is, but if you go to the rural areas outside of Tokyo, it's all old people.
But Singapore is a city state, and has had <1.15 fertility since 2003, and <1.8 fertility since 1978(!). There IS no back country or hinterland.
And yet I spend significant amounts of time there, and everywhere I see it's smiling young couples with babies. On the metro, on the river walk, at restaurants, in Bugis - *everywhere.*
It is the single biggest disconnect I've seen between "official statistics" and "lived experience" anywhere in the world, and I still don't understand it.
> And yet I spend significant amounts of time there, and everywhere I see it's smiling young couples with babies.
Is that "babies" plural, in that you see lots of couples with multiple kids? Or just a general "I see lots of couples out with a single baby"?
If it's the latter, then your lived experience makes perfect sense. Even if every single couple has one child, that's still a TFR of only 1. In order to reach replacement level, every couple (on average) needs to have at least two children. (In a real country with a TFR of ~2, that usually looks like a few couples having 1, most couples having 2, a few couples having 3+, and a few couples having none.)
That's... actually a lot of kids! I don't know how old you are, but if you're in the primary age range of the ACX readership (mid-20s through mid-40s), think of your own personal social circle. Out of all your friends and family of childbearing age, how many are in committed relationships? How many have two children? One? None? Because in a country with replacement-level fertility, most young couples have at least two children. Do they? Imagine every single couple you know having two children. Do you feel a knee-jerk, "Woah, that's a lot of kids"? I definitely do when I try this myself.
You can have extensive fertility decline *even if most couples still have a kid.* The proportion of childless couples has grown slightly, but the big decline has been from most families going from 2-3 children down to 1, maybe 2.
Chart 5: https://www.population.gov.sg/images/press%20release%20images/pdfs/marriage-and-parenthood-trends-in-singapore.pdf
The majority of married Singaporeans in their 30s still have 2 or more kids (as of 2011), but about 1/3rd of people in that age range remain single.
I think you see the small children more in Tokyo and Singapore because they are out in public more. It's a combination of:
1) Less car dependence, better public transport. The equivalent children in America are inside an SUV
2) Higher (perceived) safety. People are not worried about taking children around in the city center. The American children are out in the suburbs.
There aren't actually more children. You rarely see playgrounds full of children, unless it's at a school.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2024/ => 11.5% under age 14 in Japan
https://www.populationpyramid.net/singapore/2024/ => 11.8% under age of 14 in Singapore
https://www.populationpyramid.net/uzbekistan/2024/ => 31% (!) under age 14 in Uzbekistan, which still has a TFR over 3.0.
You'd still see a group numbering 11-12% of the population everywhere around you, but you need to go visit a country with a large TFR to understand what the difference is.
> You'd still see a group numbering 11-12% of the population everywhere around you, but you need to go visit a country with a large TFR to understand what the difference is.
Thanks, I appreciate the grounding in data. The country I've spent the majority of my time in over the past year hits ~28% by that metric, and it doesn't really feel hugely different than Singapore or Tokyo?
The USA is only 17.3%, and Tokyo and Singapore feels like MORE couples and babies than most US cities in terms of public life, but that's probably lifestyle differences.
Actually, lifestyle differences probably explain a lot about it - pretty much everyone metros in Singapore in Tokyo, including families with kids, and pretty much everyone with kids drives in the USA and many other countries / cities.
I think there's more general "public life" mixing in Singapore and Tokyo as a result, whereas in driving-centric places, families with kids go to different types of businesses, and you never see them in transit because they're in their individual cars.
I just got back from a few weeks in Taipei, and that felt lower fertility than Singapore or Tokyo, but alas, your site doesn't have Taiwan as a comparison point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan
Taiwan is at 12.22% as per Wiki. Not sure how to explain the visual difference, maybe Taiwanese kids don't go to touristy places there?
Everywhere. It's just that the urban Japanese population sort of just self-segregates based on age. If you go to somewhere like Shibuya, obviously you're going to see much younger people. If you want to see where all the old people are, go to Sugamo. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugamo
outside the tourist hotspots
Tokyo in particular is the only prefecture (or top-level government area, as technically its a metropolis) to post population growth this last year, and people are always visiting Kyoto
Is anyone aware of a way to disable the notes and chats pages within Substack (or at the very least to not have notes as the homepage on the app)?
I have a good collection of subscriptions at this point, but every time I open the app I lose a few brain cells just by having my eyes rest on whatever the algorithm thinks I should see (this is also why I quit all other social media). I've blocked our muted hundreds of people at this point but the deluge of idiocy continues.
If anyone from Substack is reading this, please be aware that Notes may increase 'engagement' in the short term but ultimately kills what is unique and good about your product.
I found notes quite enjoyable until a few months ago. It used to be that all the notes were from people I subscribed to who were mostly talking about the topics I found interesting. It feels now like the feed has been algorithmed and it shows me mostly random crap from people I don't care about.
Update: there is indeed an option within the app to change the homepage to 'subscriptions'; not sure if that's new or if I've previously just been blind.
Can't disable notes and chats completely as far as I can tell, but that'll do
...Why are you using the app? That seems to be the root of the problem.
I don't find the app useful. It doesn't seem to have any benefits and there are a hundred things that browsers do that the app doesn't do.
Notes is still the home page in a browser though but it’s only one click to get to the stacks.
Go old fashioned... Each substack has an RSS feed, open a feedly account (or similar), subscribe to them there, together with any other blogs you want to follow. Then click to open articles in the browser when you want to read the comments section.
I was thinking about the Brian Thompson assassination. The media seems to be shocked — shocked! — that some people are expressing schadenfreude that he was killed. WaPo posted an editorial, "A sickness in the wake of a health insurance CEO’s slaying," in which they expressed their dismay...
"As most Americans quickly recognized, there is no justification for taking a life in this manner — yet on social media, expressions of not just understanding but support for the crime also gained traction in the aftermath of Mr. Thompson’s death. Many people made crude and depraved jokes, such as “my condolences are out-of-network.” Others said flatly that the insurance executive deserved what happened to him, comparing the victim to a serial killer."
Then they try to shut down the conversation about why Thompson was hated by so many.
"...but we're skeptical that at this particular moment lends itself to a nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry."
If not now, when would be a good time? Just because you're heavily regulated doesn't mean you can't game the system. United Health Care has outperformed all the other health insurance providers by aggressively implementing systems that resist paying out claims. I'd be curious if people covered by UHC have higher mortality rates than those covered by other insurance providers. And if so, why can't the UHC execs be considered murderers?
In my opinion, Brian Thompson is an example of the banality of evil. In another time and place, Thompson would have been the technocrat, high up in the regime — who never got his hands dirty — but enabled greater efficiency in the concentration camps. I'm sure he was otherwise a good family man, a very nice guy, and fun at cocktail parties.
You seem to be arguing that if a majority of society agrees with a moral framework in which extrajudicial killing is justified, then it is justified. But you don't really believe this, you only believe that it is justified if you yourself share in that moral framework.
If it were the first then you would have to support the extrajudicial killing of apostates in countries where there is sufficient support for it. And in such societies apostasy is worse than murder. Murder only ends someone's finite life on earth. Open apostasy, by tempting others towards apostasy, causes eternal damnation and therefore infinite suffering.
I never said that. I was indulging in the schadenfreude that payback is a bitch, but I believe in the rule of law and that laws should be administered equitably. But when a man who oversees a corporation that profits by denying care to ill people can face no consequences for his actions, then something is wrong with the justice system. People like Thompson exist in a bubble removed from the problems of ordinary people. Is it surprising that his actions angered someone beyond their breaking point? Like I said, I'm sure he was otherwise a good family man, a very nice guy, and fun at cocktail parties — but he's an example of a corporate sociopath. We've seen this type before in history.
"But when a man who oversees a corporation that profits by denying care to ill people can face no consequences for his actions, then something is wrong..."
An insurance company can never deny care, only refuse to pay for it, so I assume that's what you are trying to say here. If so: Really?
Is it really your contention that any non-fraudulent insurance company *must* pay for *every* treatment that any of their clients demand? When someone pays for an insurance policy, they get a virtual or literal stack of signed blank checks that they can hand out to anyone with an MD after their name, and the insurance company can't do anything but pay up even when they see that one of those checks is for ten million dollars to Dr. Quackenhoffer for one bottle of Miracle Tonic?
Because Dr. Quackenhoffer's Miracle Tonic is a treatment, which the insurance company must not "deny" by e.g. refusing to pay for on the grounds that it obviously won't do any good.
If that's really what you are trying to say, then I think it is absolutely unworkable.
And if that's *not* what you're trying to say, then you and everyone else on the assassin-sympathizing side of this debate might want to come up with some evidence that the treatments UHC has "denied" to Mr. Mangione or whoever he is championing, is anything more than a bottle of Dr. Quackenhoffer's finest. It is certainly possible that UHC has improperly denied payment for legitimate medical treatment they were contracted to provide, but it is telling that basically no one on the assassin-sympathetic side has bothered to even argue that point.
No it's not surprising that his actions angered someone towards a breaking point. And the public response isn't surprising either.
It's also not surprising that in a country where apostasy is considered the height of immorality, then when someone gets honor killed for it - the response of their countrymen is also to feel some schadenfreude. They had it coming. They dared to turn their back on God?
This is perfectly rational from their point of view, so we can't criticize them for it right?
I'm not sure how Thompson was apostatic, so I may be missing your point.
While the killer may be, and very likely is, psychologically disturbed, I can't help but wonder if Thompson wasn't psychologically damaged, as well. Perhaps instead of "damaged," I wonder if he was somehow incomplete in the way he viewed his actions in relation to other humans. I am not a psychiatrist, so my terminology may be inappropriate, but something was indefinably missing from Thompson for him to be doing the job that he did. I came across the following video on TwiXter this morning. I realized that the psychological opposite of Thompson is this famous guy...
https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1866203663561117785
I'm not saying Thompson was apostatic. I'm saying that the way in which people are responding to his murder is indistinguishable from the way that people in fundamentalist societies respond to apostates, or gay people, or 'witches' getting murdered.
Indistinguishable except for the underlying justification. Which you can counter by saying that their entire moral views are stupid and wrong, whereas your own moral views are totally correct. It should be obvious why this is problematic.
Gotcha. I understand what you're saying now. I'm more curious about why the MSM responds with shock when an angry white guy kills a CEO but not when a former marine chokes a "crazy" person to death on the subway. I suspect it's because the members of the MSM consciously or unconsciously align their tribal identity with powerful people.
Health insurance is not health care, and health care is not health. Robin Hanson has been writing about that for years. Amusingly, strikes by medical workers don't appear to affect health. https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1865261789237100701
> "...but we're skeptical that at this particular moment lends itself to a nuanced discussion of a complicated, and heavily regulated, industry."
> If not now, when would be a good time?
Hasn't it been a major topic of conversation for the last 8 years minimum ever since Bernie almost won the democratic primary on a platform of better healthcare?
I unhesitatingly condemn the crime, this being my real name and incitement laws being what they are.
That said, take a look at the Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield case. Everything about it starting with their name is satirical science fiction, except that it happened - they decided that in 3 states they would no longer pay for anaesthesia for as long as an operation took. There would be a time limit. If the surgery overruns that's just tough. After the killing they reversed this decision. A high and immediate utilitarian payoff.
Second point, people keep saying that we (you) have a justice system. True, but consider this: the alleged perp will be tried by jury. There's a splendid decision called Bushel's case 1670, English but good law in the US, which says that juries can deliver whatever verdict they please (it's about a judge who wanted to imprison a jury of which Bushel was foreman, for failing to find William Penn guilty of sedition). It's therefore tacitly built in to English and US law that juries can effectively award a popular pardon. Until the verdict we don't know whether a crime has been committed.
The anesthesiologists are rich fraudsters https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1864532455853547934
Just to poke at this for a bit.
Lets assume the following, all unproven:
- many anesthesiologists round out numbers
- those that do over report instead of under
- those that over report do so at such significant magnitudes that it would be 'fraudulent'
In such a case, are you saying that because some anesthesiologists will report the amount of time that they work, it is therefore ethical to hit an _unconscious patient_ with a massive bill?
I didn't say anything about the ethics of billing patients. But I will say that anesthesia ought to be treated like other procedures, like surgery.
Look, I'm a surgeon and absolutely discourage reducing physician payments but your characterization of the Anthem decision (and retraction) is just wrong. Basically Anthem just wanted to go to a fixed payment system for anesthesia for cases which by the way is exactly how surgeons get paid for cases. If I do a gallbladder removal it doesn't matter if it takes 45 minutes or 3 hours, I submit the code 47562 and get paid whatever insurance says that code is worth. I don't threaten to stop the case because it's taking longer than average and I don't get paid more when it does. By framing the debate as "Anthem wanted them to stop providing anesthesia" as opposed to "Anthem wanted to punish slow surgery teams and prevent overcharging and bill padding by rich anesthesiologists in order to keep your policy payments down" the American Society of Anesthesiologists achieved a wonderful PR coup.
This makes me worry that there's a whole bunch of patients being kept under for longer than necessary in order to pad the anaesthetist's bill.
Nah. It's a hell of lot more money to do another case.
That is exactly how a neighbor who is an anesthesiologist describes the Anthem case. She is unwilling to converse about it in her workplace though because she's the only one who's read anything about the case beyond clickbait headlines and social media posts.
Sorry, but if you're cheering on the CEOs death in any way, you're a horrible person and (possibly) a psychopath. We live in a society of laws and have a justice system for a reason. If you don't like how healthcare works in the US, go campaign to change the laws. Obama did and a lot of things changed when ACA got implemented. Murdering the CEO in the open is NOT the way, regardless of your opinion on him being evil or not.
My friend, America is not the USSR, nor are our concerns primarily about not the turning into the USSR (nor *should they be* about not turning into Nazi Germany, even if for a great deal of the elite class that seems to be their primary ridiculous worry).
We are just another problematic society with its own issues.
There are more than two ways for societies to be constructed that we needn't be overly concerned about not giving an inch against our American "greed is great!" approach lest we go Soviet.
The matter of healthcare is a matter of life and death. And ignoring that fact in favor of State Worship (or the righteousness of law school graduates for godssake) is neither kind nor wise.
Murder is a matter of life and death. I don't want to see it happening in American cities with approval from local citizens, because that's the first step towards the abyss of no-return. Campaign, protest, vote, donate, setup insurance companies, lobby, whatever. But if you approve murdering a CEO because his company doesn't behave the way you think they should behave, then you are not a healthy human being in my opinion and nothing could change that.
A few months ago I was asked to produce a video series on The 10 Commandments -- each one 5 minutes long. Here's the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL20zNTAn_sgc5vsXwXuBKLVD4HBFfTEfz
As you can see, I had a hard time keeping them short (I mean what is this, "Bible for Babies"?) but the one I had the greatest difficulty with was "Thou Shalt Not Murder", which ran to nearly 2 hours.
A few people told me the next day that they watched the whole thing and found it enlightening but that due to its length it would remain largely unseen so they asked me to make a shorter version.
I did. Just 20 minutes this one.
The jist of it is that according to the Torah we are all murderers.
We are all responsible for our brothers' blood.
This concept is so foreign to modern society that it must sound like I'm making it up (cue "what about amalikites!" witticisms) so I read and translated word for word the Torah's instructions regarding the Eglah Arufah, the neck-chopped calf.
I took it a step further and, in a post shorter than this comment, prefaced that video (which ultimately became my most-watched video of all time) with the explanation that Biblical Monotheism's overriding point is: Each Person is An Equal Manifestation of God.
That's why it has always been intolerant of systems that claim otherwise -- intolerant to the point of the sword.
This is built in to Christianity, Islam, and the worldwide consensus today. It was once a radical idea but it is now accepted as a given and celebrated via the ritual of "voting", a ritual that serves no end but which keeps the dream alive.
I explained it better there than i have above. I've removed the paywall to make it freely accessible for anyone interested.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/brotherhood-or-the-sword-the-only
> We live in a society of laws and have a justice [sic] system for a reason
Okay, what if you disagree with the reason? Certainly one good reason to obey the laws of the state is fear of retribution, but when the benefit outweighs the cost, it is only inertia (and probably cowardice) that keeps you from taking justice (ACTUAL justice, not the poor imitation the legal system produces) into your own hands.
I was born in the Soviet Union which was formed on the basis of such ideas. They've successfully exiled, imprisoned, executed or impoverished every single rich person in the Russian Empire, from rich farmers (see: kulaks) to the Royal Highness the Emperor. Unfortunately for the "common people", once the "rich bastards" were taken care of, those newly in power didn't stop and ended up killing more Soviet citizens than the Nazis did during WWII.
Be very, very careful what you wish for, my friend. You'd be surprised as to how easy "CEOs get extrajudicial mob punishment" turns into "my entire family is now in the Gulag".
Wait a minute, aren't YOU the one arguing essentially that anyone who defies the state and its laws is evil? I am arguing that one's personal sense of justice ought to take precedence. What lesson are you drawing from your personal experience relating to the Soviet Union to endorse leaving it up to the so-called "justice system"?
I am not a communist. Or a socialist. Or any flavor of left-wing. So preaching to me about their evils isn't productive.
I won't repeat it here so as not to appear to be spamming but YOU would personally enjoy my video on The 6th Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Murder) which I unpaywalled and linked to in my own response to Nikita (whise view I understand and respect even though I ultimately side with yours).
C'mon, you know perfectly well what I've meant, and the difference between the legal systems of Soviet Union and the US. Shameful discourse all around. But I guess that's about as much as what one could expect from the kind of people who cheer on a cold-blooded murder on the streets of New York.
How is this shameful discourse? A *very important person* got shot by a man who held a grudge against him. Isn't it worth examining what caused the grudge and perhaps work to find a way to address the problem behind the grudge? If the victim was shot was a mobster, and an ordinary person shot him, the media would be cheering. But this victim is supposedly an upstanding citizen and a member in good standing of the Brotherhood of CEOs. The fact that he ran an enterprise with some sketchy behaviors seems to be obscured by his CEOness.
Well then I guess the majority of the American people are psychopaths and you're in a weird minority of people who can't recognize the equivalence between making decisions you know will kill large numbers of statistical people and the sort of murder that our laws will prosecute.
Is it a majority in the "real" world? I'd be curious to see some research on this. I'm very much hopeful that this is primarily a phenomenon against terminally online people, many of whom are trolls, clickbait drama queens (see: Taylor Lorenz) or just deranged.
"trolls, clickbait drama queens (see: Taylor Lorenz) or just deranged."
But you repeat yourself (twice!)
I don't impose physical suffering on anyone. How am I a psychopath to call out the callousness of executives who make decisions about who will and who will not receive care? It seems like what we've got here is the media and virtue-washing a bunch of corporate psychopaths. The fact that someone got angry enough to kill one of these execs shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone — and I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.
>It seems like what we've got here is the media and virtue-washing a bunch of corporate psychopaths.
Exactly. Mass murdering corporate psychopaths.
Yes, it is unfortunate that people are so cowardly that they fall for it. I am not referring to Nikita here. He shares hus identity and his reasons quite eloquently. I understand where he (personally) is coming from and empathize with it.
The same can not be said for all of the American-born statists who seem to believe that our law-writing law school graduates are taking dictation from God.
Numbers indicating that such sentiments probably aren't as widespread as they seem:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1864660670819783113
https://x.com/janzilinsky/status/1865499408617353326
I'd guess the actual percentages to be somewhat lower than shown in that graph -- makes me wonder about the specific polling that it's based on -- but I still agree with Hanania's point.
The comments sections of every single video on the topic on both the right and left make it seem like very much the majority opinion. If it wasn't the majority opinion I'd expect for *any* of the top comments to condemn the assassin. Instead there's a pretty clear consensus rather or not you sort by most popular or by new.
Also if you just look online the people celebrating his death aren't just terminally online people, it's also people like the boomer normies who still use facebook. Like I've actively been searching out right wing media and stuff on facebook to gauge normie opinions here, because this is making me very excited about people getting some genuine class consciousness. Also anecdotally literally everyone I know in RL feels the same way (including the non politically engaged), but of course we both probably have our own filter bubbles.
Would absolutely love to see a poll on this as well.
It would be extremely sad if you're right about this and people are indeed this evil in our society.
If you had a button you could use to kill people in some hypothetical scenario:
Then which injustices against you or your loved one's would you consider egregious enough to press a button to get vengeance against the perpetrator? What if you know that you pressing that button is the only way that person will face any consequences whatsoever for the injustice they committed against your family?
Since as I said in my other comment I doubt you'd feel the same way if you personally lost family to the policies this guy oversaw.
I'm curious, is there a scenario where you would see an extrajudicial killing as justified, or do you see bypassing the law as evil no matter what?
I definitely don't think that this is indicative at all of being horrible or a psychopath. I think there are a few different categories of response:
1) Condemning the violence, but indulging in a bit of harmless schadenfreude - "couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke"
2) Believing that this was a rare, justifiable exception to our justified taboos against violence, like a victim of abuse killing their abuser
3) Believing that the possibility of mob justice is actually a useful safety valve for a law-based society, playing an important role in stopping people who cause incredible harm while using (possible immoral) means to stay within the existing system of laws
I actually think all three are morally justifiable. I don't know enough about this particular case to determine whether 2) fits, and 3) is very context-dependent, but I think all three are perfectly ethical beliefs to hold.
> I was thinking about the Brian Thompson assassination. The media seems to be shocked — shocked! — that some people are expressing schadenfreude that he was killed.
I've personally been loving it and hoping it's the start of a trend. I've always wanted assassination markets for airline executives. Airlines are accountable to nobody, there's no alternative because every airline maximally screws their customers, they're in bed with politics at the top level and heavily regulatorily captured, so nobody can really compete, and there's no way to deliver clear feedback about bad practices. It's a clear case where assassination markets for airline executives would align incentives and create better products, positive externalities, and social benefits to all.
But you know, health insurance executives are even better! Their literal JOB is to kill sick children and grandmothers to pad their bottom line! They're actually worse than airline executives! I'm astonished nobody has done this before, and I heartily applaud the fact that it's happening.
Also, I hope it serves as a shining example of what to do if you ever get a terminal diagnosis - be the change you want to see in the world. There's probably nothing that would move the US to a more reasonable healthcare system sooner than for this to become commonplace.
I haven't flown since 2020, and am disinclined to do so, as the experience isn't pleasant, the rates seem excessive, and I can find alternatives, including not traveling long distances. The free market is speaking, for those that will hear.
Airline executives? WTF? Airlines are extremely competitive. Their profit margins are razor thin and there is lots of consumer choice, and lots of available information about on time performance etc. Unlike healthcare, airfares are cheaper than they were 20 years ago even with rising fuel costs. And the FTC just blocked Spirit from merging with JetBlue and now they are about to declare bankruptcy, how is that 'in bed with politics?'
> And the FTC just blocked Spirit from merging with JetBlue and now they are about to declare bankruptcy, how is that 'in bed with politics?'
Ah, the politics line is more about non-US airline carriers, because this is a global problem, not a US-only problem.
I haven't even been inside the US for over a year, and traveling in the US is generally fine because you can fly JSX or drive.
I'm talking about all the zero-accountability, customer-hostile mediocrities like AirAsia, Vietjet, Cebu Pacific, Thai Lion, and similar in those cases.
You are a bad human being.
> You are a bad human being.
Oh, 100%. I've never claimed otherwise.
You know who's bad and never gets called out, though? The airline executives that waste hundreds of thousands or millions of person-hours per year with customer-hostile practices, inefficiency, and rules that steal many tens of thousands of flights and millions of dollars from their customers.
A 76 year life is roughly 666k hours. They're actuarially killing somebody with every 666k hours wasted. A US life is $7-10M. Every $7-10M they take in missed flights and self-serving rules that net them money at the customer's expense is another actuarial human life.
But sure, I'm the bad guy for wanting to hold them accountable somehow, when there's currently zero way to do this. I'm fine with that.
Seconding this.
This whole subject has shown me how terrible so many people (or at least so many internet commenters) really are.
I guess it boils down to whether you think corporate sociopaths are a protected class.
A former 800-pound gorilla corporation in Silicon Valley used to pay retainers to all the major law firms in California to avoid legal actions. Conflict of interest prevented those firms from taking hostile clients. The 800-pound gorilla saw that 10+ million dollars as well spent. Money can distort the legal system in all sorts of ways.
This is true and it's a significant problem, but I don't see why you would expect regular assassinations of corporate executives by outraged people to make it better. The 800 lb gorilla can pay for expensive lawyers but they can't hire private security?
https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1864758895148978347
(the text of this tweet is "just fyi this lady is also a healthcare CEO who denies a lot of claims", in reply to a video of Dafna Yoran, the prosecutor in the Daniel Penny case)
I think you could in fact consider the UHC execs murderers, if you believe that UHC operates in such a way that it trades off more human health and life for profit than a health insurance organization in its position ought to. The problem is, under that standard, you could also consider a lot of people who work in various bureaucracies - such as prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office - to be effectively murderers, or otherwise operating the bureaucracy in a way inimical to human life and freedom.
If there is real political disagreement about whether some bureaucracy is harmful or not, it is good if there are still norms against randomly killing the people involved in that bureaucracy without actually establishing laws about what the bureaucracy can and cannot legitimately do, and having a legal process to see whether a given bureaucrat actually broke those laws. Your UHC is someone else's Manhattan District Attorney's office, and pretty much any way the state exercises power (health insurance is a heavily regulated industry) involves making life-or-death decisions for somebody.
> The problem is, under that standard, you could also consider a lot of people who work in various bureaucracies - such as prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney's office - to be effectively murderers, or otherwise operating the bureaucracy in a way inimical to human life and freedom.
What's the problem here?
"What's the problem here?"
Because once you start down this road, you would be unpleasantly surprised how rapidly the list of people who "operate the bureaucracy in away inimical to human life and freedom" includes, oh I don't know, Indian postdocs at the University or Maryland, as a very random example.
Truly a random example. No idea what would have prompted one to think of such a bizarre and implausible thing.
How does this differ in principle from laws being so broad that everyone commits "three felonies a day" and prosecutors having enough discretion that anyone can be convicted of something whenever the government wishes?
"How does this differ in principle from laws being so broad that everyone commits "three felonies a day" and prosecutors having enough discretion that anyone can be convicted of something whenever the government wishes?"
Because we have agreed to vest prosecutors, as duly elected/ appointed representatives of our established legal system, with the authority to do so. And you are very not likely to get killed by the system, at least not without significant legal protections.
If you want a legal system where "people" can decide that those in powerful bureaucracies can be executed, I am begging you to consider that to A) you are very much a member of a powerful bureaucracy, and b) the "people" who will be making decisions to execute the bureaucrats, are as DiKotter noted in his study of the Chinese revolution, far more likely to be the equivalent of meth heads who think its fun to kill people as wise, intellectual readers of ACX.
The legitimacy arguments of "duly elected", "legal authority" etc. don't mean anything to me. I don't accord the state privileged moral status, and judge its actions as I would any other organization's.
You're right that my class interests are actually aligned quite closely with billionaires CEOs and the like, and that a socialist/methhead revolution like Pol Pot's or Mao's, would be really bad for me personally. I don't judge such a thing likely to occur in the US.
In the world that IS, I estimate that I'm much more likely to be railroaded by government prosecutors than lynched by a Reign of Terror.
I'd argue that this doesn't make the point that you want. Since arguably without political violence we wouldn't have basically any modern forms of welfare or worker protections.
I think the bipartisan enthusiasm around this guys death (check the youtube comments on right wing channels, it's absolutely bipartisan) is a good example of the possibility of political violence to unite people across political divides against elites they can directly see screwing them over.
Here's the nuance: he and others like him bribed politicians, so everything he did was legal, and they had a guaranteed racket which made them millions to slash American life expectancy. I'm tired of "nuance" being used to justify evil, and I haven't forgotten what happened to health insurance stocks the moment they killed medicare for all.
His fate, and the admirable refusal of Americans to identify the killer, gives me a rare bit of hope for the country where I was born.
But he was such a nice guy! And his family is trying to make sense of the tragedy.
Any evidence for any of these claims?
Posted this under the wrong sub-thread by mistake. Moved it here.
I was afraid I had slandered the upstanding E-Staff of United HealthCare, so I did a little research.
1. UNH (United Healt Group, the parent company) is being sued for making an auto-denier AI program "known by the company to have a 90% error rate, overriding determinations made by the patients's doctors that the expenses were medically necessary." This directly resulted in multiple elderly deaths in Midwest.
2. Despite having a market cap of $515B and ranking 18th in the nation's most valued companies, UNH was found by a government watchdog to have defrauded the Federal Government of $3.2B in extra federal payments for health-related assessments.
3. UNH is also famous for the Ingenix lawsuit. Ingenix was/is a subsidiary of UNH, and in the late '00s. They used a database to improperly under-reimburse physicians and hospitals for services. The case led to a significant settlement in 2009 with the New York Attorney General's Office, requiring UnitedHealth to pay $50M to establish an independent database for calculating out-of-network charges. This database was intended to eliminate conflicts of interest and ensure fairer reimbursements.
4. And in a related class-action lawsuit, UnitedHealth reached a $350M settlement, with funds allocated to affected consumers and providers, attorneys' fees, and administrative costs. This settlement aimed to compensate individuals who were under-reimbursed due to Ingenix's alleged data manipulation.
I'm sorry I said mean things about UHC and UNH. They're clearly focused on shareholder value and thus should be praised (even though they cut a few corners and caused some needless suffering along the way).
Sounds like the system is working as intended and the government is successfully curtailing their breaches of the law when they happen. How on Earth do we get from "maybe we should audit UnitedHealthcare more often" to "maybe we should approve of maniacs committing murder on our streets"?
we live in a world where people are routinely imprisoned for decades over far smaller amounts of money
I don't believe a fine is nearly adequate recompense for the things Thompson did, and the fines in question, given the US government's history in this regard, would have been written off as a cost of doing business.
A functional justice system would've prevented Thompson from freely walking the streets in the first place; in a just world, he would've been in jail awaiting trial on multiple charges of murder, not using the corporate veil to escape justice.
> And if so, why can't the UHC execs be considered murderers?
Because it's not murder if it's legal. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/murder
Of course, the wealthy do have significantly more influence over legislation... But that's just a part of our wonderful little democracy that's cherished by all, isn't it?
Under 18 U.S. Code § 1111, second-degree murder is described (I paraphrase) as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought — but without the premeditation required for first-degree murder. The act has to be intentional but not planned, and it can involve a reckless disregard for human life — such as extreme recklessness or *depraved indifference*.
It seems like denying care to someone who will otherwise die fits the definition of second-degree murder. They're denying care with malice aforethought, and they have a depraved indifference for whether the patient dies. Of course, IANAL, but we've have few lawyers following this substack. I'd be curious why UHC's actions don't rise to a standard of 2nd degree murder.
Is the owner of a hotel committing murder if he doesn't give a homeless person a free room and they subsequently freeze to death?
Don't you have the issue here that your theoretical swings easily both ways, given the fact that the real world is nuanced? You're setting up a hypothethical that doesn't work to illuminate either point.
On a warm summer day, and the homeless person died due to some unforeseen freak of weather? Seems unlikely that there's any link at all between the act of 'say no' and 'they die'
On a cold winter midnight day, as a snowstorm rolls in, and some guy knocks on a door and begs for a room for the night because the car he normally lives in broke down and it's freezing out? Well, yeah, strictly speaking, the actual fact of turning them away is fully intentional murder.
On a normally temperate day, and the homeless person recently moved out of their room in this hypothethical hotel, but now it's snowing and they want back in? Maybe, maybe not. At what point does a manager going "Well, sorry, you paid for 14 days, it's been 14 days, off you go" link directly with "oh whupsie, he died?"
You could argue the case - you will argue the case in court, certainly, if it then turns out that this particular hotel has a history of providing shelter to homeless people at specific prices and then always kick them out during December, during snow-storms, when room heating bills are apt to rise.
Your hypothethical hotel lets any homeless in the city pay them 25 dollars to get a piece of paper that promises them they can sleep in a warm room if temperatue drops below a certain point, so long as they pay the 25 dollars every month, and some homeless do take this deal, then show up, and the conscierge checks the temperature and sees that it swings to -5.5, the contract says anything past -5 is 'cold enough', but when you aggregate together the average temperature over the last 8 hours a freak sunspot has actually made it so the reading could reasonably be +3.3 which is above the require threshold, and anyway, it's dawn soon, so even if it says -5.1 now or -4.9 or -7, it's going to warm up soon, so away you go, your room claim is denied this time, try again for another room another night, and then in in the morning it turns out people died.
Is that murder? Is it not murder? Is it reasonably statistically true to at least gesture that it has certain murder-like characteristics?
Like, we can all play the game of WHAT IF X, but your WHAT IF X here at least doesn't seem to help any argument much.
I mean you can shade it all you want. The fact is that the hotel owner has no legal duty to provide a service that was not contracted for and is not legally guilty of any crime and it is pretty unlikely that anyone would encourage his assassination.
Interesting need to hedge there, don't you find?
But I think you'll find your premises are still in error. Your hypothethical hotel manager may not have a legal duty to offer services that are not contracted for, sure, but why is that your sudden new line in the sand? The corporation may not be culpable, in the form of its manager on the ground, in some cases, depending on how the courts rule it. But the private citizen the manager also is is certainly going to get dinged when the corpses stack up at his door. Remember, in your example, the causal link is direct: turning them away kills them. That's a murder, mate, and we tend to think of that as a crime. Can't plead "not guilty" when your bloody hand is on the homless-crushing machine.
Stuff like this is why we have debates about... stuff like this.
You're functionally a little too certain of the self evident obviousness of your correctness. It's what I was trying to nudge you towards accepting, and maybe, uh, stop doing. Asides about hypothetical hotel management best practice doesn't actually illuminate anything, so I'm willing to throw shade for it because you brought it up
( Aside: if multiple corpses turned up all relating to the actions and activities of a single hotel or hotel manager, it seems extremely likely they would, in fact, be calls for their assassination. I'm unsure how you expect that to work, here. People keep dying once they enter the periphery of this entity, and society at large, legal or otherwise, is hypothetically meant not to care about it? That's a certainly... a novel take )
Based on this rationale it would be OK to assassinate the heads of every government or at least every governmental agency that offers "universal healthcare" because every one of those systems explicitly denies some life saving treatment based on rationing.
Then you must be a murderer too for refusing to pay for a terminally ill people’s healthcare yourself. Or more likely you don’t understand the definition of murder.
Is it murder to kill someone by denying them care to which they were never entitled to in the first place? Because it's not like they're just randomly denying claims without justification, it's all there in the fine print. ...And there is a lot of fine print. Still, it's not their problem if their customers can't hire a lawyer.
In corporate health insurance, there's no "fine print" to read. You get what the company gives you. And the problem is that UHC is denying or delaying paying out legitimate claims under the contract of their engagement.
>it's all there in the fine print. ...And there is a lot of fine print.
And their AI care denial system doesn't even match their own fine print 90% of the time...
As has been noted elsewhere, that's 90% of the times *that someone said "hey, I think the system made a mistake here and could you maybe double-check that?"*.
Not 90% of all denials. I haven't seen evidence that it would be 9% or even 0.9% of all denials.
Many Thanks! Also, in the case where the denied care is life-critical, the dead patient can't pursue the appeal, and only some of them will have had relatives with the legal standing and the endurance to pursue it.
I've read horror story after horror story after horror story. I am _very_ skeptical that the 32% of medical claims that UHC denied were _actually_ medically unnecessary.
> Still, it's not their problem if their customers can't hire a lawyer.
Sure, and shooting them in the street MAKES it their problem.
More likely, it makes it the problem of the squad of armed bodyguards future insurance execs will be traveling with.
Except very often the claim is something they are absolutely required to cover, after all that's the reason the persons actual doctor requesting it be covered in the first place. However, they know that for instance if they deny claims on knowingly BS grounds then some of those people will die before they can overturn that decision, which is the best case scenario because it means they pay out nothing.
I'm a physician and would like to make it perfectly clear that no physician has ANY idea what your insurance does or doesn't cover. Insurance benefits are vastly complex and every policy, even from the same company, is different. For that matter you can't even figure it out on the front end because you don't have access to the drug formulary so basically we just order what we think is appropriate and then wait to see if it's covered, just like you.
ISTM that the price system is totally broken at the consumer level in health care. I cannot find out what anything will cost me or the insurance company, I routinely get a weird mystery bill I don't understand (spend an hour on the phone and you can probably get an explanation and maybe get it reversed) after normal medical stuff. I don't have an incentive to care how much anything costs the insurance company, and also all the prices anyone quotes for anything are made-up numbers with no relevance to reality at all.
I mean surely you think your judgement about what should be covered is much more informed than the insurance company though right?
Are the insurance companies threatening to break hospitals that accept patients without health insurance? If not, your arguments are directed entirely at the doctors who won't treat them without being paid, even though they still could.
You might like: https://gardenscenery.net/p/this-strange-moment
In a perfect world, I would have preferred that healthcare (insurers, hospitals, pharma) be held to strict ethical and legal standards. But dog forbid we inhibit free enterprise! Of course, countries with "socialized" healthcare have their own problems. The wife of an acquaintance of mine who lived in Denmark died because their primary care physician wouldn't approve an emergency procedure. I don't remember all the details, but the primary care physician acts as a gatekeeper for all emergency and specialist medical treatments. The primary care physicians are employed by a national health authority, and that national health authority rewards stinginess. Danes can purchase supplemental private insurance to cover the gaps, but I guess my acquaintance and his wife hadn't purchased extra insurance.
From that link...
"It is true, no doubt, that his successor will continue in his footsteps, and kill many more people themselves, because this is the nature of the business they are in, which is not the “healthcare” business but, rather, parasitic upon it, and which derives its profit not from providing healthcare but from withholding it, and demanding a handsome tribute for this “service” – but this successor, I suspect, will be somewhat more cautious in how they go about their business, how many they consign, for the sake of the margin, to expiration in slow agony. They will think twice, sometimes, about the decisions they make, not out of some remarkable rejuvenation of their shriveled ethical faculty, but out of simple, animal fear, a fear which they will deny feeling but will feel nonetheless."
How is this view consistent with the studies that seem to show little health impact from providing health insurance to people?
Im in the last days of discounting my hard biological science fiction novel that might be of interest to folks in this community. It explores a distant post industrial civilisation built entirely on biological technology. Ebook on amazon but also on kobo - https://www.amazon.com/Our-Vitreous-Womb-Book-1-4-ebook/dp/B0C7H9N1K3
Thanks for this! Having thought and written a bit of far-future bio-fi (for my own amusement only), I'm very interested to see what you came up with.
A while ago I predicted that a) the left wing media would pust "dont do thanksgiving your trump supporting family are nazis" but b) this probably wouldnt work and c) thanksgiving is radically important for political stability as political insults and violence have to be constrained to what you will say to family
https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-skipping-thanksgiving-family-over-133844577.html
Who *personally* skipped thanksgiving uniquely this year, went to thanksgiving in 2019, and politics was a factor?
I actually know of someone who skipped Thanksgiving after feeling depressed about Trump winning the election, but this person already had good reason to feel depressed and to want to be elsewhere.
What is the actual value of this post "supported" by a link to a video segment which in no way supports the post? I want my minutes back please
...Man, you really scraped the bottom of the barrel for that article, huh? Though, I'm honestly surprised you couldn't find an article that wasn't from some TV tabloid I've never even heard of, and even that article really doesn't support your point. I really expected you to find at least one tone-deaf opinion piece by some activist arguing for cancelling Thanksgiving or something stupid like that.
Ugh, anomie. I'm reporting this comment. It's a cruel personal attack on OP with no substantive content unless one counts your unsupported wisp of a claim that the article OP mentions doesn't support their point.
How is it a personal attack? If you predict
>the left wing media would pust "dont do thanksgiving your trump supporting family are nazis"
and your evidence isn't articles from the NYT, WaPo, Vox or something of the sort, it seems to me that your prediciton has failed.
It's a personal attack not because anomie says OP is wrong, but because anomie's criticism doesn't say crisply that OP's source is weak evidence, especially in light of the absence of supporting evidence from from much more important sources -- NYT etc. It's an extended riff about the dumbness and lameness of OP's choice of sources, and implies that's characteristic of OP.
>and implies that's characteristic of OP.
This would be our point of disagreement. I think you're reading a bit too much into this because anomie's "2edgy4me zoomer" posting style grates on you (which, fair, tbh).
I watched the article. It shows some TV personality saying they got banned from their family Thanksgiving, another TV personality saying people should put their politics aside to be with their family, two random people who say they're skipping Thanksgiving to travel or watch movies, and a "psychologist" at the end that recommends that people make it clear to their families that they will not tolerate politics at the table.
...I have no idea how they could interpret that as "dont do thanksgiving your trump supporting family are nazis". This is just a rerun of the same Thanksgiving drama that's been going on for decades.
That's irrelevant to my complaint, because it's after the fact. Your original post was dumb and cruel. Meanwhile, in the course of justifying your view of the article you are grabbing the chance to stick new little needles into Monkyyy. How about you just shut your pie hole?
I found monkyyys post to be extremely low value (as many, many of his posts are).
It's an inflammatory subject, he's boasting about his ability to predict something, and then using an extremely low quality source to back up his assertion, and the source doesn't even back up his assertion!
While anomies response was not kind, it was both true and necessary.
Your way of saying it, had you said it to OP: "I found your post to be extremely low value. It's an inflammatory subject, and you're boasting about your ability to predict something, and then using an extremely low quality source to back up your assertion, and the source doesn't even back up his assertion!"
This would count as true & necessary, but not kind. It is, however, civil. Getting to be unkind if you're making a good point doesn't mean civility goes out the door and you have a license to mock, belittle and sneer. Jesus Christ, I hate this group sometimes. It's like some of you don't get it that other posters are sentient beings. Go save some shrimp.
Wikipedia claims that Mizrahi Jews (Jews indigenous to various parts of the Middle East who now mostly live in Israel) had property stolen from them during the 1950s, 1960s etc by various majority Muslim countries that adds up to 4 times the size of Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world#Estimated_financial_value
Is this something that should figure into peace negotiations in the region? E.g. should the Muslim majority states in question pay reparations of $4X to the Mizrahi Jews to drop all claims to their lost property, then Israel pays reparations of $1X to the Palestinians to drop all claims to Israeli land, and then everyone agrees to stop killing each other?
The Palestinian reaction to the Trump plan made it pretty clear that more money doesn't solve anything from their perspective, and no amount of reparations for the Israelis would make it worthwhile to drop security requirements. (You can't spend money when you're dead.)
Those who are pro-peace would easily drop any monetary considerations to achieve it. Those who are opposed would not find compensation relevant.
The negotiations should be whatever people are willing to accept. Peace should be an end to past hostilities. It's not about what's right, it's about what people will live with, and what they'll die over.
Truthfully, I find the estimated amounts highly suspect and my guess is it's deployed far more as a rhetorical weapon to justify disposession of the Palestinians as opposed to anything else.
Any particular reason you find them highly suspect?
The fact the estimated value of the "stolen" land tripled from $100 billion to $300 billion in just a single year, for one, is a big sign of opportunistic or politically-motivated people making things up. Even this link from an Israeli think tank cited as a source by the Wiki page linked above mention the $300 billion estimate with an eyebrow raised, and when it gives actual figures for seized wealth the figure are much lower: https://jcpa.org/article/the-palestinian-refugee-issue-rhetoric-vs-reality/
I guess I should’ve been clearer - I meant the land numbers cited in GT’s comment. Besides for possible credibility issues based on the 100-300 change, any reason to doubt the land numbers? It doesn’t seem outlandish (no pun intended) to me, given the size of Israel as compared to the other countries.
I don't think it should be accounted for at all, let alone factored into current geopolitics. History is messy and practically and meaningfully there's a statute of limitations to claims. Someone's grandfather may have exploited someone else's grandfather, but life moves on. This is especially so as identities get messy over time.
What about mixed Mizrahi-Ashkenazi Jews? Do they get reimbursed? Is it proportional to their Mizrahi share? Who pays for this? Current inhabitants of Muslim countries? Only Muslim inhabitants of those countries? Descendants of people who used to live in those countries?
This messiness relates to why terms like "Jews indigenous to various parts of the Middle East" are messy, as is the term "indigenous" in general.
Middle Eastern Jews are heavily admixed with Jews who fled Spain. Are they then not "'indigenous?" But wait, the Spanish Jews probably had Levantine admixture themselves. Indigenous?
I believe the figure refers mostly to land stolen since 1948, e.g. during the 1950s, 1960s etc so even if the land was stolen from people who are a mixture of Mizrahim and Sephardim, they would still be owed reparations.
Of course you can say that the 1960s were so long ago that there should be no reparation, but then under that argument, can't Israel claim the whole West Bank?
"Of course you can say that the 1960s were so long ago that there should be no reparation, but then under that argument, can't Israel claim the whole West Bank?"
IMO this is a key point of confusion in this whole mess. Israel not claiming the entire West Bank isn't some concession to the Palestinians.
If Israel annexes the West Bank either they let the Palestinians stay and grant them citizenship, which threatens Israel's status as a Jewish state, or they don't, in which case they're definitely an apartheid state whatever you think of that label now. Either of those are non-starters to Israel.
The remaining options are to give up the land (two state solution), or to try and keep the land while having enough legal haziness around the situation to avoid "apartheid" charges, and the Palestinians are a ruled-over people with no rights (status quo).
The issue with the occupation is about *ongoing* injustice, no reparations-like reasoning needed. You can be 100% against the concept of reparations and the status quo is still wrong.
Your comments seem to confuse a few points.
First, the point of "mixture of Mizrahim and Sephardim" isn't that they aren't due reparations but that the term "indigenous" is sloppy and speaks to the messiness of litigating historic claims by populations against each other.
Second, your comments seem to conflate personal property and national borders.
Third, historic property claims just aren't that significant in the big scheme of things. There's abundant literature showing the persistence of status in the face of massive exogenous shocks over very small numbers of generations.
Descendants of Jews exploited by Muslims in the 1960s are likely hardly worse off, if at all, than had the exploitation not occurred (indeed, it's quite likely that they're better off, if the discrimination spurred them to emigrate earlier than they would have otherwise to places where they ended up being able to better capitalize off their skills).
Fourth, as another commenter pointed out (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80703577), issues of ultimate justice are hardly the most relevant factors to geopolitics. In reality, everything is complex and messy in the present, and the past is even more so. No settlement of any issue will ultimately be fair, with that all taken into account. But that doesn't matter much. The goal of peace negotiations is peace - whatever will end hostilities.
When it comes to Israel and the Arabs, peace agreements have been possible in accordance with facts on the ground and the reality of the present, without concern for historic justice.
Whether such an agreement would be possible with Palestinians is a different question, but the operative factor isn't some cosmic tally card recording historic injustices.
No, history is an endless stream of wars, anything about the long dead is just continuing violence. Dont punish the children for the sins of the father; unless you want to hear about your great grand parents crimes.
Lightcone CEO here. Happy to answer any questions about Lightcone if you are thinking about donating to us (or otherwise).
What do the neighbors think about Lightcone? Have you encountered a lot of NIMBYist activism?
Not yet! We are mostly surrounded by businesses that don't really pay much attention to us and are happy about bringing activity to their area. We have one residential neighbor who we talked a lot to, and they seem pretty happy with us (they used to run a preschool but are now retiring).
I do live my days being kind of terrified of the City of Berkeley directing its ominous eyes on us and adding some terrible restrictions to our activities, but so far things have been chill.
I’m a fan of LessWrong and would be interested in donating for the sake of the website, however I feel less sure about helping fund the campus.
If I understand the fundraising post and some of the comments correctly, the campus costs (more than?) 1M$ per year (?) in interest payments alone (please correct me if I’m wrong). Assuming a 5% interest rate, this amounts to 20M$ property value, which seems realistic for a nice location in Berkeley. However I wonder what justified taking such a large loan of you are in an unstable funding situation?
I hope my question is not rude. I just feel like my favourite internet box is jeopardized unnecessarily because of “risky real state gambling”.
This makes sense! We definitely wouldn't have done it without buy-in from funders at the time. We had strong support from Open Philanthropy, FTX Future Fund and Jaan Tallinn (who ultimately financed our mortgage).
I think at the time it was definitely a huge risk, but the outlook on the funding situation looked a lot more optimistic, and risk taking made sense. Ultimately we did pull it off, and as you can see from the fundraiser, Lighthaven is reasonably likely to financially break even on rental revenue soon, so I am happy about the choice we made, but if things had went worse, we definitely would be in a tight spot.
If I had predicted the less rosy funding landscape for x-risk reduction work and rationality community building stuff, I probably wouldn't have taken a risk this big, but it did work work, and I think in the long run will stabilize rather than destabilize our funding situation.
*Shakes enormous novelty tin cup*
I'm a microbiome scientist, about to quit my job at a big probiotics company and spin out my own thing.
We're going to cure hypercholesterolemia—or at least some subset of it. (But a pretty substantial one. 1 in 5 people is missing the gut bacterium that ordinarily enables you to excrete cholesterol in your stool. All signs indicate that the absence of this bacterium, caused by antibiotics, is a major driver of high cholesterol.)
There's only one strain of bacterium in public strain banks that performs the chemical reaction in question (conversion of cholesterol to coprostanol) and ZERO human-derived ones, despite the fact that coprostanol has been on scientists' radars since 1896.
But that's about to change. I had a lab of my own for the last year, and during that time I cultured a coprostanol-producing bacterium from my own fecal sample—I have a spectacular lipid profile. Tested it on myself for an n-of-1 safety trial, and it passes at least that. So now the plan is basically to do what Lantern is doing, but with heart disease (#1 killer of humans!) instead of cavities, and no genetic modification.
Unfortunately, the lab was in Switzerland and my visa expired in September—so we're back in the US now and I'm trying to raise the funds to do this by the new year. If you're interested in helping make this possible, shoot me an email at SDSkolnick@gmail.com.
For a little more background, see this post I wrote last year (about three months before I got into my lab.): Stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/cholesterol
So other than access to the experimental probiotic treatment that you plan to develop, would you recommend eating a lot of cholesterol in order to encourage growth of this kind of bacteria? Is that the best that can be said about recommendations, other than taking the soon to be developed experimental treatment?
If you wanna get your shit sequenced I can look at your results and tell you whether you do or not. (No guarantees with commercial services like Flore or whatever, you gotta at least be able to get me raw 16s data)
Really depends whether or not you have any of this bacterium to begin with.
Any ideas for what I should talk about at Minifest next wkd? What’s interesting to ppl besides AI?
That’s pretty difficult these days isn’t it? The rate of obsolescence is quite fast these days.
I have to say that any profession that requires you to be on site and do something is an advantage. I think of things like plumbers. It is absolutely immune to outsourcing.
What are the most promising college majors to pursue in order to avoid earning a degree in a field that is likely to soon become obsolete?
Our HVAC system was only heating / cooling the upstairs, not the downstairs. The cheap HVAC company we used last time caused multiple gas leaks. This time we got a quote from the expensive but reputable HVAC company to fix the problem, 7500 dollars. I had to get my ass out of bed, spend a weekend learning about air systems and flow rates whether the problem was poor insulation, bad ducts, or what, and then finally dig around in the fiberglass insulation until I found the damper lever. Ultimately, the fix was to move the lever from "Don't heat or cool the downstairs" to "Do heat or cool the downstairs."
In retrospect, I would have quite liked to pay a real expert $500 an hour to solve this expediently, given that now that I have taken the time to learn the ins and outs of an HVAC system, I can see that "expediently" for an expert should have been ~80 seconds + transit time. Alas, paying for expertise in the trades is growing into a spectacular market for lemons / actual swap-the-shells-find-the-marble level scam.
Please share which resources you found helpful educate yourself on this topic?
No information source I found was helpful, and in fact most were actively unhelpful / trying to sell me something in a way that was malicious. I very nearly replaced all the ducting myself on the basis that all information sources suggested that the real solution was to let a professional replace either the ducting or the insulation, and that doing it myself would be ~half the cost at the price of risking doing a bad job that would be expensive for a professional to fix. I almost failed to challenge this frame.
Thinking about the problem from first principles + Crawling in and physically disassembling things until I understood the problem let me find the actual solution.
Gotcha, thanks for sharing your experience!
Paranoid thought: Given the past gas leaks (I assume that means that you have a gas combustion powered heating system, like mine), do you have carbon monoxide detectors? Combustion (or partial combustion) products can also leak... :-(
We have carbon monoxide detectors. Thank you for checking, this is an important question and would have been life saving in many of the possible worlds that produce my parent comment.
Many Thanks! Very glad you have the detectors!
Have you read the Asterisk article on this? https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/lies-damned-lies-and-manometer-readings
Thanks for the link! It's unfortunate to hear that this is widespread and not just a skill issue on my end- I still hold out hope that there's some "contracting" stat I could level up so that I don't have to do everything myself.
I worked as a small scale, general contractor and carpenter, etc. for quite a while in New York City. HVAC contractors are really a nightmare.. I have been screwed so many times I can’t remember. In the house I currently live in with my wife the duct sizes throughout the house are incorrect for the AC unit on the roof which totally freezes up every summer because the airflow isn’t great enough. Ripping the house apart to replace the ducts is not really a feasible option. It’s incredibly disappointing that the company would’ve done that out of the gate.
I'll note that home builders all over the country tend to skimp badly on HVAC. I had a townhouse in Florida, built in 2014. I bought in 2017. And the AC condenser coil had, by the time I moved out in 2020, been replaced *3 times* because they'd specced the unit with a brand notorious for the thinnest, cheapest copper without any kind of anti-corrosion coating. Thankfully we were able to skate under the warranty (maybe stretching it a time or two) so it only cost umpteen dollars in labor, thankfully from a well-regarded local guy.
So yeah, not just NYC.
Has anyone else experienced Substack requiring more frequent authentications?
Yes, very irritating. And my hands are dry and chapped from winter so my Mac doesn't recognize my thumbprint & I have to type in my one-ring-to-rule-then-all password.
If someone has their own domain name the substack app requires you to re-authenticate for each new domain name, which makes sense to me. But maybe it's not supposed to work like that.
I still just can’t get behind diverting $ from human causes to shrimp welfare. I’ve heard the arguments in favor, and I suppose I just care more about my species. Am I wrong?
Shrimp have no feet, and so cannot kick any ass, thus falling short of my criteria: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dvc7zrqsdCYy6dCFR/suffering#pjPbCamDYMNsPf9HB
They have like ten feet, man.
If they can't kick ass they'll surely evolve into creatures that can.
You're not objectively wrong, but that does lower the weight of any moral objections you might have in the event that an AI actively tries to destroy humanity.
Orthogonality thesis! You don't have to care about the shrimp, but shouldn't necessarily be surprised to encounter arbitrarily smart agents who do care about the shrimp.
But the fact that you could imagine agents caring about lots of things doesn't mean that it's consistent with the reflective values of most humans not to care about shrimp. Indeed, as I argue in the article and elsewhere, it's not https://benthams.substack.com/p/rebutting-every-objection-to-giving. The orthogonality thesis isn't a blanket excuse not to do philosophy. And note, I had a debate with William about whether it's good to shrimp welfare, and over the course of it he ended up biting the bullet on it not being valuable to shut down a baby torture facility that created, tortured, and killed quadrillions of babies, if doing so would cost one penny.
So you can operate a facility that creates, tortures, and kills quadrillions of babies for nothing? Because the cost of one penny to shut it down is more than it costs to run it?
Man, that is some efficient technology! Can we get it in the real world, or is this all just spherical cow world thought experiment? Because I think we could rephrase the argument that it would cost more to stop torturing quadrillions of shrimp than to keep on doing what we're doing in the shrimp fishing and farming industries, you know?
Well said. I’m not so much surprised as I am curious about it
I don't think so, but I also think giving to almost any charity would feel miserable and burdensome if you had to think about all the other charities you were implicitly rejecting by giving to that one. Most people only donate ~1% of their money to charity in general, and are more motivated by being excited about a specific cause than by fulfilling some general pledge, so I think they mostly don't funge. I donate more money to human causes than shrimp, but I also just find it exciting to be able to help one million of something.
I feel like you and the linked article are failing to take the logic being used to it's logical conclusion. Which is that suffering is something which serves a clear evolutionary function, and that needn't be very complicated (indeed you have reasons to expect smarter animals to have certain incentives to evolve to feel pain less intensely, counter to most people's intuitions):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RjkfdOv6bpsQkF-Y4Gp0FYbVfNZDa_NU4PYulp5r1rY/edit?usp=sharing
This is by far the most satisfying take I've read in ages. Reminds me of when an ASCPA activist stopped me on the street to ask for donations at exactly the wrong moment in 2016. I burst into tears and offered to donate to his cause if he'd donate to mine, and then I went home and did my part because I wanted to live in a world where we stand by our word and because I figured it wouldn't lead me to donating less to causes I care more about anyway.
Are you an effective altruist? You seem like one of the people with the sort of psychological makeup who would be helped by it (as opposed to the many other people with the psychological makeup to be harmed by it)
No, but kinda in the same way that I’m not a rationalist. Some combination of ‘keep your identity small’ and the communities feeling like they’re in the uncanny valley for me, mostly. There are aspects that really resonate with me, and others that very much do not.
That’s fair enough and I can appreciate your disposition. It is an interesting project and I don’t mean to diminish its virtue. Personally, every charity dollar I give outside of human causes goes to dogs and cats because, well, I love them :)
It's hard to find any good analysis on Syria. What are the chances that Bashar is dead? There's no proof he's in Russia, and Putin has an incentive to claim he's safe in Russia. Who's been financing and arming the rebels? If Turkey, why? Were the rebels supported by Israel, with the intention of cutting off the weapons flow to Hezbollah? What happens now? The consequences are completely unpredictable, but it's easy to imagine disintegration and anarchy.
I've been wondering the same thing after not paying too close attention to Syria in the last decade and then seeing everything change over the weekend. Stable seeming can deteriorate very fast is a useful lesson to get reminded of
>What happens now?
Nothing good.
The best case realistic scenario I see is... an ultra-conservative, repressive but stable Islamist country, akin to Afghanistan under the Taliban postwar.
And even that seems optimistic; Turks are attacking Manbij, Israel just grabbed some more land in the Golan, and there's a very ugly legacy of sectarian violence during the conflict and I don't trust Jolani's assurances to the contrary. Plus the risk of the whole place becoming a base for international terrorism.
I suppose it's possible that HTS doesn't control the whole country, as that offensive was very fast and there were local uprisings elsewhere, I don't know how much control they have on the ground. But if not, it means another round of civil war, in which the most powerful and best organized faction is also a former (or "former") al-Qaeda affiliate.
Turkey was surrounded by the Russians on three sides; the Black Sea, Caucasus and Syria. This was unacceptable to them, so they took the opportunity to topple Assad via various militia groups. Assad was backed by both the Russians, who have several military bases in Syria (possibly evacuated now) and the Iranians/Hezbollah. Russia is tied up in Ukraine and the Iranian axis is weakened from the war with Israel, so Assad went down.
Bashar is very likely in Russia, not dead. Which rebels? The main ones responsible, HTS, have been stockpiling for years from Syrian Army desertions and probably Turkey. SNA definitely a lot from Turkey. The Kurds and Free Syrian Army at Al Tanf from the US. The southern rebels maaaybe some from Israel. Israel definitely gains more from cutting Iranian land bridge across Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
No one knows what happens now with any confidence. Best guess to me is we get an extremer than Egypt type Muslim state. Kurds won't get their own state because Turkey will declare full war on them, because they believe it will cause their own Kurd separatism to flare up gravely. Kurds will have some type of semi-autonomy with less territory than now, pending negotiations between them Turkey and Jolani's government. Otherwise, continuous civil war between Turkey-backed SNA, SDF (Kurds), and Syrian government by everyone else still possible.
My best guess is anarchy and chaos, because that's what happened after both Saddam and Qaddafi were overthrown. I was surprised that no one would fight for Bashar, even along the Alawite coast. Turkey could invade more of the Kurdish east. HTS might turn jihadi again, or decide they want to liberate Palestine and expand the war to Israel. ISIS might return. In both Iraq and Libya the euphoria lasted a few days, then skirmishes exploded into war. I hope it's peace and stability this time.
For what it's worth, HTS has a civilian front called the Syrian Salvation Government" that acts as its political and administrative arm. In Idlib province, which they've controlled for a while, SG has sectors overseeing education, health, banking, and reconstruction. It's run by a council that follows Sharia law, but Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani has said he intends to tolerate religious and ethnic minorities. We'll see if that actually happens. But I've seen a bunch of videos on X of HTS/SG representatives meeting with local leaders of various provinces.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q0w1g8zqvo
Too early to tell. Give it a few days. My guess is that Assad really IS safely in Russia.
Shar'a/Jolani seems to be in charge, and as long as nothing too crazy happens (like the Americans droning him for the lulz), he might rule and bring peace and stability for several decades. Or he might immediately go to war with the Kurds in the North East.
https://manifold.markets/TimothyBandors/assad-dead-in-2024
https://x.com/BarakRavid/status/1865805934800367827
Have a hard time imagining they’ll get the Kurdish NE anytime soon…ideological gap too big. Also coastal Latakia might retrench
In politics we have the left and the right. The idea of there also being an up and down has been floated but hasn’t caught on, maybe because it’d be harder to know who exactly to disagree with.
I’m an American who likes Americans. So I’m most comfortable wherever I can find a lot of them, which usually means somewhere other than at the extremes. The further I go either left or right, the more people I find who like fewer and fewer Americans. This strikes me as a stupid place to be if you love your country more than various ways of improving it.
Though we just have the two directions, we’re lucky not to be stuck with one. The best route around some obstacles doesn’t typically consist of all left turns. Or right turns. Or no turns. If you want to get most places, you’ll eventually need to turn both ways. If you favor direction over destination you go in circles and people look at you like you’re fucking bananas. Having a favorite direction is detrimental to getting places.
This loopy prioritization of direction over destination afflicts both parties—they just keep grabbing at the wheel and jerking it in the same goddamn direction. It’s like they’d prefer a ratchet to a wheel. The same single-mindedness is just as true of centrists. They barely turn at all no matter what’s in the road.
I think it’s reasonable and necessary to sometimes make even sharp turns left or right, but to me that implies you should also be just as willing to spin the wheel the other direction when the need arises.
Note: As to destination—national prosperity is usually where people (regardless of their favorite direction) claim we should all end up.
Why is it that we have two distinct directions? Consider the following political positions:
Pro-choice/pro-life
Capital punishment/no capital punishment
Gun control/2nd amendment's supremacy
Social safety net/anti-welfare
Four choices ought to lead to 16 distinct political affiliations. Instead, they are all apparently somehow correlated, so we end up with two. Why is that?
They’re mostly contingent, collapsing an enormous number of different issues into a binary. If you take the historical perspective, what it means to be a “Democrat” has mutated out of all recognition over the years. Even conservative ideology has changed significantly over time as different factions become more influential.
Richard Nixon talked like a modern Republican in many ways, but his policies were very different.
I’m sorry but I’m not sure if you’re genuinely asking. My argument was not that conservatism and progressivism are incoherent ideologies. I’m arguing that if someone is philosophically committed to always favoring one over the other regardless of circumstance, I don’t think that’s sensible. It’s dogmatic. They’re drastically narrowing their range of governing options.
I don’t get ideological loyalty. There are good progressive ideas and good conservative ideas. I like strict anti-illegal immigration policy. I like gobs of tradition and stability and individual responsibility. I also like environmental protection and global cooperation and bold progress. And how much I support associated policies is affected by society’s current circumstance, not by my party association.
And, just to reiterate, I’m not advocating centrism because it also just narrows your range of options to those closest to the political middle, which makes it impossible to make abrupt or sweeping changes in the face of big challenges.
"In politics we have the left and the right. The idea of there also being an up and down"
The idea of 16 orthogonally different ideologies tracks more closely with the idea of left, right, up, down, back, forth, diagonally, and reverse. But it isn't that way. You say you like tradition: does that mean you're opposed to gay marriage, which is not traditional? You say you like environmental protection: does that mean you're in favor of "green" energy like hydroelectric which drastically changes local environments?
The world is complicated, yet somehow in the US everyone can be neatly divided into one of two camps. I find this implausible, yet empirically true.
Thanks for taking the time to explain. I should’ve understood your meaning, but thought your question might be rhetorical.
The up/down notion I was referring to as not catching on was in reference to the various multi-axis models, like those proposed by psychologists Leonard Ferguson and Hans Eysenck in the 50s. Eysenck’s was sorta: Radical<———->Conservative on the x and Authoritarian<———->Democratic on the y. Ferguson’s was similar. There have been many others.
I agree that your example of 16 directions similarly expands the spectrum to more axes, and also agree that supporting a broad category of values (like tradition) invariably leads to some contradictory beliefs associated with it like say a conservative supporting gay marriage. The left-right axis is simplistic, which probably contributes to its mass appeal but it does a terrible job of capturing the nuance of individual political belief.
This is why I feel like instead of trying to occupy a place on the spectrum and identifying with it, it’s wiser to simply use it to gauge the political direction of action/policy. I’m not a lefty, righty or a centrist. I support ideologically diverse policies depending on how I see the world at a particular time, and just because say I support gay marriage, I don’t want to be associated with supporting Palestine over Israel or DEI policy. Also, if I support a lefty politician who supports gay marriage, once gay marriage is widely accepted, the lefty politician’s reputation is defined by his place on the spectrum that then dictates he always favor progressive policy over conservative. So next he might want to push for more state funding for gender-confirmation surgeries, which I might oppose.
So I guess I don’t quite agree Americans can all be divided neatly into two camps. I think most Americans can’t be, but they allow the false association in order to gain the advantage that a massive coalition offers.
Your problem lies in taking the analogy too far. Ideologies are not directions that you take through a winding path to welfare. There is only one path to improving human welfare that has been found in all of human history - a government that is strong enough to ensure property rights exist and markets can function, and sensible enough to limit itself to that. Deviations away from this can still keep us inching forward, but more deviation moves you slower, and less deviation moves you faster. You can deviate as far as Soviet Russia or Venezuela and end up a basket case, you can deviate as far as Europe and just stagnate, or you can try and keep economic liberty alive and well.
Some things, like water that governments can be, and frequently are, good at supplying.
Maybe you’re right. But you don’t think circumstances like a market collapse or foreign invasion or civil conflict or global disaster or technological leap, etc. could dictate greater conservatism or progressivism to temporarily navigate such a period? I’m not sure there’s some Goldilocks zone on the political spectrum in which a government can safely operate without encountering challenges that necessitate ideologically flexible governance.
Countries that have a first-past-the-post voting system, such as the US, end up with only two parties, and therefore only two mainstream political positions.
Countries with a proportional system, for example Germany and (for most parliament seats) Italy, end up with many parties, and therefore more than two political ideologies.
If America abolished first-past-the-post and replaced it with a proportional system, third, fourth and fifth parties would become mainstream, and people would realize that there are more than two possible positions.
>> Countries that have a first-past-the-post voting system, such as the US, end up with only two parties, and therefore only two mainstream political positions
But this is false. India uses FPTP but has a lot of parties. The UK uses FPTP and has at least three substantial parties (the lib dems have no realistic chance of winning a majority, but were kingmakers less than a decade ago). Canada uses FPTP and has four parties with significant parliamentary representation (2 small, but not negligible). etc.
The claim may be correct about the specific form of the US political system (FPTP plus presidential system plus highly nationalized politics)...but is plainly false about FPTP alone.
You're right, I should have worded that more carefully.
Let's say that first-past-the-post systems tends to keep the number of parties down, especially if you exclude regionalist parties, which are defined by their ties to a specific region rather than their ideology.
India is a special case, since most of its population doesn't speak Hindi. It's only natural that their politics is regionally fragmented.
Ok, but the ideological parties in fptp systems are themselves coalitions. Proportional representation just pushes the coalition negotiations to after the general election instead of before it.
It’s not at all clear to me that eg Germany had a wider ideological Overton window than the UK. Rather the other way around, as far as I can tell. De facto, Germany seems to be a uniparty system. You can vote for any one of a large number of parties, but you will inevitably get a franken-coalition of all of them (except AfD), pursuing essentially the same policies.
See my answer to Mark.
You can find it by scrolling down a tiny bit, or by clicking here
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80822576
Of course, to a large degree, one of the fundamental points that Trump supporters have hammered again and again is the idea that the existing US political parties *as actually functioning in DC* are really just different wings of the Uniparty, and that one reason to elect an "outsider" is to break that monopoly where whether you select D or R doesn't really matter, since it's the same faceless bureaucrats and establishment types running things either way.
Is it true? I don't know. But it definitely feels that way a lot of the time.
My country, Italy, is not as you describe. I'll write more when I have time.
This actually doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Countries like Germany only reassure me that politics naturally tends toward two camps, as there is still basically just a left and a right in Germany, just more than one left party and more than one right party - with FDP being only moderately more influential than the American libertarian party.
Even without first-past-the-post, coalitions will tend to grow to encompass about half the population. There may be more than two parties, but a ‘two tribe’ political culture isn’t just an artifact of American electoral customs.
I live in Italy, where the system is mostly proportional.
It’s funny that one of those who replied to my comment says in a proportional system you just get two coalitions, while another says that you get a single coalition in the middle. One scenario excludes the other.
Anyhow, that is not how it works.
Often you get a coalition goverment that takes up one half of the spectrum (right or left), but other outcomes are possible. For example, in 2018, two growing populist parties, the right wing League and the center-left Five Star Movement, formed a goverment together, excluding both the hitherto mainstream right and the hitherto mainstream left.
Also, which parties exactly are of the right and which of the left is a flexible notion. During the 90’s the League was part of a right wing government, then it was part of a left wing government, and then in 2001 it was part of a right wing government again.
A right-wing or left-wing government doesn’t have to include all the parties in its own half of the spectrum, if it can form a majority without them (fewer parties means that less compromise is needed). To make an extreme example, throughout the cold war era, the Italian Social Movement (MSI) was always excluded, since everyone understood it to be a party of Mussolini nostalgics. This forced the right-wing Christian Democrats to ally with centrist parties. But the perseverance of MSI served a purpose, because as National Alliance they would finally get to be part of a government in the 90’s.
Parties within a government coalition retain separate political positions. They do not merge into a coalition hive mind.
For example, of the two biggest parties in the current government, one is very supportive of Ukraine, while the other is lukewarm. Of course, they have to vote as a bloc, so they work out such differences. This doesn’t mean those differences cease to exist, or that the public ceases to be aware of them.
The news will frequently go through the main parties and report what a spokesman from each has to say about some development. The ones in power will try to show they get along, lest people think they’re bickering, but their individual positions are still conveyed. The ones not in power are even freer to say whatever they want.
Contrast all this with how it works in the US. I remember the 2016 primaries, when Bernie Sanders fought against Hillary Clinton. But in spite of massive support, his movement didn’t obtain any power at all. Zero, zilch, nada. If the US had had a proportional system, four parties would have emerged in that year, each with 20%-30% of seats in both Congress and electoral college. Traditional Democrats and Republicans, plus a Bernie party and a Maga party. People would think of two parties as “the left” and the other two as “the right”, but would also be more aware of the different shades of right and left.
In such a world, Sanders could pull the rug from under a left-wing government if it is not socialist enough. He could even decide to form a populist alliance with Trump, excluding the mainstream parties, just like the League and the Five Stars did a few years ago. Therefore it is not at all the case that it is, in the words of one commenter, ”six of one, a half dozen the other”.
In a proportional US, even libertarians would become a significant power. A two-digits percentage of Americans describe themselves as libertarians. They don’t vote for the libertarian party because it’s pointless, but in a proportional system it would not be. A libertarian party may act as kingmaker, forcing others to come to a compromise with them.
Therefore a wider range of ideologies would obtain actual influence, both at the center (libertarians), and at the extremes (socialists).
1. Once you're in a coalition government, all of the coalition partners have to maintain it against the threat of early elections. You're now collectively responsible to hold the government together. So Sanders could form a coalition with whomever, let's say Trump's party, but then he can't take free votes with the center left Democrats when he feels like it or when he disagrees with Trump. He has to vote with Trump on everything, or the coalition will collapse. So PR coalitions are highly rigid, strange affairs. None of this is desirable
2. Small kingmaker parties tilt politics towards the extreme. You're giving the small party outsized power. This is, obviously, a bad thing. Netanyahu's most recent coalition is obviously being run by a few very far-right parties that got 3 or 4%, who can threaten to quit at any time. Small parties being kingmakers is a bad thing, and tilts politics away from the median voter and towards the extremes
3. Sanders voters are part of the Democratic Party now, and they're free to influence and lobby Democrats on stuff important to them. If they lose on a particular issue- hey, that's just democracy, which by definition is a majoritarian system. It's better to tilt politics towards large parties that have to appeal to the media voter, not small extreme parties that got 7% of the vote or whatever
But the Sanders wing does have political power. Sanders is a senator. Has been for decades. So is Elizabeth Warren. The libertarian wing also has power. Paul the elder was a congressman. Paul the younger is a senator. Jared Polis is a governor. They exist within the framework of the existing two party system, but the parties in question are themselves coalitions capable of holding more than one ideological position. Including socialists and libertarians.
What the socialists and libertarians have not had, is control of the white house. But your beef there is not with FPTP, but rather with the presidential system.
And you know what? I agree switching the US system from a presidential to a parliamentary system would be an improvement. But I'd switch it to a Westminster model parliamentary system, with FPTP. Makes it far easier to throw the bums out.
Sanders has one Senate seat. If the Senate were proportionally elected, Sanders would have not one, but 20 Senate seats.
I'm not sure what you mean by throwing the bums out. Proportional systems usually have thresholds. A party must obtain a minimum percentage of votes. If it fall shorts the votes are redistributed. If you don't want bums (what are bums? small parties?), why not a proportional system with a higher threshold.
An example would be Germany's FDP, which has averaged 9 or 10% in the postwar era, yet has been a coalition partner and achieved outsized power in 6 different governments over 46 years. They've partially run the world's 3rd largest economy for close to half a century, despite never breaking 10% in election results. How is that democratic? How can a German voter vote them out of office? Coalitions aren't subject to democratic vote. No matter how Germans vote, you keep getting the same small party in government
Most countries with FPTP do not end up with such a strict two-party system as US. Canada has NDP and BQ, UK has LibDems and the various separatist parties, India has a bevy of regionalist parties. There must be something beyond just FPTP to lead to US having *only* two parties of any real power.
England* has had a two-party system for the last 100 years since the Liberals almost entirely vanished after the First World War. The Liberal Party and Social Democrats and LibDems and now the Greens make a very tiny showing and rarely influence anything.
This will all dramatically change after the next election because Reform and the LibDems will probably do extremely well and because Labour and the Conservatives are extremely unpopular at the moment. I expect we will end up with a different ‘two party’ system eventually but it will be a bumpy ride to get there.
* its different in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
LibDems have often received ~9-10 % of the seats, which is hardly a "very tiny showing" compared to what third parties get in the US, and even made it to the government once.
And they got 8 seats (1%) in 2017.
Having more viable political parties would no doubt help with polarization, but what I’m arguing is that constantly trying to steer a society in any one ideological direction isn’t sensible, regardless of how many might be available. And this is what the majority of voters and politicians seem to do by remaining loyal to a party regardless of where their society is or what challenges it currently faces.
Conservatism isn’t a destination. Neither is progressivism. Sustaining a societal turn in either direction indefinitely would be catastrophic. That’s not what they’re designed for. Conservatism, progressivism, liberalism, libertarianism, etc. are means not ends. They’re tools and which ones you use and to what extent depends on where your society is and what types of challenges it’s facing. If you had six parties, I would still argue it would be foolish to favor one over all the others on principle. But I think this describes most people who identify strongly with their politics.
I’d say that conservatism *is* a destination. Or, at least it was until the name got hijacked by some revolutionaries.
Isn't this six of one, a half dozen the other? First-past-the-post induces coalitions to form before the election, in proportional systems coalitions form after. The latter gives you more parties, but do you really end up with more ideologies represented?
See my answer to Mark, where I explain why it is not, in fact, six of one, half a dozen of the other.
You can find it by scrolling up a tiny bit, or by clicking here
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80822576
I want to agree with this, but for example Labour recently won with 33% of the vote, and I think that's a pretty typical winning result in a FPTP election. By contrast a coalition government in PR by definition has to be at least 51% of the parliament, maybe more. A 51% or higher coalition is obviously much larger than a 33% one- the latter doesn't sound like very many ideologies are represented
on the other hand, FPTP allows you to `throw the bums out.' PR makes this much harder.
Was just coming here to say that.
Or put another way some nations with PR have stumbled along for decades at a time with a series of awkward/kludged parliamentary coalitions. That renders the national government incapable of making and sticking to a broad new policy direction, the government is kind of just stumbling along.
And for a while that can be kind of okay or at least not-terrible...until the circumstances arrive in which it no longer suffices. Germany is now looking like a new example of that; a lot of Italy's post-WW II history fits that description; Spain has been living it lately. The French thought they'd solved this by having an overlaid nationally-elected president but I know a couple of people from that nation who are really wondering what the hell happens next given recent electoral/political events. Etc.
https://open.spotify.com/track/5nEkWBNfUA87RY6ZSx2aR3?si=4J5rKCodTWyR_sOjuzqV0w&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A2oJHtuXrCJ0KMH5GrC6Qdw
Does anyone have a good summary of the evidence for the healthfulness or lack thereof of seed oils versus animal fats or traditionally "unhealthy" fats? This has been in the news lately (RFK). It seems like all the claims about seed oils being bad for you flies in the face of standard recommendations from reputable medical organizations. Is it really that simple, or is there more to it than that?
Scott, any chance you'd do one of your wonderful evidence overview writeups about this topic? I'm also interested in your take on how much we should trust nutrition science in general, given how hard it is to do methodologically sound science in that field. It's very difficult to do randomized controlled trials in humans for food over long timescales, and almost nobody tries. Observational studies are hard to do well, because of all the confounding variables; health-coded food is confounded with all sorts of healthy lifestyle choices that are hard to quantify and thus hard to control for. And we don't really get good natural experiments in humans nutrition, like we sometimes get in economics and other social science fields. Given those methodological challenges associated with the field, how much should we listen to nutrition science?
Others have already shared some good write-ups. Points worth consideration besides:
Fat sources are not uniform in lipid type. There's generally some distribution of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats in each, and different acids within those categories (e.g. linoleic acid, omega 3 vs omega 6 PUFA). Meaning, you won't have a 0% SFA or 0% PUFA consumption rate if you include a variety of fats in your diet, whether all-veg or all animal. Oil with a higher PUFA ratio is more likely to oxidize. Impact of this is not well understood. Another contentious and not-so-well understood phenomenon is the omega-3:6 ratio, but the uncontroversial truism is that omega 3 consumption is good (especially DHA/EPA), and often lacking compared to omega 6. The most well researched cooking oil is olive oil, which is high in MUFA. Possibly the antioxidant content is what sets it apart from others in terms of health impact. Yet, asian countries mostly consume seed oils copiously - peanut (high in SFA), mustard ( MUFA), sesame and soybean (PUFA) and they're not faring any worse. In the margins, you've also got the Israeli paradox to consider - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_paradox, where heart disease rates are higher despite low SFA consumption, which may be attributed to high linoleic acid consumption.
Risk associated with SFA consumption appears to climb past a certain threshold that is not well defined, but health institutions all issue the same warning. PUFA consumption in general is much higher now, but mortality risk of SFA remains, so one doesn't necessarily negate the other, plus seed oil still contains SFA in varying amounts. In research, replacing SFA with PUFA (rather than carbs) better mitigates CVD risk.
SFA is not devoid of benefit either. It may help e.g. protect testosterone levels. But I see a case of diminishing returns, to everything. In PUFA research and nutrition discussion, it's as though there's no ceiling to the benefits PUFA provides, but that flies in the face of the fact that PUFA consumption is at record highs and so are obesity rates. The generous interpretation is that this is tied to processed foods, which alongside seed oil contain copious amounts of refined flour and sugar. Even so, obviously the seed oils don't negate the impacts of overconsumption and sugar consumption.
My personal approach: eat omega 3s regularly (algal oil supplement or sardines), use olive oil for cooking most of the time, eat nuts and seeds (preferably raw), moderate animal fat consumption (e.g. lean cage-free chicken breast).
EDIT: an observation about the graphs in Scott's old SSC post is that it pits total animal fat consumption vs total PUFA. Comparing against SFA itself would be more enlightening. Vegetable oils used in packaged products can be high in SFA, most ubiquitous being palm oil.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-356/comment/77982462
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-356/comment/77978713
One writeup:
https://dynomight.net/seed-oil/
This was a good read, thank you
Ofc!
I wrote a bit about this at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/10/for-then-against-high-saturated-fat-diets/
Short version: there's a lot of really suggestive evidence, but all direct studies find that seed oils are better than saturated fats (the old stuff that seed oils replaced). I think there's probably something subtle going on that we're missing - maybe seed oils are only bad in some context, and we haven't figured out the context? maybe seed oils aren't bad themselves but are very heavily correlated with something else bad? - and I think it's probably not a bad choice to cut down on seed oils, but I don't feel like we actually understand what's going on here.
A nuance that is not often captured is that palm oil is the most widely produced, and most ubiquitous vegetable oil added to packaged products i.e. junk food. It is high in saturated fat ("palm mesocarp oil is 49% saturated, while palm kernel oil and coconut oil are 81% and 86% saturated fats"). All seed oils contain some varying amount, and the acids are structurally identical to what you'd find in animals, so maybe "animal fat vs oils" is the wrong question.
This is all still poorly understood. At least we can say that seed oils won't save us from the impacts of obesity. Asians use a ton of seed oil in cooking and they're not fat (presumably total consumption still modest). Peanut oil is (relatively) higher in SFA, while soybean and grapeseed is very high in PUFA. They also won't shy from full-fat animal parts, but eat way more vegetables.
Thanks for the post; it was a good read.
Looking through the sources you linked to, I was pleasantly surprised at how many of them were proper randomized controlled trials. Reading blogs, reddit posts, etc, about this topic, people generally refer to either observational studies or non-human randomized controlled trials, both of which should be considered somewhat limited in what they can tell us (the former because it's difficult to control for all the confounding healthy lifestyle choices associated with eating health-coded foods, the latter because mice aren't humans).
Whereas you linked to several proper randomized controlled trials on this subject (eg https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21331065/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5855206/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6134288/#__ffn_sectitle). That's encouraging; I will have to retract my statement "almost nobody tries".
>maybe seed oils are only bad in some context, and we haven't figured out the context? maybe seed oils aren't bad themselves but are very heavily correlated with something else bad?
Bing bing bing! It's agricultural practices.
Tell me: if I sprayed the leaves of an olive tree with enough Roundup to kill it, then plucked the withered olives from its dead branches, and then pressed those into olive oil...would you put that on your salad?
Hopefully not. But this is how it's done in modern industrial agriculture, with practically any crop that is killed during harvest, i.e. corn, rapeseed (i.e. canola), sunflower, peanuts, etc. It's called "preharvest desiccation".
So you end up eating those herbicides. And yes, roundup is supposed to be safe to eat, because we don't have EPSP synthase, the enzyme it interferes with. But a lot of your gut bacteria DO have that enzyme, and it's a critical step in the biosynthesis of tryptophan and tyrosine, i.e. the precursors to serotonin and dopamine.
So you can bend over backwards comparing the unsaturated fatty acid profiles of walnut vs. olive vs. rapeseed vs. sunflower oil, trying to explain why the first two are good and the last two are bad, but if you apply the simple heuristic of "Did this come from a plant that was poisoned to death?", you'll find that it tracks suspiciously well with which vegetable oils are "bad" and which ones are "good".
All the scientifically literate sources/studies I’ve seen find no harm (beyond the obvious fact of caloric density). Sorry for the lazy answer but Google scholar has lots of meta studies on the subject
>They’ve been endorsed by GiveWell as one of the most effective charities in the world
Importantly, even after increasing their estimate of GiveDirectly's effectiveness severalfold, GiveWell still estimates their top charities to be at least twice as effective as GiveDirectly (by extension, the many charities in GiveWell's "All Grants Fund" would be assessed to have an even higher expected value).
See: https://blog.givewell.org/2024/11/12/re-evaluating-the-impact-of-unconditional-cash-transfers/
Thanks, I've softened the language.
I have been doing a deeper-than-usual dive into gender dysphoria, and I think I reached some genuinely novel conclusions regarding transgenderness and some other related ~disorders. I'm pretty sure the mainstream understanding of how it works is wrong.
Plugging in my summary of the investigation
https://thesolarprincess.github.io/blog/en/identitydisorders
Thanks for the plug and the research, your theory sure sounds like there's something to it, and even more so coming from someone with direct personal experience. I especially liked the part where you define an identity as “the thing that people with multiple personality disorder have a multiple of”, and then go on to apply that to disphoria. Definitely gives it a more cognitive vibe, than the usual mainstream bio-developmental explanations, and at first blush it sounds right.
Looks interesting and plausible.
From my understanding, for every person that feels this strongly, there should be lots of people who feel this weakly. Ie who are slightly transgender.
And from my reading of r/transhumanism and similar, there seems to be a few people who really want to be robots.
> From my understanding, for every person that feels this strongly, there should be lots of people who feel this weakly. Ie who are slightly transgender
Certainly! The LGBT community even has terms like "demigender" for people who feel only weakly drawn to a particular gender.
Although "where you want to fall on the gender spectrum" and "how much do you want it seem to be different axes, e.g. you can weakly prefer to be extremely feminine, or don't think that life has any meaning unless you are a very slightly masculine.
> And from my reading of r/transhumanism and similar, there seems to be a few people who really want to be robots.
I haven't heard of that! Do they (at least sometimes) report dysphoria?
Hey, just wanted to say thanks for commenting here, i wouldn't have found your post otherwise and it's a fresh perspective and it brings a good set of questions to investigate theories (what about nonbinary/genderfluid, why does it depend on non-biological factors). Looking forward to your research on this.
Thank you for your kind words.
This kind of amateur mini-research on the fringes is why I'm in the SSC/ACX community. The site by the link has options to subscribe, if you want to be notified of any follow-ups.
...Well, I was always under the impression that these desires and fetishes were downstream of "innate" body dysmorphia. The theory was mostly supported by my own observations, and I have good reason to believe it is shared by the medical establishment. But your theory does make more sense, especially given the insights into intelligence we've gained via AI...
It doesn't matter though. Do you people even understand how utterly inconvenient your existences are to society? You're undermining the very bedrock of modern society, the gender binary, and the very concept of identity. Not to mention the accomodations you people expect for your delusions. Do you really believe you deserve happiness at the expense of everyone else?
Unless you have a cure and a means of administering it to the population by force (because as you said, no one would take it willingly), the people are not interested. In the absense of a cure, society will eventually resort to dealing with such aberrations the old fashioned way, just as the cells in a body work to purge a cancer. And regardless of the outcome, a cancer has no future.
Can we not refer to small minorities as cancers in the body politic that need to be purged? I bet you could come up with less murdery analogies with some effort.
Seasonings? Spices?
Could you explain exactly how existence of trans people is at expense of everyone else, over the regular expense that people with health problems inflict by needing treatment?
Those people aren't unraveling the very fabric of society simply by existing. The gender binary is fundamental to modern society, to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female. The role and identity of any given person is decided by it; it defines all of who they are. But what happens when that reality of that identity is put into question?
It makes so much sense now, why so many people see gender transition as morally wrong. Gender used to be absolute. Identity is relative, and when the system that their identity is relative to is compromised, so is the identity itself. There is the very real fear of losing yourself and your place in the world. Even if it was all just a lie, it was a lie that was holding everything together.
It's not just trans people, it's the entire movement to erase gender roles. The old hierarchy ensured that there was no conflict. There was an expectation for each sex, and no deviation was tolerated. But as the lie unravels, animosity between the sexes grows, and people start looking out for their own self-interests. Social cohesion frays.
Our entire society is built on nothing but lies, but those lies were the only thing keeping the social fabric intact. Not just gender; religion, class, race, nationalism... They were all necessary, and we trivialized all of them.
However, the system seems to be self-correcting. A wave of populism is washing over the world, promising to burn down the establishment and replace it with a new dogma. A new set of lies. And they will destroy anything that threatens it.
...There is no world in which we can be happy. Our very existence is antithetical to human society. No hope, no path to salvation... Why are we even here? We never even had a chance.
>to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female.
As you might have heard from a famous Mark Twain bit, German maidens are "it" and German turnips are "she." So if you're going to claim that language is pointing at some sort of fundamental truth, then the fundamental truth is that German women aren't actually women, but German vegetables are.
Or maybe the fundamental truth is "don't make sweeping claims about society and which people ought to be purged from it based on linguistic quirks."
>The gender binary is fundamental to modern society, to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female. The role and identity of any given person is decided by it; it defines all of who they are.
Really? I'm a hobby chemist and retired programmer myself. (oh, and cishet male)
Identity can include:
Career
Nationality/Citizenship(s)
Language(s)
Education
Sexual orientation
Age
Birthplace
Religion
Economic status
Medical condition
Skills (besides job/career)
Night owl/Early bird
Ethnicity/Race
Culinary preferences
Technology preferences
Marital status
> The gender binary is fundamental to modern society,
How that? For better or for worse, in this modern world where we barely know our neighbors, interact with people on the internet through nicknames, work from home, and men and women are about equally educated and doing all sorts of jobs... how is the gender binary "fundamental" to anything, when most social interactions are less gendered than ever?
Of course gendered differences exist in the right corners if you look for them, including the entire arena of sexual attraction. But attraction mostly takes care of itself, either it happens or it doesn't, end of story. And there are a few relatively narrow controversial areas, such as women's sports, which have their importance but are surely not "fundamental to modern society".
> to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female.
Yeah, over here in Spain the sky is male, rain is female, and water is weird enough to take female adjectives and male articles (maybe it's non-binary?). But languages evolve according to their own dynamics, and trying to extract philosophy from grammar or etymology fell out of fashion a century ago because it just does'nt make much sense.
> The old hierarchy ensured that there was no conflict.
LOL, conflict is as old as community itself!
Love is free. I think we can teach anyone anything by being better teachers. We can use the tools of humanity to teach ourselves how to love.
People deserve to be happy. My ‘expense’ in bringing that about gives me meaning and purpose.
"to the point where some languages split all of existence into male and female"
Can you name three?
I'm not trolling: many languages have three genders: male, female, and neutral. And I know of at least one language that has no grammatical gender: Georgian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_language). So at least this point doesn't seem to be fundamental at all.
English also has no grammatical gender. Most Romance languages have just masculine and feminine (having lost the neuter).
But I'd say that the idea that languages that do have grammatical gender split all of existence into the classes defined by those genders is mistaken. E.g. in German the same person can be referred to using nouns of all three genders, and in Spanish, females are regularly referred to in the masculine. What grammatical gender splits is the set of nouns, not all of existence.
"But I'd say that the idea that languages that do have grammatical gender split all of existence into the classes defined by those genders is mistaken."
Yes, this is what I was getting at.
Don’t French and Spanish do this?
They have a "neutral" gender, too.
As well as Russian.
I'm not fluent in either, so I don't really know. That's why I asked for examples...
One of my patients is moving to Austin, TX, and asks for recommendations for good psychiatrists there. Bonus if they have video appointments or experience with bipolar.
Freelance political murder is mostly a young man's (or woman's, c.f. Bernadine Dorne) game. The boomers mostly got it out of the systems in the 70s.
Reminder that Scott requests people not just post links to their own blog posts.
Well, the birth rate issue has nothing to do with culture. That's entirely an issue with policy and increasing social liberalization. Fix those, and the birth rate would return to what it once was.
While a policy solution may be needed, I don't think it's true that depressed TFR has nothing to do with culture. As people increasingly see qualities like career success and other status signaling goods as mutually exclusive with being a parent, their propensity to have children decreases. We would expect this effect to be strongest in societies that value conformity and the ability to obtain/display these aspects the most (like Japan and other East Asian countries).
Sorry, I meant that it's not due to any culture that's exclusive Japan. If anything, the US is doing even worse; I'm assuming the rebound in TFR starting in the 90s was due to immigrant populations, but even that didn't last. And of course, now the government is going oust the illegal immigrant population and close the borders...
I suspect that TFR is hard to affect via easily-applied policy levers (changes in tax code, government benefits, etc.). Without much confidence, I'd guess that the biggest policy lever for TFR in the US now would be YIMBY stuff to lower housing costs and public-order stuff (institutionalizing crazy street people and letting the cops run off vagrants so that free public spaces like parks and libraries are appealing to parents with small children). Maybe also getting on top of the higher education tuition bubble. But all three of those are hard problems that involve lots of conflicting interest groups and arguments, not some simple thing you can do by passing the Have More Babies Act of 2025 in Congress or something.
Assuming this is real, I'm not impressed at all.
The guy and his mom contracted chronic pain disorders, for which no treatment would work. It's not like there was some special treatment that only universal healthcare could provide, or a treatment that was too expensive for him and his mom. Literally none of the treatments would fix the problem.
That's awful. But I promise that even in countries with universal healthcare, people still get sick and suffer and die. That's been true since life first emerged on this planet. It's true in Norway. It's true in Namibia.
It's not something UHC invented to torture people for a profit. Even if every person in the United States of America were replaced with a clone of Bernie Sanders, his mom would still have untreatable chronic pain, as would he.
In response to his illness, UHC tried to treat him. They tried to take his pain away.
In response to his illness, the UHC shooter decided to inflict more pain on others. To increase the amount of pain in the world.
The math is pretty simple.
Fwiw I'm pretty sure it's fake, and am going to delete the comment to avoid spreading BS
Note: unknown right now if this is real
> we try to avoid sharing the words and writings that motivated the individual
Who is this "we"? I know that the social media giants (and repressive foreign governments) try to suppress them, and I make the effort to find and share them regardless, following the "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master" philosophy (from Alpha Centauri).
Yeah. Manifestos are great. People who give their lives for a cause ought to be heard.
If doing so were to become so popular that millions of people were dying and killing for their moment of fame then I would agree that manifestos ought not to be shared, but that is not currently the case.
I would say:
a. Nobody should be in a position to withhold some murderer's or terrorist's manifesto from the public, other than maybe for a short time during the investigation or something.
b. Media outlets can (and maybe should) try to limit the appeal of copycat attacks by not giving away massive amounts of free media attention as a reward for murdering people. I think most media outlets have policies wrt coverage of suicide to try to avoid copycat suicides, and it's probably reasonable to have similar policies for mass shootings, assassinations, terrorist attacks, and the like.
c. In general, I don't expect the manifesto of a murderer or terrorist to be especially enlightening. I mean, I can spend the next hour reading the ideas of any number of people. Assuming I'm not a student of crime or terrorism in particular, is there some particular reason why I should select which person's ideas I read based on their body count?
Stephen Jenkinson's shows (Nights of Grief and Mystery) are very much like this. Also see the "You're going to die" open mics in SF
Eric Bergosian did one man shows where he put on different personas. Some of them had at least a tinge of tragedy.
Jerry Springer.
There are people like Peter Zeihan who have made a career telling tragedy narratives about pretty much everything.
I had professors in some humanities courses that were basically stand up tragedians. Also had to sit through a DEI type seminar at work that basically felt like this.
Also some religious end of the world types do this to very large audiences.
>Is there such a thing as a 'stand up tragedian' (even if it isn't called by that name)?
There is; we call them "politicians" now.
More seriously, the most likely place to find a "stand-up tragedian" is at safety training. Charlie Morecraft surely counts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JVUawbSMUw
Nanette?
And her baguette.
"My wife, ladies and gentlemen.... what? Oh.... My mother, ladies and gentlemen."
I seem to remember that what the ancient Greeks actually meant by "Comic" was *a happy ending*, not just humor. So I think you are using the term somewhat incorrectly.
If what you want is a functional opposite of what a stand up comic does, I would suggest the sermonizer at a church.
"In die Kirche ging ich morgens, um Komödie zu schauen, Abends ins Theater, um mich an der Predigt zu erbauen."
"I went to church in the morning to watch comedy, in the evening to the theatre to edify myself from the sermon."
Correct?
Yes. Its from 1827,
https://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/heine_reisebilder02_1827?p=132
already observing that there might not be so much of a difference here.
Actually, ancient Greeks thought *tragedies* could have happy endings. Aristotle thought the best plot for a tragedy was someone about to do something that is particularly horrible for reasons he doesn't know, but he finds out in time. (Worst was when he did know and just didn't do it in the end -- which is still happy.)
So this (https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature) is wrong? Or I am misinterpreting it?
"branch of drama that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or caused by a heroic individual."
Also, that definition doesn't preclude having a happy ending. Personally, I prefer my tragedies to have a small spark of hope at the end, even if it is bittersweet. Otherwise it's just depressing.
Semantic drift. It didn't mean that in Aristotle's time.
I remain confident that they didn't mean to imply anything about stand up comedy.
Interesting observation.
Perhaps comedy lends itself more to a solo stand-up routine than tragedy does? Tragedy often involves the experience of lost, and maybe this lost is most keenly felt when you're seeing it occur in real time as opposed to hearing about it second hand. Watching a play where the main character loses his beloved wife, who is also a character in the play that we get to know well... maybe this is more effective than hearing a 'stand up tragedian' talk about losing his wife a year ago when almost nobody in attendance knows his wife personally.
some one-man shows. there also used to be solo performers who would travel around orating Shakespeare, Cicero, etc.
See ‘The Meal Ticket’, a short within The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Coen Bros anthology for a far fetched and very sad fictional example.
Wikipedia synopsis:
“Meal Ticket"
An aging impresario and his artist, Harrison, a usually uncommunicative young man with no arms or legs, travel from town to town in a wagon that converts into a small stage where Harrison theatrically recites classics such as Shelley's poem "Ozymandias"; the biblical story of Cain and Abel; works by Shakespeare, including Sonnet 29 and The Tempest; and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
The impresario collects money from the crowd at the end of each performance, but profits are dwindling as they visit increasingly remote towns with smaller, less appreciative audiences.
After a performance that yields no profit, the impresario observes a man nearby drawing a crowd with a chicken that ostensibly performs basic arithmetic by pecking at painted numbers to answer addition and subtraction problems the audience calls out.
After buying the chicken, the impresario drives the wagon through a mountain pass and stops by a bridge over a rushing river. He walks to the center of the bridge and drops a large stone to gauge the water's depth before returning to the wagon. The impresario resumes driving, with the caged chicken as his only passenger.”
You can book David Hogg for a speech. Greta Thunburg says(or said, 5 years ago) that you can't.
Is that the sort of thing you mean?
Comedy in theatre is traditionally just a play with a happy ending. Comparing a Shakespeare comedy ( no tragic ending) to a teller of jokes is a category error. A Shakespeare comedy or tragedy could have jokes within it, like the light relief of the gravedigger in hamlet. If you like that sort of thing. I don’t. Stick to drama Bill.
And there are onstage dramatists who on their own will recite plays or poems. And there are plays with two people doing non comedic role, just as there are comedians who are duos or trios. And there are comic plays, in the modern use of comedy, where everybody is a comedian, like in a farce.
I think Whoopi Goldberg had a stage performance in the 80s where she acted out the part of a young woman giving herself an abortion. John Leguizamo had a three-act solo show that had a similarly tragic story in one of the acts.
I've heard that the Vagina Monologues often brings people to tears in parts.
It's no doubt harder to make a living as a full-time sadness creator.
I think a factor here is how much weight you give to the idea of drawing moral lessons from the tragedy. If's a lot, then probably either religious sermons or maybe Ted talks fill that role.