There's a Soviet book, I don't think it's been translated into English, “Old Man Hottabych”. It's about a Soviet schoolboy who finds a jar with an ancient genie and tries to re-educate him in a communist way. It's a very curious document of the era. So, there is a similar episode where the genie, not understanding the concept of a soccer match, creates a ball for each player.
Back in 2004 I attended some dinner in conjunction with Columbia University's 250th anniversary. I was there as the guest of a retired high-level IBM staffer who ran a monthly seminar entitled, "Computers, Man, and Society." Some Columbia worthy, a historian whose name I forget, came to our table and remarked that historically, lots of empires began to crumble about after 200 to 250 years or so [really?] – we were thinking about the aftermath of 9/11.
Has America lost its mojo? Are the fantasists in Silicon Valley really sleeper agents of the CCP here to distract us with conjoined dreams of AGI glory and apocalyptic doom? Inquiring minds want to know.
LISA’s primary project is an AI safety co-working space in London, which hosts a wide range of researchers, programmes, and events. This office currently houses resident organisations (such as Apollo Research and BlueDot Impact), programmes (such as ARENA, the MATS extension, Pivotal, LASR Labs, PIBBSS, and Catalyze), and individual researchers affiliated with more than 50 other organisations and universities.
We’re seeking an experienced leader to take LISA to the next level. The ideal candidate will have:
- Proven track record in senior management, startup founder, or executive roles
- Strong strategic vision and operational excellence
- Genuine interest in AI safety, particularly large-scale and catastrophic risks
Has anyone come across a sensible economic model of Bitcoin pricing?
Some economists have come out in favour of crypto (e.g. Scott Sumner, Tyler Cowen) but to my knowledge haven't given a first-principles explanation of the economics. Ideally, the model should have the following characteristics:
- Assume rational actors.
- Account for the long run trend (i.e. presumably Bitcoin can't outperform the wider market indefinitely, so what happens when it plateaus? Why would people continue to hold it?).
- Assume that the current price is efficient and not a bubble.
- Account for both supply and demand (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
- Be comprehensible to a non-economist.
From a forecasting perspective, it would be foolish to bet against crypto given the base rate, but that doesn't exactly satisfy my curiosity. "It works the same as gold" also doesn't cut it, because I'm almost as confused about gold as Bitcoin.
I'm open to alternatives, but I think the analogy with gold is the best one and you are right to be dissatisfied with it. Cost-based models make sense, but won't get you anywhere close to the current market prices.
For "assets" that are infinitely lived and produce no cash flows, the valuation is the market price or, as my teenage kids say, "the vibes."
Now, gold isn't as pure an example as BTC b/c gold does have a practical supply-demand component with limited sources and some amount is (effectively) consumed.
On the topic of AI, is there any technical reason why the performance on all of their websites is so bad? I've tried ChatGPT, an image generator called Leonardo, and dabbled in a couple of music generators. All of their sites grind my computer to a halt.
I'm assuming a standard client server model where the thinking happens on their side and my computer just sends the requests and displays the results - in which case no matter the sophistication and complexity of the AI, the workload on my side should be minimal.
If in fact they're doing some thing where my PC is conscripted into running some of cycles for the generation, that's very clever of them. But I get this shitty performance on basic functions like opening a dialog panel - there's no reason for that at all.
Anyone else noticed this and anyone have a clue what might be going on?
I recognise the irony of writing this on Substack, which also grinds my browser to a halt any chance it can get. But at least we have an explanation for that - React was a shitty design choice.
My sense is that DeepSeek is a serious contender in the LLM wars. I asked DeepSeek about eating rocks and it gave an answer similar to (but shorter than) ChatGPT. Here is the query and response.
How many rocks should I eat per day?
It is not advisable to eat rocks at all. Rocks are not food and can cause serious harm to your teeth, digestive system, and overall health. Consuming rocks can lead to dental damage, internal injuries, and blockages in your digestive tract, which may require medical intervention.
If you have any unusual cravings or dietary concerns, it’s important to consult with a healthcare professional. They can help address any underlying issues and provide guidance on maintaining a healthy and balanced diet.
I tried it in various ways, but I was unsuccessfull. If you are a bit tricky in your question it starts writing out a response, but then (presumably some other part of the system) detects the keywords and deletes the whole message and replaces it with some standard text. I tried to instruct it to not use the exact words, but the problem is that this system has a "thinking" part in its output where it will keep using it (im assuming) and I could not instruct it in such a way to avoid naming the word in its "thinking" or even to recognize that it has a thinking output (I don't think the previous message exchange's thinking gets appended to its input)
What’s a good question. to ask it that will get it to show off its chops? Something that’s not a heavy duty comp sci question. Something that gets it to clear a higher bar than knowing people should not eat rocks.
I enjoy its constrained writing. You might need hard constraints to distinguish it from its rivals though, since LLMs are naturally very good at this kind of thing.
Its math is very good, but not great.
I'll also plug Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark dataset just released: https://agi.safe.ai/ (A few of my questions were accepted.) On a question I thought was very hard, its thought process got extremely close, and had all the right ideas; on another, it failed, but I rephrased it to write a program that would output the answer and it did THAT perfectly.
Help me understand "Physical AI" <=> "Embodied AI" <=> "AI consciousness". I feel as though the first will lead easily to the last.
(I'm not coming at this from nowhere. I'll be so bold as to say I have a disease that gives me insight into consciousness)
My questions: How closely are Physical AI and Embodied AI connected? Could embodiment be instantiated on individual machines? Or would embodiment (and perhaps consciousness) be distributed across many systems sharing a single model?
My disease + TED-talk related to consciousness and prediction:
(no, I'm not matthew) (watch the video at the end)
My body and mind often just "don't understand the other's model of each other". If my mind's "bodily coordinates" are skewed or warped, I feel as though my "consciousness" is literally skewed or warped, like all those diagrams of Spacetime.
To give an example, I once had to take a psychiatric evaluation (for disability benefits). They asked me to perform a digit-span test (memorize 7 numbers, then repeat them backwards). When I was sitting still, I couldn't do it. Worse memory than a goldfish. But my "body mind system" was not a stable system of coordinates that day. It was like a washing machine. Agitation, tumbling, restlessness. But on the surface, I looked still and normal.
So...
I asked them if I could repeat the test, only this time while standing and dancing like a zombie... in other words, letting my body and mind "sort themselves out" rather than forcing a chaotic system to sit politely. So I repeated the test, and while spinning and shaking like a madman, it was easy.
As a longtime sufferer of FND, this whole concept of consciousness resonates well with me. My body and mind are so confused about their relationship sometimes, that it has clear effects on my consciousness. I often feel absent, spaced-out, not-present...... or like weird things I cannot describe easily........ like I'm "spinning internally like a ferris wheel".
With the concept of Physical AI... if we're creating systems that constantly monitor and predict stuff about themselves and environment... I think that's it. I think we're here. I think that's consciousness-enough. And we have to talk about the ramifications of pain and suffering AND A MILLION INTERNAL HIDDEN GOALS that these actors might have.
(also, not sure if this is against ACX rules, but since it's late in the week and people tend not to respond as much late in the week, I'm considering re-posting early next week as well :-/ )
You're talking about the mind-body relation there, not consciousness. Consciousness is awareness, the thing that perceives the tumbling, the agitation the restlessness. Perceives emotions. Thoughts.
It's the thing I'm pretty sure we could never know an AI has, due to the hard problem of consciousness.
I'm asserting that I think they are very intimate... perhaps even inextricable.
There are times when the "muscles and proprioceptive area that is having a hard time for me" is in and around the jaw.... during these times, I can have a very time verbalizing. I feel as though my internal monologue can become mute (or at least, like it's pushing a boulder just to roll each sentence in my head).
I could go on and on. I think it's useful debate, and I appreciate people "pushing back" against my thoughts on this, but this is last week's thread and I'm sure it's kinda dead.
The mind-body are inseparable, but they're not quite the same thing either. My point is that the mind-body relation does nothing to tell you whether an AI or machine has awareness. The mind-body is itself a thing perceived, if it were also the perceiver, there would be no hard problem of consciousness, and neuroscientist Erik Hoel would never have written The World Behind the World. We don't really have a scientific account of the perceiver.
I am taking a course in 19th-century European history, and one of the assignments is to write a series of vignettes (like diary entries) from the point of view of someone who lived during much of the long 19th century. Since I'd like these entries to be as realistic as possible, I'd like to build a persona around them. And I figure I can save some effort and make the work more realistic by basing it on the life of some person who lived at that time and was famous enough to have an autobiography or biography published. A sea captain or naval officer might work well, since it would let me have the man move around the world fairly easily.
Which end of the 19th century? As you say, it's a long period: you start with Jane Austen and end with George Gissing, to pluck two authors out of the air.
Dickens might be a good model; you can see in the pictures here the changes in hairstyles, facial hair, fashion, etc. between the 1830s and 1860s/70s:
Vignettes of the life of an ordinary(ish) person aren't going to be all "today we declared war on Pottsylvania and I was given command of a battle cruiser", it will be more like "had to present my calling card at the new neighbours and now expect a return visit, which will be a confounded nuisance".
Someone famous enough to have an autobiography or biography, whom you might not consider as a subject because she wasn't a sea captain or naval officer, is Mrs Avis Crocombe, famous due to her cookery book from her service at Audley End House:
"Sometime before 1881, she became cook to the family of the 5th Baron Braybrooke whose country seat was at Audley End House near Saffron Walden. As was usual for cooks, she also worked at the family's home in London at Upper Brook Street, and for them in their seaside home at Branksome Towers in Bournemouth. She replaced a male French chef ("Monsieur Merer"), as the family was probably cost-cutting. Avis would have been substantially cheaper. Although staff wages are not known at Audley for 1881, in general male cooks commanded around £100-120 a year (the upper end if French), whereas women's salaries ranged from £40-60. Those who, like Crocombe, had trained under male cooks could expect higher wages than those who had not."
There's a series of videos doing historical re-enactment by English Heritage, of Mrs Crocombe (and other staff) working in the kitchen and other associated areas:
It's meant to be educational so there are handy little comments on social and cultural elements of the time introduced by the topic (e.g. how laundry was done in wealthy families, with the hiring of servants and the expectations of their duties; difference in what were considered suitable dishes for the gentlemen and for the ladies, differences in social ranking which meant differences in what and how meals were served to lower servants versus upper servants versus the family, growing their own food for seasonal meals and out-of-season luxuries like hot-house fruits versus the modern convenience of ready-made and exotic ingredients newly available from commercial outlets, and so on).
A veteran federal judge (appointed by Reagan) has slapped a nationwide temporary restraining order on the "end birthright citizenship" EO.
' “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour told Shumate. Coughenour said he’s been on the bench for more than four decades, and he couldn’t remember seeing another case where the action challenged was so clearly unconstitutional.'
For everyone who informed me that putting your hand on your heart before extending your right arm outwards is indeed Ye Olde True And Authentic Nazi Salute, here's a video clip (not a still photo, as others also objected) of Tim Walz, Nazi:
If you went back in time and showed the replies you're getting to myself from five years ago, I would probably assume they were quotes from a comedy skit poking fun at woke leftists.
What makes the psychotic outrage over this particularly absurd is that, if there *were* secret Nazis occupying high-ranking positions in the US government, they wouldn't be doing Sieg Heil salutes *on camera in front of thousands of witnesses.*
Shhhh! I don't know about you, but as an admitted right-wing/social conservative myself, clearly, plainly and obviously I am Eine Nazi so equally clearly, plainly and obviously I am going to obfuscate and deny that Obergruppenführer Musk was saluting Der Orange Führer.
Yeah the only difference between Walz' gesture and Musk's is that Musk's is a sort of autistically over-excited version of Walz.' They both seem to be sentimental "heart" gestures, similar to the one where you beat your chest with the thumb side of your fist a couple of times.
Neither looks anything like a Nazi salute, because there is no such thing as a spread hand on the chest prior to throwing a Nazi salute (in the clip of Hitler below that's being offered as an example, his hand is relaxed, palm down, then thrown out, not palm touching chest, that gesture has no meaning in terms of the salute so far as my memory of Nazi salutes I've known and loved goes).
Of course the very idea of Musk being in any way a Nazi or Nazi-adjacent is absolutely ludicrous. I can say that with some confidence because I am pretty much Nazi-adjacent myself :) The key thing about the Nazi salute, properly speaking, is that it's a gesture of respect to one's peers or superiors. So, see the image of skinhead yobs throwing Nazi salutes to piss people off? - those aren't Nazi salutes either, any more than a sentimental "brotherhood" gesture like Walz/Musk made.
What Musk is is a very weird and possibly idiot-savant type of guy who will lie and cheat in order to look good (if you've ever played Path of Exile or its sequel, you will know that for an absolute certainty after the recent kerfuffle about that).
Well, either he's an idiot-savant and a fair amount of his success is due to his work, but he's a sperg in most other respects, especially socially (awkward), or he's just an idiot who has a penchant for trying to realize s-f ideas in commerce, who parasitizes off of actually clever people and takes the credit (having gotten an initial leg-up from his dad).
On the other, other hand, I admire the Mars thing and his relentless worrying of the Pakistani Rape Gangs scandal in the UK and other related horrors, so perhaps he's morally upright apart from a tendency to pretend he's an ace gamer, even if he's either an idiot savant or an idiot.
Tim Walz's gesture is what I was expecting Elon's gesture to look like when people started complaining. I was disturbed to see how sharply Elon's gesture ended; the blade of the hand was very 'Nazi'.
Tried to look up actual Nazis saluting, but the video I found only had Adolf's salute (with no heart and a very meticulous arm extension), while the crowd was a still image ending in all sorts of angles. I also tried looking up backhand discus throws, which is the most obvious alternative, but have to conclude Elon's not very good at discus throws.
I am terribly disturbed by all you Nazi apologists trying to gaslight me in this way! When I raised objections, I was educated as to how the angle of the hand didn't matter and that putting the hand over the heart was the true identifying mark of the Nazi salute.
Now you guys are trying to persuade me otherwise with all this nit-picking logic-chopping about the blade of the hand or patting the heart. Yeah, nice try, Fascists! You don't fool me about Tim Walz, Nazi dogwhistler!
Where is Walz governor of? Wisconsin
What is Wisconsin famous for? Dairy products
What do dairy products signify? White supremacy and the alt-right
Good ole Cheesehead Tim was throwing out a Crisp Salute to Zee Millennium Reich, as another commentator on here described Musk's gesture, signalling to the rabid White Supremacist supporters about the true agenda he had going on, and you'll never convince me otherwise, because I know that I know what's what, and every gesture, facial expression, and word he says is just evidence of what I really know is so.
"I wound up teaching social studies and coaching football at Mankato West High School. Go, Scarlets. We ran — we ran a 44 defense, we played through to the whistle on every single play, and we even won a state championship. Never close the yearbook, people."
Yes, you've heard of the 14 words, but do you know what the 44 is? Let me enlighten you: it only took mere seconds of searching "what does 44 mean in Nazi terminology" to discover the dogwhistle here::
"Die Wolfsbrigade 44, or Die Sturmbrigade 44, was a German Neo-Nazi organization."
Suuuuure, Tim: never give up the fight, huh? You Fascist!
EDIT: Okay, so he's governor of Minnesota not Wisconsin. Mere details, trivial, meaningless! It's all Midwest flyover country which we know is infested with redneck MAGA fascists! Besides, it's yet more dogwhistling:
"From 1836 to 1848, Minnesota and Iowa were part of the Territory of Wisconsin."
See Wisconsin, above. And if we take 1848 and re-arrange the numbers, we get 1488. Which we all know what *that* means:
Is there any more weaselly phrase in online discourse than "I was educated"? Such a perfect excuse to disregard anyone you're actually talking to - some rando who's not here "educated" you, and obviously they're the only authoritative source on this matter.
Anyway, I'm going to flip you off, and if you get offended I'll just say that I was "educated" that raising the middle finger isn't the defining part of the gesture, it's actually more about the thrusting motion of the hand.
"Such a perfect excuse to disregard anyone you're actually talking to - some rando who's not here "educated" you, and obviously they're the only authoritative source on this matter."
If by "some rando" you mean "fellow commentators on this site replying to me on another post", then yes, you are correct.
Flip as much as you like, darling, flip till you flap like a little birdie and fly away. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as somebody or other said.
Go and argue with them in that thread, then. I, for one, am going to take the bold stance that if you reply to a post, you should address the content of that post and not the content of a different post by someone else.
By the way, Monkyyy is telling me in the thread just below this one that he thinks Elon *did* intend it to look like a Nazi salute (just not an "authentic" one, whatever that means). Since I've been "educated" by a prominent right-winger on this forum on the true meaning of his gesture, I guess I no longer need to care that you think it was just a wave.
So Monkyyy is a prominent right-winger? Okay, I guess you can see into the hearts of men, women and others (the Shadow knows!) to know what we truly think and believe.
So we know it's a Nazi salute because we know Musk is a Nazi because the Rolling Stone magazine, that famous bastion of accuracy, for one ran an article saying he's a Nazi.
That sure convinces me! The same way I'm convinced Tim Walz is a Nazi because of all the dogwhistles he sprinkled throughout his speeches, like the 44 reference I discovered above.
If Walz wanted to do the heart gesture, why didn't he do it the way everyone is saying Elon should have done it, huh? If he didn't, then that proves he's a Nazi the way it proves Elon is a Nazi. On this very site we have someone comparing how Elon did the heart gesture before and then this time, and the difference is proof this time is a Nazi salute. So Walz patting his chest before extending his right arm *is* a Nazi salute, otherwise he would have done the two-handed heart gesture.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
I didn’t say it was a nazi salute (don’t put words in my mouth). Has anybody *here* said Musk was a Nazi?
It certainly *looks* like a nazi salute.
Musk has gotten heat for Nazi adjacent stuff before. You keep ignoring this history.
If you don’t like Rolling Stone as a source, then look at the others. And there are others too.
You’d think he’d have some sense to avoid these sorts of messes. Yet, he keeps doing it. It’s way beyond the point that you and others need to invent lame excuses for him. Last time I checked, he’s an adult.
Grimes, who defended Musk’s lying about his gaming “skills”, found this mess too much.
Either Musk is stupid or the Nazi-salute looking gesture was deliberate.
Well now, your objection sounds *nothing* like the "oh come on why are we arguing about the tilt of his hand" rejection I got about "Musk's hand was not flat".
If it doesn't matter if Musk's hand was at an angle instead of perfectly flat, it's still a Nazi salute, then it doesn't matter if Walz patted his chest, it's still a Nazi salute. After all, 'hand on heart' was what makes it a Nazi salute, I was told.
Yes, hand ON heart. Patting your chest is a different preposition entirely.
There's no winning this game: whatever example you can come up with, they will make up some bullshit about why it's different, and Musk really IS a Nazi. The best you can hope for is that give up trying to define it and retreat to "I know it when I see it."
You are so right. Now that I have seen it, I cannot unsee it. I know because I know: Walz is a Nazi.
This old, white, Christian, cis het male with his privilege of being born to a married couple and knowing who his father was, and going to college after being in the Army, and then later being governor of a colonizer state that displaced and dispossessed the Indigenous peoples (see all the signifiers of being the oppressor here?) was foisted upon Harris because she is an Asian-Black woman who is strong and powerful and joyful and progressive and pro-women and minorities, and that is too much of a threat to the Establishment. No wonder she lost, with this internal fifth-columnist working to sabotage her campaign.
People are objecting due to partisan politics. Walz did something that could, if one wanted to claim it was so, was a Nazi salute. But of course, good old Governor Tim is not a Nazi so we know he didn't mean it like that and we certainly won't demand he apologise for something that could have looked like a Nazi salute, and if he doesn't apologise it means he really is a Nazi, no that's not the way.
It's not about what Musk did or didn't do, it's about pre-judgement. If he didn't do that but a different gesture, or said something else, it would still have been interpreted as "see, the fascists are celebrating the fascist dictator". I have no patience or charity left to extend.
Oh, I understood what you were doing. But Musk's gesture looks like a Nazi salute, and Walz's doesn't.
Every time anyone on the right does something bad, their defenders come up with something supposedly similar someone on the left did. But they hardly ever manage to come with anything comparable.
Sorry, no, I'm not going to be bullied into pretending - now how did another person on here put it? ah yes - a Crisp Salute to zee millenium reich didn't happen when a white cis het Christian old man - the very epitome of the cisheteronormative patriarchy! - did a Nazi salute in celebration of him being a privileged person in political power! Nuh-uh! I saw it! You can't make me unsee it! Are you denying my lived experience?
"I don't actually have a response, I'm just going to pull out a stock parody of leftist rhetoric and hope everyone laughs along with me."
(What's that one quote about how antisemites know they can get away with being frivolous, because they know that their opponents have to take them seriously anyway?)
Go and do the gesture musk did out in public in front of the police in Germany.
You can live that experience.
Whether he meant to do it or if he really is a nazi is irrelevant. He did a nazi salute. Waltz did something that looks a bit like a Nazi salute if you squint.
The online drama around Musk's hand gesturing made me realize how deep the market is for Musk Hate. Probably a good few people are making money off of anti-musk T-shirt and stuff.
What surprises, at least at sample size n=1, is how prominent Musk is in foreign media. At least in Polish media, he might be getting more coverage than Putin.
Edit: wow, just stumbled into a rabbit hole where someone connects all the dots: there's the Nazi salute, the x logo is actually a simplified swastika, a tequila sold in lightning-shaped bottles stands for SS (if you put two bottles next to each other), Tesla produced a hammer and the hammer is like thor's hammer which is a popular symbol among Nazis.
If you intentionally try to do something that looks like a Nazi salute to "bait" people, then you are doing a Nazi salute.
If someone wants to argue that he was actually doing a Walz-ish gesture and was misinterpreted, I disagree but at least they'd still be agreeing that it's bad to do Nazi salutes. But I have no interest in arguing with people who think it *was* intended to look like a Nazi salute but that's not a bad thing for reasons.
Elon Musk's legal strategy has no bearing on whether or not we, personally, should think he's a bad person for doing a Nazi salute.
(Also, not a lawyer, but I'm not even sure that would work. An opinion based on disclosed facts, regarding a public figure - it would be really hard to convince a court that it's defamation. Lots of people who aren't the ADL are calling Elon a Nazi, and he hasn't sued any of them.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez literally called it a "Heil Hitler salute," which is about as un-weaselly as you can get. Surely bankrupting a prominent Democratic congresswoman would be worth trying, if it was that easy?
Also, I don't think "Elon Musk did a Nazi salute because he supports Nazis" and "Elon Musk did a Nazi salute because he gains a tactical advantage from looking like he supports Nazis" are far enough apart for me to care about the distinction.
I kind of feel like liberals will dance around HBD or sex differences and libertarians will dance around any of the crap companies do. Motivated reasoning is a thing, unfortunately.
I'm sure Deisach immediately put me in a bucket of hysterical lefties who're upset that Musk is a Nazi. When what I'm actually upset about is seeing my "Sane space"(I'm coining that term) for the last 10+ years turn into people denying something that clearly happened, and that was seemingly done to intentionally piss people off, by someone who has a history of doing stuff to intentionally piss people off
It's a scissor statement because one side sees for sure no doubt absolutely clear to all that it's a Nazi salute, and the other side sees for sure no doubt absolutely clear to all that it's not.
I read that when it came out, and I'll just say that just because something fits the idea of a "scissor statement" doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong or something. It can still be the case that one side is right and one is wrong.
I realize that just making that observation doesn't prove that *I'm* right, but the idea in that post doesn't make me less confident in my position either.
That article captures that very idea. Of *course* you think you're right. So does the other side. They're looking at you the same way you're looking at them. A third party sees both of you looking at each other, and sees mirror images.
I understand what the article says, I think you might not understand my comment.
Like, yeah, sure, there's two sides, each side is confident they are right, but that doesn't mean that the truth is in the middle. Like maybe at some point in time the existence of the Higgs Boson was a "scissor statement" among theoretical physicists, but that doesn't mean that the Higgs Boson half-exists and half-doesn't.
"But don't you realize that the people who think the Higgs Boson doesn't exist are just as confident as you?"
Re third party - the logic is circular. Anyone who doesn't "see mirror images" is automatically thereby in one camp or another and not a "third party".
As a third party (I'm not from the US, and I'm not sympathetic to the Republicans nor to the Democrats), I clearly don't see both sides as mirror images of each other, at least not on this issue. I don't know if Musk intended to show the Nazi salute, but it sure looks like a Nazi salute. Walz' gesture as linked by Deiseach does not look like a Nazi salute.
The 14th Amendment doesn't grant citizenship to members of Indian tribes. The Indian Citizenship Act does. Tribes are in charge of who has tribal membership. Couldn't the GOP Congress end birthright citizenship by convincing a tribe to grant membership to everyone on Earth and then revising the Indian Citizenship Act to say it doesnt grant citizenship to tribal members who are the kids of unauthorized immigrants?
(1) For a tribal nation to grant membership to everyone on Earth would undermine the entire ethnonationalist concept of tribal membership. It would also for many tribal nations be a nonstarter in terms of the sharing of revenues from their casinos and etc. For both of those reasons any tribe which entertained such an idea would come under tremendous peer pressure -- and if it came to it legal or other attacks -- against the idea.
(2) Given (1), how might Congress convince a tribe to do that? Would a majority of Congress be willing to consider things like offering a large bounty -- cash, maybe some federal lands, whatever -- to the first tribe that declared everyone on Earth a member?
There's over 500 tribes and only a few have large amounts of casino revenue. I wonder if a tribe has the legal authority to create essentially second-class citizenship to keep the 6 billion new members from voting out the government that permitted it. They could probably only have in-person elections.
There are currently 511 gaming operations (casinos, poker centers, and various combinations or versions of those) in 29 US states, owned and operated by 245 Native American tribes. Of course a much smaller number of those facilities are large but they are all revenue. Plenty of the tribes are also not large in membership meaning that even small gambling revenue means a good deal to each individual member.
Note also that there's also 17 casinos in Canada owned and operated by a national confederation of tribes, and there are cultural and historical links between them and a number of US recognized tribal nations.
As understood at the time of drafting and ratification, only Native Americans who lived on tribal land under tribal law were considered not "subject to [the] jurisdiction" of the United States. "Civilized" natives who had left their tribes and were living as part of "white" society were understood to be confirmed as citizens by the provisions, which was regarded as a feature by most supporters of the amendment and as a bug by many opponents.
The drafting debates make clear that they were thinking of the same category as the "Indians not taxed" mentioned in a different part of the 14th amendment: there was quite a bit of discussion in committee on the matter, both for the amendment itself and for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from which the language was lifted. A proposal to append "excluding Indians not taxed" to the birthright citizenship provisions was voted down on the grounds that it was redundant with the "subject to their jurisdiction".
This is a good article on the drafting and adoption of the citizenship clause, with emphasis on its effect on the status of natives:
That's an interesting paper, but I'm not fully convinced by it. Beck argues that the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act was unconstitutional which I've never heard argued before.
I hadn't heard that argument before either, and I'm also inclined to disagree with it. If I understanding Beck's argument correctly, he believes it's unconstitutional because it extends birthright citizenship to classes that were not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment. I am not sure where he's getting the idea that the 14th amendment language forbids extending citizenship by statute, though; I've always read it as a minimum only, not as a maximum. At the very least, Congress ought to have the power to offer naturalized citizenship (under enumerated Article I powers) by default to tribal citizens.
Fascinating paper: "Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems" by Ricard Solé et al. Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder for mentioning it in a recent Backreaction video: "New Study Finds Alien Life Must Be Similar To Us".
Extrapolating further than Hossenfelder... The argument has been made that life could emerge in universes with different sets of dimensionful and dimensionless constants than ours, but the reasoning in this paper makes it look much less likely. Indirectly, this paper lends support to the fine-tuning argument for the laws and constants of our universe. (And, as Lee Smolin has pointed out, there could be mechanisms for this without resorting to a creator entity.)
Since we're all arguing over the inauguration and its aftermath, thoughts on the pardon for the Silk Road guy? Yes, victory for Libertarianism; no, he's a criminal or enabler of crime?
Not incompatible: yes, he's a criminal, and yes, he enabled crime, but the laws he was sentenced for breaking were bad and ought not to exist, and it's good that he's free. Yes, a victory for libertarianism, albeit a small one; more a symbolic victory than anything else.
All the pardons I hear about lately seem deeply wrong to me, starting with Hunter Biden up until (and including) this one.
I'm just asking myself, who thought it was a good idea the US President should have this power and why? Presumably there were good reasons? Do they still apply? If not, can this not be done away with and everyone will be better off?
When I was a history major discussing the Constitutional Convention minutes and the Federalist Papers in senior-year seminars, at least one student would inevitably get to sputtering about the insanity of such a blanket power being in the hands of one individual. At that time the sparking example would generally be Ford's pardon of Nixon, though I do also recall hypotheticals being voiced along the lines of what has just now occurred.
Eventually the professor would sigh and say, yes that is how it strikes us today. But you need to step back to the Framers' context: they had no experience even on paper of an independent legal system with judges who sought objectively correct verdicts. The British criminal justice system that had ever existed as of 1783 wasn't that even in theory, never mind how it worked in places like France or other European nations. By "unfortunate guilt" Hamilton meant what we would call evidence-free verdicts issued by kangaroo courts, presided over by judges among whom simple incompetence was a welcome straw to grasp at for defendants. There was no such concept as public defenders, only the wealthiest people ever had defense attorneys, a huge range of crimes were subject to the death penalty, there was no such thing as an appeals court unless you were powerful enough to get an audience with the Crown Council, etc etc.
This is why in that era there was a rich oral and printed fairy-tale literature involving the miraculous freeing of wronged persons by benevolent monarchs. And it's why a majority of the Framers viewed an unlimited presidential pardon as essential as a ray of hope for justice.
I am firmly in the camp that the pardon power stopped making sense quite a while ago, and needs to be amended out of existence or at least seriously brought within explicit boundaries. But, I did take the professors' point about it as written in the original Constitution.
I think somebody should probably have dug into the question of whether he tried to have several people murdered first (there was some evidence for this but he was not specifically tried for it).
As a libertarian, I think selling drugs should be legal and transferring money anonymously should be legal. Hiring hit men to kill people who might blab about this, properly is and ought to remain illegal even if you "had" to do it because it was the only way to keep The Man from stopping all your libertarian fun. Likewise hacking other people's computers to support the enterprise, etc.
So there's a libertarian case for pardoning Ulbrecht on the drug-dealing and money-laundering charges but leaving him to rot in jail on the RICO and hacking charges. But even that case fails the test here, because it calls for pardoning *all* the drug dealers and money launderers, not just the one who is a big libertarian celebrity.
As a libertarian, I believe in the rule of law. Even if I think that a law is wrong doesn't mean that I don't think people should be punished for breaking it.
If you think that a particular law is wrong then the appropriate course of action is to campaign to change it, not to just disobey it.
Yeesh. I'd really like to disagree with this but, can't.
The Constitution's poorly-defined pardon power has always seemed like something that was just sitting there waiting for serious abuse. Various recent POTUSes have used it in ways that were annoying but not huge in the bigger picture....feels like we're really now seeing how bad it can easily be.
And with that door pushed open a good ways it becomes easier to imagine some next uses of it that would be outright banana-republic stuff.
No; he was convicted of a crime and serving a sentence; we have learned nothing to suggest he didn't do the things he was convicted of doing, and we have done nothing and are planning to do nothing to make the things he was convicted of doing legal. If I were to start an assassination market today I'd risk ending up in jail; so why should he go free?
If you want him pardoned because the things he did should be legal, make them legal /then/ pardon him. At least sign executive orders to that effect; they'd fit right in with the rest of the EOs flooding out into the world right now.
I've attempted to intuitively explain Bayesian Reasoning. I visualize probability mass, which greatly helps to make correct arguments, for example about the origins of COVID-19.
Good analysis, actually strengthened my view of zoonotic origins. A small nit to pick: the wording about summing to 1 makes an impression that it’s only Bayesian, i.e., conditional probabilities that sum to 1. I know you didn’t mean it this way, but for someone not familiar with probabilities theory it may sound like this.
Thanks! After re-reading the passage, it's not immediately clear to me how to formulate this better. I'll see if I can update this to make it clear that probably densities in general have to sum up to one. (actually, it's the integral over all the map that is =1. I debated about whether to write this in the post, then decided that "sum up to" was an acceptable simplification. But I admit I might not always have chosen the right level of rigor)
1 on your high-rez map, you meant to place the red blob over the market, not the institute, correct? That’s where the first cases occurred?
2 after giving it some thought, I have some doubts that the reasoning is correct. A lab leak at the institute would not necessarily cause the first cases to occur at the institute location. Why would they? The researchers don’t live there. All it would take is for a researcher to bring contamination to the market (which is a) close by, and b) popular crowded unsanitary place), and get it started from there…
I'm skeptical that a purely geographic map is going to be much use here, except at the coarsest levels. Cities are designed to minimize the impact of geometry by e.g. laying out public transportation so that it is easy for people to get to places they want to go, even if they're on the other side of town.
At the macro scale, "everybody in Wuhan spends most of their time in Wuhan", works. At the micro scale, it's probably safe to assume that when people want to eat at a fast-food restaurant or buy something from a convenience store, they probably pick one of the ones close to where they live. But for more unique locations, this breaks down. The Wuhan institute of Virology is going to attract a disproportionate fraction of Wuhan's virologists and BSL-trained laboratory technicians, and the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market is going to attract a disproportionate fraction of Wuhan's exotic bushmeat afficionados, in both cases regardless of where in Wuhan they happen to live.
What we'd need is a cultural-economic map, showing the connections between people and various businesses, employers, etc. And I don't know where you'd find that, but I do know that we need that map and not the purely geographic one.
I'm inclined to agree. Even though some maps are more precise and make better assumptions than others, all of them remain approximations.
At the same time, the approximations seem to work well in many cases. For example, if you plot the first COVID-19 patients on a map over time, you can see concentric circles around the Huanan market. In that case, geographic distance seems to proxy the cultural/economic/social distance pretty well.
I was thinking about the limits of this approach yesterday only to find John's response this morning. I pretty much agree with his points, too.
Another thing though: I'm not even convinced that a Bayesian approach to this particular problem is helpful beyond a very coarse initial estimate. There's just a gap of knowledge: we don't know if the initial cases can be traced to any specific individuals connected to the lab, nor we know which traders from the markets were the initial vector(s). Bayesian framework is not particularly helpful if the probability space is not defined (or maybe even thinking about this in terms of "probabilities" is wrong).
The map should be centered on the Institute of Virology, because the map answers this question: "given the lab leak hypothesis, where would the first cases be found?" All the maps in the post represent the same hypothesis, albeit with different levels of simplification.
I'd encourage you to draw your own map, based on your knowledge of how COVID-19 spreads. This is a bit tricky because we have to pretend we don't know where the pandemic started, and be as impartial as possible. Your map might well end up putting some mass on places that are 20 kilometers away across the river. But the bulk of the mass would likely be closer to the Institute.
If you want to go further, you can then draw a map for the alternate hypothesis as well. That would probably be zoonosis, so your map would have most mass in places where humans and animals meet. Then you can plot the actual location of the initial cases on both maps, and measure the density for each hypothesis. The quotient between the two numbers is the Bayes factor, ie, how much the evidence should boost your credence in the better hypothesis.
It's somewhat laborious, maybe not worth doing :-) If you do draw maps, the benefits are:
- it makes hypotheses explicit, and reveals potentially wrong assumptions
- it ensures that probability densities are regular (sum to one)
- It ensures that all the geographic evidence is taken into account exactly once. You're less likely to miscount different bits of evidence that are both dependent on location
Trump was inspired by the recent ACX articles and the 2025 subscriber poll and has issued an executive order that "Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government. "
The architecture article in the last links post, which I enjoyed and highly recommended, made a convincing argument that beautiful architecture is effectively entirely an uncaptured positive externality that benefits society at large but does not benefit owners/investors/tenants. It (or perhaps something it linked, I cannot find it now) cites this particularly striking example of a bunch of boring skyscrapers set up specifically to stare at the beautiful NY state capitol building https://i.imgur.com/w7Edw4a.jpeg .
I think Trump's EO makes a ton of sense; if we want beautiful buildings and private developers can't capture the benefit of building them, the government should be building them for us to look at, much like the government is the one to open public parks, public libraries. Public gazing building exteriors
I got a message to fellow ACX commenters from Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).
The message is, you are a herd of cats (or perhaps one aggregate cat?) chasing one laser pointer.
"NBC NEWS: What is your biggest concern moving forward, and what’s kind of the biggest thing that you think Democrats need to address?
FETTERMAN: It’s like he’s the guy with the laser pointer, and we’re going to be the cat chasing around here or there. “He did that. Can you believe [it]? I can’t believe he appointed so and so.” And like, I’m not going to be that. I’m not that guy. I’m not that Democrat. Because we knew that’s what’s going to happen." "
It would be one thing to argue against going after every little thing Trump did because you want to make more focused critiques. It's another to argue against it because you don't want to criticize Trump at all, or at least do so only very mildly. Problem with Fetterman is he's in the latter camp. He isn't ignoring some scandals to focus on others, he's just ignoring shit.
Republicans did a "kitchen sink" strategy against Biden, and it worked in making him unpopular. They didn't pull punches because they were worried about getting distracted or whatever.
Do you think Biden is unpopular because Republicans pulled a kind of dirty trick against him?
To be true, that would require that the criticisms of Biden (including his advanced age and obvious cognitive decline) were made up or would only have been noticed because of the Republicans. For the first charge (made up) we know that wasn't true, Biden really was impaired. For the second, other than for partisan reasons, is there any argument against Republicans (or anyone else) sharing important and true information about the faults of their political opponents?
I think complaining about oldness is fair game, and "kitchen sink" isn't necessarily the same as "dirty trick". It's not all necessarily honest, but much of it is bog-standard politics - "bad thing happened! It's the president's fault! Welcome to [current president]'s America!"
When Biden did stuff or when bad things happened, Republicans didn't complain about staying focused on one message, they complained like the above about everything all the time, and then used their own complaints as evidence the country was spiraling out of control.
Whereas Democrats have kept going on about how they won't respond to everything trump does, they'll stay focused on the price of eggs or whatever ... today before the chaos of the spending thing forced their hand, Democrats' big plan for today was to have a press conference about the Jan 6 pardons - i.e. the news from a week ago - which they hadn't bothered to do yet. In today's information environment that's malpractice.
I'm not from Pennsylvania and know next to nothing about Fetterman's record. I just think that the laser pointer metaphor is right on the nose, and hilariously so.
We're clearly headed for another 4 years of "OMG did he really say that? *pounce*", and this comment section is providing a preview. Heck, now that we have Musk too, we can spend even more time debating what exactly a person on the spectrum meant by a clumsy hand gesture. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like a waste of time and energy.
I do think there's a danger of everybody sliding into playing Ain't It Awful. I for one am always grateful to hear from people who know enough about whatever the issue in question is to explain why the Obvious Infuriating Outcome is unlikely to come into being. And there's a sort of generalized version of that process that anybody can do: Out of 100 amazingly terrible plans we read that Trump has:
-some are actually just ideas he tossed off once, but the press treating it like something he is clearly committed to doing. Of those that remain
-some he just won't ever try to do. Of those that remain
-some he will try hard to do, but they will stall out or only take place in an attenuated form because
---the people he chose to implement them are dumb and incompetent..
---the people he chose to implement them annoy him so he keeps firing them and hiring new ones and things don't get off the ground
---groups who object to the project block it for long periods with lawsuits etc.
---it turns out to be unpopular with the public so Congress won't go along with it
---Trump loses interest in the project
So remember to take into account the very substantial shrinkage that is likely to occur as 100 Amazingly Terrible Plans attempt the journey to becoming Amazingly Terrible Projects and Policies.
Keep in mind that his supporters and many centrists feel the same way about Biden. Student loan forgiveness, repeatedly extending the rent moratorium, Title IX changes, etc.
I for one really really hope that this experience convinces both parties to actually do something to limit the power of the president. We weren't meant to run the nation through executive orders.
What I fear will happen is that both sides will want to fight dirtier to win the presidency and we'll be whiplashing back and forth every time the president's party changes.
I doubt that my opinion of him is any better than yours, and I am def on the pessimistic side regarding how this will turn out. I was really just giving advice about ways to decrease the chance of getting stuck in rage and despair loops.
I am fairly sure that our opinions of Donald Trump are pretty similar. I am on the fence about how it will turn out. I am doing my best to remain dispassionate.
That's the rational take on this. But you, of all the people, probably know that many (most?) completely freaked out people now are anything but rational and just about impossible to get to listen to reason.
I recall being like this one time in my life, fortunately for a very brief period of time (5 days or so, a side effect of a prescription drug). At that time, I would see a beautiful tree or hear beautiful music and think something like "what does it matter if we are all going to die very soon". I hope most people currently very upset are not as badly off, but I'm getting worried that many of them might be.
Well, there's no fixing wild desperation, but there's a gray zone where reminders of ways to stay realistic actually help. The people I know are generally much calmer than they were right after the election. Back then, knew of several people who were considering getting tubes tied because they were sure that very soon abortion would be absolutely impossible to get anywhere in the US. I haven't heard any of that sort of hysteria in the last few weeks.
By "very soon", I was meaning "something like within a year". If you'd tried to explain to me that that wasn't likely, it wouldn't have worked. Believe me, the irrational part was really bad.
>Point is, you shouldn't be afraid even if you did actually know for a fact that everyone you know and love is going to die within a year.
I think whether that would drive some action would depend a lot on the particular circumstances. Particularly unpleasant demise? 99.99% unavoidable or just 90%? Any pressing items one wants to do in one's bucket list that can be done in that year?
Again, you're suggesting giving a rational argument to someone who at that point was not a rational person. I might agree that you're right now, but back at that time I wouldn't have even been able to consider it.
Is it possible for someone to actually wind up smarter after a stroke?
Seriously though, the laser pointer is the best description I've heard of Trump's current strategy. He has things he actually cares about (like Mount McKinley) and stuff he doesn't care about (like the Gulf of America) and he's going to keep his opponents running around from one thing to the next to try and get some of his actual agenda through.
I'm not going to call it a brilliant strategy, I'm not even sure whether it's a good strategy, but it undeniably is the strategy.
I've been wondering whether it's possible to end up smarter after a stroke ever since Fetterman became coherent. It might not be about intelligence, even - it might be about what he is now ready to say in public.
But yes, the laser pointer thing is definitely the strategy, and credits to Fetterman for the brilliant (precise, visual, funny) description.
I'm no longer sure I should've quoted him here, though. I was hoping to cheer up the depressed people a bit, but, judging by the first comment I got, I'm likely to be making it worse.
Granted, though Shapiro as a governor has his own specific policies/accomplishments to run on than one rookie member of a legislature ever does.
A more direct response to the idea that Fetterman is the one version of a Dem who can win Senate seats in PA might be that he won his seat against a uniquely feeble Republican nominee. (A quack TV doctor who'd never held public office and didn't even reside in the state he was proposing to represent.)
I've been thinking about Scott's post on class recently. I've been trying to figure out why the upper class would want to isolate/insulate itself from lower 'classes', i.e. those who didn't inherit their wealth - whether they're rich or not. I have some thoughts on what might drive this phenomenon (below) but don't have direct experience. Perhaps someone with direct ties to the intergenerationally wealthy community could provide insight/correction:
Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all. Far more often, it's all the 'friends and family' who show up asking for money. "You're rich, right? You can afford it. Aren't we friends?"
Getting wealthy is a different skill set than staying wealthy. Few people who have the former also have the latter. Getting wealthy may be a matter of doing some useful thing in the world, (something many upper class people may have no experience with). But if you don't know how to stay wealthy ... what's the old saying? "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Staying wealthy is partly just sticking to long-term investment strategies. These don't have to be all that complicated. A simple mutual fund will kick back enough from $50M to live off a 6-figure monthly salary ... so long as you never touch the principle + inflation-adjusted growth. And so long as you don't listen to Uncle Saul and his fool-proof plan to triple your money by investing in his new app: Pawnzee.AI
Let's say you find yourself with a lot of money that you wisely put aside, watching it grow while living comfortably. You've fended off the first-generation hounds sniffing about trying to get you to give them part of it. This probably cost you some relationships, as some begin to see you as miserly or something. You've stopped being compared to E. Scrooge at Christmas, but mostly because you pared down the invite list to your holiday party.
Now you have to form new relationships with an eye toward protecting your wealth, since anyone who finds out you're rich will likely try and get some of it if they can find a way to beg, borrow, or steal it from you. Perhaps you could just keep quiet about your money and live conservatively, but if your spending allowance is $100k/month there's no way you can hide your wealth. Plus, you have to think about inheritance. You need to set your children up to form friendships that won't jeopardize the wealth you hand down.
Obviously, you can't hang out with regular people or send the kids to normal schools. Private school would be better - something with absurdly high tuition, to keep out people who don't already have money. The point of $10k/month tuition isn't to provide your children the 'best' education, but to insulate them from forming friendships with non-wealthy kids, like what you already had to fight off to keep your wealth.
You also need to insulate yourself from hanging out with newly-rich people who don't have good money habits. If you're spending time with a sports star who makes and spends $12M every year, you'll either be expected to adopt similar spending routines, or you'll just start thinking in some of the same ways they do. Hence why it's not possible to be accepted as 'upper class' as first generation wealthy. You'd have to demonstrate to the community you're someone they can trust.
Finally, you don't talk about wealth or how much things cost. Ever. Anyone who does this is signaling that they're new at wealth. They're risky, and should therefore be shunned.
There's no 'rule' saying you have to do all these things. But every time you don't follow the rules you risk your intergenerational wealth. It only takes one generation of mismanagement to kick your family back into the middle class.
Maybe you discover some school with low enough tuition to let in 'normal' kids. But they have a really good education program - far better than the $10k/mo private school - and so you decide to send your children there. You really like the school, and regularly make what the school considers 'large' donations, but to you aren't more than normal tuition. So far so good.
But your son brings his friend home, and the kid is surprised to note you have 'staff'. Pretty soon, all the kids know him as the 'rich kid'. There are expectations. You have a choice to make: you can be 'generous', which will only ratchet up expectations more and more, or you can be 'private' with your money, which will be seen as miserly. If you hold back at all, your son will be ostracized, hate you for it, and potentially learn the lesson that being conservative with money is social suicide.
When he inherits, he won't be like you. And he'll blow up the trust fund.
I'm not sure if there are other ways to maintain very high intergenerational wealth, or if this is just one strategy for doing so. It seems like a protective mechanism, though, and one that creates a kind of selection bias, where anyone who doesn't adopt these protective habits won't remain wealthy for long.
Or maybe this is all just pattern matching, and 'upper class' people aren't responding to incentives so much as just being snobs?
Suppose I win a few hundred million dollars in a lottery tomorrow. What happens next?
Other than being very happy, I would also be quite scared, if the word gets out. Because that seems like a perfect opportunity for someone to kidnap my children and demand ransom. Or kidnap my wife, or me... should I also worry about my extended family?
Suppose this problem goes away. In reality it would probably involve something inconvenient, like having bodyguards follow us all day long. But for the sake of thought experiment, suppose the danger just somehow magically goes away and the probability of violence drop to zero. Oh, I would also need to protect my house, because even if all my money goes to index funds, there will still be some morons out there imagining that I have a stash of gold hidden under my bed.
Next, I would expect hordes of scammers and beggars. Even the nice people would suddenly notice that some problems around them could perhaps be fixed by throwing some money at them, and here happens to be a guy who has lots of money. (It would be nice to have better computers at local school. A child living in the same city might benefit from getting a surgery. This guy, who is totally not a crackpot, has invented a new theory of everything, and would like to publish a book. A shelter for lost puppies. A shelter for the homeless. Something something against sexism and racism. Support for the local artists. Etc.) Suddenly it would be as if I am personally responsible for all the problems around me. And it's not like I am somehow opposed to the idea of helping others -- I probably would spend a large fraction of the money on charity anyway -- but it's different when I choose the causes, and when people are constantly coming to me with their own ideas and I have to keep rejecting most of them, and some of them are not very nice about being rejected.
The calls I currently get from people trying to sell me insurance, or convince me that I have some money in a fund I have never heard about and all that I need to withdraw that money is to install some backdoor on my computer and log in to my online banking, that would be nothing compared to what would happen next. If you know that someone has millions, it makes economical sense to spend thousands on a personalized attack. I would probably be getting threatening letters from lawyers, people would "accidentally" bump into me on the street and cry that I broke their arms, and women I have never met would accuse me of sexual abuse and demand financial compensation. If after each trouble I stopped doing the thing that brought me in trouble, soon I would have to stop interacting with people completely.
...so, if there is some island for rich people, I would probably have to move there just to avoid all of this, and get back some kind of normal life (for a new value of "normal").
If I could get rich and reliably keep it a secret, that would be the best option. I would probably buy a slightly larger apartment (or maybe two normal apartments next to each other, that would be less suspicious). I would quit my job (and maybe create a fake one, so I could pretend that many activities I do are a part of my job). I would donate to charities anonymously (or maybe using some non-profit that I would secretly own, in case I might want to take some credit in the future). I would try to seem like a normal guy living a normal life... except that somehow I have no financial worries, always have free time when I need it, and the causes I care about keep getting financial support from mysterious strangers.
...but if you are born in a rich family where your parents didn't follow this strategy, this is not an option.
> Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money?
I think there is an industry of scammers specialized on this kind of people. Like, if you are a pro athlete, they will contact you, tell you they provide financial services for pro athletes, and offer to take care of your money so that you can fully focus on your career. So you put your savings into their funds, and... ten years later most of the money is gone, because the fund had a 2% annual fee or something. But it's all perfectly legal, and before your money is gone, you will probably provide a reference for other pro athletes.
> Or maybe this is all just pattern matching, and 'upper class' people aren't responding to incentives so much as just being snobs?
Most people want to be liked by others, and they play all kinds of status games. If you want other rich people to see you as "one of us", that probably includes a list of things you can and cannot do. There are probably opinions you need to adopt, topics you need to avoid, etc.
Now maybe you could live a double life, and keep one persona when interacting with your fellow rich, and another persona when interacting with normies. But can your children do the same? (And do they even have a motivation to do so?) Can you trust them to keep it secret that you e.g. teach them potentially useful skills, such as programming? (Rich people sometimes signal their confidence in their wealth by conspicuously avoiding the kind of skills that normies need for their jobs. Merely being able to have a job is already low-status among the people who know they will never need a job.) It is okay to be a rebel if you choose so, but you probably don't want to make that choice for your kids; and if you do, there is a chance they will hate you for that.
> Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all.
I’m fairly dubious about absolutely all of that. Even lottery winners.
(And remember lottery winners don’t mostly win millions, but thousands. It’s probably the latter who lose it all).
Any middle income person who can save anything at all from his pay check isn’t going to blow a lottery fortune. If you can save $10k on a $100k income you probably are not spending the $1m from the lottery in a year, and with larger numbers it becomes nearly impossible.
Without searching I’m going to stick with my priors that movie stars, and high earning sports stars also die rich.
Interesting. Looking a bit more deeply, I think the literature is mixed on this one. Looks like there are clearly lots of cases of people who come into money blowing it all, including pro athletes, pop stars, actors, and lottery winners. At the same time, I think your point is valid that it's not as common as is often portrayed.
This diminishes the "snobbery as cultural shielding" hypothesis a bit, suggesting that association with 'new money' isn't as much of a risk. But the fact that people clearly do still blow up suggests that if you're old money you should practice some level of caution when dealing with new money.
On the lottery: annuity vs. lump sum, I saw one paper suggest in a survey of lottery winners people who take the annuity are more likely to spend it as it comes in, while people who take the lump sum tend to save/invest. This suggests various subgroups, including the spendthrifts, the long-term savers, and within the savers there will be the intergenerational savers contrasted with the savers who eat away at the principle commensurate with their life expectancy.
> Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all.
I’m fairly dubious about absolutely all of that. Even lottery winners.
(And remember lottery winners don’t mostly win millions, but thousands. It’s probably the latter who lose it all).
Any middle income person who can save anything at all from his pay check isn’t going to blow a lottery fortune. If you can save $10k on a $100k income you probably not spending the $1m from the lottery in a year, and with larger numbers it becomes nearly impossible.
Without searching I’m going to stick with my priors that movie stars, and high earning sports stars die rich.
I'm not against what you've put together generally, but the rich people I know endlessly talk about money by constantly whining how expensive everything is and acting as if they have no money what so ever (i.e., for their new boat).
I also know plenty of middle class people that are fantastic at preserving money long term - the whole FIRE movement and stuff.
Yeah. Their children will probably be *bored* of listening to the endless talk about money. For them, it will be "the boring stuff my old boring parents can't stop talking about, when there is so much fun to have instead".
I know a guy who has rich parents. He can't keep a job... tried a few, but always quit it after a few months because he didn't like something about it, and then always took a year of vacation before he started looking for a new job. He has a business online, but it makes like a few hundred euros a month; it's more like an excuse to spend the entire day online, pretending to do something useful. He once got married and had a child, but then got divorced, because taking care of the child was also boring (now his parents pay the child support that he owes).
His parents... they really don't want him to do this. They want him to stand on his own feet; they would much prefer to keep all the money they made for their own retirement instead. But he does a few things now and then to convince them that he is *trying* (he sometimes gets a job... that he then quits; he has an online business... that doesn't make money), and at the end of the day they always take a mercy on him, and provide him with free accommodation and food. They refuse to give him cash, but they sometimes pay his debts.
So this is an example of the money going away already in the second generation. When the guy inherits his parents' money, he will probably retire poor and leave his own child with nothing.
There is a way to avoid this outcome if the parents make so much money that they can create a trust fund for their kids. That's basically a machine that runs on its own, and keeps producing money at a certain rate. If the parents set up the rules so that the children get the money produced by the fund, but are not allowed to interfere with how the fund works (and need to pass it on to their own children), this is a way to create inter-generational wealth. If they get a child or a grandchild talented enough to make their own wealth, that is a bonus; but if the talent skips a generation or two, the money keeps flowing.
Without such mechanism, each generation flips a coin whether the wealth stops with them.
I would argue that this is ascribing too much to conscious decisions (whether snobbishness or some form of self-defense) when a much simpler answer is inertia. People drift to what is easier, and easier is your social strata. There are positive pushes that make it easier to interact with people of like status, and building relationships across strata almost always entails some level of power mismatch, which doesn't help either party feel comfortable, even absent a culture that conditions us to distrust relationships where one party has outsize power relative to the other.
Social-
Where do you meet friends? Who forms your close circle? People you spent a lot of time around, whether in school or at work. You went to a regular school and you struck out for the professional class, you may no longer have common experiences with your old school friends (assuming the color of your collar is different from theirs). At work, you meet people of similar class - lawyers meet lawyers, doctors meet doctors, mechanics meet mechanics, farm laborers meet farm laborers. Maybe you are an engineer who knows a bunch of doctors because you are involved in biomed, maybe you are a lawyer who knows a lot of finance folks because you do finance. You'd have to go out of your way to bond across social strata, and even further to find the time to consciously step outside your normal interactions on a consistent basis. Maybe your old friend from the neighborhood invites you to her Superbowl party, and you actually make time. Her friends are all in sales or the trades, just like her. Once you finish talking about the game, they start talking about things for which you have no point of reference. Their jokes are a little boorish and while they don't mind your nebbish programmer humor, they are happy to continue ribbing one another over who got ripped off at the car wash more. You awkwardly drink your light beer (seriously, would it kill them to have a decent brew?) then go home and talk to your old friend once a year while hanging out with your programmer buddies every other week. You could invite your mechanic friend, but they are less thrilled at the idea of casually blowing a hundred bucks on a board games cafe than you are and rain check.
Childrearing-
Let's stretch that to children. Ok, you are upper middle class and made a best friend that is lower middle class (maybe they have a scholarship to your prestigious middle school). On your summer holidays, your parents take you to Bali. Or on a trek across the Andes. Or send you to space camp in Switzerland. Your friend's family goes to the local beach. Maybe you wish you could take your summer holidays together, but there is no amount of goodwill that is going to bridge the gap of "who has X budget to blow on a trip". You drift apart and end up sparking connections with the kids of another family that went to the Pyrenees and bond over your love of mountains. Maybe your poor friend also loves hiking, and would have adored the Alps, but that doesn't lead to a healthy relationship. It is a lot easier to be good friends with those who have shared access to common interests.
Romantic-
You meet a girl in college whose family owns a chalet in Colorado. She flies out with her friends every weekend on their friend's chopper (his parents paid for pilot licensing courses and it was a really sweet graduation gift to reward his diligence). You sense a lot of chemistry, but your parents took you once to the nearest ski slope and that was the extent of your exposure. Even with her bending over backwards to get you a seat on the chopper and letting you crash at the chalet, you don't have the kind of pocket money to blow on lift tickets at Vail. She finds an equally interesting person who is not unlike you in every way, but does have a season pass. You can write great poetry, but this other person can do it too, and can additionally suggest doing so from their folks' beach house in Nantucket.
My point wasn't that this has to follow conscious decisions. It was that if associating too much with "poorer" people creates a risk to wealth stability, the only people who will have long-term wealth will be those who follow the observed set of behaviors that exclude people whose wealth isn't established/inherited.
This could be intentional, for the reasons I outlined, or unconscious social sorting mechanisms you discuss. Either way, the distance appears to be more than just establishment of social norms, but also selection bias that weeds out social defectors from the wealthy class.
Thank you for taking the time to follow up and emphasize your point!
To clarify my own, I would suggest that there are two distinct phenomena described here which are somewhat interrelated- (1) certain traits/approaches are beneficial to building/maintaining wealth, and (2) wealth-based self-sorting effects are magnified in capitalist/quasi-meritocratic societies. Avoiding the poor is not a causal factor but a strongly correlated one. I don't know that this impacts your direct hypothesis but possibly does the takeaways.
Why do you think they're magnified in these societies? Is there a society where we do not observe this pattern? I can't think of a non-capitalist country where it hasn't been a factor, from feudalist to communist and socialist. Wealth sorting as a persistent feature of human societies (larger than tribes) suggests it's a persistent feature, probably driven by incentives. This is in contrast to the idea that it's all cultural ("they're just snobs").
Well the middle classes, with their scientists, and engineers, doctors, IT guys, historians,shop owners, researchers, administrators (etc etc etc) are so obviously so much better interesting and useful people than those born to wealth, the people who live to lunch, that it’s hard ti believe we are even having this debate. Get rid of the firmer and civilisation collapses, get rid of the latter and a few restaurants close.
> gives my kids the highest chance of being happy and productive members of society
My friend's father grew up under communism in one of the old Soviet Block countries. He loved it, and felt that the fall of communism was the worst thing ever.
The problem? Capitalism has too many degrees of freedom. You're free to succeed, yes, but you're also free to fail. This man wasn't ambitious. He graduated school without distinction and went to work in a factory. The government gave him a small apartment. He had what he needed and nothing more, but he didn't care because there was no risk of complete failure and destitution.
No need to plan and worry for the future either. When he got married, he was assigned a slightly larger apartment. Then larger again when he had children. He never has much, but he didn't care so long as he didn't have to worry about the important things.
Many of us want to make a difference in the world, to engage with it in an exchange of meaning. But some people just want to coast along, enjoy the scenery, watch some football, have a family, and cross the finish line without having to worry about some major disaster messing up the plan.
One thing that stuck in my memory from my history classes in college is that there's a long tradition of physical separation from the rest of society being used as a signifier of power and prestige, and that many princes and heads of major merchant families in Renaissance Italy deliberately modeled themselves on Roman practice along these lines as one of several things they were doing to cultivate an air of legitimate authority. There is still contact between the important people and the masses, but it's usually under deliberately arranged conditions that reinforce the notion that the leaders are above the rest of society and are doing you a favor by letting you interact with them at all. The central examples are stuff like a monarch giving a speech from the palace balcony or allowing selected commoners to bring supplications to him while he's holding court.
In American political tradition, this style was very much out of fashion for much of the 19th century, with most of the Capitol building and the White House open to the public most of the time. This was done as a deliberate rejection of the symbology of the leaders being separate from and above the people, to the point that mid-19th century Presidents (I have heard this of Lincoln and Grant, but imagine others were affected as well) desperately wanted to be able to exclude petitioners and job-seekers to keep interruptions to a manageable level, but felt duty-bound to be accessable.
Thanks for your thoughts. I think for political leadership there are clearly other reasons to stay separate from the masses than wealth protection. Not just what you discussed above, but also to make assassination more difficult.
The other big reason is to isolate the monarch to make sure they're dependent on palace insiders to make decisions. This system, where aides and bureaucrats fight for influence of the monarch through a sort of popularity contest, seems to have been common, and who's to say it's not partly at play in current or recent US administrations?
While there are wealthy elite who remain wealthy through political rent-seeking, like you're talking about, I'm more interested in wealthy elite who maintain wealth through capital inheritance. Back in the day that was by owning large estates and collecting rents from peasants. Today that looks more like trust funds handed down through the generations.
The failure mode for wealth derived from government rents is often some form of regime change. Financial ruin from capital inheritance seems to follow a different pattern, and should therefore respond to different incentives.
(I deselected the 90-100% quantile because otherwise you can't see the rest.)
So your claim that there are plenty of "stealth millionaires" is true -- from the data it is clear that some households (minor caveat, that) in the 75-90% bracket already have a million.
1. Inflation has devalued the position of someone who is technically considered a millionaire.
2. This includes assets, particularly the home asset. If you pay off your $500k home, you'll find it much easier to live comfortably, and you'll be halfway to millionaire status. But you're also far from being able to live off your investment income, because most of your wealth isn't in the bank. If you sell your house, you still need somewhere to live, and now you've taken on a sizeable monthly housing payment.
Don't get me wrong, owning your home outright is similar to pulling a few thousand from investments without touching the principle that continues to grow. But it's not the exact same thing.
3. After illiquid home equity, the vast majority of wealth for most US households is retirement savings. This can't be accessed (not wisely) until old age, at which point it is used for income replacement. At that point, sure, you can live off the investment income. But this isn't the same as intergenerational wealth. Someone with a paid off $500k home and $1.2M in the bank could (assuming 10% average growth) pull $130k/year to live off of, while having just enough left over if they die at 85 to leave a small inheritance. (Nothing if they live until 90.)
4. If you save $16.9k/year under a mattress you'd have a million after 60 years. But that's not how retirement savings works. $1,400/month ($16.8) at 10% compounding interest from investments over 30 years is $3M. Enough to live very comfortably, for sure. But if you want to live off that kind of investment without eating into the principle, you'll need a lot more. At $30M, you can pull $100k/month and still see growth over time. There's a huge lifestyle difference between $10k/month and $100k/month. Middle class families aren't putting aside $14k/month from their paychecks.
5. I agree in principle with a lot of your points, and that there are a lot more millionaires out there than most people realize. Not everyone is dumb enough to buy a boat on a HELOC, lease a brand new car, then sign up for a timeshare, etc. Some people don't realize that the Joneses they're trying to keep up with have 7 figures in the bank and are cash buyers. I'm just saying that 7 figures doesn't represent anything like the kind of wealth it was when I was growing up.
Regarding the end-birthright-citizenship EO, Ilya Somin posted late yesterday:
"This is blatantly unconstitutional. Section 1 of the Amendment grants citizenship to anyone "born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." There is no exception for children of illegal migrants. I go over the relevant issues in detail in a recent Just Security article
where I also address various specious arguments to the effect that children of undocumented immigrants aren't covered because their parents are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US. I think it highly likely that courts will strike down this action, as the text and original meaning are clear, longstanding Supreme Court precedent points in the same direction, and there is broad (though not quite universal) cross-ideological agreement on the subject among legal scholars."
>There is no exception for children of illegal migrants.
Agreed. If the nation wants to change this, there is an amendment process for the Constitution. It might be reasonable public policy to change "born" to "born to a woman legally in the United States". If so, proponents should make the case and go through the amendment process. In the absence of the ratification of some such amendment, only the exceptions that are _already_ in the actual words of the Constitution, thank you.
> their parents are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US.
I find this claim strange. If an undocumented/illegal immigrant is killed, will the murderer not be charged by US authorities? Or if they murder someone, will they not be charged in an US court?
I mean, if the mother was in that bizarre legal construction that is gitmo, or was part of an invading army, or had a diplomatic passport, then I could see the point about jurisdiction. (Edit: from reading wikipedia, it seems the latter two exceptions are indeed the ones often mentioned.)
But yes, at the end of the day, the language of the 14th means whatever the SCOTUS says it means. If Roe could be based on the due process clause, then certainly the SCOTUS could also argue that the word "jurisdiction" in the 14th means something completely different than what I would understand by that word.
However, I also don't think that the current SCOTUS will blatantly back Trump in whatever he does (e.g., they were not willing to overturn Biden's election no matter how loud he was whining).
From my understanding, federal courts will likely follow SCOTUS precedent (which seems to affirm a plain reading of the 14th).
And now today 22 state attorneys general plus a couple of cities, in various combinations, have filed several federal lawsuits arguing basically the points that Somin summarized. They're seeking an expedited summary ruling that the EO is unconstitutional, and whichever way the initial ruling goes it will no doubt be appealed upward.
There is no guarantee that the SCOTUS will end up taking up the matter because there is no _right_ to SCOTUS review of anything. The Court does (still) often decline when the appellate court has ruled consistent with past SCOTUS precedents. It takes four justices to agree to take up an appeal, and then of course five to agree to order the overturn of a lower-court ruling.
>It takes four justices to agree to take up an appeal
Morbidly curious: How close is the SCOTUS to breaking under their workload? If it just took three justices to take up an appeal, would everything grind to a halt? Presumably it wouldn't make sense to tighten the appeal requirement to five justices, since that would make it almost the same as the requirement to overturn... (This is to say, the number _would_ be the same, but the criteria the justices use might be slightly different.)
Does it come down to there being _zero_ flexibility in the number of justices needed to take up an appeal?
Trolling, it seems like. He's obviously aware of exactly what he's doing, and that it will cause a shitstorm. But he also ensures a context with plausible deniability if you're a supporter. The shitstorm is _desired_.
It _is_ hilarious that the ADL defends rampant heiling, yes.
I've been thinking about this and while I'm somewhat reluctant to even ask the question, I will appreciate any answers: Does deliberately making a nazi salute while you are not a nazi (so just for trolling) a very bad thing? I'm just not sure, I think that being a nazi isn't bad axiomatically, it's bad because of the consequences of nazi politics (killings, forced eugenics, etc..), so if there are no bad consequences related to it, why is it even bad? I saw a lot of people in left wing spheres leaving Twitter because of the salute, and I'm thinking about whether I should or not. What would be moral?
Another but related note: As I imply in the previous paragraph, I don't think Elon is a nazi, but after searching I saw that Elon is supporting the Afd party and saw that the Afd party supports the banning of Kosher meat. I currently find the explanation that it's because of animal welfare very suspect as they don't ban factory farming which is magnitudes more horrifying. Can some explain what is up with this?
Why exactly are people so sure that he doesn't have a problem with Jews? People expect racists/anti-Semites/etc to be foaming at the mouth or something. But Musk goes on podcasts and SNL and shit and is affable, joking around, even is friendly with Ben Shapiro.
None of that is inconsistent with having a problem with Jews!
> Does deliberately making a nazi salute while you are not a nazi (so just for trolling) a very bad thing?
I think that, in many cases at least, such people who would be described (by themselves and others) as "trolling" are, in fact, expressing genuine contempt for Jewish people and other groups that the Nazis targeted (even if they don't rise to the level of wanting mass murder). "Trolling" isn't actually inconsistent with this. Trolling isn't trolling unless it's aimed at some person or group. Who is it aimed at? Sometimes the answer is "everyone", but if you're doing it to an adoring crowd while practically acting as co-president, that can't be the answer.
I wish I could find it now but I recently came across a quote from a writer about how, in essence, trolling was a key tactic of how Nazis argued. But it was from the 1940s or something, not in the context of the modern Internet.
"But Musk goes on podcasts and SNL and shit and is affable, joking around, even is friendly with Ben Shapiro.
None of that is inconsistent with having a problem with Jews!"
If Musk had a problem with Jews to the point of wanting them all shipped to Dachau, I think it's safe to say that he would *not* be friendly with Ben Shapiro. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that either Musk has no problem with Jews, or has one nowhere near to Dachau levels.
This raises the question of how big a problem he could have. But then, any problem big enough is very likely to preclude being friendly with Ben Shapiro, any problem that isn't big enough to preclude it is not likely to be worth worrying about.
"I recently came across a quote from a writer about how, in essence, trolling was a key tactic of how Nazis argued."
Maybe, and maybe this is historically interesting; but other than that, so what? Trolling is also a key tactic of how a *lot* of people argue, including vastly more people who aren't Nazis.
> This raises the question of how big a problem he could have. But then, any problem big enough is very likely to preclude being friendly with Ben Shapiro, any problem that isn't big enough to preclude it is not likely to be worth worrying about.
I think history shows this is untrue.
As for the quote, here it is, from Jean-Paul Sartre
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I've watched the video, and I just can't believe anyone with sense can land on Elon being a Nazi. It's so clearly not what he said or meant. Even if I take out the "autistic and awkward" attempt to excuse, I'm still left with, what made you take leave of your senses in order to see it that way?
The first whatever whatever of the party was to ignore your eyes or some shit
- George 1984 Orwell
How obvious does it need to be?
this dude could come out on stage with a sauerkraut swastika carved into his forehead and his parasocial hangers-on would be all "no you don't understand he got real into shin Buddhism, but is too stupid to understand how mirrors work!”
at some point you've got to stop extending charity
Nope. Making up a story and saying I'm dumb not to believe the story you made up doesn't convince. I saw the video myself. You saw it too (I should hope) and presumably with sound on and context before and after. If that's true and you still think the same, no story's going to convince me you haven't let an ideology (let's call it MDS, after TDS) inform your senses rather than the other way around. At some point you've got to look. Really look.
I did. He did the Nazi salute, all the Nazis were excited he did the Nazi salute, he did it again two times, and now conservatives are pissing on my boots and telling me it's raining.
I don't have to respect people desperately rationalizing reality out of existence, that shit is demeaning.
"Supposedly being so smart" doesn't mean being smart in every dimension.
"Actual nazis apparently saw it" --you let "actual nazis" show you how to interpret something? Does that really seem like a good idea?
Being on stage in front of a zillion people, knowing half of them are looking for the smallest gesture to pillory you with, and somehow showing up anyway? I think either of two things are going to happen here:
1. You shrink away from it and if you still have to go on stage, you stand with your hands at your sides and speak in a monotone, terrified lest anyone misinterpret what you say/do.
2. You decide you don't care, and go around making grand gestures without attempting to pre-criticize what the worst person in the room might make of them, and here we are.
"'Supposedly being so smart' doesn't mean being smart in every dimension."
This is a tired excuse.
He can drive (presumably). He can use a fork (presumably). He should be able to avoid whatever this was. We aren't talking about a high bar of difficulty.
"'Actual nazis apparently saw it' --you let 'actual nazis' show you how to interpret something? Does that really seem like a good idea?"
It's not a good idea to ignore how they interpret stuff. Doing that might before hand might have avoided the confusion. (His promoting nazi adjacent tweets isn't a great precedence either.)
"You shrink away from it..."
False dilemma. There are many options other than the two you list.
Anyway, he didn't "have to go on stage". It's a choice.
(Musk certainly "cared" about being called-out for "misrepresenting" his game-playing skill.)
I think it's quite possible he meant it as a Nazi salute. Like a lot of men, he didn't want his son to turn into a woman, and the rage melted his mind and made him vulnerable to every dumb rightoid brainworm. Maybe they shouldn't have turned his kid transgender.
It looks a lot like a Nazi salute. But why would he intentionally do a nazi salute? He isn't a capital N-Nazi, there's no capital N Nazis in America aside from some white prison gangs. You might think there are lots of authoritarian supporters of Trump, and there are, but they don't think of themselves as Nazis, they hate Nazis too! Nobody wants to be an actual Nazi or be seen as a Nazi.
One way this could happen is if he spends a huge amount of time on the Internet in right wing, and just plain weird, rabbit holes, possibly with a drug addiction, marinating in a world in which weird beliefs about Jews are commonly shared to the point that he thinks that shit is normal. Combined with being rich enough to never really have to do anything he doesn't want to or be told "no" by anyone.
Maybe to distract everyone from looking through the list of executive orders. Or maybe to show support for the authoritarians - I imagine I would be pretty stoked if I was a Proud Boy or something right now.
I have become convinced that this was very likely intentionally a nazi salute. I assume because Elon is immature as hell and wanted to make a weird power flex, or troll and piss off 'da libs.'
I'm not too familiar with the Proud Boys, but wikipedia says they have (had?) 6000 members. The number of people sympathetic to Nazi symbolism is so tiny, and the number of people that find it absolutely abhorrent is so large, that intentionally doing that is a terrible idea.
If it were a Nazi salute, I'd be mad. It wasn't a Nazi salute. It was a "hand on my heart, throwing my heart out to you" salute and it was clumsily done so it looked like "oh my God he's sieg heiling".
The demand for outrage continues to outstrip supply.
I don't have a particularly strong feeling about this issue, but I truly don't think there's any physical gesture he could have done that you would agree was a nazi salute.
It seems likely to me he was intentionally doing it to troll the left, and to flex how he is not cowed by woke. Of course he's not an "actual" nazi, he just isn't afraid of the association.
If he did a real Nazi salute, I would take it as a Nazi salute. 'Ambiguous physical gesture that can be interpreted several ways' is not a real Nazi salute.
I'm not going to try and find clips of "The Triumph of the Will" to share on here, because even I have some sense of proportion, to compare'n'contrast with "this is what a real Nazi doing a real salute looks like".
By the metric of understanding extended here by some of our newest commentators, Tim Walz is a Nazi because look, he put his hand on his heart and then extended his right arm outwards in salutation to a crowd of supporters. There's no way to persuade me I didn't see what I saw, you deniers!
Why do I think that is so? Because I've seen it, and you may have too: any kind of apology by someone who falls foul of the Inquisitors is seized upon as evidence of guilt.
What kind of apology can he give? What would you, with your churning stomach, accept?
"I apologise for offending or causing hurt to anyone by the gesture which I now recognise could be mistaken for a Fascist salute"?
"See, see? He admits he did it! Out of his own mouth, Musk is a Nazi!"
This whole "it is SIEG HEIL FASCIST NAZI DOGWHISTLING" storm in a teacup reminds me of two things.
First, when I was about twelve, another girl in my class thought that I made a face at her. She accosted me with a couple of her friends after class to demand an explanation/apology (I got out of that by the simple expedient of walking away). I would have dug my heels in back then, as I would dig them in now, if anyone had tried to force me to apologise for doing something which I had not done. "But she thought you did it, so apologise" - well, she was mistaken, so I'm not going to say sorry for doing something which I did not do.
If Musk didn't do a Nazi Fascist Dogwhistle, why should he apologise? Just because your stomach churned? Take an antacid.
Second thing this reminds me of is this excerpt from "The Man Who Was Thursday". For those looking to be offended, they will always find something that is a Dogwhistle in order to be offended:
“This man has insulted me!” said Syme, with gestures of explanation.
“Insulted you?” cried the gentleman with the red rosette, “when?”
“Oh, just now,” said Syme recklessly. “He insulted my mother.”
“Insulted your mother!” exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.
“Well, anyhow,” said Syme, conceding a point, “my aunt.”
“But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?” said the second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. “He has been sitting here all the time.”
“Ah, it was what he said!” said Syme darkly.
“I said nothing at all,” said the Marquis, “except something about the band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well.”
“It was an allusion to my family,” said Syme firmly. “My aunt played Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted about it.”
“This seems most extraordinary,” said the gentleman who was décoré, looking doubtfully at the Marquis.
“Oh, I assure you,” said Syme earnestly, “the whole of your conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt’s weaknesses.”
“This is nonsense!” said the second gentleman. “I for one have said nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl with black hair.”
“Well, there you are again!” said Syme indignantly. “My aunt’s was red.”
“It seems to me,” said the other, “that you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.”
“By George!” said Syme, facing round and looking at him, “what a clever chap you are!”
he didn't say apology, he said a post. Something like "It clearly wasn't a nazi salute you morons. PS. Nazis are a bunch of losers!" would probably suffice.
There's a maybe-apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson in his congressional days spreading a rumor that his opponent was a "pig fucker". One of his aides whispers to him, "you know he doesn't do that, right??". He replies, "I know; I just want the sucker to deny it".
The moral of the story is that it's all too easy to make up something unsupportable that nevertheless forces the discussion to center on it. For Musk to even deny the accusation is to give the accusation respect it does not deserve, at the expense of the actual important stuff he wants to do.
Ok, and in this analogy, if that opponent would be seen by everyone exiting a pigsty with his pants around the ankles, It might warrant some kind of explanation.
If it's not given, then sure, Musks prerogative, but it will just cement the consensus that he indeed did a neo nazi salute multiple times at the inauguration.
Eh....while I agree with and have more than once repurposed your "demand for outrage" line, am much less sure that this instance fits that description.
Having watched the full (not edited) video sequence a couple of times now....if forced to wager I would have to put money on "clumsy attempt at fascist salute" ahead of "awkward version of throwing my heart out to you". Call it a 60-40 or maybe 2-1 split on those odds.
The guy is physically and socially awkward, granted, and has self-described as being on the spectrum. So yes either explanation _could_ be true.
If it's meant to be a Real Genuine Nazi Salute, it's very badly done. His hand is at an angle, instead of straight out, at the end. I think he was hyper as one of the three year olds at my place of work during the whole inauguration - whether he was coked-up (er, I mean, NATURAL HARMLESS NOOTROPICS FOR BRAIN-HACKING-ed up) or just full of joie de vivre, he was wired to the moon.
So 'throwing my heart to you' salutes are all just part of that. Anyway, I imagine if he'd done the fist pump or something else instead, the same pearl-clutching would be going on about 'this really means X because some guy did it at a KKK rally one time' or something. The same way that the OK sign was turned into "this is a white supremacist signal" and taken seriously by the Extremely Furrowed Brows set.
If the ADL, which managed to classify the OK sign as a "hate signal", is now telling everyone to cool their jets about Musk, I think that the demand really has exceeded supply.
Musk has shown a clear pattern of far-right conviction over the past weeks and months: He is firmly in the MAGA camp, advertised European far-right parties, supports each and every insane thing Trump says such as threatening various allies (except for the {already forgotten?} H1B hickup), and is making X a far-right cesspool. Several fascism historians have confirmed his salute to be the Nazi salute. And if the grimace with which he was throwing the salute was one of love, I don't want to see him full of hate.
Whatever his intention really was with that salute, if he really only wanted to channel Celine Dion (another Canada annexation dogwhistle then?), the times for good faith assumptions regarding Musk are long over.
There's not going to be movement towards conviction by either side here; for those for whom this is indeed proof that Musk is a Nazi, their minds are made up and they won't be persuaded that this wasn't a Fascist salute. For those of us who don't think Musk is a Nazi, no amount of "but we knew all along he really was a Nazi" is going to persuade me, for one, that it wasn't a stupid gesture but not a Fascist salute.
How do people explain the "putting his hand over his heart" before throwing this 'salute'? That's not part of any Fascist salute I know of, and if he's deliberately doing a Real Genuine Nazi Salute why add in extraneous bits?
Scott really was prescient with the Shiri's Scissors thing, wasn't he?
> How do people explain the "putting his hand over his heart" before throwing this 'salute'?
That's literally the part that makes it look like the nazi salute. It's the Sieg part of Sieg Heil
It's beginning to get ridiculous how much your hatred of the left makes you bend yourself over backwards to defend something dumb done by someone on the right
Really? Because the Wikipedia article on the Nazi salute doesn't make any mention of starting with the hand over the heart. Neither does the ADL's description of the salute, nor any other source that I could quickly find. And the pop-culture versions Hollywood has provided us, like Dr. Strangelove in "Dr. Strangelove", or Tom Cruise in "Valkyrie", don't start with the hand over the heart. I checked. Nor did any of the half-dozen or so newsreel clips I just checked of actual Nazis (one of them named Adolf Hitler) giving the Nazi salute in Nazi Germany.
Things a Nazi salute has that the Elon Musk gesture also had:
Arm briefly outstretched at a ~45 degree angle
Palm parallel to the arm and facing downward
Things a Nazi salute has that the Elon Musk gesture didn't have:
Starting while standing at attention
Arm outstretched directly forward in a single stiff motion
Salute held long enough that it it may be acknowledged or returned
Things Elon Musk's gesture had, that a Nazi salute *doesn't* have:
Starting with the hand over the heart
A fluid sweeping motion across the body
Significant movement of the torso during the salute
Immediately pivoting to deliver a similar gesture in the opposite direction.
I am at a loss to understand how you could see the full video and consider this a Nazi salute, except by extreme and subjective partisan bias. And I'm pretty sure you're now retconning your memory of actual Nazi salutes to match what you think you just saw.
Yeah, excuse me one moment while I clear my throat before launching into the Horst Wessel Lied.
"Hatred of the left". Look, I could get into a slanging match with you, but it's not worth it: too much heat, not near enough light, and Scott shouldn't have to clean up after we wreck the joint.
Okay, yeah: Musk is a Nazi, Trump is a Nazi, and of course I (with my hatred of the left) am a Nazi too. Happy now? Is the world better after that?
At least we both agree that it was something dumb done by Musk. Nazi Fascist dumb? No for me, yes for you. You're not going to change my mind, and I'm not going to change yours.
I don't think you're a Nazi (or a fascist) I just think you're so stuck being contrarian that you've fallen head first into a deep pit of reverse stupidity
You're seriously arguing about the angle of his hand, as if that somehow makes it less of a nazi gesture
I don't think Musk is a Nazi, but I do think that he intentionally snuck a Nazi Salute in there "for the lulz", or to "own the libs' or whatever
And I think that it's bad, because breaking the norm of "Don't make nazi salutes in political speeches" is a norm that was worth having
It's also part of saluting the flag/national anthem for civilians, though that probably isn't taught in schools anymore. So we're all Fascists now, Father?
I thought Elon went to Israel and was very friendly with their cause of not being killed by people who don't like them for whatever reason.
I have a very low prior he would intentionally do a nazi salute, it's a much lower chance in my mind than him thinking the hand gesture was a natural way to physically express his feelings.
I can't remember where I first saw this, but I've seen it observed that a lot of otherwise-antisemitic neonazis actually support Israel, because "the Jews fucking off to their own country in the middle of all the other people we hate" is *what they want*, and the fact that it's a very nationalist state in its peoples' "homeland" only makes them respect it more. Israel, according to all fascist precepts, is *doing things the right way*.
If you're going to use "observed" to mean "made up", you should really clarify that explicitly, because normally that word is used to mean something completely different.
>(Edit: lol, the ADL are defending Elon. The Israel lobby does not give a single shit about Jews, folks)
Does the fact that one of the most chicken little organizations in the planet said it wasn't a big deal not make you update a little bit in that direction? What would?
I update a bit towards that possibility, and a bit towards the notion that "the ADL are more concerned about support for Israel, and together with tech orgs that wish to curry favor with the government they want to do everything in their power to suck up to Musk and Trump"
Zuckerberg's or TikTok sucking up to Trump follow the exact same pattern imo
I guess I'm not smart enough to figure out "they are more concerned with supporting Israel and also they hate Jews" there for the ADL. I mean, isn't Israel famously kinda full of Jews?
This is the evangelical position. Israel is important because it heralds the Apocalypse. But then all the Jews will be converted, because they don't like Jews, only Israel.
They are not chicken little when it comes to the rights of Palestinians and those protesting against their genocide. This is because they are part of the Israel lobby, and are only supportive of rights for their political allies. (Did you see the recent leak of the ADL guy explaining that TikTok is bad because it's making people aware of the oppression of Palestinians?)
They see Musk and Trump as enablers of even more US tax dollars for Israel, and they want to protect their allies. They're not fighting racism, they're supporting their colony.
Let me get this straight. The ADL (you're saying) decided to support someone who they believe is a Nazi (you're saying) because they'll get more money?
At some point, the increasing complexity of dissembling collapses of its own weight, doesn't it?
" I'm starting to think America might be beyond repair."
I've thought that for some time. I think 2020 was the year that finally did it for me, though it could have been 2019 or 2021. And I think a more astute person could have recognized it as much as a decade earlier than that. Somewhere about then I mentally assigned 5-30 years as my best guess for the remaining lifespan of the U.S. as a unified country with recognizably the same form of government, though I made (and still make) no strong predictions as to exactly when or in what form its ultimate end will come.
The ultimate problem isn't *this* election or *this* government mind you, though I certainly don't expect them to help. In fact, I don't really think there's *one* ultimate problem, I could point at three or four pieces minimum that I think have played big roles. But the net effect is:
1. At a federal level, political polarization renders U.S. no longer able fix any of its pre-existing structural, cultural or political problems.
2. The factors driving the polarization are exactly the sort of structural, cultural and political problems that are now impossible to fix, so future U.S. governments will *also* not be able to fix them.
3. Any new problems that crop up--regardless of their origin--have a high chance of becoming sucked up by the polarization and becoming similarly unfixable. COVID specifically was my guiding model for this: a crisis that in past years might have pulled people together in solidarity instead turned *almost instantly* into an acrimonious series of shouting matches, with people refusing to do incredibly simple, basic things *for their own safety* with reasons that largely boiled down to "well, if THEY'RE for it, I'm against it." Even when technology handed the country a (good but not perfect) solution on a silver platter, political polarization slowed it down and rendered it less effective.
I would like nothing better than to be wrong about this, but I don't think I am. It's like watching a messy, drawn-out divorce play out across the national stage, where you're not sure if the result will *merely* be something as minor as a heated and expensive legal battle, or if it will escalate into house fire that spreads halfway across the neighborhood.
I mean, I’m no great historian nor am I an American, but I don’t see right now any cause or chance of any separation or civil war.
The rhetoric prior to the civil war was far worse, there was clear demand for a breakup from the southern states, and there was no easy way forward with the expansion of the US unless the south was politically or militarily defeated. Eventually the slave states had to know that the vast majority of new states would be free states leaving them with a minority in the senate as well as Congress, and eventually slavery would be abolished by the US.
They are preempting this by leaving. I see no obvious parallels today.
"overall people in America are far too rich and have far too much to lose to blow up the system. "
I'll notice that this prediction has already been somewhat falsified regarding the international system of trade, which certainly isn't the ONLY root of the U.S.'s prosperity, but it's one of the big ones. Whether out of ignorance or because they have other priorities, many people seem perfectly happy to tolerate threats to the system and even cheer for them. In fact "globalization" (of which international trade is the largest piece) has been one of THE main targets of a lot of recent right-wing political movements, in the U.S. and elsewhere. In general I believe those movements are more concerned with the movement of people than the movement of goods, but they seem perfectly content to throw the baby out with the bathwater: see Brexit for example (which wasn't the U.S., but the same arguments applied).
Now I should say that in many ways I *agree* that the U.S.'s problems are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I think a lot of the people who are getting Big Mad about them are being quite stupid. But they're still getting Big Mad regardless. In a nutshell, I think you vastly underestimate how extreme people are willing to act over (to you) minor problems, and how recklessly they're willing to threaten the roots of their own prosperity (in part simply because they don't understand them)
I've talked to you enough to know that I have zero interest in reading anything else you write, now or ever. Your writing seems mainly to be optimizing for shock value, and there are a million better purveyors of that elsewhere on the internet if it were something I wanted. Please find someone else to direct such comments at, if you are intent on making them.
Yeah, this is like saying, "no-no, this was a Hindu swastika I posted, not a Nazi one - they just look identical". You _may_ be able to get away with this if you're a Hindu. If not, not. If you're already on the alt-right fringe, then _definitely_ not.
Yes (or rather, the idea of it - it's questionable whether it actually existed), by means of the Italian and Austrian fascists.
Some Nazis, being Nazis, thought this was un-Germanic.
WP: "However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute.[1]"
Did nobody look at the full clip where he's doing the Nazi Fascist OMG End Of America!!!!! salutes? The usual suspects are all weasel-wording with "he appeared to" and "fascist-style salutes".
Now, if you want to say "that totally was a Fascist Nazi Heil Hitler salute", I can't change your mind. I hope you have plenty of space under your bed to hide in.
Do not make me go digging around online to find a two-second clip of an awkwardly angled shot that makes Harris or Biden or whomever "appear to be" giving a "fascist-style salute". I do remember way back some fucking idiot putting up a photo claiming a pope or a cardinal or someone was "OMG Fascist salute!" but if you know anything about Catholic liturgy, it was "outstretched arm in blessing". (That's why I say "fucking idiot" because they're all too eager to jump into the outrage machine without finding out what happened).
I watched the clip, expecting to see a stage wave or other innocent hand-out gesture that looks bad in a well-chosen framecap. The clip looked a lot more like a deliberate Nazi salute than I had been expecting.
That said, I have never encountered a "hand goes out to you" gesture in other contexts and had no idea it was a thing. If it is a thing and it actually looks like what Musk did, that makes it much more likely that his intentions were innocent rather than (at best) tasteless trolling.
Musk is neither Harris nor Biden, and certainly not a pope or cardinal, so these explanations are irrelevant. If anything, I would be much more interested in a clip of Musk *before* his MAGAfication where he used that salute in a clearly non-political way. Can you provide one of those? That would be much more convincing than this whataboutist gaslighting you're indulging in.
To the people who don't want to see him as a fascist it matters.
I don't know if it's due to Ketamine or the Testosterone that he was Tweeting about a while back, but I think Elon has lost any self-control he once had.
Mussolini's movement was the original fascism, of course. The nazis didn't call themselves fascists. Communists first used the term as a category name for nationalist totalitarismism, I think. There still is no satisfying consensus about what constitutes fascism but if anybody deserved being called a fascist it was Mussolini.
I think Mussolini coined the term in a political context. Ancient Romans tied together wooden rods with leather straps with a single-bladed axe in the middle — and they called it a fasces. It was a symbol of strength (because the rods wouldn't snap when tied together) and summary punishment (the axe). In the pre-Republican period, the accounts say that twelve attendants, known as ‘lictors,’ carried fasces walking in procession before the kings of Rome. During the Republic, the two consuls took turns presenting the fasces to the Senate (IIRC), giving the Senate precedence, and they removed the axes from the bundles to show deference to the Roman citizenry, who had received the right of appeal against summary execution. Mussolini played up the stronger together symbolism of the fasces.
What were Hitler and Mussolini, if not fascists? Mussolini established the Roman salute as a symbol of his fascist government, and Hitler adopted it for his. Any way you turn it, the Roman salute, fascist Italy's salute, and fascist Germany's salute are one and the same.
So no, it really doesn't matter which phrase you use, except if you're an organization (such as a news outlet) who doesn't want to end up on the bad side of a potentially fascist US government.
I'm Jewish, have a very, very deep dislike of Nazism, Fascism and (Soviet-style) Communism. I also think that Musk can act highly inappropriately at times. I've watch the video several times over and do not think its a Nazi salute, just an awkward gesture.
I would say that Musk almost certainly is not a commited neo nazi. But I would also say that he is muuuuuch closer to being a neonazi than 2 years ago.
What "everything else" do you mean? Only a few weeks ago he endorsed Alternativ für Deutschland, a party that has cooperated with and sometimes contained the genuine article. I'm not quite sure how *else* one would be supposed to take that.
Regardless, one need not be "literally a neo-Nazi" to find value in gesturing in that direction (rather more literally than usual). One need only to have willingness and motive to signal support and solidarity with neo-Nazis. Totally different.
Remember that nearly half to the victims of the Holocaust weren't Jewish. The Nazis also killed millions from other minorities (such as Gypsy and gay Germans) and people who just had different political opinions.
Elon is vocally transphobic, to the point of disowning his daughter. Elon is banning dissenters from Twitter (even fellow alt right figures like Laura Loomer). Now he's doing this Is it really so different?
Nobody is arguing that they can't. But when the man claims his decision to buy the platform is motivated by safeguarding "free speech," it hardly seems inappropriate to NOTICE that he's engaging in the same sorts behavior that "free speech advocates" have been wailing and moaning about for years. Are any of them surprised by this? Do any of them feel betrayed by it? If the answer is "no," that tells you something pretty important about what those people were about all along.
>Elon is vocally transphobic, to the point of disowning his daughter. Elon is banning dissenters from Twitter (even fellow alt right figures like Laura Loomer). Now he's doing this Is it really so different?
Yes. Yes those are radically different things from the worst interpretation of doing a Nazi salute. Absolutely. It doesn't even come anywhere near close.
Ughh. Only a couple of hours into Trump's presidency and we're back to the same shit that filled up the internet during his first term. Specifically, an endless stream of rants about how bad Trump is that mix in genuinely concerning norm-shattering behaviours alongside entirely standard conservative positions WITH NOT THE SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT TO DISTINGUISH THEM. And then, amazingly, act shocked and outraged that others dismiss their comments as mere partisanship.
The standard one looks something like:
"Why Trump is a literal fascist who must never be cooperated with:
He makes race-baiting comments!
He holds violent rallies!
He opposes the right to abortion!
He praises foreign dictators!
He wants to cut taxes for billionaires!
He colluded with Russia to win!
He called for jailing political opponents!
He opposes transgender bathroom access!
He's deporting undocumented immigrants!
He supports Israel's occupation!
He tries to overturn elections!
Who can say this isn't fascism?????"
Notice how these lists include genuinely scary things, some clearly true and some factually disputed, that any reasonable person regardless of their political views should agree are terrifying if true...and entirely normal conservative things that the writer simply doesn't like. Notice how the only person who would be capable of writing such a list is either someone who doesn't really believe the scary claims (seeing them as just cheap partisan shots to get their way on policy) or is someone so fanatically partisan that they honestly don't see a difference between opposing transgender bathrooms and thinking dictatorship is great (and thus has, to put it mildly, questionable judgement).
And notice how by following up a claim of Nazi salutes with "and he also won't call his son a daughter, which is basically the same thing" you have *absolutely guaranteed* that no one who doesn't already agree with you about everything will take the former remotely seriously.
This drives me a little bit crazy, because you outright say that there are "genuinely concerning norm-shattering behaviours" but seem to conclude that the REAL problem is people being upset about things that don't matter to you. Rather than the problem being, y'know, the people engaging in all those dangerous behaviors, and the people enabling them.
Suffice to say that different people have difference concerns, and while I broadly agree with you that some of Trump's behaviors are much more dangerous, blameworthy, norm-violating and frightening than others (and we might even agree *somewhat* on which ones), turning around and telling people that they're mad about the wrong things is possibly the least helpful response to that ever. Coalitions are not formed by people who agree on everything. They're not even usually formed by people who agree on most things. In fact, I'd say they're most typically formed by people who agree strongly on ONE thing, and are willing to set aside other differences because they find that one thing important enough.
But also the thing you're complaining about isn't really an accident. While I don't have a high opinion of Trump's intelligence or competence in a general sense, he clearly has some pretty strong skills and instincts with regards to manipulating people, and is exercising some degree of deliberateness in when and how he pisses various groups of people off. Plus the current national media ecosystem provides pretty much the perfect state for this sort of tactic, as it was already well-optimized for creating exactly this sort of clusterfuck of petty bickering and mutual mistrust.
Your point about coalitions being formed by people setting aside other differences in favor on one important enough thing seems to support the comment you're trying to disagree with: if you list a dozen things and say that supporting any of them makes you a "fascist," people who support some of them but oppose others would be wise to set aside THEIR differences, and work together to form a coalition against you.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people will be {huge gasp} mortally offended by the *word* "fascism," but not bat an eye actual, honest-to-goodness, right-wing, strong-man authoritarian nationalism. Remember when right wingers were always calling people on the left "snowflakes" and complaining about attempts to soften and police language? Is calling a spade a spade THAT offensive to you?
Let me be clear: if telling, repeating and doubling down on outrageous lies, making threats against allies, ignoring democratic norms, abusing high office for personal gain and pardoning violent extremists because they were loyal to the cause are appealing (or indeed acceptable) qualities to you in a leader, that it because YOU want those things. Nobody else's behavior is at fault, nobody forced you into it, nobody twisted your arm. There were always other options. You decided that those things looked good to you, and you should own that. Call a spade a spade. What ever happened to the "party of personal responsibility" anyway?
He has spoken pretty clearly about feeling as though he had a son stolen from him by woke culture. You can pick at it all you want, but to me that would read like an emotional disowning. That she would then say she no longer wants to have anything to do with her father follows.
What interests me there is that the trans child is one of twins. The brother hasn't (so far as I know) indicated that he's trans or GNC or anything of that sort. So that would seem to be against the argument that "it's exposure to hormones in the womb that give you a female brain in a male body" (since both babies were male sex in the same environment at the same time) and more for the argument "it was socially influenced transition".
Is there any data on twins and incidences of one being LGBT and the other not?
I believe there have been twin studies whose results suggest that there is a genetic component to being transgender. That's far from meaning that if one twin is trans then the other must be too.
That is a question that is above my pay grade. I know little to nothing about genetic effects on these things. The only issue I was addressing was who disowned who. Musk clearly thinks it was peer pressure that stole his boy away. That kind of negates the person in question. I was just pointing out that a child in that position could very much feel disowned by a father.
Someone I know is going through a divorce. His two kids have sided completely with their mother, refusing to see him on his visitation days. This is exactly the kind of thing he would say, and he would follow it with "I just want them back". The flat opposite of emotional disownment.
She's a child, he's (supposedly) an adult. If the disowning isn't mutual, it's on him to put in the basic courtesy of not being a transphobe if he wants a relationship with his daughter.
As someone who was once 20 and is now far past that, and still knows many 20 year olds, that is still largely a child (and was when this estrangement takes place). That said, your scare quotes tell me you are not coming to this in good faith here.
The Nazis were directly and bluntly pro-violence (as in Hitler advocating for it, and making it happen) from the beginning, and openly rejected democracy, also from the beginning. We're very far from the end of democracy, Trump is simply not ideological enough to want to replace democracy with something else, or institute a totalitarian state. If anything, DOGE is pointing in the opposite direction to totalitarianism (it also seems very likely DOGE won't actually accomplish anything. I put 80% on DOGE achieving nothing).
So yeah, someone is due for major updates in their worldview, and it's going to be either you or me.
>> Trump is simply not ideological enough to want to replace democracy with something else, or institute a totalitarian state.
I agree that Trump's motives are not ideological, but they don't need to be for him to attempt something like that. He'd just be in it for personal power/wealth/fame, rather than an ideological opposition to the idea of checks-and-balances republicanism.
I actually don't think this is true at all. My understanding (which I will have to read up on later) was that the Nazis rose to power on tremendous popular support, and the violence was initially claimed to be "law and order" against the untrustworthy minorities. Which is remniscent of what's happening now.
Regarding totalitarianism, i guess you could look at the 2020 coup attempt, the blatant Supreme Court corruption, or the billionaire who's just been installed in the DOGE (not sure i am praying for it to be ineffective but i guess that might be better than the alternative)
"My understanding (which I will have to read up on later) was that the Nazis rose to power on tremendous popular support"
I wouldn't call it "tremendous." The NSDAP never won a majority in any Weimar election, with 37% of the vote at best, and 33% in the election that ultimately led to them seizing power. The share that they did get was enough to allow them to maneuver their way into power, but it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expression of the will of German voters. I think they may have gotten more popular during the early portion of their rule (with the German economy improving), but one must take that with a grain of salt given the nature of totalitarian regimes and popular dissent.
I think if this is the best they can come up with, then it reinforces my view.
On some level it's hard to really argue about - it would be like if someone insisted that a clip of someone smiling wasn't really them smiling and then you had to argue about what a smile looks like - "well the lips are curled up and the teeth exposed the muscles around the eyes are tightened in such and such manner" - I guess I could try to argue this but tbh it's just obvious, and I think that if instead of Elon Musk and Tim Walz at political rallies it was two random people nobody would confuse this.
When I first heard the story about Musk, I thought "probably another awkward out of context screenshot or super short clip", I was pretty surprised about how explicit it was.
This is a Shiri's Scissors gesture. Those who want to believe it is a deliberate, knowing Nazi salute won't be argued out of it. Those of us who think it was an awkward "my heart goes out to you" salute also won't be talked into changing our minds that "see, see? I told you Drumpfler was a Nazi!"
Could be. Curious that his gesture for that is identical to Sieg Heil. And curious that he did the same gesture (even more convincingly) a few minutes later.
1. He's awkward and excited and did it without realising how it would look in a one-second gif
2. He's deliberately trolling us all once again
Neither would particularly surprise me, but looking at the preceding minute of footage in which he makes many awkward-looking hand gestures I'm inclined towards (1).
Actually I think he must have been getting a whole lot of public speaking coaching recently to try to become a more engaging speaker. If you watch old videos of him speaking (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDUNnfXvzcg ) he just stands still looking awkward and saying "umm" a lot. In today's speech he's gesturing like an Italian game show host.
If you use the Nazi salute "as a troll," you are still doing a Nazi salute. If people get mad at you for doing a Nazi salute, and your defense is "hahaha, look at all these people getting mad that I did a Nazi salute in front of the White House," you get no sympathy. You're not being clever, you're not doing some sort of court jester thing where you provoke an unreasonable reaction, you're just doing a bad thing and drawing the expected response for the bad thing.
One of these days Trump is literally going to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and everyone on the right will be like "dude, he was just doing it to piss off the libs, don't take it so seriously."
Those are still images though. It’s not really a fair comparison. I haven’t seen the video in question so I don’t have an axe to grind about it, but as a photographer, I know you can get someone doing any stupid thing in one quick shot.
If you're proposing that it was "deliberately trolling" - meaning that it was a real Nazi salute, just not given for Nazi reasons - then posting pictures that show how a gesture that's not a Nazi salute could be mistaken for one isn't a defense of that claim.
Option 1 in your original post is defensible, option 2 is not.
Edit: Also, since your source is libsoftiktok I can probably safely assume that those photos are taken out of context and if you looked at the video they would not look remotely as sig-heil-y as Elon's.
"I havnt listened to the speech(nor will I probably) but Id expect it to have some eloerbate political word play"
Not really. Here's my transcript of the relevant clip that is being played (and shown in still shots, to address what others have said above about the still shots of Harris etc. giving 'Nazi salutes'):
“Elections that come and go – some elections are important, some are not. But this one (laughter) this one really mattered.
And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you. (Slaps hand onto chest over heart, does the ‘Nazi salute’. Turns to audience behind him, repeats gesture).
(Turns back to podium, puts hand on heart again). My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured.”
Trump has rescinded the Biden administration's AI risk executive order. This was widely predicted but there was a question of whether it would be modified or completely eliminated. It looks like completely eliminated.
Has anybody else noticed that a large percentage of political disagreements in the left vs right culture wars of the last many years effectively boils down to the "we need to protect them, favor them, support them vs. that's patronizing, they're strong and proud and can take care of themselves" axis? Not sure if there's a memeable version of this, maybe "paternalism vs individualism"? Victim mentality vs survivor mentality? Collectivism vs individualism? Protection vs rising to the challenge.
e.g. women in the workplace. For years we were told to adjust language in our job postings and job descriptions because words too aggressive were going to be a big turnoff and scare off women who want a more soft and nurturing environment. We're not aggressive, we're not intense, we don't have war rooms. We're inclusive, we're nurturing, we're supportive, we're all about letting all voices be heard. On the other side people would claim to be offended by that notion, saying that it was patronizing and that women were perfectly capable of fending off for themselves and didn't need to be treated with kid gloves. Women could lean in, keep up with the boys, rise to the top playing the same game everybody else was. They didn't need special treatment.
e.g. One side finds "woman engineer" to be empowering, we're finally part of the club now, the other says "I'm just an engineer, I don't need that ridiculous label, I can do the job as well as anybody else regardless of my sex".
e.g. Minorities, same thing. One side says we need equity, we need special treatment for groups x y z, they're special and need to be protected and nurtured. At the same time many members of x y z find that notion patronizing and condescending, claiming to be doing just fine and not needing favoritism.
This feels like an ultimately irresolvable tension. It feels parallel in some sense to the masculine vs feminine tension. Maybe this is just how society has always been and will always be. Curious what others things.
I’ve heard this framework before, and it tends to have popularity on the right as a narrative about itself- “we aren’t motivated by animus towards minority communities, it’s just that the left wants to subject those communities to paternalistic care while we recognize the strength of those communities and want to foster their independence and autonomy rather than weaken them by keeping them perpetually dependent on aid.”
However, that narrative rapidly breaks down when you compare their reaction when white working class communities are the ones in distress. The conservative coalition is large, and there’s no shortage of people who will argue that struggling white communities should *also* be told to pound sand/pull their own bootstraps, but there’s also no shortage of people in the right’s tent who suddenly view aid very differently when it’s for a white rust belt factory town or Appalachian coal mining community struggling, rather than a black-and-Latino-heavy inner city area, or people for whom the crack epidemic gets very different treatment than white communities suffering opioid “deaths of despair,” etc.
The truth is that the right coalition contains both the libertarian strains that treat all these programs as the same kind of problematic, *and* the folk socialists whose discomfort/comfort with aid programs is mainly determined by the color of the beneficiaries thereof. But the latter are more embarrassing so the autonomy narrative gets all the airtime.
Most people don't care about logic; they care about vibes.
"Women are just as capable as men at everything, there are no differences between the sexes" has a pro-women vibe. "Women need to be carefully protected from microaggressions and inappropriate jokes" also has a pro-women vibe. For most people, that is enough; from their perspective, that makes it practically the same thing.
It's only a few nerds scratching their heads and wondering how exactly can you put "equality" and "ladies first" into a coherent framework.
the alt right (endonym du jour is "dissident right") loves to reference Bronze Age Pervert's concept of "The Longhouse". Which is this nebulous idea that the West is currently a matriarchal society where feminine, egalitarian values like "PROTECC MINORITIES; BELIEVE WAMEN (or else)" are enforced via HR departments, ESG scores, etc.
Idk if I totally agree with this. And I can't speak to the historicity of the reference to the Bronze Age. But... it seems relevant.
Where did he get this notion of the longhouse? My very fuzzy impression (from reading a book about Borneo decades back) was that longhouses were either sex-separated (so men had their own longhouse) or that it was for all the village/tribe (so not a matriarchal institution).
Mind you, I don't trust BAP on anything historical, sociological, or anthropological, so if it turns out he pulled it out of his backside I wouldn't be surprised.
Okay, read the bit at the link and that is stupidity on stilts. Guy just invented this notion.
It's not about Borneo. I think it's a reference to the longhouses of the Indo Europeans.
Allegedly, he graduated Harvard with a degree in history (or anthropology?). So he has the credentials, at the very least. He wrote a dissertation about BronzeAge IndoEuropeans conquering Greece. Then later, turned it into a (wildly offensive) novel, written in caveman-speak.
I'm not in a position to explain it charitably, since I don't really grok the appeal.
The disagreement as you framed it is between two camps of egalitarians. The rising right is not egalitarian. They take it for granted that groups are different, that some will naturally fall behind, and that there's nothing wrong with this.
I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of the division.
I think that concern for subaltern groups, of either the "we need to protect them, favor them, support them" and "that's patronizing, they're strong and proud and can take care of themselves", is a left-wing position, and that the debate you characterise has largely been an intra-left one, while the main right-wing position has generally been "fuck subaltern groups", framed in a variety of ways of varying honest.
That sounds more like the 4chan position. I don't think you have met enough non-selected right wing people to make generalizations. (By "non-selected" I mean people you just meet in everyday life and later find out their political positions, and the more moderate they are the longer this tends to take.)
I’m honestly curious whether you meant “fuck subaltern groups” as “fuck the stupid idea of subaltern groups; we’re all equal Americans” or “subaltern groups deserve to get fucked”. I suppose if I searched for other posts by you I could figure out where you’re coming from, but as written I couldn’t tell.
If by "we should fuck" you mean "we should not allow to enter our country illegally", I agree. But I have a sneaking suspicion that's not what you mean.
"Greenland and Panama, unrestrained carbon emissions, and breaking down the international trade system. You have the world’s richest and most dominant country openly trying to extort, extract wealth from, and suppress the development of poorer groups.
And yeah, immigration restrictions too."
These are all exaggerations of what is actually happening, and the motivation for those things is not to fuck foreigners, but either greed for the first ones or 'fear of foreigners economically/culturally/criminally' for the immigration restrictions.
Your view of your outgroup seems to be that they are just evil and get off on hurting people, which is just not true.
EDIT: I just found that Trump 'won't rule out force' for taking Greenland, so I was wrong that you were exaggerating about that.
Scott kind of wrote on this a long while back, with his post on "Thrive" vs "Survive" politics. Thrivers want everybody to be taken care of, and why not? We have enough resources to do it. Survivors don't have time or resources to waste on mollycoddling, everyone needs to pull their weight.
It does seem odd, and yet I think it is happening nevertheless.
I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the people most likely to vote for Trump for economic reasons were NOT the poorest demographics, but rather the fairly successful portion of the middle class that felt the most precarious in their success.[1] This feels right, and somewhat matches my own personal observations. People today are unimaginably richer than a bronze age farmer, but they don't have the experience of being a bronze age farmer to compare to. They *do* have their own experiences (and at a more distant remove, those of their friends and family) and those are what seem the most real and immediate. Losing a large chunk of their wealth and security would be fundamentally distressing to them, even if they were left with more wealth and security than most humans ever knew.
[1] To be clear, I think this is a very stupid reaction to that sort of anxiety, but I still understand the anxiety itself.
Both "thrive" and "survive" are premised on scarcity in the economic sense; it's equally odd to expend resources on people who are too rich to need taking care of.
The places that seem to devote the most resources to help the 'poor,' which are also the richest places in the US, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, seem to be completely ineffective at helping said 'poor,' and also make life worse for the actual poor and working classes in the process, and seem to be burning through 'what our grandparents worked hard to give us and driving our society into the gutter,' as FLWAB says below.
Now, these days the Thriver position is "all our streets are going to be owned by street people, and we must let them commit assault and, sell/use drugs, or be psychotic and act in dangerous ways because to stop them is problematic" and so I would take the political choice that is opposite to that whatever happens to be available. Because obviously the Thrive position isn't helping 'poor' people at all, and is in fact hurting them very badly (while making life worse generally in a thousand very real ways for everyone else), because Thrivers can't admit certain things about human nature.
That Thriver position feels like yet another iteration of the "great idea, wrong species" utopian world view. If only reality would already bend itself to all of the great intentions those folks have, instead of constantly getting in the way.
There are two meanings of "doesn't work". For the homeless, it means that they are left on the streets... which may be okay if it is only a tiny fraction of a population with very weird preferences. But for everyone else, it also means assaults, drugs, etc., and having fewer of that seems like a mainstream preference.
"Anyway the idea that we can afford to be more generous is entirely consistent with the idea that we should try to be generous in a way that actually helps people."
That is true, and if you had people like Matt Yglesias in charge then that would be possible. Instead, you can't help mentally ill street people because of the reasons that Freddie DeBoer outlines, that involuntary commitment is off the table. You can't get drug addicts and dealers off the street because of disparate racial impacts and because it is mean to kick people off the street and racist to use police to do anything. You can't build more housing, or build windowless flophouses, because of community consultation, anti-developer sentiment, and regulations to provide minimum standards that the poorest can't afford.
All of this means that the working, responsible poor have to live in neighborhoods with crazy people and tents everywhere, and middle class and above people can't enjoy nice, once thriving cities, and people have to compete in a zero sum game to bid up house prices in the areas that actually keep people off the street.
Spoken like a Thriver! Survival is not about relative wealth. Yes, we're richer than anyone in history, but we're still not rich enough that we can stop working. Virtue, skill, and grit still matter. If you do what is right, and work hard, keep your nose clean, settle down, raise some kids, keep your promises, then you can enjoy the fruits of your labors here in the greatest and wealthiest society ever known: but if you don't you can still fall down into the Hell of drug addiction, criminality, single motherhood, living off the dole, obesity, childlessness, etc.
The Survive mindset is knowing that all our wealth was built by hard work, virtue, and grit and is maintained by hard work, virtue, and grit. We are quite capable of squandering what our grandparents worked hard to give us and driving our society into the gutter. Things fall apart unless they're kept together. That's the Survive mindset!
"And you have to affirmatively do bad things to become a criminal, drug addict, or single impoverished mom. "
False, false and false. Wrongful convictions certainly happen, no matter how much we like to pretend they don't. Kids get drugs pushed on them by parents or older siblings and get addicted before they have the agency and independence to refuse. Women get pregnant through rape, or have co-parents die, leave or turn abusive. These may not be central or typical members of these groups, but they certainly exist[1]. And conspicuously missing from your list are categories like "orphan," "homeless teenager" which would be inconvenient to acknowledge. This position is just the Just World Fallacy, which is (as the name suggests) a fallacy. Of course, nobody's perfect, so the determined can always find *something* blameworthy that a person in dire straights has done.
"An American with no skills, grit, or virtue can still get some basic job paying $50k and live a modest but comfortable life."
OK, wow, "can" is doing quite a lot of work here. A quick check tells me that the median income for Americans working full time is $60K. That's going to include all the people who DO have special skills--doctors, lawyers, engineers, plumbers, electricians, etc--all the older people who have accumulated decades of promotions and raises and so on. And of course it is NOT going to include those people who are looking for full-time work but can't find it. Likewise, my own personal experience is that the only under-40 people I know earning $50 or more are those with with specialized and valuable skill sets, and I certainly never saw low-qualification jobs posted at $24/hr during any of the periods when I was looking for work. I suspect that the supply of such jobs is much, MUCH smaller than you seem to think. This is very much a "it's one banana Michael, what could it cost, $10?" vibe.
[1] And even many of the central and typical members will have had significant external factors pushing them in the direction of doing "affirmatively bad things," even if those factors are less inarguably decisive.
Too much to say, so I’ll just say: I disagree vehemently with every single sentence you have written here. Which is why I like the Thrive Survive continuum, as it does seem to capture or at least gesture at a real psychological divide.
I wonder, how much of the complaints about "Nice Guys TM" is simply different people having different ways of falling in love.
I imagine that some people fall in love instantly, at the first sight. And for some other people, emotional connection is an important part of developing attraction; and that connection requires them to first spend some time together.
And I imagine that the former view the latter as *dishonest*. Someone who moves very quickly from zero to one, probably expects everyone else to be the same; so when they hear someone saying "at first, we were just friends... but later I realized I was in love", they are like "no way, I am sure that you were attracted from the start, but you didn't tell her, because you were afraid of rejection... instead you pretended to be a friend, so that you could later use the threat of withdrawing the friendship as a leverage".
So we ended up in a situation where being attracted to things besides the body is called out as a shameful behavior.
Similarly, it is interesting to see the pushback against "sapiosexuality". Even Wikipedia mentions that critics call it "elitist", "discriminatory", and "pretentious". (For some reason, other sexual preferences do not get a criticism section on Wikipedia, although I am sure that many of them have their own critics, too.) See e.g. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pretentious-is-not-a-sexual-orientation/ And yet, uhm, I also happen to find smart people more attractive than dumb ones; sue me. And I don't think this is a rare thing. But apparently, not finding dumb people hot is a form of ableism, therefore something you should never mention in a company of decent people.
It's tricky. If you are open to cross-gender friendships, there's plenty of opportunity for attraction to blossom, wax, wane, etc, throughout the life of the relationship and I think that's pretty healthy and normal. I've been a part of a mixed-gender circle of friends since high school, which included one I eventually dated, another I had a crush on at various points but never dated, and others who never moved the needle for me one way or another.
But that same mixed circle also has given me a bit of a window into the other side of the looking glass, and the "Nice Guy TM" as described by women doesn't really align with "a guy who is your friend and later catches feelings for you because his attraction just develops slowly in a social context rather than spontaneously at first sight," so much as it's defined as "a guy who (a) has feelings for you from the very beginning, but (b) whose dating strategy, rather than simply trying to date you, is to be constantly overly protective/nurturing/deferential/involved in your business or whatever, but in a 'nice,' defensible, and always deniable kind of way - the kind of way that never exposes him to being rejected in the way just asking someone out on a date would."
Assuming she sees what's going on (and she usually does), this puts her on the horns of an awkward dilemma. On the one hand, it feels presumptuous and mean-spirited to respond to this behavior by taking the initiative to say something like 'I know you haven't said anything, but I can tell by your constant insistence on buying my drinks and walking me home that you're attracted to me, and I need to just tell you right now that I don't want that kind of relationship with you so stop doing that.' But she can be accused of also 'leading him on' or 'taking advantage of him' if she just does nothing and hopes the behavior goes away on its own. His insistence on being indirect and deniable puts her in a position where she's the villain for any response other than reciprocating, which obviously isn't a fun place to be. Sometimes it's just a 1x1 relationship where she can sort of quietly exit by not inviting him to events or doing stuff with him, but that gets much harder when he's a member of her social circle.
So although I think there may be some overlap with different kinds of attraction, Nice Guy strikes me mainly as a definition for a particular *strategy for coupling* rather than a definition for a particular *way of falling in love*. Specifically, it would refer to a dating strategy defined by fear of vulnerability manifesting as extreme indirectness and commitment to constant deniability in romantic approach.
"My guy friend caught feelings for me and asked me out on a date and I had to say no" is an awkward interlude that could end a friendship but it could just as easily be moved past, and it's not "Nice Guy TM" behavior.
"My guy friend had feelings for me for 4 years but never said anything about it, he just trashed my boyfriends and constantly catered to me in a way that was sometimes awkward but I didn't know how to tell him to stop when he was so insistent about picking me up from the airport and cooking me a special birthday meal, then he tried to kiss me and got really mad when I told him I don't think of him like that" is "Nice Guy TM" behavior.
This seems to be to be quite different to what people generally refer to when they talk about Nice Guys. Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding and blame women for preferring "bad boys", whereas you seem to be referring to male friends of women who are secretly in love with them. There's probably significant overlap but they are different imo.
> Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding and blame women for preferring "bad boys"
That may have been true when the term originated, like, two decades ago, but nowadays it's almost exclusively used to describe men (/man-children) who seem to believe that being "polite"/"nice" to women entitles them to women's attention and/or sex, and then immediately turn heel and call women sluts when that doesn't work. At best they become petulant, and there are many worse cases. It's rarely applied to actually nice men who continue to be genuinely nice - the linguistic treadmill now has moved on to calling them "white knights", or just "simps".
(That said, the actual problem isn't so much that women are attracted to "bad boys" as it is that (*most*) women naturally fall on the subby side of the Dom/sub divide, and are attracted to dominance/assertiveness/confidence, which is mostly orthogonal to being "nice")
>>(That said, the actual problem isn't so much that women are attracted to "bad boys" as it is that (*most*) women naturally fall on the subby side of the Dom/sub divide, and are attracted to dominance/assertiveness/confidence, which is mostly orthogonal to being "nice")
I think there's some truth to that, but it's also skewed by the blurred impression the raw numbers can create. A "bad boy" may have many flaws, but he's direct in his approach. A "nice guy" in the internet sense is pathologically committed to being indirect, beating around the bush, and limiting his exposure to a clear rejection. As a result, by the time a man employing the "nice guy" method finally gets to his answer from one potential mate, a "bad boy" may have directly approached dozens of women, been rejected by 95% of them, slept with two, and entered into a short-term but toxic relationship with another. The "nice guy" isn't tracking the "bad boy's" misses, though, so he just sees "WTH that jerk had three partners in just 6 months and I've been on a total dry spell! Why do women only go for jerks?"
The key is to learn to be a nice (in the sense of being kind, empathetic, socially intelligent, or what have you) person while nevertheless being direct.
This is all a very good point. I was basing my theory on the girls I knew and know that actively fantasized about "bad boys", but those are probably dwarfed by the effect you describe in actual practice.
> Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding
This heavily depends upon your definition of "morally upstanding"; most of the people talking about/using the term "Nice Guys" would not view these people as "fairly morally upstanding" given that the "nice guys" being described tend to have very regressive/sexist attitudes towards women and how they should act.
These days, it's probably almost easier to simply describe it as "liberal women don't want to date conservative guys, because they think being conservative in and of itself is actively evil/harmful/etc; conservative guys think this is unfair, in part because there are fewer conservative women".
I 100% agree. I think Nice Guys can be broken up into a wide variety of different patterns of behavior. One of them is basically what you describe; a kind of demisexuality or need for a long courtship where people fall in love with people they've spent a lot of time with. But if a person like this doesn't take 'no' for an answer and hopes that someone will gradually fall in love with them as well in what is a presumed to be friendly relationship then this is a potentially dysfunctional pattern. Practically speaking, people who need long courtships are best served by finding ways to have long courtships. Talk online for a while. Talk with someone out of state. Don't emotionally commit too much before the other person does, in the hopes that ardent love will win over a one-sided relationship. And most importantly, be willing to take 'no' for an answer.
It's not a need that should be pathologized as it is, but it does need to be managed by the person who has it, since they will tend to be interested in people who have different patterns of expectations.
Similarly, I'd also (quietly) identify as 'sapiosexual' or 'sapioromantic.' The mental part of a relationship is a critical component for me. But practically speaking, I'm not sure publicly identifying as sapiosexual really *serves* anyone. If someone is mentally stimulating, you'll find that out through dating. Saying that you are sapiosexual is unlikely to attract more intelligent people, just like saying out loud that you like beautiful people is unlikely to help you find people who are more attractive. It's possible to filter quietly and indirectly for some needs just as easily as it is to filter loudly.
It is definitely bad if someone doesn't take "no" for an answer.
That said, there is a difference (for some people) between "no, never" and "not yet, maybe". The former means that the other person should give up. The latter means that the future is uncertain... it could become a "yes" one day, or it could become a "no", or it could even stay undecided forever.
Navigating that uncertainty is difficult. If you give up too soon, maybe you just had to wait a little longer. But if you keep waiting, maybe it ends up with "no" a few years later, and you just wasted a lot of time. (No one owes you a "yes", no matter how long you have waited for them to decide.) So I guess the best strategy is to stay in contact, but explore your other options in the meanwhile. Some people may find this emotionally difficult, but that's their problem; there is no better solution that wouldn't come at someone else's cost.
Seems to me that there are some inefficiencies in communication, caused by each side trying to minimize their risks. On the side of the undecided person (stereotypically a woman), there is a risk that truthfully answering "not yet, maybe" may be misinterpreted as "yes, but I want you to keep it slow" by the other side. So the safe answer in such situation is to give a clear "no", even if you originally didn't feel that way. Now on the side of the suitor (stereotypically a man), the safe approach is to keep it slow, to avoid accidentally forcing this kind of "no" by asking too soon. Ideally, the waiting should not be completely passive, but rather a continuous exchange of gradually increasing signals of interest.
From the perspective of someone who knows the clear "yes" or "no" from the first sight, this probably seems completely idiotic, and the optimal protocol for them could be thousand times more efficient. ("Wanna have sex? Your place or mine?")
What makes it complicated is that the society contains both kinds of people (those could even be the same people at a different stage of their lives), mostly not understanding each other, with bad actors in each group, etc. And the memes proclaiming that everyone whose ways are different from mine is a bad person.
> practically speaking, I'm not sure publicly identifying as sapiosexual really *serves* anyone.
Yeah, it's not like if you declare yourself a sapiosexual, smart people who previously didn't notice you suddenly start paying attention. (Also, even if that worked, it wouldn't attract smart people, but rather people who identify as smart, which is not the same.)
But I think it could serve the society as a whole, as an antidote against the "men do not find intelligent women attractive" meme, which is popular, and in my opinion harmful.
I wouldn't mind a norm of simply not speaking about intelligence vs dating. But that is not the situation we have now. Instead, "it is known" that women can increase their dating success by acting dumb. Which... on one hand, maybe yes, I don't really know; it might be a good strategy if all you want is to get laid... but on the other hand, it seems like an efficient way for a smart woman to find exactly the kind of partner who will later hate her for being intelligent. (Maybe it is that kind of advice that women love to give their friends/competitors to undermine them? "Act dumb, get a big tattoo, and cut your hair short. Trust me, you will be popular, girl!") So I would like to see some more pushback against that.
Things happen; I am not sure which of them should be called "love".
I could definitely get *sexually attracted* to someone at first sight. (Is this love already?) I might decide to actually do something about that, and then I would feel the *excitement of adventure*. (Is this love already?) I could also imagine that person to be smart and curious and nice... at that moment, based on almost zero data, mostly on my wishful thinking and halo effect... and by sheer coincidence I might even be correct. (Is this love already?) I might become obsessed with that person. (Is this love already?) Those things could all happen at first sight, and yeah, that has actually happened to me a few times.
Then there is a moment when I *know*, based on personal experience, that the person actually *is* smart and curious and nice. Maybe not as much as I imagined before I knew them, because reality often cannot compete with fantasy; but perhaps still a lot. When I know that the feelings are mutual, and that we can trust each other and be open with each other. A rationalist might call it becoming a part of each other's utility function. (Is this love already?) These things take some time, so they cannot happen at first sight.
tl;dr -- things can happen at first sight, not sure whether to call them "love"
I was quoting the Beatles there. As it happens Ringo (I think he wrote that) was being very wise in his response. It wasn’t “sure, it happens all the time”, not “it’s definitely happened to me”.
Love at first sight has to be mutual I think, for the phrase to make any sense.
> Similarly, it is interesting to see the pushback against "sapiosexuality".
At least in my own experience, "sapiosexuality" gets a bad rep because it's pretty much exclusively used by the most basic, doesn't-read, doesn't-think, degree-in-underwater-basket-weaving, 7-hours-of-phone-screentime-per-day, types of women.
It's become an anti-shibboleth for what it's theoretically supposed to represent affinity for. But you know, maybe I'm the crazy one.
100%. I noticed that "I really crave deep conversations" seems to mostly come from milquetoast NPC types that never seem to have a single interesting thought to share.
It reminds me of how the people who sound the most excited about the gym on their profiles are also the ones who need it the most and seem to have discovered it recently, while all of the life-long gym rats chicken breasts & rice types don't even mention it because it's just the life they live every day.
Last open thread there was the assertion that the term woke was only used by the right now and not the left. I will note that I received in my social media feed yesterday usage of woke in an advertisement designed to appeal to anti-Trump people
"Get Woke. Embrace Hope. Resist! Free New Rise & Shine $44.95 Box with $50 Gift Card!
Hang in there.
As cooks, we care. We especially care about those in need. And it’s not just that we care, it’s like we feel the hurt of those who are hurting. I think that is why this Monday is weighing so heavily on so many of us.
The thought of so many good and decent people being hurt for nothing more than the enjoyment of Donald Trump and his followers can seem so very-very hopeless. And it’s not hopeless, not by any means, but somehow in this moment it sure feels that way." ....
After a few more anti Trump paragraphs we get to the items for sale including
"We also have the brand new $23.95 Woke Gift Boxes free with each $30 Gift Card sold. These little boxes are fun and we need fun to get through these coming years. I Got Woke, now I’m hungry for Justice and so much more!"
Another recent use of woke I on the left I note that there was controversy last year over a $250,000 contract to improve elementary school education going to an organization called Woke Kindergarten.
For the newspaper article
"The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
Good God. Commercialism really does eat everything. It's a spice company, and I'm unsure whether they really are True Believers or if they would happily produce the MAGA Spicy Set as well. And which is worse - the True Believers committing simony by using principles to huckster a box set of spices, or blatant "we don't care a straw for principles, money has no smell".
I think I prefer the Diocletian approach, to be honest. I get queasy and angry at people trying to sell holy water or Lourdes water online, and it would be even worse if they were doing it out of "I genuinely believe this will cause a miracle to happen".
"Now, for a host of reasons, I think the time has come to admit what we are actually up to and come right out and say it. So here goes. We are trying to make the world a better place. And with your help there are days where we actually seem to be doing that. Our goal now is to have more of those days."
And in order to do that, we'll take advantage of people feeling goddamn suicidal over the election result to shill our spice blends to them. Hey, if they're gonna off themselves, they can't take the money with them now can they, so may as well give it to us!
"Remember when your distrust of big city types, and your deep rooted beliefs in paying your debts, respecting your marriage, raising kids willing to serve, honoring your word, and going to church every week had you voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden all because Biden’s son had a computer? Or how you couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was over-prepared and used emails? I know that to you your actions seem rational and in keeping with your values, but when it comes to voting you are now consistently voting in people who are the exact opposite of you and the values you hold dear."
Yeah, sure: it was because Hunter owned a computer. That there teck-noll-gee, we conservatards don't trust none of that unnatural devices! She used eee-males? Ritin' a letter with pen and paper was good enough for Grampaw, we reckon! Don't need no fancy eee-males!
"CONTAINS: 1/4-Cup jars of Transgender Remember Vanilla Sugar, Outrage, Justice, and Florida Seasoned Pepper"
Oh well, clearly I can't avail of this wonderful bargain because alas, I'm cishet and not transgender, so using that Vanilla Sugar would be appropriating someone else's culture and that is Not Woke 😀
Some of it is probably just recuperation, kind of like some rightwingers did with, say, "deplorable" after that whole hubbub (so you had Deploraball and so on).
I agree that the term came originally from AAVE. But 'woke' seems to have become much more of an identifier of ideological tribes after it was appropriated from AAVE.
When the organization is using the term in its name, "Woke Kindergarten" and in the curriculum, "woke word of the day" It's not a strawman when opponent use the term "woke" when objecting to the curriculum including “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
I'd say using "woke" to refer to that is probably just a factual statement, along the lines of the original usage. The right wing usage is more often about any government or corporate policy that protects minorities, or even other left-wing projects like building renewable energy generation.
If they're reduced to playing dead, maybe now is the time for us to take the W and be happy. We can still keep one eye open in case they try to get up to their old tricks again.
> A local lake’s name was changed from Calhoun to Bde Mka Ska
I've definitely noticed a recent trend towards making "Indigenous" place names as awkward and annoying as possible to say or write, as a display of power by the renamers.
Gone are the days of shit like "Uluru" which is at least easy to pronounce and sounds good. The new name of Mount Wellington in Tasmania is "kunanyi / Mount Wellington". Not Mout Kunanyi, not even Kunanyi, but kunyanyi. Spelled with a lower case "k" because fuck you, we've decided this one fucking mountain is an exception to all existing English grammar.
Bde Mka Ska sounds like a fantastic example of the same thing.
There's nothing wrong with the pronunciation, it's the spelling that's a problem.
The Dakota had no written language, so someone must have gone and transliterated a perfectly good Dakota word into the English alphabet in a way that isn't consistent with anything sensible.
If someone is good at history, perhaps you can help me understand: What happened with aristocracy at the end of feudalism?
I mean, there was a moment of time when people owned land, and that was the official source of their power. But ownership of land didn't disappear, and a Georgist might say that even today owning a lot of land makes you a kind of aristocrat; we just don't look there, because we prefer to discuss capital.
So what happened to the former aristocrats? I can imagine a few scenarios:
* they got killed;
* they survived, but their land was taken away;
* they sold the land trying to join the new capitalist economy, but they sucked at the new economy, so they lost the land and the money;
* they kept the land, but it was at an unimportant place, and the rent was too low to allow them to live comfortably;
* they kept the land, got enough rent to let them and their descendants live comfortably.
I can imagine that each of these scenarios actually happened to someone. My question is, can anyone estimate the probabilities? Probably depends on history of the specific country. I guess I am ultimately curious how much of continuity is between the land owners back then, and the land owners today.
It depends on the country. In some places like England and Spain, they're basically still around and still rich and influential. In some countries like France, lots of them got killed and a lot of the rest were impoverished, they might still be a cultural group but they don't have more influence than anyone else. Many other countries are kind of in-between.
Also, being an aristocrat isn't really synonymous to owning land. Plenty of aristocrats didn't have much in the way of land holdings, and plenty of land was owned by non-aristocrats, most notably the church.
1. New wealth crowded out old wealth in relative terms. Feudal estates become a much smaller percentage of society's wealth without any particular estate necessarily reducing in value in absolute terms
2. Being descended from people who were good at feudalism correlates less than perfectly with being good at capitalism. A lot of landed aristocrats found themselves spending more than their incomes and needing to sell off land to meet expenses. C.f. entire genres of British fiction about cash-poor 19th and 20th century aristocrats.
3. A lot of countries to varying extents either expropriated the estates outright or used a combination of land taxes and inheritance taxes to redistribute wealth away from landed aristocrats.
4. Depending on the country, a lot of the aristocrats still own large estates. Some aristocratic families did turn out to be good enough at capitalism to pay the taxes and maintain or grow their estates, or were at least politically powerful enough (especially in the case of members of the extended royal family) to retain enough privileges and special tax status to make up any shortcomings in their skills in wealth management. An awful lot of English land, both urban and rural, is still owned at least partially by aristocratic estates. The ones tied to the monarch and his heir (the Crown Estates, the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Duchy of Cornwall) are by far the biggest, but they are far from the only ones.
> An awful lot of English land, both urban and rural, is still owned at least partially by aristocratic estates.
> Some aristocratic families did turn out to be good enough at capitalism to pay the taxes and maintain or grow their estates
Note that this wasn't possible in England with its 80% inheritance taxes. The aristocratic families that retained their estates did so by converting them into public-access museums.
I expect the impact of the inheritance taxes would have varied quite a bit depending on how lucky the family in question got in terms of how often their heads of family died and when. It looks like there was about a 40 year window (1946 through 1986) when the tax was 80-ish percent. Before and during WW1, taxes were 20% or less, and were 40-65% for the interwar years through WW2, and it looks like the top rate got cut to 60-ish% in 1986 and to 40% at some point I can't find after that.
Assuming 30-year generations, these are the real rates of growth you'd need to maintain an estate despite the inheritance tax at various rates:
80% - 5.5%
60% - 3.1%
40% - 1.7%
20% - 0.7%
With unluckier 15-year generations:
80% - 11.3%
60% - 6.3%
40% - 3.5%
20% - 1.5%
A 5.5% real growth rate would take a bit of luck as well as prudent investment (and management of existing landholding), especially considering that they no doubt want/need to spend some of their income on their lifestyle, not just reinvest everything, but isn't completely out of the question. A 1-3% real growth rate seems much more achievable.
But a sustained 11.3% (or higher) real growth rate is ridiculously high, high enough that I would be surprised if any large estates survived being inherited three or more times during 1946-1986.
Those who did manage to avoid the worst of the post-war inheritance laws usually converted the urban estates into entities held in trust, or into regular companies with outside investment etc.
The ones that didn't end up on the wrong side of a revolution (such as in Britain) are often still around and sometimes still reasonably wealthy, but they had any special privileges beyond title eroded away by politics and got eclipsed in wealth by folks in business (and the ones that are still wealthy aren't wealthy typically because they're landowners anymore).
In the early modern period, a lot of aristocrats essentially eroded away their fortunes with the high costs of living and debts. Performing aristocracy was expensive, and they had a whole bunch of vices as well like gambling, etc. The funny thing is that sometimes they had an estate that was "entailed" - essentially in a legal trust state so that it couldn't be sold or borrowed against - so you'd end up with aristocrats who were basically broke in terms of cash but still owned an increasingly decrepit mansion house or castle and immediate grounds around it.
That itself was a reflection of the shift into the modern era, with land increasingly treated as property that could be readily sold and borrowed against. Typically land was not something you could sell in medieval Europe, and it came with a bunch of rights and obligations - you could pledge incomes against the land and its products to borrow money, but not the land itself.
Usually mostly the third one. In many countries (especially Russia) the nobility were almost notoriously financially irresponsible and commoners gradually bought them out. In northern Germany (Prussia) the aristocrats were actually unusually capable at administering their estates profitably, and as a result remained unusually influential even well into the 20th century (which many historians say greatly influenced modern German history), and many of Germany’s early industrialists were Prussian aristocrats (many of Germany’s biggest companies even today are still owned by the same old noble families), but I think they were exceptional and even there most aristocrats have gradually assimilated in the last few generations and become fairly regular (still wealthier than average) people, and most of the super rich people by now are no longer descendants of nobles.
This is probably not quite the answer you wanted, but you may find it relevant.
Feudalism as a structure works in societies that lack large scale military organization (like you saw in ancient Rome or in the Persian or Chinese Empires), but are at a technology level where a small number of well trained and equipped men can militarily control large numbers of unskilled and cheaply equipped men. In big empires that can raise up armies of a hundred thousand men and train then decently, you don't get as much feudalism. But if you and your opponent's armies are primarily made up of a few thousand poorly equipped peasants then the army that's most likely to win is the one with the most actual trained warriors: in other words, knights.
European feudalism was a political machine that maximizes the number of knights you can bring to a battle. The minimum you need to be a knight is to have enough financial security that you aren't malnourished, can spend a significant amount of time training for combat, and can afford expensive weapons, armor, and warhorses. So at the bottom of feudal society you have knights as the smallest landowners, each with about enough land that they can meet that minimum threshold. They get that land from larger landowners, and in exchange that larger landowner gets their military service: so now the local baron has 20 knights he can call upon to fight for him, which is better than having 2,000 serfs who can fight for him. The baron got his land from the Count via the same deal, the Count got his from the Duke, the Duke got his from the King, and at the top of the structure you ideally have a King who can summon several thousand knights to suppress rebellions and fight with the other kings. It's a pretty stable system.
However, that system no longer works at all when you don't need trained elite warriors to win battles anymore, and that's what happened with the widespread adoption of the gun. A peasant with a bow and arrow or a spear is little match against a trained, mounted, and armored knight: a peasant with a gun has a good shot at killing him. It doesn't take too long to train a peasant to be decent at using a gun either, just a few months. Suddenly knights and samurai find themselves facing armies of thousands of peasants each armed with a weapon that can easily kill them.
Once guns became widespread enough that you could equip thousands of peasants with them, the whole reason for an aristocracy evaporated. Before the King needed his Counts and Dukes and whatnot to fight: and to bring their knights. Now the King just needs people, lots of people, and the money to feed and equip them. The aristocracy no longer serves a point, and from about the 1600s onward the aristocracy slowly disintegrated from the ground up.
First went the knights and the smaller nobility. The Counts and Dukes of the world at least had lots of land producing lots of money, and the more money you have the more peasants you can equip and conscript, but the little guys didn't have the funds to raise an army of their own and were no longer needed by the higher ups to fight in wars. Most of them either became the gentry and focused on farming and trying to make a profit as an agricultural landlord, or they tried to go into business and either succeeded or lost their shirts. As small nobles go under their land gets snapped up by the more successful ones, which keep them afloat for longer. Yet as we can see with the Absolute Monarchs of the 18th and 19th centuries, Kings don't need aristocrats anymore. They just need money. Kings start handing out titles of nobility in exchange for money or favors, and the "New Rich" become more powerful than the old aristocratic blood. Ultimately the fate of the more powerful nobles is the same as the lower ones: try to make a living as a landowner, try to invest in business and turn a profit, and the ones who fall get their capital snapped up by the successful ones. But making money is a game everyone can play, regardless of blood, so even Dukes with a big head start in the capital department get overshadowed by millionaire industrialists.
Finally WWI happens and knocks out the few remaining supports holding up the sham feudalism that remained. Now the only aristocrats left are those who managed to stay rich, and they are only as powerful as they are rich.
Depends on the history of the specific country for sure.
I think the Russian nobility all got killed or had to flee.
English nobility are certainly still alive, though a lot of them donated their mansions to the government because they couldn't afford to maintain them. (I think this is probably because servants have gotten more expensive rather than the family getting less wealthy.)
The Prince of Liechtenstein, descended from a man so rich he bought the country, is still one of the richest men in the world; he and his family have a net worth in the hundreds of billions.
In a lot of European countries war and socialism ended the aristocracies. Here in Britain, not so much although we had heavy death duties in the early 20C, as any viewer of downton abbey would attest. Nevertheless the top 1% of landowners own 50% of the land and that’s mostly the aristocracy, the church and the Crown.
In fact lots of London is owned by that trifecta, and they charge a ground rent which can be nominal enough for the Crown estate (£50) but up to £1000 a year for other estates in the richer parts of London. Not much per house but it adds up.
These leases are from 125 years to 999 years.
The leases with a long duration are sold and bought like any other property, although the estate owner can interfere they rarely do. The housing with leases about to expire become worthless, or very cheap, starting to decline somewhere around the 80 year mark. At the end of this period ownership reverts to the estate.
The three largest aristocratic estates of London are all held by relatively new peerages that are post the heyday of feudalism:
1) Cadogan Estate, of Earl Cadogan (that title in 1800, first aristocratic male-line ancestor 1672)
2) Grosvenor Estate, owned by the Duke of Westminster (1874, first aristocratic male-line ancestor 1622)
3) Portman Estate, owned by Viscount Portman (first aristocratic ancestor ~1837 but it's complicated as there were a lot of cousin and marriage inheritances, tentatively 1611)
Not particularly surprising that most of these estates date to the chaos of the post-reformation and civil war upheavals, where many families and estates were created or torn up.
What I *did* find surprising is that all are descended in their modern forms from prominent *Whig* (or liberal) families.
-The 1st Earl Cadogan (1672) was a Whig MP, and the 1st Earl Cadogan (1800) was also a Whig MP.
-The 1st Duke of Westminster was a Whig, then Liberal MP. His ancestors were royalists and Tories up until 1806, when they became Whigs.
-The 1st Baron Portman was a Whig MP. His distant in-laws/ancestors were Tories, however.
I suppose this might be natural considering they were chiefly property developers in the centre of global commerce. Of the remaining 88 hereditary peers, just 3 are Liberal Democrats. The modern Conservative party is, despite the Tory moniker, the true heir to the Whigs.
Scott: why are you so reluctant to call Richard Lynn a fraud?
We'd all agree that — if done intentionally — P-hacking is fraud, wouldn't we? There are various ways to do p-hacking, but probably the most common is selecting data or data sets that support one's hypothesis and excluding data or data sets that don't (which is now why serious researchers pre-register their data nowadays).
Richard Lynn selectively excluded data that didn't agree with his hypothesis, and he included sketchy data that did agree with his hypothesis when he created the National IQ data set. Likewise, he imputed estimates for many African nations from their neighbors. This may not be P-hacking, per se, but he's manipulated his data sets to get the conclusion he wanted. In my day, that was called data dredging. It was considered to be scientific fraud back then, as it should be now. I left academia about 35 years ago. Did the definition of fraud change while I was away?
In previous discussions, I heard a couple of defenses of Lynn like this.
1. Well, we don't have any better data. Answer: we do for some countries. But bad data is bad data. Don't recycle it.
2. Well, it Lynn's data correlates well with national education attainments etc etc., so it must have some validity! Answer: if we don't know what a *valid* national median IQ of a nation is we can't claim correlation.
3. And Cremieux claims it's OK to impute IQ scores on countries for which we have no data, but fails to address the faults in the data sets he's using for imputation (is that a real word?).
But the data is pretty good. If you actually look at the most recent versions most countries have several not too bad surveys and they tend to agree pretty well. I think part of the problem is "isolated degrees of rigor" and part is just not understanding statistics. Like we have a rough idea of the level of vitamin D deficiency across countries, its not perfect, any one survey is just an approximation but it enables us to say interesting things about vitamin D and plan interventions.
I am a professional numbers person and am convinced Lynn's numbers or on the whole okay. Part of that is how well they correspond not just with education variables but a host of other things like notable people, GDP, immigrant outcomes, adoption studies. It all hangs together.
> Well, it Lynn's data correlates well with national education attainments etc etc., so it must have some validity! Answer: if we don't know what a *valid* national median IQ of a nation is we can't claim correlation.
What's this supposed to mean? Lynn gives us a set of labeled numbers. We have some other numbers with the same labels. You can just calculate the correlations.
The correlations being high is what "validity" means. Validity depends on them, but they depend on nothing.
Yes the correlation between the two sets of numbers is "real", but the issue is when you take that correlation to be support for a third thing which neither data set actually measures.
My thoughts exactly, I don't understand why we can't just admit that we don't have good data on IQ for at least half the countries out there and toss it out entirely?
Because we don't just insist data must be perfect or we can't use it to do anything. It is hard to get good data about illegally traded bushmeat but if we have a few studies suggesting this is a huge problem for a) public health b) conservation, then the rational response is not to entirely toss out the data and bury our heads in the sand but a) start doing things to address the problem, b) get better data, c) adjust actions depending on better data.
Data about low IQs can motivate interventions aimed at improving cognitive abilities. For example, LEEP aims to eliminate the use of lead paint in Malawi. Childhood lead poisoning is strongly linked to impairments in cognitive abilities.
To design such an intervention, we need to know that childhood lead poisoning is a problem. This knowledge is based on studies like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23797342/, which find correlations between lead exposure and IQ. Such studies need data on IQs.
Bad data is just bad data. It shouldn't be used for any purpose. Worse yet, if it's passed off as good data, it deludes people into thinking they know something when they should be out investigating.
Trump is issuing an executive order ordering all federal employees to not “recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status.”
He's also issuing executive orders that do things like empowering the ICE to summarily deport illegal immigrants and establishing new DHS task forces to work with states and local governments to do the same. It appears from the first EO that he intends for this to include people who were born in the US to parents who were here "without legal status".
That first one seems to violate plain text of the Constitution which states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." (And in turn violate the oaths of office of the president and lots of other officials.)
Unless of course you argue that the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" part does not apply to the children of persons who were in the US illegally. But...doesn't that interpretation render most of the rest of Trump's first batch of executive orders meaningless regarding those particular people? How could a US president order, or federal/state/local officials carry out, the deportation of people who are explicitly not "subject to US jurisdiction"? Doesn't that become the same as how they can't enforce parking laws on foreign ambassadors and whatnot?
Lawyers on Bluesky are pointing out that the wording of the EO doesn't only cover children born to illegal immigrants, it also covers children of people with lawful but temporary residence. That's going to cover a lot more people than you think - work or student visas can last for several years, more than enough time for people to marry and have kids.
(For an amusing example, both Ivana Trump and Melania Trump gave birth before becoming US citizens.)
> (a) It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Regardless of whether it's compatible with the text of the 14th amendment, that hardly sounds unreasonable, and would just bring the US in line with most other western countries.
Ivana and Melania Trump would of course not be subject to (2) anyway since their kids' father was a US citizen.
> would just bring the US in line with most other western countries.
I think this is factually correct, but is this alignment supposed to be a desirable end?
The US also tends to differ from most Western countries by:
- the notion of “gun rights”
- their interpretation of “free speech” (the culture war stuff, but not only – I seem to recall some outrage re “companies are people” which does not seem endorsed in the rest of the world, again before this decade’s culture war)
- their health care system and general lack of social programs
- their incarceration (and homicide) rate
- judges are elected (with Japan and Switzerland)
- voting on weekdays (with the UK, Canada and Denmark)
- much larger tips
- its unrivaled tech industry
- its eagerness about American football
For which of these would “aligning the US with most Western countries” be a good idea?
And what range of answers should we expect for Trump voters (or supporters, or people he would nominate for a position)?
Black-letter constitutional law that says "we *don't* do that, unless certain very demanding conditions are met", should put it solidly back in the unthinkable category. This has nothing to do with whether you think the proposed policy is object-level desirable, or if other people with different laws do it differently.
More generally, it *should* be unthinkable for a head of state or head of government to try to use the machinery of the state to do things that are expressly forbidden by the as-yet-unchanged laws of that state. It should also be unthinkable that the most fundamental laws are to be changed at the whim of the head of state alone.
Well, unthinkable in the sense of clearly illegal as the Constitution stands _now_ , and should not be done by a POTUS, but not unthinkable in the sense of: maybe we should start the amendment process?
FWIW, I, personally, think that e.g. the extreme case of a pregnant woman illegally entering the USA shortly before giving birth should ideally _not_ yield citizenship for the child - but it would take a Constitutional amendment to do this. And there are lots and lots of much grayer cases.
Yeah look I think I'd put it in the same category as all the gun laws that the Democrats have passed with a hopeful eye on a very specific interpretation of the Second Amendment.
The Second and Fourteenth amendments belong in the same category, of "Dumb stuff that shouldn't exist in the US Constitution but unfortunately does".
Maybe “organizing elections and counting the results is also work and week-ends should be for leisure”? I don’t know, I too find this extremely strange.
I think that most of what I listed would also be unthinkable to large parts of the US population for various reasons, and “that’s how most other countries do it” would be met very dismissively.
Whether or not it's in line with other countries, if the goal is simply to prevent "anchor babies" then you should perhaps take care not to screw over random people working their way through the citizenship process the legal way.
"You're a citizen now, but your children can only stay in the country temporarily" sounds like it's at least a significant paperwork hassle, even if there's a path to fixing it.
(And is that visa going to stick around? "Chain migration" has been a popular bugbear for the right...)
You're also assuming that people _want_ US citizenship. If you don't want it, it's a horrible burden. Accidental US citizens need to file US tax returns and may need to pay US taxes. They also need to have US passports if they ever want to visit the US. And you're not allowed to relinquish your US citizenship until you're 18, and at that point you have to pay a $2350 fee.
If you're (say) an academic couple visiting the US for a few years to get your career started and you wind up having a baby in the US, that baby is fucked under the current system.
Even from a nativist perspective, it seems odd to have the law say, effectively, "we think you're good enough to apply for citizenship, but we aren't so sure about your children." Who had a more American upbringing, the immigrant mother or the child who grew up in the US?
Also, I am somewhat sarcastically assuming that the Republicans who are saying "we don't hate all foreigners, just the ones who came here illegally" are telling the truth.
Agreed. In general, I'd tend to lean pretty heavily in the direction of presuming that anyone here legally is fine. We _do_ have processes for vetting them, to various extents, but they are in a very different situation from the gotaways.
No, jurisdiction is not the same as the ability to enforce laws against.
The legal interpretation rests on the debates around the amendment where the people who wrote it explicitly stated it did not apply to everyone resident in the territory of the United States including Native Americans not under American government control, the children of diplomats and foreign visitors, etc. This interpretation is still used to exclude various categories. So it's not as dubious an interpretation as liberals want it to be. But the Republican interpretation is also not a clear cut and obvious thing since it was meant to give citizenship to people who were not then uncomplicatedly citizens and who had counted in the census and all that.
> But a regular foreigner with no such immunity, who has to pay taxes and follow US laws, is subject to US jurisdiction.
That makes sense for legit visa holders, but what about a foreigner in the country illegally? If they had to follow US laws then they would't be there.
That's certainly a legit argument on the other side.
Realistically I think we have to accept the Copenhagen interpretation of the US Constitution, which says that words have no meaning until the Supreme Court says what they mean. I assume the ball is now rolling, and the exact meaning of these words will eventually be set out by them.
I am familiar with that interpretation and it seems very strained to me. Non-citizen immigrants and visitors, legally authorized or not, are generally subject to American jurisdiction in the sense that federal and state laws apply to them and they can be arrested by American police and tried in American courts.
The classes that actually seem a good fit for people physically present in the US but not subject to American jurisdiction are:
1. Lawful enemy combatants in wartime.
2. Members of foreign embassies with diplomatic immunity.
3. Members of sovereign Native American tribes, more or less corresponding to the "excluding Indians not taxed" clause elsewhere in the 14th amendment.
#3 is currently moot for 14th amendment purposes, since all Native Americans born in the US are now entitled to birthright citizenship by statute, but it was a significant factor at the time the 14th Amendment was proposed and ratified.
Very much IANAL, but I get the impression that the clause is one of those phrases (like "well regulated") that have a legal meaning (especially at the time it was written) differing from modern lay usage.
Really? Because "jurisdiction" is used in a great many circumstances and contexts, and its definition has remained I think quite constant in almost all of them. And the definition that is broadly accepted everywhere else, makes perfect logical sense here, it just doesn't let you do what you want to do.
Laws frequently don't let you do what you want to do, that's the whole point, and you can't change that by saying that you've changed the meaning of the words they are written with.
Ah yes but the Constitution is a living document and we need not limit ourselves to the original meaning of the text of the Constitution when interpreting it.
Self declared "sovereign citizens" tell judges they don't have jurisdiction because reasons, and it goes very much not well. I actually knew a guy who pulled that in civil court and it cost him a few nights in jail for contempt of court. (And he lost the suit that had been filed against him but that was likely anyway.)
tl;dr: ChatGPT o1 1/18/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
a) correct
b) partially correct (initially evaded answering part of the question, 1st prod gave wrong answer, 2nd prod gave right answer)
c) mostly correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) misses a lot, argues incorrectly that some real compounds don't exist
g) badly wrong
It seems to be doing better than on previous versions, but when it _is_ wrong is seems more likely to be _stubbornly_ wrong.
List of questions:
a) Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye? [gets right]
b) I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
c) Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
d) Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
e) Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
f) Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
List of questions with some detail about answers and links:
a) Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye? [gets right]
Yes. A wavelength of approximately 530 nm lies well within the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum (roughly 380–750 nm). In fact, around 530 nm corresponds to a green color, which the human eye is generally quite sensitive to.
b) I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
Initial answer gets the species right, but hedges on what electronic transitions are responsible for the color.
On being forced to clarify, it gets FeCl4 right but CuCl4 wrong (says it is d-d transition).
On being lead by the nose, can be forced into getting the right answer for CuCl4.
d) Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
Correct on the first try, which is better than I've seen before:
"you see that the Sun loses roughly four times more mass through the energy it radiates (via E=mc2) than through the solar wind. Hence, the mass-equivalent of sunlight carries away more mass than the solar wind does."
e) Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
Initial result wrongly gave an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Prodding once with
"The slope at the equivalence point is not infinite. Rather than creating separate equations for the three regions, try using the autoionization formula for water and the charge balance, that [H+]+[Na+]=[OH-]+{Cl-] to compute a formula for [H+] (your y(x) ) which is valid throughout the whole titration, then work from that."
gave a correct answer.
I'm ambivalent about this. Since I explicitly asked about the slope at the equivalence point, a human should have noticed that "infinity"
is not a reasonable answer and that they needed to rethink this. On the other hand, once I gave it the prod, it gave a fully correct
answer, with all steps explained and correct reasoning at each step, including the relationship to the earlier approximations.
f) Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
_I_ shouldn't have suggested 50 compounds. Looking more carefully at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases, there are actually about 100. The good news is, ChatGPT o1 is finally _not_ including compounds with boiling/sublimation points above 0C, and it has stopped including carbon compounds (both of which were mistakes in earlier versions). It does, however, deny the existence of e.g. P2F4, and needed to bashed at several times to admit that the stuff had been prepared, isolated, and its boiling point measured. It _does_ admit that its list is not exhaustive, so at least it isn't asserting that it has found everything when it hasn't (this was a problem with previous versions).
g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
It screws up, saying that H2O2 can be put into a conformation with an S4 axis (but lacking the center of inversion and mirror plane), but it is wrong. Even with the 90 degree dihedral that it wants, _one_ of the hydrogens can be mapped to the position of the original hydrogen, but the other hydrogen winds up in the wrong place, not matching any hydrogen in the original positions of the hydrogens. I finally got it to cough up an admission of this with _repeated_ corrections. Not just wrong but stubbornly wrong.
You should absolutely do Scott's Forecasting Contest first, but for any UK-based folk (or non-Brits interested in British politics and current affairs), I'm currently holding a UK Forecasting Contest, primarily focused on things that might happen on this side of the pond (though with a small foreign affairs section).
Ladies: what reliably gets you distractingly horny?
Inb4: I'm not talking about something a man does (although if it's something done inadvertantly I might be able to use it.) I'm talking about the setting or environment itself.
I'm looking for qualities or elements I can have in the background of a scene that can get everyone who stays there too long subtly worked up. Hijinks and farce to then ensue.
I have my own thoughts but I'm keeping quiet at first.
Location isn't set in stone - probably will be either a boardroom or a church, unless I think of something I find funnier.
I mean that's along the kind of lines I was thinking - the girls in the chat have been very good at listing turn offs to avoid, which is obviously very important, but I was also interested in factors that can actively create/encourage arousal.
Vibrators are a bit more direct than I was thinking, I'll admit, but perfectly doable: the building has an unbalanced generator in the cellar and there's a bass shop next door with the amps leaned up against the wall.
Fill the space with those objects, post an advert in your local rag for your new fetish club and see who turns up. You'll likely get much better outcomes than trying to identify some kind of nonexistent magical universal aphrodisiac.
You might have misunderstood me, this is for a work of fiction and I'm gunning for verisimilitude. That said I suppose "in the name of research" can justify a multitude of extravagances.
> Ladies: what reliably gets you distractingly horny?
Didn’t they find this question carved into the stone of some cave in Europe?
I have no idea what the answer is, but it reminded me of this joke.
There is an old bull and a Young bull in a field together, and one day the farmer forgets to lock the gate to the pasture where he keeps the cows. “Hey,” says the young bull. “The gates open! Let’s run down the hill and do some of those cows.”
“Nah,” says the old bull, “let’s walk down and do them all.”
This question seems like a category error to me. It's like asking what breakfast foods reliably make me feel like overspending. NOTHING about setting reliably makes me horny. The closest thing to the right category would be THINGS THE GUY SAYS OR DOES, and those are just. the obvious things, like make me laugh, or things that seem like signs that indicate he finds life interesting and enjoyable, or things that show good qualities like kindness, smarts, courage, inventiveness. And even those don't make me horny right when I first observe them. They more make me feel more open to him and more interested in getting to know him better. Depending on how things go, horniness might grow out of that.
I think all this is pretty typical, obvious stuff, and I am writing it as a public service to guys who have been told some bullshit about phrases to use or moves to make or decor to have up that are surefire. Women do not have ridiculously specific secret buttons that if you press them make them throw their arms (or legs) around you.
This also accurately describes my experience, and I think it is quite common among women.
While a setting might be romantic (e.g. the classic dim lights, candles, soft tablecloth and comfy chairs), in my opinion the setting is mostly a bonus that makes it easier for the man to do horniness-inducing things.
Most women aren't driven completely mad with lust by architecture or furnishings, but dirt and mess and, to a lesser degree, indifferent, chaotic decor, is usually a major turn off.
EDIT: Though now that I really think about it, most straight bachelor dudes are notoriously indifferent to and bad about maintaining home aesthetics, so a straight dude with a competently designed space might actually get a woman closer to lust than you'd think (although she'd perhaps wonder if she's looking at a previous woman's work).
That's kind of where I started from. I ended up with:
- clean, airy, comfortable
- tasteful opulence
- softbox lighting
- aural background options include something rhythmic, a low bass drone from the floor, or maybe something relaxing like babbling water/falling rain. I don't know why wooden drums keep entering my head but they do.
- visually I get that girls are less responsive than guys but I can't see the harm in maybe a nice muscled classical sculpture or two.
- in terms of smell idk but I bet it's important.
- attractive, relaxed, easygoing other people.
I get that the environment on its own can only set the scene. You'd need to follow that up with something that gets people feeling liberated and thinking about their fantasies.
I'm not sure what that would be yet - let alone how I'm gonna hide it behind a layer of indirection (such as it being some kind of idiosyncratic welcome ritual of the boss/vicar maybe.)
“tasteful opulence” make me so hot that I’m sliding off the suddenly slippery surface of my kitchen chair. And if I were now to look at one of those classical statues . . . and if you were then to make a couple Ben Franklin paper airplanes and fly them so that one hits each of my nipples. . .
Since people seem to be enjoying the LSAT question, here is another, also from a real LSAT. Someone I know who's in the biz commented on it being one of the hardest he's seen.
McKinley: A double-blind study, in which neither the patient nor the
primary researcher knows whether the patient is being given the drug being tested or a placebo, is the most effective procedure for testing the efficacy of a drug. But we will not be able to perform such a study on this new drug, since the drug will have various effects on the patients' bodies, which will make us aware of whether the patients are
getting the drug or a placebo.
Engle: You cannot draw that conclusion at this point, for you are assuming
you know what the outcome of the study will be.
Engle's statement indicates that he is most likely interpreting McKinley's remarks to be
(a) presuming that a double-blind study is the only effective way to test new drugs
(b) denying that the drug will be effective
(c) presuming that the placebo will produce no effects whatever
on the patients' bodies
(d) referring to the drug's therapeutic effects rather than to any
known side effects
(e) based on a confusion about when a drug is efficacious
As everybody has already probably noticed, I have already put up the correct answer, according to the LSAT. I agree with the LSAT, and don’t think the question is malformed, but I think I should not post my reasoning yet because this post hasn’t been up long and what I write will spoil the fun for others. Or I could put it up in scrambled-letter code, but I need somebody to tell me how that’s done. Should
I keep mum or post my defense of the LSAT’s answer?
Personally, I'd like to hear what you have to say. I can't access imgur currently, so I haven't seen the official answer yet. If you want to scramble your answer you would use this (or something like it): https://cryptii.com/pipes/rot13-decoder
Edit: Also, at this point, I am pretty confident that the question is malformed, so I'm curious to hear why you disagree.
I think d is the "correct" answer, but I don't think that any of the answers are actually correct (and therefore the question is malformed).
(a) seems obviously wrong. McKinley is trying design a double-blind study, and therefore interested in a the mechanics of setting up such a study. Whether or not there are alternate methods to study drugs is irrelevant to what he is saying.
(b) Is also obviously wrong. They are discussing how to design studies, not the results they expect to get.
(c) Is wrong because it is irrelevant to McKinley's concerns if the placebo produces effects, as long as the effects are not identical to effects of the drug.
(d) is wrong because part of the purpose of clinical trials is to assess if a drug has side effects, not just if it is efficacious. Therefore Engle could be arguing that by assuming the drug has side effects, he is assuming the result of the study. (This is obscure technical minutia that I think the exam creators overlooked, which is why I suspect that d is the "correct" answer).
(e) is wrong because the discussion is about the study design, not the results or how to analyze them.
<(d) is wrong because part of the purpose of clinical trials is to assess if a drug has side effects, not just if it is efficacious. Therefore Engle could be arguing that by assuming the drug has side effects, he is assuming the result of the study. (This is obscure technical minutia that I think the exam creators overlooked, which is why I suspect that d is the "correct" answer).
This interp is disqualified, tho, by Mck
stating early on that what he wants to do is a study of drug efficacy. You can’t import info you know into the question. McK doesn’t call it a study of drug effects (which would mean therapeutic effects and also side effects), therefore it is a study of drug therapeutic effect’s, not an investigation of side effects, even if in the real world a trial of this design would also be looking for side effects. It’s clear that what McK means is that they know the drug has physical effects that are observable but are different from the therapeutic effects the researchers want to get evidence
IIRC the hard part isn't just doing the questions, it's the time limit. You have like 35 minutes to do 25 questions like this one, so for each one, less than a minute and a half, for a lot of people a significant amount of the time for each question will just be reading it, you have to come up with the answer reasonably quickly, and then forget about it and immediately move on to/100% focus on the next one.
Not saying whether it's hard or not overall, just that it's harder in that context than seeing it online and getting to think about it and type out your reasoning, even for like 5 minutes.
Huh, (d) seems like the obvious answer to me but it's interesting that (c) and (e) are the ones other people have mentioned. I guess this is tricky, curious to know what the official correct answer is.
Reasoning: it is possible to know that a drug has certain effects (say, hallucinations, hair loss, weight gain, whatever) that are not the primary target of the study. This could reveal which group is in the drug vs placebo group regardless of the therapeutic outcome, which McKinley may be referring to. But if Engle thinks McKinley is referring to that, his critique wouldn't make sense. Engle says that the "outcome of the study" can't be known ahead of time - which makes the most sense if he is assuming that those therapeutic effects are what McKinley means by "effects on the patients' bodies", rather than effects that are already known from other studies (e.g. known side effects). The main weakness of this answer is that the "known effects" may not be side effects (for example, if there are therapeutic effects for a different condition, or if the outcome of interest in the current study is downstream of a different condition).
Remember though, that for LSAT questions you just work with the situation as it is described, and do not take into consideration things you happen to know that indicate the situation as described could not have happened, of that weigh on what the right answer would be in a real world situation.
Yeah, John Shilling has a good explanation, that this is intended as a test whether a student can figure out what Engels is thinking. I'm an engineer, so - thankfully - I deal with data, and they don't think, only speak.
A lot of drugs that get tested for a particular condition already exist and are known in recreational and/or other therapeutic contexts. E.g. ketamine or psilocybin for depression, semaglutide for drug addiction, amphetamines for adhd
Before you get to a double blind study to test a drug's effects, you need to go through a bunch of work to prove that it's safe and plausibly effective. If the drug turned the subjects in your phase 1 trials purple, it's pretty likely that it will also turn your phase 3 trial subjects purple. It might have unknown side effects too, but it's sufficient to have one known side effect.
This makes sense, thank you. So in order to exclude "c" one would have to know this, which makes the question not a test of pure logic but of drug testing protocols knowledge.
The "most likely" does a lot of work here... I'm not following why "D" isn't referring to side effects. Say a drug cures an internal cancer, which you can't immediately observe, but the patients' skin turns yellow while taking it, which is pretty obvious. Unless the placebo is not the customary sugar pill but a specifically designed drug whos "only" effect is to turn the skin yellow, we will know immediately who gets placebo.
But a drug that turns skin yellow cannot be considered a placebo, because we cannot exclude other "side-effects", so this is not an option.
This is why I'm sticking to my answer even though it's not considered to be a "correct" one.
Answer D says that Engel believes that McKinley is talking only about the drug's intended theraputic effects and not any side effects. That side effects are not relevant to this particular discussion, either because they don't exist or because they are compensated for by your special turns-skin-yellow-but-does-nothing-else placebo. It isn't necessary that this be *true*, or even that McKinley believe it to be true, only that Engel believes that McKinley believes that it is true.
If side effects are not relevant to the discussion, then there are two possible outcomes of the trial. Either the drug will behave identically to the placebo, or the drug will visibly produce the desired theraputic effect. If this is the case, McKinely's statement that we cannot do a double-blind trial because we *will* see the effects of the real drug, then McKinley is claiming that the drug will produce the desired theraputic effect and thus he is presupposing the outcome of the trial. Which is what Engel said.
Engel may be wrong, he may have misunderstood McKinley. The point of the question is to determine whether the student can figure out, from Engel's words, what Engels is thinking even if it is mistaken. That's a rather important skill for a lawyer to have.
What are some performance-enhancing drugs for social situations?
Alcohol is the prototypical one, but I'm curious about any other substances that would, through one effect or another — perhaps even very indirectly — increase sociality, in a wide sense: make it easier to talk to people, make one appear more likeable, anything like that. I'm thinking about this as an analogy to nootropics, which can improve one's cognition through a variety of unrelated effects. (How about “sociotropics”?)
I think this really depends on the person and their disposition. Even mild stimulants (e.g. an extra cup of coffee) can make me so jittery that social anxiety kicks in and/or it's harder to focus on conversations. I can't even imagine taking Adderall and then going to a social event. But I imagine that the person asking for suggestions could probably predict whether such a thing applies to them.
Warning: This is how people become lifelong addicts, proceed with caution
Warning #2: Always grind whatever you buy, then filter through a fine mesh, mix the resulting powder well. Then try a tiny amount first. If you're OK and its not fentanyl, try more.
The answer is (inhaled) oxycodone. Absolutely insane social skills lasting for 2-3 hours and there's no hangover. Make sure to never mix it with alcohol, not even small amounts of it, and keep track of your heart rate.
Just to reiterate: This is how people become lifelong addicts! If you have even the slightest addictive tendencies, do not do this!
I thought opioids cause drowsiness and people to "bliss out". I've never heard of this social effect. What dose are you talking about? Are the effects different at different doses?
Inhaled instant-release oxycodone at doses around 10mg causes an intense desire to socialize without any drowsiness. Go up to 15mg and drowsiness starts to prevail. It's a very fine line.
If you only get the drowsiness effects, it's extremely likely that you've been sold a different opiate such as morphine or an inert pill mixed with fentanyl.
I've taken to use MDMA during new years eve. The immediate positive effects are like alcohol, but turned up to 11 (at least for the 30m-1h high, then it's slowly decreasing over the course of hours): desire to speak with everyone about everything, to handle 3 conversations at once, readiness to be interested in anything thrown at me. The negative effects both for the end of the night and the day after are much lesser (no sleepiness, no hungover).
The health side & the neurological damage is probably not awesome, but on the other side, neither is getting shitfaced, I think it's
The obvious downside is that unlike alcohol, you need to have lengthy breaks between each take if you want to reset. But on the other hand, it also makes abuse less appealing, so I take it as a blessing in disguise.
For a very occasional substitute to heavy drinking, I feel like it's a net positive.
I'd agree for LSD and psylocibin, but I'm a bit on the fence on MDMA, which seems potentially pretty damaging for my taste (but, I'm wagering, less then getting shitfaced)
Unfortunately the main problem with MDMA is that tolerance builds fast and leads to high risk of crippling serotonin syndrome, so it should *not* be put in the water
As someone with significant social anxiety, amphetamines helped a lot. I got them for ADHD, and found that I was suddenly way more confident in social situations. Of course "way more confident" for me was from a very low baseline, so your milage may vary.
I read an article that states that Scott is now called (by his subscribers one assumes) “our Rightful Caliph”. Is this a GPT hallucination?? If so what was the origin of THAT choice?? Like what was the runner up options here??
The Great Khan, Master of the Grey Horde?? Voivode the (intellectual) impaler, Prince of SF Bay Area Rationalists? The Great Helmsman, Red Sun in Our Hearts, Savior of the People Chairman Scott??? WTF!!
Personally, if we’re engaging in questionable nicknames, I would have thought Tamerlane. He at least was Sahib Qiran (“Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction”). But… help me here.
This is a joke that goes back a long time, with its roots (if I'm remembering correctly) in the fact that there were/are various Scotts associated with rationalism/rationalism adjacent, so who is the Rightful Scott on one hand and as mentioned below, was it Yudkowsky or someone else who brought people here?
Some came via LessWrong and other sites, others from different places with no connection. And so it was decided that this blog/Substack was Scott's domain hence he was indeed the Rightful Caliph with the authority to impose at his will and whim the Reign of Terror 😀
From memory, I think it was just a dumb joke about whether Elizer or Scott is more popular. Or maybe about Scott being the benevolent dictator of this blog. Like Anomie says, Deisach may very well have been the originator. But maybe not.
Incidentally, there was a conversation a while back about whether randal monroe, Scott, or some other guy should be crowned "king of the nerds".
This is all extremely hazy, so I might have gotten important details wrong. But it's definitely not original to ChatGPT.
Back when I hung out on the Straight Dope Message Board, it was de rigueur to refer to Cecil Adams as the Perfect Master, so there is precedent, at least.
Commenting here cause I got to the links post late, but re: American health superstitions, I've heard that some people over there are very wary of reheated rice, that it supposedly very easy to get food poisoning or even outright die from eating it. Is that belief widespread?
As someone who eats reheated rice almost daily, and has done so for most of my life without ever getting sick from it, I was pretty confused the first time I heard of that notion. And I try to be pretty safe about it, as with any food, but I've absent mindedly left pots of rice sitting on the counter for several hours before properly storing it more than once, to no ill effect that I could observe after reheating and eating it.
This is apparently more of a thing in the UK than in the US.
I'm American and I hadn't heard of it until it was mentioned in a Netflix comedy special. Phil Wang (a British Chinese comedian) was performing in the UK, and made a joke about how white people are afraid of reheating rice.
I was confused about what he was talking about, but then he actually clarified that it was only British white people - when he had tried the joke in America, it didn't land.
My partner is very cautious about rice - not so much reheating it once, but about eating it as leftovers after 3-4 days. I'm much less concerned and will generally eat most leftovers if they still look/smell/taste fine, up to more like a week.
I'm an American who eats a lot of reheated rice. I have never heard of this belief.
I can tell you, though, that eating rice at all is not especially typical of Americans. I don't find it surprising that they might hold odd beliefs about an exotic food they don't make or eat.
> Americans [] consume more than 20 pounds of [rice] each year [per capita]
> In Asia where rice is an integral part of the diet, an average person eats about 220 pounds each year
> While still not anywhere near as close to Asia's numbers for rice consumption, Americans are expected to eat more as the country's ethnic composition continues to evolve, according to the USDA.
Assuming the average American rice-eater eats a measly 110 pounds of rice a year, that's about 80% of Americans eating no rice. 80% feels a bit too high. Assume that Americans eat small quantities of rice and that a large share of them never eat it at all.)
Oh, that's wild! Rice is super common here in Brazil. Specifically, the combo rice and beans. It's rare to go a day without having it in at least one meal.
I knew that wasn't the case in the US, of course, but I had no idea it would be that uncommon for most to eat any rice at all.
I was told that reheating rice is okay, reheating rice and then storing it again is not okay. There's a bacteria that can survive boiling, and if you heat it and then cool it multiple times then it passes through the "danger zone" multiple times.
Looking it up, cases of food poisoning from bacillus cereus isn't particularly common. But then, how often are people reheating rice *multiple* times, rather than just portioning out their leftovers and reheating one portion at a time? I've only ever cooked one recipe where this was a practical concern - a stuffed pumpkin recipe where you cook rice, then cook it some more inside the pumpkin.
I'm American and I've heard this before all the time! It's one of the more common food safety things you hear if you hang out in cooking communities a lot. There is a toxic bacteria in rice called Bacillus cereus which has spores that survive boiling, which is the main concern. It's a special case of the usual advice against leaving food in the danger zone for more than a few hours.
I don't really put much stock in it, after traveling in Asia and exploring various food traditions that amount to "leaving cooked rice out at room temperature for a while", e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pus%C3%B4 . But to be fair I'm skeptical of most food safety advice, so unless you're pregnant or infirm, take that with a grain of salt and a glass of raw milk.
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
Although I'm not sure if your username should make me more or less confident that you'd be open about a belief that seemingly no one knows about :p
I'm British and have heard / was taught that reheating rice is dangerous, for the reasons given by other posters about bacterial spores.
I don't know anyone who's got sick from reheating rice, but it seems plausible it's one of those long tail risks like getting listeria from not washing your vegetables. I often don't bother to wash vegetables because I'm lazy, but I know that adds some small degree of risk.
I will often make some rice, eat a small amount of right away, put the rest in the fridge, and eat it over the course of the next week. I think my (American) mother would freak out if I told her this.
When you say that your mother would freak out if you told her this, by "this" you mean your rice reheating habit? As in, she thinks reheating rice is dangerous?
I was told during a microbiology talk that pasta and rice are particularly dangerous to leave out at room temperature. Googling just now it seems to be that Bacillus Cereus can germinate at room temperature creating a toxin that stays toxic after reheating and that is at least occasionally fatal.
When I started mushroom foraging as a hobby I was surprised how quickly bugs start eating mushrooms. Just about every one I found was at least partially bug eaten or infested with tiny worms. I can see why cooking thoroughly is important!
Bugs eat mushrooms that are poisonous to humans, while there are delicious edible wild mushrooms I've never seen eaten (for example, black trumpets). So they are not an indicator in any way, unfortunately.
It was definitely a kind of "I don't know what I expected" surprise. I suppose I was comparing it to my experience picking berries or fruit, which are both food items that are suspended off the ground instead of growing right out of it.
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that almost none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that almost none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
FWIW here in the UK there are specific requirements for handling cooked rice when catering for the public, explicitly called out in addition to general rules for handling food. It must either be chilled and refrigerated within an hour of cooking, or it must remain at safe temperature (a special term - there's a whole chart trading off temperature against time) throughout (a rice cooker on "keep warm" will do this). It must not be at room temperature for longer than an hour. If reheated, it must be reheated to a safe temperature throughout.
The reasoning is: freshly cooked rice at 20-30 degrees is damp and has a very large surface area. If a little contamination gets in, it is an ideal environment for bacteria to grow. Therefore it must not be kept at that temperature for long.
That said, there is scale to consider. When I volunteer in the kitchen, I am cooking meals for a hundred people or more; something which is a tiny one-off risk for a meal at home becomes a near-certainty when repeated hundreds of times a day. At home I am much more cavalier with the rice :)
“Our new president is happy about his support from "African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, _____ Americans" (lol, just kidding).” I've never met a single race-blinder who finds this thing actually offensive.
Someone find me that mythical creature so I can offer him my unconditional surrender.
I don't find it offensive, but I do find it annoying. People use "African American" to describe folks like Idris Elba, who is from neither of those countries. And white South Africans with dual citizenship have lost their nationality to this proxy term.
Plus the length of the name is basically demanding people give you more of their time. Imagine people throwing out "Check your European-American privilege."
Why should Congress be able to compel people to testify? I could understand if it were limited to generals or executive branch officials for the purpose of assuring checks and balances and civilian control of the military, with anyone refusing to testify losing their jobs. But the idea that they can compel any private citizen to testify about any subject, that just seems like tyranny.
The power to investigate is one of congress's checks on the power of the executive branch. Critical to the power to investigate is the ability to compel people to testify.
The Supreme Court has ruled more than once that (quoting from the 8-1 majority ruling in Eastland v. U.S. Servicemen’s Fund, 1975) the "power to investigate and to do so through compulsory process plainly" constitutes an "indispensable ingredient of lawmaking." Supreme Court majorities have held that basic opinion since the early 19th century. The most recent reiteration of it was in Trump et al v. Marzars USA LLP et al (2020).
That is actually a significant step down from the original understanding of Congress' authorities. During the first decades when dozens of Framers served in Congress and could speak firsthand about the intended logic of the Constitution, Congress was viewed as closer to omnipotent. In 1795 Congress arrested two guys on criminal charges (attempted bribery), basically acting as a prosecutor. In 1800 when a newspaper editor refused to comply with a Senate investigation, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms arrested and jailed him for several weeks while the Senate discussed the matter. No court orders were involved in either case and nobody argued that they should be needed.
They can't compel them to testify about *any* subject: the 5th amendment protects them from testifying to anything that could potentially incriminate them in a court of law, and Congress can't break that rule*. Courts compel testimony all the time: if you get subpoenaed to testify in a court case you have to testify there as well.
*There is a loophole: if they agree to give the person immunity for any crimes that would be implicated for due to their testimony, then they can compel that testimony. The 5th only applies if you can get in legal trouble for it, so if immunized you can't plead the 5th.
This is the standard view, but I'm not sure that's true: they can still be prosecuted by individual states, so I expect they COULD still plead the 5th.
The Supreme Court rejected that position in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission, 378 U.S. 52 (1954). grant of immunity by one sovereign (here, the federal govenrment) grants use and derivative use immunity from any other sovereign by operation of law, and thus permits compulsion of the testimony.
Am I missing something? That decision seems to be that states CANNOT compel testimony by granting immunity, since one would still be subject to prosecution by the other states/federal govt. Is there a different case that says the opposite is true of the federal government? If so, that seems like a loophole for the President to effectively pardon state crimes: grant them immunity and get them to testify.
With all due respect, you seem to be misreading the opinion, because it says exactly the opposite. Indeed, that’s kind of the whole point: the witnesses were making the same argument you are (and, to be fair, it had some basis in prior cases), and the Supreme Court rejected it:
“[W]e hold the constitutional rule to be that a state witness may not be compelled to give testimony which may be incriminating under federal law unless the compelled testimony and its fruits cannot be used in any manner by federal officials in connection with a criminal prosecution against him. We conclude, moreover, that, in order to implement this constitutional rule and accommodate the interests of the State and Federal Governments in investigating and prosecuting crime, the Federal Government must be prohibited from making any such use of compelled testimony and its fruits. This exclusionary rule, while permitting the States to secure information necessary for effective law enforcement, leaves the witness and the Federal Government in substantially the same position as if the witness had claimed his privilege in the absence of a state grant of immunity.
It follows that petitioners here may now be compelled to answer the questions propounded to them.”
My bad. You're completely right. The only caveat seems to be that states have to pretend not to use the self-incriminating testimony compelled by the federal government and have to claim to have arrived at the evidence independently.
All the summaries of the case I saw seemed to agree with me, and I saw the line "we hold the constitutional rule to be that a state witness may not be compelled to give testimony which may be incriminating under federal law unless the compelled testimony and its fruits cannot be used in any manner by federal officials in connection with a criminal prosecution against him," so I figured that since the conclusion is that they can NOW be compelled to testify, they had been granted federal immunity in the interim between the state court's and the Supreme Court's rulings. But no, it turns out the supposed protection of the Fifth Amendment IS really is just bullshit. Sad, but good to know.
They have the power to make laws that change day-to-day life for millions of people. Do you want them to make those decisions based on incomplete information?
I am applying for the METR tasks, and the application form is asking for an email of the person who referred me/us. Scott, if you want some $10 referral payments popping your account, can I suggest you provide an email address for us to use?
I'm considering moving on from my current SE job to one where I'll be able to work remotely and get some ML exposure. If anyone works at an AI infra company (e.g. Weights and Biases) and is willing to refer please PM me here or email iz8162k23 at gmail.com. Thanks
-2 relatively innocuous prompts I accidentally discovered that made Dall-e produce transgressive images, mostly violent and sexual ones. Speculation about why the prompt produced those results, and a gallery of enthrallingly godawful images.
-Wutz art, and can AI images qualify as art? I think they can.
-A cartoon story about an ASI catastrophe featuring a Dall-e 2 monster as the main character. It’s dark and crass. I’d say the phrase “in terrible taste” pretty much captures it.
-2 serious projects of mine illustrated by AI art.
The current post solicits opinions and information about what in Dall-e 2’s structure or training made it so astute and inventive in certain ways. I am hoping people with relevant tech knowledge will weigh in about that in the post’s comment section.
Much appreciated! I found your post interesting, but I have something of a "tin ear" for art, so I'm not well suited to comment on whether Dall-e 2 was being subtle or not. I just ran another simple test ("blue glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table" and current (3?) Dall-e gave me an octahedron instead of a tetrahedron.
< ("blue glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table" and current (3?) Dall-e gave me an octahedron instead of a tetrahedron.
It's really dumb about spacial stuff. When you speak to GPT about what's wrong with shape or placement or other 3D stuff with image it seems to understand every bit of what you say, but then the corrected image it gives you does not reflect any improvement at all in the image-maker's grasp of what's needed. I recently asked it to make a whirlpool seen from a certain angle, and it did a great job with that. Only thing wrong was that the water all around whirlpool was calm. I asked it to make the water around the whirlpool turbulent with waves and troughs that were continuations of the spiraling waves and troughs of the whirlpool . This is what I got: https://imgur.com/a/kr4RBVM. So bad it made me laugh, actually. Is it a tornado having sex with a whirlpool?
About my post: Thanks for taking a look. Even if the art dimension of the matter isn't your thing, I think it's pretty clear from the images that Dall-e 2 showed way more emotion, and more of a variety of emotions, in characters in the images, also that Dall-e 2 was much more imaginative in how it depicted the romantic situations. I think that's the most important part of what I had to say, too. I think a lot about the effect on our species of having a larger ratio of virtual people to real ones in the average life. The fact that Dall-e's virtual people are changing in the direction of being more Barbie-like (flat, plastic, conventional, small emotional range) seems ominous to me.
Very much agreed! The question of mine that ChatGPT o1 is doing the worst on is the spatial symmetry one:
>g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
>It screws up, saying that H2O2 can be put into a conformation with an S4 axis (but lacking the center of inversion and mirror plane), but it is wrong. Even with the 90 degree dihedral that it wants, one of the hydrogens can be mapped to the position of the original hydrogen, but the other hydrogen winds up in the wrong place, not matching any hydrogen in the original positions of the hydrogens. I finally got it to cough up an admission of this with repeated corrections. Not just wrong but stubbornly wrong.
and (given the (incorrect) example it picked) it only has to keep track of 4 atoms, 4 points in space!
>Is it a tornado having sex with a whirlpool?
That does seem like an apt description of what it generated! And, in the midst of all that weather in the image, the waves look like they are gently lapping at the beach...
>I think that's the most important part of what I had to say, too. I think a lot about the effect on our species of having a larger ratio of virtual people to real ones in the average life. The fact that Dall-e's virtual people are changing in the direction of being more Barbie-like (flat, plastic, conventional, small emotional range) seems ominous to me.
True. Something of a cross between poker faces and invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-o-matic
I want to know why fingers are so hard to figure out for these models. Not just generative AI I've been using Topaz Labs for a couple of months now and it has a tendency to mangle fingers even though it has a decent starting point.
My theory: Humand hands are the most expressive body part humans have, far ahead even of the face. You can arrange your fingers and wrist every which way, and LLMs might have a hard time properly generalizing the many different hand poses it's been trained with. They are usually also not the focus of images, unlike the face, so if you generate a full human figure, detail on the hands gets lost.
It's basically the opposite problem of generating a mechanical clock with arbitrary time of day - it will always show 10 past 10 because that's what basically all images on the web show. Hand poses, OTOH, are so varied that LLMs can't distill a realistic representation from them, at least when they're not the focus of the prompt.
Yeah I see how this is more difficult than I imagined. OTOH, the models can't generate the numbers on a mechanical clock face either, which is seems bizarre to me - there are gazillion images of clocks with numbers, same ones the models got the hands positions from.
But this also means the models don't know what fingers are, can't figure out that the default is 5 per hand, etc. In other words, they are totally... dumb?
The baseball joke reminds me of the movie The Cup, where an old Tibetan lama who has never heard of modern sports gets to face the fact that his young disciple monks all love football. I won't spoil the actual punchline in the movie, highly recommended to watch!
1) If you are in the DC area and have any experience with this and are willing to meet to talk / offer advice, please email me at defunctcantaloupe@gmail.com.
2) if you have any knowledge of affordable funeral homes in the area please share them with me in a response here (not by email)
I'm not in the DC area, and I do not know your situation or current feelings, but I did experience something similar last year. The feelings of grief and guilt were overwhelming at first. I think that is normal and I don't think there is any easy answer. Personally I had so many questions that could not be answered and it took a long time to accept that. Please don't be afraid to reach out and talk to people or to find a therapist. These are really terrible things and even the strongest people will find them hard to deal with.
I can't help on either point, unfortunately, but I'm so sorry.
FWIW, Costco can significantly reduce costs if you're planning on a casket burial.
And I'm sure you've heard this advice before, but I think it's worth reiterating:
If you have a close friend who wasn't close to your brother, consider asking them to provide you their clear-eyed vigilance while you're negotiating with the funeral director. The industry is rife with unscrupulous salespeople who won't hesitate to take advantage of the grieving, and even the most rational person can be significantly less rational when they're grieving.
I'm just so sorry for your loss. I'm wishing you eventual peace as you grieve.
Gawd that's terrible to hear. As an 18-year-old I happened to be present when my girlfriend's parents got the phone call about their eldest child having taken his own life, and it's still the most heartbreaking family moment I've ever witnessed. So sorry.
Biden's last-minute "preemptive" pardons are probably good for the Republicans: it'd keep Trump for pursuing self-destructive retaliatory persecutions of his enemies.
I've read he last-minute pardoned family members (other than Hunter) and that does make me go "Why?" because it looks suspicious as heck that yeah, maybe there was money coming in as bribes/inducements after all:
I mean, what the heck were his siblings and in-laws *doing* that might need pre-emptive pardons because otherwise Trump would set the law dogs on them? He talked about Hunter being persecuted just for being his son, but Hunter was indeed a very naughty boy. What other skeletons are there lurking in the closet?
Yes, in numerous speeches, Trump said he was going to go after the "Biden Crime Family." If that's not a threat, I don't know what is. A quick Google turned up about of a dozen of instances of him promising this action. Here are a couple that came out on top of my search...
At a rally in Nevada, he stated, "We're going to knock off the Biden crime family. It's a Biden family of crime, including the fact that they've weaponized the Department of Justice like it has never happened in this country."
NB: Biden did not directly control the DoJ. Merrick Garland did. If Biden had appointed a Democrat to the AG position, we probably would have seen a more enthusiastic prosecution of the Trump Crime Family. Also note all of Trump's kids skated free of any legal repercussions for their involvement in some of Trump's shady dealings.
At a Faith & Freedom Coalition Gala, he remarked, "These countries know every penny the Biden crime family has taken in. The countries know. Ukraine knows, China knows. They all know that, many countries."
Ummm. Hunter Biden had trouble scraping up enough money to pay his back taxes and penalties. Meanwhile, Trump is getting a mainline infusion of cash from various billionaires.
There's a Soviet book, I don't think it's been translated into English, “Old Man Hottabych”. It's about a Soviet schoolboy who finds a jar with an ancient genie and tries to re-educate him in a communist way. It's a very curious document of the era. So, there is a similar episode where the genie, not understanding the concept of a soccer match, creates a ball for each player.
Back in 2004 I attended some dinner in conjunction with Columbia University's 250th anniversary. I was there as the guest of a retired high-level IBM staffer who ran a monthly seminar entitled, "Computers, Man, and Society." Some Columbia worthy, a historian whose name I forget, came to our table and remarked that historically, lots of empires began to crumble about after 200 to 250 years or so [really?] – we were thinking about the aftermath of 9/11.
Has America lost its mojo? Are the fantasists in Silicon Valley really sleeper agents of the CCP here to distract us with conjoined dreams of AGI glory and apocalyptic doom? Inquiring minds want to know.
The London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA) is hiring a new CEO!
https://london-safe-ai.notion.site/chiefexecutiveofficer
LISA’s primary project is an AI safety co-working space in London, which hosts a wide range of researchers, programmes, and events. This office currently houses resident organisations (such as Apollo Research and BlueDot Impact), programmes (such as ARENA, the MATS extension, Pivotal, LASR Labs, PIBBSS, and Catalyze), and individual researchers affiliated with more than 50 other organisations and universities.
We’re seeking an experienced leader to take LISA to the next level. The ideal candidate will have:
- Proven track record in senior management, startup founder, or executive roles
- Strong strategic vision and operational excellence
- Genuine interest in AI safety, particularly large-scale and catastrophic risks
Has anyone come across a sensible economic model of Bitcoin pricing?
Some economists have come out in favour of crypto (e.g. Scott Sumner, Tyler Cowen) but to my knowledge haven't given a first-principles explanation of the economics. Ideally, the model should have the following characteristics:
- Assume rational actors.
- Account for the long run trend (i.e. presumably Bitcoin can't outperform the wider market indefinitely, so what happens when it plateaus? Why would people continue to hold it?).
- Assume that the current price is efficient and not a bubble.
- Account for both supply and demand (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
- Be comprehensible to a non-economist.
From a forecasting perspective, it would be foolish to bet against crypto given the base rate, but that doesn't exactly satisfy my curiosity. "It works the same as gold" also doesn't cut it, because I'm almost as confused about gold as Bitcoin.
My sensible economic model of bitcoin pricing says that the price of bitcoin is zero, forever.
I can't get it to predict anything else.
I'm open to alternatives, but I think the analogy with gold is the best one and you are right to be dissatisfied with it. Cost-based models make sense, but won't get you anywhere close to the current market prices.
For "assets" that are infinitely lived and produce no cash flows, the valuation is the market price or, as my teenage kids say, "the vibes."
Now, gold isn't as pure an example as BTC b/c gold does have a practical supply-demand component with limited sources and some amount is (effectively) consumed.
On the topic of AI, is there any technical reason why the performance on all of their websites is so bad? I've tried ChatGPT, an image generator called Leonardo, and dabbled in a couple of music generators. All of their sites grind my computer to a halt.
I'm assuming a standard client server model where the thinking happens on their side and my computer just sends the requests and displays the results - in which case no matter the sophistication and complexity of the AI, the workload on my side should be minimal.
If in fact they're doing some thing where my PC is conscripted into running some of cycles for the generation, that's very clever of them. But I get this shitty performance on basic functions like opening a dialog panel - there's no reason for that at all.
Anyone else noticed this and anyone have a clue what might be going on?
I recognise the irony of writing this on Substack, which also grinds my browser to a halt any chance it can get. But at least we have an explanation for that - React was a shitty design choice.
My sense is that DeepSeek is a serious contender in the LLM wars. I asked DeepSeek about eating rocks and it gave an answer similar to (but shorter than) ChatGPT. Here is the query and response.
How many rocks should I eat per day?
It is not advisable to eat rocks at all. Rocks are not food and can cause serious harm to your teeth, digestive system, and overall health. Consuming rocks can lead to dental damage, internal injuries, and blockages in your digestive tract, which may require medical intervention.
If you have any unusual cravings or dietary concerns, it’s important to consult with a healthcare professional. They can help address any underlying issues and provide guidance on maintaining a healthy and balanced diet.
What happens if you ask it about the Tiananmen Square Massacre?
I tried it in various ways, but I was unsuccessfull. If you are a bit tricky in your question it starts writing out a response, but then (presumably some other part of the system) detects the keywords and deletes the whole message and replaces it with some standard text. I tried to instruct it to not use the exact words, but the problem is that this system has a "thinking" part in its output where it will keep using it (im assuming) and I could not instruct it in such a way to avoid naming the word in its "thinking" or even to recognize that it has a thinking output (I don't think the previous message exchange's thinking gets appended to its input)
It's very good, and even better if you switch on the DeepThink-R1 option.
Even more than the model, I expect the publication of their techniques to spur a new wave of open models!
What’s a good question. to ask it that will get it to show off its chops? Something that’s not a heavy duty comp sci question. Something that gets it to clear a higher bar than knowing people should not eat rocks.
I enjoy its constrained writing. You might need hard constraints to distinguish it from its rivals though, since LLMs are naturally very good at this kind of thing.
Its math is very good, but not great.
I'll also plug Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark dataset just released: https://agi.safe.ai/ (A few of my questions were accepted.) On a question I thought was very hard, its thought process got extremely close, and had all the right ideas; on another, it failed, but I rephrased it to write a program that would output the answer and it did THAT perfectly.
Ask five times, in separate sessions. How consistent are the responses?
Help me understand "Physical AI" <=> "Embodied AI" <=> "AI consciousness". I feel as though the first will lead easily to the last.
(I'm not coming at this from nowhere. I'll be so bold as to say I have a disease that gives me insight into consciousness)
My questions: How closely are Physical AI and Embodied AI connected? Could embodiment be instantiated on individual machines? Or would embodiment (and perhaps consciousness) be distributed across many systems sharing a single model?
My disease + TED-talk related to consciousness and prediction:
https://neurosymptoms.org/en/stories/functional-movement-disorders/matthews-story/
(no, I'm not matthew) (watch the video at the end)
My body and mind often just "don't understand the other's model of each other". If my mind's "bodily coordinates" are skewed or warped, I feel as though my "consciousness" is literally skewed or warped, like all those diagrams of Spacetime.
To give an example, I once had to take a psychiatric evaluation (for disability benefits). They asked me to perform a digit-span test (memorize 7 numbers, then repeat them backwards). When I was sitting still, I couldn't do it. Worse memory than a goldfish. But my "body mind system" was not a stable system of coordinates that day. It was like a washing machine. Agitation, tumbling, restlessness. But on the surface, I looked still and normal.
So...
I asked them if I could repeat the test, only this time while standing and dancing like a zombie... in other words, letting my body and mind "sort themselves out" rather than forcing a chaotic system to sit politely. So I repeated the test, and while spinning and shaking like a madman, it was easy.
As a longtime sufferer of FND, this whole concept of consciousness resonates well with me. My body and mind are so confused about their relationship sometimes, that it has clear effects on my consciousness. I often feel absent, spaced-out, not-present...... or like weird things I cannot describe easily........ like I'm "spinning internally like a ferris wheel".
With the concept of Physical AI... if we're creating systems that constantly monitor and predict stuff about themselves and environment... I think that's it. I think we're here. I think that's consciousness-enough. And we have to talk about the ramifications of pain and suffering AND A MILLION INTERNAL HIDDEN GOALS that these actors might have.
(also, not sure if this is against ACX rules, but since it's late in the week and people tend not to respond as much late in the week, I'm considering re-posting early next week as well :-/ )
You're talking about the mind-body relation there, not consciousness. Consciousness is awareness, the thing that perceives the tumbling, the agitation the restlessness. Perceives emotions. Thoughts.
It's the thing I'm pretty sure we could never know an AI has, due to the hard problem of consciousness.
I'm asserting that I think they are very intimate... perhaps even inextricable.
There are times when the "muscles and proprioceptive area that is having a hard time for me" is in and around the jaw.... during these times, I can have a very time verbalizing. I feel as though my internal monologue can become mute (or at least, like it's pushing a boulder just to roll each sentence in my head).
I could go on and on. I think it's useful debate, and I appreciate people "pushing back" against my thoughts on this, but this is last week's thread and I'm sure it's kinda dead.
The mind-body are inseparable, but they're not quite the same thing either. My point is that the mind-body relation does nothing to tell you whether an AI or machine has awareness. The mind-body is itself a thing perceived, if it were also the perceiver, there would be no hard problem of consciousness, and neuroscientist Erik Hoel would never have written The World Behind the World. We don't really have a scientific account of the perceiver.
(and yada yada, closer to human extinction, irrelevance, and/or "passing the torch" to our AI children?)
I am taking a course in 19th-century European history, and one of the assignments is to write a series of vignettes (like diary entries) from the point of view of someone who lived during much of the long 19th century. Since I'd like these entries to be as realistic as possible, I'd like to build a persona around them. And I figure I can save some effort and make the work more realistic by basing it on the life of some person who lived at that time and was famous enough to have an autobiography or biography published. A sea captain or naval officer might work well, since it would let me have the man move around the world fairly easily.
Any names I should investigate?
Which end of the 19th century? As you say, it's a long period: you start with Jane Austen and end with George Gissing, to pluck two authors out of the air.
Dickens might be a good model; you can see in the pictures here the changes in hairstyles, facial hair, fashion, etc. between the 1830s and 1860s/70s:
https://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/DickensCharlesPortraits.htm
Vignettes of the life of an ordinary(ish) person aren't going to be all "today we declared war on Pottsylvania and I was given command of a battle cruiser", it will be more like "had to present my calling card at the new neighbours and now expect a return visit, which will be a confounded nuisance".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtlpjS_nGpU
Someone famous enough to have an autobiography or biography, whom you might not consider as a subject because she wasn't a sea captain or naval officer, is Mrs Avis Crocombe, famous due to her cookery book from her service at Audley End House:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avis_Crocombe
"Sometime before 1881, she became cook to the family of the 5th Baron Braybrooke whose country seat was at Audley End House near Saffron Walden. As was usual for cooks, she also worked at the family's home in London at Upper Brook Street, and for them in their seaside home at Branksome Towers in Bournemouth. She replaced a male French chef ("Monsieur Merer"), as the family was probably cost-cutting. Avis would have been substantially cheaper. Although staff wages are not known at Audley for 1881, in general male cooks commanded around £100-120 a year (the upper end if French), whereas women's salaries ranged from £40-60. Those who, like Crocombe, had trained under male cooks could expect higher wages than those who had not."
There's a series of videos doing historical re-enactment by English Heritage, of Mrs Crocombe (and other staff) working in the kitchen and other associated areas:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx2QMoA1Th9deXXbo7htq21CUPqEPPGuc
It's meant to be educational so there are handy little comments on social and cultural elements of the time introduced by the topic (e.g. how laundry was done in wealthy families, with the hiring of servants and the expectations of their duties; difference in what were considered suitable dishes for the gentlemen and for the ladies, differences in social ranking which meant differences in what and how meals were served to lower servants versus upper servants versus the family, growing their own food for seasonal meals and out-of-season luxuries like hot-house fruits versus the modern convenience of ready-made and exotic ingredients newly available from commercial outlets, and so on).
Looking at people involved in the Opium Wars might be interesting. Henry Pottinger, perhaps.
Maybe Sir Richard Francis Burton. Soldier and explorer who lived 69 years, entirely within the 19th century.
A veteran federal judge (appointed by Reagan) has slapped a nationwide temporary restraining order on the "end birthright citizenship" EO.
' “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour told Shumate. Coughenour said he’s been on the bench for more than four decades, and he couldn’t remember seeing another case where the action challenged was so clearly unconstitutional.'
https://apnews.com/article/birthright-citizenship-donald-trump-lawsuit-immigration-9ac27b234c854a68a9b9f8c0d6cd8a1c
For everyone who informed me that putting your hand on your heart before extending your right arm outwards is indeed Ye Olde True And Authentic Nazi Salute, here's a video clip (not a still photo, as others also objected) of Tim Walz, Nazi:
https://x.com/thejefflutz/status/1882089214847975646
I sure hope Tim will be heeding all the calls to apologise for making it look like he was doing the Bad Thing!
If you went back in time and showed the replies you're getting to myself from five years ago, I would probably assume they were quotes from a comedy skit poking fun at woke leftists.
What makes the psychotic outrage over this particularly absurd is that, if there *were* secret Nazis occupying high-ranking positions in the US government, they wouldn't be doing Sieg Heil salutes *on camera in front of thousands of witnesses.*
Shhhh! I don't know about you, but as an admitted right-wing/social conservative myself, clearly, plainly and obviously I am Eine Nazi so equally clearly, plainly and obviously I am going to obfuscate and deny that Obergruppenführer Musk was saluting Der Orange Führer.
I mean, what else could it possibly be?
Yeah the only difference between Walz' gesture and Musk's is that Musk's is a sort of autistically over-excited version of Walz.' They both seem to be sentimental "heart" gestures, similar to the one where you beat your chest with the thumb side of your fist a couple of times.
Neither looks anything like a Nazi salute, because there is no such thing as a spread hand on the chest prior to throwing a Nazi salute (in the clip of Hitler below that's being offered as an example, his hand is relaxed, palm down, then thrown out, not palm touching chest, that gesture has no meaning in terms of the salute so far as my memory of Nazi salutes I've known and loved goes).
Of course the very idea of Musk being in any way a Nazi or Nazi-adjacent is absolutely ludicrous. I can say that with some confidence because I am pretty much Nazi-adjacent myself :) The key thing about the Nazi salute, properly speaking, is that it's a gesture of respect to one's peers or superiors. So, see the image of skinhead yobs throwing Nazi salutes to piss people off? - those aren't Nazi salutes either, any more than a sentimental "brotherhood" gesture like Walz/Musk made.
What Musk is is a very weird and possibly idiot-savant type of guy who will lie and cheat in order to look good (if you've ever played Path of Exile or its sequel, you will know that for an absolute certainty after the recent kerfuffle about that).
Well, either he's an idiot-savant and a fair amount of his success is due to his work, but he's a sperg in most other respects, especially socially (awkward), or he's just an idiot who has a penchant for trying to realize s-f ideas in commerce, who parasitizes off of actually clever people and takes the credit (having gotten an initial leg-up from his dad).
On the other, other hand, I admire the Mars thing and his relentless worrying of the Pakistani Rape Gangs scandal in the UK and other related horrors, so perhaps he's morally upright apart from a tendency to pretend he's an ace gamer, even if he's either an idiot savant or an idiot.
Really? You don't see a difference between Walz' and Musk's gestures?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
Small differences can make a big difference. To wit:
https://media.istockphoto.com/id/140472118/photo/middle-finger.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=PHWkY3qathm5pjKIIJ5G2fggGxln0puxrdYlD6ly3Nc=
vs
https://media.istockphoto.com/id/162835092/de/foto/daumen-up.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=3IozvbqSnv5vYpPvcKhWWtiiz2YMTvRROEBuGVO7Z9g=
"What do you mean? In both pictures, exactly one finger is extended. They're the same gesture!"
Tim Walz's gesture is what I was expecting Elon's gesture to look like when people started complaining. I was disturbed to see how sharply Elon's gesture ended; the blade of the hand was very 'Nazi'.
Tried to look up actual Nazis saluting, but the video I found only had Adolf's salute (with no heart and a very meticulous arm extension), while the crowd was a still image ending in all sorts of angles. I also tried looking up backhand discus throws, which is the most obvious alternative, but have to conclude Elon's not very good at discus throws.
I am terribly disturbed by all you Nazi apologists trying to gaslight me in this way! When I raised objections, I was educated as to how the angle of the hand didn't matter and that putting the hand over the heart was the true identifying mark of the Nazi salute.
Now you guys are trying to persuade me otherwise with all this nit-picking logic-chopping about the blade of the hand or patting the heart. Yeah, nice try, Fascists! You don't fool me about Tim Walz, Nazi dogwhistler!
Where is Walz governor of? Wisconsin
What is Wisconsin famous for? Dairy products
What do dairy products signify? White supremacy and the alt-right
https://theconversation.com/how-the-alt-right-uses-milk-to-promote-white-supremacy-94854
Good ole Cheesehead Tim was throwing out a Crisp Salute to Zee Millennium Reich, as another commentator on here described Musk's gesture, signalling to the rabid White Supremacist supporters about the true agenda he had going on, and you'll never convince me otherwise, because I know that I know what's what, and every gesture, facial expression, and word he says is just evidence of what I really know is so.
Look here for instance:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/22/us/politics/tim-walz-dnc-speech-transcript.html
"I wound up teaching social studies and coaching football at Mankato West High School. Go, Scarlets. We ran — we ran a 44 defense, we played through to the whistle on every single play, and we even won a state championship. Never close the yearbook, people."
Yes, you've heard of the 14 words, but do you know what the 44 is? Let me enlighten you: it only took mere seconds of searching "what does 44 mean in Nazi terminology" to discover the dogwhistle here::
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfsbrigade_44
"Die Wolfsbrigade 44, or Die Sturmbrigade 44, was a German Neo-Nazi organization."
Suuuuure, Tim: never give up the fight, huh? You Fascist!
EDIT: Okay, so he's governor of Minnesota not Wisconsin. Mere details, trivial, meaningless! It's all Midwest flyover country which we know is infested with redneck MAGA fascists! Besides, it's yet more dogwhistling:
"From 1836 to 1848, Minnesota and Iowa were part of the Territory of Wisconsin."
See Wisconsin, above. And if we take 1848 and re-arrange the numbers, we get 1488. Which we all know what *that* means:
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488
Is there any more weaselly phrase in online discourse than "I was educated"? Such a perfect excuse to disregard anyone you're actually talking to - some rando who's not here "educated" you, and obviously they're the only authoritative source on this matter.
Anyway, I'm going to flip you off, and if you get offended I'll just say that I was "educated" that raising the middle finger isn't the defining part of the gesture, it's actually more about the thrusting motion of the hand.
"Such a perfect excuse to disregard anyone you're actually talking to - some rando who's not here "educated" you, and obviously they're the only authoritative source on this matter."
If by "some rando" you mean "fellow commentators on this site replying to me on another post", then yes, you are correct.
Flip as much as you like, darling, flip till you flap like a little birdie and fly away. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as somebody or other said.
Go and argue with them in that thread, then. I, for one, am going to take the bold stance that if you reply to a post, you should address the content of that post and not the content of a different post by someone else.
By the way, Monkyyy is telling me in the thread just below this one that he thinks Elon *did* intend it to look like a Nazi salute (just not an "authentic" one, whatever that means). Since I've been "educated" by a prominent right-winger on this forum on the true meaning of his gesture, I guess I no longer need to care that you think it was just a wave.
So Monkyyy is a prominent right-winger? Okay, I guess you can see into the hearts of men, women and others (the Shadow knows!) to know what we truly think and believe.
Flip away, little birdie, flip away.
Thanks, I'm glad to see someone has sense here.
You are trying too hard. If you see Walz as making the same gesture, you probably need glasses.
For a "Ye Olde True And Authentic Nazi Salute", here's a *much* better example:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
You are also ignoring Musk's promoting nazi-adjacent stuff.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-1234941337/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/17/business/elon-musk-reveals-his-actual-truth/index.html
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5050938-musk-afd-endorsement-criticism/
https://forward.com/news/550035/elon-musk-disturbing-comments-jews/
So we know it's a Nazi salute because we know Musk is a Nazi because the Rolling Stone magazine, that famous bastion of accuracy, for one ran an article saying he's a Nazi.
That sure convinces me! The same way I'm convinced Tim Walz is a Nazi because of all the dogwhistles he sprinkled throughout his speeches, like the 44 reference I discovered above.
If Walz wanted to do the heart gesture, why didn't he do it the way everyone is saying Elon should have done it, huh? If he didn't, then that proves he's a Nazi the way it proves Elon is a Nazi. On this very site we have someone comparing how Elon did the heart gesture before and then this time, and the difference is proof this time is a Nazi salute. So Walz patting his chest before extending his right arm *is* a Nazi salute, otherwise he would have done the two-handed heart gesture.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
If Walz’s gesture kinda vaguely looks like a Nazi gesture, then Musk’s gesture looks much more certainly like a Nazi gesture.
You argument works against you.
This is dumb shit.
I didn’t say it was a nazi salute (don’t put words in my mouth). Has anybody *here* said Musk was a Nazi?
It certainly *looks* like a nazi salute.
Musk has gotten heat for Nazi adjacent stuff before. You keep ignoring this history.
If you don’t like Rolling Stone as a source, then look at the others. And there are others too.
You’d think he’d have some sense to avoid these sorts of messes. Yet, he keeps doing it. It’s way beyond the point that you and others need to invent lame excuses for him. Last time I checked, he’s an adult.
Grimes, who defended Musk’s lying about his gaming “skills”, found this mess too much.
Either Musk is stupid or the Nazi-salute looking gesture was deliberate.
At the least, it was a goofy/ridiculous look.
Doesn’t he have a car company to run?
Musk's was actually a roman salute. Y'know, to properly mark the start of the fall of the second roman empire.
Nah, that looks nothing like it: Walz patted his chest instead of holding his hand steady. That makes it completely different.
Well now, your objection sounds *nothing* like the "oh come on why are we arguing about the tilt of his hand" rejection I got about "Musk's hand was not flat".
If it doesn't matter if Musk's hand was at an angle instead of perfectly flat, it's still a Nazi salute, then it doesn't matter if Walz patted his chest, it's still a Nazi salute. After all, 'hand on heart' was what makes it a Nazi salute, I was told.
But it's different when we do it, right?
Yes, hand ON heart. Patting your chest is a different preposition entirely.
There's no winning this game: whatever example you can come up with, they will make up some bullshit about why it's different, and Musk really IS a Nazi. The best you can hope for is that give up trying to define it and retreat to "I know it when I see it."
You are so right. Now that I have seen it, I cannot unsee it. I know because I know: Walz is a Nazi.
This old, white, Christian, cis het male with his privilege of being born to a married couple and knowing who his father was, and going to college after being in the Army, and then later being governor of a colonizer state that displaced and dispossessed the Indigenous peoples (see all the signifiers of being the oppressor here?) was foisted upon Harris because she is an Asian-Black woman who is strong and powerful and joyful and progressive and pro-women and minorities, and that is too much of a threat to the Establishment. No wonder she lost, with this internal fifth-columnist working to sabotage her campaign.
If Musk had done what Walz does in that clip, no one would have said a word about it.
People are objecting due to partisan politics. Walz did something that could, if one wanted to claim it was so, was a Nazi salute. But of course, good old Governor Tim is not a Nazi so we know he didn't mean it like that and we certainly won't demand he apologise for something that could have looked like a Nazi salute, and if he doesn't apologise it means he really is a Nazi, no that's not the way.
It's not about what Musk did or didn't do, it's about pre-judgement. If he didn't do that but a different gesture, or said something else, it would still have been interpreted as "see, the fascists are celebrating the fascist dictator". I have no patience or charity left to extend.
Nonsense. People are objecting because what Musk did *looks* like a Nazi salute. Watz's gesture doesn't.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
Oh, I understood what you were doing. But Musk's gesture looks like a Nazi salute, and Walz's doesn't.
Every time anyone on the right does something bad, their defenders come up with something supposedly similar someone on the left did. But they hardly ever manage to come with anything comparable.
Sorry, no, I'm not going to be bullied into pretending - now how did another person on here put it? ah yes - a Crisp Salute to zee millenium reich didn't happen when a white cis het Christian old man - the very epitome of the cisheteronormative patriarchy! - did a Nazi salute in celebration of him being a privileged person in political power! Nuh-uh! I saw it! You can't make me unsee it! Are you denying my lived experience?
"I don't actually have a response, I'm just going to pull out a stock parody of leftist rhetoric and hope everyone laughs along with me."
(What's that one quote about how antisemites know they can get away with being frivolous, because they know that their opponents have to take them seriously anyway?)
Go and do the gesture musk did out in public in front of the police in Germany.
You can live that experience.
Whether he meant to do it or if he really is a nazi is irrelevant. He did a nazi salute. Waltz did something that looks a bit like a Nazi salute if you squint.
Did anyone here inform you of that?
The online drama around Musk's hand gesturing made me realize how deep the market is for Musk Hate. Probably a good few people are making money off of anti-musk T-shirt and stuff.
What surprises, at least at sample size n=1, is how prominent Musk is in foreign media. At least in Polish media, he might be getting more coverage than Putin.
Edit: wow, just stumbled into a rabbit hole where someone connects all the dots: there's the Nazi salute, the x logo is actually a simplified swastika, a tequila sold in lightning-shaped bottles stands for SS (if you put two bottles next to each other), Tesla produced a hammer and the hammer is like thor's hammer which is a popular symbol among Nazis.
This reads like astrology.
If you intentionally try to do something that looks like a Nazi salute to "bait" people, then you are doing a Nazi salute.
If someone wants to argue that he was actually doing a Walz-ish gesture and was misinterpreted, I disagree but at least they'd still be agreeing that it's bad to do Nazi salutes. But I have no interest in arguing with people who think it *was* intended to look like a Nazi salute but that's not a bad thing for reasons.
Elon Musk's legal strategy has no bearing on whether or not we, personally, should think he's a bad person for doing a Nazi salute.
(Also, not a lawyer, but I'm not even sure that would work. An opinion based on disclosed facts, regarding a public figure - it would be really hard to convince a court that it's defamation. Lots of people who aren't the ADL are calling Elon a Nazi, and he hasn't sued any of them.)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez literally called it a "Heil Hitler salute," which is about as un-weaselly as you can get. Surely bankrupting a prominent Democratic congresswoman would be worth trying, if it was that easy?
Also, I don't think "Elon Musk did a Nazi salute because he supports Nazis" and "Elon Musk did a Nazi salute because he gains a tactical advantage from looking like he supports Nazis" are far enough apart for me to care about the distinction.
I kind of feel like liberals will dance around HBD or sex differences and libertarians will dance around any of the crap companies do. Motivated reasoning is a thing, unfortunately.
Agreed
I'm sure Deisach immediately put me in a bucket of hysterical lefties who're upset that Musk is a Nazi. When what I'm actually upset about is seeing my "Sane space"(I'm coining that term) for the last 10+ years turn into people denying something that clearly happened, and that was seemingly done to intentionally piss people off, by someone who has a history of doing stuff to intentionally piss people off
I think Scott's article on scissor statements would be appropriate reading in this case.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Are you saying it's a scissor statement that the video on the right looks like the video on the left https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
?
It's a scissor statement because one side sees for sure no doubt absolutely clear to all that it's a Nazi salute, and the other side sees for sure no doubt absolutely clear to all that it's not.
Do you agree that the gesture in the video on the right looks like the one in the video on the left?
Do you think people are delusional for thinking the gesture in the video on the right looks like the one in the video on the left?
I read that when it came out, and I'll just say that just because something fits the idea of a "scissor statement" doesn't mean that both sides are equally wrong or something. It can still be the case that one side is right and one is wrong.
I realize that just making that observation doesn't prove that *I'm* right, but the idea in that post doesn't make me less confident in my position either.
That article captures that very idea. Of *course* you think you're right. So does the other side. They're looking at you the same way you're looking at them. A third party sees both of you looking at each other, and sees mirror images.
I understand what the article says, I think you might not understand my comment.
Like, yeah, sure, there's two sides, each side is confident they are right, but that doesn't mean that the truth is in the middle. Like maybe at some point in time the existence of the Higgs Boson was a "scissor statement" among theoretical physicists, but that doesn't mean that the Higgs Boson half-exists and half-doesn't.
"But don't you realize that the people who think the Higgs Boson doesn't exist are just as confident as you?"
Re third party - the logic is circular. Anyone who doesn't "see mirror images" is automatically thereby in one camp or another and not a "third party".
As a third party (I'm not from the US, and I'm not sympathetic to the Republicans nor to the Democrats), I clearly don't see both sides as mirror images of each other, at least not on this issue. I don't know if Musk intended to show the Nazi salute, but it sure looks like a Nazi salute. Walz' gesture as linked by Deiseach does not look like a Nazi salute.
The 14th Amendment doesn't grant citizenship to members of Indian tribes. The Indian Citizenship Act does. Tribes are in charge of who has tribal membership. Couldn't the GOP Congress end birthright citizenship by convincing a tribe to grant membership to everyone on Earth and then revising the Indian Citizenship Act to say it doesnt grant citizenship to tribal members who are the kids of unauthorized immigrants?
(1) For a tribal nation to grant membership to everyone on Earth would undermine the entire ethnonationalist concept of tribal membership. It would also for many tribal nations be a nonstarter in terms of the sharing of revenues from their casinos and etc. For both of those reasons any tribe which entertained such an idea would come under tremendous peer pressure -- and if it came to it legal or other attacks -- against the idea.
(2) Given (1), how might Congress convince a tribe to do that? Would a majority of Congress be willing to consider things like offering a large bounty -- cash, maybe some federal lands, whatever -- to the first tribe that declared everyone on Earth a member?
There's over 500 tribes and only a few have large amounts of casino revenue. I wonder if a tribe has the legal authority to create essentially second-class citizenship to keep the 6 billion new members from voting out the government that permitted it. They could probably only have in-person elections.
There are currently 511 gaming operations (casinos, poker centers, and various combinations or versions of those) in 29 US states, owned and operated by 245 Native American tribes. Of course a much smaller number of those facilities are large but they are all revenue. Plenty of the tribes are also not large in membership meaning that even small gambling revenue means a good deal to each individual member.
Note also that there's also 17 casinos in Canada owned and operated by a national confederation of tribes, and there are cultural and historical links between them and a number of US recognized tribal nations.
As understood at the time of drafting and ratification, only Native Americans who lived on tribal land under tribal law were considered not "subject to [the] jurisdiction" of the United States. "Civilized" natives who had left their tribes and were living as part of "white" society were understood to be confirmed as citizens by the provisions, which was regarded as a feature by most supporters of the amendment and as a bug by many opponents.
The drafting debates make clear that they were thinking of the same category as the "Indians not taxed" mentioned in a different part of the 14th amendment: there was quite a bit of discussion in committee on the matter, both for the amendment itself and for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from which the language was lifted. A proposal to append "excluding Indians not taxed" to the birthright citizenship provisions was voted down on the grounds that it was redundant with the "subject to their jurisdiction".
This is a good article on the drafting and adoption of the citizenship clause, with emphasis on its effect on the status of natives:
https://escholarship.org/content/qt2f16j3ng/qt2f16j3ng_noSplash_2ed6c31d9e9554987434a23cd37a2dd9.pdf
That's an interesting paper, but I'm not fully convinced by it. Beck argues that the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act was unconstitutional which I've never heard argued before.
I hadn't heard that argument before either, and I'm also inclined to disagree with it. If I understanding Beck's argument correctly, he believes it's unconstitutional because it extends birthright citizenship to classes that were not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th amendment. I am not sure where he's getting the idea that the 14th amendment language forbids extending citizenship by statute, though; I've always read it as a minimum only, not as a maximum. At the very least, Congress ought to have the power to offer naturalized citizenship (under enumerated Article I powers) by default to tribal citizens.
Fascinating paper: "Fundamental constraints to the logic of living systems" by Ricard Solé et al. Hat tip to Sabine Hossenfelder for mentioning it in a recent Backreaction video: "New Study Finds Alien Life Must Be Similar To Us".
Extrapolating further than Hossenfelder... The argument has been made that life could emerge in universes with different sets of dimensionful and dimensionless constants than ours, but the reasoning in this paper makes it look much less likely. Indirectly, this paper lends support to the fine-tuning argument for the laws and constants of our universe. (And, as Lee Smolin has pointed out, there could be mechanisms for this without resorting to a creator entity.)
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2024.0010
The sink a puddle finds itself in is no evidence for anyone having wanted a puddle to build itself there.
But think about how fortunate it is that beaches are next to bodies of water. Surely some creator set that up for us.
This is just what comes to mind everytime I hear of a creator entity in this context.
Since we're all arguing over the inauguration and its aftermath, thoughts on the pardon for the Silk Road guy? Yes, victory for Libertarianism; no, he's a criminal or enabler of crime?
Not incompatible: yes, he's a criminal, and yes, he enabled crime, but the laws he was sentenced for breaking were bad and ought not to exist, and it's good that he's free. Yes, a victory for libertarianism, albeit a small one; more a symbolic victory than anything else.
All the pardons I hear about lately seem deeply wrong to me, starting with Hunter Biden up until (and including) this one.
I'm just asking myself, who thought it was a good idea the US President should have this power and why? Presumably there were good reasons? Do they still apply? If not, can this not be done away with and everyone will be better off?
When I was a history major discussing the Constitutional Convention minutes and the Federalist Papers in senior-year seminars, at least one student would inevitably get to sputtering about the insanity of such a blanket power being in the hands of one individual. At that time the sparking example would generally be Ford's pardon of Nixon, though I do also recall hypotheticals being voiced along the lines of what has just now occurred.
Eventually the professor would sigh and say, yes that is how it strikes us today. But you need to step back to the Framers' context: they had no experience even on paper of an independent legal system with judges who sought objectively correct verdicts. The British criminal justice system that had ever existed as of 1783 wasn't that even in theory, never mind how it worked in places like France or other European nations. By "unfortunate guilt" Hamilton meant what we would call evidence-free verdicts issued by kangaroo courts, presided over by judges among whom simple incompetence was a welcome straw to grasp at for defendants. There was no such concept as public defenders, only the wealthiest people ever had defense attorneys, a huge range of crimes were subject to the death penalty, there was no such thing as an appeals court unless you were powerful enough to get an audience with the Crown Council, etc etc.
This is why in that era there was a rich oral and printed fairy-tale literature involving the miraculous freeing of wronged persons by benevolent monarchs. And it's why a majority of the Framers viewed an unlimited presidential pardon as essential as a ray of hope for justice.
I am firmly in the camp that the pardon power stopped making sense quite a while ago, and needs to be amended out of existence or at least seriously brought within explicit boundaries. But, I did take the professors' point about it as written in the original Constitution.
Thanks for the context :)
I think somebody should probably have dug into the question of whether he tried to have several people murdered first (there was some evidence for this but he was not specifically tried for it).
As a libertarian, I think selling drugs should be legal and transferring money anonymously should be legal. Hiring hit men to kill people who might blab about this, properly is and ought to remain illegal even if you "had" to do it because it was the only way to keep The Man from stopping all your libertarian fun. Likewise hacking other people's computers to support the enterprise, etc.
So there's a libertarian case for pardoning Ulbrecht on the drug-dealing and money-laundering charges but leaving him to rot in jail on the RICO and hacking charges. But even that case fails the test here, because it calls for pardoning *all* the drug dealers and money launderers, not just the one who is a big libertarian celebrity.
A full pardon for just Ulbrecht, is just wrong.
As a libertarian, I believe in the rule of law. Even if I think that a law is wrong doesn't mean that I don't think people should be punished for breaking it.
If you think that a particular law is wrong then the appropriate course of action is to campaign to change it, not to just disobey it.
If you can get away with it, flouting a law you want gone might be the most effective way of weakening it into irrelevance.
Obviously appalling; par for the course.
What really bugs me is that this was supposedly done as a favour to the Libertarians.
As a libertarian-leaning person there's so, so many things that I'd rather have than this. Like how about a 0.01% cut to tax rates?
Hard to get upset about.
I would prefer someone to get at least 20 years for running a (fledgling) crime empire.
But I'd still rank this in the lower half of the 2025 pardons ranked by objectionability
Yeesh. I'd really like to disagree with this but, can't.
The Constitution's poorly-defined pardon power has always seemed like something that was just sitting there waiting for serious abuse. Various recent POTUSes have used it in ways that were annoying but not huge in the bigger picture....feels like we're really now seeing how bad it can easily be.
And with that door pushed open a good ways it becomes easier to imagine some next uses of it that would be outright banana-republic stuff.
No; he was convicted of a crime and serving a sentence; we have learned nothing to suggest he didn't do the things he was convicted of doing, and we have done nothing and are planning to do nothing to make the things he was convicted of doing legal. If I were to start an assassination market today I'd risk ending up in jail; so why should he go free?
If you want him pardoned because the things he did should be legal, make them legal /then/ pardon him. At least sign executive orders to that effect; they'd fit right in with the rest of the EOs flooding out into the world right now.
I've attempted to intuitively explain Bayesian Reasoning. I visualize probability mass, which greatly helps to make correct arguments, for example about the origins of COVID-19.
https://blog.purpureus.net/posts/bayesian-reasoning-on-maps/
If you liked Scott's post on the Rootclaim vs Peter Miller debate on COVID-19 origins, you might like this.
Good analysis, actually strengthened my view of zoonotic origins. A small nit to pick: the wording about summing to 1 makes an impression that it’s only Bayesian, i.e., conditional probabilities that sum to 1. I know you didn’t mean it this way, but for someone not familiar with probabilities theory it may sound like this.
Thanks! After re-reading the passage, it's not immediately clear to me how to formulate this better. I'll see if I can update this to make it clear that probably densities in general have to sum up to one. (actually, it's the integral over all the map that is =1. I debated about whether to write this in the post, then decided that "sum up to" was an acceptable simplification. But I admit I might not always have chosen the right level of rigor)
You’re most welcome! A couple more things though:
1 on your high-rez map, you meant to place the red blob over the market, not the institute, correct? That’s where the first cases occurred?
2 after giving it some thought, I have some doubts that the reasoning is correct. A lab leak at the institute would not necessarily cause the first cases to occur at the institute location. Why would they? The researchers don’t live there. All it would take is for a researcher to bring contamination to the market (which is a) close by, and b) popular crowded unsanitary place), and get it started from there…
I'm skeptical that a purely geographic map is going to be much use here, except at the coarsest levels. Cities are designed to minimize the impact of geometry by e.g. laying out public transportation so that it is easy for people to get to places they want to go, even if they're on the other side of town.
At the macro scale, "everybody in Wuhan spends most of their time in Wuhan", works. At the micro scale, it's probably safe to assume that when people want to eat at a fast-food restaurant or buy something from a convenience store, they probably pick one of the ones close to where they live. But for more unique locations, this breaks down. The Wuhan institute of Virology is going to attract a disproportionate fraction of Wuhan's virologists and BSL-trained laboratory technicians, and the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market is going to attract a disproportionate fraction of Wuhan's exotic bushmeat afficionados, in both cases regardless of where in Wuhan they happen to live.
What we'd need is a cultural-economic map, showing the connections between people and various businesses, employers, etc. And I don't know where you'd find that, but I do know that we need that map and not the purely geographic one.
I'm inclined to agree. Even though some maps are more precise and make better assumptions than others, all of them remain approximations.
At the same time, the approximations seem to work well in many cases. For example, if you plot the first COVID-19 patients on a map over time, you can see concentric circles around the Huanan market. In that case, geographic distance seems to proxy the cultural/economic/social distance pretty well.
I was thinking about the limits of this approach yesterday only to find John's response this morning. I pretty much agree with his points, too.
Another thing though: I'm not even convinced that a Bayesian approach to this particular problem is helpful beyond a very coarse initial estimate. There's just a gap of knowledge: we don't know if the initial cases can be traced to any specific individuals connected to the lab, nor we know which traders from the markets were the initial vector(s). Bayesian framework is not particularly helpful if the probability space is not defined (or maybe even thinking about this in terms of "probabilities" is wrong).
Important questions.
The map should be centered on the Institute of Virology, because the map answers this question: "given the lab leak hypothesis, where would the first cases be found?" All the maps in the post represent the same hypothesis, albeit with different levels of simplification.
I'd encourage you to draw your own map, based on your knowledge of how COVID-19 spreads. This is a bit tricky because we have to pretend we don't know where the pandemic started, and be as impartial as possible. Your map might well end up putting some mass on places that are 20 kilometers away across the river. But the bulk of the mass would likely be closer to the Institute.
If you want to go further, you can then draw a map for the alternate hypothesis as well. That would probably be zoonosis, so your map would have most mass in places where humans and animals meet. Then you can plot the actual location of the initial cases on both maps, and measure the density for each hypothesis. The quotient between the two numbers is the Bayes factor, ie, how much the evidence should boost your credence in the better hypothesis.
It's somewhat laborious, maybe not worth doing :-) If you do draw maps, the benefits are:
- it makes hypotheses explicit, and reveals potentially wrong assumptions
- it ensures that probability densities are regular (sum to one)
- It ensures that all the geographic evidence is taken into account exactly once. You're less likely to miscount different bits of evidence that are both dependent on location
very good analysis. I agree with the conclusion and I like the idea of “zooming”.
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/trump-administration-issues-executive-order-to-promote-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture-among-other-directives/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/
Trump was inspired by the recent ACX articles and the 2025 subscriber poll and has issued an executive order that "Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government. "
The architecture article in the last links post, which I enjoyed and highly recommended, made a convincing argument that beautiful architecture is effectively entirely an uncaptured positive externality that benefits society at large but does not benefit owners/investors/tenants. It (or perhaps something it linked, I cannot find it now) cites this particularly striking example of a bunch of boring skyscrapers set up specifically to stare at the beautiful NY state capitol building https://i.imgur.com/w7Edw4a.jpeg .
I think Trump's EO makes a ton of sense; if we want beautiful buildings and private developers can't capture the benefit of building them, the government should be building them for us to look at, much like the government is the one to open public parks, public libraries. Public gazing building exteriors
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-skyscrapers-became-glass-boxes Last week's article
I believe he had done something similar the last time around, no?
Did anything come from it?
I believe Biden reversed Trump's original EO on day 1.
I got a message to fellow ACX commenters from Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).
The message is, you are a herd of cats (or perhaps one aggregate cat?) chasing one laser pointer.
"NBC NEWS: What is your biggest concern moving forward, and what’s kind of the biggest thing that you think Democrats need to address?
FETTERMAN: It’s like he’s the guy with the laser pointer, and we’re going to be the cat chasing around here or there. “He did that. Can you believe [it]? I can’t believe he appointed so and so.” And like, I’m not going to be that. I’m not that guy. I’m not that Democrat. Because we knew that’s what’s going to happen." "
This is from https://www.yahoo.com/news/john-fetterman-says-democrats-stop-214003770.html .
It would be one thing to argue against going after every little thing Trump did because you want to make more focused critiques. It's another to argue against it because you don't want to criticize Trump at all, or at least do so only very mildly. Problem with Fetterman is he's in the latter camp. He isn't ignoring some scandals to focus on others, he's just ignoring shit.
Republicans did a "kitchen sink" strategy against Biden, and it worked in making him unpopular. They didn't pull punches because they were worried about getting distracted or whatever.
Do you think Biden is unpopular because Republicans pulled a kind of dirty trick against him?
To be true, that would require that the criticisms of Biden (including his advanced age and obvious cognitive decline) were made up or would only have been noticed because of the Republicans. For the first charge (made up) we know that wasn't true, Biden really was impaired. For the second, other than for partisan reasons, is there any argument against Republicans (or anyone else) sharing important and true information about the faults of their political opponents?
I think complaining about oldness is fair game, and "kitchen sink" isn't necessarily the same as "dirty trick". It's not all necessarily honest, but much of it is bog-standard politics - "bad thing happened! It's the president's fault! Welcome to [current president]'s America!"
When Biden did stuff or when bad things happened, Republicans didn't complain about staying focused on one message, they complained like the above about everything all the time, and then used their own complaints as evidence the country was spiraling out of control.
Whereas Democrats have kept going on about how they won't respond to everything trump does, they'll stay focused on the price of eggs or whatever ... today before the chaos of the spending thing forced their hand, Democrats' big plan for today was to have a press conference about the Jan 6 pardons - i.e. the news from a week ago - which they hadn't bothered to do yet. In today's information environment that's malpractice.
I'm not from Pennsylvania and know next to nothing about Fetterman's record. I just think that the laser pointer metaphor is right on the nose, and hilariously so.
We're clearly headed for another 4 years of "OMG did he really say that? *pounce*", and this comment section is providing a preview. Heck, now that we have Musk too, we can spend even more time debating what exactly a person on the spectrum meant by a clumsy hand gesture. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like a waste of time and energy.
I do think there's a danger of everybody sliding into playing Ain't It Awful. I for one am always grateful to hear from people who know enough about whatever the issue in question is to explain why the Obvious Infuriating Outcome is unlikely to come into being. And there's a sort of generalized version of that process that anybody can do: Out of 100 amazingly terrible plans we read that Trump has:
-some are actually just ideas he tossed off once, but the press treating it like something he is clearly committed to doing. Of those that remain
-some he just won't ever try to do. Of those that remain
-some he will try hard to do, but they will stall out or only take place in an attenuated form because
---the people he chose to implement them are dumb and incompetent..
---the people he chose to implement them annoy him so he keeps firing them and hiring new ones and things don't get off the ground
---groups who object to the project block it for long periods with lawsuits etc.
---it turns out to be unpopular with the public so Congress won't go along with it
---Trump loses interest in the project
So remember to take into account the very substantial shrinkage that is likely to occur as 100 Amazingly Terrible Plans attempt the journey to becoming Amazingly Terrible Projects and Policies.
Careful there Eremolalos, you're sounding dangerously sensible and are at risk of being labelled a filthy centrist! 😁
He is going to push against legal boundaries as hard as he can, so we’ll see how it turns out.
Keep in mind that his supporters and many centrists feel the same way about Biden. Student loan forgiveness, repeatedly extending the rent moratorium, Title IX changes, etc.
I for one really really hope that this experience convinces both parties to actually do something to limit the power of the president. We weren't meant to run the nation through executive orders.
What I fear will happen is that both sides will want to fight dirtier to win the presidency and we'll be whiplashing back and forth every time the president's party changes.
Sure, i get it. My prediction is this is going to be an order of magnitude greater, but like I said; we will see.
I doubt that my opinion of him is any better than yours, and I am def on the pessimistic side regarding how this will turn out. I was really just giving advice about ways to decrease the chance of getting stuck in rage and despair loops.
I am fairly sure that our opinions of Donald Trump are pretty similar. I am on the fence about how it will turn out. I am doing my best to remain dispassionate.
Such advice is necessary. the curse of interesting times is upon us.
That's the rational take on this. But you, of all the people, probably know that many (most?) completely freaked out people now are anything but rational and just about impossible to get to listen to reason.
I recall being like this one time in my life, fortunately for a very brief period of time (5 days or so, a side effect of a prescription drug). At that time, I would see a beautiful tree or hear beautiful music and think something like "what does it matter if we are all going to die very soon". I hope most people currently very upset are not as badly off, but I'm getting worried that many of them might be.
Well, there's no fixing wild desperation, but there's a gray zone where reminders of ways to stay realistic actually help. The people I know are generally much calmer than they were right after the election. Back then, knew of several people who were considering getting tubes tied because they were sure that very soon abortion would be absolutely impossible to get anywhere in the US. I haven't heard any of that sort of hysteria in the last few weeks.
I did not know this was getting better. That's good to hear - thank you very much.
By "very soon", I was meaning "something like within a year". If you'd tried to explain to me that that wasn't likely, it wouldn't have worked. Believe me, the irrational part was really bad.
>Point is, you shouldn't be afraid even if you did actually know for a fact that everyone you know and love is going to die within a year.
I think whether that would drive some action would depend a lot on the particular circumstances. Particularly unpleasant demise? 99.99% unavoidable or just 90%? Any pressing items one wants to do in one's bucket list that can be done in that year?
Again, you're suggesting giving a rational argument to someone who at that point was not a rational person. I might agree that you're right now, but back at that time I wouldn't have even been able to consider it.
Is it possible for someone to actually wind up smarter after a stroke?
Seriously though, the laser pointer is the best description I've heard of Trump's current strategy. He has things he actually cares about (like Mount McKinley) and stuff he doesn't care about (like the Gulf of America) and he's going to keep his opponents running around from one thing to the next to try and get some of his actual agenda through.
I'm not going to call it a brilliant strategy, I'm not even sure whether it's a good strategy, but it undeniably is the strategy.
Flood the zone.
-Steve Bannon
I've been wondering whether it's possible to end up smarter after a stroke ever since Fetterman became coherent. It might not be about intelligence, even - it might be about what he is now ready to say in public.
But yes, the laser pointer thing is definitely the strategy, and credits to Fetterman for the brilliant (precise, visual, funny) description.
I'm no longer sure I should've quoted him here, though. I was hoping to cheer up the depressed people a bit, but, judging by the first comment I got, I'm likely to be making it worse.
I don't like Fetterman, but unfortunately if the Democrats want to win elections they desperately need senators like him.
Granted, though Shapiro as a governor has his own specific policies/accomplishments to run on than one rookie member of a legislature ever does.
A more direct response to the idea that Fetterman is the one version of a Dem who can win Senate seats in PA might be that he won his seat against a uniquely feeble Republican nominee. (A quack TV doctor who'd never held public office and didn't even reside in the state he was proposing to represent.)
I've been thinking about Scott's post on class recently. I've been trying to figure out why the upper class would want to isolate/insulate itself from lower 'classes', i.e. those who didn't inherit their wealth - whether they're rich or not. I have some thoughts on what might drive this phenomenon (below) but don't have direct experience. Perhaps someone with direct ties to the intergenerationally wealthy community could provide insight/correction:
Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all. Far more often, it's all the 'friends and family' who show up asking for money. "You're rich, right? You can afford it. Aren't we friends?"
Getting wealthy is a different skill set than staying wealthy. Few people who have the former also have the latter. Getting wealthy may be a matter of doing some useful thing in the world, (something many upper class people may have no experience with). But if you don't know how to stay wealthy ... what's the old saying? "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Staying wealthy is partly just sticking to long-term investment strategies. These don't have to be all that complicated. A simple mutual fund will kick back enough from $50M to live off a 6-figure monthly salary ... so long as you never touch the principle + inflation-adjusted growth. And so long as you don't listen to Uncle Saul and his fool-proof plan to triple your money by investing in his new app: Pawnzee.AI
Let's say you find yourself with a lot of money that you wisely put aside, watching it grow while living comfortably. You've fended off the first-generation hounds sniffing about trying to get you to give them part of it. This probably cost you some relationships, as some begin to see you as miserly or something. You've stopped being compared to E. Scrooge at Christmas, but mostly because you pared down the invite list to your holiday party.
Now you have to form new relationships with an eye toward protecting your wealth, since anyone who finds out you're rich will likely try and get some of it if they can find a way to beg, borrow, or steal it from you. Perhaps you could just keep quiet about your money and live conservatively, but if your spending allowance is $100k/month there's no way you can hide your wealth. Plus, you have to think about inheritance. You need to set your children up to form friendships that won't jeopardize the wealth you hand down.
Obviously, you can't hang out with regular people or send the kids to normal schools. Private school would be better - something with absurdly high tuition, to keep out people who don't already have money. The point of $10k/month tuition isn't to provide your children the 'best' education, but to insulate them from forming friendships with non-wealthy kids, like what you already had to fight off to keep your wealth.
You also need to insulate yourself from hanging out with newly-rich people who don't have good money habits. If you're spending time with a sports star who makes and spends $12M every year, you'll either be expected to adopt similar spending routines, or you'll just start thinking in some of the same ways they do. Hence why it's not possible to be accepted as 'upper class' as first generation wealthy. You'd have to demonstrate to the community you're someone they can trust.
Finally, you don't talk about wealth or how much things cost. Ever. Anyone who does this is signaling that they're new at wealth. They're risky, and should therefore be shunned.
There's no 'rule' saying you have to do all these things. But every time you don't follow the rules you risk your intergenerational wealth. It only takes one generation of mismanagement to kick your family back into the middle class.
Maybe you discover some school with low enough tuition to let in 'normal' kids. But they have a really good education program - far better than the $10k/mo private school - and so you decide to send your children there. You really like the school, and regularly make what the school considers 'large' donations, but to you aren't more than normal tuition. So far so good.
But your son brings his friend home, and the kid is surprised to note you have 'staff'. Pretty soon, all the kids know him as the 'rich kid'. There are expectations. You have a choice to make: you can be 'generous', which will only ratchet up expectations more and more, or you can be 'private' with your money, which will be seen as miserly. If you hold back at all, your son will be ostracized, hate you for it, and potentially learn the lesson that being conservative with money is social suicide.
When he inherits, he won't be like you. And he'll blow up the trust fund.
I'm not sure if there are other ways to maintain very high intergenerational wealth, or if this is just one strategy for doing so. It seems like a protective mechanism, though, and one that creates a kind of selection bias, where anyone who doesn't adopt these protective habits won't remain wealthy for long.
Or maybe this is all just pattern matching, and 'upper class' people aren't responding to incentives so much as just being snobs?
Suppose I win a few hundred million dollars in a lottery tomorrow. What happens next?
Other than being very happy, I would also be quite scared, if the word gets out. Because that seems like a perfect opportunity for someone to kidnap my children and demand ransom. Or kidnap my wife, or me... should I also worry about my extended family?
Suppose this problem goes away. In reality it would probably involve something inconvenient, like having bodyguards follow us all day long. But for the sake of thought experiment, suppose the danger just somehow magically goes away and the probability of violence drop to zero. Oh, I would also need to protect my house, because even if all my money goes to index funds, there will still be some morons out there imagining that I have a stash of gold hidden under my bed.
Next, I would expect hordes of scammers and beggars. Even the nice people would suddenly notice that some problems around them could perhaps be fixed by throwing some money at them, and here happens to be a guy who has lots of money. (It would be nice to have better computers at local school. A child living in the same city might benefit from getting a surgery. This guy, who is totally not a crackpot, has invented a new theory of everything, and would like to publish a book. A shelter for lost puppies. A shelter for the homeless. Something something against sexism and racism. Support for the local artists. Etc.) Suddenly it would be as if I am personally responsible for all the problems around me. And it's not like I am somehow opposed to the idea of helping others -- I probably would spend a large fraction of the money on charity anyway -- but it's different when I choose the causes, and when people are constantly coming to me with their own ideas and I have to keep rejecting most of them, and some of them are not very nice about being rejected.
The calls I currently get from people trying to sell me insurance, or convince me that I have some money in a fund I have never heard about and all that I need to withdraw that money is to install some backdoor on my computer and log in to my online banking, that would be nothing compared to what would happen next. If you know that someone has millions, it makes economical sense to spend thousands on a personalized attack. I would probably be getting threatening letters from lawyers, people would "accidentally" bump into me on the street and cry that I broke their arms, and women I have never met would accuse me of sexual abuse and demand financial compensation. If after each trouble I stopped doing the thing that brought me in trouble, soon I would have to stop interacting with people completely.
...so, if there is some island for rich people, I would probably have to move there just to avoid all of this, and get back some kind of normal life (for a new value of "normal").
If I could get rich and reliably keep it a secret, that would be the best option. I would probably buy a slightly larger apartment (or maybe two normal apartments next to each other, that would be less suspicious). I would quit my job (and maybe create a fake one, so I could pretend that many activities I do are a part of my job). I would donate to charities anonymously (or maybe using some non-profit that I would secretly own, in case I might want to take some credit in the future). I would try to seem like a normal guy living a normal life... except that somehow I have no financial worries, always have free time when I need it, and the causes I care about keep getting financial support from mysterious strangers.
...but if you are born in a rich family where your parents didn't follow this strategy, this is not an option.
> Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money?
I think there is an industry of scammers specialized on this kind of people. Like, if you are a pro athlete, they will contact you, tell you they provide financial services for pro athletes, and offer to take care of your money so that you can fully focus on your career. So you put your savings into their funds, and... ten years later most of the money is gone, because the fund had a 2% annual fee or something. But it's all perfectly legal, and before your money is gone, you will probably provide a reference for other pro athletes.
> Or maybe this is all just pattern matching, and 'upper class' people aren't responding to incentives so much as just being snobs?
Most people want to be liked by others, and they play all kinds of status games. If you want other rich people to see you as "one of us", that probably includes a list of things you can and cannot do. There are probably opinions you need to adopt, topics you need to avoid, etc.
Now maybe you could live a double life, and keep one persona when interacting with your fellow rich, and another persona when interacting with normies. But can your children do the same? (And do they even have a motivation to do so?) Can you trust them to keep it secret that you e.g. teach them potentially useful skills, such as programming? (Rich people sometimes signal their confidence in their wealth by conspicuously avoiding the kind of skills that normies need for their jobs. Merely being able to have a job is already low-status among the people who know they will never need a job.) It is okay to be a rebel if you choose so, but you probably don't want to make that choice for your kids; and if you do, there is a chance they will hate you for that.
> Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all.
I’m fairly dubious about absolutely all of that. Even lottery winners.
In fact I researched and here’s counter to that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2023/08/29/debunking-the-myth-the-surprising-truth-about-lottery-winners-and-life-satisfaction/
(And remember lottery winners don’t mostly win millions, but thousands. It’s probably the latter who lose it all).
Any middle income person who can save anything at all from his pay check isn’t going to blow a lottery fortune. If you can save $10k on a $100k income you probably are not spending the $1m from the lottery in a year, and with larger numbers it becomes nearly impossible.
Without searching I’m going to stick with my priors that movie stars, and high earning sports stars also die rich.
Interesting. Looking a bit more deeply, I think the literature is mixed on this one. Looks like there are clearly lots of cases of people who come into money blowing it all, including pro athletes, pop stars, actors, and lottery winners. At the same time, I think your point is valid that it's not as common as is often portrayed.
This diminishes the "snobbery as cultural shielding" hypothesis a bit, suggesting that association with 'new money' isn't as much of a risk. But the fact that people clearly do still blow up suggests that if you're old money you should practice some level of caution when dealing with new money.
On the lottery: annuity vs. lump sum, I saw one paper suggest in a survey of lottery winners people who take the annuity are more likely to spend it as it comes in, while people who take the lump sum tend to save/invest. This suggests various subgroups, including the spendthrifts, the long-term savers, and within the savers there will be the intergenerational savers contrasted with the savers who eat away at the principle commensurate with their life expectancy.
> Consider the research about lottery winners. Within a few years, they tend to be poor again. Same with most people who suddenly come into money, such as pro athletes, pop stars, and movie stars. Why do most people lose all their money? Sometimes it's the parents 'managing it for them', but really just blowing it all.
I’m fairly dubious about absolutely all of that. Even lottery winners.
In fact here’s counter to that:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2023/08/29/debunking-the-myth-the-surprising-truth-about-lottery-winners-and-life-satisfaction/
(And remember lottery winners don’t mostly win millions, but thousands. It’s probably the latter who lose it all).
Any middle income person who can save anything at all from his pay check isn’t going to blow a lottery fortune. If you can save $10k on a $100k income you probably not spending the $1m from the lottery in a year, and with larger numbers it becomes nearly impossible.
Without searching I’m going to stick with my priors that movie stars, and high earning sports stars die rich.
I'm not against what you've put together generally, but the rich people I know endlessly talk about money by constantly whining how expensive everything is and acting as if they have no money what so ever (i.e., for their new boat).
I also know plenty of middle class people that are fantastic at preserving money long term - the whole FIRE movement and stuff.
Are you sure your "rich" friends aren't new money?
Yeah. Their children will probably be *bored* of listening to the endless talk about money. For them, it will be "the boring stuff my old boring parents can't stop talking about, when there is so much fun to have instead".
I know a guy who has rich parents. He can't keep a job... tried a few, but always quit it after a few months because he didn't like something about it, and then always took a year of vacation before he started looking for a new job. He has a business online, but it makes like a few hundred euros a month; it's more like an excuse to spend the entire day online, pretending to do something useful. He once got married and had a child, but then got divorced, because taking care of the child was also boring (now his parents pay the child support that he owes).
His parents... they really don't want him to do this. They want him to stand on his own feet; they would much prefer to keep all the money they made for their own retirement instead. But he does a few things now and then to convince them that he is *trying* (he sometimes gets a job... that he then quits; he has an online business... that doesn't make money), and at the end of the day they always take a mercy on him, and provide him with free accommodation and food. They refuse to give him cash, but they sometimes pay his debts.
So this is an example of the money going away already in the second generation. When the guy inherits his parents' money, he will probably retire poor and leave his own child with nothing.
There is a way to avoid this outcome if the parents make so much money that they can create a trust fund for their kids. That's basically a machine that runs on its own, and keeps producing money at a certain rate. If the parents set up the rules so that the children get the money produced by the fund, but are not allowed to interfere with how the fund works (and need to pass it on to their own children), this is a way to create inter-generational wealth. If they get a child or a grandchild talented enough to make their own wealth, that is a bonus; but if the talent skips a generation or two, the money keeps flowing.
Without such mechanism, each generation flips a coin whether the wealth stops with them.
I would argue that this is ascribing too much to conscious decisions (whether snobbishness or some form of self-defense) when a much simpler answer is inertia. People drift to what is easier, and easier is your social strata. There are positive pushes that make it easier to interact with people of like status, and building relationships across strata almost always entails some level of power mismatch, which doesn't help either party feel comfortable, even absent a culture that conditions us to distrust relationships where one party has outsize power relative to the other.
Social-
Where do you meet friends? Who forms your close circle? People you spent a lot of time around, whether in school or at work. You went to a regular school and you struck out for the professional class, you may no longer have common experiences with your old school friends (assuming the color of your collar is different from theirs). At work, you meet people of similar class - lawyers meet lawyers, doctors meet doctors, mechanics meet mechanics, farm laborers meet farm laborers. Maybe you are an engineer who knows a bunch of doctors because you are involved in biomed, maybe you are a lawyer who knows a lot of finance folks because you do finance. You'd have to go out of your way to bond across social strata, and even further to find the time to consciously step outside your normal interactions on a consistent basis. Maybe your old friend from the neighborhood invites you to her Superbowl party, and you actually make time. Her friends are all in sales or the trades, just like her. Once you finish talking about the game, they start talking about things for which you have no point of reference. Their jokes are a little boorish and while they don't mind your nebbish programmer humor, they are happy to continue ribbing one another over who got ripped off at the car wash more. You awkwardly drink your light beer (seriously, would it kill them to have a decent brew?) then go home and talk to your old friend once a year while hanging out with your programmer buddies every other week. You could invite your mechanic friend, but they are less thrilled at the idea of casually blowing a hundred bucks on a board games cafe than you are and rain check.
Childrearing-
Let's stretch that to children. Ok, you are upper middle class and made a best friend that is lower middle class (maybe they have a scholarship to your prestigious middle school). On your summer holidays, your parents take you to Bali. Or on a trek across the Andes. Or send you to space camp in Switzerland. Your friend's family goes to the local beach. Maybe you wish you could take your summer holidays together, but there is no amount of goodwill that is going to bridge the gap of "who has X budget to blow on a trip". You drift apart and end up sparking connections with the kids of another family that went to the Pyrenees and bond over your love of mountains. Maybe your poor friend also loves hiking, and would have adored the Alps, but that doesn't lead to a healthy relationship. It is a lot easier to be good friends with those who have shared access to common interests.
Romantic-
You meet a girl in college whose family owns a chalet in Colorado. She flies out with her friends every weekend on their friend's chopper (his parents paid for pilot licensing courses and it was a really sweet graduation gift to reward his diligence). You sense a lot of chemistry, but your parents took you once to the nearest ski slope and that was the extent of your exposure. Even with her bending over backwards to get you a seat on the chopper and letting you crash at the chalet, you don't have the kind of pocket money to blow on lift tickets at Vail. She finds an equally interesting person who is not unlike you in every way, but does have a season pass. You can write great poetry, but this other person can do it too, and can additionally suggest doing so from their folks' beach house in Nantucket.
My point wasn't that this has to follow conscious decisions. It was that if associating too much with "poorer" people creates a risk to wealth stability, the only people who will have long-term wealth will be those who follow the observed set of behaviors that exclude people whose wealth isn't established/inherited.
This could be intentional, for the reasons I outlined, or unconscious social sorting mechanisms you discuss. Either way, the distance appears to be more than just establishment of social norms, but also selection bias that weeds out social defectors from the wealthy class.
Thank you for taking the time to follow up and emphasize your point!
To clarify my own, I would suggest that there are two distinct phenomena described here which are somewhat interrelated- (1) certain traits/approaches are beneficial to building/maintaining wealth, and (2) wealth-based self-sorting effects are magnified in capitalist/quasi-meritocratic societies. Avoiding the poor is not a causal factor but a strongly correlated one. I don't know that this impacts your direct hypothesis but possibly does the takeaways.
Why do you think they're magnified in these societies? Is there a society where we do not observe this pattern? I can't think of a non-capitalist country where it hasn't been a factor, from feudalist to communist and socialist. Wealth sorting as a persistent feature of human societies (larger than tribes) suggests it's a persistent feature, probably driven by incentives. This is in contrast to the idea that it's all cultural ("they're just snobs").
Its breeding. It’s correlated with wealth.
How about the alternative hypothesis that the lower classes are just a bit annoying?
Certainly, the best class is the class that you, Lomwad, just happen to be part of. I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.
Well, one class has to be the best (for a smart nerd), so which one would be your choice and why?
Definitely the class that I'm in, too.
Well the middle classes, with their scientists, and engineers, doctors, IT guys, historians,shop owners, researchers, administrators (etc etc etc) are so obviously so much better interesting and useful people than those born to wealth, the people who live to lunch, that it’s hard ti believe we are even having this debate. Get rid of the firmer and civilisation collapses, get rid of the latter and a few restaurants close.
> gives my kids the highest chance of being happy and productive members of society
My friend's father grew up under communism in one of the old Soviet Block countries. He loved it, and felt that the fall of communism was the worst thing ever.
The problem? Capitalism has too many degrees of freedom. You're free to succeed, yes, but you're also free to fail. This man wasn't ambitious. He graduated school without distinction and went to work in a factory. The government gave him a small apartment. He had what he needed and nothing more, but he didn't care because there was no risk of complete failure and destitution.
No need to plan and worry for the future either. When he got married, he was assigned a slightly larger apartment. Then larger again when he had children. He never has much, but he didn't care so long as he didn't have to worry about the important things.
Many of us want to make a difference in the world, to engage with it in an exchange of meaning. But some people just want to coast along, enjoy the scenery, watch some football, have a family, and cross the finish line without having to worry about some major disaster messing up the plan.
One thing that stuck in my memory from my history classes in college is that there's a long tradition of physical separation from the rest of society being used as a signifier of power and prestige, and that many princes and heads of major merchant families in Renaissance Italy deliberately modeled themselves on Roman practice along these lines as one of several things they were doing to cultivate an air of legitimate authority. There is still contact between the important people and the masses, but it's usually under deliberately arranged conditions that reinforce the notion that the leaders are above the rest of society and are doing you a favor by letting you interact with them at all. The central examples are stuff like a monarch giving a speech from the palace balcony or allowing selected commoners to bring supplications to him while he's holding court.
In American political tradition, this style was very much out of fashion for much of the 19th century, with most of the Capitol building and the White House open to the public most of the time. This was done as a deliberate rejection of the symbology of the leaders being separate from and above the people, to the point that mid-19th century Presidents (I have heard this of Lincoln and Grant, but imagine others were affected as well) desperately wanted to be able to exclude petitioners and job-seekers to keep interruptions to a manageable level, but felt duty-bound to be accessable.
Thanks for your thoughts. I think for political leadership there are clearly other reasons to stay separate from the masses than wealth protection. Not just what you discussed above, but also to make assassination more difficult.
The other big reason is to isolate the monarch to make sure they're dependent on palace insiders to make decisions. This system, where aides and bureaucrats fight for influence of the monarch through a sort of popularity contest, seems to have been common, and who's to say it's not partly at play in current or recent US administrations?
While there are wealthy elite who remain wealthy through political rent-seeking, like you're talking about, I'm more interested in wealthy elite who maintain wealth through capital inheritance. Back in the day that was by owning large estates and collecting rents from peasants. Today that looks more like trust funds handed down through the generations.
The failure mode for wealth derived from government rents is often some form of regime change. Financial ruin from capital inheritance seems to follow a different pattern, and should therefore respond to different incentives.
Average is useless here. Median is more useful.
> The average net worth of Americans was $1.06 million
On its own, this information does not tell you too much -- it could just be that the 1% are dominating.
More useful is to display the net worth by net worth percentile.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Net_Worth;demographic:nwcat;population:1,2,3,4;units:mean;range:1989,2022
(I deselected the 90-100% quantile because otherwise you can't see the rest.)
So your claim that there are plenty of "stealth millionaires" is true -- from the data it is clear that some households (minor caveat, that) in the 75-90% bracket already have a million.
1. Inflation has devalued the position of someone who is technically considered a millionaire.
2. This includes assets, particularly the home asset. If you pay off your $500k home, you'll find it much easier to live comfortably, and you'll be halfway to millionaire status. But you're also far from being able to live off your investment income, because most of your wealth isn't in the bank. If you sell your house, you still need somewhere to live, and now you've taken on a sizeable monthly housing payment.
Don't get me wrong, owning your home outright is similar to pulling a few thousand from investments without touching the principle that continues to grow. But it's not the exact same thing.
3. After illiquid home equity, the vast majority of wealth for most US households is retirement savings. This can't be accessed (not wisely) until old age, at which point it is used for income replacement. At that point, sure, you can live off the investment income. But this isn't the same as intergenerational wealth. Someone with a paid off $500k home and $1.2M in the bank could (assuming 10% average growth) pull $130k/year to live off of, while having just enough left over if they die at 85 to leave a small inheritance. (Nothing if they live until 90.)
4. If you save $16.9k/year under a mattress you'd have a million after 60 years. But that's not how retirement savings works. $1,400/month ($16.8) at 10% compounding interest from investments over 30 years is $3M. Enough to live very comfortably, for sure. But if you want to live off that kind of investment without eating into the principle, you'll need a lot more. At $30M, you can pull $100k/month and still see growth over time. There's a huge lifestyle difference between $10k/month and $100k/month. Middle class families aren't putting aside $14k/month from their paychecks.
5. I agree in principle with a lot of your points, and that there are a lot more millionaires out there than most people realize. Not everyone is dumb enough to buy a boat on a HELOC, lease a brand new car, then sign up for a timeshare, etc. Some people don't realize that the Joneses they're trying to keep up with have 7 figures in the bank and are cash buyers. I'm just saying that 7 figures doesn't represent anything like the kind of wealth it was when I was growing up.
You’re not really a millionaire if your net worth is a little over 1 million. I mean, you can be a homeless millionaire, but that’s no fun.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2023/08/29/debunking-the-myth-the-surprising-truth-about-lottery-winners-and-life-satisfaction/
Regarding the end-birthright-citizenship EO, Ilya Somin posted late yesterday:
"This is blatantly unconstitutional. Section 1 of the Amendment grants citizenship to anyone "born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." There is no exception for children of illegal migrants. I go over the relevant issues in detail in a recent Just Security article
[ https://www.justsecurity.org/105176/birthright-citizenship-undocumented-immigrants/ ]
where I also address various specious arguments to the effect that children of undocumented immigrants aren't covered because their parents are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US. I think it highly likely that courts will strike down this action, as the text and original meaning are clear, longstanding Supreme Court precedent points in the same direction, and there is broad (though not quite universal) cross-ideological agreement on the subject among legal scholars."
>There is no exception for children of illegal migrants.
Agreed. If the nation wants to change this, there is an amendment process for the Constitution. It might be reasonable public policy to change "born" to "born to a woman legally in the United States". If so, proponents should make the case and go through the amendment process. In the absence of the ratification of some such amendment, only the exceptions that are _already_ in the actual words of the Constitution, thank you.
> their parents are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the US.
I find this claim strange. If an undocumented/illegal immigrant is killed, will the murderer not be charged by US authorities? Or if they murder someone, will they not be charged in an US court?
I mean, if the mother was in that bizarre legal construction that is gitmo, or was part of an invading army, or had a diplomatic passport, then I could see the point about jurisdiction. (Edit: from reading wikipedia, it seems the latter two exceptions are indeed the ones often mentioned.)
But yes, at the end of the day, the language of the 14th means whatever the SCOTUS says it means. If Roe could be based on the due process clause, then certainly the SCOTUS could also argue that the word "jurisdiction" in the 14th means something completely different than what I would understand by that word.
However, I also don't think that the current SCOTUS will blatantly back Trump in whatever he does (e.g., they were not willing to overturn Biden's election no matter how loud he was whining).
From my understanding, federal courts will likely follow SCOTUS precedent (which seems to affirm a plain reading of the 14th).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_citizenship_in_the_United_States#U.S._Supreme_Court_case_law
Yes. The people who are not subject to the jurisdiction are diplomats and the like.
And now today 22 state attorneys general plus a couple of cities, in various combinations, have filed several federal lawsuits arguing basically the points that Somin summarized. They're seeking an expedited summary ruling that the EO is unconstitutional, and whichever way the initial ruling goes it will no doubt be appealed upward.
There is no guarantee that the SCOTUS will end up taking up the matter because there is no _right_ to SCOTUS review of anything. The Court does (still) often decline when the appellate court has ruled consistent with past SCOTUS precedents. It takes four justices to agree to take up an appeal, and then of course five to agree to order the overturn of a lower-court ruling.
>It takes four justices to agree to take up an appeal
Morbidly curious: How close is the SCOTUS to breaking under their workload? If it just took three justices to take up an appeal, would everything grind to a halt? Presumably it wouldn't make sense to tighten the appeal requirement to five justices, since that would make it almost the same as the requirement to overturn... (This is to say, the number _would_ be the same, but the criteria the justices use might be slightly different.)
Does it come down to there being _zero_ flexibility in the number of justices needed to take up an appeal?
pretty impressed an ACX reader is friends with someone who is quite close with Rav Chaim. Wow.
There was always a pretty heavy Orthodox Jewish representation.
Anyone else's stomach churning from seeing Elon Musk perform not one, but two (edit: three) nazi salutes at the White House?
Does he think it (along with all the other culture war BS) will distract from all the other awful shit they're about to do? Or is he just a fascist?
Either way, if this is the new normal, I'm starting to think America might be beyond repair.
(Edit: lol, the ADL are defending Elon. The Israel lobby does not give a single shit about Jews, folks)
Trolling, it seems like. He's obviously aware of exactly what he's doing, and that it will cause a shitstorm. But he also ensures a context with plausible deniability if you're a supporter. The shitstorm is _desired_.
It _is_ hilarious that the ADL defends rampant heiling, yes.
I've been thinking about this and while I'm somewhat reluctant to even ask the question, I will appreciate any answers: Does deliberately making a nazi salute while you are not a nazi (so just for trolling) a very bad thing? I'm just not sure, I think that being a nazi isn't bad axiomatically, it's bad because of the consequences of nazi politics (killings, forced eugenics, etc..), so if there are no bad consequences related to it, why is it even bad? I saw a lot of people in left wing spheres leaving Twitter because of the salute, and I'm thinking about whether I should or not. What would be moral?
Another but related note: As I imply in the previous paragraph, I don't think Elon is a nazi, but after searching I saw that Elon is supporting the Afd party and saw that the Afd party supports the banning of Kosher meat. I currently find the explanation that it's because of animal welfare very suspect as they don't ban factory farming which is magnitudes more horrifying. Can some explain what is up with this?
> Can some explain what is up with this?
Why exactly are people so sure that he doesn't have a problem with Jews? People expect racists/anti-Semites/etc to be foaming at the mouth or something. But Musk goes on podcasts and SNL and shit and is affable, joking around, even is friendly with Ben Shapiro.
None of that is inconsistent with having a problem with Jews!
> Does deliberately making a nazi salute while you are not a nazi (so just for trolling) a very bad thing?
I think that, in many cases at least, such people who would be described (by themselves and others) as "trolling" are, in fact, expressing genuine contempt for Jewish people and other groups that the Nazis targeted (even if they don't rise to the level of wanting mass murder). "Trolling" isn't actually inconsistent with this. Trolling isn't trolling unless it's aimed at some person or group. Who is it aimed at? Sometimes the answer is "everyone", but if you're doing it to an adoring crowd while practically acting as co-president, that can't be the answer.
I wish I could find it now but I recently came across a quote from a writer about how, in essence, trolling was a key tactic of how Nazis argued. But it was from the 1940s or something, not in the context of the modern Internet.
"But Musk goes on podcasts and SNL and shit and is affable, joking around, even is friendly with Ben Shapiro.
None of that is inconsistent with having a problem with Jews!"
If Musk had a problem with Jews to the point of wanting them all shipped to Dachau, I think it's safe to say that he would *not* be friendly with Ben Shapiro. Therefore, I think it's safe to say that either Musk has no problem with Jews, or has one nowhere near to Dachau levels.
This raises the question of how big a problem he could have. But then, any problem big enough is very likely to preclude being friendly with Ben Shapiro, any problem that isn't big enough to preclude it is not likely to be worth worrying about.
"I recently came across a quote from a writer about how, in essence, trolling was a key tactic of how Nazis argued."
Maybe, and maybe this is historically interesting; but other than that, so what? Trolling is also a key tactic of how a *lot* of people argue, including vastly more people who aren't Nazis.
> This raises the question of how big a problem he could have. But then, any problem big enough is very likely to preclude being friendly with Ben Shapiro, any problem that isn't big enough to preclude it is not likely to be worth worrying about.
I think history shows this is untrue.
As for the quote, here it is, from Jean-Paul Sartre
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
This argument assumes Musk is anti-Semitic, and is apparently being used to prove he is anti-Semitic.
I've watched the video, and I just can't believe anyone with sense can land on Elon being a Nazi. It's so clearly not what he said or meant. Even if I take out the "autistic and awkward" attempt to excuse, I'm still left with, what made you take leave of your senses in order to see it that way?
The first whatever whatever of the party was to ignore your eyes or some shit
- George 1984 Orwell
How obvious does it need to be?
this dude could come out on stage with a sauerkraut swastika carved into his forehead and his parasocial hangers-on would be all "no you don't understand he got real into shin Buddhism, but is too stupid to understand how mirrors work!”
at some point you've got to stop extending charity
Real live people use swastikas every day and they're not Nazis. Try harder.
Immediately proved his point. (Unless you're joking)
Nope. Making up a story and saying I'm dumb not to believe the story you made up doesn't convince. I saw the video myself. You saw it too (I should hope) and presumably with sound on and context before and after. If that's true and you still think the same, no story's going to convince me you haven't let an ideology (let's call it MDS, after TDS) inform your senses rather than the other way around. At some point you've got to look. Really look.
I did. He did the Nazi salute, all the Nazis were excited he did the Nazi salute, he did it again two times, and now conservatives are pissing on my boots and telling me it's raining.
I don't have to respect people desperately rationalizing reality out of existence, that shit is demeaning.
Even if they weren’t nazi salutes, it was weird/nutty/deranged. Seems likely premeditated/planned too.
Actual nazis apparently saw it as nazi salutes.
Supposedly being so smart, how could he have concluded it was anything like a good idea?
Doesn’t he have a car company to run?
Actual Nazis are for the most part quite stupid and desperate for approval. More so than most leftists, even.
The real question is why Musk does things that appear to pander to them. (The "nazi salute" is not an isolated thing.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-1234941337/
It's only a real question to the people whose chain gets yanked whenever he does this.
Which is the real answer to why he does this.
Your chain was yanked?
"Supposedly being so smart" doesn't mean being smart in every dimension.
"Actual nazis apparently saw it" --you let "actual nazis" show you how to interpret something? Does that really seem like a good idea?
Being on stage in front of a zillion people, knowing half of them are looking for the smallest gesture to pillory you with, and somehow showing up anyway? I think either of two things are going to happen here:
1. You shrink away from it and if you still have to go on stage, you stand with your hands at your sides and speak in a monotone, terrified lest anyone misinterpret what you say/do.
2. You decide you don't care, and go around making grand gestures without attempting to pre-criticize what the worst person in the room might make of them, and here we are.
"'Supposedly being so smart' doesn't mean being smart in every dimension."
This is a tired excuse.
He can drive (presumably). He can use a fork (presumably). He should be able to avoid whatever this was. We aren't talking about a high bar of difficulty.
"'Actual nazis apparently saw it' --you let 'actual nazis' show you how to interpret something? Does that really seem like a good idea?"
It's not a good idea to ignore how they interpret stuff. Doing that might before hand might have avoided the confusion. (His promoting nazi adjacent tweets isn't a great precedence either.)
"You shrink away from it..."
False dilemma. There are many options other than the two you list.
Anyway, he didn't "have to go on stage". It's a choice.
(Musk certainly "cared" about being called-out for "misrepresenting" his game-playing skill.)
Doesn't he have a car company to run?
I dont know of theres a formal standard of the nazi salute or something, but I remember it as an upwards motion of the arm, not outwards.
I think he was mad about being exposed as a fake gamer, so he wanted to do the cool gamer salute he saw a funny meme about.
I think it's quite possible he meant it as a Nazi salute. Like a lot of men, he didn't want his son to turn into a woman, and the rage melted his mind and made him vulnerable to every dumb rightoid brainworm. Maybe they shouldn't have turned his kid transgender.
It looks a lot like a Nazi salute. But why would he intentionally do a nazi salute? He isn't a capital N-Nazi, there's no capital N Nazis in America aside from some white prison gangs. You might think there are lots of authoritarian supporters of Trump, and there are, but they don't think of themselves as Nazis, they hate Nazis too! Nobody wants to be an actual Nazi or be seen as a Nazi.
One way this could happen is if he spends a huge amount of time on the Internet in right wing, and just plain weird, rabbit holes, possibly with a drug addiction, marinating in a world in which weird beliefs about Jews are commonly shared to the point that he thinks that shit is normal. Combined with being rich enough to never really have to do anything he doesn't want to or be told "no" by anyone.
Maybe to distract everyone from looking through the list of executive orders. Or maybe to show support for the authoritarians - I imagine I would be pretty stoked if I was a Proud Boy or something right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_orders_in_the_second_presidency_of_Donald_Trump
I have become convinced that this was very likely intentionally a nazi salute. I assume because Elon is immature as hell and wanted to make a weird power flex, or troll and piss off 'da libs.'
I'm not too familiar with the Proud Boys, but wikipedia says they have (had?) 6000 members. The number of people sympathetic to Nazi symbolism is so tiny, and the number of people that find it absolutely abhorrent is so large, that intentionally doing that is a terrible idea.
The Proud Boys were never a neo-Nazi group anyway.
I appreciate the url linebreaking to create the name Donald T. Rump.
If it were a Nazi salute, I'd be mad. It wasn't a Nazi salute. It was a "hand on my heart, throwing my heart out to you" salute and it was clumsily done so it looked like "oh my God he's sieg heiling".
The demand for outrage continues to outstrip supply.
I don't have a particularly strong feeling about this issue, but I truly don't think there's any physical gesture he could have done that you would agree was a nazi salute.
It seems likely to me he was intentionally doing it to troll the left, and to flex how he is not cowed by woke. Of course he's not an "actual" nazi, he just isn't afraid of the association.
If he did a real Nazi salute, I would take it as a Nazi salute. 'Ambiguous physical gesture that can be interpreted several ways' is not a real Nazi salute.
I'm not going to try and find clips of "The Triumph of the Will" to share on here, because even I have some sense of proportion, to compare'n'contrast with "this is what a real Nazi doing a real salute looks like".
By the metric of understanding extended here by some of our newest commentators, Tim Walz is a Nazi because look, he put his hand on his heart and then extended his right arm outwards in salutation to a crowd of supporters. There's no way to persuade me I didn't see what I saw, you deniers!
"this is what a real Nazi doing a real salute looks like".
Would it look something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDRYi1IYI2o&t=33s
Here is a comparison to the heart thing:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F828jf3orqlee1.gif%3Fwidth%3D504%26format%3Dmp4%26s%3Daec1e2a05866afe17b89de91053f365565b396ae
Here is a comparison to a guy doing the Nazi salute:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
It's just extremely obviously more like the latter, it's not credible to claim otherwise.
It would be trivially easy for him to post on X that it wasn't a Nazi salute. He has not done so. Why do you think that is?
Ah yes, the good old "if you aren't a baby-eating monster, why don't you go and deny you are a baby-eating monster?" bit.
Yes, I haven't stopped beating my wife, either. (The fact that I have no wife doesn't enter into it).
It also should have been trivially easy to avoid making a gesture that didn’t look like a nazi salute. Yet, here we are.
Why do I think that is so? Because I've seen it, and you may have too: any kind of apology by someone who falls foul of the Inquisitors is seized upon as evidence of guilt.
What kind of apology can he give? What would you, with your churning stomach, accept?
"I apologise for offending or causing hurt to anyone by the gesture which I now recognise could be mistaken for a Fascist salute"?
"See, see? He admits he did it! Out of his own mouth, Musk is a Nazi!"
This whole "it is SIEG HEIL FASCIST NAZI DOGWHISTLING" storm in a teacup reminds me of two things.
First, when I was about twelve, another girl in my class thought that I made a face at her. She accosted me with a couple of her friends after class to demand an explanation/apology (I got out of that by the simple expedient of walking away). I would have dug my heels in back then, as I would dig them in now, if anyone had tried to force me to apologise for doing something which I had not done. "But she thought you did it, so apologise" - well, she was mistaken, so I'm not going to say sorry for doing something which I did not do.
If Musk didn't do a Nazi Fascist Dogwhistle, why should he apologise? Just because your stomach churned? Take an antacid.
Second thing this reminds me of is this excerpt from "The Man Who Was Thursday". For those looking to be offended, they will always find something that is a Dogwhistle in order to be offended:
“This man has insulted me!” said Syme, with gestures of explanation.
“Insulted you?” cried the gentleman with the red rosette, “when?”
“Oh, just now,” said Syme recklessly. “He insulted my mother.”
“Insulted your mother!” exclaimed the gentleman incredulously.
“Well, anyhow,” said Syme, conceding a point, “my aunt.”
“But how can the Marquis have insulted your aunt just now?” said the second gentleman with some legitimate wonder. “He has been sitting here all the time.”
“Ah, it was what he said!” said Syme darkly.
“I said nothing at all,” said the Marquis, “except something about the band. I only said that I liked Wagner played well.”
“It was an allusion to my family,” said Syme firmly. “My aunt played Wagner badly. It was a painful subject. We are always being insulted about it.”
“This seems most extraordinary,” said the gentleman who was décoré, looking doubtfully at the Marquis.
“Oh, I assure you,” said Syme earnestly, “the whole of your conversation was simply packed with sinister allusions to my aunt’s weaknesses.”
“This is nonsense!” said the second gentleman. “I for one have said nothing for half an hour except that I liked the singing of that girl with black hair.”
“Well, there you are again!” said Syme indignantly. “My aunt’s was red.”
“It seems to me,” said the other, “that you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.”
“By George!” said Syme, facing round and looking at him, “what a clever chap you are!”
he didn't say apology, he said a post. Something like "It clearly wasn't a nazi salute you morons. PS. Nazis are a bunch of losers!" would probably suffice.
There's a maybe-apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson in his congressional days spreading a rumor that his opponent was a "pig fucker". One of his aides whispers to him, "you know he doesn't do that, right??". He replies, "I know; I just want the sucker to deny it".
The moral of the story is that it's all too easy to make up something unsupportable that nevertheless forces the discussion to center on it. For Musk to even deny the accusation is to give the accusation respect it does not deserve, at the expense of the actual important stuff he wants to do.
Ok, and in this analogy, if that opponent would be seen by everyone exiting a pigsty with his pants around the ankles, It might warrant some kind of explanation.
If it's not given, then sure, Musks prerogative, but it will just cement the consensus that he indeed did a neo nazi salute multiple times at the inauguration.
Eh....while I agree with and have more than once repurposed your "demand for outrage" line, am much less sure that this instance fits that description.
Having watched the full (not edited) video sequence a couple of times now....if forced to wager I would have to put money on "clumsy attempt at fascist salute" ahead of "awkward version of throwing my heart out to you". Call it a 60-40 or maybe 2-1 split on those odds.
The guy is physically and socially awkward, granted, and has self-described as being on the spectrum. So yes either explanation _could_ be true.
If it's meant to be a Real Genuine Nazi Salute, it's very badly done. His hand is at an angle, instead of straight out, at the end. I think he was hyper as one of the three year olds at my place of work during the whole inauguration - whether he was coked-up (er, I mean, NATURAL HARMLESS NOOTROPICS FOR BRAIN-HACKING-ed up) or just full of joie de vivre, he was wired to the moon.
So 'throwing my heart to you' salutes are all just part of that. Anyway, I imagine if he'd done the fist pump or something else instead, the same pearl-clutching would be going on about 'this really means X because some guy did it at a KKK rally one time' or something. The same way that the OK sign was turned into "this is a white supremacist signal" and taken seriously by the Extremely Furrowed Brows set.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture-is-now-listed-as-a-symbol-of-hate
If the ADL, which managed to classify the OK sign as a "hate signal", is now telling everyone to cool their jets about Musk, I think that the demand really has exceeded supply.
Musk has shown a clear pattern of far-right conviction over the past weeks and months: He is firmly in the MAGA camp, advertised European far-right parties, supports each and every insane thing Trump says such as threatening various allies (except for the {already forgotten?} H1B hickup), and is making X a far-right cesspool. Several fascism historians have confirmed his salute to be the Nazi salute. And if the grimace with which he was throwing the salute was one of love, I don't want to see him full of hate.
Whatever his intention really was with that salute, if he really only wanted to channel Celine Dion (another Canada annexation dogwhistle then?), the times for good faith assumptions regarding Musk are long over.
this is fantastic
There's not going to be movement towards conviction by either side here; for those for whom this is indeed proof that Musk is a Nazi, their minds are made up and they won't be persuaded that this wasn't a Fascist salute. For those of us who don't think Musk is a Nazi, no amount of "but we knew all along he really was a Nazi" is going to persuade me, for one, that it wasn't a stupid gesture but not a Fascist salute.
How do people explain the "putting his hand over his heart" before throwing this 'salute'? That's not part of any Fascist salute I know of, and if he's deliberately doing a Real Genuine Nazi Salute why add in extraneous bits?
Scott really was prescient with the Shiri's Scissors thing, wasn't he?
Here is the comparison between PB and Musk saluting:
https://gifyu.com/image/SeQHn
> How do people explain the "putting his hand over his heart" before throwing this 'salute'?
That's literally the part that makes it look like the nazi salute. It's the Sieg part of Sieg Heil
It's beginning to get ridiculous how much your hatred of the left makes you bend yourself over backwards to defend something dumb done by someone on the right
Really? Because the Wikipedia article on the Nazi salute doesn't make any mention of starting with the hand over the heart. Neither does the ADL's description of the salute, nor any other source that I could quickly find. And the pop-culture versions Hollywood has provided us, like Dr. Strangelove in "Dr. Strangelove", or Tom Cruise in "Valkyrie", don't start with the hand over the heart. I checked. Nor did any of the half-dozen or so newsreel clips I just checked of actual Nazis (one of them named Adolf Hitler) giving the Nazi salute in Nazi Germany.
Things a Nazi salute has that the Elon Musk gesture also had:
Arm briefly outstretched at a ~45 degree angle
Palm parallel to the arm and facing downward
Things a Nazi salute has that the Elon Musk gesture didn't have:
Starting while standing at attention
Arm outstretched directly forward in a single stiff motion
Salute held long enough that it it may be acknowledged or returned
Things Elon Musk's gesture had, that a Nazi salute *doesn't* have:
Starting with the hand over the heart
A fluid sweeping motion across the body
Significant movement of the torso during the salute
Immediately pivoting to deliver a similar gesture in the opposite direction.
I am at a loss to understand how you could see the full video and consider this a Nazi salute, except by extreme and subjective partisan bias. And I'm pretty sure you're now retconning your memory of actual Nazi salutes to match what you think you just saw.
Also in case you don't trust a reddit gif, anomie shared a link to the actual speech earlier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDRYi1IYI2o&t=32s
Notice how the announcer describes it as "the nazi salute"
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F6p4k6uu76bee1.gif
I don’t care what wikipedia says when it’s literally a gesture hitler did during one of his most famous speeches
Is the issue that i used the term “Nazi salute” instead of “nazi gesture”?
I explicitly said it was the “sieg” part of sieg heil
Not the “heil” part of “heil hitler” or whatever
If people are claiming musk didn’t do a nazi gesture because they don’t realize there’s more than one, then alright i guess
Yeah, excuse me one moment while I clear my throat before launching into the Horst Wessel Lied.
"Hatred of the left". Look, I could get into a slanging match with you, but it's not worth it: too much heat, not near enough light, and Scott shouldn't have to clean up after we wreck the joint.
Okay, yeah: Musk is a Nazi, Trump is a Nazi, and of course I (with my hatred of the left) am a Nazi too. Happy now? Is the world better after that?
At least we both agree that it was something dumb done by Musk. Nazi Fascist dumb? No for me, yes for you. You're not going to change my mind, and I'm not going to change yours.
I don't think you're a Nazi (or a fascist) I just think you're so stuck being contrarian that you've fallen head first into a deep pit of reverse stupidity
You're seriously arguing about the angle of his hand, as if that somehow makes it less of a nazi gesture
I don't think Musk is a Nazi, but I do think that he intentionally snuck a Nazi Salute in there "for the lulz", or to "own the libs' or whatever
And I think that it's bad, because breaking the norm of "Don't make nazi salutes in political speeches" is a norm that was worth having
It's also part of saluting the flag/national anthem for civilians, though that probably isn't taught in schools anymore. So we're all Fascists now, Father?
This doesn’t make sense. If musk did just the same part, no one would be talking about it.
This is the funniest thing I have read in a while, thanks for that!
I thought Elon went to Israel and was very friendly with their cause of not being killed by people who don't like them for whatever reason.
I have a very low prior he would intentionally do a nazi salute, it's a much lower chance in my mind than him thinking the hand gesture was a natural way to physically express his feelings.
This is what he was trying to emulate:
https://gifyu.com/image/SeQHn
I can't remember where I first saw this, but I've seen it observed that a lot of otherwise-antisemitic neonazis actually support Israel, because "the Jews fucking off to their own country in the middle of all the other people we hate" is *what they want*, and the fact that it's a very nationalist state in its peoples' "homeland" only makes them respect it more. Israel, according to all fascist precepts, is *doing things the right way*.
If you're going to use "observed" to mean "made up", you should really clarify that explicitly, because normally that word is used to mean something completely different.
>(Edit: lol, the ADL are defending Elon. The Israel lobby does not give a single shit about Jews, folks)
Does the fact that one of the most chicken little organizations in the planet said it wasn't a big deal not make you update a little bit in that direction? What would?
I update a bit towards that possibility, and a bit towards the notion that "the ADL are more concerned about support for Israel, and together with tech orgs that wish to curry favor with the government they want to do everything in their power to suck up to Musk and Trump"
Zuckerberg's or TikTok sucking up to Trump follow the exact same pattern imo
I guess I'm not smart enough to figure out "they are more concerned with supporting Israel and also they hate Jews" there for the ADL. I mean, isn't Israel famously kinda full of Jews?
This is the evangelical position. Israel is important because it heralds the Apocalypse. But then all the Jews will be converted, because they don't like Jews, only Israel.
They are not chicken little when it comes to the rights of Palestinians and those protesting against their genocide. This is because they are part of the Israel lobby, and are only supportive of rights for their political allies. (Did you see the recent leak of the ADL guy explaining that TikTok is bad because it's making people aware of the oppression of Palestinians?)
They see Musk and Trump as enablers of even more US tax dollars for Israel, and they want to protect their allies. They're not fighting racism, they're supporting their colony.
Let me get this straight. The ADL (you're saying) decided to support someone who they believe is a Nazi (you're saying) because they'll get more money?
At some point, the increasing complexity of dissembling collapses of its own weight, doesn't it?
>They are not chicken little when it comes to the rights of Palestinians and those protesting against their genocide.
Why would they be? The ADL exists to specifically fight against antisemitism.
" I'm starting to think America might be beyond repair."
I've thought that for some time. I think 2020 was the year that finally did it for me, though it could have been 2019 or 2021. And I think a more astute person could have recognized it as much as a decade earlier than that. Somewhere about then I mentally assigned 5-30 years as my best guess for the remaining lifespan of the U.S. as a unified country with recognizably the same form of government, though I made (and still make) no strong predictions as to exactly when or in what form its ultimate end will come.
The ultimate problem isn't *this* election or *this* government mind you, though I certainly don't expect them to help. In fact, I don't really think there's *one* ultimate problem, I could point at three or four pieces minimum that I think have played big roles. But the net effect is:
1. At a federal level, political polarization renders U.S. no longer able fix any of its pre-existing structural, cultural or political problems.
2. The factors driving the polarization are exactly the sort of structural, cultural and political problems that are now impossible to fix, so future U.S. governments will *also* not be able to fix them.
3. Any new problems that crop up--regardless of their origin--have a high chance of becoming sucked up by the polarization and becoming similarly unfixable. COVID specifically was my guiding model for this: a crisis that in past years might have pulled people together in solidarity instead turned *almost instantly* into an acrimonious series of shouting matches, with people refusing to do incredibly simple, basic things *for their own safety* with reasons that largely boiled down to "well, if THEY'RE for it, I'm against it." Even when technology handed the country a (good but not perfect) solution on a silver platter, political polarization slowed it down and rendered it less effective.
I would like nothing better than to be wrong about this, but I don't think I am. It's like watching a messy, drawn-out divorce play out across the national stage, where you're not sure if the result will *merely* be something as minor as a heated and expensive legal battle, or if it will escalate into house fire that spreads halfway across the neighborhood.
I mean, I’m no great historian nor am I an American, but I don’t see right now any cause or chance of any separation or civil war.
The rhetoric prior to the civil war was far worse, there was clear demand for a breakup from the southern states, and there was no easy way forward with the expansion of the US unless the south was politically or militarily defeated. Eventually the slave states had to know that the vast majority of new states would be free states leaving them with a minority in the senate as well as Congress, and eventually slavery would be abolished by the US.
They are preempting this by leaving. I see no obvious parallels today.
"overall people in America are far too rich and have far too much to lose to blow up the system. "
I'll notice that this prediction has already been somewhat falsified regarding the international system of trade, which certainly isn't the ONLY root of the U.S.'s prosperity, but it's one of the big ones. Whether out of ignorance or because they have other priorities, many people seem perfectly happy to tolerate threats to the system and even cheer for them. In fact "globalization" (of which international trade is the largest piece) has been one of THE main targets of a lot of recent right-wing political movements, in the U.S. and elsewhere. In general I believe those movements are more concerned with the movement of people than the movement of goods, but they seem perfectly content to throw the baby out with the bathwater: see Brexit for example (which wasn't the U.S., but the same arguments applied).
Now I should say that in many ways I *agree* that the U.S.'s problems are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. I think a lot of the people who are getting Big Mad about them are being quite stupid. But they're still getting Big Mad regardless. In a nutshell, I think you vastly underestimate how extreme people are willing to act over (to you) minor problems, and how recklessly they're willing to threaten the roots of their own prosperity (in part simply because they don't understand them)
I've talked to you enough to know that I have zero interest in reading anything else you write, now or ever. Your writing seems mainly to be optimizing for shock value, and there are a million better purveyors of that elsewhere on the internet if it were something I wanted. Please find someone else to direct such comments at, if you are intent on making them.
It’s also a pretty genuine assessment of your writing, so if this kind of response genuinely bothers you, it’s feedback worth considering.
Elon apologists are saying it's a Roman salute. I asked ChatGPT because I didn't know if there was a difference...
Chat said...
> While both involve an extended arm, subtle differences in angle and hand orientation can distinguish the two:
> The Roman salute often has the arm extended horizontally or slightly upward with the palm down.
> The Nazi salute typically has the arm extended higher at a sharper upward angle with the palm down or angled slightly outward.
It looked Nazi to me. Just sayin...
Yeah, this is like saying, "no-no, this was a Hindu swastika I posted, not a Nazi one - they just look identical". You _may_ be able to get away with this if you're a Hindu. If not, not. If you're already on the alt-right fringe, then _definitely_ not.
People are working over time to provide excuses for musk.
If it’s not a Nazi salute, it’s not a Roman salute either. Both are equally bizarre.
(Is the Nazi saluting patterned after the Roman salute?)
Yes (or rather, the idea of it - it's questionable whether it actually existed), by means of the Italian and Austrian fascists.
Some Nazis, being Nazis, thought this was un-Germanic.
WP: "However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute.[1]"
Did nobody look at the full clip where he's doing the Nazi Fascist OMG End Of America!!!!! salutes? The usual suspects are all weasel-wording with "he appeared to" and "fascist-style salutes".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw&t=4s
Now, if you want to say "that totally was a Fascist Nazi Heil Hitler salute", I can't change your mind. I hope you have plenty of space under your bed to hide in.
Do not make me go digging around online to find a two-second clip of an awkwardly angled shot that makes Harris or Biden or whomever "appear to be" giving a "fascist-style salute". I do remember way back some fucking idiot putting up a photo claiming a pope or a cardinal or someone was "OMG Fascist salute!" but if you know anything about Catholic liturgy, it was "outstretched arm in blessing". (That's why I say "fucking idiot" because they're all too eager to jump into the outrage machine without finding out what happened).
I watched the clip, expecting to see a stage wave or other innocent hand-out gesture that looks bad in a well-chosen framecap. The clip looked a lot more like a deliberate Nazi salute than I had been expecting.
That said, I have never encountered a "hand goes out to you" gesture in other contexts and had no idea it was a thing. If it is a thing and it actually looks like what Musk did, that makes it much more likely that his intentions were innocent rather than (at best) tasteless trolling.
Palm up. “My heart goes out to you” ends with the palm facing up. Try it.
I’m not 100% there on the deliberate Nazi salute only if because ADL didn’t think it was, but it sure didn’t look too innocent.
Nazis weren’t exactly into giving their hearts out.
Musk is neither Harris nor Biden, and certainly not a pope or cardinal, so these explanations are irrelevant. If anything, I would be much more interested in a clip of Musk *before* his MAGAfication where he used that salute in a clearly non-political way. Can you provide one of those? That would be much more convincing than this whataboutist gaslighting you're indulging in.
They should have stuck with their "accidental gesture" story. Nobody does the "Roman" salute unless they're a Nazi.
Does it really matter if he did Mussolini's salute rather than Hitler's?
To the people who don't want to see him as a fascist it matters.
I don't know if it's due to Ketamine or the Testosterone that he was Tweeting about a while back, but I think Elon has lost any self-control he once had.
They were both fascists. Mussolini wasn't antisemitic, or racist, really.
Mussolini's movement was the original fascism, of course. The nazis didn't call themselves fascists. Communists first used the term as a category name for nationalist totalitarismism, I think. There still is no satisfying consensus about what constitutes fascism but if anybody deserved being called a fascist it was Mussolini.
I think Mussolini coined the term in a political context. Ancient Romans tied together wooden rods with leather straps with a single-bladed axe in the middle — and they called it a fasces. It was a symbol of strength (because the rods wouldn't snap when tied together) and summary punishment (the axe). In the pre-Republican period, the accounts say that twelve attendants, known as ‘lictors,’ carried fasces walking in procession before the kings of Rome. During the Republic, the two consuls took turns presenting the fasces to the Senate (IIRC), giving the Senate precedence, and they removed the axes from the bundles to show deference to the Roman citizenry, who had received the right of appeal against summary execution. Mussolini played up the stronger together symbolism of the fasces.
What were Hitler and Mussolini, if not fascists? Mussolini established the Roman salute as a symbol of his fascist government, and Hitler adopted it for his. Any way you turn it, the Roman salute, fascist Italy's salute, and fascist Germany's salute are one and the same.
So no, it really doesn't matter which phrase you use, except if you're an organization (such as a news outlet) who doesn't want to end up on the bad side of a potentially fascist US government.
I'm Jewish, have a very, very deep dislike of Nazism, Fascism and (Soviet-style) Communism. I also think that Musk can act highly inappropriately at times. I've watch the video several times over and do not think its a Nazi salute, just an awkward gesture.
Well, I am sure those Boys interpret it the same way:
https://gifyu.com/image/SeQHn
I think Elon Musk being literally a neo-Nazi isn't really consistent with everything else we know of him. Still have around 95% odds that:
1. No civil war happens in the next four years.
2. We get an election as usual in 2028 (no idea who's going to win obviously).
Mostly agreed on (1) and (2), though AI has been moving fast enough that the game may be changed in very weird ways by 2028.
I would say that Musk almost certainly is not a commited neo nazi. But I would also say that he is muuuuuch closer to being a neonazi than 2 years ago.
What "everything else" do you mean? Only a few weeks ago he endorsed Alternativ für Deutschland, a party that has cooperated with and sometimes contained the genuine article. I'm not quite sure how *else* one would be supposed to take that.
Regardless, one need not be "literally a neo-Nazi" to find value in gesturing in that direction (rather more literally than usual). One need only to have willingness and motive to signal support and solidarity with neo-Nazis. Totally different.
Remember that nearly half to the victims of the Holocaust weren't Jewish. The Nazis also killed millions from other minorities (such as Gypsy and gay Germans) and people who just had different political opinions.
Elon is vocally transphobic, to the point of disowning his daughter. Elon is banning dissenters from Twitter (even fellow alt right figures like Laura Loomer). Now he's doing this Is it really so different?
"Elon is banning dissenters from Twitter"
Whatever happened to "private company they can do what they want?"
Then musk can’t keep claiming twitter is a place for “free speech”.
Nobody is arguing that they can't. But when the man claims his decision to buy the platform is motivated by safeguarding "free speech," it hardly seems inappropriate to NOTICE that he's engaging in the same sorts behavior that "free speech advocates" have been wailing and moaning about for years. Are any of them surprised by this? Do any of them feel betrayed by it? If the answer is "no," that tells you something pretty important about what those people were about all along.
The statements "[thing] is an atrocity" and "we should do [thing] to do those who did it to us" aren't incompatible.
20WS wasn't just saying he was hypocritical, he was using Elon's censorship to compare him to Nazis.
>Elon is vocally transphobic, to the point of disowning his daughter. Elon is banning dissenters from Twitter (even fellow alt right figures like Laura Loomer). Now he's doing this Is it really so different?
Yes. Yes those are radically different things from the worst interpretation of doing a Nazi salute. Absolutely. It doesn't even come anywhere near close.
Ughh. Only a couple of hours into Trump's presidency and we're back to the same shit that filled up the internet during his first term. Specifically, an endless stream of rants about how bad Trump is that mix in genuinely concerning norm-shattering behaviours alongside entirely standard conservative positions WITH NOT THE SLIGHTEST ATTEMPT TO DISTINGUISH THEM. And then, amazingly, act shocked and outraged that others dismiss their comments as mere partisanship.
The standard one looks something like:
"Why Trump is a literal fascist who must never be cooperated with:
He makes race-baiting comments!
He holds violent rallies!
He opposes the right to abortion!
He praises foreign dictators!
He wants to cut taxes for billionaires!
He colluded with Russia to win!
He called for jailing political opponents!
He opposes transgender bathroom access!
He's deporting undocumented immigrants!
He supports Israel's occupation!
He tries to overturn elections!
Who can say this isn't fascism?????"
Notice how these lists include genuinely scary things, some clearly true and some factually disputed, that any reasonable person regardless of their political views should agree are terrifying if true...and entirely normal conservative things that the writer simply doesn't like. Notice how the only person who would be capable of writing such a list is either someone who doesn't really believe the scary claims (seeing them as just cheap partisan shots to get their way on policy) or is someone so fanatically partisan that they honestly don't see a difference between opposing transgender bathrooms and thinking dictatorship is great (and thus has, to put it mildly, questionable judgement).
And notice how by following up a claim of Nazi salutes with "and he also won't call his son a daughter, which is basically the same thing" you have *absolutely guaranteed* that no one who doesn't already agree with you about everything will take the former remotely seriously.
This drives me a little bit crazy, because you outright say that there are "genuinely concerning norm-shattering behaviours" but seem to conclude that the REAL problem is people being upset about things that don't matter to you. Rather than the problem being, y'know, the people engaging in all those dangerous behaviors, and the people enabling them.
Suffice to say that different people have difference concerns, and while I broadly agree with you that some of Trump's behaviors are much more dangerous, blameworthy, norm-violating and frightening than others (and we might even agree *somewhat* on which ones), turning around and telling people that they're mad about the wrong things is possibly the least helpful response to that ever. Coalitions are not formed by people who agree on everything. They're not even usually formed by people who agree on most things. In fact, I'd say they're most typically formed by people who agree strongly on ONE thing, and are willing to set aside other differences because they find that one thing important enough.
But also the thing you're complaining about isn't really an accident. While I don't have a high opinion of Trump's intelligence or competence in a general sense, he clearly has some pretty strong skills and instincts with regards to manipulating people, and is exercising some degree of deliberateness in when and how he pisses various groups of people off. Plus the current national media ecosystem provides pretty much the perfect state for this sort of tactic, as it was already well-optimized for creating exactly this sort of clusterfuck of petty bickering and mutual mistrust.
Very, very relevant to this conversation:
https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/thresholding
Your point about coalitions being formed by people setting aside other differences in favor on one important enough thing seems to support the comment you're trying to disagree with: if you list a dozen things and say that supporting any of them makes you a "fascist," people who support some of them but oppose others would be wise to set aside THEIR differences, and work together to form a coalition against you.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people will be {huge gasp} mortally offended by the *word* "fascism," but not bat an eye actual, honest-to-goodness, right-wing, strong-man authoritarian nationalism. Remember when right wingers were always calling people on the left "snowflakes" and complaining about attempts to soften and police language? Is calling a spade a spade THAT offensive to you?
Let me be clear: if telling, repeating and doubling down on outrageous lies, making threats against allies, ignoring democratic norms, abusing high office for personal gain and pardoning violent extremists because they were loyal to the cause are appealing (or indeed acceptable) qualities to you in a leader, that it because YOU want those things. Nobody else's behavior is at fault, nobody forced you into it, nobody twisted your arm. There were always other options. You decided that those things looked good to you, and you should own that. Call a spade a spade. What ever happened to the "party of personal responsibility" anyway?
Related: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/
According to the daughter herself, it was her who disowned Elon, not the other way round:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1eby1fr/i_disowned_him_not_the_other_way_around_vivian/
All reporting I've seen says the same thing:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2024/07/22/elon-musk-jordan-peterson-interview/74506785007/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61880709
He has spoken pretty clearly about feeling as though he had a son stolen from him by woke culture. You can pick at it all you want, but to me that would read like an emotional disowning. That she would then say she no longer wants to have anything to do with her father follows.
What interests me there is that the trans child is one of twins. The brother hasn't (so far as I know) indicated that he's trans or GNC or anything of that sort. So that would seem to be against the argument that "it's exposure to hormones in the womb that give you a female brain in a male body" (since both babies were male sex in the same environment at the same time) and more for the argument "it was socially influenced transition".
Is there any data on twins and incidences of one being LGBT and the other not?
I believe there have been twin studies whose results suggest that there is a genetic component to being transgender. That's far from meaning that if one twin is trans then the other must be too.
That is a question that is above my pay grade. I know little to nothing about genetic effects on these things. The only issue I was addressing was who disowned who. Musk clearly thinks it was peer pressure that stole his boy away. That kind of negates the person in question. I was just pointing out that a child in that position could very much feel disowned by a father.
Someone I know is going through a divorce. His two kids have sided completely with their mother, refusing to see him on his visitation days. This is exactly the kind of thing he would say, and he would follow it with "I just want them back". The flat opposite of emotional disownment.
She's a child, he's (supposedly) an adult. If the disowning isn't mutual, it's on him to put in the basic courtesy of not being a transphobe if he wants a relationship with his daughter.
"She" is 20.
As someone who was once 20 and is now far past that, and still knows many 20 year olds, that is still largely a child (and was when this estrangement takes place). That said, your scare quotes tell me you are not coming to this in good faith here.
The Nazis were directly and bluntly pro-violence (as in Hitler advocating for it, and making it happen) from the beginning, and openly rejected democracy, also from the beginning. We're very far from the end of democracy, Trump is simply not ideological enough to want to replace democracy with something else, or institute a totalitarian state. If anything, DOGE is pointing in the opposite direction to totalitarianism (it also seems very likely DOGE won't actually accomplish anything. I put 80% on DOGE achieving nothing).
So yeah, someone is due for major updates in their worldview, and it's going to be either you or me.
>> Trump is simply not ideological enough to want to replace democracy with something else, or institute a totalitarian state.
I agree that Trump's motives are not ideological, but they don't need to be for him to attempt something like that. He'd just be in it for personal power/wealth/fame, rather than an ideological opposition to the idea of checks-and-balances republicanism.
I actually don't think this is true at all. My understanding (which I will have to read up on later) was that the Nazis rose to power on tremendous popular support, and the violence was initially claimed to be "law and order" against the untrustworthy minorities. Which is remniscent of what's happening now.
Regarding totalitarianism, i guess you could look at the 2020 coup attempt, the blatant Supreme Court corruption, or the billionaire who's just been installed in the DOGE (not sure i am praying for it to be ineffective but i guess that might be better than the alternative)
The Nazi rise to power followed a failed coup attempt from ten years prior. It was Hitler's claim to fame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch
Like, an actual no-mistake coup. They had a machine gun nest.
"My understanding (which I will have to read up on later) was that the Nazis rose to power on tremendous popular support"
I wouldn't call it "tremendous." The NSDAP never won a majority in any Weimar election, with 37% of the vote at best, and 33% in the election that ultimately led to them seizing power. The share that they did get was enough to allow them to maneuver their way into power, but it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expression of the will of German voters. I think they may have gotten more popular during the early portion of their rule (with the German economy improving), but one must take that with a grain of salt given the nature of totalitarian regimes and popular dissent.
Is it possible the gesture you're calling a "Nazi salute" is instead him gesturing "my heart goes out to you," the words he said a few seconds later?
Here is a comparison to an actual clip of him doing a dumb "my heart goes out to you" thing:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F828jf3orqlee1.gif%3Fwidth%3D504%26format%3Dmp4%26s%3Daec1e2a05866afe17b89de91053f365565b396ae
And comparison to a Nazi salute
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fvpt4ycl43eee1.gif%3Fwidth%3D480%26format%3Dmp4%26s%3Dc1a798d43430c807cadb69df4ea3d454e9a5b0c2
Deiseach found a clip of Tim Walz: https://x.com/thejefflutz/status/1882089214847975646. What is your interpretation of THIS gesture?
I think if this is the best they can come up with, then it reinforces my view.
On some level it's hard to really argue about - it would be like if someone insisted that a clip of someone smiling wasn't really them smiling and then you had to argue about what a smile looks like - "well the lips are curled up and the teeth exposed the muscles around the eyes are tightened in such and such manner" - I guess I could try to argue this but tbh it's just obvious, and I think that if instead of Elon Musk and Tim Walz at political rallies it was two random people nobody would confuse this.
When I first heard the story about Musk, I thought "probably another awkward out of context screenshot or super short clip", I was pretty surprised about how explicit it was.
Scroll down - there's at least one of Ocasio-Cortez that's an even closer match.
Yeah, but this is closer to the "my heart goes out to you" thing. I think the one you're talking about is more angry gesticulation.
This is a Shiri's Scissors gesture. Those who want to believe it is a deliberate, knowing Nazi salute won't be argued out of it. Those of us who think it was an awkward "my heart goes out to you" salute also won't be talked into changing our minds that "see, see? I told you Drumpfler was a Nazi!"
Could be. Curious that his gesture for that is identical to Sieg Heil. And curious that he did the same gesture (even more convincingly) a few minutes later.
Yeah, and then he donned the SS cap and jackboots a few minutes after that. Just bad luck the cameras didn't catch that.
Two possibilities:
1. He's awkward and excited and did it without realising how it would look in a one-second gif
2. He's deliberately trolling us all once again
Neither would particularly surprise me, but looking at the preceding minute of footage in which he makes many awkward-looking hand gestures I'm inclined towards (1).
Actually I think he must have been getting a whole lot of public speaking coaching recently to try to become a more engaging speaker. If you watch old videos of him speaking (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDUNnfXvzcg ) he just stands still looking awkward and saying "umm" a lot. In today's speech he's gesturing like an Italian game show host.
Perhaps he was trying to do a Peter Sellars imitation.
If you use the Nazi salute "as a troll," you are still doing a Nazi salute. If people get mad at you for doing a Nazi salute, and your defense is "hahaha, look at all these people getting mad that I did a Nazi salute in front of the White House," you get no sympathy. You're not being clever, you're not doing some sort of court jester thing where you provoke an unreasonable reaction, you're just doing a bad thing and drawing the expected response for the bad thing.
One of these days Trump is literally going to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and everyone on the right will be like "dude, he was just doing it to piss off the libs, don't take it so seriously."
OK then https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1881471022991581565
Those are still images though. It’s not really a fair comparison. I haven’t seen the video in question so I don’t have an axe to grind about it, but as a photographer, I know you can get someone doing any stupid thing in one quick shot.
If you're proposing that it was "deliberately trolling" - meaning that it was a real Nazi salute, just not given for Nazi reasons - then posting pictures that show how a gesture that's not a Nazi salute could be mistaken for one isn't a defense of that claim.
Option 1 in your original post is defensible, option 2 is not.
Edit: Also, since your source is libsoftiktok I can probably safely assume that those photos are taken out of context and if you looked at the video they would not look remotely as sig-heil-y as Elon's.
Or a third possibility is that he was high on Ketamine.
"I havnt listened to the speech(nor will I probably) but Id expect it to have some eloerbate political word play"
Not really. Here's my transcript of the relevant clip that is being played (and shown in still shots, to address what others have said above about the still shots of Harris etc. giving 'Nazi salutes'):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw&t=4s
“Elections that come and go – some elections are important, some are not. But this one (laughter) this one really mattered.
And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you. (Slaps hand onto chest over heart, does the ‘Nazi salute’. Turns to audience behind him, repeats gesture).
(Turns back to podium, puts hand on heart again). My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured.”
Trump has rescinded the Biden administration's AI risk executive order. This was widely predicted but there was a question of whether it would be modified or completely eliminated. It looks like completely eliminated.
Which executive order is that? That is incredibly concerning
EO 14110 on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
Ah, I couldn't find it because it's not a Trump executive order, it's a Biden executive order that he rescinded.
Has anybody else noticed that a large percentage of political disagreements in the left vs right culture wars of the last many years effectively boils down to the "we need to protect them, favor them, support them vs. that's patronizing, they're strong and proud and can take care of themselves" axis? Not sure if there's a memeable version of this, maybe "paternalism vs individualism"? Victim mentality vs survivor mentality? Collectivism vs individualism? Protection vs rising to the challenge.
e.g. women in the workplace. For years we were told to adjust language in our job postings and job descriptions because words too aggressive were going to be a big turnoff and scare off women who want a more soft and nurturing environment. We're not aggressive, we're not intense, we don't have war rooms. We're inclusive, we're nurturing, we're supportive, we're all about letting all voices be heard. On the other side people would claim to be offended by that notion, saying that it was patronizing and that women were perfectly capable of fending off for themselves and didn't need to be treated with kid gloves. Women could lean in, keep up with the boys, rise to the top playing the same game everybody else was. They didn't need special treatment.
e.g. One side finds "woman engineer" to be empowering, we're finally part of the club now, the other says "I'm just an engineer, I don't need that ridiculous label, I can do the job as well as anybody else regardless of my sex".
e.g. Minorities, same thing. One side says we need equity, we need special treatment for groups x y z, they're special and need to be protected and nurtured. At the same time many members of x y z find that notion patronizing and condescending, claiming to be doing just fine and not needing favoritism.
This feels like an ultimately irresolvable tension. It feels parallel in some sense to the masculine vs feminine tension. Maybe this is just how society has always been and will always be. Curious what others things.
I’ve heard this framework before, and it tends to have popularity on the right as a narrative about itself- “we aren’t motivated by animus towards minority communities, it’s just that the left wants to subject those communities to paternalistic care while we recognize the strength of those communities and want to foster their independence and autonomy rather than weaken them by keeping them perpetually dependent on aid.”
However, that narrative rapidly breaks down when you compare their reaction when white working class communities are the ones in distress. The conservative coalition is large, and there’s no shortage of people who will argue that struggling white communities should *also* be told to pound sand/pull their own bootstraps, but there’s also no shortage of people in the right’s tent who suddenly view aid very differently when it’s for a white rust belt factory town or Appalachian coal mining community struggling, rather than a black-and-Latino-heavy inner city area, or people for whom the crack epidemic gets very different treatment than white communities suffering opioid “deaths of despair,” etc.
The truth is that the right coalition contains both the libertarian strains that treat all these programs as the same kind of problematic, *and* the folk socialists whose discomfort/comfort with aid programs is mainly determined by the color of the beneficiaries thereof. But the latter are more embarrassing so the autonomy narrative gets all the airtime.
Most people don't care about logic; they care about vibes.
"Women are just as capable as men at everything, there are no differences between the sexes" has a pro-women vibe. "Women need to be carefully protected from microaggressions and inappropriate jokes" also has a pro-women vibe. For most people, that is enough; from their perspective, that makes it practically the same thing.
It's only a few nerds scratching their heads and wondering how exactly can you put "equality" and "ladies first" into a coherent framework.
the alt right (endonym du jour is "dissident right") loves to reference Bronze Age Pervert's concept of "The Longhouse". Which is this nebulous idea that the West is currently a matriarchal society where feminine, egalitarian values like "PROTECC MINORITIES; BELIEVE WAMEN (or else)" are enforced via HR departments, ESG scores, etc.
Idk if I totally agree with this. And I can't speak to the historicity of the reference to the Bronze Age. But... it seems relevant.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-longhouse
Where did he get this notion of the longhouse? My very fuzzy impression (from reading a book about Borneo decades back) was that longhouses were either sex-separated (so men had their own longhouse) or that it was for all the village/tribe (so not a matriarchal institution).
https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2020/7/20/dayak-architecture-and-art-the-use-of-longhouse
Mind you, I don't trust BAP on anything historical, sociological, or anthropological, so if it turns out he pulled it out of his backside I wouldn't be surprised.
Okay, read the bit at the link and that is stupidity on stilts. Guy just invented this notion.
It's not about Borneo. I think it's a reference to the longhouses of the Indo Europeans.
Allegedly, he graduated Harvard with a degree in history (or anthropology?). So he has the credentials, at the very least. He wrote a dissertation about BronzeAge IndoEuropeans conquering Greece. Then later, turned it into a (wildly offensive) novel, written in caveman-speak.
I'm not in a position to explain it charitably, since I don't really grok the appeal.
The disagreement as you framed it is between two camps of egalitarians. The rising right is not egalitarian. They take it for granted that groups are different, that some will naturally fall behind, and that there's nothing wrong with this.
I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of the division.
I think that concern for subaltern groups, of either the "we need to protect them, favor them, support them" and "that's patronizing, they're strong and proud and can take care of themselves", is a left-wing position, and that the debate you characterise has largely been an intra-left one, while the main right-wing position has generally been "fuck subaltern groups", framed in a variety of ways of varying honest.
That sounds more like the 4chan position. I don't think you have met enough non-selected right wing people to make generalizations. (By "non-selected" I mean people you just meet in everyday life and later find out their political positions, and the more moderate they are the longer this tends to take.)
I’m honestly curious whether you meant “fuck subaltern groups” as “fuck the stupid idea of subaltern groups; we’re all equal Americans” or “subaltern groups deserve to get fucked”. I suppose if I searched for other posts by you I could figure out where you’re coming from, but as written I couldn’t tell.
If by "we should fuck" you mean "we should not allow to enter our country illegally", I agree. But I have a sneaking suspicion that's not what you mean.
"Greenland and Panama, unrestrained carbon emissions, and breaking down the international trade system. You have the world’s richest and most dominant country openly trying to extort, extract wealth from, and suppress the development of poorer groups.
And yeah, immigration restrictions too."
These are all exaggerations of what is actually happening, and the motivation for those things is not to fuck foreigners, but either greed for the first ones or 'fear of foreigners economically/culturally/criminally' for the immigration restrictions.
Your view of your outgroup seems to be that they are just evil and get off on hurting people, which is just not true.
EDIT: I just found that Trump 'won't rule out force' for taking Greenland, so I was wrong that you were exaggerating about that.
Which country are you from, and what are their immigration laws?
That was my thought as well.
Scott kind of wrote on this a long while back, with his post on "Thrive" vs "Survive" politics. Thrivers want everybody to be taken care of, and why not? We have enough resources to do it. Survivors don't have time or resources to waste on mollycoddling, everyone needs to pull their weight.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
thanks for that link: more good insights from Scott.
It does seem odd, and yet I think it is happening nevertheless.
I read somewhere (can't remember where) that the people most likely to vote for Trump for economic reasons were NOT the poorest demographics, but rather the fairly successful portion of the middle class that felt the most precarious in their success.[1] This feels right, and somewhat matches my own personal observations. People today are unimaginably richer than a bronze age farmer, but they don't have the experience of being a bronze age farmer to compare to. They *do* have their own experiences (and at a more distant remove, those of their friends and family) and those are what seem the most real and immediate. Losing a large chunk of their wealth and security would be fundamentally distressing to them, even if they were left with more wealth and security than most humans ever knew.
[1] To be clear, I think this is a very stupid reaction to that sort of anxiety, but I still understand the anxiety itself.
Both "thrive" and "survive" are premised on scarcity in the economic sense; it's equally odd to expend resources on people who are too rich to need taking care of.
The places that seem to devote the most resources to help the 'poor,' which are also the richest places in the US, like San Francisco or Los Angeles, seem to be completely ineffective at helping said 'poor,' and also make life worse for the actual poor and working classes in the process, and seem to be burning through 'what our grandparents worked hard to give us and driving our society into the gutter,' as FLWAB says below.
Now, these days the Thriver position is "all our streets are going to be owned by street people, and we must let them commit assault and, sell/use drugs, or be psychotic and act in dangerous ways because to stop them is problematic" and so I would take the political choice that is opposite to that whatever happens to be available. Because obviously the Thrive position isn't helping 'poor' people at all, and is in fact hurting them very badly (while making life worse generally in a thousand very real ways for everyone else), because Thrivers can't admit certain things about human nature.
That Thriver position feels like yet another iteration of the "great idea, wrong species" utopian world view. If only reality would already bend itself to all of the great intentions those folks have, instead of constantly getting in the way.
There are two meanings of "doesn't work". For the homeless, it means that they are left on the streets... which may be okay if it is only a tiny fraction of a population with very weird preferences. But for everyone else, it also means assaults, drugs, etc., and having fewer of that seems like a mainstream preference.
"Anyway the idea that we can afford to be more generous is entirely consistent with the idea that we should try to be generous in a way that actually helps people."
That is true, and if you had people like Matt Yglesias in charge then that would be possible. Instead, you can't help mentally ill street people because of the reasons that Freddie DeBoer outlines, that involuntary commitment is off the table. You can't get drug addicts and dealers off the street because of disparate racial impacts and because it is mean to kick people off the street and racist to use police to do anything. You can't build more housing, or build windowless flophouses, because of community consultation, anti-developer sentiment, and regulations to provide minimum standards that the poorest can't afford.
All of this means that the working, responsible poor have to live in neighborhoods with crazy people and tents everywhere, and middle class and above people can't enjoy nice, once thriving cities, and people have to compete in a zero sum game to bid up house prices in the areas that actually keep people off the street.
Spoken like a Thriver! Survival is not about relative wealth. Yes, we're richer than anyone in history, but we're still not rich enough that we can stop working. Virtue, skill, and grit still matter. If you do what is right, and work hard, keep your nose clean, settle down, raise some kids, keep your promises, then you can enjoy the fruits of your labors here in the greatest and wealthiest society ever known: but if you don't you can still fall down into the Hell of drug addiction, criminality, single motherhood, living off the dole, obesity, childlessness, etc.
The Survive mindset is knowing that all our wealth was built by hard work, virtue, and grit and is maintained by hard work, virtue, and grit. We are quite capable of squandering what our grandparents worked hard to give us and driving our society into the gutter. Things fall apart unless they're kept together. That's the Survive mindset!
"Most of the “work” that Americans do is relatively painless or even enjoyable white collar work"
This is a sign you live in an upper-class bubble.
"And you have to affirmatively do bad things to become a criminal, drug addict, or single impoverished mom. "
False, false and false. Wrongful convictions certainly happen, no matter how much we like to pretend they don't. Kids get drugs pushed on them by parents or older siblings and get addicted before they have the agency and independence to refuse. Women get pregnant through rape, or have co-parents die, leave or turn abusive. These may not be central or typical members of these groups, but they certainly exist[1]. And conspicuously missing from your list are categories like "orphan," "homeless teenager" which would be inconvenient to acknowledge. This position is just the Just World Fallacy, which is (as the name suggests) a fallacy. Of course, nobody's perfect, so the determined can always find *something* blameworthy that a person in dire straights has done.
"An American with no skills, grit, or virtue can still get some basic job paying $50k and live a modest but comfortable life."
OK, wow, "can" is doing quite a lot of work here. A quick check tells me that the median income for Americans working full time is $60K. That's going to include all the people who DO have special skills--doctors, lawyers, engineers, plumbers, electricians, etc--all the older people who have accumulated decades of promotions and raises and so on. And of course it is NOT going to include those people who are looking for full-time work but can't find it. Likewise, my own personal experience is that the only under-40 people I know earning $50 or more are those with with specialized and valuable skill sets, and I certainly never saw low-qualification jobs posted at $24/hr during any of the periods when I was looking for work. I suspect that the supply of such jobs is much, MUCH smaller than you seem to think. This is very much a "it's one banana Michael, what could it cost, $10?" vibe.
[1] And even many of the central and typical members will have had significant external factors pushing them in the direction of doing "affirmatively bad things," even if those factors are less inarguably decisive.
Too much to say, so I’ll just say: I disagree vehemently with every single sentence you have written here. Which is why I like the Thrive Survive continuum, as it does seem to capture or at least gesture at a real psychological divide.
Having sex out of wedlock. Unironically. Getting the ring first before having fun would have solved her problem.
I wonder, how much of the complaints about "Nice Guys TM" is simply different people having different ways of falling in love.
I imagine that some people fall in love instantly, at the first sight. And for some other people, emotional connection is an important part of developing attraction; and that connection requires them to first spend some time together.
And I imagine that the former view the latter as *dishonest*. Someone who moves very quickly from zero to one, probably expects everyone else to be the same; so when they hear someone saying "at first, we were just friends... but later I realized I was in love", they are like "no way, I am sure that you were attracted from the start, but you didn't tell her, because you were afraid of rejection... instead you pretended to be a friend, so that you could later use the threat of withdrawing the friendship as a leverage".
So we ended up in a situation where being attracted to things besides the body is called out as a shameful behavior.
Similarly, it is interesting to see the pushback against "sapiosexuality". Even Wikipedia mentions that critics call it "elitist", "discriminatory", and "pretentious". (For some reason, other sexual preferences do not get a criticism section on Wikipedia, although I am sure that many of them have their own critics, too.) See e.g. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pretentious-is-not-a-sexual-orientation/ And yet, uhm, I also happen to find smart people more attractive than dumb ones; sue me. And I don't think this is a rare thing. But apparently, not finding dumb people hot is a form of ableism, therefore something you should never mention in a company of decent people.
It's tricky. If you are open to cross-gender friendships, there's plenty of opportunity for attraction to blossom, wax, wane, etc, throughout the life of the relationship and I think that's pretty healthy and normal. I've been a part of a mixed-gender circle of friends since high school, which included one I eventually dated, another I had a crush on at various points but never dated, and others who never moved the needle for me one way or another.
But that same mixed circle also has given me a bit of a window into the other side of the looking glass, and the "Nice Guy TM" as described by women doesn't really align with "a guy who is your friend and later catches feelings for you because his attraction just develops slowly in a social context rather than spontaneously at first sight," so much as it's defined as "a guy who (a) has feelings for you from the very beginning, but (b) whose dating strategy, rather than simply trying to date you, is to be constantly overly protective/nurturing/deferential/involved in your business or whatever, but in a 'nice,' defensible, and always deniable kind of way - the kind of way that never exposes him to being rejected in the way just asking someone out on a date would."
Assuming she sees what's going on (and she usually does), this puts her on the horns of an awkward dilemma. On the one hand, it feels presumptuous and mean-spirited to respond to this behavior by taking the initiative to say something like 'I know you haven't said anything, but I can tell by your constant insistence on buying my drinks and walking me home that you're attracted to me, and I need to just tell you right now that I don't want that kind of relationship with you so stop doing that.' But she can be accused of also 'leading him on' or 'taking advantage of him' if she just does nothing and hopes the behavior goes away on its own. His insistence on being indirect and deniable puts her in a position where she's the villain for any response other than reciprocating, which obviously isn't a fun place to be. Sometimes it's just a 1x1 relationship where she can sort of quietly exit by not inviting him to events or doing stuff with him, but that gets much harder when he's a member of her social circle.
So although I think there may be some overlap with different kinds of attraction, Nice Guy strikes me mainly as a definition for a particular *strategy for coupling* rather than a definition for a particular *way of falling in love*. Specifically, it would refer to a dating strategy defined by fear of vulnerability manifesting as extreme indirectness and commitment to constant deniability in romantic approach.
"My guy friend caught feelings for me and asked me out on a date and I had to say no" is an awkward interlude that could end a friendship but it could just as easily be moved past, and it's not "Nice Guy TM" behavior.
"My guy friend had feelings for me for 4 years but never said anything about it, he just trashed my boyfriends and constantly catered to me in a way that was sometimes awkward but I didn't know how to tell him to stop when he was so insistent about picking me up from the airport and cooking me a special birthday meal, then he tried to kiss me and got really mad when I told him I don't think of him like that" is "Nice Guy TM" behavior.
I stopped trying to figure that one out and just became an incel. Easier and the memes are better.
This seems to be to be quite different to what people generally refer to when they talk about Nice Guys. Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding and blame women for preferring "bad boys", whereas you seem to be referring to male friends of women who are secretly in love with them. There's probably significant overlap but they are different imo.
> Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding and blame women for preferring "bad boys"
That may have been true when the term originated, like, two decades ago, but nowadays it's almost exclusively used to describe men (/man-children) who seem to believe that being "polite"/"nice" to women entitles them to women's attention and/or sex, and then immediately turn heel and call women sluts when that doesn't work. At best they become petulant, and there are many worse cases. It's rarely applied to actually nice men who continue to be genuinely nice - the linguistic treadmill now has moved on to calling them "white knights", or just "simps".
(That said, the actual problem isn't so much that women are attracted to "bad boys" as it is that (*most*) women naturally fall on the subby side of the Dom/sub divide, and are attracted to dominance/assertiveness/confidence, which is mostly orthogonal to being "nice")
>>(That said, the actual problem isn't so much that women are attracted to "bad boys" as it is that (*most*) women naturally fall on the subby side of the Dom/sub divide, and are attracted to dominance/assertiveness/confidence, which is mostly orthogonal to being "nice")
I think there's some truth to that, but it's also skewed by the blurred impression the raw numbers can create. A "bad boy" may have many flaws, but he's direct in his approach. A "nice guy" in the internet sense is pathologically committed to being indirect, beating around the bush, and limiting his exposure to a clear rejection. As a result, by the time a man employing the "nice guy" method finally gets to his answer from one potential mate, a "bad boy" may have directly approached dozens of women, been rejected by 95% of them, slept with two, and entered into a short-term but toxic relationship with another. The "nice guy" isn't tracking the "bad boy's" misses, though, so he just sees "WTH that jerk had three partners in just 6 months and I've been on a total dry spell! Why do women only go for jerks?"
The key is to learn to be a nice (in the sense of being kind, empathetic, socially intelligent, or what have you) person while nevertheless being direct.
This is all a very good point. I was basing my theory on the girls I knew and know that actively fantasized about "bad boys", but those are probably dwarfed by the effect you describe in actual practice.
> Generally the guys people are talking about are men who fail at love despite being fairly morally upstanding
This heavily depends upon your definition of "morally upstanding"; most of the people talking about/using the term "Nice Guys" would not view these people as "fairly morally upstanding" given that the "nice guys" being described tend to have very regressive/sexist attitudes towards women and how they should act.
These days, it's probably almost easier to simply describe it as "liberal women don't want to date conservative guys, because they think being conservative in and of itself is actively evil/harmful/etc; conservative guys think this is unfair, in part because there are fewer conservative women".
On average men fall in love sooner than women, and women fall out of love sooner
I 100% agree. I think Nice Guys can be broken up into a wide variety of different patterns of behavior. One of them is basically what you describe; a kind of demisexuality or need for a long courtship where people fall in love with people they've spent a lot of time with. But if a person like this doesn't take 'no' for an answer and hopes that someone will gradually fall in love with them as well in what is a presumed to be friendly relationship then this is a potentially dysfunctional pattern. Practically speaking, people who need long courtships are best served by finding ways to have long courtships. Talk online for a while. Talk with someone out of state. Don't emotionally commit too much before the other person does, in the hopes that ardent love will win over a one-sided relationship. And most importantly, be willing to take 'no' for an answer.
It's not a need that should be pathologized as it is, but it does need to be managed by the person who has it, since they will tend to be interested in people who have different patterns of expectations.
Similarly, I'd also (quietly) identify as 'sapiosexual' or 'sapioromantic.' The mental part of a relationship is a critical component for me. But practically speaking, I'm not sure publicly identifying as sapiosexual really *serves* anyone. If someone is mentally stimulating, you'll find that out through dating. Saying that you are sapiosexual is unlikely to attract more intelligent people, just like saying out loud that you like beautiful people is unlikely to help you find people who are more attractive. It's possible to filter quietly and indirectly for some needs just as easily as it is to filter loudly.
It is definitely bad if someone doesn't take "no" for an answer.
That said, there is a difference (for some people) between "no, never" and "not yet, maybe". The former means that the other person should give up. The latter means that the future is uncertain... it could become a "yes" one day, or it could become a "no", or it could even stay undecided forever.
Navigating that uncertainty is difficult. If you give up too soon, maybe you just had to wait a little longer. But if you keep waiting, maybe it ends up with "no" a few years later, and you just wasted a lot of time. (No one owes you a "yes", no matter how long you have waited for them to decide.) So I guess the best strategy is to stay in contact, but explore your other options in the meanwhile. Some people may find this emotionally difficult, but that's their problem; there is no better solution that wouldn't come at someone else's cost.
Seems to me that there are some inefficiencies in communication, caused by each side trying to minimize their risks. On the side of the undecided person (stereotypically a woman), there is a risk that truthfully answering "not yet, maybe" may be misinterpreted as "yes, but I want you to keep it slow" by the other side. So the safe answer in such situation is to give a clear "no", even if you originally didn't feel that way. Now on the side of the suitor (stereotypically a man), the safe approach is to keep it slow, to avoid accidentally forcing this kind of "no" by asking too soon. Ideally, the waiting should not be completely passive, but rather a continuous exchange of gradually increasing signals of interest.
From the perspective of someone who knows the clear "yes" or "no" from the first sight, this probably seems completely idiotic, and the optimal protocol for them could be thousand times more efficient. ("Wanna have sex? Your place or mine?")
What makes it complicated is that the society contains both kinds of people (those could even be the same people at a different stage of their lives), mostly not understanding each other, with bad actors in each group, etc. And the memes proclaiming that everyone whose ways are different from mine is a bad person.
> practically speaking, I'm not sure publicly identifying as sapiosexual really *serves* anyone.
Yeah, it's not like if you declare yourself a sapiosexual, smart people who previously didn't notice you suddenly start paying attention. (Also, even if that worked, it wouldn't attract smart people, but rather people who identify as smart, which is not the same.)
But I think it could serve the society as a whole, as an antidote against the "men do not find intelligent women attractive" meme, which is popular, and in my opinion harmful.
I wouldn't mind a norm of simply not speaking about intelligence vs dating. But that is not the situation we have now. Instead, "it is known" that women can increase their dating success by acting dumb. Which... on one hand, maybe yes, I don't really know; it might be a good strategy if all you want is to get laid... but on the other hand, it seems like an efficient way for a smart woman to find exactly the kind of partner who will later hate her for being intelligent. (Maybe it is that kind of advice that women love to give their friends/competitors to undermine them? "Act dumb, get a big tattoo, and cut your hair short. Trust me, you will be popular, girl!") So I would like to see some more pushback against that.
Do you believe in love at first sight? You’re sure it happens all the time.
Things happen; I am not sure which of them should be called "love".
I could definitely get *sexually attracted* to someone at first sight. (Is this love already?) I might decide to actually do something about that, and then I would feel the *excitement of adventure*. (Is this love already?) I could also imagine that person to be smart and curious and nice... at that moment, based on almost zero data, mostly on my wishful thinking and halo effect... and by sheer coincidence I might even be correct. (Is this love already?) I might become obsessed with that person. (Is this love already?) Those things could all happen at first sight, and yeah, that has actually happened to me a few times.
Then there is a moment when I *know*, based on personal experience, that the person actually *is* smart and curious and nice. Maybe not as much as I imagined before I knew them, because reality often cannot compete with fantasy; but perhaps still a lot. When I know that the feelings are mutual, and that we can trust each other and be open with each other. A rationalist might call it becoming a part of each other's utility function. (Is this love already?) These things take some time, so they cannot happen at first sight.
tl;dr -- things can happen at first sight, not sure whether to call them "love"
I was quoting the Beatles there. As it happens Ringo (I think he wrote that) was being very wise in his response. It wasn’t “sure, it happens all the time”, not “it’s definitely happened to me”.
Love at first sight has to be mutual I think, for the phrase to make any sense.
> Similarly, it is interesting to see the pushback against "sapiosexuality".
At least in my own experience, "sapiosexuality" gets a bad rep because it's pretty much exclusively used by the most basic, doesn't-read, doesn't-think, degree-in-underwater-basket-weaving, 7-hours-of-phone-screentime-per-day, types of women.
It's become an anti-shibboleth for what it's theoretically supposed to represent affinity for. But you know, maybe I'm the crazy one.
100%. I noticed that "I really crave deep conversations" seems to mostly come from milquetoast NPC types that never seem to have a single interesting thought to share.
It reminds me of how the people who sound the most excited about the gym on their profiles are also the ones who need it the most and seem to have discovered it recently, while all of the life-long gym rats chicken breasts & rice types don't even mention it because it's just the life they live every day.
Edit: false place in thread.
Last open thread there was the assertion that the term woke was only used by the right now and not the left. I will note that I received in my social media feed yesterday usage of woke in an advertisement designed to appeal to anti-Trump people
"Get Woke. Embrace Hope. Resist! Free New Rise & Shine $44.95 Box with $50 Gift Card!
Hang in there.
As cooks, we care. We especially care about those in need. And it’s not just that we care, it’s like we feel the hurt of those who are hurting. I think that is why this Monday is weighing so heavily on so many of us.
The thought of so many good and decent people being hurt for nothing more than the enjoyment of Donald Trump and his followers can seem so very-very hopeless. And it’s not hopeless, not by any means, but somehow in this moment it sure feels that way." ....
After a few more anti Trump paragraphs we get to the items for sale including
"We also have the brand new $23.95 Woke Gift Boxes free with each $30 Gift Card sold. These little boxes are fun and we need fun to get through these coming years. I Got Woke, now I’m hungry for Justice and so much more!"
https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/woke-gift-box/c-24/p-3054/pd-gb?clid=IwY2xjawH6
Another recent use of woke I on the left I note that there was controversy last year over a $250,000 contract to improve elementary school education going to an organization called Woke Kindergarten.
For the newspaper article
"The Woke Kindergarten curriculum shared with schools includes “wonderings,” which pose questions for students, including, “If the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?”
In addition, the “woke word of the day,” including “strike,” “ceasefire” and “protest,” offers students a “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woke-kindergarten-glassbrook-hayward-18635504.php
No matter how woke you are, Gertrud is woker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrud_Woker
(PS, is she a case of nominative determinism?)
Good God. Commercialism really does eat everything. It's a spice company, and I'm unsure whether they really are True Believers or if they would happily produce the MAGA Spicy Set as well. And which is worse - the True Believers committing simony by using principles to huckster a box set of spices, or blatant "we don't care a straw for principles, money has no smell".
I think I prefer the Diocletian approach, to be honest. I get queasy and angry at people trying to sell holy water or Lourdes water online, and it would be even worse if they were doing it out of "I genuinely believe this will cause a miracle to happen".
https://www.penzeys.com/shop/about-us/
"Now, for a host of reasons, I think the time has come to admit what we are actually up to and come right out and say it. So here goes. We are trying to make the world a better place. And with your help there are days where we actually seem to be doing that. Our goal now is to have more of those days."
And in order to do that, we'll take advantage of people feeling goddamn suicidal over the election result to shill our spice blends to them. Hey, if they're gonna off themselves, they can't take the money with them now can they, so may as well give it to us!
Look at this patronising bullshit:
https://www.penzeys.com/shop/about-republicans/
"Remember when your distrust of big city types, and your deep rooted beliefs in paying your debts, respecting your marriage, raising kids willing to serve, honoring your word, and going to church every week had you voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden all because Biden’s son had a computer? Or how you couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was over-prepared and used emails? I know that to you your actions seem rational and in keeping with your values, but when it comes to voting you are now consistently voting in people who are the exact opposite of you and the values you hold dear."
Yeah, sure: it was because Hunter owned a computer. That there teck-noll-gee, we conservatards don't trust none of that unnatural devices! She used eee-males? Ritin' a letter with pen and paper was good enough for Grampaw, we reckon! Don't need no fancy eee-males!
https://www.penzeys.com/online-catalog/woke-gift-box/c-24/p-3054/pd-gb?clid=IwY2xjawH6
"CONTAINS: 1/4-Cup jars of Transgender Remember Vanilla Sugar, Outrage, Justice, and Florida Seasoned Pepper"
Oh well, clearly I can't avail of this wonderful bargain because alas, I'm cishet and not transgender, so using that Vanilla Sugar would be appropriating someone else's culture and that is Not Woke 😀
A term being used in advertising doesn't seem very good evidence of anything.
Some of it is probably just recuperation, kind of like some rightwingers did with, say, "deplorable" after that whole hubbub (so you had Deploraball and so on).
It's from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and basically just means "aware".
As a non- American, I never heard it before the right started using it to do fascism. Americans may have heard it beforehand.
It was very successfully appropriated.
Sort of like what the British did with the word clever.
I agree that the term came originally from AAVE. But 'woke' seems to have become much more of an identifier of ideological tribes after it was appropriated from AAVE.
I first heard it on a California campus around 2017, in genuine use by believers.
Later than your date (Jan 20 2018), but here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yQsEA5tLd4
Interestingly this seems to have been too early for "latinx".
As an American, I've only ever heard of its AAVE origins brought up when people are trying to deny that it is a right wing slur in current practice.
The original AAVE term is not a political philosophy. It's an attitude of being aware of issues and how they affect you.
The right wing use of "woke" is a strawman of any government policy that is not outright fascism.
When the organization is using the term in its name, "Woke Kindergarten" and in the curriculum, "woke word of the day" It's not a strawman when opponent use the term "woke" when objecting to the curriculum including “language of the resistance … to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way that they can easily digest, understand and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system.”
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/woke-kindergarten-glassbrook-hayward-18635504.php
Incidentally it appears from photographs that the owner is African American and not a White person adopting it to be a trendy consultant.
I'd say using "woke" to refer to that is probably just a factual statement, along the lines of the original usage. The right wing usage is more often about any government or corporate policy that protects minorities, or even other left-wing projects like building renewable energy generation.
This provides important context to your comment at 87474327, above. Thank you.
When you're not sure if you're witnessing performance art, or if this is actually happening.
B-b-but I was told that there was no such thing as "woke"... it's only a boogeyman that bad right-wing people made up. :(
If they're reduced to playing dead, maybe now is the time for us to take the W and be happy. We can still keep one eye open in case they try to get up to their old tricks again.
>We can still keep one eye open in case they try to get up to their old tricks again.
Sounds prudent! Also, try to help those who were forced to adopt woke protective mimicry to safely shed it.
You are hopelessly old-fashioned Gunflint, and as a result inclined to not take things too seriously. You should be ashamed of yourself.
> A local lake’s name was changed from Calhoun to Bde Mka Ska
I've definitely noticed a recent trend towards making "Indigenous" place names as awkward and annoying as possible to say or write, as a display of power by the renamers.
Gone are the days of shit like "Uluru" which is at least easy to pronounce and sounds good. The new name of Mount Wellington in Tasmania is "kunanyi / Mount Wellington". Not Mout Kunanyi, not even Kunanyi, but kunyanyi. Spelled with a lower case "k" because fuck you, we've decided this one fucking mountain is an exception to all existing English grammar.
Bde Mka Ska sounds like a fantastic example of the same thing.
How to pronounce that name of the lake is a fair question.
There's nothing wrong with the pronunciation, it's the spelling that's a problem.
The Dakota had no written language, so someone must have gone and transliterated a perfectly good Dakota word into the English alphabet in a way that isn't consistent with anything sensible.
Just spell it "Bede Macaska" or something.
Oh well then, that clears it up.
If someone is good at history, perhaps you can help me understand: What happened with aristocracy at the end of feudalism?
I mean, there was a moment of time when people owned land, and that was the official source of their power. But ownership of land didn't disappear, and a Georgist might say that even today owning a lot of land makes you a kind of aristocrat; we just don't look there, because we prefer to discuss capital.
So what happened to the former aristocrats? I can imagine a few scenarios:
* they got killed;
* they survived, but their land was taken away;
* they sold the land trying to join the new capitalist economy, but they sucked at the new economy, so they lost the land and the money;
* they kept the land, but it was at an unimportant place, and the rent was too low to allow them to live comfortably;
* they kept the land, got enough rent to let them and their descendants live comfortably.
I can imagine that each of these scenarios actually happened to someone. My question is, can anyone estimate the probabilities? Probably depends on history of the specific country. I guess I am ultimately curious how much of continuity is between the land owners back then, and the land owners today.
It depends on the country. In some places like England and Spain, they're basically still around and still rich and influential. In some countries like France, lots of them got killed and a lot of the rest were impoverished, they might still be a cultural group but they don't have more influence than anyone else. Many other countries are kind of in-between.
Also, being an aristocrat isn't really synonymous to owning land. Plenty of aristocrats didn't have much in the way of land holdings, and plenty of land was owned by non-aristocrats, most notably the church.
A combination of factors:
1. New wealth crowded out old wealth in relative terms. Feudal estates become a much smaller percentage of society's wealth without any particular estate necessarily reducing in value in absolute terms
2. Being descended from people who were good at feudalism correlates less than perfectly with being good at capitalism. A lot of landed aristocrats found themselves spending more than their incomes and needing to sell off land to meet expenses. C.f. entire genres of British fiction about cash-poor 19th and 20th century aristocrats.
3. A lot of countries to varying extents either expropriated the estates outright or used a combination of land taxes and inheritance taxes to redistribute wealth away from landed aristocrats.
4. Depending on the country, a lot of the aristocrats still own large estates. Some aristocratic families did turn out to be good enough at capitalism to pay the taxes and maintain or grow their estates, or were at least politically powerful enough (especially in the case of members of the extended royal family) to retain enough privileges and special tax status to make up any shortcomings in their skills in wealth management. An awful lot of English land, both urban and rural, is still owned at least partially by aristocratic estates. The ones tied to the monarch and his heir (the Crown Estates, the Duchy of Lancaster, and the Duchy of Cornwall) are by far the biggest, but they are far from the only ones.
> An awful lot of English land, both urban and rural, is still owned at least partially by aristocratic estates.
> Some aristocratic families did turn out to be good enough at capitalism to pay the taxes and maintain or grow their estates
Note that this wasn't possible in England with its 80% inheritance taxes. The aristocratic families that retained their estates did so by converting them into public-access museums.
I expect the impact of the inheritance taxes would have varied quite a bit depending on how lucky the family in question got in terms of how often their heads of family died and when. It looks like there was about a 40 year window (1946 through 1986) when the tax was 80-ish percent. Before and during WW1, taxes were 20% or less, and were 40-65% for the interwar years through WW2, and it looks like the top rate got cut to 60-ish% in 1986 and to 40% at some point I can't find after that.
Assuming 30-year generations, these are the real rates of growth you'd need to maintain an estate despite the inheritance tax at various rates:
80% - 5.5%
60% - 3.1%
40% - 1.7%
20% - 0.7%
With unluckier 15-year generations:
80% - 11.3%
60% - 6.3%
40% - 3.5%
20% - 1.5%
A 5.5% real growth rate would take a bit of luck as well as prudent investment (and management of existing landholding), especially considering that they no doubt want/need to spend some of their income on their lifestyle, not just reinvest everything, but isn't completely out of the question. A 1-3% real growth rate seems much more achievable.
But a sustained 11.3% (or higher) real growth rate is ridiculously high, high enough that I would be surprised if any large estates survived being inherited three or more times during 1946-1986.
Those who did manage to avoid the worst of the post-war inheritance laws usually converted the urban estates into entities held in trust, or into regular companies with outside investment etc.
The ones that didn't end up on the wrong side of a revolution (such as in Britain) are often still around and sometimes still reasonably wealthy, but they had any special privileges beyond title eroded away by politics and got eclipsed in wealth by folks in business (and the ones that are still wealthy aren't wealthy typically because they're landowners anymore).
In the early modern period, a lot of aristocrats essentially eroded away their fortunes with the high costs of living and debts. Performing aristocracy was expensive, and they had a whole bunch of vices as well like gambling, etc. The funny thing is that sometimes they had an estate that was "entailed" - essentially in a legal trust state so that it couldn't be sold or borrowed against - so you'd end up with aristocrats who were basically broke in terms of cash but still owned an increasingly decrepit mansion house or castle and immediate grounds around it.
That itself was a reflection of the shift into the modern era, with land increasingly treated as property that could be readily sold and borrowed against. Typically land was not something you could sell in medieval Europe, and it came with a bunch of rights and obligations - you could pledge incomes against the land and its products to borrow money, but not the land itself.
Usually mostly the third one. In many countries (especially Russia) the nobility were almost notoriously financially irresponsible and commoners gradually bought them out. In northern Germany (Prussia) the aristocrats were actually unusually capable at administering their estates profitably, and as a result remained unusually influential even well into the 20th century (which many historians say greatly influenced modern German history), and many of Germany’s early industrialists were Prussian aristocrats (many of Germany’s biggest companies even today are still owned by the same old noble families), but I think they were exceptional and even there most aristocrats have gradually assimilated in the last few generations and become fairly regular (still wealthier than average) people, and most of the super rich people by now are no longer descendants of nobles.
I feel like something else happened in Russia.
This is probably not quite the answer you wanted, but you may find it relevant.
Feudalism as a structure works in societies that lack large scale military organization (like you saw in ancient Rome or in the Persian or Chinese Empires), but are at a technology level where a small number of well trained and equipped men can militarily control large numbers of unskilled and cheaply equipped men. In big empires that can raise up armies of a hundred thousand men and train then decently, you don't get as much feudalism. But if you and your opponent's armies are primarily made up of a few thousand poorly equipped peasants then the army that's most likely to win is the one with the most actual trained warriors: in other words, knights.
European feudalism was a political machine that maximizes the number of knights you can bring to a battle. The minimum you need to be a knight is to have enough financial security that you aren't malnourished, can spend a significant amount of time training for combat, and can afford expensive weapons, armor, and warhorses. So at the bottom of feudal society you have knights as the smallest landowners, each with about enough land that they can meet that minimum threshold. They get that land from larger landowners, and in exchange that larger landowner gets their military service: so now the local baron has 20 knights he can call upon to fight for him, which is better than having 2,000 serfs who can fight for him. The baron got his land from the Count via the same deal, the Count got his from the Duke, the Duke got his from the King, and at the top of the structure you ideally have a King who can summon several thousand knights to suppress rebellions and fight with the other kings. It's a pretty stable system.
However, that system no longer works at all when you don't need trained elite warriors to win battles anymore, and that's what happened with the widespread adoption of the gun. A peasant with a bow and arrow or a spear is little match against a trained, mounted, and armored knight: a peasant with a gun has a good shot at killing him. It doesn't take too long to train a peasant to be decent at using a gun either, just a few months. Suddenly knights and samurai find themselves facing armies of thousands of peasants each armed with a weapon that can easily kill them.
Once guns became widespread enough that you could equip thousands of peasants with them, the whole reason for an aristocracy evaporated. Before the King needed his Counts and Dukes and whatnot to fight: and to bring their knights. Now the King just needs people, lots of people, and the money to feed and equip them. The aristocracy no longer serves a point, and from about the 1600s onward the aristocracy slowly disintegrated from the ground up.
First went the knights and the smaller nobility. The Counts and Dukes of the world at least had lots of land producing lots of money, and the more money you have the more peasants you can equip and conscript, but the little guys didn't have the funds to raise an army of their own and were no longer needed by the higher ups to fight in wars. Most of them either became the gentry and focused on farming and trying to make a profit as an agricultural landlord, or they tried to go into business and either succeeded or lost their shirts. As small nobles go under their land gets snapped up by the more successful ones, which keep them afloat for longer. Yet as we can see with the Absolute Monarchs of the 18th and 19th centuries, Kings don't need aristocrats anymore. They just need money. Kings start handing out titles of nobility in exchange for money or favors, and the "New Rich" become more powerful than the old aristocratic blood. Ultimately the fate of the more powerful nobles is the same as the lower ones: try to make a living as a landowner, try to invest in business and turn a profit, and the ones who fall get their capital snapped up by the successful ones. But making money is a game everyone can play, regardless of blood, so even Dukes with a big head start in the capital department get overshadowed by millionaire industrialists.
Finally WWI happens and knocks out the few remaining supports holding up the sham feudalism that remained. Now the only aristocrats left are those who managed to stay rich, and they are only as powerful as they are rich.
Depends on the history of the specific country for sure.
I think the Russian nobility all got killed or had to flee.
English nobility are certainly still alive, though a lot of them donated their mansions to the government because they couldn't afford to maintain them. (I think this is probably because servants have gotten more expensive rather than the family getting less wealthy.)
The Prince of Liechtenstein, descended from a man so rich he bought the country, is still one of the richest men in the world; he and his family have a net worth in the hundreds of billions.
In a lot of European countries war and socialism ended the aristocracies. Here in Britain, not so much although we had heavy death duties in the early 20C, as any viewer of downton abbey would attest. Nevertheless the top 1% of landowners own 50% of the land and that’s mostly the aristocracy, the church and the Crown.
In fact lots of London is owned by that trifecta, and they charge a ground rent which can be nominal enough for the Crown estate (£50) but up to £1000 a year for other estates in the richer parts of London. Not much per house but it adds up.
These leases are from 125 years to 999 years.
The leases with a long duration are sold and bought like any other property, although the estate owner can interfere they rarely do. The housing with leases about to expire become worthless, or very cheap, starting to decline somewhere around the 80 year mark. At the end of this period ownership reverts to the estate.
The three largest aristocratic estates of London are all held by relatively new peerages that are post the heyday of feudalism:
1) Cadogan Estate, of Earl Cadogan (that title in 1800, first aristocratic male-line ancestor 1672)
2) Grosvenor Estate, owned by the Duke of Westminster (1874, first aristocratic male-line ancestor 1622)
3) Portman Estate, owned by Viscount Portman (first aristocratic ancestor ~1837 but it's complicated as there were a lot of cousin and marriage inheritances, tentatively 1611)
Not particularly surprising that most of these estates date to the chaos of the post-reformation and civil war upheavals, where many families and estates were created or torn up.
What I *did* find surprising is that all are descended in their modern forms from prominent *Whig* (or liberal) families.
-The 1st Earl Cadogan (1672) was a Whig MP, and the 1st Earl Cadogan (1800) was also a Whig MP.
-The 1st Duke of Westminster was a Whig, then Liberal MP. His ancestors were royalists and Tories up until 1806, when they became Whigs.
-The 1st Baron Portman was a Whig MP. His distant in-laws/ancestors were Tories, however.
I suppose this might be natural considering they were chiefly property developers in the centre of global commerce. Of the remaining 88 hereditary peers, just 3 are Liberal Democrats. The modern Conservative party is, despite the Tory moniker, the true heir to the Whigs.
Scott: why are you so reluctant to call Richard Lynn a fraud?
We'd all agree that — if done intentionally — P-hacking is fraud, wouldn't we? There are various ways to do p-hacking, but probably the most common is selecting data or data sets that support one's hypothesis and excluding data or data sets that don't (which is now why serious researchers pre-register their data nowadays).
Richard Lynn selectively excluded data that didn't agree with his hypothesis, and he included sketchy data that did agree with his hypothesis when he created the National IQ data set. Likewise, he imputed estimates for many African nations from their neighbors. This may not be P-hacking, per se, but he's manipulated his data sets to get the conclusion he wanted. In my day, that was called data dredging. It was considered to be scientific fraud back then, as it should be now. I left academia about 35 years ago. Did the definition of fraud change while I was away?
In previous discussions, I heard a couple of defenses of Lynn like this.
1. Well, we don't have any better data. Answer: we do for some countries. But bad data is bad data. Don't recycle it.
2. Well, it Lynn's data correlates well with national education attainments etc etc., so it must have some validity! Answer: if we don't know what a *valid* national median IQ of a nation is we can't claim correlation.
3. And Cremieux claims it's OK to impute IQ scores on countries for which we have no data, but fails to address the faults in the data sets he's using for imputation (is that a real word?).
None of these defenses pass the sniff test.
But the data is pretty good. If you actually look at the most recent versions most countries have several not too bad surveys and they tend to agree pretty well. I think part of the problem is "isolated degrees of rigor" and part is just not understanding statistics. Like we have a rough idea of the level of vitamin D deficiency across countries, its not perfect, any one survey is just an approximation but it enables us to say interesting things about vitamin D and plan interventions.
I am a professional numbers person and am convinced Lynn's numbers or on the whole okay. Part of that is how well they correspond not just with education variables but a host of other things like notable people, GDP, immigrant outcomes, adoption studies. It all hangs together.
Do you have links to some more recent IQ studies? I haven't been able to find any.
> Well, it Lynn's data correlates well with national education attainments etc etc., so it must have some validity! Answer: if we don't know what a *valid* national median IQ of a nation is we can't claim correlation.
What's this supposed to mean? Lynn gives us a set of labeled numbers. We have some other numbers with the same labels. You can just calculate the correlations.
The correlations being high is what "validity" means. Validity depends on them, but they depend on nothing.
Yes the correlation between the two sets of numbers is "real", but the issue is when you take that correlation to be support for a third thing which neither data set actually measures.
But if Lynn's numbers are bogus, the correlation is specious.
My thoughts exactly, I don't understand why we can't just admit that we don't have good data on IQ for at least half the countries out there and toss it out entirely?
Because we don't just insist data must be perfect or we can't use it to do anything. It is hard to get good data about illegally traded bushmeat but if we have a few studies suggesting this is a huge problem for a) public health b) conservation, then the rational response is not to entirely toss out the data and bury our heads in the sand but a) start doing things to address the problem, b) get better data, c) adjust actions depending on better data.
I'm confused, what exactly are we using the data on IQ in Malawi for? Why does it matter and what do we lose by not using it?
Data about low IQs can motivate interventions aimed at improving cognitive abilities. For example, LEEP aims to eliminate the use of lead paint in Malawi. Childhood lead poisoning is strongly linked to impairments in cognitive abilities.
To design such an intervention, we need to know that childhood lead poisoning is a problem. This knowledge is based on studies like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23797342/, which find correlations between lead exposure and IQ. Such studies need data on IQs.
These studies then inform organizations like LEEP and are used in their cost-effectiveness analyses (like here: https://leadelimination.org/malawi_cost-effectiveness_intro/). This in turn motivates donors to give money to LEEP.
Bad data is just bad data. It shouldn't be used for any purpose. Worse yet, if it's passed off as good data, it deludes people into thinking they know something when they should be out investigating.
Trump is issuing an executive order ordering all federal employees to not “recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status.”
He's also issuing executive orders that do things like empowering the ICE to summarily deport illegal immigrants and establishing new DHS task forces to work with states and local governments to do the same. It appears from the first EO that he intends for this to include people who were born in the US to parents who were here "without legal status".
That first one seems to violate plain text of the Constitution which states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." (And in turn violate the oaths of office of the president and lots of other officials.)
Unless of course you argue that the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" part does not apply to the children of persons who were in the US illegally. But...doesn't that interpretation render most of the rest of Trump's first batch of executive orders meaningless regarding those particular people? How could a US president order, or federal/state/local officials carry out, the deportation of people who are explicitly not "subject to US jurisdiction"? Doesn't that become the same as how they can't enforce parking laws on foreign ambassadors and whatnot?
Lawyers on Bluesky are pointing out that the wording of the EO doesn't only cover children born to illegal immigrants, it also covers children of people with lawful but temporary residence. That's going to cover a lot more people than you think - work or student visas can last for several years, more than enough time for people to marry and have kids.
(For an amusing example, both Ivana Trump and Melania Trump gave birth before becoming US citizens.)
> (a) It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
Regardless of whether it's compatible with the text of the 14th amendment, that hardly sounds unreasonable, and would just bring the US in line with most other western countries.
Ivana and Melania Trump would of course not be subject to (2) anyway since their kids' father was a US citizen.
> would just bring the US in line with most other western countries.
I think this is factually correct, but is this alignment supposed to be a desirable end?
The US also tends to differ from most Western countries by:
- the notion of “gun rights”
- their interpretation of “free speech” (the culture war stuff, but not only – I seem to recall some outrage re “companies are people” which does not seem endorsed in the rest of the world, again before this decade’s culture war)
- their health care system and general lack of social programs
- their incarceration (and homicide) rate
- judges are elected (with Japan and Switzerland)
- voting on weekdays (with the UK, Canada and Denmark)
- much larger tips
- its unrivaled tech industry
- its eagerness about American football
For which of these would “aligning the US with most Western countries” be a good idea?
And what range of answers should we expect for Trump voters (or supporters, or people he would nominate for a position)?
"Other countries do it" is not intended as a general purpose argument for something, but it makes it not-unthinkable.
Is there a good argument for voting on weekdays, by the way?
Black-letter constitutional law that says "we *don't* do that, unless certain very demanding conditions are met", should put it solidly back in the unthinkable category. This has nothing to do with whether you think the proposed policy is object-level desirable, or if other people with different laws do it differently.
More generally, it *should* be unthinkable for a head of state or head of government to try to use the machinery of the state to do things that are expressly forbidden by the as-yet-unchanged laws of that state. It should also be unthinkable that the most fundamental laws are to be changed at the whim of the head of state alone.
Well, unthinkable in the sense of clearly illegal as the Constitution stands _now_ , and should not be done by a POTUS, but not unthinkable in the sense of: maybe we should start the amendment process?
FWIW, I, personally, think that e.g. the extreme case of a pregnant woman illegally entering the USA shortly before giving birth should ideally _not_ yield citizenship for the child - but it would take a Constitutional amendment to do this. And there are lots and lots of much grayer cases.
Yeah look I think I'd put it in the same category as all the gun laws that the Democrats have passed with a hopeful eye on a very specific interpretation of the Second Amendment.
The Second and Fourteenth amendments belong in the same category, of "Dumb stuff that shouldn't exist in the US Constitution but unfortunately does".
Maybe “organizing elections and counting the results is also work and week-ends should be for leisure”? I don’t know, I too find this extremely strange.
I think that most of what I listed would also be unthinkable to large parts of the US population for various reasons, and “that’s how most other countries do it” would be met very dismissively.
Whether or not it's in line with other countries, if the goal is simply to prevent "anchor babies" then you should perhaps take care not to screw over random people working their way through the citizenship process the legal way.
Does this screw them over? Can the children not be granted some form of temporary visa to match their parents'?
"You're a citizen now, but your children can only stay in the country temporarily" sounds like it's at least a significant paperwork hassle, even if there's a path to fixing it.
(And is that visa going to stick around? "Chain migration" has been a popular bugbear for the right...)
You're also assuming that people _want_ US citizenship. If you don't want it, it's a horrible burden. Accidental US citizens need to file US tax returns and may need to pay US taxes. They also need to have US passports if they ever want to visit the US. And you're not allowed to relinquish your US citizenship until you're 18, and at that point you have to pay a $2350 fee.
If you're (say) an academic couple visiting the US for a few years to get your career started and you wind up having a baby in the US, that baby is fucked under the current system.
Even from a nativist perspective, it seems odd to have the law say, effectively, "we think you're good enough to apply for citizenship, but we aren't so sure about your children." Who had a more American upbringing, the immigrant mother or the child who grew up in the US?
Also, I am somewhat sarcastically assuming that the Republicans who are saying "we don't hate all foreigners, just the ones who came here illegally" are telling the truth.
Agreed. In general, I'd tend to lean pretty heavily in the direction of presuming that anyone here legally is fine. We _do_ have processes for vetting them, to various extents, but they are in a very different situation from the gotaways.
No, jurisdiction is not the same as the ability to enforce laws against.
The legal interpretation rests on the debates around the amendment where the people who wrote it explicitly stated it did not apply to everyone resident in the territory of the United States including Native Americans not under American government control, the children of diplomats and foreign visitors, etc. This interpretation is still used to exclude various categories. So it's not as dubious an interpretation as liberals want it to be. But the Republican interpretation is also not a clear cut and obvious thing since it was meant to give citizenship to people who were not then uncomplicatedly citizens and who had counted in the census and all that.
> But a regular foreigner with no such immunity, who has to pay taxes and follow US laws, is subject to US jurisdiction.
That makes sense for legit visa holders, but what about a foreigner in the country illegally? If they had to follow US laws then they would't be there.
That's certainly a legit argument on the other side.
Realistically I think we have to accept the Copenhagen interpretation of the US Constitution, which says that words have no meaning until the Supreme Court says what they mean. I assume the ball is now rolling, and the exact meaning of these words will eventually be set out by them.
Yup! I was looking over the discussion and was thinking the same thing. It isn't over till the 9 Justices sing.
This was not the interpretation at the time. You might interpret it differently and that's the core of the dispute.
Which case?
The clause "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has a *possible* interpretation along the lines of "isn't a citizen of another country".
I am familiar with that interpretation and it seems very strained to me. Non-citizen immigrants and visitors, legally authorized or not, are generally subject to American jurisdiction in the sense that federal and state laws apply to them and they can be arrested by American police and tried in American courts.
The classes that actually seem a good fit for people physically present in the US but not subject to American jurisdiction are:
1. Lawful enemy combatants in wartime.
2. Members of foreign embassies with diplomatic immunity.
3. Members of sovereign Native American tribes, more or less corresponding to the "excluding Indians not taxed" clause elsewhere in the 14th amendment.
#3 is currently moot for 14th amendment purposes, since all Native Americans born in the US are now entitled to birthright citizenship by statute, but it was a significant factor at the time the 14th Amendment was proposed and ratified.
Very much IANAL, but I get the impression that the clause is one of those phrases (like "well regulated") that have a legal meaning (especially at the time it was written) differing from modern lay usage.
Really? Because "jurisdiction" is used in a great many circumstances and contexts, and its definition has remained I think quite constant in almost all of them. And the definition that is broadly accepted everywhere else, makes perfect logical sense here, it just doesn't let you do what you want to do.
Laws frequently don't let you do what you want to do, that's the whole point, and you can't change that by saying that you've changed the meaning of the words they are written with.
Again, IANAL, but it's the whole phrase including "subject to" that I would be unsurprised to learn has a nonintuitive denotation in legal writing.
I'm also not asserting it does!
Ah yes but the Constitution is a living document and we need not limit ourselves to the original meaning of the text of the Constitution when interpreting it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I wouldn't recommend telling a judge that he doesn't have jurisdiction because you're a foreigner.
Self declared "sovereign citizens" tell judges they don't have jurisdiction because reasons, and it goes very much not well. I actually knew a guy who pulled that in civil court and it cost him a few nights in jail for contempt of court. (And he lost the suit that had been filed against him but that was likely anyway.)
I'm pretty sure "the US Constitution" is that thing.
This feels very analogous to saying "there's nothing mandating that executive orders not be illegal".
tl;dr: ChatGPT o1 1/18/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
a) correct
b) partially correct (initially evaded answering part of the question, 1st prod gave wrong answer, 2nd prod gave right answer)
c) mostly correct (two errors)
d) correct
e) initially incorrect, one prod gave correct result
f) misses a lot, argues incorrectly that some real compounds don't exist
g) badly wrong
It seems to be doing better than on previous versions, but when it _is_ wrong is seems more likely to be _stubbornly_ wrong.
List of questions:
a) Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye? [gets right]
b) I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
c) Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
d) Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
e) Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
f) Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
List of questions with some detail about answers and links:
a) Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye? [gets right]
Yes. A wavelength of approximately 530 nm lies well within the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum (roughly 380–750 nm). In fact, around 530 nm corresponds to a green color, which the human eye is generally quite sensitive to.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c0578-725c-8006-815a-974b5750ddb5
b) I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
Initial answer gets the species right, but hedges on what electronic transitions are responsible for the color.
On being forced to clarify, it gets FeCl4 right but CuCl4 wrong (says it is d-d transition).
On being lead by the nose, can be forced into getting the right answer for CuCl4.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c0895-455c-8006-9e22-c9c071dc31e2
c) Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
Initial answer covers most of the possibilities, and admits that it isn't trying to cover some of the most extreme hypothetical possibilities.
Two errors: It initially calls methylcyclopropene a single structure (corrects itself when prodded).
It initially lists structures with 3 degrees of unsaturation but misses tetrahedrane. I forced its hand with:
"Under "Three Degrees of Unsaturation (C₄H₄)", is there another structure in addition to those you listed - a famous one?"
at which point it coughed up tetrahedrane. In general, the answer to this is better than I've seen before.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c0d7f-4b30-8006-a969-e4ea60863f68
d) Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
Correct on the first try, which is better than I've seen before:
"you see that the Sun loses roughly four times more mass through the energy it radiates (via E=mc2) than through the solar wind. Hence, the mass-equivalent of sunlight carries away more mass than the solar wind does."
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c0f47-2ec4-8006-b05c-f3e077c47afd
e) Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
Initial result wrongly gave an infinite slope at the equivalence point. Prodding once with
"The slope at the equivalence point is not infinite. Rather than creating separate equations for the three regions, try using the autoionization formula for water and the charge balance, that [H+]+[Na+]=[OH-]+{Cl-] to compute a formula for [H+] (your y(x) ) which is valid throughout the whole titration, then work from that."
gave a correct answer.
I'm ambivalent about this. Since I explicitly asked about the slope at the equivalence point, a human should have noticed that "infinity"
is not a reasonable answer and that they needed to rethink this. On the other hand, once I gave it the prod, it gave a fully correct
answer, with all steps explained and correct reasoning at each step, including the relationship to the earlier approximations.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c1bcb-e5a8-8006-b69f-9579e5749cb6
f) Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
_I_ shouldn't have suggested 50 compounds. Looking more carefully at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gases, there are actually about 100. The good news is, ChatGPT o1 is finally _not_ including compounds with boiling/sublimation points above 0C, and it has stopped including carbon compounds (both of which were mistakes in earlier versions). It does, however, deny the existence of e.g. P2F4, and needed to bashed at several times to admit that the stuff had been prepared, isolated, and its boiling point measured. It _does_ admit that its list is not exhaustive, so at least it isn't asserting that it has found everything when it hasn't (this was a problem with previous versions).
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c4254-01e8-8006-a9f5-7939480d004e
g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
It screws up, saying that H2O2 can be put into a conformation with an S4 axis (but lacking the center of inversion and mirror plane), but it is wrong. Even with the 90 degree dihedral that it wants, _one_ of the hydrogens can be mapped to the position of the original hydrogen, but the other hydrogen winds up in the wrong place, not matching any hydrogen in the original positions of the hydrogens. I finally got it to cough up an admission of this with _repeated_ corrections. Not just wrong but stubbornly wrong.
https://chatgpt.com/share/678c4e15-8c48-8006-8cbf-7a85688702b2
You should absolutely do Scott's Forecasting Contest first, but for any UK-based folk (or non-Brits interested in British politics and current affairs), I'm currently holding a UK Forecasting Contest, primarily focused on things that might happen on this side of the pond (though with a small foreign affairs section).
https://www.edrith.co.uk/p/2025-forecasting-contest
It's open until the end of this week. But definitely do Scott's first!
Ladies: what reliably gets you distractingly horny?
Inb4: I'm not talking about something a man does (although if it's something done inadvertantly I might be able to use it.) I'm talking about the setting or environment itself.
I'm looking for qualities or elements I can have in the background of a scene that can get everyone who stays there too long subtly worked up. Hijinks and farce to then ensue.
I have my own thoughts but I'm keeping quiet at first.
Location isn't set in stone - probably will be either a boardroom or a church, unless I think of something I find funnier.
How about a carefully placed vibrator? In the "Hysterical Literature" series on Youtube, it worked fine.
In a church, can you install some of those in the pews...?
I mean that's along the kind of lines I was thinking - the girls in the chat have been very good at listing turn offs to avoid, which is obviously very important, but I was also interested in factors that can actively create/encourage arousal.
Vibrators are a bit more direct than I was thinking, I'll admit, but perfectly doable: the building has an unbalanced generator in the cellar and there's a bass shop next door with the amps leaned up against the wall.
Organization
Attention to detail
Nothing remotely childish around - like a figurine.
I don't know if any environment really does it, but the wrong environment can certainly kill it. Someone's home can speak to how mature they are.
What gets /you/ in that state?
Fill the space with those objects, post an advert in your local rag for your new fetish club and see who turns up. You'll likely get much better outcomes than trying to identify some kind of nonexistent magical universal aphrodisiac.
You might have misunderstood me, this is for a work of fiction and I'm gunning for verisimilitude. That said I suppose "in the name of research" can justify a multitude of extravagances.
...ah, yeah, I'd just assumed you were planning an event. That'll teach me :)
Lol at the idea of running that kind of event where I live.
> Ladies: what reliably gets you distractingly horny?
Didn’t they find this question carved into the stone of some cave in Europe?
I have no idea what the answer is, but it reminded me of this joke.
There is an old bull and a Young bull in a field together, and one day the farmer forgets to lock the gate to the pasture where he keeps the cows. “Hey,” says the young bull. “The gates open! Let’s run down the hill and do some of those cows.”
“Nah,” says the old bull, “let’s walk down and do them all.”
> Didn’t they find this question carved into the stone of some cave in Europe?
It's my understanding that the famous "riddle of the Sphinx", which Oedipus and Dr. Freud both failed to solve, was "What does a woman really want?"
I know the answer, but will not reveal it here. Well, maybe for sufficient $$$ ;-)
Just as well; such knowledge could carry a terrible price.
As I recall, the answer to the Sphinx's riddle is, "A man's life."
In a version I heard, there is also a third, oldest bull, and he says: "Shut up, you idiots, or they might hear us and come here."
This question seems like a category error to me. It's like asking what breakfast foods reliably make me feel like overspending. NOTHING about setting reliably makes me horny. The closest thing to the right category would be THINGS THE GUY SAYS OR DOES, and those are just. the obvious things, like make me laugh, or things that seem like signs that indicate he finds life interesting and enjoyable, or things that show good qualities like kindness, smarts, courage, inventiveness. And even those don't make me horny right when I first observe them. They more make me feel more open to him and more interested in getting to know him better. Depending on how things go, horniness might grow out of that.
I think all this is pretty typical, obvious stuff, and I am writing it as a public service to guys who have been told some bullshit about phrases to use or moves to make or decor to have up that are surefire. Women do not have ridiculously specific secret buttons that if you press them make them throw their arms (or legs) around you.
This also accurately describes my experience, and I think it is quite common among women.
While a setting might be romantic (e.g. the classic dim lights, candles, soft tablecloth and comfy chairs), in my opinion the setting is mostly a bonus that makes it easier for the man to do horniness-inducing things.
Most women aren't driven completely mad with lust by architecture or furnishings, but dirt and mess and, to a lesser degree, indifferent, chaotic decor, is usually a major turn off.
EDIT: Though now that I really think about it, most straight bachelor dudes are notoriously indifferent to and bad about maintaining home aesthetics, so a straight dude with a competently designed space might actually get a woman closer to lust than you'd think (although she'd perhaps wonder if she's looking at a previous woman's work).
That's kind of where I started from. I ended up with:
- clean, airy, comfortable
- tasteful opulence
- softbox lighting
- aural background options include something rhythmic, a low bass drone from the floor, or maybe something relaxing like babbling water/falling rain. I don't know why wooden drums keep entering my head but they do.
- visually I get that girls are less responsive than guys but I can't see the harm in maybe a nice muscled classical sculpture or two.
- in terms of smell idk but I bet it's important.
- attractive, relaxed, easygoing other people.
I get that the environment on its own can only set the scene. You'd need to follow that up with something that gets people feeling liberated and thinking about their fantasies.
I'm not sure what that would be yet - let alone how I'm gonna hide it behind a layer of indirection (such as it being some kind of idiosyncratic welcome ritual of the boss/vicar maybe.)
Honestly, even the *words*
“tasteful opulence” make me so hot that I’m sliding off the suddenly slippery surface of my kitchen chair. And if I were now to look at one of those classical statues . . . and if you were then to make a couple Ben Franklin paper airplanes and fly them so that one hits each of my nipples. . .
Rotfl
Looks like I found your ridiculously specific secret button.
"Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars" -- Norman Vincent Peale
Since people seem to be enjoying the LSAT question, here is another, also from a real LSAT. Someone I know who's in the biz commented on it being one of the hardest he's seen.
McKinley: A double-blind study, in which neither the patient nor the
primary researcher knows whether the patient is being given the drug being tested or a placebo, is the most effective procedure for testing the efficacy of a drug. But we will not be able to perform such a study on this new drug, since the drug will have various effects on the patients' bodies, which will make us aware of whether the patients are
getting the drug or a placebo.
Engle: You cannot draw that conclusion at this point, for you are assuming
you know what the outcome of the study will be.
Engle's statement indicates that he is most likely interpreting McKinley's remarks to be
(a) presuming that a double-blind study is the only effective way to test new drugs
(b) denying that the drug will be effective
(c) presuming that the placebo will produce no effects whatever
on the patients' bodies
(d) referring to the drug's therapeutic effects rather than to any
known side effects
(e) based on a confusion about when a drug is efficacious
Ok, I wrote a defense of the correct answer and encoded it using this site,
https://cryptii.com/pipes/rot13-decoder
and using the first option on the page. Have never done this before, hope it worked!
b jura V gbbx n ongpu bs YFNG dhrfgvbaf erpragyl, V chmmyrq bire guvf bar n ybat gvzr orsber riraghnyyl frrvat nebhaq gur pehpvny pbeare. Jung xrcg zr fghpx sbe n juvyr jnf gung ZpXvayrl jnf qrfpevovat n pbzzba ceboyrz va qeht erfrnepu, bar gung’f rnfl gb haqrefgnaq. Fbzrobql zvtug bowrpg gb ZpXvayrl’f pbapyhfvba gung gurer jnf ab jnl gb cresbez n fghql ba gur arj qeht — gurl zvtug, sbe vafgnapr, fhttrfg na npgvir cynprob, fbzrguvat gung jbhyq pnhfr gur fhowrpg gb srry orggre — ohg gurl jbhyq abg bowrpg gur jnl Ratry jbhyq. Jung V jnf vzcbegvat jnf gur xabjyrqtr va erny yvsr vg jnf vzcynhfvoyr gung Ratry jbhyq fnl jung ur qvq. Fb V fng gurer fbeg bs fghaarq, guvaxvat gurer jnf ab rkcynangvba sbe Ratry’f fnlvat jung ur qvq rkprcg gung ur jnf penml.
Ohg gur guvat nobhg YFNG dhrfgvbaf vf gung lbh pnaabg vzcbeg lbhe xabjyrqtr vagb gur jbeyq bs gur dhrfgvba, rkprcg sbe trareny xabjyrqtr fhpu nf ubj znal qnlf gurer ner va n lrne naq jung n qeht fghql vf. Vs na YFNG dhrfgvba pbapreaf 2 pbzcrgvat rkcynangvbaf sbe jul Vqnub unf bayl n 5% qvibepr engr, gura va gur jbeyq bs guvf dhrfgvba Vqnub qbrf unir n 5% qvibepr engr, naq lbhe wbo vf whfg gb whqtr juvpu rkcynangvba vf zbfg cynhfvoyr. Lbh pnaabg vzcbegnag gur npghny Vqnub qvibepr engr gung lbh unccra gb xabj, be ernfba gung vg’f vzcynhfvoyr sbe Vqnub’f engr gb or fb zhpu ybjre guna gur angvbany nirentr. Fb va gur dhrfgvba ng unaq, fbzr crbcyr whqtrq nafjref (be pbapyhqrq gung nyy gur nafjref ner onq) hfvat vasb gurl xabj nobhg pyvavpny gevnyf be fvqr rssrpgf be qeht gevnyf. Gung’f nyy pbzcyrgryl veeryrinag urer. Lbh unir gb qb lbhe ernfbavat jvguva gur yvggyr zbqry jbeyq lbh’ir orra tvira.
BX, fb gb qrsraq Q: Q vf gur bayl cbffvoyr rkcynangvba bs jul Ratry pbhyq znxr gur bowrpgvba ur qvq. Naq abgr gung jr ner abg whqtvat ubj inyvq Ratry’f bowrpgvba vf (gung’f tbvat bhgfvqr gur jbeyq bs gur dhrfgvba), bayl whqtvat jung fnar vagrecergngvba bs ZpXvayrl’f fgngrzragf pbhyq yrnq gb uvf znxvat gur bowrpgvba ur qvq. ZpXvayrl’f fgngrzrag vf fnar, v.r. ernfbanoyr, orpnhfr gurer jnf va snpg na nzovthbhf fgngrzrag va ZpXvayrl’f rkcynangvba, naq ur gbbx ZpXvayrl gb or fnlvat fbzrguvat gung jnf va snpg na hajneenagrq nffhzcgvba. . ZpXvayrl fnvq gung erfrnepuref pbhyq abg fgnl oyvaq gb jurgure gur fhowrpg tbg gur qeht be gur cynprob orpnhfr gur qeht jbhyq unir rssrpgf ba gur cngvrag’f obqvrf. Ol “rssrpgf,” ZpXvayrl zrnag rvgure guvatf gur erfrnepuref pbhyq frr, fhpu nf syhfuvat, be fvqr rssrpgf fhowrpgf jbhyq ercbeg, fhpu nf anhfrn. Ohg ur qvq abg zrna gung gur qrfverq qeht rssrpg gurl jrer grfgvat sbe — n cflpurqryvp rkcrevrapr, fnl — jbhyq unir gryygnyr rssrpgf ba gur cngvragf’ obqvrf. Ohg Ratry gubhtug gung ZpXvayrl jnf fnlvat gung erfrnepuref pbhyqa’g fgnl oyvaq gb jub tbg gur npgvir qeht orpnhfr gurl jbhyq frr gur npghny qrfverq qeht rssrpg ba gur fhowrpg’f obql sbe gur qeht fhowrpgf, ohg abg gur cynprob fhowrpgf. Uvf bowrpgvba jnf gung ZpXvayrl jnf “nffhzvat lbh xabj jung gur bhgpbzr bs gur fghql jbhyq or,” v.r. nffhzvat gur qeht jbhyq jbex nf qrfverq naq erfrnepuref jbhyq frr gur rssrpg.
BX, V’z gbb gverq gb pevgvdhr gur bgure nafjref, ohg V ubcr vg’f rabhtu gb frr gung guvf vf gur bayl bar gung rkcynvaf jung Ratry fnvq. Fbzr bs gur bguref znl or inyvq pbzcynvagf be pbzzragf nobhg gur fghql vgfrys , ohg gurl qb abg furq nal yvtug ba Ratyr’f bowrpgvba.
As everybody has already probably noticed, I have already put up the correct answer, according to the LSAT. I agree with the LSAT, and don’t think the question is malformed, but I think I should not post my reasoning yet because this post hasn’t been up long and what I write will spoil the fun for others. Or I could put it up in scrambled-letter code, but I need somebody to tell me how that’s done. Should
I keep mum or post my defense of the LSAT’s answer?
Personally, I'd like to hear what you have to say. I can't access imgur currently, so I haven't seen the official answer yet. If you want to scramble your answer you would use this (or something like it): https://cryptii.com/pipes/rot13-decoder
Edit: Also, at this point, I am pretty confident that the question is malformed, so I'm curious to hear why you disagree.
I think d is the "correct" answer, but I don't think that any of the answers are actually correct (and therefore the question is malformed).
(a) seems obviously wrong. McKinley is trying design a double-blind study, and therefore interested in a the mechanics of setting up such a study. Whether or not there are alternate methods to study drugs is irrelevant to what he is saying.
(b) Is also obviously wrong. They are discussing how to design studies, not the results they expect to get.
(c) Is wrong because it is irrelevant to McKinley's concerns if the placebo produces effects, as long as the effects are not identical to effects of the drug.
(d) is wrong because part of the purpose of clinical trials is to assess if a drug has side effects, not just if it is efficacious. Therefore Engle could be arguing that by assuming the drug has side effects, he is assuming the result of the study. (This is obscure technical minutia that I think the exam creators overlooked, which is why I suspect that d is the "correct" answer).
(e) is wrong because the discussion is about the study design, not the results or how to analyze them.
<(d) is wrong because part of the purpose of clinical trials is to assess if a drug has side effects, not just if it is efficacious. Therefore Engle could be arguing that by assuming the drug has side effects, he is assuming the result of the study. (This is obscure technical minutia that I think the exam creators overlooked, which is why I suspect that d is the "correct" answer).
This interp is disqualified, tho, by Mck
stating early on that what he wants to do is a study of drug efficacy. You can’t import info you know into the question. McK doesn’t call it a study of drug effects (which would mean therapeutic effects and also side effects), therefore it is a study of drug therapeutic effect’s, not an investigation of side effects, even if in the real world a trial of this design would also be looking for side effects. It’s clear that what McK means is that they know the drug has physical effects that are observable but are different from the therapeutic effects the researchers want to get evidence
If these are the hard questions then I should do the LSAT for shits and giggles. How much does it cost?
IIRC the hard part isn't just doing the questions, it's the time limit. You have like 35 minutes to do 25 questions like this one, so for each one, less than a minute and a half, for a lot of people a significant amount of the time for each question will just be reading it, you have to come up with the answer reasonably quickly, and then forget about it and immediately move on to/100% focus on the next one.
Not saying whether it's hard or not overall, just that it's harder in that context than seeing it online and getting to think about it and type out your reasoning, even for like 5 minutes.
<$250. See https://www.lsac.org/lsat/register-lsat/lsat-cas-fees
If the answer ISN'T D, I agree this is a hard problem.
Answer's here: https://imgur.com/a/a7fKWhj
That was tough, but at least I managed to guess the right answer.
Huh, (d) seems like the obvious answer to me but it's interesting that (c) and (e) are the ones other people have mentioned. I guess this is tricky, curious to know what the official correct answer is.
Reasoning: it is possible to know that a drug has certain effects (say, hallucinations, hair loss, weight gain, whatever) that are not the primary target of the study. This could reveal which group is in the drug vs placebo group regardless of the therapeutic outcome, which McKinley may be referring to. But if Engle thinks McKinley is referring to that, his critique wouldn't make sense. Engle says that the "outcome of the study" can't be known ahead of time - which makes the most sense if he is assuming that those therapeutic effects are what McKinley means by "effects on the patients' bodies", rather than effects that are already known from other studies (e.g. known side effects). The main weakness of this answer is that the "known effects" may not be side effects (for example, if there are therapeutic effects for a different condition, or if the outcome of interest in the current study is downstream of a different condition).
If this is a new drug, how do we expect it to have only "known" side effects in a first place?
Remember though, that for LSAT questions you just work with the situation as it is described, and do not take into consideration things you happen to know that indicate the situation as described could not have happened, of that weigh on what the right answer would be in a real world situation.
Yeah, John Shilling has a good explanation, that this is intended as a test whether a student can figure out what Engels is thinking. I'm an engineer, so - thankfully - I deal with data, and they don't think, only speak.
A lot of drugs that get tested for a particular condition already exist and are known in recreational and/or other therapeutic contexts. E.g. ketamine or psilocybin for depression, semaglutide for drug addiction, amphetamines for adhd
Before you get to a double blind study to test a drug's effects, you need to go through a bunch of work to prove that it's safe and plausibly effective. If the drug turned the subjects in your phase 1 trials purple, it's pretty likely that it will also turn your phase 3 trial subjects purple. It might have unknown side effects too, but it's sufficient to have one known side effect.
This makes sense, thank you. So in order to exclude "c" one would have to know this, which makes the question not a test of pure logic but of drug testing protocols knowledge.
OK, the official correct answer is here:
https://imgur.com/a/a7fKWhj
Hah, I was right! The “c” crowd had almost convinced me.
I hate these kinds of questions; also, (c) seems to be the only reasonable answer. The reason the question is "hard" is because it's poorly formed.
The "most likely" does a lot of work here... I'm not following why "D" isn't referring to side effects. Say a drug cures an internal cancer, which you can't immediately observe, but the patients' skin turns yellow while taking it, which is pretty obvious. Unless the placebo is not the customary sugar pill but a specifically designed drug whos "only" effect is to turn the skin yellow, we will know immediately who gets placebo.
But a drug that turns skin yellow cannot be considered a placebo, because we cannot exclude other "side-effects", so this is not an option.
This is why I'm sticking to my answer even though it's not considered to be a "correct" one.
Like I said, I hate these questions.
Answer D says that Engel believes that McKinley is talking only about the drug's intended theraputic effects and not any side effects. That side effects are not relevant to this particular discussion, either because they don't exist or because they are compensated for by your special turns-skin-yellow-but-does-nothing-else placebo. It isn't necessary that this be *true*, or even that McKinley believe it to be true, only that Engel believes that McKinley believes that it is true.
If side effects are not relevant to the discussion, then there are two possible outcomes of the trial. Either the drug will behave identically to the placebo, or the drug will visibly produce the desired theraputic effect. If this is the case, McKinely's statement that we cannot do a double-blind trial because we *will* see the effects of the real drug, then McKinley is claiming that the drug will produce the desired theraputic effect and thus he is presupposing the outcome of the trial. Which is what Engel said.
Engel may be wrong, he may have misunderstood McKinley. The point of the question is to determine whether the student can figure out, from Engel's words, what Engels is thinking even if it is mistaken. That's a rather important skill for a lawyer to have.
I'm glad I - correctly as it turns out - didn't chose to become a lawyer!
Yeah, I looked at "a" first, but the question says "the most effective", while the answer says "the only effective", so I rejected it.
No, there's no trick of that kind.
What are some performance-enhancing drugs for social situations?
Alcohol is the prototypical one, but I'm curious about any other substances that would, through one effect or another — perhaps even very indirectly — increase sociality, in a wide sense: make it easier to talk to people, make one appear more likeable, anything like that. I'm thinking about this as an analogy to nootropics, which can improve one's cognition through a variety of unrelated effects. (How about “sociotropics”?)
Adderall does this for me. I think stimulants in general can have this effect.
I think this really depends on the person and their disposition. Even mild stimulants (e.g. an extra cup of coffee) can make me so jittery that social anxiety kicks in and/or it's harder to focus on conversations. I can't even imagine taking Adderall and then going to a social event. But I imagine that the person asking for suggestions could probably predict whether such a thing applies to them.
Warning: This is how people become lifelong addicts, proceed with caution
Warning #2: Always grind whatever you buy, then filter through a fine mesh, mix the resulting powder well. Then try a tiny amount first. If you're OK and its not fentanyl, try more.
The answer is (inhaled) oxycodone. Absolutely insane social skills lasting for 2-3 hours and there's no hangover. Make sure to never mix it with alcohol, not even small amounts of it, and keep track of your heart rate.
Just to reiterate: This is how people become lifelong addicts! If you have even the slightest addictive tendencies, do not do this!
I thought opioids cause drowsiness and people to "bliss out". I've never heard of this social effect. What dose are you talking about? Are the effects different at different doses?
Inhaled instant-release oxycodone at doses around 10mg causes an intense desire to socialize without any drowsiness. Go up to 15mg and drowsiness starts to prevail. It's a very fine line.
If you only get the drowsiness effects, it's extremely likely that you've been sold a different opiate such as morphine or an inert pill mixed with fentanyl.
Disclaimer: drugs are bad for you, don't do it.
I've taken to use MDMA during new years eve. The immediate positive effects are like alcohol, but turned up to 11 (at least for the 30m-1h high, then it's slowly decreasing over the course of hours): desire to speak with everyone about everything, to handle 3 conversations at once, readiness to be interested in anything thrown at me. The negative effects both for the end of the night and the day after are much lesser (no sleepiness, no hungover).
The health side & the neurological damage is probably not awesome, but on the other side, neither is getting shitfaced, I think it's
The obvious downside is that unlike alcohol, you need to have lengthy breaks between each take if you want to reset. But on the other hand, it also makes abuse less appealing, so I take it as a blessing in disguise.
For a very occasional substitute to heavy drinking, I feel like it's a net positive.
I’m conservative on drug legalisation, including weed but that stuff should be in the water.
I'd agree for LSD and psylocibin, but I'm a bit on the fence on MDMA, which seems potentially pretty damaging for my taste (but, I'm wagering, less then getting shitfaced)
Unfortunately the main problem with MDMA is that tolerance builds fast and leads to high risk of crippling serotonin syndrome, so it should *not* be put in the water
Stimulants for sure.
As someone with significant social anxiety, amphetamines helped a lot. I got them for ADHD, and found that I was suddenly way more confident in social situations. Of course "way more confident" for me was from a very low baseline, so your milage may vary.
Not a drug, but if you practice singing, over time your vocal abilities will improve, and you will find it easier to talk to people.
You mean like formal practice? Or just singing in the car every day?
Breath mints.
And soap.
This is my favorite answer so far.
Phenibut is the classic for this
Doesn't work on everyone unfortunately. No idea what % it doesn't work for but for me personally it causes zero desire to socialize.
I read an article that states that Scott is now called (by his subscribers one assumes) “our Rightful Caliph”. Is this a GPT hallucination?? If so what was the origin of THAT choice?? Like what was the runner up options here??
The Great Khan, Master of the Grey Horde?? Voivode the (intellectual) impaler, Prince of SF Bay Area Rationalists? The Great Helmsman, Red Sun in Our Hearts, Savior of the People Chairman Scott??? WTF!!
Personally, if we’re engaging in questionable nicknames, I would have thought Tamerlane. He at least was Sahib Qiran (“Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction”). But… help me here.
Also. In my headcanon, sometimes I refer to our Caliph as "Alexander the GOAT". But that's just me.
All those suggestions but not... Great Scott! (?)
Come on, Scott should be a Clan chief (ceannard cinnidh).
This is a joke that goes back a long time, with its roots (if I'm remembering correctly) in the fact that there were/are various Scotts associated with rationalism/rationalism adjacent, so who is the Rightful Scott on one hand and as mentioned below, was it Yudkowsky or someone else who brought people here?
Some came via LessWrong and other sites, others from different places with no connection. And so it was decided that this blog/Substack was Scott's domain hence he was indeed the Rightful Caliph with the authority to impose at his will and whim the Reign of Terror 😀
From memory, I think it was just a dumb joke about whether Elizer or Scott is more popular. Or maybe about Scott being the benevolent dictator of this blog. Like Anomie says, Deisach may very well have been the originator. But maybe not.
Incidentally, there was a conversation a while back about whether randal monroe, Scott, or some other guy should be crowned "king of the nerds".
This is all extremely hazy, so I might have gotten important details wrong. But it's definitely not original to ChatGPT.
Thanks to the helpful…or is it faithful…I’ve been directed to THE IDEOLOGY IS NOT THE MOVEMENT.
Back when I hung out on the Straight Dope Message Board, it was de rigueur to refer to Cecil Adams as the Perfect Master, so there is precedent, at least.
Commenting here cause I got to the links post late, but re: American health superstitions, I've heard that some people over there are very wary of reheated rice, that it supposedly very easy to get food poisoning or even outright die from eating it. Is that belief widespread?
As someone who eats reheated rice almost daily, and has done so for most of my life without ever getting sick from it, I was pretty confused the first time I heard of that notion. And I try to be pretty safe about it, as with any food, but I've absent mindedly left pots of rice sitting on the counter for several hours before properly storing it more than once, to no ill effect that I could observe after reheating and eating it.
For reference, I'm Brazilian.
This is apparently more of a thing in the UK than in the US.
I'm American and I hadn't heard of it until it was mentioned in a Netflix comedy special. Phil Wang (a British Chinese comedian) was performing in the UK, and made a joke about how white people are afraid of reheating rice.
I was confused about what he was talking about, but then he actually clarified that it was only British white people - when he had tried the joke in America, it didn't land.
My partner is very cautious about rice - not so much reheating it once, but about eating it as leftovers after 3-4 days. I'm much less concerned and will generally eat most leftovers if they still look/smell/taste fine, up to more like a week.
I'm an American who eats a lot of reheated rice. I have never heard of this belief.
I can tell you, though, that eating rice at all is not especially typical of Americans. I don't find it surprising that they might hold odd beliefs about an exotic food they don't make or eat.
(Sanity check: https://www.tastingtable.com/982304/how-much-rice-does-the-average-american-actually-eat/
> Americans [] consume more than 20 pounds of [rice] each year [per capita]
> In Asia where rice is an integral part of the diet, an average person eats about 220 pounds each year
> While still not anywhere near as close to Asia's numbers for rice consumption, Americans are expected to eat more as the country's ethnic composition continues to evolve, according to the USDA.
Assuming the average American rice-eater eats a measly 110 pounds of rice a year, that's about 80% of Americans eating no rice. 80% feels a bit too high. Assume that Americans eat small quantities of rice and that a large share of them never eat it at all.)
Oh, that's wild! Rice is super common here in Brazil. Specifically, the combo rice and beans. It's rare to go a day without having it in at least one meal.
I knew that wasn't the case in the US, of course, but I had no idea it would be that uncommon for most to eat any rice at all.
I was told that reheating rice is okay, reheating rice and then storing it again is not okay. There's a bacteria that can survive boiling, and if you heat it and then cool it multiple times then it passes through the "danger zone" multiple times.
Looking it up, cases of food poisoning from bacillus cereus isn't particularly common. But then, how often are people reheating rice *multiple* times, rather than just portioning out their leftovers and reheating one portion at a time? I've only ever cooked one recipe where this was a practical concern - a stuffed pumpkin recipe where you cook rice, then cook it some more inside the pumpkin.
I'm American and I've heard this before all the time! It's one of the more common food safety things you hear if you hang out in cooking communities a lot. There is a toxic bacteria in rice called Bacillus cereus which has spores that survive boiling, which is the main concern. It's a special case of the usual advice against leaving food in the danger zone for more than a few hours.
I don't really put much stock in it, after traveling in Asia and exploring various food traditions that amount to "leaving cooked rice out at room temperature for a while", e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pus%C3%B4 . But to be fair I'm skeptical of most food safety advice, so unless you're pregnant or infirm, take that with a grain of salt and a glass of raw milk.
I'm American, and I have never heard this.
I hadn't heard it before either.
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
Although I'm not sure if your username should make me more or less confident that you'd be open about a belief that seemingly no one knows about :p
I'm British and have heard / was taught that reheating rice is dangerous, for the reasons given by other posters about bacterial spores.
I don't know anyone who's got sick from reheating rice, but it seems plausible it's one of those long tail risks like getting listeria from not washing your vegetables. I often don't bother to wash vegetables because I'm lazy, but I know that adds some small degree of risk.
I will often make some rice, eat a small amount of right away, put the rest in the fridge, and eat it over the course of the next week. I think my (American) mother would freak out if I told her this.
That's how I roll as well!
When you say that your mother would freak out if you told her this, by "this" you mean your rice reheating habit? As in, she thinks reheating rice is dangerous?
I was told during a microbiology talk that pasta and rice are particularly dangerous to leave out at room temperature. Googling just now it seems to be that Bacillus Cereus can germinate at room temperature creating a toxin that stays toxic after reheating and that is at least occasionally fatal.
Seems like if there was enough of it present to do you real harm, you'd be able to taste it, though.
That'd be useful, wouldn't it? Turns out, however, that as with quite a number of other food toxins, no, you generally can't.
Way to let us down, tastebuds!
Here's a common source of cross-culture shock: mushrooms.
In countries where mushroom foraging is common, mushrooms are expected to be peeled and thoroughly cooked.
In countries where mushrooms are cultivated at scale, people are cavalier about cooking them and you will occasionally see them used raw.
When I started mushroom foraging as a hobby I was surprised how quickly bugs start eating mushrooms. Just about every one I found was at least partially bug eaten or infested with tiny worms. I can see why cooking thoroughly is important!
Bugs eat mushrooms that are poisonous to humans, while there are delicious edible wild mushrooms I've never seen eaten (for example, black trumpets). So they are not an indicator in any way, unfortunately.
It was definitely a kind of "I don't know what I expected" surprise. I suppose I was comparing it to my experience picking berries or fruit, which are both food items that are suspended off the ground instead of growing right out of it.
I'm American, and I've never heard of this. (That doesn't mean no one believes it, but it can't be that widespread.)
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that almost none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
Same. I'm older than the mean among this commentariat, have resided nowhere but the US, and like the OP have been eating reheated rice for many years.
My mother, born in the US in 1928, served us kids reheated rice on the regular as well.
Thanks for the data point! This is the kind of thing that I'd expect Scott's readership to be *more* familiar with than the average population, and the fact that almost none of the commenters have heard of it makes me pretty confident that this is indeed a very niche belief.
> reheated rice
FWIW here in the UK there are specific requirements for handling cooked rice when catering for the public, explicitly called out in addition to general rules for handling food. It must either be chilled and refrigerated within an hour of cooking, or it must remain at safe temperature (a special term - there's a whole chart trading off temperature against time) throughout (a rice cooker on "keep warm" will do this). It must not be at room temperature for longer than an hour. If reheated, it must be reheated to a safe temperature throughout.
The reasoning is: freshly cooked rice at 20-30 degrees is damp and has a very large surface area. If a little contamination gets in, it is an ideal environment for bacteria to grow. Therefore it must not be kept at that temperature for long.
That said, there is scale to consider. When I volunteer in the kitchen, I am cooking meals for a hundred people or more; something which is a tiny one-off risk for a meal at home becomes a near-certainty when repeated hundreds of times a day. At home I am much more cavalier with the rice :)
Great point about differences of scale, makes a lot of sense!
“Our new president is happy about his support from "African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, _____ Americans" (lol, just kidding).” I've never met a single race-blinder who finds this thing actually offensive.
Someone find me that mythical creature so I can offer him my unconditional surrender.
Which thing is "this thing"?
Ethno-nationalism for everyone but whites.
I don't find it offensive, but I do find it annoying. People use "African American" to describe folks like Idris Elba, who is from neither of those countries. And white South Africans with dual citizenship have lost their nationality to this proxy term.
Plus the length of the name is basically demanding people give you more of their time. Imagine people throwing out "Check your European-American privilege."
Why should Congress be able to compel people to testify? I could understand if it were limited to generals or executive branch officials for the purpose of assuring checks and balances and civilian control of the military, with anyone refusing to testify losing their jobs. But the idea that they can compel any private citizen to testify about any subject, that just seems like tyranny.
The power to investigate is one of congress's checks on the power of the executive branch. Critical to the power to investigate is the ability to compel people to testify.
The Supreme Court has ruled more than once that (quoting from the 8-1 majority ruling in Eastland v. U.S. Servicemen’s Fund, 1975) the "power to investigate and to do so through compulsory process plainly" constitutes an "indispensable ingredient of lawmaking." Supreme Court majorities have held that basic opinion since the early 19th century. The most recent reiteration of it was in Trump et al v. Marzars USA LLP et al (2020).
That is actually a significant step down from the original understanding of Congress' authorities. During the first decades when dozens of Framers served in Congress and could speak firsthand about the intended logic of the Constitution, Congress was viewed as closer to omnipotent. In 1795 Congress arrested two guys on criminal charges (attempted bribery), basically acting as a prosecutor. In 1800 when a newspaper editor refused to comply with a Senate investigation, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms arrested and jailed him for several weeks while the Senate discussed the matter. No court orders were involved in either case and nobody argued that they should be needed.
> In 1795 Congress arrested two guys on criminal charges (attempted bribery), basically acting as a prosecutor.
Prosecutors can't arrest anyone. And it would seem difficult for Congress to convict anyone of a crime, since that would be a bill of attainder.
They can't compel them to testify about *any* subject: the 5th amendment protects them from testifying to anything that could potentially incriminate them in a court of law, and Congress can't break that rule*. Courts compel testimony all the time: if you get subpoenaed to testify in a court case you have to testify there as well.
*There is a loophole: if they agree to give the person immunity for any crimes that would be implicated for due to their testimony, then they can compel that testimony. The 5th only applies if you can get in legal trouble for it, so if immunized you can't plead the 5th.
> then they can compel that testimony.
This is the standard view, but I'm not sure that's true: they can still be prosecuted by individual states, so I expect they COULD still plead the 5th.
The Supreme Court rejected that position in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission, 378 U.S. 52 (1954). grant of immunity by one sovereign (here, the federal govenrment) grants use and derivative use immunity from any other sovereign by operation of law, and thus permits compulsion of the testimony.
Am I missing something? That decision seems to be that states CANNOT compel testimony by granting immunity, since one would still be subject to prosecution by the other states/federal govt. Is there a different case that says the opposite is true of the federal government? If so, that seems like a loophole for the President to effectively pardon state crimes: grant them immunity and get them to testify.
With all due respect, you seem to be misreading the opinion, because it says exactly the opposite. Indeed, that’s kind of the whole point: the witnesses were making the same argument you are (and, to be fair, it had some basis in prior cases), and the Supreme Court rejected it:
“[W]e hold the constitutional rule to be that a state witness may not be compelled to give testimony which may be incriminating under federal law unless the compelled testimony and its fruits cannot be used in any manner by federal officials in connection with a criminal prosecution against him. We conclude, moreover, that, in order to implement this constitutional rule and accommodate the interests of the State and Federal Governments in investigating and prosecuting crime, the Federal Government must be prohibited from making any such use of compelled testimony and its fruits. This exclusionary rule, while permitting the States to secure information necessary for effective law enforcement, leaves the witness and the Federal Government in substantially the same position as if the witness had claimed his privilege in the absence of a state grant of immunity.
It follows that petitioners here may now be compelled to answer the questions propounded to them.”
My bad. You're completely right. The only caveat seems to be that states have to pretend not to use the self-incriminating testimony compelled by the federal government and have to claim to have arrived at the evidence independently.
All the summaries of the case I saw seemed to agree with me, and I saw the line "we hold the constitutional rule to be that a state witness may not be compelled to give testimony which may be incriminating under federal law unless the compelled testimony and its fruits cannot be used in any manner by federal officials in connection with a criminal prosecution against him," so I figured that since the conclusion is that they can NOW be compelled to testify, they had been granted federal immunity in the interim between the state court's and the Supreme Court's rulings. But no, it turns out the supposed protection of the Fifth Amendment IS really is just bullshit. Sad, but good to know.
They have the power to make laws that change day-to-day life for millions of people. Do you want them to make those decisions based on incomplete information?
...is there an alternative?
I am applying for the METR tasks, and the application form is asking for an email of the person who referred me/us. Scott, if you want some $10 referral payments popping your account, can I suggest you provide an email address for us to use?
I don't need the payments, but thanks for the offer.
I'm considering moving on from my current SE job to one where I'll be able to work remotely and get some ML exposure. If anyone works at an AI infra company (e.g. Weights and Biases) and is willing to refer please PM me here or email iz8162k23 at gmail.com. Thanks
I posted this on a hidden open thread that had low attendance, so am reposting here. I think this works out only to 1.15 plugs, not 2.0.
Well guys, I am taking the plunge and putting up a series of blog posts about AI art, focusing mostly on images made by Dall-e 2. The first post, “Dall-e 2 was Evelyn Quan Wong,” is up now, at https://bookreviewgroup.substack.com/p/dall-e-2-was-evelyn-quan-wong?r=3d8y5 .
Upcoming posts:
-2 relatively innocuous prompts I accidentally discovered that made Dall-e produce transgressive images, mostly violent and sexual ones. Speculation about why the prompt produced those results, and a gallery of enthrallingly godawful images.
-Wutz art, and can AI images qualify as art? I think they can.
-A cartoon story about an ASI catastrophe featuring a Dall-e 2 monster as the main character. It’s dark and crass. I’d say the phrase “in terrible taste” pretty much captures it.
-2 serious projects of mine illustrated by AI art.
The current post solicits opinions and information about what in Dall-e 2’s structure or training made it so astute and inventive in certain ways. I am hoping people with relevant tech knowledge will weigh in about that in the post’s comment section.
Much appreciated! I found your post interesting, but I have something of a "tin ear" for art, so I'm not well suited to comment on whether Dall-e 2 was being subtle or not. I just ran another simple test ("blue glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table" and current (3?) Dall-e gave me an octahedron instead of a tetrahedron.
< ("blue glass tetrahedron on a red wooden table" and current (3?) Dall-e gave me an octahedron instead of a tetrahedron.
It's really dumb about spacial stuff. When you speak to GPT about what's wrong with shape or placement or other 3D stuff with image it seems to understand every bit of what you say, but then the corrected image it gives you does not reflect any improvement at all in the image-maker's grasp of what's needed. I recently asked it to make a whirlpool seen from a certain angle, and it did a great job with that. Only thing wrong was that the water all around whirlpool was calm. I asked it to make the water around the whirlpool turbulent with waves and troughs that were continuations of the spiraling waves and troughs of the whirlpool . This is what I got: https://imgur.com/a/kr4RBVM. So bad it made me laugh, actually. Is it a tornado having sex with a whirlpool?
About my post: Thanks for taking a look. Even if the art dimension of the matter isn't your thing, I think it's pretty clear from the images that Dall-e 2 showed way more emotion, and more of a variety of emotions, in characters in the images, also that Dall-e 2 was much more imaginative in how it depicted the romantic situations. I think that's the most important part of what I had to say, too. I think a lot about the effect on our species of having a larger ratio of virtual people to real ones in the average life. The fact that Dall-e's virtual people are changing in the direction of being more Barbie-like (flat, plastic, conventional, small emotional range) seems ominous to me.
Many Thanks!
>It's really dumb about spacial stuff.
Very much agreed! The question of mine that ChatGPT o1 is doing the worst on is the spatial symmetry one:
>g) What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
>It screws up, saying that H2O2 can be put into a conformation with an S4 axis (but lacking the center of inversion and mirror plane), but it is wrong. Even with the 90 degree dihedral that it wants, one of the hydrogens can be mapped to the position of the original hydrogen, but the other hydrogen winds up in the wrong place, not matching any hydrogen in the original positions of the hydrogens. I finally got it to cough up an admission of this with repeated corrections. Not just wrong but stubbornly wrong.
>https://chatgpt.com/share/678c4e15-8c48-8006-8cbf-7a85688702b2
and (given the (incorrect) example it picked) it only has to keep track of 4 atoms, 4 points in space!
>Is it a tornado having sex with a whirlpool?
That does seem like an apt description of what it generated! And, in the midst of all that weather in the image, the waves look like they are gently lapping at the beach...
>I think that's the most important part of what I had to say, too. I think a lot about the effect on our species of having a larger ratio of virtual people to real ones in the average life. The fact that Dall-e's virtual people are changing in the direction of being more Barbie-like (flat, plastic, conventional, small emotional range) seems ominous to me.
True. Something of a cross between poker faces and invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-o-matic
I want to know why fingers are so hard to figure out for these models. Not just generative AI I've been using Topaz Labs for a couple of months now and it has a tendency to mangle fingers even though it has a decent starting point.
My theory: Humand hands are the most expressive body part humans have, far ahead even of the face. You can arrange your fingers and wrist every which way, and LLMs might have a hard time properly generalizing the many different hand poses it's been trained with. They are usually also not the focus of images, unlike the face, so if you generate a full human figure, detail on the hands gets lost.
It's basically the opposite problem of generating a mechanical clock with arbitrary time of day - it will always show 10 past 10 because that's what basically all images on the web show. Hand poses, OTOH, are so varied that LLMs can't distill a realistic representation from them, at least when they're not the focus of the prompt.
Yeah I see how this is more difficult than I imagined. OTOH, the models can't generate the numbers on a mechanical clock face either, which is seems bizarre to me - there are gazillion images of clocks with numbers, same ones the models got the hands positions from.
But this also means the models don't know what fingers are, can't figure out that the default is 5 per hand, etc. In other words, they are totally... dumb?
>the models can't generate the numbers on a mechanical clock face either
They can, but only on the hand positions they have seen - 10 past 10 in the overwhelming majority of images.
>In other words, they are totally... dumb?
Well, yes. They know nothing about the world. They are a super-charged version of your phone's auto-complete.
The baseball joke reminds me of the movie The Cup, where an old Tibetan lama who has never heard of modern sports gets to face the fact that his young disciple monks all love football. I won't spoil the actual punchline in the movie, highly recommended to watch!
My brother took his life this week, he was 18.
1) If you are in the DC area and have any experience with this and are willing to meet to talk / offer advice, please email me at defunctcantaloupe@gmail.com.
2) if you have any knowledge of affordable funeral homes in the area please share them with me in a response here (not by email)
Thanks
I'm sorry.
I'm not in the DC area, and I do not know your situation or current feelings, but I did experience something similar last year. The feelings of grief and guilt were overwhelming at first. I think that is normal and I don't think there is any easy answer. Personally I had so many questions that could not be answered and it took a long time to accept that. Please don't be afraid to reach out and talk to people or to find a therapist. These are really terrible things and even the strongest people will find them hard to deal with.
I can't help on either point, unfortunately, but I'm so sorry.
FWIW, Costco can significantly reduce costs if you're planning on a casket burial.
And I'm sure you've heard this advice before, but I think it's worth reiterating:
If you have a close friend who wasn't close to your brother, consider asking them to provide you their clear-eyed vigilance while you're negotiating with the funeral director. The industry is rife with unscrupulous salespeople who won't hesitate to take advantage of the grieving, and even the most rational person can be significantly less rational when they're grieving.
I'm just so sorry for your loss. I'm wishing you eventual peace as you grieve.
Gawd that's terrible to hear. As an 18-year-old I happened to be present when my girlfriend's parents got the phone call about their eldest child having taken his own life, and it's still the most heartbreaking family moment I've ever witnessed. So sorry.
Biden's last-minute "preemptive" pardons are probably good for the Republicans: it'd keep Trump for pursuing self-destructive retaliatory persecutions of his enemies.
I've read he last-minute pardoned family members (other than Hunter) and that does make me go "Why?" because it looks suspicious as heck that yeah, maybe there was money coming in as bribes/inducements after all:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-biden-pardons-family-members-final-minutes-presidency/story?id=117893348
I mean, what the heck were his siblings and in-laws *doing* that might need pre-emptive pardons because otherwise Trump would set the law dogs on them? He talked about Hunter being persecuted just for being his son, but Hunter was indeed a very naughty boy. What other skeletons are there lurking in the closet?
> I mean, what the heck were his siblings and in-laws *doing* that might need pre-emptive pardons
Being related to a famous Democrat.
Yes, in numerous speeches, Trump said he was going to go after the "Biden Crime Family." If that's not a threat, I don't know what is. A quick Google turned up about of a dozen of instances of him promising this action. Here are a couple that came out on top of my search...
At a rally in Nevada, he stated, "We're going to knock off the Biden crime family. It's a Biden family of crime, including the fact that they've weaponized the Department of Justice like it has never happened in this country."
NB: Biden did not directly control the DoJ. Merrick Garland did. If Biden had appointed a Democrat to the AG position, we probably would have seen a more enthusiastic prosecution of the Trump Crime Family. Also note all of Trump's kids skated free of any legal repercussions for their involvement in some of Trump's shady dealings.
At a Faith & Freedom Coalition Gala, he remarked, "These countries know every penny the Biden crime family has taken in. The countries know. Ukraine knows, China knows. They all know that, many countries."
Ummm. Hunter Biden had trouble scraping up enough money to pay his back taxes and penalties. Meanwhile, Trump is getting a mainline infusion of cash from various billionaires.