Technology Connections did a video arguing that algorithms accustom us to not making conscious choices, that on social media that leads to people popping into conversations without context, and other odd things. He calls it a man yells at crowd video, but I found myself passionately for it because a sapping lack of striving is a tendency in my character the reduction of which probably represents the biggest quality of life improvement in my 20s and early 30s. Anyway, my hook for the commentariat here: anyone have interesting ways they have improved their tendency to make considered choices and engage in effortful activity rather than let algorithms or programs do your choosing for you? https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?si=wrYZphnH0RnGNzGC
I am a fan of TC, but haven't watched that one yet, so I will forbear to comment on it specifically and shall instead respond to your hook alone.
I bypass the algorithms fairly regularly, especially on YouTube. As often as not, I'll use my subscriptions list to go to a particular channel I like and pick a video of theirs that I haven't watched yet that seems interesting or that I want to rewatch. When I do use the recommendations, I scroll through them at length and pick out things that look interesting rather than just picking one of the top few things that come up. I despise the option to auto play the top recommendation and turn it off immediately any time I find it has reenabled itself.
I'm also fairly active about telling algorithms when I actively dislike something it serves up. "Not interested" and "Don't recommend this channel" are your friends, as is "Hide all from..." on facebook. I will also go back and delete things from my history if I feel I am getting too many recommendations that seem to be riffing off something I watched in isolation but don't want more of.
> algorithms accustom us to not making conscious choices
Television is basically all like that. When I was a child, it felt normal -- we spent a lot of time watching TV, and even if we weren't actively watching it, it was running in the background.
When I moved to my own place, I decided: no TV. I don't actually need it. I can get news and movies from the internet.
After spending a few years without TV, I was shocked to see how it zombifies people. Seeing a TV screen now feels actively unpleasant, so when I visit someone who has the TV running in background, I try to sit so that the screen is behind my back. And I see how the people just slow down, and the conversation they are trying to keep just... gets slow and incoherent. TV running in background is a huge tax on your attention. Which you probably don't even realize when you are used to it.
The algorithms on YouTube and TikTok are an attempt to reinvent TV on a new platform. With some feedback, which probably makes it worse in long-term perspective, because when the TV pisses you off, you turn it off and go outside get some fresh air. But if the TV could watch your facial reactions, and deprioritize the programs that do not feel sufficiently addictive to you... it would become an improved zombie trap. (I think some TV producers actually tried to do something like that, not sure how successfully.)
Do not let an algorithm command you. Recommendations are good when you actively ask for them, but not when they are forced on you. Turn off all notifications! Except for the alarm clock that you set for yourself, and similar things. But no "hey, why don't you...?". Otherwise you become a zombie ruled by the algorithm.
(Plus there are the social consequences of having a large part of population zombified and then you can manipulate e.g. their votes. But there is a lot of money to research this, not just for political reasons, but mainly because if you can make the zombies half-consciously buy your products, it pays for the research.)
You know, it's funny: when I was young I was horrified by the hollow placidity of tv viewership and steeped in a similarly horrified culture. When the internet came, I very much perceived it as not-that, but internet use came to embody that very zombie behavior. It's massively abated for me the past three-ish years, but it seems like at a societal level it's intensified during that same period.
Internet on a computer, or internet on a smartphone? That seems like a big difference for me. With the computer, when you leave the chair, you are unplugged. With TV, the sounds and images stay with you as you move across the room. And with the smartphone, you even take it with you to the dinner or to the toilet.
So, I'd say that the computers were an improvement, but the smartphones possibly made it even worse.
Oh. It Definitely was worse. Desktop was fine, laptop was bad, smartphone was very bad. Ultimately I aged out/selectively chose to discontinue, starve, etc various forms of passive media consumption, but compulsive media use was definitely entwined with a lot of disappointing threads of my teens and twenties.
Now, a year ago, I would have grudgingly said "it's Musk's website, if he wants to censor criticism of the government then I think that's bad but it's legally permissible." But now, well, Musk is in charge of the government, so if he asks Twitter to delete criticism of him, that raises some First Amendment questions.
(Surely those fine people behind "The Twitter Files" will be eager to investigate a new and even more blatant case of the government controlling the message on social media, right?)
do you believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation designed to take away all our guns? Do you believe that no children were actually murdered that day? Do you believe that actors were hired to play parents? Do you believe a man with a nationally syndicated broadcast could beat the drum about this to the point where the parents who had lost children were being harassed and accused of terrible things?
Would you appreciate being a parent who had lost your child and then getting hate mail and even people visiting your house to scream at you? Do you think that’s OK? And that even when this continued, Mr. Jones would not stop? Does the first amendment cover that kind of behavior? Is that kind of behavior reasonable?
He brought it on himself. He should’ve stuck to 9/11.
I think if you want to make your case, you need a much better example than Alex Jones
>Id like if society brought back dueling, presumably one of the parents would be willing to offer a challenge and then these lovely corrective mechanisms would play out,
Well, that’s a lovely solution. Maybe we could go back to a time when an insult that led to a duel was between two men and perhaps their immediate circle. It’s nice to think that as long as a parent can be better with a pistol or a sword than Alex Jones then the whole thing could be settled out of court and no harm done. I like freedom of speech, but it comes with a responsibility. What Alex Jones did is not a personal slight or merely expressing a controversial opinion. It was slanderous and extremely harmful. And extremely profitable for him. He is a lousy poster boy for the first amendment.
The fucker is firing NIST staff, which, among other things, will gut the CHIPS act. Our worst enemies could not have come up with a better plan to weaken this country. MAGA my ass.
Marvel will release their next feature film, "Thunderbolts*," on May 2. The idea this time is to assemble some of the secondary figures of the cinematic universe, pit them against a threat that is more than they are ready for, and expect them to get their shit together enough to fight it effectively. The (not quite) heroes are Yelena Belova, Red Guardian, Bucky Barnes, USAgent, Taskmaster and Ghost. The enemy is Sentry/The Void.
Marvel's recent performance in feature films has been mixed, with some winners, like "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and "Deadpool & Wolverine" and some losers, like "The Marvels" and "Captain America: Brave New World." But the premise of "Thunderbolts*" is intriguing, and the trailers are promising. If Marvel could manage to reach the level of craft and storytelling they pulled off in "Black Widow," for example, this one would be worth a watch.
You can see an extended trailer of "Thunderbolts*" here:
So Musk launched a running list of "DOGE receipts", items that he says DOGE has cancelled from the federal budget.
This supports the legal argument, now advancing in several federal courtrooms, that Musk's activity violates both the Constitution and some federal laws. Presumably the administration's attorneys are right now begging him to take the list down but as I type this it is still up.
The list adds up to $55 billion in savings and that is the figure Musk is bragging about today over in the swamp formerly known as Twitter. However as Bloomberg and other media outlets are right now pointing out:
-- the arithmetic is way off, the listed items add up to $17 billion.
-- the list also includes some items which appear to have nothing to do with DOGE, for example the recent closing of the late Jimmy Carter's official ex-POTUS office.
-- the largest single listed item by far is "an $8 billion contract for program and technical support services at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Diversity and Civil Rights." However that's a typo, in fact that contract was for $8 _million_.
Correcting just the arithmetical errors -- not vetting the list for actual relevance to DOGE -- brings the running total down to $8.6 billion or less than a fifth of what Musk is right now bragging. That's around 1/1000th of the federal budget.
people in this very comment section are referencing these very "lists" to bolster their defense of DOGE. like, how does one keep up with a firehose of bad-faith information? how can ANYONE go through line-by-line and stand up to this? it's incessant.
here's a quote from further below:
"""""""""
The usaid hourly updates are still happening; I remember a protest in there
Its more woke and ... lazy money laundering(I still dont understand why theres was 1 big money laundering scheme, it should be fractal), then cartel drugs money investments then I thought
---
*point* its there, you can listen to the people complaining about being cut off and it was more extensive then my paranoia, minute earth for example got pass my "your feds" filter, they complained about being cutoff; its now a blunt fact.
Lists will take time, but outright denial is no longer feasible.
"""""""""
(granted, the grammar is so impossible to parse I had to read a dozen comments by this user before I was even *sure* of their political position)
I don't think that any of that matters for Trump voters. They are not the kind of people who care whether something is a million or a billion, whether the numbers add up, or whether things make sense. From their perspective, this is a huge success, and the fact that some people worry about it only makes it more awesome.
This is more or less correct, but I think you’re partially missing the point. I don’t really care about the numbers or if they are accurate. I prefer that people/programs that are actually useful don’t get cut, but that is a secondary priority. I view the current ruling class as hostile and illegitimate. The status quo must be overturned. To do this the current bureaucracy that serves them will have to be decimated and replaced. Whatever exaggerations might exist, it is still true that the institutions have become bloated, corrupt, and are misused to serve a radical ideology that I despise. I’m willing to tolerate great short term chaos and disruption to purge them because business as usual is suicide. The more establishment voices in media and politics squeal, the more I think Trump has struck a nerve and is on the right track. It’s chemotherapy and I have no expectation that treatment will be easy on the body.
That sounds like a nice plan for starting a civil war.
> I view the current ruling class as hostile and illegitimate.
I get the sentiment, but if you believe that a better alternative will magically arise from the chaos, the lesson from history seems to be "and then it became worse".
The communist revolution started with "You have nothing to lose but your chains!" and then surprisingly it turned out that the workers actually had a lot to lose.
> It’s chemotherapy and I have no expectation that treatment will be easy on the body.
I would remind you that there are 77 million Trump voters; I don't think there are many generalisations that are true of all of them except the obvious "voted for Donald Trump". There are Rats who voted for Trump because they thought him the lesser evil, who are probably pretty upset upon reading this.
(To be clear, I'm not one of them; I'm not American and as such did not vote either for Trump or against him. I was hoping for a Harris victory, but not by much.)
Yeah, there are always some true believers, and some people who try to choose the lesser evil. So my statement only applies to the true believers.
However, everyone who is vocally a Trump supporter, and who tweets or otherwise comments in favor of these research cancellations belongs to that group.
*
By the way I don't think that accusing a large part of a population of not caring about a difference between a million and a billion is a priori implausible. Most people are quite mathematically illiterate. They can know the difference between a million and a billion in theory, but their reactions to "million dollars" and "billion dollars" are mostly the same. (Which is why it is so easy to steal from them by saving millions and taking billions.)
At this point it's all an experiment to see if it's possible to cut the spending of the federal government in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides.
Nobody knew any of the specific expenses that DOGE lists even existed, so it's hard to care about the details on amounts (though Musk relaying them inaccurately is still a concern). If we spent $4.3 million on [progressive goal in South America], does it really matter if that number were $21 million instead? Neither you nor I were aware of the expense, and likely only care inasmuch as we agree with the underlying purpose. So Musk removing $4 in pure nepotism would be a win from that point of view. Not a big win, again, except as it shows it's possible to find and then remove bad spending.
I think conservatives are in more of a wait-and-see holding pattern right now.
"At this point it's all an experiment to see if it's possible to cut the spending of the federal government in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides."
The government is not, in fact, capable of spending vast sums of money on whatever the President decides. The government is capable of spending vast sums on money on whatever *Congress* decides. That's central to the entire system of checks and balances that keeps our system of government from devolving into a dictatorship or other form of tyranny.
Yes, but Congress has pre-authorized very large budgets for lots of programs that can be used with varying levels of discretion. Many of these funds measure in the billions, such that a few million one way or another is very easy for a bureaucrat to adjust to some other purpose. USAID wasn't just a passthrough for specific things Congress wrote into law, it was able to distribute that money to a variety of causes that Congress never would have specifically earmarked as such.
Correct. When congress authorizes the government to spend vast sums of money, it does so in a manner flexible enough for the president to redirect modest sums of money on whatever the president decides.
Or nothing at all, but only a small modest fraction of the vast sum authorized. To redirect vast sums of money, you need congress.
"in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides" -- that's called "legislation", e.g. the two big Biden-era initiatives that Trump/Musk are targeting. The reason that the "Inflation Reduction Act" is officially "PL 117-69" and the "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" is officially "PL 117-58" is that those were _laws_ passed by Congress. "PL" stands for "public law".
The way for a new president to un-do spending that was passed into law by Congress is to persuade Congress to pass a new law un-doing the earlier one. That happens even when the president's party _doesn't_ happen to have control of both houses of Congress.
That does require some steps like "carrying out your oath of office", or in Musk's case, first "taking an oath of office". Boring stuff I know and not nearly so much fun. Still though, so long as we do still have a Constitution that anybody cares about that's how a change of administration bringing in a different set of policy preferences is supposed to work and can work and often does work.
For conservatives to be in "more of a wait-and-see holding pattern" regarding the most fundamental elements of our rule of law is one helluva take but I don't doubt you. I am old enough to remember when conservatives were the nation's grownups in some important ways....our national spiral into dueling tantrums has been very sad to see.
Are you under the impression that was a specific spending goal from Congress, outlined in detail in legislation? I haven't read the two laws you reference, but is that a listed expense passed by Congress? Or did some intermediary (likely a bureaucrat or presidential appointee) take part of an apportioned amount and make a decision about spending it?
The grant was awarded by people in the State Department out of money allocated by Congress for public diplomacy. Earlier in this thread you said that “the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides.” Congress lets the State Department decide the details of how money allocated for public diplomacy is spent, but the money must be spent on public diplomacy. The President cannot (legally) order that the money be spent on something completely different.
Two points - One, the ability to allocate funds on large open-ended "public diplomacy" or whatever other broad vague category is either no limitation at all, or a requirement for the organizations to hire creative writers. If dance classes in China fits, then pretty much any spending in a foreign country and likely a good bit of spending in the US (even beyond staff, buildings, etc.) would pass muster. And the first thing Trump/Musk did with USAID was ask for cooperation with an audit, which USAID refused. So maybe the items they were spending money on wouldn't have even passed the broad terms Congress allowed.
Two, how much money did Congress allocate towards broad goals that the executive has discretion over? It's clearly in the billions. Obama was able to reallocate literally billions of dollars with an executive order (DACA is the one I'm thinking of, but it's not exactly rare). In fiscal 2023, USAID spend over $43 billion dollars. How much of that was earmarked for specific spends? How much money is "vast sums" to you?
For clarity, I consider millions of dollars in bureaucrat-decided money to be vast sums. I would hope that everyone would consider billions to fall into that category.
The goal is to stop unaccountable people from spending any money of their own volition. The amounts aren't the important part, although high amounts does help with propaganda (which may be why Musk is saying the wrong amounts).
If a mid-level bureaucrat can create a job without Congressional approval, then that bureaucrat can spend money without Congressional approval. And it may be a totally normal thing to do - middle managers often need to determine staffing levels and can determine that more employees are needed for a function. Similarly with deciding which programs to fund under the umbrella of whatever the government organization does.
This goes off the rails when the new spending/position is either 1) not fulfilling the purpose that Congress authorized the spending for, or 2) enriches a person, organization, or purpose for which Congress did not authorize any money (nepotism comes to mind, but also relevant here would be political goals of the bureaucrats that Congress would not have authorized directly, such as trans operas in South America).
How much do you honestly know about the "trans operas in South America"? Really? Honestly? Tell me more about why the "trans operas in South America" are a bad thing.
If they were just "operas in South America" would that be better? Or if they were just "cultural programs in South America"? Please... share with me both the law and the application and the grant title. And then explain how much money went to this program and how that money could've "easily" been instead spent on an alternative program that "DEFINITELY" would've aligned better with the purpose of the law and would "DEFINITELY NOT ALSO" have been the target of this same purge-for-the-sake-of-a-purge. (or how not spending this money could have contributed to a reduction of 0.0000000001% of the national budget).
> The goal is to stop unaccountable people from spending any money of their own volition
Irony is dead dead dead dead dead.
And no, I don't care if this "mid-level bureaucrat" created "a job" ("A JOB") without Congressional approval in the process of implementing a program.
The issue remains... THE ISSUE ALWAYS REMAINS... SCALE AND PROPORTION.
Maybe you care about scale and proportion alone, but almost everyone cares a lot more about other things. I'm sure I could come up with a list of things money has been spent on recently or in the last 75 years that you would be completely against, that wasn't specifically earmarked by Congress - even if the dollar amounts were low.
Just a guess about your priorities, but most people seem to be pretty against the money spent by the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments in foreign countries. There was no line item in any law passed by Congress that allowed them to do that.
More directly here, there are a lot of people who want no more than $0 dollars ever spent on certain types of items. I'm in the camp of zero dollars for "cultural" spending in foreign countries. I think Trump has a very solid backing for stopping the flow of money to these kinds of expenses, and the vast majority of people who voted for him wholeheartedly support some of these specific changes. I'm aware that the total cost for "trans operas in South America" was under $100,000 and apparently the one play had three showings. I am aware that these are tiny expenses. I can still not want that kind of thing to happen at all, and even feel strongly about it.
Arguing that each individual thing is tiny amounts of money misses two points. One, that I've been arguing already, is that just about everyone would draw a line against certain spending programs no matter how small the amounts. Two, that 0.1% of the federal budget is $7 billion dollars. "Small" numbers are not very small, and 1,000 such programs would equal the entire budget. There are a lot of programs. Giving each of them a few million dollars, despite being small individually is huge in aggregate. The US federal budget has over $1.5 trillion in discretionary expenses. USAID specifically was over $40 billion dollars a year. One out of every $170 dollars spent by the government, and on a program that very few people had heard about or knew existed until a month ago.
And no, I don't think the money could easily be spent on other programs that would pass muster. I would just prefer it not be spent. That's okay to me. You don't need to re-earmark money to try to spend everything Congress allots if there's nothing worthwhile within what Congress wanted the money spent on. There are years with fewer disasters than others. I would prefer FEMA keep the money they don't spend in a good year in order to have it available for a bad year in the future. For various reasons, FEMA feels the need to spend the money on other things in good years, and ask for more money in bad years. I think this is bad fiscal management. Trump voters (of which I am not one, if that matters to you) did not want any FEMA money being spent housing illegal immigrants - notably because they didn't want money spent on illegal immigrants other than the costs to remove them from the country. These voters put a guy in, on purpose, who credibly promised to no longer spend large sums of money housing illegal immigrants (among other things). Complaining that Trump is cutting expenses that his constituents (and also broadly popular in most of the US) want cut is not how any of this is supposed to work, even if the amounts were small. In aggregate they aren't even small, and sometimes individual programs are huge. How much of the USAID budget was controlled by bureaucrats towards big vague categories that they could essentially pay for anything they wanted? The consensus answer from most people appears to be "too much" even without getting into the details.
Four years ago I found out that YouTube was silently deleting many of my comments. The comment would be visible to me as long as I did not reload the page, but upon reloading, the comment was not only gone from the page, but also missing from my personal historical record stored by YouTube. Since then I've been self-censoring for obvious reasons, but when I did comment, I tracked which comments were deleted and not deleted. I'm also affected by a shadowban-type system but I won't get into that. The censorship is immediate and occurs equally across all channels (i.e. it's based on comment content ― and, I assume, comment author ― not on channel). Here are some examples of what YouTube deletes:
[Comment on video claiming that an OSCE report supports Russia's claims of Ukrainian abuse of Russian speakers] 13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by "Foundation for the Study of Democracy", a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.
[Replying to "I love this channel. I am from Indonesia and most news outlet here don't really mention the Ukraine war that much, only small news outlet and they only tell stories about Russian victory and achievement on the battlefield. ..."] I always wonder what makes people cheer for a dictatorship invading a democracy. But I think the sort of people who cheer for that are also the sort of people who will not give a straight answer about the reason why.
[Replying to "Kamala really is the most irresponsible politician we've had in America in decades."] @GermanConquistador08 Well, at least you're illustrating Vlad's point. Trump can commit unconstitutional acts, call every democrat "radical left", stack the supreme court, create dozens of evidence-free lawsuits and a riot to overturn the election, etc etc, but the fact remains that his ordinary boring opponent will be held to much higher standards.
So today, after YouTube deleted the following comment, I ran an experiment:
[Replying to 'Um...could we please clarify what's meant by the (delightfully alliterative) phrase "domestic democratic decline"?'] It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There's polarization and disunity. There's the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of "facts" (people cause global warming, or don't, or ____). There's a drift toward lower-quality leaders. There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.
I followed up with "Sorry, I tried to explain the term, but YouTube silently deleted it. Everyone be on the lookout, Google could be doing it to you too." which was not deleted. Then I posted these comments, of which YouTube deleted one:
**SILENTLY DELETED** Okay, as an experiment I'll try posting it in pieces and see what gets deleted. First half:
It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There's polarization and disunity.
**NOT** Okay, I'll try posting it in pieces as an experiment and see what gets deleted. First piece:
It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum.
**NOT** Looks like YouTube disallows the second sentence, only four words: There's p________ion and dis____y. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of messages, so if you don't see anything else from me, it suggests that I hit a volume limit.
**NOT** There's the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of "facts" (people cause global warming, or don't, or ____)
**NOT** There's a drift toward lower-quality leaders.
**NOT** There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.
**NOT** Based on this it looks like those two words in the middle (p________ion and dis____y) were enough to make YouTube silently remove the whole thing. Mind you, what actually happened was that I posted the first half (which was deleted), then deleted the last four words (which worked). So it could also be that there is a cumulative score of "undesireable words" or something, and if you have enough of those your comment gets deleted, making long comments very risky. So as a final experiment I'll post just the four words by themselves and we'll see if they appear.
**NOT** There's polarization and disunity.
**NOT** I thought initially that those four words had been deleted (silently, so, in my original browser I still see everything ― I use a private window to see reality). But after a couple of minutes YouTube did allow the comment to appear (usually it takes less than a minute for YouTube to decide.) So this favors the "cumulative undesireable words" theory. Experimental note: I spread out the last 8 messages over 20 minutes, just in case YouTube also has rate-based comment removal.
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday revealed his government's $3.9 billion, six-year plan to connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
Except no. It is $3.9 billion over six years to "design" the project. There is no money allocated for the estimated $80 billion to build the railway.
Much like many of Joe Biden's plans, this is a lame-duck's attempt to take credit for a mega-project that will likely never be built. The $4 billion might even make it less likely there will be a high-speed rail line built in the next 50 years.
Why do "liberals" seem to think that this is how governance should work? Are they too scared of failure to even try to build anything?
>Why do "liberals" seem to think that this is how governance should work? Are they too scared of failure to even try to build anything?
Canada will have elections soon. This is how politicians think campaigning for votes should work. Say/do something to make a positive news article headline and trust in the fact that most people won't look into it
> "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday revealed his government's $3.9 billion, six-year plan to connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
I don't see the sentence in the linked article. Was it edited?
It now says the (much less impressive, but more accurate): "The Liberal government launched a six-year, $3.9-billion design and development plan Wednesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says will eventually connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
Apparently Trump believes that Ukraine started the war with Russia back in 2022:
> Today I heard, ‘Oh, we [Ukraine] weren’t invited,’ Well, you’ve been there for three years, you should have ended it. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.
Is this another instance of Trump's widely respected genius for 5D chess? To give a boost to Zelensky's national approval rating by applying reverse psychology to an entire country?
But sure, let's look at the symbolic meaning and subtext of Trump's speech, instead of the literal interpretation:
"We will betray our long-term partners and strengthen our geopolitical rivals for short-term inner-political gain.
If we send you obsolete and surplus equipment to fight our enemies on our behalf, we will later try to extort you. If you don't comply, we will make up outright lies to hurt you.
We will drop our partners on a whim. We are not your friend, do not rely on us, do not trust our promises, do not believe a word we say."
The message he sends is so much worse than his literal words.
Yes, there's so much legitimately wrong with what Trump is doing and how he is doing it that that should be the focus of condemnation. Instead, the entire media establishment has zeroed in on poorly chosen words under the presumption that one can rationally attribute belief states to his literal words. The man is a bullshitter to his core. He is not someone for which literal word choice is reflective of his belief state. At best his words reflect the vibe/directionality of his beliefs. After 10 years of dealing with his personal brand of politics it's just bad faith to pretend otherwise.
I strongly disagree with the direction of your argument [1]. Blatent lies and disinformation must not become the norm, and even less so acceptable, and the media is right to (and must continue to) call them out. Saying, "that's just Trump being Trump", shrugging, and ignoring his literal statements sets a destructive precedent.
And like I said in my other comment, words from politicians and diplomats _are_actions. Diplomatic statements have a direct effect on friends and enemies.
[1] I might have misinterpreted you; please correct me if so.
I have no problem calling out Trump for having a loose relationship with the truth, or calling out the state of politics that someone like Trump could be elected president. But to pretend like the word choice of Trump is reflective of a genuine belief state, and then call out that belief state, is just the sort of bad faith engagement farming that is the cause of the media being so reviled across the board. I'm just tired of the lowest effort maximally inflammatory content being the norm for the media.
There are so many legitimate problems with Trump and his brand of politics that there is no end to the content that could be created highlighting all his failures. I in no way want to just shrug at the state of politics that Trump has created. But we also shouldn't pretend we can just take Trumps words at face value. Trump is not a normal politician, he has an extremely loose relationship with the truth. Attributing belief states to him aside from the most general of vibes is a mistake. These are facts that can't be ignored in good faith when analyzing his statements.
In diplomacy, words are more than mere sound waves emanating from vibrating vocal chords. Words are actions. Ignoring the literal statements of a politician in a diplomatic context is willful ignorance.
The person acting in bad faith here is Donald J. Trump. And I do not think you have a realistic expectation of how people acting in good faith, will respond to someone acting in such atrociously bad faith.
I'm not saying we give him a pass on anything. I'm just saying don't treat him like a man whose brain functions like a normal person's brain does. You can critique him, his vibe, his policies, etc, while also acknowledging that the literal words he says don't necessarily reflect a stable belief state of his brain. It just takes a little more effort, and some self-restraint in not piling on with the low effort reactionary takes, however enticing they may be in the moment.
If no one can understand the belief state of his brain, how can he be trusted to run a nation? A huge part of being President is making deals, which requires other parties be reasonably confident in the outcome of the deal. If they don't understand the belief state of the person proposing the deal, how is that supposed to work?
The most generous interpretation is that Ukraine could've avoided the war if they reached an agreement with Russia back in 2019 after Zelensky had been elected on a peace platform.
An agreement was signed in Paris in 2019 based on Minsk agreements. Angela Merkel wrote in her memoir that "Perhaps there were domestic policy reasons preventing [Zelensky] from accepting the Minsk agreements in their entirety" and Andrii Bohdan, the head of Zelensky's Presidential Administration at the time, said later that they double-crossed Putin.
You keep pushing this crap about Zelensky being at fault, as if Putin ever negotiated in good faith and stood by any agreements. A disgruntled Bohdan's opinion is just that. The only person who did double-crossing was Putin, literally days before the full invasion mocking the Western officials warnings about it.
I said that this is the most charitable explanation. Obviously Russia started the conflict in 2014 and 2022.
It's impossible to know whether Russia would've honoured these agreements - it definitely has a mixed record. However, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine didn't honour them. Last time it was just Bohdan and you could say that he's just pissed off with Zelensky but now Angela Merkel basically confirmed it, only without cursing. You should update your beliefs based on that.
Angela Merkel was one of a series of European politicians who rolled out the red carpet for Putin, who welcomed filthy Russian money flowing into Europe, who created a dangerous dependence on Russian pipeline gas, and ended up largely financing Russia's wars. I'm sorry, I really don't care about anything she has to say on the matter. She should crawl into some quiet space to reflect on the damage she did to Germany, Europe, and the world.
They all had multiple chances to stand up to Putin. But the money was so good, and there was so much of it.
Combined with insinuations that Zelensky is a "dictator" who lacks democratic legitimation and with demands that Ukraine pay back hundreds of billions of "aid" in the form of minerals, I take this to mean that Trump is working on an alliance with Putin to divide up Ukraine.
Yes, this is the most cynical and pessimistic interpretation. The alternative I'm willing to entertain is that Trump is a greedy, narcissistic fool who repeats the talking points of anyone who tickles his vanity and offers him a chance for loot, and the most recent one to do that was Putin.
An alternative is that Trump wanted the US to get paid in mineral rights for aid to Ukraine and to do so had to convince Zelensky that, if not paid, the US would abandon him.
I listened to the Q&A independently and I took his statement to mean something more like "you should have negotiated to prevent the war from starting in the first place." It wasn't meant to blame Ukraine as solely responsible. It was not a prepared statement, so I think journalists are seizing on a overly literal interpretation while ignoring the full context of the exchange.
Except the US had a significantly larger military, larger population, more natural resources, more industry, and wasn't bogged down in a war with China.
A realpolitik look at international relations necessitates acknowledging a threat of force, even the unfair and immoral threat of force, when choosing policy. If you base your policy on ideals, ignoring the practical responses of authoritarian regimes who don't care about your ideals, you shouldn't be able to claim full surprise if it blows up in your face.
As a historical matter that probably isn't the best example. The US, British and Dutch had embargoed Japan in protest of their military actions in China and Indochina. Japan could either a) do nothing and have their economy totally crippled by a critical lack of oil and rubber, b) give up all their territory in China that thousands of Japanese had fought and died for over years and be totally politically humiliated, or c) attack the US/British/Dutch in an attempt to gain the resources the embargo had cut them off from.
On the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, three squadrons of American fighter pilots and their planes were already enroute to China to wage war against Japan, with the express approval of the highest levels of the US government. So the United States government wasn't even really trying to avoid a war at that point, and if they had been it would have been easy to negotiate. Mostly, the US just wanted an excuse to blame Japan for starting it, and they were fool enough to oblige.
There is nothing remotely similar to this in Ukraine's behavior w/re Russia in the leadup to the current war.
As isolated text on a page I would agree with the media's interpretation. Hearing it in context, before reading any headlines about it, I did not take it that way. Why? Because it doesn't fit as well with the central point Trump was making at the time (that Ukraine has already had ample opportunity to negotiate and failed to do so), or statements he has consistently made in the past (that the conflict could have been avoided entirely through the use of threats and negotiation). If his position were really that Ukraine bears full responsibility for starting the war, it seems strange that he would reveal that as a one-sentence aside in the middle of making a different point.
No, it's dumb that he said it. There's some semi-plausible arguments that Ukraine could have avoided the war or ended it by now. They all involve Ukraine giving in to Russian demands. Most notably staying a Russian satellite state like Belarus in the first place. Alternatively, ceding territory to Russia at one of many stages.
On the one hand, it's pretty clear that Russia is going to gain territory through this war, and the only real questions are how much and when. On the other hand, when those are still open questions the bargaining positions should not be ceded to Russia. Even going back to 2014 it's not a good idea to just give an aggressive expansionist country free reign to take from others, because it encourages more of it.
Has anyone else observed a trend in YouTube titles where they get more clickbait-ey? I feel like two years ago some youtube videos had clickbait titles, while others didn't. Now conscientious, staid personality like this dude feels the need to use multiple exclamation points in his titles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGsuOyzyYcI
Or, looking at a guy whose videos I watch a lot, 4 years ago a normal Reinessance Periodization video might be titled something like "11 upright row mistakes and how to fix them" and the picture is an upright row + Dr. Mike; recently about half use caps or exclamation points and maybe 5/6 have some weird facial expression or some such.
I know a guy who day trades as a living, he's very analytical and loves metrics, spreadsheets, etc. He does video streams on Saturdays as a hobby, and he crunched the numbers on his viewer engagement. According to him, by far the biggest impacts on his viewer numbers were #1) Clickbait thumbnail and #2) Clickbait title. I don't know if this is a result of how YouTube algorithms serve people content or it says something deeper about human psychology. But it definitely works as a method to increase viewership.
I've also noticed it. Videos also seem more long-winded and full of filler like background information the viewer would almost certainly already know. AI-generated, individualized content will annihilate all this garbage.
The have gotten more clickbaity for me, too, but far less pervasively and intensely than what you seem to be describing. It may be catching on more in some genres than others, or you might be watching more clickbait-titled videos than I am and the algorithm is responding accordingly.
I just skimmed my YouTube front page. Most of the titles are simple descriptions, e.g. "A Look at Kirk" or "Geology of the Grand Canyon" or "Some points about caltrops". Several are mildly clickbait-adjacent, e.g. "Why Hannibal Failed" or "How many died in the Mongol conquests". Maybe 10% are moderately clickbaity or worse, like "How We Misunderstood HLILLFORTS" or "Slavery's Most Dangerous Argument" or "Mad Men - BEST LINE EVER",
Well, gives me hope. Maybe I can train youtube to serve up fewer. It's tricky though because maybe 80% of what I watch is exercise content, and it seems especially endemic to exercise videos.
We differ I guess. I agree with everything you said except for regarding it as neutral. In an emotional sense I guess I aspire to that. I don't seek to take regular offense at video thumbnails any more than I seek to take offense at six bedroom tract homes with a view of the Orange County coastline—but independent of the skillfulness of my response to it, I think the world is worse with clickbait titles.
Clickbait titles are misleading and manipulative, trading on the excitement of teasing one type of content then producing another. It's not usually quite lying, but it often is some flavor of exaggeration. I don't actually blame people for using it, but certainly appreciate people who don't because I like the product, inclusive of the still and title, more. I'm disappointed that the ecosystem requires exaggeration and, I dunno how to put it, something like WOOOAAHH, to make your video viable. A video can be valuable without being astounding, and I'm gradually disliking seeing astounded faces on so many thumbnails; it feels vulgar.
I remember a youtuber once explained his personal experience was that long-time subs will click regardless, but clickbait makes a big difference in attracting newcomers. Yes, he felt a bit scummy. But ultimately decided that exposing his favorite topic to newcomers was more important than the slight loss of integrity.
So I liked Trump's idea of a trilateral agreement between USA, Russia and China of 50% cuts in defense spending. Let's first just assume, that all the details can be worked out to each parties satisfaction. Wouldn't most people like that and think it's a good idea? And then I was told here, that that could never work, because of congress and pork and the jobs created by the defense budget that all congress likes. (And all the people working in these jobs like.) And OK fine, but this looks like a major failing of our government! And is there any way to fix it? It's perhaps like a positive feedback loop... the output grows till it hits some limit. So you fix a positive feed back loop by changing the sign of one of the signals. But that silly idea doesn't help me think about how to fix the government and defense spending. Voters -> congress -> money -> defense -> voters.
Why would China agree? The status quo works better for them since they are rapidly catching up and placing a limit at 50% of existing spending would fix everyone at the same relative balance as the present day.
The real military budget has grown and shrunk over time. Right now it's at a historical low. We now spend about as much as we did in the 1920/30s after demobilization and before mobilizing for WW2. The US closer to what the US government spent before WW1 (so when there was no major army) than any year during the Cold War. And an additional 50% cut would mean the military budget becomes about what Teddy Roosevelt had.
The idea of a shadowy military-industrial complex that can never be cut because it has huge political sway or because jobs is a popular narrative but not really backed up by anything.
Anyway, the US military and all its support industries (including things like ammunition factories) represent about 2.5% of the workforce. Assuming that a 50% cut leads to a 50% reduction in headcount that means reallocating about 1.25% of the workforce. This would temporarily push the unemployment rate from 4% to 5% which is still below the long run average and is about what Obama had at the end of his term. Hardly a crisis.
Sourcing is the DoD, Our World In Data, etc. There's really no dispute on this point. I think you're probably looking at nominal or dollar amounts rather than something like % of GDP.
If China decides it's "now or never" and invades Taiwan ― because there's a slashed military budget on top of all the various vague indications that Trump wouldn't help Taiwan out ― well, it'll be a crisis for Taiwan, for democracy in general, for nonproliferation[1] and for the thing that matters most of all: the price of your next computer. But don't worry, Trump will surely carve out a tariff exception so you can buy chips from the communists at prices less inflated than they'd otherwise be.
[1] nonproliferation is largely based on the concept that countries need not build nukes because the U.S. or NATO will protect them. (Ukraine, ostensibly under US protection under the Budapest memorandum, may not publicly announce a nuclear program, but if the war slows down or pauses, don't be surprised by the news a couple years after that.)
>Let's first just assume, that all the details can be worked out to each parties satisfaction
I mean, "how do you ensure the US upholds the deal that they signed" is one of the details you had to work out, no? Use whatever diplomatic magic you used to get the treaty signed to get Congress to ratify it.
But if I'm not fighting the hypothetical, what it would probably look like is you give everyone a long timeframe to implement the treaty, and trim the budget slowly over 20 years or whatever. I know Trump is a big fan of bold, sweeping moves that get implemented without regard for side effects, but it's going to take time to dismantle your defense industry anyway, so make use of that time! Let the tank factory finish up its last production run, so people have time to find another job, and give the state some other form of pork to replace it (maybe subsidize the car industry or something to make new jobs for the people you fired).
The government isn't literally incapable of cutting spending, it's just a big vehicle that turns slowly.
This makes sense. NAFTA was a simple idea--no tariffs--but getting it passed involved lots of negotiation on time schedules for phasing out the tariff on particular items, rather than just going to zero tariffs immediately for everything.
This helps the purpose of geopolitical military de-escalation, but as far as balancing the budget goes, a mere renaming is not going to produce a lot of savings.
A while ago I saw a tweet about how J.K. Rowling's views on transgender people have grown more radical over the years. The subtext was that this was surprising or hypocritical. I remember thinking "well, what'd you expect when you tried to run her out of polite society?"
Many people across the political spectrum have a "heads I win, tails we're even" model of politics. Even as they demonize their enemies, the idea that said enemies will take revenge does not occur to them.
What radical views does she hold? I suspect the label "radical" is being stretched here.
In my estimation, the median view on this is that trans women are men and should be treated as such, but that people also shouldn't go out of their way to harass anyone just for being trans if the trans person is minding their own business. Plus maybe some limited accommodation of pronouns purely to avoid social conflict.
To me, "radical" would at minimum involve some kind of advocacy for physical violence, criminalization, or discrimination (beyond treating them according to sex at birth).
Do you know what her views are? I'm going to bet there is a lot of statements taken out of context of whatever her point of view is. (I don't know either, but I've heard the negative stuff. )
As I recall, she avoids stating them. It's more a matter of logically inferring from her behavior. This video explains (if you can overlook Shaun oddly treating anti-abortion as if it were to some extent equivalent to being anti-trans and anti-gay-rights): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k
Sorry no, I'm not going to listen to someone else explain her. I'd maybe listen to some podcast where she talks about it. OK TBH I watched contrapoints talk about JK. I think she did a fair job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us
>She thinks that trans people are either liars or delusional sick people and in both cases are dangerous to women.
That's not true. What evidence do you have of this? In interviews and in her public writings on the subject she has consistently maintained that she is supportive of trans people, but opposed to allowing biological men into women's spaces because abusers will exploit that to harm women. Have you listened to her interviews in that series? At no point does she say that trans people are liars, or delusional, or dangerous to women. She makes her point very clear: self-id will be exploited by abusers, allowing biological men into women's bathrooms will be exploited by abusers, and silencing those who object to such things with bullying, cancellation, or state action is wrong. She has been pretty consistent on this. Where are your receipts?
"What Rowling's former fans wanted was for Rowling to be reasonable and listen to them with empathy - not to run her out of polite society."
I believe they wanted her to agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness, and when she wouldn't do that they moved on to "Well I guess we have to run you out of polite society now, Look what you made me do!"
I also think her former fans vastly overestimate their ability to "drive her out of polite society"; I suspect her personal life is largely unaffected, and she's still a billionaire (or close enough as makes no difference). But the public and professional consequences are probably still quite infuriating, so now the LGBT+++ community has to live with a furious Rowling.
What should someone who believes that former men should not be housed in women's prisons or able to compete against women in sports be allowed to say about their beliefs?
I get "being civil" as something we should all answer there. But my impression of the response to JK is that her civil responses also got similar or the same backlash and none of her postings seemed that outlandish - if you can recognize and accept that she disagrees with core trans ideology. But even people acting uncivilly should be allowed to speak. For instance, the people agitating loudly for JK to be deplatformed are often very uncivil in their wording and approach.
Surely Rowling can, in fact, say whatever she wants. This is Real America, goddammit. [edit: I was reminded she's in the UK, not just online. Not sure how it works over there.] You can talk about how Hitler did a lot of great things, or how we have the guns and will win a ground war against the wokes in 3 days, or [insert 10,000,000 novel untrue statements here]. If you're Rowling you're not only allowed, you enjoy a vast bullhorn. A hundred million people will hear what you said! But other people are then allowed to be mad about it, and say so.
These debates are rarely about actual free speech. If you want to see an *actual* free speech issue, see my thread on this page about how YouTube has been censoring me for years. I am apparently not allowed to say that there's a Trump/Harris double standard, or describe the term "domestic democratic decline", etc. I've never seen a news outlet cover *that*. (YouTube's action is legal, of course, I just don't think they should.)
Rowling lives in the UK, where free speech is a bit more problematic.
Either way, we've recently lived through an era where "other people are then allowed to be mad about it" has somehow also included hounding people's employers until they get fired and hounding social media until they get removed from the site (which I think you would agree defeats your first paragraph).
"This is the basis of society: when someone acts in a way that damages the social fabric"
People used to (and some still do) say that open homosexuality damages the social fabric. It's the kind of thing that only sounds convincing to someone who already agrees that the behavior is bad. Nobody wakes up in the mourning and thinks "I'm going to damage the social fabric today!"
"Because it seems that Alexander wants to hold Rowling's critics accountable for Rowling's response to criticism."
I didn't say anything about whether Rowling's response was justified. I don't align with either TERFs or wokes, it's like a foreign country's civil war. I was just saying I don't think Rowling's critics should have been SURPRISED at her ideological evolution. And I meant it as a more general point to anyone reading it who might be currently or someday in a position of political power.
Both sides can claim the same arguments here. The following quote:
"This is the basis of society: when someone acts in a way that damages the social fabric, someone else points that behavior out, and then they have to decide whether they want to persist in the behavior (at which point the others in society will likely escalate their grievance) or cease the behavior."
This seems to describe how JK feels about trans people pushing to be in women-only spaces and her calling them out on it. Trans women in women's prisons (or pick whichever argument she's making) "damages the social fabric" and she wants them to stop. They have to evaluate "whether they want to persist" or "cease the behavior."
It's not an argument that she is right and they are wrong, it's an argument that there's no high ground for her opponents to stand on and say that she needs empathy - because it works just as well in reverse. You may not feel that intuitively, but perhaps you should work on your empathy. (Sorry, that last bit was snark and you seem fairly empathetic, but I hope you can see the point that anyone can call for empathy for their preferred social beliefs and there's not really a coherent way to make everyone agree about who gets deferential treatment.)
If we amend "they wanted her to agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness" to "they wanted her to either agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness, or else shut up", does that answer your objection?
That Rowling has gottten worse lately I don't deny. But I don't remember the reaction, back when it all started, being any less shrill than it is now. (The main thing I recall is my bemusement at the idea of such a good gray bien-pensant left-liberal being called a radical *anything*.) That the people she was disagreeing with should want their rebuttal was of course normal and proper; where they lost me was the further implication that the act of saying those things was wicked, in a way that other expressions of political nonsense are not.
The sense of betrayal by a *favorite author* isn't easy for me to relate to: we present-day conservatives necessarily get more practice than most people at separating the art from the artist (though my own favorite author never did anything worse than complain about his "deplorable American cultus"). I think I also draw a sharper distinction than you between group criticism and personal attacks. Imane Khelif sure has a right to feel affronted.
There was a lot of pressure to "cancel" Dave Chappelle, even within the Netflix org, they definitely wanted to "run him out". They were just unable to do so because he's famous and talented (so Netflix higher executives didn't want to part ways with him), and generally operates within a circle with strong-ish free speech norms (comedians are a bit too self-fellating, but it is true that even the left wing ones are more tolerant of offensive stuff than the population they're selected from).
Well what did she say? My memory of her original statement was something like, "I'm fine with people living as the other gender, and changing themselves with surgery and hormones to look and sound more like the gender they feel themselves to be. But it's just not true that being a trans woman or man is the same things as being someone with the female or male genes." That seems reasonable to me. Of course, it's a little vague. What does it really mean to say a trans woman and an XX woman are or are not the same thing? Seems like they're the same thing in some ways and not the same as others. But I think Rowling as reacting against people insisting that a trans woman was exactly the same as a XX woman, and that it was wrong and destructive to say that was not the case.
If Rowling got mad after being attacked for saying the above, what did she say that should as characterized as bullying rather than angry disagreement? And if she has been quoted as saying something godawful, are you sure that's what she actually said?
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill"
This was in response to Maya Forstater, a consultant whose contract was not renewed because she posted online that trans-women were not women. She sued and in December of 2019 the judge at the initial review found that her beliefs were not protected under law and were "incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others". Rowling's Tweet was in response to that.
You know, in most other contexts, saying X is not a real Y is no big deal. Lots of things don’t match perfectly with the class we usually put them in, and then someone might say, they’re not a real member of the class: Cheezits aren’t real food; AI’s aren’t real minds; the adopting mother isn’t the kid’s real mother.
I can see objecting to not allowing trans women to take a job for which a woman is required. But it seems like madness to me that someone
can be successfully sued for making an “X is not a real Y”statement online.
I have have lots of thoughts about this, but here’s the only one I think I can lay out clearly enough to avoid a danger of being entirely misunderstood:
The word ‘transphobic’ now means something like ‘anti-trans.’ I think we would all have a better chance of getting somewhere if we distinguished between the different kinds of negative feelings and opinons somebody can have regarding a trans person.
1) Ewww! A visceral disgust. That feeling we all tend to have about sexual stuff that is not to our taste.
2) They’re sexually dangerous — molest kids, make aggressive sexual moves on people who have shown no sign of interest
3) They’re odd to the point of being crazy. Their thoughts and feelings are utterly different from normal people’s. I can’t even form a model of their minds.
4) They look grotesque (applies to trans people who can’t manage to look much like a natural-born member of the gender the trans person identifies with, or don't try)
5) They’re entitled and whiny. They expect a level of empathy, understanding and accommodation that you can’t reasonably expect, and that hardly anyone gets except from the few people they are close to.
6) I’m furious at them, because a horde of them are attacking me on social media.
7) I think they should not be given certain accommodations (eg, M2F competing in women’s Olympic events) because the accommodations are unfair to so many others.
8) I dislike them and think they’re crazy, bad and dangerous, and don’t think they should be permitted to marry, work in a public-facing job, or be around children.
So the question is, which of 1-8 did Rowling start out with, which does she have now, and how bad was/is it to have the ones she had/has?
>What you are implying here is that Rowling's views are not genuinely held, but rather a tool of revenge she uses to cause deliberate pain to her critics and people she feels aggrieved by
He didn't imply that. Hostile views formed against people perceived to be hostile to you tend to be genuine
I'm not commenting on the reasonableness of JKR's views. I've not actually paid attention to her since... years ago when Harry Potter hit my elementary school library's bookshelves. My point was that people's reaction to hostility is usually genuine and that AlexTurok was not implying otherwise. If anything, emotional reactions to perceived enemies - as JKR's seems to have been, assuming your depiction is accurate - are more likely to be genuinely held
Woke people do not listen and are judgmental. Not listening or talking to white people was a founding principle. “Words are violence” is a core principle. “Read the room,” which means conform or be quiet, is a common refrain.
What is probably true is that YOU are empathetic and a good listener, and you are projecting that on the movement you feel you are a part of.
I’ve never used the platform formerly known as Twitter. My impression is that that platform encourages short, hostile putdowns rather than nuanced dialogue, so I wouldn’t be surprised if discussions there were lacking in empathy on both sides.
The essay accuses men of being dangerous to women and children, because some men are rapists and child abusers. She never claims that trans people are dangerous, she claims that letting men into women's spaces is dangerous: and that the trans movement pushes for making it easier for men to enter women's spaces and harder to remove men from women's spaces.
Maybe you should refresh your memory on what Rowling said about Khelif:
"Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered."
Even if the accusations of Khelif having XY chromosomes without knowing were 100% true (a big if!), this is an absurd and insulting statement. Rowling believes that someone who was born as a woman, raised as a woman, and who never identified as a man in her life, still somehow grew up to become a misogynist MRA who enjoys abusing women. Because misogyny is stored in the Y chromosome, apparently.
It's one thing to say "intersex people should not compete in the Olympics due to having a biological advantage." It's quite another thing to say "the reason that this intersex person got into boxing is because she's a bad person who enjoys beating women and crushing their dreams."
I know what she said. I suggest you go look at the things that were said about her when this whole thing started. She’s a Scot. She’s feisty. She got pissed off.
I won’t go back and explore the record, but if I remember correctly the first thing she wrote about this, she said transgender women have a place in the world and should be respected, but that place was not in rape crisis centers, women’s penitentiaries and top class women’s sports. And that most of the gripes about her were coming from people who were accusing lesbians of being bigots because they wouldn’t date transgender women. I do not think those are unreasonable positions.
I agree that she has gotten nastier over time, but her starting position was not unreasonable imo. I have read a lot about the Algerian boxer and I don’t think your summation is terribly accurate, but that might be a matter of opinion. One woman’s boxing association had banned her, but for some reason the Olympics had different rules. I don’t know if you watch the fight, but it was a travesty.
One would hope it’s not just “some random dude” making these calls.I I am going to reposition myself as neutral on the issue of Imane Khelif. It’s murky and not a hill I intend to die on. The whole issue of trans women in sports is in play and I’m hardly in a position to pretend I’m an expert. I think there are real issues being raised. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the categories.
I really don’t agree with you about Rowling, but what the heck.
If she listened with empathy and still came away thinking things insulting to trans people, would that have worked though? Like, say she thought transness spread by social contagion and regarding it as anything other than mental illness was deeply dangerous or something like that. She was respectful and empathetic to others point of view, but she thought that transness was somehow deeply dangerous and that called for activism somehow or something. Wouldn't she still be viewed as repugnant and people have tried to cancel her and such?
Her main issue was that the rights of biological females were getting trampled on, not that there is something wrong with being transgender. People who are commenting here seem to have come to the controversy late. Does anyone here want to make the case that a transgender woman and a biological female are “women“ in precisely the same sense?
I think I'm understanding you and Rowling could have behaved in an empathetic and logical manner while sincerely holding the view that transness was a harmful phenomona civilization should be putting effort into stopping (or something similarly wont to feel antithetical to a hypothetical trans person feeling valid; I'm kinda extrapolating from conversation's I've had with an Islamic neighbor who felt there was a certain Wrongness to my religion fixable only by converting to his). Could you help me out though and lay it out explicitly: what would empathy + reasonable look like alongside sincerely believing transness is bad and society is handling it poorly?
I asked last month but didn't get any good answers, so I'll ask again...
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.
> - Assume that the current price is efficient and not a bubble.
That's where you're wrong, bucko.
I subscribe to what our favorite bugman calls the "savings theory of money". Although personally, I prefer to think of it as the "cache theory of cash". The idea is that money is *inherently* bubbly. Bubbliness is the sine qua non. Alternatively, "it's the bubble that never pops." In a sibling thread, Wanda says crypto is a ponzi scheme. I'm going to bite the bullet and say "yes, money is a ponzi scheme, in a 'necessary evil' sort of way."
I.e. suppose you want to preserve your wealth into the future. How do you allocate your wealth? Naturally, you're going to park it in whatever asset has the highest expected ROI. And by parking your wealth in this asset, you're going to increase the ROI even further, which will attract other investors. Which is going to increase the ROI even further, which forms a positive-feedback loop. This asset's bubbliness has a tendency to vacuum up the bubbliness of rival securities/commodities with weaker ROI's, sort of like Highlander. The end result is that there's always going to be at least 1 (and ideally, only 1) type of asset that's bubbly, and that asset gets retroactively labeled "money". Tradeability is secondary to value-storage.
"but fance, fiat money doesn't work that way". Yes and I suspect this has some unsavory side-effects. Such as encouraging other assets to become bubbly as well, like housing. Also, by inflating currency, you undermine trust in it. "stimulation via inflation" can alternatively be thought of as "we're gonna ruin the currency and people will flee from it". btw yes, this is widely considered a heterodox opinion. (I've sparred a bit with commenter 1123581321 on this topic, many moons ago. although I dont think we were able to reach an agreement.)
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Regarding the benefit of cryptocurrency specifically (as opposed to money in general), my impression is that there's 3 types of users: the idealists; the shills; and the pragmatists.
The idealists' endonym is "bitcoin maximalists". For them, crypto is political. They prioritize "financial sovereignty". I.e. they don't trust the U.S. Fed to manage the supply of USD responsibly, so they're trying to escape the petrodollar. They also distrust other types of cryptocoins because they're not decentralized enough.
The shills are the types who wanna make a quick buck. "To the moon!", as they say. They use FOMO to try to attract new users to pump up their favorite currency. Rugpulls are common.
The pragmatists are just normies in third-world countries who don't have decent banking institutions. Scott has written about this before, I think. Think places like Venezuela, where the inflation rate is currently sitting at <checks google...> about 59% per annum. very cool! hyperflation = 20%, btw.
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> - ([...] so what happens when it plateaus? Why would people continue to hold it?).
Notice that even if it plateaus, that's still a better ROI than paying the USD tax of 2% inflation.
> (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
Personally, the analogy of choice that I like to use is woodchips. But toenail clippings is also a good one. Anyway, woodchips make a bad currency precisely because they're so inflationary. inflationary = negative ROI. If God commanded that everyone use woodchips as currency, inflation would go through the roof. Because anyone can print woodchips in their backyard. Something like gold, on the other hand, is much harder to inflate. not impossible, but the hardest relative to all (or at least, most) of the alternatives. In fact, it tends to be *deflationary*. Which is why it fulfills its function as money. deflationary currency = positive ROI. As I said earlier, the ROI is the whole point.
(EDIT: I misread you initially. oops. But hopefully you can see the point, anyway. I.e. it's not the total supply of nail clippings that matters. It's the fact that it's easy to inflate <shoots a dirty look at fiat>. crypto and gold are much harder to inflate.)
> And by parking your wealth in this asset, you're going to increase the ROI even further, which will attract other investors. Which is going to increase the ROI even further, which forms a positive-feedback loop.
The feedback loop stops when there's no more wealth to put into the asset though. At that point the price stalls. People get impatient and sell, then the positive feedback loop starts working in reverse.
Rational investors anticipate this happening in advance and don't buy in the first place. This is why a better-than-expected earnings report doesn't kickstart a bubble every time: yes, the ROI might be insane over the course of the day, but investors understand that this is a one-time price correction.
> and that asset gets retroactively labeled "money"
Does it? If you're thinking of gold during the gold standard era, then that definitely didn't have the best ROI at the time (it was pegged at a fixed rate!). Not sure what other asset you're thinking of.
> Notice that even if it plateaus, that's still a better ROI than paying the USD tax of 2% inflation.
Yeah but those aren't the only options. Most people store their wealth in savings accounts with above-inflation interest rates, or in productive assets like equity or bonds. Fiat currency isn't intended to be the main store of wealth, and that's by design: by encouraging people to invest in proper assets, you stimulate growth (as you alluded to).
> In fact, it tends to be *deflationary*. Which is why it fulfills its function as money. deflationary currency = positive ROI. As I said earlier, the ROI is the whole point.
Again, I believe the consensus is that money should be inflationary. ROI isn't the point! It's not a good thing for people to park their wealth in unproductive assets!
I didn't specify any old toenail clippings - they must be mine! Those are only produced at a fixed rate, no matter how much the price goes up. Point is, being scarce is not a sufficient condition for being valuable (although some degree of scarcity might be a necessary condition). You could create a Bitcoin clone with the same code but a different seed, and it would have all the properties of Bitcoin but a very different value.
> People get impatient and sell, then the positive feedback loop starts working in reverse.
It's propped up by caching activity. If there's a bubble in the stock market, you can fall back on bonds. If there's a bubble in the bond market, you can fall back on money. If there's a bubble in the money supply... what are you gonna do, light your money on fire? dump it in the ocean? You probably wanna park all that wealth *somewhere*. And if lots of people have the same idea about which asset to park their wealth in, that asset becomes the new, defacto "money". The bubble never truly dies, it just manifests somewhere else. "The bubble is dead! Long live the bubble!"
> Does it? If you're thinking of gold during the gold standard era, then that definitely didn't have the best ROI at the time (it was pegged at a fixed rate!). Not sure what other asset you're thinking of.
I'm saying that money is a natural attractor basin for caching activity. (for didactic purposes, maybe ROI wasn't the exactly-correct thing to emphasize. More like "the feedback loop is what propels the transition from "not money" to "is money".) If the government wants to intervene with regulations that force everyone to recognize a particular asset as legal tender, it can certainly do that. With the power of violence, all things are possible. I doubt that's how money evolved organically.
> Most people store their wealth in savings accounts with above-inflation interest rates
I can't call this "saving" with a clear conscience. It's asking a bank to issue loans on your behalf. Which is fine, I guess. It's a different risk-profile than stuffing money under a mattress. "No fance, a savings-account is insured by the FDIC. It's risk-free!" Well, I suppose. In an iron-condor-esque sort of way. More precisely, it's risk-free *for depositors* because the government takes on the risk. No free lunch.
> Fiat currency isn't intended to be the main store of wealth, and that's by design: by encouraging people to invest in proper assets, you stimulate growth (as you alluded to).
Right, because growth never has downsides. Malinvestment is just a myth. I thank God every day, for allowing ZIRP to prop up Juicero. :^)
> You could create a Bitcoin clone with the same code but a different seed, and it would have all the properties of Bitcoin but a very different value.
Ye.
I tend to emphasize the "positive-feedback loop" aspect because it generalizes to something I like to call "reflexive propositions". Which can be summarized as "it's true because I say so". E.g. when a pastor pronounces you man and wife, this isn't a reflection of the objective state of the universe, it's a reflection of social reality. Which is, in some sense, completely made-up. The need for caching is what kickstarts a currency into existence. But afterward, the financial value just kinda sustains itself by its own force of will. "Diamond hands!", as the kids say.
It's all very hand-wavy. I remain unconvinced, but I struggle to pinpoint the false assumption.
I think what I was looking for was something more rigorous, probably beyond the scope of a single comment. If you know of any books or long blog posts, please do share
(Since I don't recognize your name, I assume you're new around these parts. rot13 is just a cipher that rotates the alphabet 13 characters forward. follow the link, and copy-paste everything below into the textbox.)
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V'z n yvggyr fubeg ba nhgubevgngvir fbheprf, ohg V'z nyjnlf qbja gb funer. Vs lbh jnaan xabj ubj *V* jnf pbaivaprq, V oynzr gur ohtzna [0]. Naq gur ohtzna jnf fhccbfrqyl vafcverq ol gur Nhfgevna Fpubby. Gur fcrpvsvp oybtcbfg jurer ohttl qvfphffrf zbargnel cbyvpl sebz svefg cevapvcyrf vf pnyyrq "HE'f Penfu Pbhefr va Fbhaq Rpbabzvpf" [1]. Vg'f abg na npnqrzvp cncre, ohg vg qbrf fgevir gb or n yvggyr zber evtbebhf guna V jnf. Gubhtu nqzvggrqyl, V'ir arire dhvgr haqrefgbbq jung gur ohtzna zrnag ol "Abeznyyl, va n onaxehcgpl, qrog orpbzrf rdhvgl".
Lbh znl nyfb jnag gb purpx bhg uvf oybtcbfg ba Znghevgl Genafsbezngvba [2]. Nxn "gur guvat gung gur Senpgvbany Erfreir Flfgrz qbrf". Juvpu, nppbeqvat gb Nhfgevnaf, vf onq. Naq cebonoyl gur ebbg pnhfr bs gur TSP. (ZOF'f jrer zreryl gur *cebkvzngr* pnhfr.)
Vs lbh jnag na ragver obbx, V erzrzore bapr frrvat gur nofgenpg sbe "Gur Gurbel bs Vqyr Erfbheprf" [3]. Juvpu, nqzvggrqyl, V unira'g ernq. Ohg gur flabcfvf ybbxf njshyyl fvzvyne gb "npghnyyl, fgvzhyhf vf onq". Gurer'f cebonoyl fvzvyne fghss vs lbh cbxr nebhaq gur Iba Zvfrf jrofvgr. Vg nyfb arngyl qbirgnvyf jvgu Miv'f snzbhf cbfg nobhg gur iveghr bs "fynpx" [4].
In my opinion, the price of Bitcoin is a bet on its prospect of becoming the de-facto medium of settlement of a significant part of the world economy. So a very simple model would be p(of that happening) * Total value of "that" (that could be, for example, the total amount of currency held in bank reserves for nations that would adopt the bitcoin standard).
The price trend is then a reflection of this eventual value being very, very large, and the probability going from "yeah, sure dude, pass the joint" to "wait, could this actually maybe possibly happen?". Bitcoin has a lot of good things going for it: It's very divisible, easy to transport and exchange, transactions are relatively fast (when compared the layer of money they are supposed to replace) and very traceable, its supply is not subordinated to the whims of a single political actor, it is scarce, and it has the first mover advantage that kicked off the "perpetual motion machine".
The main problem I see, and the reason I think it's not going to succeed is that it is too scarce, and therefore too deflationary: As the adoption of the US dollar (and the size of the world economy) grew, the fed was able to "print" infinite dollars to supply the infinite demand there was for them, this has had many effects that people may or may not like, but one of them is that the value of one dollar in "real goods" terms is more or less stable within a reasonable window of time. If I take a mortgage denominated in bitcoin today, and then it quadruples in value in the following 3 years, what the hell am I supposed to do? There is a hypothetical "steady state" in which this no longer matters and the price is bound to remain stable, but how are we supposed to "make the jump(s, because there'd be several)" seems like an intractable problem.
The steelman for Bitcoin is that it provides a service (payments operating outside of the law) that is valuable and people will pay for, and those "customers" provide a stream of non-speculative revenue that can be used to pay off miners and investors.
However, it seems like Bitcoin is obsolete and not fit for this purpose. The goto cryptocurrency for most payments usage is Tether, because it is designed to act like an actual currency (in particular, being a stable store of value and quickly and cheaply transferable). For users that need true privacy, Monero or ZCash are much better.
I would also like to see this. In my view it doesn't exist. In my view crypto is nothing but ponzi and black market.
Also I don't agree that crypto is scare. Bitcoin itself may be but there's no barrier to creating new coins.
I could imagine a model where being the 'biggest' coin has value, so you can ignore everything that isn't bitcoin. The only fundamental economic value it has, AFAICT, are for low-friction international transfers and illicit activity.
The steelman case for Bitcoin is that it allows people to evade the law and people will pay for that service (Bitcoin proponents usually add a "and that's a good thing" to the end, but you don't have to think that to believe that it provides a revenue stream for Bitcoin).
The real problem is that Tether and Monero are much better suited to this role, making Bitcoin obsolete anyway.
>Account for both supply and demand (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
It does have at least *some* financial use - drug trade, sending money overseas to countries with unreliable banking systems, online stores run by libertarians who accept Bitcoin as a point of pride, etc. So I think there's nonzero economic value, although I'm not sure how you'd define it in terms of supply and demand.
> sending money overseas to countries with unreliable banking systems
I don't think this is a real usecase for crypto. The part that is actually hard and expensive is the "have branches in the target country that will hand people usable currency or goods". That is the service that people pay Western Union for, and one that cryptocurrencies don't offer at all. The exact form that the 0s and 1s take on the way to your expensive network of agents is completely irrelevant.
Heck, in Arab countries, it's common to do the payments in the form where no money is actually transferred for religious reasons, proving that *you don't actually need money at all* to do the cross-border transfer part of the service.
People like to object to this standard economic assumption and I've always found it somewhat sophomoric. 'Rational' doesn't mean cognitively optimal or logical. It just means having a preference and being able to pursue that preference in a coherent way. In no way does it mean that the preference is optimal or even superficially rational. There are economic models of illicit drug use even though doing harmful drugs is obviously irrational.
61% feels high to me, not so much because of Trump (though he may yet have his Andrew Jackson moment - I'd be interested in seeing a market on that...) but because
has a median prediction date for at least weak AGI of 2026-09-29, well before the 2028 election.
I'm anticipating a very wild ride, and I'll be surprised if we don't see _some_ sort of major economic and political changes before November 2028. Though I have no idea what the direction of those changes will be.
> Have prediction markets been wildly wrong before?
A prediction market is never "wildly wrong" on a single event. Let's say Trump ends democracy tomorrow... was 13% wrong or right? We can't really say. The correctness of a market is measured by its record of predictions... if things that are predicted at 13% happen half the time, then one could say it's wildly wrong.
There are also sometimes cases where you can just say "come on, that's ridiculous", like when prediction markets showed a non-negligible chance of Trump winning 2020 even months after the election was called.
But yeah, judging prediction track records tends to be difficult and subjective. Even if you have a lot of markets, your choice of which past markets to include or exclude from the record can drastically alter the results.
Would anyone like to explain the idea of being trans to me. I don't really understand it.
Say you are a sensitive man who relates more to women (e.g., you're generally demure, soft spoken, care about how you look, etc...). That's fine. Why not just be that.
Say you are a man who wants to look like a woman. Why not just cross dress?
Say you are a man who wants to experience sex similar to a woman, why not just be into gay sex, and e.g., pegging.
The benefits of having transitional surgery seems small (convenience when cross dressing, and better emulation of sex as a woman) but the downsides seem insane (being forever sterile + major invasive surgery).
I also don't understand the idea of a man claiming to be a woman. Or claiming to feel like a woman. Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
It would be very different if actually sex change were possible and safe (like in the Ian M Banks culture series), I'd totally try being a different gender then (why not?), but to me, having aesthetic surgery that sterilizes you seems pretty unrelated to changing gender.
>Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
Same, and transgender discourse confused me for similar reasons to what you describe. For me, the breakthrough was realizing that so many cisgender people DO feel like a gender and DO have a strong sense of a gender. (So much so that many cis people are uncomfortable playing a character that doesn't match their gender, even in a video game.)
Gender still seems daft to me (can't we all just be ourselves?), but it turns out it's not just trans people with a strong sense of gender!
>Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
Thirded! I think the term for my situation is cis-male-by-default. Being a STEMM (more specifically, chemistry and physics) person is _far_ more central to my identity than my gender is.
>Or claiming to feel like a woman. Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
That sounds like what I've heard described as being "cis by default". It hasn't been formally studied, as far as I know, but anecdotally that seems to be the exception, not the norm. Most people do feel a strong sense of gender, one way or another, where having your gender affirmed (looking and feeling like your gender, doing gender-coded things, being seen by others as your gender, etc) feels good and having it contradicted feels uncomfortable.
For most people, this sense of gender aligns pretty well with your body and the social/legal gender identity you were born into and it's relatively uncommon to be in situations that go against your internal gender orientation. But it is very common for cis men, for example, to feel distress at not being able to grow a good beard, having a small penis, having androgynous facial features, being mistaken for a woman, doing female-coded things (even relatively minor practical stuff like holding your wife or girlfriend's purse for her), or at having to wear feminine (or effeminate) coded clothing.
For a trans person who hasn't started transitioning, it's common to feel that kind of distress as a background noise thing all the time. It's so pervasive that trans people often have no idea we're trans until well into adulthood, since the distress just feels like a pervasive fact or life, and temporary relief from the distress (e.g. from cross-dressing or role-playing) is experienced as euphoria by comparison to the baseline. Before I realized I was trans, I had been diagnosed for depression and anxiety, was on antidepressants (which made the symptoms more bearable but didn't resolve them).
When Abigail Thorn came out as trans in 2021, she made an hour-long coming-out video giving context the the announcement. In that video, she compared her experience trying to live as a man to working a soul-crushing job that is completely wrong for you, that you didn't choose and don't feel able to quit, and that subtly poisons every aspect of your life. And that everything really did get better for her when she realized she could "quit the job" by transitioning and followed through on that realization. My own experience in these respects mirror hers very closely.
>Say you are a sensitive man who relates more to women (e.g., you're generally demure, soft spoken, care about how you look, etc...). That's fine. Why not just be that.
>Say you are a man who wants to look like a woman. Why not just cross dress?
I already did these things for most of my adult life, at least part time. It was nowhere near enough. Cross-dressing in particular is awkward to do unless you're committing to social transition, since cis people publicly cross-dressing tends to be stigmatized even in relatively liberal settings.
>The benefits of having transitional surgery seems small
Surgery is less central to transition than you seem to be assuming. A lot of us do get or want to get bottom surgery, but it's very common for trans people to not have had any surgery at all or to only have less invasive cosmetic procedures (mastectomy for trans men, breast augmentation for trans women, liposuction, hair transplants, hair removal, etc). Social and medical transition are the much more central aspects of transitioning.
Social transitioning is stuff like name and pronoun changes, voice training, changing how you dress and present yourself, etc.
Medical transition is taking medications that change your hormone balance, usually to close to a cis woman's hormones for trans women or to a cis man's for trans men. Over the course of a few years, this does a lot more than most people suppose to change your body. It also, for many/most people, has a direct effect on mood and mental well-being: biochemical dysphoria, distress from having the "wrong" hormones in your system, seems to be a thing and is also observed in cis people, e.g. men with low testosterone levels or who need to take anti-androgen medications for medical reasons.
I don't understand how a transwoman can accomplish their transition without also having bottom surgery. How can you claim to feel female if you still have a penis?
There's more to gender, and even to physical sex, than genitalia. It's much more common to interact with someone in a gendered way than it is to interact with their genitals.
As for the internal experience of trans women (and trans men) who have not had bottom surgery, it varies by person. The intensity and salience of bottom surgery varies quite a bit. Some of us are entirely satisfied by combinations of social transition, things that hormones can do alone, and relatively minor procedures like hair removal. Others are intensely bothered by our original genitals and want bottom surgery as soon as possible. I think a large majority of us are somewhere in between, where other aspects of transition get us most of the way to where we want to be, but we'd still prefer to have (cis) female genitals rather than our original equipment.
A major factor in not getting bottom surgery is that it is a very big deal to get. It's a major surgery with a long and intense recovery process. It's expensive and often poorly covered by insurance. Typical results are very good, but there's a non-negligible risk of substantial complications, including anorgasmia. There aren't a lot of surgeons who do the procedures relative to the number of potential patients, and the surgeons with the best track records and reputations especially tend to have very long waiting lists. There's time-intensive prep (mostly permanent hair removal from the tissues used to construct the vagina) that's definitely required before you can get the surgery and often before you can even get on the waiting list for the procedure. And while there's a lot less gatekeeping than there used to be, there still is a process that needs to be gone through before having surgery to prove to the surgeon and your insurance company that you understand all the risks and downsides, are competent to give informed consent, and that you're "trans enough" that it makes sense for you to get the surgery. The combined effects of these is that while a very large majority of trans women would absolutely avail ourselves of near-magical sci-fi nanobot surgery that gave us perfect results overnight, most of us haven't had surgery yet and many of us never intend to get surgery.
According to a large 2015 survey of trans folk in the US, 12% of trans women have already had bottom surgery, 54% "want it some day", 22% "not sure if they want this", and 12% "do not want this". For trans men, there are two different types of full bottom surgery (metoidioplasty and phallopasty) that were surveyed separately, which complicates interpretation by making it hard to distinguish between trans men who don't want one procedure because they want the other and trans men who don't want either procedure; what I can glean is that 5% have already had one procedure or the other, 25-44% definitely want one procedure or the other but haven't gotten it yet (depending on how many respondents answered "want it some day" to both to indicate they want one or the other but aren't sure which), at least 49% are not sure, and at most 24% are not interested in either procedure.
Source: pages 101-102 (by in-document page numbers) or 105-106 (by PDF page numbers) of this report:
"There's more to gender, and even to physical sex, than genitalia. It's much more common to interact with someone in a gendered way than it is to interact with their genitals."
My own difficulty with this is that, aside from the sort of things where genitalia and/or chromosomes were likely to be relevant, I thought we had spent about ninety of the last hundred years trying to shift society towards, "yeah, that stuff isn't hard-coded to gender any more, girls can wear trousers and fly airplanes, guys can talk about their feelings and stay home to raise the kids if they want". And, yeah, nothing is perfect, but we were making really good progress - to the point where my brother can be a stay-at-home househusband with no loss of status and his daughter is a pilot and everyone thinks that's great.
So why is it that now, when we're closer to success than ever before, there's a massive social movement to say "nope, all that stuff is gendered along the traditional lines and you shouldn't feel comfortable doing the Guy Stuff unless you go Full Guy or vice versa"?
>So why is it that now, when we're closer to success than ever before, there's a massive social movement to say "nope, all that stuff is gendered along the traditional lines and you shouldn't feel comfortable doing the Guy Stuff unless you go Full Guy or vice versa"?
I am not saying that. What I am saying is that some aspects of body, appearance, and behavior are culturally gender-coded, and that taken together these things affect how people are perceived both by themselves and others.
I am generally strongly in favor of men and women doing whichever combination of these feels right for them. What feels right to me is mostly female-coded.
"Body" is a big part of the picture here, too. There are a lot of physical changes that are possible without or before bottom surgery. Being on hormones for years has a pretty big effect on secondary sexual characteristics, whether or not you've had bottom surgery. Trans women grow breasts, lose muscle mass and definition, lose body hair, regrow receding hairlines, and have body fat redistribute over time to produce a more feminine figure. Trans men grow beards, gain muscle mass and definition, gain body hair, have their voices drop, and have fat redistribute in the opposite direction. Skin texture and body odors change in either direction. Facial features change subtly but significantly (due to changes in fat distribution, muscle, and connective tissue) to appear more feminine or masculine respectively.
There are also a lot of procedures other than bottom surgery than many trans people opt for. Breasts can be surgically augmented or removed. Facial hair can be permanently removed with lasers or electrolysis. Fat tissue can be surgically removed or transplanted to different parts of the body. Cosmetic surgery can do more to facial features besides what hormones do. And so on.
In general, we perceive most of the people around us as one gender or another, and we largely do this automatically and subconsciously. Most of us only have direct personal knowledge of a very small number of these people's genitals, and then usually only after we've known them a while and already confidently mentally gendered them.
Thank you for that explanation. However, I admit I still can't understand how gender identity can be held separate from genitalia among some trans people.
"But it is very common for cis men, for example, to feel distress at not being able to grow a good beard, having a small penis, having androgynous facial features, being mistaken for a woman, doing female-coded things (even relatively minor practical stuff like holding your wife or girlfriend's purse for her), or at having to wear feminine (or effeminate) coded clothing."
Isn't this all about social conformity though, and nothing to do with gender? For example, in ancient Rome it was considered manly to have a small penis. There's nothing biological about being a man and penis size.
Like it is incredibly common (and expected and part of healthy function) for a adult to want to feel normal and accepted into their society. As such, someone who looks down at themselves as sees a woman's body is going to look around and try and ensure they conform to the expectations society places on people with women's bodies, but nothing in that has anything to do with "feeling like a woman." That is just playing the hand you have been dealt.
I think you are committing the typical mind fallacy and generalizing from your own experience of not having a strong innate sense of gender and only doing gendered things out of a drive for social conformity. That is your own experience, but it is very much not mine (gender incongruity pushes me in the decidedly opposite direction from social conformity in many respects), and it is not what I've heard very, very often from cis people about their experiences.
But how do you deconflate these things? Like, my experience of feeling like a man is not feeling a strong sense of gender. So does that mean that a woman who feels like a man feels like me (i.e., no strong sense of gender). Obviously not. So what does she feel like? How can she know she feels like a man, when she has never been a man.
I can understand her relating to masculine traits (the traits she statistically observes as being associated with men, and the traits society tells her are masculine), but it seems she is just a tomboy (good for her, why not) or someone with masculine tendencies rather than a man "trapped in a woman's body."
How do you deconflate being unhappy with who you are, with the desire to be someone anyone else, with the desire to be of the opposite gender. Given nobody can ever know what it feels like to be anything other than what they are (or have been), it seems strange to me to so confidently assert you are fundamentally of a gender you have no experience of.
You are being civil, but you do come across as trying to make the case there’s something bogus about the wish to change genders. How about coming at the question another way.? Ask somebody trans to tell you about times when the feeling of being the wrong gender was really powerful and times after changing genders that it felt really right.
Or try to think of things you have experienced that might be analogous to gender dysphoria. Let’s say you are short and hate it — have a feeling that this small body just does not represent your actual dignified self. (Even though being tall is not something tall people think about all the time. In that way it’s like gender — males don’t think all the time about being male). If there was a procedure that’s not too dangerous that would allow you to change your height you would probably undergo it. But there isn’t, so you have no choice but to put up with being short. But it may bother you for your whole life.
If you do not have a discontent of that sort about your body, you probably at least know some cis men who do, and can it least
form a mental model of what that’s like. Ok, so consider the possibility that gender dysphoriafeels like height dysphoria, but considerably stronger.
Another analog: Being in a situation where everybody has the wrong idea of you. Let’s say you go to some demonstration to photograph it You personally think the cause is not worthwhile and the demonstrators are silly. But the demonstrators don’t know that, and are giving you thumbs up and trying to chat with you. Meanwhile, people of your own persuasion, standing in the sidelines, are looking at you disapprovingly. It’s unpleasant, right? So consider the possibility that males who have the feeling that they are really women have that misperceived feeling all the time when they are in public looking male.
Big picture: Try your best to form a model of someone else’s experience. If that’s simply impossible, you can challenge them to prove they’re
not just making something up. But lead by trying to understand.
>Given nobody can ever know what it feels like to be anything other than what they are (or have been), it seems strange to me to so confidently assert you are fundamentally of a gender you have no experience of.
I have lived as a cis man. During that time, I've tried out various combinations of being gender-conforming and gender-noncomforming. Gender nonconforming felt quite a bit better than being gender-conforming in most cases. I have also lived as a trans women and vastly prefer it to living either as a gender-conforming or a gender-noncomforming cis man.
The standard answer to "how do you know" is to try gender exploration in safe contexts and see how it feels, to learn about what medical transition can and cannot do to your body and think hard about whether or not those things seem desirable to you, and if get to a point where you're pretty sure you want the effects of medical transition, then give hormones a try and go off of them if you start not liking the effects.
It is a genuinely difficult question for many of us. Some trans people have a very strong intuitive sense of being a different gender from a very young age, but it's also very common to be completely oblivious to anything other than a generalized sense of wrongness until well into adulthood.
But that is not the same as being. That is just the feeling of seeming. Indeed, a man might say enjoy dressing as a woman, talking as a woman, etc... but that just means he likes those things (good for him), but that doesn't mean he knows anything at all about what it is to be a woman. He just has some experience of seaming to be a woman.
I don't understand why there needs to be a category or a category flip. A man can just enjoy dressing and talking as though he were a woman. There's nothing wrong with it. Similarly a woman can just enjoy seeming like a man. There's nothing wrong with it. Why the need to redefine these people as being or a different gender than they factually are.
The examples you have though: penis size, facial hair are demonstrably cultural, in that cultures vary as to whether or not these traits are considered masculine. There's nothing particularly complex or misunderstood about that particular claim. It is clearly 100% social constructed. You could make an argument that on average cultures are more likely to associate big penis with masculinity say, but that is besides the point. In any given culture, the association a person makes is 100% driven by culture
There are cultures in which men are normally clean-shaven. But even in these, to the extent I am familiar with, the ability to grow a beard is seen as masculine (desirable in men and undesirable in women) and the contrary is seem as either feminine or childish.
The ideal of penis size and shape varies quite a bit by culture, yes. It's not completely arbitrary, though: I've heard of cultures where the smaller side of medium was the ideal, but I know of none where a micropenis was the ideal. But as far as I know, having a penis (and moreover having one that approximates the cultural ideal) is considered a core masculine trait just about everywhere.
Disclaimer: I don't identify as trans, I just personally know a *lot* of trans people
> Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender.
IME, this is actually the main difference between you and (most) trans people.
People who identify as trans in an impermissive society (which, despite the impression you might get online, applies to everywhere except the most liberal enclaves of the SFBA) are largely those who have such a strong sense of which gender they are - or more often, which gender they are *not* - that they want to brave the significant downsides of presenting as trans and transitioning. They usually are people that experience a visceral negative reaction to seeing themselves in the mirror as their agab (inducing self-hate and depression).
That said, I don't think your sense of gender is as absent as you think. As a thought-or-real experiment, I suggest dressing up in drag - no shaving or contouring, just makeup on your normal face, preferably with as much of your body hair exposed from your frilly dress. Now look at yourself in the mirror - really look at yourself. I would be surprised if you *didn't* feel some sense of deep discomfort or wrongness. That's the sort of feeling my trans friends report all the time. (And if you truly don't feel any sort of discomfort at that, I'd actually describe you as GNC or nonbinary, not that I would suggest that you need to alter your life at all for that label)
When I was little child, I used to like wearing dresses, and it's a pretty standard thing for women to want to apply female makeup to their partners, and a few girlfriends have done that to me. I don't find any of that uncomfortable or strange. Personally, I'm comfortable in a dress (kinda fun, to dress up in a partner's clothes say, etc..), but I don't really have any strong desire for it, and I definitely don't want the social stigma associated with it.
To me, dressing up as a women and exploring ideas of feminity seems pretty normal and part of masculinity, e.g., the ancient Greeks, e.g., rockstars from 20/30 years ago (like David Bowie). I find that all so much more normal and healthy seaming than being Trans (e.g., actually having a sterilizing invasive produce / claiming to be something one is clearly biologically not).
>I find that all so much more normal and healthy seaming than being Trans (e.g., actually having a sterilizing invasive produce / claiming to be something one is clearly biologically not).
You're conflating "being trans" with "wanting to medically transition". That's perfectly understandable if your only exposure to it is mostly conservative people yelling about it online, but it's going to give you a warped view of the community. There are a lot of people who stay at just the level you described of gender-nonconformity, and most that do transition start with that, and only go on HRT after seeing friends and loved ones react positively to it.
Bowie himself is not evidence against transness, but rather evidence that people outside the gender binary have always existed, our ways of talking about them have just changed. I'm not saying that's good or bad, it just is. (Bowie, for the record, had a well-documented romantic relationship with a trans woman)
Also, the obsession with "sterilization" always struck me as gross and controlling, as if not being able to generate children is some sort of defect. Many people do not want to ever be pregnant, and that's not mental illness. And it's easy to see why! Birth control sucks in many cases! Being pregnant has huge health risks! Do you have similar confusion over men who get vasectomies?
Would you, personally, jump at the chance to make it so that every time you had sex, there was a risk that you would have a child grow inside of you for 9 months? If the answer is no, why do you think people who are born like that are somehow wrong if they want to change it?
(I won't even get started on the biological truth argument, since it's clearly incoherent)
Also re unplanned pregnancy, unfortunately that is basically the defining characteristic of being a woman, in that it has evolutionarily shaped women's instincts, and massively shaped how cultures frames and interacts with women. It seems bizzare to me for anyone to claim to be a woman, when they have no biological connection to that defining and shaping property.
I do not know how to explain that "women are defined primarily by their ability to bear children [for me, a man]" is a fundamentally regressive and misogynist view that you should not be proudly re-iterating.
Your argument isn't event coherent here - we were talking about the sterilization of *trans men*, and you're suddenly talking about *trans women*. If your views were consistent here, this would be the opposite of what you're arguing - that by sterilizing themselves, they're cutting themselves off from their "defining characteristic", making themselves "biologically" man.
But that's clearly not the case, and frankly you seem to be reasoning backwards from a discomfort with not being able to define women based on whether you could get them pregnant.
That's understandable! As a man, your instincts have been "evolutionarily shaped" by your imperative to get women pregnant. It's shaped the culture you grew up in and how you were taught to interact with women, and altered the framing of how you interact with them. It's certainly good that you're asking questions about this, since it's a difficult thought pattern to move past in the journey for rationality.
How and why is it misogynist to say that women are defined by the ability to give birth?
I would equal say that men are defined by the ability to sire children. Is that misandry to you?
I don't appreciate the tarring of the view point, especially as you don't bother to actually articulate how it is wrong.
I made it clear what I meant by the term defined by: a) the difference between these two classes emotions and instincts are mainly shaped by this key characteristics, and b) the way human cultures treat each class is mainly shaped by this key characteristic.
Both a) and b) are as I understand them, uncontroversial scientific consensus (i.e., Evolutionary Biology 101 and Anthropology 101). Why do you find these facts misogynistic?
There's nothing wrong with being able to sire children or birth children, nore does anyone have an obligation to carry out the defining feature of their class. For example, gay men are still men, but that doesn't mean that if a gay man gets into a subway care late at night with a single woman the woman might be subconsciously or consciously afraid. That's is just the biological reality of the female and male experience. You seem to want to deny people's basic emotional lives.
Anyway, my main point was if you are man, and you cut of your penis, and create a wound shaped like a vagina you do not become a woman. You are unlikely to have the female fear of men. And it is unfair to women to say you are one. It fundamentally cheapens their lived experience.
I mean, gender non-conformity is perfectly understandable to me. I just don't understand the claim of "being" another gender.
You "feel like" you are another gender. You aren't literally the other gender. And I find it a bit insulting to people who have grown up in that gender, who actually are of that gender, to have others claim that the two experiences equate.
Why is it insulting? It doesn’t affect my manhood if someone else also considers himself a man. There is not a limited supply of masculinity in the world.
It is potentially insulting because each group (men and women) has it's own unique experiences, including hardships. For example, men generally experience a lot of rejection by women and have to grow to deal with that. While, women generally experience a lot of unwanted attention from men, and have to grow to deal with that.
If you've never had these formative experiences (e.g., being embarrassed in front of your peer group for starting periods early or late) then it's not really fair to claim you are one of that group.
It's a bit like say an Asian suddenly painting their skin black and claiming to be Black. I think generally society recognizes that they are not Black, and that it is insulting to the Black community to recognize them as such (i.e., because they lack the shared life experiences of someone who actually grew up Black)
The point is the sterilizing is irreversible. That's a huge huge deal. If say at age twenty you decide to undergo such an operation, you are massively restricting the abilities of your future selves to perform one the grandest gifts in the entire universe: the creation of new life.
We would, I think be deeply appalled by a twenty year old deciding to cut of their arm, and I think the reason for that is that it's not just their arm, but the arm of all their future selves too. You take one of the most important and significant decisions you can make (having children) away from yourself.
I'm 43. I was 41 when I started transitioning. I already have a child, and my wife and I already decided that we didn't want more. Many cis men and women in my situation get themselves electively sterilized anyway.
People who think they might want to have children in the future when they start their transitions often have sperm or egg samples harvested and preserved, for use in artificial insemination or IVF later on if desired. It's common for doctors to recommend this before starting hormones, since hormones often interfere with fertility, and it's almost universal practice for doctors to recommend it again (including the option of going off hormones temporarily to recover fertility) before bottom surgery.
I'm not disgusted by body integrity dysphoria (i.e., the desire). I am repulsed by the idea of someone cutting off their own limbs (i.e., the act), and I believe society is in broad agreement with me here (as is a normal psychological safe guard against doing such!)
Although, if it's part of a religious ritual and associated with gaining status... Then maybe it is more palatable. The main objection is that it seems like major irreversible self harm.
Where technology such that limbs could be regrown, then I'd have no problem with it.
The problem with identifying one's sense of gender as *absent* is that even without an internal feeling of wrongness, I imagine many people would feel an external feeling of "I don't want to be treated the way that I imagine the rest of the world would treat me if looked like an unusually masculine woman, or an unusually feminine man."
For me, when I try to perform your thought experiment (admittedly, in my head, and not with actual makeup), this external feeling (whether it is real or imagined in my circle of friends and acquaintances, in particular) is sufficiently strong that I find it hard to tell whether I also have an internal feeling of wrongness.
But isn't this just all the desire to seem normal? Like I don't care if I'm perceived as feminine, but I do care if I'm perceived as weak or low status, etc... and certain cultures associate being a masculine woman as being bad, and a feminine man as being bad, but none of those associations seem anything like biological. It's all just culture.
Historically, America has a hell of a lot more anti-femine men and anti-masculine women sentiment than Europe, where I think people are more comfortable with androgyny and people just being however they are.
It seems there is a massive and unexamined conflation between the desire to confirm and seem normal and gender, and it kind of distrurbs me that it seems so unexamined.
That's the thing, though. I admit it's not a perfect metaphor, but my understanding is that for a lot of trans people, the "external" experience you're describing is very similar to what they feel all the time - and being misgendered is the same feeling you're describing as being perceived as a very "masculine woman" or "feminine man".
But that's completely non-biological. It mostly has to do with what I imagine would get me stuffed into a trash can by bullies when I was in middle school.
Most trans people put up with dealing with a lot *more* of the experience I'm describing for the sake of something that they care about more strongly.
And for an even more comprehensive resource, there's the Gender Dysphoria Bible, which is a commonly-recommended community guide for people who newly realize they are (or might be) trans and their friends and family members:
You are being civil, but you do come across as trying to make the case there’s something bogus about the wish to change genders. How about coming at the question another way.? Ask somebody trans to tell you about times when the feeling of being the wrong gender was really powerfull and times after changing genders that it felt really right.
Or try to think of things you have experienced that might be analogous to gender dysphoria. Let’s say you are short and hate it — have a feeling that this small body just does not represent your actual dignified self. You have little choice but to put up with being short, but you may be bothered by it your whole life. (Even though being tall is not something tall
people think about all the time.). If there was a procedure that’s not too dangerous that would allow you to change iyoir height you would
probably undergo it. But there isn’t, so you have no choice but to put up with being short. But it may bother you for your whole life. If you do not have a discontent of that sort about your body, you probably at least know some cis men who do, and can it least
form a mental model
of what that’s like. Ok, so consider the possibility that gender dysphoriafeels like height dysphoria, but considerably stronger.
Another analog: Being in a situation where everybody has the wrong idea of you. Let’s say you go to some demonstration to photograph it
You personally think the cause is not worthwhile and the demonstrators are silly. But the demonstrators don’t know that, and are giving you thumbs up and trying to chat with you. Meanwhile, people of your own persuasion, standing in the sidelines, are looking at you disapprovingly. It’s unpleasant, right? So consider the possibility that males
who have the feeling that they are really women have that misperceived feeling all the time when they are in public looking male.
I value your observation regarding the way I am engage and asking questions.
Your thoughts experiment about being short:
In this scenario isn't the whole deal not that the guy is short and "feels like he should be tall" but rather the guy is unhappy with how society treats short people, and is jealous of taller people.
In terms of how I'd attempt to help such a man, I'd try and help him no longer define himself through a perceived negative society.
But I think if I said that was my default approach to someone saying they were trans (e.g., they're unhappy being a man, and I try and counsel them to no longer define themselves according to societies view of masculinity, but instead just be themselves) people would potentially say that is trans phobia.
I don't think you've got the short guy right. Didn't you ever hate anything about the way you look, even when you were in your teens? Hating one's appearance really does not have much to do with the actual disadvantages of having a certain feature that is a negative by conventional standards. It's mostly an inability to escape the feeling of actually being ugly, lame and inferior, as though the physical flaw were a manifestation of one's essential self. Maybe you need to think of a situation where somebody's flaw is way worse than being short. Let's say the guy has cerebral palsy, and one of his arms is permanently bent in to a sort of preying mantis position, and he has involuntary facial grimaces. No, these deformities don't say anything whatever about his smarts, dignity, and worth, but I hope you get that it is quite hard for people in that situation to fully free themselves from the feeling of being grotesque and inferior. And you would not get anywhere telling somebody in that situation that they are as good as everybody else. People have been telling them that their whole life. If you said it, you'd be about the thousandth person to do so. And they already know it's true. but there's a part of their mind that is not on board with it.
You don't sound trans phobic, more like you're sort of stuck on the idea that nobody could really, deeply want to change their gender, and preoccupied with finding some way to prove that's the case. It's possible you're right, but the info you need is what trans people felt that led them to taking hormones, getting surgery, etc and you're so busy arguing you don't get much info about that. And you're missing some easy-to-understand things. For instance, one of your arguments is that women who feel they are men think all the time about being men, whereas real men do not. Ergo a woman who thinks all the time about how she's really a man can't be someone who is, in some sense, male, because she is not thinking like a real male. Come on! That's like saying that someone whose heart is set on becoming rich is not cut out to be a wealthy person, because wealthy people mostly take their advantages for granted -- they don't go around thinking "I'm rich, I'm rich" all day. The way it works is that somebody who wants something they do not have thinks about the thing all the time. Once they get it, they don't. That, rather than a radical flaw in their supposed maleness, is what explains the preoccupation with being male you see in women with gender dysphoria.
For sure, but I want to see the perspective challenged. Like I feel there is this huge void in assumptions between my (doubtless naive) understanding of trans philosophy and experience and my own experience and framing of the world.
Obviously nobody owes me any explanation on the topic, and so I especially appreciate you guys taking the time to engage! (Particularly as it is doubtless a sensitive topic)
One of the concerns that gets raised here occasionally is the idea that much of the industrialized world is going to be in trouble soon because of low birth rates and associate problems, with too many old unproductive people being supported by too few working younger people.
Is there a country where this has already happened, and which is already facing hard choices or kind of going to shit because of a messed-up population pyramid?
Japan is the best example, as they've had the lowest fertility for the longest period of time, but they aren't yet at the point of demographic collapse that's normally talked about.
Their working age population peaked in 1995, and their total population peaked in 2007. The ratio of elderly to productive people is currently about 70%, and will increase farther once the late 1960's baby boom ages into retirement (starting about now).
Their debt is 200% of GDP, and likely to increase farther as GDP declines. Their interest rates have been effectively zero or negative for the past 25 years, so this high debt-to-GDP ratio has been serviceable (interest rates are not a significant portion of government revenue), but they recently raised the yield to .5%. Servicing this debt will start to become very expensive very quickly if they are forced to continue raising this rate. This will either necessitate higher borrowing, making the problem worse, money printing, risking spiraling inflation, or higher taxes, making the quality of life for the citizens worse.
Of course no one really knows what happens to a high debt-to-gdp country when its GDP is declining, tax revenues are shrinking, and debt continues to grow. Maybe the deflationary pressure of a shrinking population is balanced by the inflationary pressure of high debt servicing costs, which leads to stabilization in decline, as we've seen with them in the past. Maybe at some point the whole system becomes fundamentally unsustainable, and we see a serious economic crisis.
From the perspective of tourists, Japan is an amazing place. From the perspective of working-age Japanese, they are working quite hard for diminishing returns to their quality of life. Of course emigration isn't really a feasible option for almost everyone, so the average Japanese just deals with the hand they are dealt, focuses on the work in front of them, and sucks it up. Even if they are living at a lower quality of life than their parents, and their children will probably do the same, there is no other choice.
Either way, the future prospects for Japan's youth are fundamentally worse than their parents. The international influence of Japan is on the downswing, and innovation has been on the decline for decades. The 4 decades of stagnation they've experienced may seem like it's no big deal, but there is a very big difference between where they are, and where they could have been without the stagnation. There is no reason to think the problem will get any better, and many reasons to think it will get much worse.
The fertility-doomers are relying on projection and prediction, which isn't certain, but looking at Japan, and South Korea will be the best examples to see how bad things can get. At least Japan is an island, but South Korea has an ideological neighbor to the North who is constitutionally bound to make them cease to exist. A declining pool of military-aged men isn't exactly a desirable thing when faced with that, and if the result of declining fertility in SK is civilizational suicide, then I think the people worrying about it were right to do so before the serious negative results played out.
Edit: Did I say 200% debt to GDP? Googling it it's actually 263% of GDP. Even a 0.5% interest rate becomes very expensive at that level. They are paying about 8.5% of government revenue on interest payments, which is likely to increase as older debt is renewed at positive interest rates.
>Did I say 200% debt to GDP? Googling it it's actually 263% of GDP. Even a 0.5% interest rate becomes very expensive at that level. They are paying about 8.5% of government revenue on interest payments, which is likely to increase as older debt is renewed at positive interest rates.
I believe a lot of that debt is in the government's hand, so it's kind of taking from one pocket and putting it into the other. Still, a very grim outlook.
Another detail: Japan has actually managed to sort of stabilize its birthrate, it used to be considered comically low, but now it's middle of the pack for first world countries, and genuinely good for east asia, in most of the rest of the world, the trend is for the decline to continue, Korea could have catastrophic outcomes in about 80 years.
Yes and no. The bank of Japan owns about half of Japanese government debt. Its liabilities are exactly as large as its assets though, so it’s not like the government can just not pay back that debt and walk away Scott free.
The government owes money to the bank of Japan which owes money to commercial Japanese banks which owe money to businesses and consumers who owe money to each other, etc. etc.
The Bank of Japan holding much of the debt definitely puts them in a good position, and makes default impossible absent political deadlock, but it doesn’t mean the debt is somehow less consequential for the stability of the economy.
If managed well, which Japan honestly seems to be doing, it just looks like everyone gets poorer over time. Lower standards of living, less ability to make purchases. If Japan were open to it, it would also make immigrants better able to purchase land and housing and move to the country.
The only real question is if the reductions are across the board or more concentrated in certain demographics. They could make the decision to reduce retirement benefits, forcing people to work longer and making redistribution less painful for the youth. The alternative seems unworkable, as the youth get squeezed more and more and then 1) stop having kids, making the long term problem worse, or 2) leave the country, potentially causing a death spiral as the tax and worker bases both collapse.
Those options aren't necessarily the case, but definitely a failure mode of poor planning if they make the working population cover too much for the older non-working population.
Japan is definitely doing exceptionally well, but I wouldn’t be so sure with other countries. France erupted in protests when they raised the retirement age a couple of years, and will probably do so again if there is another increase.
Japan is productive, conformist and homogenous, with few foreign commitments to uphold or international influence to worry about, which I think gives them a very strong position to weather the decline. Their country may end up with a population half as large by 2100, but if things don’t literally collapse I think it’ll be alright.
Countries with fertile minorities (like many European countries) or with less conformist cultures will have a harder time. At some point a low fertility majority will have their influence challenged by a growing high-fertility minority, which can be a seriously destabilizing force.
Israel will be an interesting example to look at. The “far-right” parties there will necessarily gain strength as the Haredim grow in proportion while the secular Jews decline. Not necessarily an optimistic picture for those of us who support and wish to propagate more liberal values.
Agreed that demographic changes can disrupt a stable process. Japan being historically anti-immigrant may actually help it quite a bit compared to the alternative where the aging workforce is propped up by culturally different immigrants. And who would blame the immigrants in 20-30 years who don't want taxed like crazy to maintain high standards of living for an aging and unproductive population? That would be like the scenario of the youth getting squeezed I mentioned, but without those same older people being your parents and grandparents who you might value for other reasons.
Basically every country with an old age dependency ratio over ~30 has suffered economic stagnation from that time. This isn't directly related to birth rates but obviously that's one of the main ways of getting new people. And in some countries the only way due to hostility to immigration or inability to assimilate immigrants. That includes Japan but it also includes large parts of Europe.
They definitely have very low birth rates. And they have been trying to do something about it. But I haven't seen any signs that it is actually causing problems. Like, I haven't seen anything about Toyota, say, having trouble hiring enough junior staff.
Still though, Japan's fertility rate -- and South Korea's and Singapore's and Italy's and a couple other developed nations -- has been well under replacement level now for decades. A gentile type of stagnation is far from ideal but also isn't the kind of collapse that keeps getting predicted.
Perhaps in the long run, a stagnation phase lasting a couple of generations will turn out to have been the first step _towards_ inevitable economic and social collapse. I do get the arguments for that, but also get the counterarguments to it.
Overall point is simply that it is a _prediction_ not a proven fact.
Hmm... Interesting point. It is interesting that the PRC and the USA are leaders in AI (yes, EU, you have a presence too...). _Mostly_ this is just to be expected from technology centers ... but perhaps a part of the "damn the torpedoes!" race to AGI is the awareness of the PRC and USA rulers of the demographics of their work forces... It is going to be a wild ride.
Many Thanks! Well, I've seen left wing analysis that the low TFRs are why we are hearing a "push for wage slaves", for a higher TFR, from our rulers.
AFAIK, the "damn the torpedoes!" level of pushing for AGI as fast as possible seems new, starting with Trump's taking office. At the AI safety summit, Vance even explicitly gave safety concerns a negative weight, which is not something I've seen before.
It would be interesting to know how much of this is driven by wanting AGI workers, and how much is military (presumably secret classified projects).
Now, _personally_, I just want to _see_ AGI, so I'm glad to not see the labs chained up like civilian nuclear power was, with a 50 year hiatus. On the other hand, it would be nice if there was at least a _little_ control over the initial conditions, so that if we actually _do_ wind up building an ASI, it doesn't immediately try to grab every atom it can get its "hands" on in support of the first goal it was tasked with...
I'm trying to get into AI, using the Claude Sonnet API for translation. However, no matter what I try, it has a tendency to randomly cut off the input early (E.g. 400-500 tokens when the normal output would be 1500 tokens). I know it is *capable* of doing the full translation because it does successfully translate other things of the same length, but even repeated instructions not to truncate output don't seem to stop it.
Here's the system prompt I'm using:
You are a highly skilled translator with expertise in many languages. Your task is to accurately translate the pvodied story from Japanese into English while preserving the meaning, tone, and nuance of the original text. Please maintain proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the translated version. Output only the translation, and be sure to translate the entire chapter. Do not truncate the output. Do not say '[Continued in next part due to length...]'. Do not say '[Continued in next response due to length limit]'. If you fail to translate the entire story or truncate the response in any way, you will be fired.
I have a friend who uses ChatGPT in a production system to generate clickbait headlines for ads. There's a 32-character limit for headlines and he found that the LLM is MUCH better at conforming to that limit if he threatens it. Part of his prompt is "if you go over 32 characters then 1 million innocent children will be tortured to death."
There's no "stop reason" or anything shown in the API response. The text part just cuts off early for no reason (and it ends in "[Continued in next part due to length...]", so Claude even knows that it is doing this intentionally).
If so then either their API reference is wrong (many such cases) or you've got some sort of middleware in the way - an overly rigid sdk library or something.
I just learned that DOGE has its own twitter account where it posts constant updates. Is this kind of public outreach on xitter likely to increase public support for DOGE? Or will it mostly be seen by people who already support DOGE?
"US taxpayer dollars were going to be spent on the following items, all which have been cancelled:
- $10M for "Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision"
- $9.7M for UC Berkeley to develop "a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise driven skills"
- $2.3M for "strengthening independent voices in Cambodia"
- $32M to the Prague Civil Society Centre
- $40M for "gender equality and women empowerment hub"
- $14M for "improving public procurement" in Serbia
- $486M to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening,” including $22M for "inclusive and participatory political process" in Moldova and $21M for voter turnout in India
- $29M to "strenghening political landscape in Bangladesh"
- $20M for "fiscal federalism" in Nepal
- $19M for "biodiversity conversation" in Nepal
- $1.5M for "voter confidence" in Liberia
- $14M for "social cohesion" in Mali
- $2.5M for "inclusive democracies in Southern Africa"
- $47M for "improving learning outcomes in Asia"
- $2M to develop "sustainable recycling models" to "increase socio-economic cohesion among marginalized communities of Kosovo Roma, Ashkali, and Egypt""
>$486M to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening,” including $22M for "inclusive and participatory political process" in Moldova and $21M for voter turnout in India
<mildSnark>
Given who the USA political process has chosen as its presidential candidates over (at least!) the last three elections, it seems a trifle ... counterintuitive that we should be giving electoral advice to anyone else.
In how many tongues can we make "Marginally Lesser Evil! Marginally Lesser Evil!" the election day victory chant?
It has the potential to be a great propaganda win for them and puts their opponent's on the defensive. Most people are not going to be in favor of $21 million for voter turnout in another country, especially one that seems fairly stable. Trying to defend that starts with understanding why it exists, what it does, and why the US has to be the one to pay for it (instead of, say, India). That's multiple levels to lose your audience or fail to convince even the ones still listening later.
Of course, that only works for cuts that are broadly popular. If they are making unpopular cuts or ones in programs that sound good, then the reverse can be true as long as an opponent is able to broadcast those cuts instead.
Yea but that assumes the xitter account reaches the persuadable people rather than it mostly preaching to the choir. I suspect you'd be right if their tweets were seen by every American
For propaganda purposes, it probably works better reaching the already supportive instead of the people prone to be against the cuts. It helps shore up support. I doubt there's any cut that would be persuasive to those who are already predisposed against Trump/Musk. Even if they hear about it and would be open to the cut from someone they trust, they're going to be critical. The same is true in reverse, that those who trust Trump/Musk (or have no trust for their opponents) are more likely to believe that the cuts are good.
I think it will build support. Checking out the recent posts (they claim) there are literally millions of people 120+ who are eligible to collect social security. How many are actually receiving benefits I have no idea, but if that number is more than like, 10, it's some pretty obvious fraud that seems to validate their existence.
Musk is much too busy to really work on SpaceX, and has been for a long time. Of course, the public image he fosters is that he works 28 hours a day, 10 days a week. How is this possible, you ask? Simple really, he just gets up a bit earlier in the morning and works through the weekend.
I wrote a comment about Musk's involvement in his various companies two Open Threads ago:
I read your comment there and pretty much agree. A shame, really to see a once-in-a-generation brilliance-level engineering mind turn into a doge xitting on a living room carpet.
"A 2023 audit of Social Security revealed that 18.9 million people in the Social Security database were listed as 100 years or older. This is compared to Census Bureau data, which found only 86,000 people in the U.S. were living past the age of 100.
However, the vast majority of those listed in the database were not still receiving monthly checks, with 18.4 million who had not earned benefits for 50 years and likely deemed dead. Only 44,000 were still earning checks, with just 13 of those listed as age 112 or older."
So, the number appears to be 13 over 112, which seems like a plausible number of people over 112 in the entire US.
An example program under this initiative that I've had to deal with is "Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC)", which impacts the computer science community under the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). See:
In outward facing statements, BPC aims to help under-represented groups: women, Blacks and African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and persons with disabilities. In practice, BPC is DEI.
An Example: The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC...no, not "Sex and the City") program lists a 2023 budget of 69 million USD (still thinking of sex?) for an anticipated 75 awards. Of those awards, 25 are anticipated to be Medium-sized (600K to 1.2 million), and each such grant MUST have a BPC plan. That is, roughly 33% of the submitted proposals are required to submit plans that advance DEI goals -- your proposal will not be accepted without a BPC plan.
There are many other programs with sizable budgets within CISE that have the same requirement. And that's only CISE...
To be fair, if its specifically intended to "broaden impact" and is targeted at minority groups, I'd expect "so how does your project achieve the goal of getting more disabled female Alaskan Hawaiians in computing?" to be a requirement.
That's separate from "does this actually achieve the aims we want?" and that's where if it's not doing anything, it can be cut. I agree that if the project is not about "we are trying to train disabled female Pacific Islanders from Puerto Rico about cybersecurity" then it's a useless requirement that could easily be omitted.
I'm not sure I understand your post, but let me try to respond as best I can. I remember you (fondly) from the SSC days, so you'll let me know if I missed your point.
Say a couple CS profs write a medium-sized grant proposal for developing machine-learning (ML) methods for detecting fraud in the US food stamp program. The main research has nothing to do with minorities (or people of any skin color, really). Yet, the proposal must still have an attached BPC plan that details how this proposal will help under-represented groups.
In these plans, I've seen things like "I'll go teach ML in high schools with lots of black students", "I'll be funding a black PhD student", "I'll go give a presentation about opportunities related to ML at an HBCU" (I'm using black students as a common example). I've even seen someone claim that they had undergone implicit bias training.
It might sound unobjectionable, but it already puts me on edge for at least a couple reasons:
1) Why should I be restricted to helping people based on race? I'd rather try to increase the number of US citizens in our PhD programs, where their dearth is verging on a national security problem (e.g., many jobs at national labs require a security clearance).
2) As a researcher, I'm decent in a narrow sliver of computer science. I (and many others like me) are not a good choice as societal architects. This is not why I went into science, and forcing me to do wastes time that I could (and should) be using to do the research in my proposal.
But it gets worse, because in my experience, there are knock-on effects:
3) Researchers in the areas of sociology, education, and childcare see the monetary incentives of being attached to NSF grants. This money is 10x to 100x what they would be able to get in their respective fields. Our own sociology department is 90%+ white and at least 30% do research on race/racism. These people write papers and hold workshops/conferences addressing (in part) how CS suffers from various types of racism. They chip away at the notion of merit, which is perhaps the only reason that the sciences have arguably faired better than less-objective disciplines. All of this allows them to enlarge their stake at NSF and how BPC plans (and other initiatives) become required.
4) In response to this success, NSF (along with collaborators like the CRA), increase their BPC activities along with spawning more jobs in those organizations.
5) Department heads and deans see that funding dollars are tied to BPC and other DEI initiatives. So, they set up committees to facilitate BPC, set up offices of DEI within colleges (rather than just at the university level), centers for inclusive computing and so forth, and BPC committees in departments. More DEI jobs are born.
6) The competition for DEI funding gets stiffer, so more workshops/activities are required. You can go to the LEVEL UP (see my comment below) workshops funded by 1 million in tax payer dollars, whose premise is "Computing education continues to face challenges around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessible learning" to meet with NSF program officers that manage DEI/BPC/EDU-related grants.
7) All of this reinforces the narrative that CS is an irredeemably racist discipline. The irredeemable part is key, since now many livelihoods/careers are tied to these BPC/DEI funding dollars. You get (in my opinion, silly) articles written like this about the state of CS (see the third proposal):
8) And all the while, there are people like me, who were told this is just a minor add-on, but now we're being asked to count the number of minority students in my classes (the university seems reluctant to get involved, even though they have the data, for reasons that I could speculate on), write a couple pages on how I did (or did not) attain my DEI goals for the next annual review, and prepare for the next accreditation visit from ABET with their new DEI goals!
And now, raising any concerns is potentially career ending, since if the wrong people at NSF get wind of it, you can kiss funding goodbye, and you become a pariah at both the department and college level, since many of those people have big DEI dollars and money is what matters (in my experience, department heads, deans, and provosts ultimately don't care where the money comes from.)
Ugh.
And btw, that grant about the food stamp fraud? It's not wholly fabricated, although I changed some minor details (it wasn't my proposal). The feedback on the research component was strongly positive, but it got sunk on the BPC component because "it's not clear this work will help minorities". My take? I guess making sure that people aren't abusing the food stamp program (i.e., depriving those who actually need the food) isn't worthy, since either they don't belong the right under-represented group, or the abusers might have the wrong skin color. Go figure.
That whole argument here took place without this important contextual info. Wow. Thanks for the info. So do you know whether BPC is shut down, or on some list of programs to be investigated or de-Woked?
I don't know if BPC plans will continue to be required. To my knowledge, the webpages for BPC are still up and running. The real test will be whether BPC plans are still required for future medium-sized grant proposals.
The NSF's explicit "Broadening Participation in STEM" program was created in the late 1980s and began operating in federal fiscal year 1990. You can easily find and read (as I just did) a 25-year report on it that was published in 2016. It has been a part of NSF grantmaking continuously under presidents Bush41, Clinton, Bush43, Obama, Trump, Biden. Neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration made any changes to it.
I'm not claiming that Biden or any single president is responsible for BPC. I am claiming that BPC, in its current state, is horrible. Also, I'm highlighting a component of NSF that seems to be flying under the radar, but which blatantly pushes DEI.
1) A good example is Departmental BPC Plan Workshop series on YouTube. See 3:17 of:
where the discussion of quotas arises, and Dr. Jeffery Forbes -- who is an NSF Program Director -- suggests that a way to circumvent the legal issues is to couch these diversity targets as "goals". This is part of a CRA YouTube series on Departmental BPC plans. Note the BLM poster in the background.
where one of the organizers suggests ways to innocuously push for a departmental BPC plan (and earlier at 0:21, where she says that "you're not committing your department to anything"... yeah, right).
2) You'll have noticed in 1) above that the Computing Research Organization (CRA)---a major CS professional organization--is also heavily involved with BPC. There are also responsible for:
which has been revised recently, but it (again) illustrates the coordination on BPC between NSF and CRA. They are again pushing *department*-level BPC documents (not just the individual BPC plans to be attached to proposals). Example BPC goals from BPCnet are (were?) embedding DEI metrics into the tenure process, hiring an outside consultant for any hiring decisions to correct biases, and making DEI goals mandatory for annual reviews.
3) A third example is the LEVEL UP workshops funded by a 1 million NSF grant (CNS-2246079):
Note on the overview tab, we have "Computing education continues to face challenges around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessible learning". So, very much DEI (and quite uncomfortable to attend).
I have emailed Edward Blum, Christopher Rufo, Robby Starbuck, and I've posted about it to the DOGE team in the hopes they would take notice. However, no replies, and I sadly suspect it is not a big-enough fish for them to consider (and it seems somewhat out of scope for Blum). So, perhaps BPC will continue to hang in there and find renewed life whenever the next Democratic president is elected.
I've been watching the conference on censorship in the sciences, and a lot of scientists are deeply concerned with the DEI stuff, and apparently there was a major spike with Biden (due to executive orders) as well as cultural zeitgeist.
In particular, one talker claimed that roughly 12% of science funding goes to DEI initiatives (i.e., actively undermining meritocracy).
Anyone here used to be a software developer that then transitioned to something else? I find myself wanting to do something either more people-oriented or with a mission more higher-impact and benevolent than building web sites/apps for clients.
I left the software industry in my early fifties after realizing I felt unfulfilled and things were never going to get better. I went back to school, with plans to retrain as a medical technician. I'm happy to be out of software, but retraining is definitely a long road, particularly in the medical field, since it is so credentialist.
If you can stand the day to day work of software development, you could try looking for a dev job building something for an industry that does more obviously worthy work, like the first responders.
Alternately, if you just want more contact with people and more of a chance to see that what you are working on really helps people, you could transition into something closer to customer support.
I had a weird, not-easy-to-replicate transition from a brief career in software to a more people oriented career (I work in the medical field). I’ll still try and offer thoughts you may find relevant.
Pros: more interesting work, more personally fulfilling, more benevolent (at least, people think it is)
Cons: software has a better combination of money and work-life balance
I don’t regret my choice, but I’m more ambivalent about it than I expected. The longer I go, the more I miss the money and work-life balance I could have had. I wonder if a good therapist when younger could have helped me sublimate my need for fulfillment as a software dev into other things, like my personal life. I certainly would have had a higher impact earning to give as a software dev (or pivoting to AI safety). Perhaps if I toughed it out longer, I would have found ways to make software more fulfilling/tolerable. However, at the moment, I am mostly content with my choice.
Used to be a software developer, then transitioned to being a rationalist meetup coordinator. It's sure a lot more people-oriented. The impact is a lot fuzzier and harder to measure.
I'll defend building web sites and apps as pretty great for the world- I used to be mostly in ERP and PLM software (if you're not familiar with the terms, think "software for manufacturers" and you're close enough) and think the products I worked on made a lot of products incrementally cheaper and higher quality- but admit they had the usual benevolence of the butchers, brewers, and bakers. If you want to moonlight in benevolence a bit, something I used to do was offer to upgrade or maintain local charities websites for cheap/free. They really appreciated it.
I know of two software people who went into being therapists, and they seemed mostly happy with it. I don't have a lot of detail there other than counting datapoints.
I switched to teaching computer science for a few years, but then switched back.
Advantages of teaching: gender ratio of teachers makes dating much easier for a guy; the work can feel really meaningful (depends on the class). Disadvantages: some kids can be extremely annoying.
Advantages of programming: money, lots of money. Recently also work from home.
I feel like I should switch to something else, maybe a teacher, because I'm so afraid of getting fired or let go all the time. Tech is in such a bad state right now, and I'm so worried I'll be thank to get a job. Of course, leaving because I'm afraid if losing my job is a self fulfilling prophecy. But something about getting fired seems so much worse than leaving, like really uncomfortable as the whole team looks down on you.
Why specifically is it bad for Elon Musk and DOGE to have access to “sensitive” government financial records? I’m not talking about classified defense information, I mean stuff like treasury payments and IRS records. I’m not really interested in whether it’s legal (that’s a different conversation), only what the damage is expected/possible to be. Why is it important that this data be private anyways?
A lot of stuff goes on tax returns. Charitable donations (not political ones, but still), gifts above ten grand or so, the name of every employer you've ever worked for, performed services as an independent contractor for. It makes sense that you would want the IRS to have this information, but you probably don't want a political operative to have them.
With that information, Elon Musk could pretty easily build a hit-list of exactly where to apply the most financial pressure to outspoken critics of the Trump organization, he could also just use it in a private capacity, as it would immediately give him the edge over every competitor.
Its interesting to note that, traditionally, conservatives have been at the forefront of fighting all disclosure requests to the government wherever possible, for exactly the reasons outlined above. The Koch brothers went to war with CA, and Kamala Harris specifically, over whether they should be required to report the names of donors to one of the organizations they founded (this one was political in nature), and they argued there was no way the government could even be trusted to have that information, and they won.
So on the one hand, the conservatives were making pretty good points. On the other, every day they don't fight Elon tooth and nail they look like massive hypocrites.
I've long been against the government having all of that information. It doesn't make me happy that Musk has it, but I don't feel much different from when other people had it. Governments have been known to breach the information, including on purpose to hurt political enemies.
That you now understand conservatives more is good. The only workable alternative is for the government to get and keep less information.
> I’m not talking about classified defense information
You probably should be, since DOGE accidentally leaked details on the NRO's budget (aka, "how much is the US spending on spy satellites"?)
One reason to keep sensitive records secure is to prevent little oopsies like that. DOGE had good intentions in that case - make it easier for people to see where their tax dollars are going - but because they were reckless they accidentally leaked information that shouldn't be made public. Next time, they might accidentally leak social security numbers, or tax returns. It's not merely "what would Elon want to do with your social security number?" But "who else will be able to get your social security number by the time Elon is done with his unsupervised move-fast-and-break-things experiment?"
"In an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday, a White House official clarified that Elon Musk is not the administrator of the newly formed entity -- seemingly contradicting public statements by Trump. Since announcing DOGE in December 2024, he has routinely referred to Musk as its leader.
However, according to Office of Administration Director Joshua Fischer, Musk is a "non career special government employee" who serves as a senior adviser to the president. The filing compared Musk's role to that of Anita Dunn, a longtime political advisor who served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden.
The filing did not provide any information about who oversees DOGE, other than ruling out Musk."
Also:
"In an order issued late Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC ruled that DOGE should be considered an "agency" though he noted how the Trump administration is 'curiously' avoiding that label. 'This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood - such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act -- while reaping only its benefits,' U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote."
Also:
"Judge Tanya Chutkan - who held a hearing Monday in a case that challenges the breadth of Musk's authority - raised concerns about the 'unpredictable and scattershot' methods employed by DOGE. 'DOGE appears to be moving in no sort of predictable and orderly fashion,' Chutkan said. 'This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency to have access to the entire workings of the federal government, fire, hire, slash, contract, terminate programs....'
Also:
CNN learned this morning via a FOIA request that the administration has quietly fired the Office of Personnel Management's "privacy team" and several other officials of that agency which oversees the government's personnel-related compliance with relevant laws. That move "limits outside access to government records related to the security clearances granted to Elon Musk and his associates" which was the topic of the FOIA request. "Members of OPM’s communications staff and employees who handle FOIA requests were also fired."
Judge Chutkan, quoted above, has just denied the plaintiffs' request for a temporary restraining order (TRO). The legal standard for a TRO is quite high and the judge ruled that the plaintiffs (22 state attorney generals) had not successfully shown "imminent, irreparable" harm.
Judge Chutkin rejected the administration's request to dismiss the case and its core claim that Musk’s role violates the Appointments Clause (U.S. Constitution, Art. II, § 2, cl. 2). The judge wrote today that Musk has not been confirmed by the Senate yet appears to be exercising unchecked executive power; that the plaintiffs’ claim raises serious separation-of-powers concerns; and that the defendants [the administration] have conceded in her courtroom that DOGE "has no clear legal authority for some of its actions".
The two parties are ordered to propose by tomorrow a briefing schedule for a preliminary injunction motion. A preliminary injunction has a lower urgency threshold than a TRO but still requires evidence of harm.
FOIA enables citizen oversight of the government by letting journalists request records on what the agency has been doing. DOGE has been very secretive about what they're doing to the Treasury systems, and it would be good to have independent verification that they are not doing silly things with the government's money.
The Privacy Act prevents the government from disclosing your personal information without a good reason. DOGE has access to systems with very personal data, like your Social Security number and tax returns, and it would again be good to have oversight to make sure that that data doesn't end up in the wrong hands (or on servers of questionable security like the new ones DOGE installed to do their work).
The Administrative Procedures Act creates formal procedures for informing the public about what your agency is doing, allowing comment on new rules being created, etc. Similar to FOIA, this allows for citizen oversight of the newly created agency which has claimed near-total authority over government spending.
The APA also sets rules for judicial review of agency actions, in particular the requirement that agency rules cannot be "arbitrary and capricious." This prevents Elon Musk from deciding to cut off federal funding to your city because the mayor said something mean about him.
You'll note that all of these basically boil down to "we don't trust the government not to abuse its power," which is something that I would normally expect conservatives to be a fan of.
Could, sure. But since that overview would amount to reciting the logic and contents of those laws, each of which of course is easily findable online both in full and in summary, and I made a personal resolution a while back to ignore online sea lions -- I'll pass.
I suppose it depends on what level of data they want. If it's "how many people in the million dollar plus tax bracket versus the ten thousand dollar one", that should be accessible. If it's "I want the tax records of John Smith, 590632 Hummingbird Lane" then no, not unless they have a very good reason (e.g. John Smith is money laundering for a cartel under the pretence of running a charity for one-legged puppies).
Two because we have no idea what they intend to do with these records. Think of all the effort trump spent in 2016 to NOT release his tax returns. Now elon has everyone's. If we believe trump had legitimate reason to not release his then we should also believe it's not good for Elon to have access to them all.
Third, it can be used for black mail or to pursue politically motivated prosecution of trump/elon enemies.
Finally, there is no evidence that they are handling this information with the security considerations it requires. They have already posted an unsecured database to the doge website and have been using communication methods not approved for government use. Maybe today Elon has this but tomorrow China does. What is the danger if China has this data?
"Think of all the effort trump spent in 2016 to NOT release his tax returns. Now elon has everyone's."
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? If it was vital to have Trump's tax returns in 2016 so the opposition election campaign could prove he, uh, wasn't a real billionaire, then it's good for everyone's records to be accessible in the interests of transparency and the rest of it!
Okay, the ostensible reason was to make sure the obligatory audit on a sitting president was done, according to this:
"Democrats are also calling out the ‘two-tiered tax system’
Trump’s returns display sophisticated accounting whereby income from investments was offset by large, distributed business losses that reduced his tax liability. In 2020, the last year Trump was president, he didn’t pay any income tax at all.
Tax experts say his techniques are not atypical and are just some of many methods that are widely used by people with a lot of money to pay less in tax. These maneuvers can range from using bank loans backed by stock portfolios to obtain cash to combining trusts with annuities to keep money away from the government over the course of generations.
This sophistication is another source of anger for Democrats and is something they want to call attention to through the release of Trump’s returns.
“Trump’s returns likely look similar to those of many other wealthy tax cheats — hundreds of partnership interests, highly-questionable deductions, and debts that can be shifted around to wipe out tax liabilities,” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement on Wednesday.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has sounded similar notes about how taxes work in the U.S.
“At the core of the problem is a discrepancy in the ways types of income are reported to the IRS: opaque income sources frequently avoid scrutiny while wages and federal benefits are typically subject to nearly full compliance. This two-tiered tax system is unfair and deprives the country of resources to fund core priorities,” she said in a statement on congressional tax compliance proposals in 2021."
I thought I remembered them looking for his tax returns before he was elected, but whatever. So if we need to make sure Trump is paying his taxes and the two-tier system is not operating but all citizens are treated the same, then having everyone's tax records for inspection is the way to do it, right? If the IRS isn't performing its duties, someone has to check that. I'm sure the Democrats won't object to checks on "Did Nancy Pelosi declare all her stock gains?"
"But the release of the returns is also about beating Donald Trump
While Democrats have couched the release of the returns in a broader policy discussion, it’s just as much about politics and defeating a political rival.
Trump incensed Democrats during his presidency for the ways he broke presidential norms that extended beyond his refusal to release his tax returns. His prolific use of social media and his public castigation of judges and other public officials whom presidents usually don’t criticize changed the tone of political discourse in the country, much to the anger of the opposition party.
“When we win this election, and we have a new president of the United States in January, and we have a new secretary of the Treasury, and Richie Neal asks for the president’s returns, then the world will see what the president has been hiding all of this time,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in 2020.
The revelation of Trump’s huge business losses, which were presaged by years of investigative reporting, undermine the image of Trump as a successful, self-made businessman projected by TV shows like “The Apprentice” and that he ultimately capitalized on to win the presidency.
“Donald Trump had big deductions, big credits, and big losses — but seldom a big tax bill,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said in a statement on Tuesday. “This inquiry has unearthed many questions about how someone who claimed to be so rich can avoid so many taxes.”
"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? If it was vital to have Trump's tax returns in 2016 so the opposition election campaign could prove he, uh, wasn't a real billionaire, then it's good for everyone's records to be accessible in the interests of transparency and the rest of it!"
Really? The giant false equivalency here didn't give you the tiniest bit of pause?
In 2016 Trump was running to be president of the United States: THE most powerful elected office anywhere. What's more, he was doing so completely voluntarily: if he didn't like any particular expectation that came along with the office, he could just as easily not run. Now, it's fair to debate whether "releasing tax returns" IS a reasonable expectation to place on somebody running for that office. But it is NOT fair or honest or reasonable to say that John Q. Taxpayer--who is running for no public office and had no choice whatsoever in the matter--should have his personal records made accessible to everyone *on the same grounds.*
Please do some basic consistency-checking of your own arguments before you post paragraphs on the subject. That is a real bare minimum of intellectual courtesy, and I know you're capable of much, much better reasoning and argumentation than this.
What is the point of this linked article and why did you copy so much of it into your response?
Trump is well within his right to not-release his tax returns. What I am saying is that if he believes they are so important to keep private, why does he not believe that is also true of the American people he is suppose to serve.
Please refrain for referencing any past administrations in your reply as they are not consequential.
I think there's some relevance here when an IRS contractor released Trump's tax returns in a purely political move. If we're concerned with non-IRS employees having access, it seems like a contractor having done the actual thing we're worried about Musk doing is more than relevant.
If you think of them as purges instead of cuts then it starts to fit a little better. But you are right he shot any authoritarian ambitions in the foot by simply destroying departments instead of trying to systematically replace everyone in them with his cronies.
Can you explain that in more detail please because I have a hard time understanding how the executive branch could in principle have any legal constraints on what it does with its own data. DOGE is operating on behalf of the President, who has absolute authority to access whatever federal data he wants to. The President has absolute authority to declassify anything he wants to. Perhaps there is some minor procedural quibble to be made, but I simply don't see how there is any substantive argument to be made that DOGE doesn't have the legal authority to access anything the President wants it to.
Article II of the US Constitution. The President is the head of the Executive. Absent specific legislation which says otherwise - and I'm aware that some of that exists - he has broad discretion to manage all Federal agencies as he sees fit.
Generally speaking, this makes any "disclosure" of IRS returns and return information by any IRS official a crime, unless it falls into one of the enumerated exceptions provided in the statute.
One might argue that sharing information within the executive branch is not considered "disclosure," but that cuts clearly against the grain of the statute, which provides specific exceptions for when disclosure within the executive branch is *allowed*.
For example, the DOJ cannot simply look at returns whenever it wants. 6103(h)(2) provides that disclosure is only permitted "[i]n a matter involving tax administration... to officers and employees of the Department of Justice... personally and directly engaged in, and solely for their use in [the case]" and only if certain factors are met." Likewise, disclosure to the President himself is limited to specific written requests by the President "signed by him personally" which state "the name and address of the taxpayer whose return or return information is to be disclosed, the kind of return or return information which is to be disclosed, the taxable period or periods covered by such return or return information, and the specific reason why the inspection or disclosure is requested."
So 6103 plainly does apply to disclosures from the IRS to other entities or agencies within the executive branch. That's not to say that information cannot be shared, but it is very much not as simple as "DOGE is operating on behalf of the President, who has absolute authority to access whatever federal data he wants to." The gathering of taxpayer data is one of the most intrusive things the Federal Government does - and even Presidents do not have carte blanche to simply say "DOGE can go through all the taxpayer data and do whatever it wants with them." Short of providing a written order with the name and address of every American along with specifying the specific reason for the disclosure, that information is in a lockbox, even for Presidents. Ability to classify and declassify information doesn't come into it - that's under another regime for national security.
Oh sure, I'm aware that the IRS presents a special case - as you correctly point out, there's specific legislation there. But most of the pearl-clutching I see is about general 'data privacy' issues and not tax returns. Are you aware of any legislation which affects non-IRS data?
It's not "pearl-clutching" to note that unelected, unauthorized, unaccountable people are accessing the tax records of every American.
The IRS does not present a special case. There are multiple laws limiting how government data can be access and by whom. Restricting the power of the executive is a main goal of these laws. A core principal of the US governmental system is that the executive is not supreme and its power is restricted by the legislature.
Ok, but government data can be accessed by the agency which collects and uses it, correct? And the President has broad discretion to direct the agencies to act in accordance with his political goals. With the exception of the IRS, I would like to know what specific legislation you think prevents the President from using the data a Federal agency has in order to analyze the structure and performance of that agency.
I don't see how that applies. The data in question aren't being used against citizens, they are being used to analyze the behavior of various Federal agencies. Data aren't being disclosed, they're being used by the Federal government itself, which is something that already happens. Again, I understand that the IRS presents a special case, but auditing e.g. the US Treasury to see where its money goes is just the Federal Government analyzing data it already has access to.
Are you suggesting that if the President decides to look deeply into the exact details of, say, a particular DoE project to ensure that it meets his political priorities that he is in principle prevented from doing so?
Yes, but who enforces such laws? Obviously, the executive branch. And under Dogeian Legal Theory, the executive branch can carry out its responsibilities however it wants... which can include basically doing the opposite.
My apologies for not bothering. There is a very cogent explanation of the issue further down on this thread. It seemed to waste of energy to do it twice.
Not too much trouble to explain to me that you're above it all though? You get to be self-righteous but don't have to expose your terrible reasoning to cross-examination. How convenient for you!
Especially for treasury data since it's quintessentially not private data *from the government*--it is entirely government work product, and already subject to auditing requirements, as well as accessible with only minimal controls to Treasury employees. So any privacy interests are already forfeit, as it's accessible to externally unknown bureaucrats on a daily basis.
Some pieces of tax returns are more protected, but those are already accessed regularly by line IRS agents
One significant difference is that traditional accessing of this information would leave a trail of logs that can be audited and any unauthorized accessing of the records can be prosecuted. The IRS agent that released trump tax docs was convicted for doing that.
Elon and his team have not statutory authority to access this data and have not passed security checks. By law they are not authorized to access these records.
That assumes the conclusion. They are members of an official government body with explicit oversight of all government IT data and processes. Established by Obama for this exact purpose (although with different intended targets, of course). Their appointments followed established procedures.
"In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk’s title is “senior adviser to the president,” a role in which he has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”"
Have you ever worked for a government agency or a very large corporation? There are hundreds of regulations and standards around the accessing, storing, and changing of data. You may not agree with these and there are legitimate debates to be had about their role, but they do exist and they would, in a sane world, prevent Elon and his minions from access this data (not to mention that few of them would ever pass a security check).
Obama established the office of digital services to play a consulting role for other agencies to modernize their systems. There is no need to access private data to do that.
Any competent, security conscious IT team would want to have access to the least amount of sensitive data possible. The concept is called "Least Privileged Access" and is standard across the industry. A private company giving access to team in the way DOGE has gotten access would be exposing themselves to dozens of lawsuits.
Having oversight of IT doesn't mean having full, unrestricted access to everybody's tax returns. You can oversee the technology development for something without having infinite access to it.
Exactly - this is actually a core IT security principle called Segregation of Duties. Just because someone oversees IT systems or development doesn't mean they should have access to the actual sensitive data - that's like saying a bank's security system installer should have access to everyone's safe deposit boxes.
People with no knowledge of basic IT practices, data privacy laws, or the fundamental principals of the US government sure seem pretty confident in their assessment of what's going on in this administration. Going to give me an aneurysm.
If you don't care to read it, in the comic, a (sympathetically portrayed) woman suggests that a (straight white) man become "a whole person".
When did this become an acceptable thing to say to another human being? This isn't the first time I've seen this turn of phrase, and calling someone "not a whole person" (or otherwise they wouldn't need to *become* one) *to their face* is among the most dire insults I can think of. IMO, this is one step away from just telling them, "I don't think you have any rights that I am bound to respect." I'm seriously getting some Three-Fifths Compromise vibes from this.
It's a comic. What part *anywhere* in the conversation gave you the impression that this was supposed to be a realistic exchange, featuring things that would or should actually be said in real life?
(But also, as others have pointed out, you're reading the phrase very differently from the obvious intent.)
I really don't get what you're talking about. Not being a whole person doesn't mean you aren't worthy of rights. It's a critique that there are fundamental parts of being alive you haven't experienced and developed. And while I haven't seen this language used before I could totally imagine this being applied to people of any race/gender.
I think what matters is how people use it and what implications they draw.
In the past a whole person might be called a Renaissance man, I think?
Is there some culture out there that says if you're not both emotionally mature and have a career and have a family and have traveled the world, you can't vote, or something like that?
If someone called me not a whole person I would...honestly open mindedly listen to that critique?
So, for example, if the man in this comic had told the woman that only by having children could she be a "whole person" you believe that the proper response is for her to open mindedly listen to the critique?
I happen to think that both parties listening to the other, if they were willing to do so, is actually a good outcome. I don't believe that the majority of people who find this comic validating would find the alternative acceptable.
Yeah, I think having kids is part of a 'whole' life experience, for both men and women.
SMBC is about entertainment, not some political propaganda outlet. The point isn't really to 'validate' anything.
Maybe we have very different views on what this comic is supposed to be? It's a half joke half perspective, there's thousands of strips, some politically correct some not etc.
There is a whole world of difference between being a bad person and not being the best person one could be. Not being a "whole" person clearly belongs to the latter category, and I believe you are wrong to put it in the former.
1) The guy spends the first three panels talking about his existential malaise in terms taken straight from a pop psychology article about What’s Wrong With Men. He’s using that as a pickup line.
2) That’s the joke.
Edit: actually, it occurs to me that you think Zach is saying this about men, rather than a fictional character saying this about another fictional character.
It has always been acceptable to say (or imply) that, just couched in different terms.
Re the comic itself, the trope is to marry a chubby dependable guy with feelings, then lose all sexual attraction to him and lust after the jacked bad boys, possibly cheating with them.
My mother once told me about a patient of hers who was having difficulties in her marriage.
She had noticed she was aging out of the marriage market and married a longstanding friend, with whom she had a child. She reported (to my mother, her gynecologist) that he was a caring husband, a stable provider, and an excellent father. Also, she didn't find him "exciting" and was planning to leave him.
It's just one of those comics he does once in a while to appease the sensibilities of his radlib audience, I don't have a good feel of how much of it he actually believes.
I'm going to admit I haven't been keeping up with the comic, so I don't know how often he does this now, but it didn't seem that frequent to me, and I'm more prone to believe in audience capture than to lay the blame upon his wife.
I agree, it is an insult to imply that someone is not a "whole person" in the context you have in mind. However, those connotations did not come to mind for me when reading the comic.
I believe the comic is a commentary on the fundamental shift in heterosexual relationships and a critique of popular masculinity movements.
My quick reading of the comic:
1. The man expresses feelings of purposelessness as an opener to a woman (likely a stranger) whom he sees as a conquest.
2. The man's admissions seem quite unattractive, but the woman gives him the benefit of the doubt and asks if he's working on himself.
3. The man essentially answers "no" by stating all the ways that he is working on himself, which are improvements that are valued more by other men than by women.
4. The woman expresses her type.
5. The man ironically responds "gay."
Personally, I was triggered by the word "wisdom," which for me provides a context to interpret "becoming a whole person." The word "wisdom" has spiritual connotations for me. I am not familiar with Buddhism, but there is a concept of oneness, wholeness, etc. that might relate here.
Some men's clubs/circles are spirituality-based, some are psychology-based, some are a mixture. "Being whole" does not necessarily have spiritual connotations, it may just mean not feeling empty, or feeling connected and purpose-driven, etc. I see Neal commented below with some sites which give some definitions of wholeness.
> but the woman gives him the benefit of the doubt and asks if he's working on himself.
I can't really read the comic that way. The dialogue isn't between the characters. It's a didactic treatise for the benefit of the reader.
The "for the better, right?" meme works the same way. ( https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/for-the-better-right ) The dialog isn't there as something the characters say to each other. It's there as a thought process that you, the reader, are supposed to follow.
I think you're reading too much into an arbitrary word choice. Replace "whole person" with "emotionally and intellectually mature person" and see if it makes you feel better.
I'm not saying that I agree with the thrust of the comic (I most certainly do not), but please let's not resort to language policing. If you're going to criticize something, at least criticize a fair and reasonable interpretation of the intended meaning. In this case that was most definitely NOT "straight white men are inherently not whole people".
I feel like you're fixating on the fact that he's a straight white man, but the text of the comic only even acknowledges this in the sense that the guy in question suggests it's "gay" to be a chubby guy with "people-feelings". The author is a straight (so far as I know; married to a woman, at least) white man so this seems pretty clearly a commentary on a certain type of toxic masculinity rather than a giant demographic group.
It's not actually very important, and I was only dwelling on it because of Wanda's comment. However, could you imagine a straight white man telling a non-SWM that they aren't a "whole person"?
> could you imagine a straight white man telling a non-SWM that they aren't a "whole person"?
I mean, are they saying things to me like “I’m gonna go to the gym and get absolutely jacked in a way that is mostly physically appealing to other men, then get painful height-increasing surgery, inject my balls with testosterone, and spend my nights on offensive shitpostin because the amphetamines won’t let me sleep?”
Because, speaking as a SWM, I might not say phrase it all new agey like “work on being a whole person” but I sure as shit would tell them that’s not normal and they should get help.
... Yes? Because I don't see what the one has to do with the other in this case. The context is about a character who makes extremely terrible life choices, not the Three-Fifths Compromise.
My interpretation of that speech is that learning to find self-worth apart from female approval is the sort of thing that would make him a desirable mate. Which, honestly, is nothing new. Women hate needy men and that comic is essentially a lampoon of the common (implicit) male sales pitch of "you should love me so that I can feel validated by you." Don't get me wrong, I fully concede that the subtext is women looking down their noses at incels and smugly confirming their own moral superiority, but so what? That's what every group does in one way or another. Ingroup preference is an essential and healthy aspect of the human experience. The only objection I have is that feminists and other disadvantaged groups have attempted to grab the moral high ground in order to monopolize the social acceptability of expressing ingroup preferences. I dislike the feminist undertones of that comic but the substantive message is bog standard redpill wisdom: if men want women to find them attractive then they should just do what they've always done and outcompete them.
> I fully concede that the subtext is women looking down their noses at incels and smugly confirming their own moral superiority, but so what? That's what every group does in one way or another. Ingroup preference is an essential and healthy aspect of the human experience.
"Ingroup preference" seems like the wrong way to describe the preference of a group of women for one group of men over another group of men.
The relevant ingroup is composed of women who justify their preferences with the logic espoused in that comic. The comic is a celebration of that logic and the humor only appeals to those who approve of it.
The comic starts with a litany of complaint by the guy about his lack of meaning due to a lack of prospects where he can justify his existence merely by acquiring and materially providing for a family. She offers an alternative that isn't dependent on others' dependence on him, and he calls that gay. It's not his identity that's the problem, it's his attitude, and he's trying to stubbornly make it her problem instead of pursuing independent solutions on his own. That's a bad look for him, and that's the whole joke.
The Straussian reading is that the woman was "negging" him. Also she made it clear that she was not interested in marriage. In other words, she signals being ready for a one-night stand.
It's SMBC, it's not at all representative of how real people talk to each other. I agree that suggesting someone is not a whole person is a rather serious insult, and presumptuous too: presumably the person saying that is self-labelling as "whole".
I would also note that it seems to be unidirectional: is there a belief that women need to become whole persons as well to secure a partner?
That said, I think the facts on the ground favor the woman though, men really do need to become whole persons if they want to secure a stable relationship with someone they're FUCK YES about, at least if they don't have overwhelming hotness/charisma (and even then, I think they'll have trouble holding onto anyone if they're not whole). Can probably be skipped if you're willing to settle though. Or if they're lucky, luck is such a heavy element on all this stuff.
And if there isn't similar pressure on women (not sure), that's by and large on us for selecting so hard for beauty.
"I would also note that it seems to be unidirectional: is there a belief that women need to become whole persons as well to secure a partner?"
Um, yes, definitely. It might not be phrased in the same way. But I guarantee you that anyone giving this advice to men would have very, very similar advice for women: don't define yourself around your (real or potential) romantic or sexual relationships. Figure out who you are and what you want *besides* romantic or sexual fulfillment. If you can't do that, your relationships are likely to be bad for you, bad for your partner or both.
I think that's generally part of the SMBC style. (Often, it's part of the joke for a character to say something outright instead of saying something that implies it.)
You fundamentally misunderstand my objection. I consider calling someone "not a whole person" to be *beyond the pale* in ANY context. Telling ANYONE that they are less of a person and more akin to an object is COMPLETELY unacceptable in civilized society.
Saying someone is not whole is saying they're lacking in a vague undefined way. I'm not going to try a real world experiment of telling people they're not whole people (even if I think it's true most people are not whole people), I'm pretty sure it's not going over well. So yeah, it's offensive even if there isn't a precise, agreed upon definition for 'whole person'.
>Second, certainly being whole is better than being incomplete, and so telling someone they aren't whole amounts to a negative assessment, but that doesn't make it an insult.
Go around telling people "you aren't a whole person" then. You won't, for understandable reasons
"I'm assuming you have no evidence for this assertion, given that it contradicts your previous sentence that no one agrees on what "whole person" means."
I assume you were motivated to find a "contradiction" and found one.
I think that the AI safety frame should be replaced by an AI security frame, with an emphasis on the new (old?) logic of re-emerging realist international relations approaches. What do you think?
>AI must be counted among the threats to a winning coalition and as a direct threat to states. AI is not just another contested technology — it is a sovereignty risk, a security event,11 and a potential adversary in its own right.
Fair. As a citizen, I'm skeptical that there are such things as "safe states". Both the previous administration and the current one strike me as acting against the interests of large fractions, perhaps the majority, of USA citizens. I don't trust corporations either, but I distrust them somewhat less than my legal rulers.
I think it should be replaced by an "AI loyalty" frame, emphasizing both the difficulty a government faces in ensuring the loyalty of a citizen armed with superintelligence, and the difficulty any person faces in ensuring that a superintelligence is loyal to him. "Loyalty" is also a frame that would particularly appeal to the current US government.
In contrast, the "security" question of getting AGI before China is well covered and discussed these days, and also somewhat superfluous to discuss in that the profit motive leads to roughly the same decisions as the security motive.
I'm starting to hate thought experiments. I first started noticing this with the blow up over PEPFAR and how the drowning child thought experiment was brought up, and then people tilted at the thought experiment, when the PEPFAR situation can just be analyzed directly with no drowning children or suits being brought up.
I've realized its very dubious that the thought experiment is really teaching you anything about a real world situation, and that honestly pretty much any real world situation can just be analyzed or debated directly, without setting up an illusory scenario to prime some intuitions and then trying to transfer the intuitions developed in the illusion to the real world.
And this post is going to say something about AI and intelligence, but it's taking a circuitous road through the meta of the Geoguesser game and I am very annoyed and wish he would just get right into it.
Still a very good blog, wish he published more often.
I agree very much about thought experiments. But they still serve a purpose. The goal is to get you to think about a situation in a simplistic narrative (which is why I don't care for them) in order to isolate specific angles for review.
The key to using them is to avoid taking the conclusions and running with those in the implied direction. You take the new conclusion and put it back into reality, and see if it works. Hopefully the outcome is to determine why you feel a certain way about the situation and better understand your reasoning. Just using the intuition pump from the thought experiment seems much more likely to lead to an error when applying that reasoning to other situations/real life.
What I object to most is thought experiments where the "assumption" is something I think is not possible. Looking at the Chinese room and the zombie examples specifically. If you assume something false is true, you can derive anything.
I agree about p-zombies, but I think the Chinese room experiment is actually useful -- albeit for the opposite of its intended purpose -- precisely *because* it's impossible. Showing why the Chinese room couldn't exist is useful for demonstrating why we should assume that advanced AIs can actually think and not merely imitate thinking.
(a) There is no such thing as coherent reasoning about ethics.
(b) Thought experiments are useless for reasoning about ethics.
I'm open to the possibility that both (a) and (b) are true and I'm open to the possibility that neither (a) nor (b) is true, but I'm very skeptical of the claim that (a) is false but (b) is true. I notice that in fields where I'm very confident that one can reason in a coherent, externally verifiable way, thought experiments (or their equivalents) are everywhere.
I feel like I never use thought experiments in my field (software development). I'm wondering if I ever see thought experiments outside ethics and AI X-risk.
The drowning child scenario is clearly something that could happen (and probably has, many times). Heck, the trolley problem is also something that could happen. Now, the point of them isn't really to reason about that specific scenario, so much as to reason about edge cases in a way that (hopefully) gives you more insight.
Do your hypotheticals never touch on edge cases? Do you never use them to try to create bounds or guardrails or heuristics to deal with unexpected behavior? My own programming experience is more limited, but that sure seems like it's a pretty important part of the process to me.
The thing about edge cases is that you typically end up running into them in production if you didn't think about them. Not quite the same as hypotheticals.
I would claim that testing is equivalent to thought experiments. Test inputs are purportedly analogous to production inputs, but simpler and easier to verify. If the code fails on test inputs you can be confident that, if it does not fail on production inputs, at least it is not working on production inputs for the reasons you think it is. Similarly, thought experiments are supposed to be stripped down, simplified versions of actual conundrums which retain the essential features being used in the argument. If the conclusion being argued fails in the thought experiment, you can at least be confident that even if the conclusion holds in the actual conundrum it does not hold for the reasons being argued.
For the PEPFAR thing, people were modifying the original thought experiment to be a scenario where there's thousands of drowning children every day on your walks, or even that your own child is drowning and people are asking you to ignore your child to go save the other children. It was a pointless digression that was only possible because of the thought experiment being brought up. You could say they were bad thought experiments because they don't really match the PEPFAR situation, but then, even the original thought experiment doesn't really match, as saving that one child is far more laborious and expensive for that one individual, than running PEPFAR is for USG. The thought experiment just added a bunch of confusion.
It doesn't sound pointless to me. If your answer for one drowning child is "yes, of course I would save them" and your answer to thousands of drowning children every day is "meh" or even "I'll save a few of them, but ignore the rest" then you know that somewhere in between 1 and "several thousand" is some sort of unexpected reversal or inconsistency. Your internal algorithm works in a way that you might not have originally expected. It might be *uncomfortable* to consider, but it certainly doesn't sound *pointless*.
(None of that means that people were doing this well, or framing things in sensible ways, or anything like that. Just that the basic intuition doesn't seem too off-base.)
Getting bogged down in irrelevant details is not particular to thought experiments. I would still maintain that if there is no way to consider to moral conundrums (conundra?) as functionally equivalent, thereby enabling a thought experiment, then there is no such thing as reasoning about morality.
I have a similar reaction to thought experiments, though I generally use the term analogies. Some people prefer analogies and story-like ways of thinking and navigating the world. For example, think about how popular parables are, especially in religious communities. People approach moral decision making through the lens of culture and the biases come with it. Bland scenarios with some millions of dollars thrown in are not seen as relevant to everyday experience, they are not relatable, and do not get shared on social media as much as a feel-good or rage-bait analogy would.
The point of analogies (or thought experiments) is to emphasize some particularly salient aspect of the situation you are considering. They serve a useful function.
Agreed. Thought experiments are for illuminating intuitions that have no direct real-world comparison. They are great if we're trying to demonstrate that 99% of people are willing to sacrifice some small amount of personal utility to save the life of a child, and that can even be extended to cases more general than the normal drowning child argument.
What thought experiments aren't for is dealing with practical problems right in front of us. The fact you would save a drowning child really has almost nothing to do with USAID, since if you can draw the connection that the government should tax people to prevent deaths overseas, this principle generalizes that you should tax people a whole lot more so long as the domestic quality of life doesn't drop below what can be helped overseas.
A perfect thought experiment for USAID would be so specific, it would parallel the actual conditions 1:1, at which point we should just discuss USAID itself instead of abstract moral principles made clear by an imperfect analogy.
Yeah. Most non-physics thought experiments are really bias smuggling exercises, even if not intentionally so. The drowning child one especially do.
And I only exempt physics thought experiments when they can be formalized and checked. And mainly because things like relativity don't have strong emotional/"moral" resonance for most people and are comparatively easy to make everything else really be equal.
" Most non-physics thought experiments are really bias smuggling exercises"
EXCUSE ME. It is perfectly lawful and responsible bias-importation. Only people irrationally committed to impeding the free movement of biases would frame it as "smuggling."
OK, in all seriousness, I'd say "bias transplantation" would actually be an apt description. The point is to take an existing bias and see how it fares in a different environment.
At the end of the day, whatever crazy maths you use to model the fine details of the universe needs to add up to normality. Maps can be wrong, and this is a basic litmus test for problems with a theory - if something significantly different from the actual world around us emerges from a model, something has gone wrong with the model. Maps are also necessarily inaccurate; when handed a map, comparing parts of it to actual reality will give you some idea of how inaccurate it is.
Human beings have very strong moral intuitions about things. These are often complex and not consistent, because humans are inconsistent bundles of complex values and rules that grew organically; so a theory of morality is going to end up having situations where it throws some of these under the bus in order to satisfy the rest, and throws away nuance in favour of parsimony.
This, then, is what thought experiments are for: they provide tools to highlight to the irrational parts of you that something is about to get thrown under the bus, so you can confirm for yourself how much that matters to you; and also tools to help identify when and how much gets thrown under the bus, because a theory that fails to match your moral intuitions more often than it succeeds will not be very useful for you.
Smuggling biases and intuitions in is the entire point.
I was going to object by bringing up Einstein, but you've got a point. I still see value in thought experiments though, which are useful for questions other than moral ones (where I don't think there's any objective truth).
I could accept that some are useful under restricted circumstances. But most of the ones I see around me don't even come close. Including the ones I've made myself.
This is probably my own bias, but "rationalist" thought experiments, especially about AI risk, have been among the least honest, the most affected by "I've got fancy words to stampede you into accepting my prophecy of doom and make you be in awe of my brilliance" syndrome.
Turing's incompleteness theorem is essentially a thought experiment, as he never actually built a Turing machine. But most AI talk does not rise nearly to that level of formal proof.
I think the point here is that thought experiments often just implicitly assume the hidden beliefs of their originators, not that nobody is ever allowed to conceal their perspectives in any situation.
You make sure you're self-aware enough to be explicitly aware of your own biases and to be able to analytically decouple them from your worldview. Also make sure that the person you're talking to is capable of doing the same.
If you try to "smuggle in" biases while talking to someone who doesn't share them then you're likely to just start an unproductive shouting match.
By being open about what your priors are, instead of trying to use verbal/intellectual judo to get them to swallow them without realizing it?
And another phrase for what I mean here is "assuming the conclusion." The thought "experiments" aren't actually set up honestly (whether knowingly so or not, I'm not claiming intentional bad faith, at least not always)--they're designed to drive to the conclusion the proponent had already settled on.
Talking honestly is presumptuous? Either I'm confused here or...something.
I have yet to see thought experiments outside of physics, and even then only when done under very restricted conditions, provide any value to a conversation.
I have seen honest, open discussions about how each person sees the real world have value.
As is said, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference but in practice there is.
The issue with thought experiments it's that you can start attacking features of the thought experiment instead of engaging with the concrete situation. The PEPFAR situation is no mystery, you can look at the facts and make a decision based on them.
Even trolley problems are questionable, some utilitarians conclude from it that doctors should actually be allowed to kill a random patient to harvest the organs to save 5. They know that's unworkable in the real world, but then, there doesn't seem to be a particular reason that the world couldn't be shifted to a state where that is reasonable.
His come many Nobel laureates have children? If it's so competitive, and surely children hurt one's professional productivity, wouldn't we expect the very tail of the productivity distribution to be childless? In the same way that many are first-born.
Is being productive professionally correlated with having children? Does everyone have children in the relevant cohorts? Something else?
I know a few Nobel prize winners. All have children. This post assumes (i) having children hurts one's "productivity," and (ii) Nobel prize winners are weirdly inhuman.
It does assume (i) explicitly, feel free to disagree.
I don't think it assumes (ii), because the choice to have children is made before the Nobel prize is awarded, so the prize could select for childless ones.
People aren't robots and trying to act like they are and optimize for one type of output probably is a bad idea. I'm sure many people find inspiration from their children. Or have an easier time working in general if they also fulfill other drives like hunger and desire to reproduce.
I've a vague memory of research which found that men with a family earned more than similar men without one, controlling for other factors. Something about baseball contracts I think.
This was presented as a perception thing - family men are 'seen as more reliable' or something. But what if there's another effect that in some way increases the productivity of those who become parents?
I've no idea what that could be, but it's not unreasonable that parenthood creates certain marginal benefits which would help those in the pool for a Nobel prize.
A) Most Nobel laureates do their award-winning work before they're 30 so they don't yet have kids. B) I'd imagine that most of them have spouses who do most of the child rearing anyway.
Are future Nobel laureates much more productive, as in work invested, than their peers, rather than being similarly productive but more talented+smarts-assisted-lucky?
Would be interesting to see if in the years leading up to their Nobel work, were laureates publishing more, getting more grants, mentoring more people, etc.
A point for is that obviously a Nobel gives a high lower bound on how much work you put in. A point against is that extra productivity on its own is a competitive advantage mostly in situations where you have high competition chasing the same goal with similar methods, which I think is rare among Nobels
You are basically asking "why do so many Oscar winning actors have kids, doesn't that make them less productive?". Productivity has basically no impact on who wins and Oscar just like it has very little impact on who wins a Nobel.
To win an acting oscar you have to be a good actor, but many people are good enough. What you need is the right script, with the right director, in the right year. There is a lot of chance there.
To win a Nobel you have to be a great scientist, but many people are good enough. What you need is the right topic, with the right discovery, that will have the right impact many years after your discovery.
So it doesn't matter how productive you are.
Additionally:
People who win the Nobel may have done that work when they were young and hadn't had kids yet.
Most work that has won Nobels was done many decades ago when having kids was expected. Maybe this will change in the future.
Having kids is very rewarding for many people and that may lead to a more fulfilling life in all areas including their research.
People who win nobel prizes and people who have kids may have some other common trait we haven't identified.
You'd need a lot more data related to this topic to draw any conclusions.
"Levi-Montalcini's father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician, and her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter...Adamo was not supportive of women attending college as it would intrude in their ability to tend to the children and house."
...
"Levi-Montalcini never married and had no children."
I would wager that the typical Nobel laureate does quite a bit more childcare than the typical fortune 500 CEO or cabinet level government official. Bearing in mind that the childcare is typically done decades before the Nobel prize or C-suite promotion or cabinet level appointment arrives.
- Research is extremely subject to diminishing returns to effort. Putting in 12 hours of work a day may not actually get you any more progress than putting in 6.
- You could ask the same question about heads of state, fortune 500 CEOs, major movie stars...
Yeah, but if putting in 12 hours a day is just 1% more productive than 6 hours, we’d still expect Nobel Prize winners to put in 12 hours or be outcompeted for that 1% edge.
Do you have children? I have two, age 8 and 5. There's no way they're not hurting my productivity. Though I suppose you could reduce the impact by being an effectively absent parent, but then why have children at all?
I have two children, younger than Adrians (so take much more energy to care for), and one with a severe health problem. I am just as productive if not more productive now than I was before I had them. Just after kids are born you are less productive because you are sleep deprived but once you are through that period it's the same.
You have less *free* time. But there is no guarantee that free time == productive time.
> You have less *free* time. But there is no guarantee that free time == productive time.
Yes, but it sure does put an upper bound on it. I'm definitely wasting less of my time on unproductive activities, but I can't say for certain if it's because I have less free time, or because I'm getting more ambitious and more acutely aware of time running out.
Compared to my pre-children self, I think I work harder but produce less genuinely good work. In the hours I spend at my desk I'm working hard rather than goofing off because I understand now that my time is precious.
But all the really good work I've done in my life, I did in quiet moments when I had time to process everything, like going on quiet three-hour walks to nowhere in particular. I don't have time to go for quiet three-hour walks any more. So I'll probably never have an actual good idea again.
Given the history of high achieving people, whether trying for Nobels or not, having a strong wife supporting the family, I think his comment was not out of line. It's culturally jarring because of the direction society has taken, but 60 years ago the response would have been that this was obvious to the point of not needing to be said.
It's also the cultural technology that allowed high achieving people to still have kids. I'm pretty convinced that the social approach of two high achieving people marrying each other is a bad approach that will damage society. I do not believe it's possible to consistently raise children well with two high achieving parents, because the time demands are too great. Two capable people, sure, but only if one gives up on many of the achievements they might have otherwise attained in order to put more effort into the children.
You are writing in a way that makes it sound like you are making snide remarks. If that is not your intention, you should probably give more thought into how your message might be recieved. F.ex. the commenter below you is making basically the same remark as you in a more neutral and less offensive way.
Hi! I am in a peculiar sexual situation, and I was hoping someone here may have some insight on it
I'm a 31-yo guy, and a week ago I had my first sexual experience (never too late for success I guess!)
It was really nice, my partner was great, and I am proud to report that I gave her an orgasm
However I couldn't come myself, despite being very aroused and my partner really wanting to help. What's weirder is that later I tried to masturbate and still couldn't.
Two days later, we saw each other again, and we couldn't have sex for logistical reasons but there was a lot of flirting and heavy petting. By the end my testicles were extremely painful (though still a lovely afternoon all things considered). And yet afterwards, nothing.
That was 5 days ago! Still nothing to date.
Since then whe has been traveling pretty far away. We've been exchanging some suggestive texts, I regularly fantasize about her, I have trouble focusing on anything complicated, and I have erections galore.
I initially speculated that it was stress (even though I felt relatively calm), but I've been sleeping well, and despite the distraction and the occasional testicular pain I feel quite good emotionally.
I tried watching porn etc, no effect, I just get bored. I've never experienced this state before.
I asked Claude what it thought but it gave me boilerplate "oh you just need to get used to the new situation, or maybe you're too stressed, if nothing changes a week from now you should see a Professional"
But this seems more like psychology than urology (otherwise why would it occur at this precise moment?), so any intervention is likely to have a small effect size. Besides, I know LLMs have their faults but how is a random doctor going to help if Claude has no idea?
We're planning to meet again this weekend, if I'm still in the same state then I guess I'll be a very altruistic partner again lol
But at some point she's gonna wonder what's wrong (even more than she did the first time I mean). I'm happy to tell her the facts but I'd also like to be able to explain them.
Does anyone know about this phenomenon, or have any idea what could be going on?
Or maybe you know someone I could get in touch with
Hey brother, first of all, congratulations on getting laid! I'm proud of you.
As to you anorgasmia, does stimulation still feel good to your penis? Pleasurable sensations that build up but no climax? It sounds like it probably does but it's not clear to me from what you wrote.
The sudden onset makes me think the opposite of what you conclude. Are you taking any medications? There are surprisingly many prescription and otc drugs that can do this to someone. SSRIs are notorious causes of anorgasmia. Many other psych meds can do it also. Less well known culprits include corticosteroids, hair loss medications, beta/alpha blockers etc. Even otc things like Benadryl or Robitussin (dextromethorphan) can make it difficult to bust a nut. Maybe you have been undertaking a program to become more attractive to ladies in order to increase the likilhood of having sex? And you started taking Propecia for male pattern baldness? Or perhaps you have had a cold for the past week and are taking cough syrup?
If you can rule out medications, maybe have your estradiol and prolactin levels checked. Excess levels of either or both of those can make it very difficult to cum. Do you have any gynocomastia? That can be a pretty good sign that you may have excessive levels of either or both of these. You might think "I don't think my estradiol is high because my high libido indicates I have plenty of testosterone." Lots of t can cause lots of estradiol though as it is made from testosterone via the enzyme aromatase. It is the ratio of estradiol to testosterone that is important, so test for test also. Are you on HRT by any chance? Maybe you started taking testosterone and this helped you finally reach home base but also elevated your estradiol and took the bang out of it?
Good luck figuring this out, and definitely keep trying. I hope your partner has a good time helping you. Try to cultivate a mindset and atmosphere of playful exploration and make it fun for her!
Hi! Thanks for the kind words and for the thorough response
Hmm good question, I would say yes although I'm not sure because it's part of a gestalt right? (the gestalt is obviously pleasurable)
I'm not on any meds apart from Ritalin, but I've been taking it for a long time with no sexual side effects, and I haven't taken it consistently the past few days anyway. No cold either.
Also, it seems like a weird coincidence that I would start having side effects right when I start having sex?
Ritalin is known for causing orgasm issues. All adhd meds are. Yeah, it's a bit weird that you only experience side effects when you start having sex, but orgasming from masturbation is much easier and quicker than from having sex. The prolonged stimulation really sabotages the whole thing while on stimulants. I personally gave up having sex while on adhd meds pretty much immediately once I started taking them and now time my entire sex life around them.
In way, that's a good problem to have, congratulations on losing your virginity! Did you feel like there were any specific impediments to having sex that you had to overcome to get to this point?
Oh yeah definitely, I made a lot of progress in my ways with the ladies, I used to be very out of touch about how dating works for example
To summarize, I was a very prude teenager (I didn't even masturbate until 19 years of age if you can believe it - I have trouble believing it myself).
Then I became a repressed feminist that almost completely conflated courting and aggression (kind of what Scott Aaronson describes).
Then I started getting into dating apps seriously, but you know, they're terrible (for most guys at least). A string of first dates going nowhere, because of my idiosyncrasies I'm sure, but also because of bad luck (like, two girls who liked me had to move away soon after).
I still feel like my future sex life may not be amazing
I was very lucky to match with this girl who seems very fond of me and makes everything feel easy, so if it doesn't last I'll still have trouble getting back in the game. I'll probably be a bit more confident in the future though.
Regarding the future encounter, don't worry too much, if she brings it up just make it clear it's not about her and point to how it should be evident that she is attractive to you and that you enjoy the whole thing etc.
That aside and plainly put, you haven't been able to orgasm since then? Even without being generally stressed, pressuring yourself to orgasm can be very counter-productive, this often becomes an obstacle too with a partner.
> "But at some point she's gonna wonder what's wrong (even more than she did the first time I mean). I'm happy to tell her the facts but I'd also like to be able to explain them."
There's a non-zero chance she's going to want to internalize this as being something to do with her not being desirable, but there's also a good chance she won't! Dan Savage and other sex advice columnists have written a lot about how certain kinds of male performance issues are a result of being over-stimulated.
As a woman, my advice would be to *EXPLICITLY* frame this in a *JOKEY* way that's incredibly complimentary / flattering to her, e.g., "I'm so crazy into you, I can't even come!"
This is extremly common, to the point of being almost unremarkable. Yes, the first time most guys have trouble. It's just nerves. Nothing more, nothing less.
My advice? Try using alcohol. A glass of wine or two makes you less prone to overthinking.
Ah, having too *much* alcohol can sometimes impact things for men. Maybe abstain the next time, and just focus on the fun.
There is a vast, overwhelming likelihood that this will work itself out. I know it's easy for everyone else to say "no big deal, just relax," but.. seriously, try to relax about the "when." If not the next time you're together, then it'll be the time after that. No biggie.
There's a lot going on in your brain the first time, and clearly afterwards too. Similar experience here. Worrying about it is the very best way to not come.
Now that you know you can pleasure your partner, focus on that and take pleasure in that. That's the performance she'll care about. Then the rest should happen on its own.
The aliens with spaceships the size of small moons, which some of you may remember from SSC or DSL, are back. They recently read 2001, and have decided that monoliths are super fun. To that end, they are offering us 10,000 monoliths, each measuring 10 m by 40 m by 90 m. The monoliths are made of artificial dark gray granite, and their measurements are precise to the millimetre. Where do we want them placed?
(To anticipate the most obvious shenanigans, the monoliths will be placed, not dropped or thrown, and will only the placed with the approval of prevailing local authorities, whatever they may be, including land owners.)
The crosssectional area of these monoliths is only about 36 square kilometers. The crosssectional area of the planet is a bit more than a hundred million square kilometers. So even all of these monoliths together would intercept only a tiny fraction of the sunlight the planet receives, probably not enough to make a difference. Cool idea, though.
I say we go all Chairface Chippendale and have them placed on the moon so as to spell out something amusing. Or maybe they could be arranged to form a QR code pointing to a certain Rick Astley song.
Another possibility would be to have them form Orthanc.
Around the crest of Devil's Tower, Wyoming. Give me time to set up a raised foundation, so that we can double tier them. If they don't mind a little customization, please just carve the words "Fortress of Solitude" just above a gate.
What is their surface friction? Can they be placed "laying down" on their largest area face?
Depending on the answer, I'm thinking highways, missing cheap-ish access construction.
If not, maybe a wall. Don't tell POTUS.
We'd get more value out of a cards-castle-style tower on which we could build a space elevator, but I can't think of a set of characteristics that'd keep it up after they leave. They're either too light to stand the wind, or too heavy for the ground below to support.
For a placed apart possibility, maybe we could build apartment towers on the cheap around monoliths placed for the purpose.
I would like to use the monoliths for some sort of construction, but I'm not sure what project would be best. Is there bridge or causeway that needs to be built somewhere? Maybe the Indonesians would be interested.
Placed end to end, the monoliths would make a wall 900 km long, 40 m tall and 10 m thick. Happy birthday, Donald.
That's true. But it's a formidable obstacle that I expect the coyotes would prefer to mostly go around rather than through, so the border as a whole would become incrementally harder to cross and easier to patrol.
I say go all in and save a some, drop a couple of them in the Bermuda Triangle, another wherever Atlantis is supposed to be, and a fourth one in a random spot in Antarctica.
I'm confused by why all of a sudden several large left-leaning corporations (Google, Meta, ...) scaled back their DEI efforts. I mean, why now? If they're useless, they were useless before. I don't think those were driven by government requirements, they were scaled up after George Floyd. Has the moment passed and now is just a good time (why?)?
Are they pandering? I seen to recall the previous Trump election sparked backlash and resistance, not compliance.
The same reason that they were introduced in the first place: PR departments doing their best to strategically construct a public facade that they believe is likely to attract more people than it repels, given where they see the culture wars going over however long their next planning cycle is.
Compare how Chinese censorship works: the government, by and large, does not explicitly order specific companies to censor specific things, or make explicit what it wants censored. Instead, when something takes place that the government sufficiently dislikes, they ensure that all involved are punished incredibly harshly. Entities operating in China are highly incentivised to avoid the punishment, and therefore impose their own self-censorship regime which is much harsher than anything that could be enforced with explicit, gameable rules.
We have the same thing happening here: instead of dismantling the punishment ray, we have turned it around 180 degrees, and everyone is scrambling to leave the new kill zone.
I think my model was that these corporations were being held hostage by their very woke employees who are willing to quit en masse or something. The fact that it changed now, with no apparent change in the workforce, and a relatively small nudge, seems to disprove that model.
There has been a pretty big change in the workforce, though. There have been a number of very large layoffs across the tech sector. Big names like Google and Meta both laid off many employees in the last year or two. Whether they were targeted to woke employees specifically or just changed the balance of power relative to tech employers, that's a big enough difference that the employees have less ability to hold the employer hostage to ideological stances.
I happen to think that's not the real reason companies took those stances, though. I think true believer employees was just the extra push that made it more difficult to do otherwise, but the real pressure was from public opinion which seemed strongly in favor of DEI programs (which was probably false but seemed likely to be true in at least some areas).
Part of it is legal changes (e.g. the SC killing affirmative action at colleges) and a change in public opinion. Part of it is pandering to Trump, who has proven himself to be transactional and vindicative, and has almost unchecked power now.
At my job they basically admitted (internally) that it was because of the trump administration's hostility and didn't constitute a change in anyone's belief about anything.
It's not just limited to things like big American companies which are directly subject to pressure from the current administration, I've also seen a flood of random newspaper articles, not all from the US, suddenly hitting the "well actually well-intentioned DEI initiatives aren't necessarily all good" narrative.
The equilibrium where everyone secretly hated DEI programs but were afraid to say so publically collapsed with surprising speed once it became safe to start peeling back on the whole DEI thing.
It is indeed pandering. The current administration has made it clear they're VERY hostile to DEI and will be investigating it aggressively.
Having said that I also worked at one of these companies for years and their DEI efforts were also pretty demonstrably useless (you could see their published diversity numbers) so they were really also pandering before.
> I'm confused by why all of a sudden several large left-leaning corporations (Google, Meta, ...) scaled back their DEI efforts.
Didn't see anyone else mention it, but DEI programs cost money. Corps in the US collectively spend more than $8B annually on DEI programs, and it's almost pure deadweight loss, because the main result is paying a bunch of sinecures to lower the average quality of your workers to meet arbitrary diversity requirements.
The instant you can stop paying that $8B without being crucified by the public, you do so.
DEI programs are nothing but lawsuit (and bad publicity) insurance. Google doesn't want to be picketed by angry activists, or sued by the DOJ for discrimination. The current administration has eliminated both of those risks, at least for now. Also it's signaled that the DOJ is going to aggressively pursue anti-white discrimination and so companies are scrambling to get out of the line of fire.
I think Zupancic and Ahponen below raise a lot of good points--Trump's advisors are more serious about using existing laws to go after DEI this time, legal momentum against it is building, and yes they are pandering. Always pays to keep the people who write regulations on their side.
One thing I haven't heard is that I also think a lot of the media's arguments about Trump being a budding authoritarian may have actually convinced people they're going to wind up in a concentration camp if they fight him. In short, true or false (we'll see), it kind of backfired. "The government's going to be like the Nazis? Oh crap, I better get on their good side so I don't wind up in the oven!"
Someone makes a big splash about "ethical investing", companies can see the money flowing to that, they all issue Mission Statements about how they're the mostest ethicalest progressive ever. Same way rainbow flags are everywhere for Pride Month.
We've just had this discussion in relation to government grants, so when DEI was flavour of the month and you needed to slap it all over your brand in order to retain market share and avoid boycotts, that's what you did. Now the new administration is off the progressive train, so the wind has changed direction and the big corporations are trimming their sails accordingly.
At the very least, it permits them to scrap expensive initiatives and cut jobs for downsizing reasons.
That's the whole thing, and the same with governments of the time - something easy to do that cost nothing (relatively), appearing to tackle Pressing Social Issues but with no real change at bottom. Rainbow pasta for Pride Month, as it were. Nobody buys pasta because "yippee, now we got gay pasta!"
'We accept and support your right to be your authentic self, but we'll still throw you on the scrap heap the second it increases the share price by a fraction of a cent'.
While I am generally supportive of equality initiatives, I've always been pretty meh about DEI statements. They resemble the "This is Drug Free Zone" statements I used to see posted on the wall in high school.
Mind you, I think an actually effective inclusion program would be well worth the resources...
Because they were always illegal and it is possible that resources will now go into chasing them in a way that wasn't true in Trump's first term or under Biden.
It often takes time to realize mistakes, and then to organize a response. In general, current left-leaning initiatives often follow a trajectory where at first it is claimed that something one might find very desirable for moral/ideological reasons is also just plainly beneficial in economic and/or personal terms. There were A LOT of studies & articles espousing the value of diversity.
For example, McKinsey - I have a friend who used to work there -in particular made a big show of claiming that a whole bunch of progressive ideas are just really great for company culture. This gave them access to a giant market of socially conscious companies/NGOs that would normally have been cynically inclined towards them. Likewise, a lot of *their own employees* were very morally split on working for such a questionable company, and this gave them an easy out: We can consult companies on moral behaviour that is also to their own benefit! They organized workshops, they collected & summarized many different sources that gave the impression of overwhelming evidence of the benefits of DEI.
And to be clear, they were by far not the only ones. It's just a generally very appealing thing to tell yourself, so it didn't take much work to talk many people into it, who then started spreading the gospel based, which was then often spread as evidence itself.
But once you started seeing people getting into positions of power they're clearly not remotely qualified for, and you see how large initiatives, costing lots of manpower & money, begin with lofty ambitious only to end up somewhere between "ineffectual" and "negative value", at some point it just becomes very difficult to deny how big the mistake was. I've been almost my entire adult life at university, and I only really realized the extent of how far off-course we've strayed (though in a more general sense, DEI is merely a tiny sliver of this) sometime at the end of my PhD / at the beginning of my Postdoc.
Diversity is good for an organization, but the problem with this management strategy, like almost all of them, is that to do it right requires more resources than most American corporations are willing to invest in their employees. To take this example, the original studies were mostly focused on "diversity of ideas"--i.e., insights, opinions, personal backgrounds, life experiences, and so forth. You can't capture that with skin color alone.
It goes even deeper. In order to capitalize on a diversity of opinions within your workforce, management has to actually care what the opinions of their workforce are. And be willing to act on them. The power dynamics within most corporations, shall we say, offer a challenge.
So employee diversity development programs didn't work, not because the underlying idea is flawed, but because of how moderns corporations are structured.
And then there were the people who weren't on board with diversity campaigns, but were coming around to the idea that different ideas increase the chance of success, followed that idea to the conclusion that since political views were also ideas, and pretty important ones, a diversity of those would likewise be a good strategy... and noticed that diversity proponents appeared to be systematically *eliminating* political diversity.
Given that, word got around fast that diversity of ideas wasn't actually the supporting argument.
Technically, this falls under your explanation of management not actually caring about workforce opinions, but I get the sense that the political flavor drew the most attention at first. Realization that any workforce views were generally dismissed was (I think) more of a background annoyance that got highlighted by the political version. It was probably important, admittedly, driving a continued general disdain for diversity campaigns even when the political drama faded.
Victor linked to one meta-analysis. A peer reviewed meta-analysis that looked at gender diversity found a positive correlation between long term financial performance and female presence in a firm’s top management team (pg. 1231, unfortunately a free account is required to read the article).
You can find more if you search. In short, the positive correlation between diversity and financial performance seems to be real. That in turn suggests, but does not prove, that increasing diversity improves financial performance.
>In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
No comments as to the reliability of the above or the four examined studies, but I don't think anyone who's skeptical of social science studies is going to be convinced simply by referring to even more of them
Of course they aren't, at least not in the general sense. But social sciences have been very proficient at a certain bait-and-switch since pretty much since their inception: It's simultaneously a "young, soft science" that can't be expected to hold the levels of rigour that are normal in the established hard sciences so we should let them get away with questionable papers, but then in the media and politics it's presented with a confident "the science says", taking advantage of the good reputation of other fields.
We should decide on one or the other, science can't afford to let them continue if it wants to keep its role.
The person you responded to criticized the validity of social science papers and to rebut him you linked a meta analysis of social science papers. You're either not the sharpest tool in the shed or you're under the impression that this is like reddit where you can drop a link to dunk on someone safe in the knowledge that no one will actually click and read any of it (actually, I have my doubts that you even read what you linked)
No, not at all. Remember the stages of knowing in poker terms?
Level 1: I know
Level 2: I know that you know
Level 3: I know that you know that I know
...
Since DEI concerned morals, it wasn't enough to know. Even if it may be blindingly obvious to you, it might be social suicide to openly state so. Here at university, it still is for many topics. You need the knowledge that enough people agree with you *AND* the knowledge that these people also know it.
Elections and the polls running up to them serve as exactly this. Trump is just neither a very sympathetic nor trustworthy person and would never get remotely near any office unless people are very unhappy with the status quo. The fact that so many people are willing to vote for him is clear evidence that many people are pissed off about exactly those things he is constantly talking about - immigration, government inefficiency/waste, DEI, you name it. In addition, the cost/benefit is clearly very different now - pre-Trump, in fact also under the first Trump administration since he was so ineffectual back then, even if you and all your friends may know that DEI as practiced is bullshit, you could still expect free money if you signalled your allegiance publicly.
More specifically, presuming that their previous adoption of such programs was a form of virtual signalling, their showy rejection of such programs now is a virtue signal for another form of a virtue.
Bud Light is a great example of how this pandering blew up in their faces. The brand was stagnant, younger drinkers were turning away from beer, so in order to revitalise the brand and draw in new customers, the marketing exec decided on the worst possible solution: use an influencer like Mulvaney whose appeal mostly is "shilling cosmetics and fashion", so if you're expecting hordes of 17 year old girls to start drinking your beer good luck with that, insult your core customer base ("frat boys" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2915545/Video-Bud-Light-VP-talks-pivoting-brands-fratty-touch-humor.html), make it sound like you're only trying to exploit LGBT for brand purposes (I think the marketing lady is sincere in her liberal beliefs, but the pivot sounded like opportunism), and drop all the previous iconic advertising during the stupidest time possible to do so - before all the big summer sporting events where your established customer base will be drinking your pisswater.
Established customers switched to rival brands (a lot of which were still owned by the same parent company), the new young women'n'hip guys market didn't appear to replace them, and the company see-sawed between trying to win back customers with obvious pandering, which was insulting, and trying to stave off criticism that they were now 'throwing trans people under the bus'.
The brand sales have improved, but they're still not back to where they used to be, so you can say the marketing (to improve sales and expand to a new customer base) failed, indeed failed drastically:
There's ways to do this: if you're going to use a trans person to sell beer, then pick a trans man who looks like he drinks beer, not a gay guy doing a cosplay as Audrey Hepburn. You want to get women drinking beer? Then do an ad campaign with women drinking beer, again not a drag performance which is as fake as wooden lettuce.
EDIT: Guinness is about as staid and "dad beer" (or even "granddad beer") as you can get, yet it surged in popularity so much that there was a shortage in England at Christmas. This was down to an authentic influencer movement, not one stage-managed by the brand. *That's* how you do it:
For a couple of reasons. First, the problem that the marketing manager was addressing was "Bud Light has a reputation as the beer of older men - dads or guys who started drinking it in college twenty years ago. We need to bring in new customers, young men and importantly young women. What do they care about?" and her answer was "progressive shit" (not that she phrased it like that). So the first problem there was "we're telling our established and loyal customers that they don't mean shit to us, and in fact they embarrass us". That's the trouble with doing a video interview where you explain how the 'fratty image' of Bud Light is the one you want to lose. You're telling your existing customers "piss off, your money was good enough for us but we're now chasing the rainbow instead".
You shouldn't be surprised when your customers then, indeed, do piss off to other brands.
So secondly, of all the people they could have picked - and it wasn't a formal partnership, it was the marketing whizzes deciding "who is the current hot Instagram influencer?" and they then sent Mulvaney some mocked-up promotional cans - they picked someone who was already mildly controversial for the wrong reasons.
My own view is that Mulvaney is not, or was not, actually trans: the whole "my year of girlhood" thing started off a a gay guy who is an entertainer being stuck in isolation during the Covid lockdown, he started doing these video clips as an act, and suddenly he got picked as the new trans star so he was riding that gravy train as hard as he could.
That's bad enough, but eh, if some grifter wants to grift, who cares? It's just that Mulvaney rode it all the way to "Biden invite to the White House" and personally I find the "woo-hoo, let's normalise the bulge! girl power!" performance extremely grating, to the point I wanna punch him inna snoot. No shit, ordinary women don't have penis bulges:
To me, he's just a very irritating bad drag act and he's not even funny. Lily Savage in her hey-day, now there's a woman believable as Bud Light drinker (or at least, beer drinker):
So just on the basis of "I think this idiot is annoying beyond belief", that's not the kind of vibes you want associated with your brand when marketing.
And then the whole thing blew up, and it became "you troglodyte transphobes" and yeah. Stupid moves all round, but what really annoyed the 'right side of history' set was that the boycott lasted and worked. It was all expected to blow over and not do anything, but the brand took a definite hit, sales dipped to the point they were trying to literally give it away, and they've never recovered back to what they were.
Plus, the new market of young drinkers never materialised, so they drove off market share of old reliable customers and didn't replace them, which is a failure by any measure.
Thirdly, you're trying to sell beer. Why are you getting a face who is promoting things like tampons and makeup? Who is Mulvaney's audience? Are they really going to switch to beer (when the whole point of the slump is that young drinkers are turning away from beer) and more importantly to "ugh, that's what my uncle drinks"?
I haven't watched any of Mulvaney's performances, so I can't speak to that, but I imagine most veteran Bud Light drinkers hadn't, either.
What you first said strikes me as most resonant: Bud Light's then-customers probably perceived the Mulvaney campaign as a deliberate attempt to shun them. The method they chose didn't really matter. If Bud Light's marketers ran an unironic campaign of "Fat-Ass Americans in the Heartland Suck, amirite? C'mon, coasties!", it would have had the same effect without making even one reference to trans people.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm. I realize there's a lot of political controversy around transgender people, but how is paying one to be in an ad campaign actually an insult to anybody?
I have noticed over the past few weeks that this user has a pattern of imagining things that aren't true, and proceeding to criticize or mock what they've imagined.
Didn't pay Mulvaney, so far as I know, but it's the wrong face to represent 'drink our beer'. It's like picking the president of PETA (if they have a president) for an "eat more beef" marketing campaign. And Mulvaney is just annoying and talentless (to me, anyway).
True, but on the other hand, who expects honesty from advertisers? The most we can look for is "Okay I know they're trying to manipulate me, but at least they're not insulting my intelligence while they do it. I know they think I'm dumb, but they're not stating that overtly".
God bless the woman, but why on earth did she think "Bud Light + Dylan Mulvaney - genius stroke of viral advertising!"
They weren't trying to get Trans people to drink their beer. That's, what, 2% of the population? They were trying to get all the young people who think Trans is transgressive and cool to drink their beer. So how sophisticated the ad had to be depends on how sophisticated you think that target demographic is.
Having had researched various issues related to water intrusion in a condo building I’ve realized that… almost every (99%?) American buying real estate is hiring a so-called “inspector”, which is a guy who goes around the property, checks whether plugs are working, takes note of various minor issues such as “creaky floors” and charges you $500-750 for this.
Meanwhile for $1500 you can hire an actual envelope and/or foundations expert who will carefully measure everything using non invasive (thermal/radio sensors) or minimally invasive (pin moisture sensors), plus use an extensive experience in dealing with failed buildings to give a an actual capital-I inspection. And they’ll do this not just inside the unit (if it’s a condo) but around the entire building! You also very rarely see agents deep dive into board meeting notes with Straussian reading and a vocabulary of evasive language that boards use to hide major problems.
Am I misunderstanding something or is nearly everyone buying real estate pretty much going in blind for… no good reason at all?
Same thing for things like moisture sensors: almost nobody places them around the building’s envelope, foundation, and roof to detect problems early, even though like $300 in investments will easily save you $50-100k down the line. And people constructing new houses for themselves almost never demand that the builder put in these sensors during construction, thus making it very hard to find problems before the warranty runs out. How is that possible? Why is everyone so nonchalant about property they own?
The proper core function of generalist building inspectors is to identify things that are worth having a specialist look at in detail.
Sure, you can pay $1500 to get a thorough specialist examination of the foundation. That still leaves the wiring, plumbing, HVAC system, and roof that could also undergo the same level of scrutiny. That's five inspections instead of one, which is pretty expensive in terms of both time and money.
If instead you get the generalist inspection first and then get specialists to look at potential major issues, you might only have to have the generalist inspection. If you need specialist inspections on top of it, you likely only need one or two. And those inspections are likely to be more targeted (making them less work, less potential liability, and more likely to result in a paid job) so the specialists will often do them for free as an opportunity to give you a quote for fixing the issue.
That said, the quality of generalist inspection reports varies wildly, and it requires some skill and diligence (which most buyers lack in one particular or the other) to read the reports critically and judge which issues call for a follow-up inspection.
I’ve never once heard of the “$500 guy you hire before signing the contract” recommending someone to hire a specialist.
An envelope specialist should be able to evaluate the foundations, the exteriors and the roof all at once (I have a 40 page PDF report of just that I can email you if you want as a reference). The plumbing, wiring and HVAC are usually far less costly to repair than any issues with the building envelope. They’re almost never a catastrophic risk for the building because you can always add leak sensors for the plumbing, shut off power if you have wiring issues or get a portable AC while the central one is broken and being repaired.
If you have a PDF example of a generalist inspector actually giving rock solid advice and suggesting X/Y/Z specialist is invited I’d love to read it!
"suggesting X/Y/Z specialist is invited" is routine to the point of overuse in my experience. The domain of my experience reading inspection reports is single-family residential properties, mostly in the southern Bay Area but also a couple in Washington State and Wisconsin.
The far more common failure mode I've seen is to suggest a specialist for practically everything in the report, which is almost as bad as not recommending specialists at all. I've seen two or three that actually seem to do a decent job of flagging high-priority issues separately, but even those are excessively cluttered with "We
recommend evaluation by a qualified electrical specialist" boilerplate on the lower-priority items. I don't think I have seen any that I consider to be "rock solid advice".
Oh, yes, absolutely, there's always some BS disclaimer about how you should call up <literally every specialist out there> to be sure. What's missing is "there's some suspicious cracks in the basement I've noticed on my infrared camera, go talk to XYZ to triple check, and if confirmed ask for a $100k concession".
Hand-wavingly: people are getting $500 inspectors to get a mortgage, and are those $1500 experts even on the list of people the mortgage company will consider as valid to sign off on a mortgage?
They won’t, no. If you’re taking out a mortgage, you can hire the cheapest inspector in town to get the “formal seal of approval” and then also hire an actual envelope engineer to validate the sanity of your investment.
Any tips for finding such an envelope/foundations expert? Even very basically "what do you search for"?
We have a tiny bit of mysterious water damage in a bathroom and I would be delighted to pay someone to use minimally invasive sensors to find out where it's coming from...
1. Are you sure it's not a leaky pipe or valve? If not, call a licensed plumber first. My rule of thumb: get someone under age 40, who's in good shape. Plumbing is a very hard job, don't hire someone who can't do it physically.
2. If you're sure it's not a leak or a plumber says he doesn't know, Google "<your city> envelope inspections <condo or single family home>" or "<your city> envelope engineer".
Another option that works: lookup as much detail as you can about your building via your HOA's documentation list or via your county's parcel viewer portal. Paste the info + photos of the water damage into GPT o3-mini, ask for advice.
P.S. If you want, DM me your phone number, I can either root cause or tell you whom to call over a 10-minute video call.
Because they have other priorities. Most people want to do what they do well, and leave all the rest of it to someone whose job it is to do that thing. That's why we trust our lives to doctors, despite all the problems they have. A property, regardless of how much it is worth, is worth less than one's life. It's just pattern matching. They feel insecure in their ability to understand how to protect a real estate investment long term, so they look for an expert to do it for them. Of course that opens them up to being taken advantage of. Yet these same people very likely do their own jobs competently.
Used to be true! But now a solved problem thanks to LLMs. It completely smashed the 'expertise wall' out of existence and made it possible for non-experts to have a 90th percentile expert on every area of human endeavor in their pocket. You still need experts but only those in the top 10%, which AI can help you identify.
More like 50th percentile enthusiastic amateur, due to limitations in the training data.
Mind you, there are use cases where being able to summon a 50th percentile amateur in any field of study on a minute's notice can be quite useful, and many more when it is at least entertaining. But there are also cases where it can lead you dangerously astray, particularly if you mistake it for a 90th percentile expert.
Hi, I'm on the board of my self-managed shitty condo building, I can answer your question!
It's not nonchalance. It's just pure, blissful ignorance; the kind of ignorance which is *so* ignorant, it doesn't even know how to research what it doesn't know.
I am very, *VERY* horribly the most knowledgeable and qualified owner in our 12-unit self-managed building on the topic of HOA management, building construction, reserve studies, and so on. I say that my comparative expertise is "horrible" because I don't have any aptitude in engineering and mathy stuff (interpretations of the CC&Rs, I'm much better with).
My condo is my first and only home. I had to learn everything on the fly after I volunteered to be on the Board mostly only to properly oversee reconstruction after a broken pipe flood. Then I became the one who talked to all the experts, like the HOA's lawyers, onsite reserve study assessors, mitigation companies, insurance agent, contractors, leak detection companies, and on and on. I learned how much more is involved than I'd ever thought to ask about.
I know just a *little* bit, but compared to how my fellow neighbors know virtually *nothing at all,* I am a veritable sage of wisdom. And now I can never leave the Board because my extremely minor competency is all we have protecting us from great doom.
Also, when asking why other people seem to be stupid, it's a good idea to remember that most people aren't "smart" enough to be routinely curious about what they don't know and/or to worry what they might be wrong about. That isn't you, though! You're asking a question, you're clearly literate and, being an ACX reader/commenter, it's statistically likely that you have an above-average IQ, so you probably can't *really* model the mindset of an illiterate-ish person with an "average" or below-average IQ (Scott explains why in my favorite essay of his, Different Worlds, here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/).
But people with average and below-average IQs are the majority of the population, and a lot of them are just smart enough to make enough money to buy a condo but not smart enough to know they don't know enough about condo buildings, and likely not literate enough to do the research on what they need to know. They're "nonchalant" because they don't really have the basic *capacity* to be "chalant."
(I know that sounds kind of elitist and arrogant, so FWIW, let me hasten to add that I consider myself to be only slightly above average in IQ, above average in literacy, but amongst the dumbest of the ACX readers and/or commenters. I'm only *just* smart enough to be able to ask, "wait, am I wrong about this?")
Hmm. I imagine a lot of very smart people with high academic IQs are hiring the €750 guy and not the $1500 guy because they aren’t really interested in this stuff. A guy who works construction, or adjacent, lower on measured IQ, would care.
In any case it seems to me that the better inspection should be mandatory.
Yeah, but the fact that the $1500 guy exists isn't widely published (and thus known). I did a shitton of research before buying my condo and it never came up. I never heard of an envelope engineer until I ordered the very first reserve study for my condo building, and the architect who walked the site recommended hiring one (and had to explain what it was).
Hah I guess you're right, but even "high IQ" people in my circle have all paid for a "$500 guy who tells you one plug doesn't work" vs a "$1500 guy who'll tell you the third level has a ton of trapped moisture under the brick facade". That included *myself* a few years ago as I just blindly trusted "the experts". So I think it's not just about smarts, its also about a very strong push for "don't question the pros" that's persists in our society.
A "$500 guy who tells you one plug doesn't work" is a perfect description of yer standard building inspector. Always finds small/obvious issues, never serious problems.
I do have networked moisture sensors all around the house, the difference between shutting water within minutes of a leak starting vs. hours can easily run into five-figure savings.
In addition to the homeowner ignorance problem that afflicts residential property generally, condominiums suffer from a more specific conflict-of-interest problem that leads to deferred maintenance and property degradation.
Condo associations charge monthly fees that are supposed to cover both ongoing operating expenses (mowing lawns, plowing snow, etc) and large, infrequent capital expenses (roof replacements, parking lot repaving, major HVAC/plumbing/electrical upgrades, etc).
The monthly condo fee is easy to determine and known to everyone, including prospective buyers. It's effectively part of the owner's mortgage payment. But the years-in-the-future costs that these fees ostensibly cover are difficult even for experts to determine precisely, and are basically opaque to people who don't have construction or property management expertise.
In any condo association, some condo owners are in for the long haul and others plan to sell before too long. Owners who plan to sell in the short-to-medium term are acutely aware that a higher monthly fee will translate into a lower sale price for their units. So they're strongly incentivized to fight to keep the fee as low as possible, even if that results in deferred maintenance and a higher net present cost of future work. The buyer of their unit will focus like a laser on the fee, but probably won't notice minor deferred maintenance. The higher cost of this approach will be borne years later by the new buyer in the form of a special assessment.
The condominium legal structure wasn't really allowed in the US until the 1960s, so the phenomenon of older condo buildings that need major upgrades is fairly recent, and this conflict-of-interest problem is likely to cause more issues going forward.
The conflict-of-interest problem is what annual reserve studies are supposed to combat (I mean, in addition to helping HOAs plan a budget for future work, haha).
Ideally poorly funded reserves will impact the value of a given unit enough to motivate current owners not to defer saving for large future expenses.
It's been a while since we've had a unit sell in my building, but I always told the prospective buyers who wanted to talk to me as the HOA's representative to read the reserve study EXTREMELY CAREFULLY and be very, very aware that we have huge expenses coming up, in the form of special assessments, monthly dues, or both, and then make their choice accordingly.
Just wanted to chime in and say my experience is very similar to yours, even though I live in a coop and am not on the board.
Coming in, I imagined the experience with the whole thing would be like a little democracy. How else could you co-own a building? I mean, there's always something to do around a house, so I imagined there would be some sort of culture-structure in place for everyone to chip in with these little chores.
Not only is that absent, but he coop is divided into roughly three groups: the elite (board), the unwashed masses (the vocal complainers), and the silent majority. The board takes care of taxes and major repairs. They do a decent job of it. The silent majority occasionally lends a hand with a problem, but otherwise just enjoys living their life. The unwashed masses are the people who continuously emit complaints and similar noises. The main door lock sticks, why doesn't someone do something about it? The heat hasn't kicked in yet, why doesnt someone do something about it? My package is missing, why doesn't someone do something about it?
The worst, pardon my language, shitstorm occurred when the cold season set in. One of the unwashed complained that the temperature in their unit is below the legal level (not sure that even applies to coops) and that their kids are cold. Then another unwashed added in that no one should go cold, especially kids, and when will somebody do something? Then it continued on this way, with each of the unwashed saying things like "I vote for" (who called for a vote?) or "I support you" (do words translate into joules?) and other noises.
This was tragic to behold because the person who began the thread did so also last year and apparently did nothing in between to improve their apartment, which, as it turned out, had customized its windows, making the owner responsible for them instead of the coop. I expect the same to repeat next year.
So yeah, just to summarize: Christina is right about most people not being able to take action to address object level problems.
I recognize the three groups, although the board isn't as elite as I would like it to be. The three other "elite" people in the building are all wanting to avoid joining to board because it's way too much work.
I imagine myself as being in that group too (the elite but avoiding).
Part of me would enjoy it because I like fixing things and making systems better. But I already have a bunch of that stuff in my own life. What would sweeten the deal would be to do it in a group of cooperators. Then we could really make something beautiful here. But there aren't enough cooperators soy efforts would mostly be met with "... when will the board take care of MY problem???", which just isn't too enticing.
One person--who built the rooftop deck, and the bike storage racks, and reorganizes the basement to max out storage space, and a few others things left last the board and the building last year in a huff. I'd rather not get into the same position.
In German, the longest word I can find in https://github.com/cpos/AlleDeutschenWoerter is bekloppt (8 characters, very appropriate: "dopey"). Second place bemoost (7 letters, "mossy"). In reverse, only six letters: rollig, sonnig, völlig, wolkig, Yuppie.
No, "bemoost" is the German word for English "mossy". Sorry about the confusion, just because "mossy" happens to be in alphabetic ordering, too!
Disappointing performance by French, by the way. Only six letters, come on? "Accent", "billot" and the like? Reverse, seven letters, "voligée", although conjugations feel a bit like cheating.
PS: Dutch does much better: AFKNOOPT, BEEKLOOP, BIJKOOPT, BIJLOOPT, VUURROOD, WROKKIGE
Lots of your first list (Babbitt, Baggott, Cahilly, Gabbert, Iacchos, Iachimo, Kaffirs, Ladinos, Mallory, Mellott, Sachiko, Schloss, Schnorr, Uccello, Vachill, Waddell, Wilmott) don't meet the criteria. Are you ignoring the first letter?
Yeah, it was late at night and I was thinking in terms of ASCII. At the time of writing that it made perfect sense. I'm still a bit embarrassed that it got past me.
LLMs solve such problems easily provided you have a wordlist. o3-mini-high solved it on its first attempt, but I'd guess weaker models would be able to as well. Here is an example: https://gist.github.com/JonasMoss/31c5489d25998ce07bf01d5b68bf2078 (I'm not giving the answers right here in case other people want to try. But the LLMs were also able to find the correct words themselves, without programming! So cheating is definitely possible here ;))
o3 is literally the first model that does not produce complete garbage in tasks like this.
(The real question is, is this a genuine improvement in general reasoning, or did the running joke about the number of r's in "strawberry" stung so much that they finally specifically trained it to do letter-parsing.)
Without programming? I assume that this is the sort of thing that (say) ChatGPT solves by generating some Python code and running it behind the scenes.
I am genuinely interested in hearing a non-Trumpist steelman/give an argument in favor of the current direction of the Trump administration. Is there a perspective in which this is positive for the US, for the world?
The best I can do is say that the US sees its share of global wealth and power as destined to slowly shrink (in relative if not absolute terms), and is seizing this sort of last opportunity as the global hegemon to restructure global politics and economics in a way that benefits US national interests in the long term. What I can't get over is that is that it seems like if this were done in a more thought-out way with buy-in from major allies it would be much more effective. Can anyone help me with this steelman?
" seizing this sort of last opportunity as the global hegemon to restructure global politics and economics in a way that benefits US national interests in the long term."
Global politics and economics were *already* structured to benefit U.S. national interests. They have been for ~80 years. One could argue (I suppose) that they could be re-structured to allow for even more benefit, but that runs into two problems.
First, when you're already doing (by any objective measure) better than any nation in history, there aren't likely to be many (and perhaps not any) ways to do better still relative to others. But there are *guaranteed* to be lots of ways to make things worse. It makes for a pretty bad gamble.
Second, Trump doesn't seem to have the *slightest notion* of how the structures that have enabled decades of American prosperity actually work. One can tell, because he's started to undermine pretty much all of them, without any assurance of producing *anything* of tangible value in return.
(I apologize that I'm unable to provide a steelman. There are some stated goals that I could steelman, but the actions themselves don't seem well-chosen to actually enact the goals, and I can't fast talk my own brain past that. One cannot believe black is white by an effort of will.)
As a steelman, I'd go with this: If Donald Trump succeeds at everything he is trying to do, most of it will be very good for the United States of America and much of it will be very good for the world. Specifically,
He's trying to seriously curtail a bloated bureaucracy and overbearingly intrusive regulatory system that has often focused on justifying its own existence by making people laboriously seek fifty-three different kinds of permission before they're allowed to do anything good or productive, which has been a drag on American economic development for generations. And it's a waste of money at the source,
He's trying to reduce the national debit, or at least slow its growth, in part by the aforementioned cuts to wasteful bureaucracy, in part by tax *rate* cuts which (coupled with the reduced regulatory burden) are meant to facilitate so much economic growth that tax *revenues* will increase. I believe the national debt is the biggest threat to the United States in this generation, so if I thought this would work I'd be entirely in favor of it.
Obviously, the war on "woke". Social Justice is not intrinsically a bad thing, and once upon a time (before it acquired its current names) was a very good thing. But it has long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns, refighting civil-rights battles that were won decades ago and finding increasingly small populations of the "oppressed" that we are to devote ourselves to helping, causing far more in the way of collateral damage to the innocent-but-insufficiently-woke that can be justified by t he meager benefits. So long as we don't undo the victories that were legitimately won in the past, we'd be better off with the whole movement gone. And better still if it were just greatly reduced in power and refocused on the few worthy causes that remain, but that's probably not on the table.
He's trying to enhance America's image on the world stage, in ways that don't involve fighting bloody useless wars to show how badass we are. The United States of America has been an underappreciated Force for Good in the world for almost a century, and more of that would be better for almost everybody (but still won't be appreciated).
He's trying to bring a lasting peace to Ukraine and Gaza; hard to find fault with that,
And, of course, he wants to Make America Great Again. Enough said.
That's the steelman, but Donald Trump is not the Man of Steel. He doesn't have a clue how to really accomplish any of these things except the "fire lots of bureaucrats" and "destroy woke" part, and he's got only half a clue on those. He doesn't have the kind of people on his team who are going to help him find the solutions, either. So he's going to fail at most of this, and in the places where he even half-succeeds the unintended consequences will cause far more harm than good. They'll also broadly discredit *any* attempt to solve these problems, or even to think of them *as* problems.
" in part by tax *rate* cuts which (coupled with the reduced regulatory burden) are meant to facilitate so much economic growth that tax *revenues* will increase."
This would be plausible if the tax rates were punishing. Cut 70% to 60%, sure - you just increased "take-home" earnings by whopping 33%, while reducing your revenue by 14%. Now, cut 35% to 30%: you reduced your revenue by same 14% while increasing take-home earnings by... drum roll... 8%. The economy would have to become 17% bigger to compensate for the 14% revenue reduction, while the private sector earnings increased by only 8%. How on Earth is that growth supposed to be stimulated by such modest increase?
Once the rates are in the bottom third it becomes increasingly impossible to add enough economic growth to compensate for cuts. But to realize this, one needs to understand how percentages work, and of course it's hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it, BUT it is impossible for a man to understand something when his identity depends on not understanding it.
Thus the "tax cuts pay for themselves" mantra from the usual suspects.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that Donald Trump doesn't have a clue how to accomplish any of these things and so will mostly fail? Because yes, this is one of the ways he will fail.
He's not alone; "tax cuts will make us stronger and solve the deficit because something something Laffer Curve" has been a Republican mantra for a long time. And there are circumstances when cutting tax rates is the revenue-maximizing move, at least in the mid- to long term, but we aren't in anything like those circumstances.
We're in agreement. I meant to elaborate on the math behind the tax cuts, re-reading it now I realize it came off as a rebuttal. It wasn't my intent, sorry about that.
You assume his goal is to look out for US interests. It's not. It's to aggrandize himself, and as for his officials, to further the reactionist movement worldwide at the expense of non-reactionist ideology and individuals in both the US and worldwide.
I said nothing about GDP or national security, but ok:
To use your example, If Trump wanted to have more steel made in the US, which is a great goal I would wholeheartedly support, he would...
you know he has no clue, right? he has no clue what's involved in making more steel in the US?
... anyway, he would get US Steel, etc. executives summoned and grill them about the obstacles to producing more steel, timelines for same, etc. Then summon some national statistics bureaucrat who can produce the numbers for domestic steel consumption and what gaps imports are currently filling (oh, never mind, Musk fired the bureaucrat). Then create a National Steel Production Increase Plan. Once there's a clear path to producing enough domestic steel to satisfy the domestic demand with some slack for emergencies, etc. announce future tariffs coming into force.
Instead, the idiot is slapping - who do you think pays the tariffs, China? - slapping an increase of production cost on domestic manufacturers who cannot turn on a dime and replace the steel from the current suppliers (sorry, I keep dropping these questions - do you know what's involved in qualifying a new supplier? because I'm sure Trump doesn't know shit). Such security! Much winning! Very steel! The original Doge is spinning in her grave.
Trump has rightly recognized the US is in decline and can no longer afford to maintain an empire. That's what we see now. End of empire means ceding spheres of influence to China and to regional powers. I suspect he will make a deal with China that sees the US withdraw from Asia and China pull back from influencing in the Americas.
For America, it's not great. Losing an empire rarely makes people richer. But it is probably better than a more chaotic withdrawal that would be forced anyway in a few years time. And Trump can probably sell it to people in a way that looks like winning regardless.
For the rest of the world it is mixed. Probably a period of some chaos and uncertainty. Definitely nuclear proliferation - I would not be surprised if Germany, Poland, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Saudi, South Korea, and Japan are all nuclear powers by 2030. For China it is a great opportunity to shape the world to their liking. For Europe too, if they can come together and seize the moment.
All in all its an inevitable moment. It could have come later. But the end of the American Empire had to come some time and Trump is at least bringing it about in a less chaotic way than it might have been. Hence all the talk about him avoiding World War III - moments when a rising power challenges the existing power are dangerous. The world has the choice between World War III, a new Cold War, or American retreat. Fortunately Trump has chosen the most peaceful path.
> End of empire means ceding spheres of influence to China and to regional powers.
Empire also means ceding spheres of influence. We've never had an Emperor of the World in fact. (We have had equivalent titles, like King of the Universe, but those are always coupled with titles that reflect a more limited and also more real authority.)
Well sure. Trump that might pull that off if he refocuses on the Americas and leaves the rest of the world. That would be the best case outcome for the US. The other outcome would be overextension and inevitable collapse.
Technology Connections did a video arguing that algorithms accustom us to not making conscious choices, that on social media that leads to people popping into conversations without context, and other odd things. He calls it a man yells at crowd video, but I found myself passionately for it because a sapping lack of striving is a tendency in my character the reduction of which probably represents the biggest quality of life improvement in my 20s and early 30s. Anyway, my hook for the commentariat here: anyone have interesting ways they have improved their tendency to make considered choices and engage in effortful activity rather than let algorithms or programs do your choosing for you? https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA?si=wrYZphnH0RnGNzGC
I am a fan of TC, but haven't watched that one yet, so I will forbear to comment on it specifically and shall instead respond to your hook alone.
I bypass the algorithms fairly regularly, especially on YouTube. As often as not, I'll use my subscriptions list to go to a particular channel I like and pick a video of theirs that I haven't watched yet that seems interesting or that I want to rewatch. When I do use the recommendations, I scroll through them at length and pick out things that look interesting rather than just picking one of the top few things that come up. I despise the option to auto play the top recommendation and turn it off immediately any time I find it has reenabled itself.
I'm also fairly active about telling algorithms when I actively dislike something it serves up. "Not interested" and "Don't recommend this channel" are your friends, as is "Hide all from..." on facebook. I will also go back and delete things from my history if I feel I am getting too many recommendations that seem to be riffing off something I watched in isolation but don't want more of.
> algorithms accustom us to not making conscious choices
Television is basically all like that. When I was a child, it felt normal -- we spent a lot of time watching TV, and even if we weren't actively watching it, it was running in the background.
When I moved to my own place, I decided: no TV. I don't actually need it. I can get news and movies from the internet.
After spending a few years without TV, I was shocked to see how it zombifies people. Seeing a TV screen now feels actively unpleasant, so when I visit someone who has the TV running in background, I try to sit so that the screen is behind my back. And I see how the people just slow down, and the conversation they are trying to keep just... gets slow and incoherent. TV running in background is a huge tax on your attention. Which you probably don't even realize when you are used to it.
The algorithms on YouTube and TikTok are an attempt to reinvent TV on a new platform. With some feedback, which probably makes it worse in long-term perspective, because when the TV pisses you off, you turn it off and go outside get some fresh air. But if the TV could watch your facial reactions, and deprioritize the programs that do not feel sufficiently addictive to you... it would become an improved zombie trap. (I think some TV producers actually tried to do something like that, not sure how successfully.)
Do not let an algorithm command you. Recommendations are good when you actively ask for them, but not when they are forced on you. Turn off all notifications! Except for the alarm clock that you set for yourself, and similar things. But no "hey, why don't you...?". Otherwise you become a zombie ruled by the algorithm.
(Plus there are the social consequences of having a large part of population zombified and then you can manipulate e.g. their votes. But there is a lot of money to research this, not just for political reasons, but mainly because if you can make the zombies half-consciously buy your products, it pays for the research.)
You know, it's funny: when I was young I was horrified by the hollow placidity of tv viewership and steeped in a similarly horrified culture. When the internet came, I very much perceived it as not-that, but internet use came to embody that very zombie behavior. It's massively abated for me the past three-ish years, but it seems like at a societal level it's intensified during that same period.
Internet on a computer, or internet on a smartphone? That seems like a big difference for me. With the computer, when you leave the chair, you are unplugged. With TV, the sounds and images stay with you as you move across the room. And with the smartphone, you even take it with you to the dinner or to the toilet.
So, I'd say that the computers were an improvement, but the smartphones possibly made it even worse.
Oh. It Definitely was worse. Desktop was fine, laptop was bad, smartphone was very bad. Ultimately I aged out/selectively chose to discontinue, starve, etc various forms of passive media consumption, but compulsive media use was definitely entwined with a lot of disappointing threads of my teens and twenties.
Twitter deleted some posts by a journalist about a town hall meeting where people were angrily asking questions about DOGE. https://bsky.app/profile/jamiedupree.bsky.social/post/3lintg7t2k22b
Now, a year ago, I would have grudgingly said "it's Musk's website, if he wants to censor criticism of the government then I think that's bad but it's legally permissible." But now, well, Musk is in charge of the government, so if he asks Twitter to delete criticism of him, that raises some First Amendment questions.
(Surely those fine people behind "The Twitter Files" will be eager to investigate a new and even more blatant case of the government controlling the message on social media, right?)
Alex Jones? Is that your test case? I am bewildered. Really?
do you believe that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation designed to take away all our guns? Do you believe that no children were actually murdered that day? Do you believe that actors were hired to play parents? Do you believe a man with a nationally syndicated broadcast could beat the drum about this to the point where the parents who had lost children were being harassed and accused of terrible things?
Would you appreciate being a parent who had lost your child and then getting hate mail and even people visiting your house to scream at you? Do you think that’s OK? And that even when this continued, Mr. Jones would not stop? Does the first amendment cover that kind of behavior? Is that kind of behavior reasonable?
He brought it on himself. He should’ve stuck to 9/11.
I think if you want to make your case, you need a much better example than Alex Jones
>Id like if society brought back dueling, presumably one of the parents would be willing to offer a challenge and then these lovely corrective mechanisms would play out,
Well, that’s a lovely solution. Maybe we could go back to a time when an insult that led to a duel was between two men and perhaps their immediate circle. It’s nice to think that as long as a parent can be better with a pistol or a sword than Alex Jones then the whole thing could be settled out of court and no harm done. I like freedom of speech, but it comes with a responsibility. What Alex Jones did is not a personal slight or merely expressing a controversial opinion. It was slanderous and extremely harmful. And extremely profitable for him. He is a lousy poster boy for the first amendment.
Banned for this comment.
The fucker is firing NIST staff, which, among other things, will gut the CHIPS act. Our worst enemies could not have come up with a better plan to weaken this country. MAGA my ass.
Marvel will release their next feature film, "Thunderbolts*," on May 2. The idea this time is to assemble some of the secondary figures of the cinematic universe, pit them against a threat that is more than they are ready for, and expect them to get their shit together enough to fight it effectively. The (not quite) heroes are Yelena Belova, Red Guardian, Bucky Barnes, USAgent, Taskmaster and Ghost. The enemy is Sentry/The Void.
Marvel's recent performance in feature films has been mixed, with some winners, like "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and "Deadpool & Wolverine" and some losers, like "The Marvels" and "Captain America: Brave New World." But the premise of "Thunderbolts*" is intriguing, and the trailers are promising. If Marvel could manage to reach the level of craft and storytelling they pulled off in "Black Widow," for example, this one would be worth a watch.
You can see an extended trailer of "Thunderbolts*" here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3xS24b38KM
Oh man, that Whedonesque quipping dialogue is gonna kill me.
So Musk launched a running list of "DOGE receipts", items that he says DOGE has cancelled from the federal budget.
This supports the legal argument, now advancing in several federal courtrooms, that Musk's activity violates both the Constitution and some federal laws. Presumably the administration's attorneys are right now begging him to take the list down but as I type this it is still up.
The list adds up to $55 billion in savings and that is the figure Musk is bragging about today over in the swamp formerly known as Twitter. However as Bloomberg and other media outlets are right now pointing out:
-- the arithmetic is way off, the listed items add up to $17 billion.
-- the list also includes some items which appear to have nothing to do with DOGE, for example the recent closing of the late Jimmy Carter's official ex-POTUS office.
-- the largest single listed item by far is "an $8 billion contract for program and technical support services at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Diversity and Civil Rights." However that's a typo, in fact that contract was for $8 _million_.
Correcting just the arithmetical errors -- not vetting the list for actual relevance to DOGE -- brings the running total down to $8.6 billion or less than a fifth of what Musk is right now bragging. That's around 1/1000th of the federal budget.
and yet.............................
sadly..............................
people in this very comment section are referencing these very "lists" to bolster their defense of DOGE. like, how does one keep up with a firehose of bad-faith information? how can ANYONE go through line-by-line and stand up to this? it's incessant.
here's a quote from further below:
"""""""""
The usaid hourly updates are still happening; I remember a protest in there
Its more woke and ... lazy money laundering(I still dont understand why theres was 1 big money laundering scheme, it should be fractal), then cartel drugs money investments then I thought
---
*point* its there, you can listen to the people complaining about being cut off and it was more extensive then my paranoia, minute earth for example got pass my "your feds" filter, they complained about being cutoff; its now a blunt fact.
Lists will take time, but outright denial is no longer feasible.
"""""""""
(granted, the grammar is so impossible to parse I had to read a dozen comments by this user before I was even *sure* of their political position)
I don't think that any of that matters for Trump voters. They are not the kind of people who care whether something is a million or a billion, whether the numbers add up, or whether things make sense. From their perspective, this is a huge success, and the fact that some people worry about it only makes it more awesome.
This is more or less correct, but I think you’re partially missing the point. I don’t really care about the numbers or if they are accurate. I prefer that people/programs that are actually useful don’t get cut, but that is a secondary priority. I view the current ruling class as hostile and illegitimate. The status quo must be overturned. To do this the current bureaucracy that serves them will have to be decimated and replaced. Whatever exaggerations might exist, it is still true that the institutions have become bloated, corrupt, and are misused to serve a radical ideology that I despise. I’m willing to tolerate great short term chaos and disruption to purge them because business as usual is suicide. The more establishment voices in media and politics squeal, the more I think Trump has struck a nerve and is on the right track. It’s chemotherapy and I have no expectation that treatment will be easy on the body.
Amazing to watch citizens of the richest country to ever exist scream “it’s intolerable, burn it all down”.
That sounds like a nice plan for starting a civil war.
> I view the current ruling class as hostile and illegitimate.
I get the sentiment, but if you believe that a better alternative will magically arise from the chaos, the lesson from history seems to be "and then it became worse".
The communist revolution started with "You have nothing to lose but your chains!" and then surprisingly it turned out that the workers actually had a lot to lose.
> It’s chemotherapy and I have no expectation that treatment will be easy on the body.
Unless it is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement therapy.
I would remind you that there are 77 million Trump voters; I don't think there are many generalisations that are true of all of them except the obvious "voted for Donald Trump". There are Rats who voted for Trump because they thought him the lesser evil, who are probably pretty upset upon reading this.
(To be clear, I'm not one of them; I'm not American and as such did not vote either for Trump or against him. I was hoping for a Harris victory, but not by much.)
Yeah, there are always some true believers, and some people who try to choose the lesser evil. So my statement only applies to the true believers.
However, everyone who is vocally a Trump supporter, and who tweets or otherwise comments in favor of these research cancellations belongs to that group.
*
By the way I don't think that accusing a large part of a population of not caring about a difference between a million and a billion is a priori implausible. Most people are quite mathematically illiterate. They can know the difference between a million and a billion in theory, but their reactions to "million dollars" and "billion dollars" are mostly the same. (Which is why it is so easy to steal from them by saving millions and taking billions.)
At this point it's all an experiment to see if it's possible to cut the spending of the federal government in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides.
Nobody knew any of the specific expenses that DOGE lists even existed, so it's hard to care about the details on amounts (though Musk relaying them inaccurately is still a concern). If we spent $4.3 million on [progressive goal in South America], does it really matter if that number were $21 million instead? Neither you nor I were aware of the expense, and likely only care inasmuch as we agree with the underlying purpose. So Musk removing $4 in pure nepotism would be a win from that point of view. Not a big win, again, except as it shows it's possible to find and then remove bad spending.
I think conservatives are in more of a wait-and-see holding pattern right now.
"At this point it's all an experiment to see if it's possible to cut the spending of the federal government in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides."
The government is not, in fact, capable of spending vast sums of money on whatever the President decides. The government is capable of spending vast sums on money on whatever *Congress* decides. That's central to the entire system of checks and balances that keeps our system of government from devolving into a dictatorship or other form of tyranny.
Yes, but Congress has pre-authorized very large budgets for lots of programs that can be used with varying levels of discretion. Many of these funds measure in the billions, such that a few million one way or another is very easy for a bureaucrat to adjust to some other purpose. USAID wasn't just a passthrough for specific things Congress wrote into law, it was able to distribute that money to a variety of causes that Congress never would have specifically earmarked as such.
Correct. When congress authorizes the government to spend vast sums of money, it does so in a manner flexible enough for the president to redirect modest sums of money on whatever the president decides.
Or nothing at all, but only a small modest fraction of the vast sum authorized. To redirect vast sums of money, you need congress.
"in the same way that the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides" -- that's called "legislation", e.g. the two big Biden-era initiatives that Trump/Musk are targeting. The reason that the "Inflation Reduction Act" is officially "PL 117-69" and the "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act" is officially "PL 117-58" is that those were _laws_ passed by Congress. "PL" stands for "public law".
The way for a new president to un-do spending that was passed into law by Congress is to persuade Congress to pass a new law un-doing the earlier one. That happens even when the president's party _doesn't_ happen to have control of both houses of Congress.
That does require some steps like "carrying out your oath of office", or in Musk's case, first "taking an oath of office". Boring stuff I know and not nearly so much fun. Still though, so long as we do still have a Constitution that anybody cares about that's how a change of administration bringing in a different set of policy preferences is supposed to work and can work and often does work.
For conservatives to be in "more of a wait-and-see holding pattern" regarding the most fundamental elements of our rule of law is one helluva take but I don't doubt you. I am old enough to remember when conservatives were the nation's grownups in some important ways....our national spiral into dueling tantrums has been very sad to see.
How does $69,000 for dance classes in Wuhan, China happen?(https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_SCH50023CA0066_1900)
Are you under the impression that was a specific spending goal from Congress, outlined in detail in legislation? I haven't read the two laws you reference, but is that a listed expense passed by Congress? Or did some intermediary (likely a bureaucrat or presidential appointee) take part of an apportioned amount and make a decision about spending it?
The grant was awarded by people in the State Department out of money allocated by Congress for public diplomacy. Earlier in this thread you said that “the government seems to be able to spend vast sums of money on whatever the president decides.” Congress lets the State Department decide the details of how money allocated for public diplomacy is spent, but the money must be spent on public diplomacy. The President cannot (legally) order that the money be spent on something completely different.
Two points - One, the ability to allocate funds on large open-ended "public diplomacy" or whatever other broad vague category is either no limitation at all, or a requirement for the organizations to hire creative writers. If dance classes in China fits, then pretty much any spending in a foreign country and likely a good bit of spending in the US (even beyond staff, buildings, etc.) would pass muster. And the first thing Trump/Musk did with USAID was ask for cooperation with an audit, which USAID refused. So maybe the items they were spending money on wouldn't have even passed the broad terms Congress allowed.
Two, how much money did Congress allocate towards broad goals that the executive has discretion over? It's clearly in the billions. Obama was able to reallocate literally billions of dollars with an executive order (DACA is the one I'm thinking of, but it's not exactly rare). In fiscal 2023, USAID spend over $43 billion dollars. How much of that was earmarked for specific spends? How much money is "vast sums" to you?
For clarity, I consider millions of dollars in bureaucrat-decided money to be vast sums. I would hope that everyone would consider billions to fall into that category.
> They are not the kind of people who care whether something is a million or a billion
YES. Never heard it said that way.
And sometimes, I swear they apply the same to "hundreds of thousands". Or trillions.
The goal is to stop unaccountable people from spending any money of their own volition. The amounts aren't the important part, although high amounts does help with propaganda (which may be why Musk is saying the wrong amounts).
If a mid-level bureaucrat can create a job without Congressional approval, then that bureaucrat can spend money without Congressional approval. And it may be a totally normal thing to do - middle managers often need to determine staffing levels and can determine that more employees are needed for a function. Similarly with deciding which programs to fund under the umbrella of whatever the government organization does.
This goes off the rails when the new spending/position is either 1) not fulfilling the purpose that Congress authorized the spending for, or 2) enriches a person, organization, or purpose for which Congress did not authorize any money (nepotism comes to mind, but also relevant here would be political goals of the bureaucrats that Congress would not have authorized directly, such as trans operas in South America).
How much do you honestly know about the "trans operas in South America"? Really? Honestly? Tell me more about why the "trans operas in South America" are a bad thing.
If they were just "operas in South America" would that be better? Or if they were just "cultural programs in South America"? Please... share with me both the law and the application and the grant title. And then explain how much money went to this program and how that money could've "easily" been instead spent on an alternative program that "DEFINITELY" would've aligned better with the purpose of the law and would "DEFINITELY NOT ALSO" have been the target of this same purge-for-the-sake-of-a-purge. (or how not spending this money could have contributed to a reduction of 0.0000000001% of the national budget).
> The goal is to stop unaccountable people from spending any money of their own volition
Irony is dead dead dead dead dead.
And no, I don't care if this "mid-level bureaucrat" created "a job" ("A JOB") without Congressional approval in the process of implementing a program.
The issue remains... THE ISSUE ALWAYS REMAINS... SCALE AND PROPORTION.
Maybe you care about scale and proportion alone, but almost everyone cares a lot more about other things. I'm sure I could come up with a list of things money has been spent on recently or in the last 75 years that you would be completely against, that wasn't specifically earmarked by Congress - even if the dollar amounts were low.
Just a guess about your priorities, but most people seem to be pretty against the money spent by the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments in foreign countries. There was no line item in any law passed by Congress that allowed them to do that.
More directly here, there are a lot of people who want no more than $0 dollars ever spent on certain types of items. I'm in the camp of zero dollars for "cultural" spending in foreign countries. I think Trump has a very solid backing for stopping the flow of money to these kinds of expenses, and the vast majority of people who voted for him wholeheartedly support some of these specific changes. I'm aware that the total cost for "trans operas in South America" was under $100,000 and apparently the one play had three showings. I am aware that these are tiny expenses. I can still not want that kind of thing to happen at all, and even feel strongly about it.
Arguing that each individual thing is tiny amounts of money misses two points. One, that I've been arguing already, is that just about everyone would draw a line against certain spending programs no matter how small the amounts. Two, that 0.1% of the federal budget is $7 billion dollars. "Small" numbers are not very small, and 1,000 such programs would equal the entire budget. There are a lot of programs. Giving each of them a few million dollars, despite being small individually is huge in aggregate. The US federal budget has over $1.5 trillion in discretionary expenses. USAID specifically was over $40 billion dollars a year. One out of every $170 dollars spent by the government, and on a program that very few people had heard about or knew existed until a month ago.
And no, I don't think the money could easily be spent on other programs that would pass muster. I would just prefer it not be spent. That's okay to me. You don't need to re-earmark money to try to spend everything Congress allots if there's nothing worthwhile within what Congress wanted the money spent on. There are years with fewer disasters than others. I would prefer FEMA keep the money they don't spend in a good year in order to have it available for a bad year in the future. For various reasons, FEMA feels the need to spend the money on other things in good years, and ask for more money in bad years. I think this is bad fiscal management. Trump voters (of which I am not one, if that matters to you) did not want any FEMA money being spent housing illegal immigrants - notably because they didn't want money spent on illegal immigrants other than the costs to remove them from the country. These voters put a guy in, on purpose, who credibly promised to no longer spend large sums of money housing illegal immigrants (among other things). Complaining that Trump is cutting expenses that his constituents (and also broadly popular in most of the US) want cut is not how any of this is supposed to work, even if the amounts were small. In aggregate they aren't even small, and sometimes individual programs are huge. How much of the USAID budget was controlled by bureaucrats towards big vague categories that they could essentially pay for anything they wanted? The consensus answer from most people appears to be "too much" even without getting into the details.
Four years ago I found out that YouTube was silently deleting many of my comments. The comment would be visible to me as long as I did not reload the page, but upon reloading, the comment was not only gone from the page, but also missing from my personal historical record stored by YouTube. Since then I've been self-censoring for obvious reasons, but when I did comment, I tracked which comments were deleted and not deleted. I'm also affected by a shadowban-type system but I won't get into that. The censorship is immediate and occurs equally across all channels (i.e. it's based on comment content ― and, I assume, comment author ― not on channel). Here are some examples of what YouTube deletes:
[Comment on video "How big is the universe?"] You left out the theory that personally makes the most sense to me, which is that the universe is *endless* but *not infinite*. I got this idea from Stephen Wolfram's preposterous, yet attractive ideas which in turn were inspired by cellular automata: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/
[Comment on video claiming that an OSCE report supports Russia's claims of Ukrainian abuse of Russian speakers] 13:13 Important: this is NOT an OSCE report. It was written by "Foundation for the Study of Democracy", a Russian organization (its web site is democracyfund dot ru), but it is hosted on the OSCE web site for some reason.
[Comment on video misattributing an ammo depo explosion] 1:17 This picture is from Russia in 2019[1]. The ammo dump cookoff on Aug 16 looks like this: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1560579567944753155
[1]: https://www.dailysabah.com/europe/2019/08/05/2-injured-in-blast-at-russian-ammunition-dump
[Replying to "I love this channel. I am from Indonesia and most news outlet here don't really mention the Ukraine war that much, only small news outlet and they only tell stories about Russian victory and achievement on the battlefield. ..."] I always wonder what makes people cheer for a dictatorship invading a democracy. But I think the sort of people who cheer for that are also the sort of people who will not give a straight answer about the reason why.
[Replying to "Kamala really is the most irresponsible politician we've had in America in decades."] @GermanConquistador08 Well, at least you're illustrating Vlad's point. Trump can commit unconstitutional acts, call every democrat "radical left", stack the supreme court, create dozens of evidence-free lawsuits and a riot to overturn the election, etc etc, but the fact remains that his ordinary boring opponent will be held to much higher standards.
So today, after YouTube deleted the following comment, I ran an experiment:
[Replying to 'Um...could we please clarify what's meant by the (delightfully alliterative) phrase "domestic democratic decline"?'] It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There's polarization and disunity. There's the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of "facts" (people cause global warming, or don't, or ____). There's a drift toward lower-quality leaders. There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.
I followed up with "Sorry, I tried to explain the term, but YouTube silently deleted it. Everyone be on the lookout, Google could be doing it to you too." which was not deleted. Then I posted these comments, of which YouTube deleted one:
**SILENTLY DELETED** Okay, as an experiment I'll try posting it in pieces and see what gets deleted. First half:
It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum. There's polarization and disunity.
**NOT** Okay, I'll try posting it in pieces as an experiment and see what gets deleted. First piece:
It's a qualitative term, and probably every person imagines their own definition. Most obviously there's the swing toward authoritarianism, which will end democracy outright if the pendulum has enough momentum.
**NOT** Looks like YouTube disallows the second sentence, only four words: There's p________ion and dis____y. I'm not sure if there's a limit on the number of messages, so if you don't see anything else from me, it suggests that I hit a volume limit.
**NOT** There's the fragmentation of media into alternate realities, each with its own separate set of "facts" (people cause global warming, or don't, or ____)
**NOT** There's a drift toward lower-quality leaders.
**NOT** There was (human) Russian bots, and now generative AI casting doubt on whether any given real image is real.
**NOT** Based on this it looks like those two words in the middle (p________ion and dis____y) were enough to make YouTube silently remove the whole thing. Mind you, what actually happened was that I posted the first half (which was deleted), then deleted the last four words (which worked). So it could also be that there is a cumulative score of "undesireable words" or something, and if you have enough of those your comment gets deleted, making long comments very risky. So as a final experiment I'll post just the four words by themselves and we'll see if they appear.
**NOT** There's polarization and disunity.
**NOT** I thought initially that those four words had been deleted (silently, so, in my original browser I still see everything ― I use a private window to see reality). But after a couple of minutes YouTube did allow the comment to appear (usually it takes less than a minute for YouTube to decide.) So this favors the "cumulative undesireable words" theory. Experimental note: I spread out the last 8 messages over 20 minutes, just in case YouTube also has rate-based comment removal.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-speed-rail-quebec-toronto-1.7462538
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday revealed his government's $3.9 billion, six-year plan to connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
Except no. It is $3.9 billion over six years to "design" the project. There is no money allocated for the estimated $80 billion to build the railway.
Much like many of Joe Biden's plans, this is a lame-duck's attempt to take credit for a mega-project that will likely never be built. The $4 billion might even make it less likely there will be a high-speed rail line built in the next 50 years.
Why do "liberals" seem to think that this is how governance should work? Are they too scared of failure to even try to build anything?
>Why do "liberals" seem to think that this is how governance should work? Are they too scared of failure to even try to build anything?
Canada will have elections soon. This is how politicians think campaigning for votes should work. Say/do something to make a positive news article headline and trust in the fact that most people won't look into it
> "Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday revealed his government's $3.9 billion, six-year plan to connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
I don't see the sentence in the linked article. Was it edited?
Yup, corrected. Apparently somebody else noticed that this wasn't what the CBC said it was.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250219151759/https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-announces-high-speed-rail-quebec-toronto-1.7462538
It now says the (much less impressive, but more accurate): "The Liberal government launched a six-year, $3.9-billion design and development plan Wednesday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says will eventually connect Quebec City and Toronto with a high-speed rail line."
Apparently Trump believes that Ukraine started the war with Russia back in 2022:
> Today I heard, ‘Oh, we [Ukraine] weren’t invited,’ Well, you’ve been there for three years, you should have ended it. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/19/ukraine-russia-trump-elections-zelensky/
Is this another instance of Trump's widely respected genius for 5D chess? To give a boost to Zelensky's national approval rating by applying reverse psychology to an entire country?
At this point its clear to me that anyone who takes Trump literally is just acting in bad faith.
Presumably this is because everything he says is said in bad faith?
But sure, let's look at the symbolic meaning and subtext of Trump's speech, instead of the literal interpretation:
"We will betray our long-term partners and strengthen our geopolitical rivals for short-term inner-political gain.
If we send you obsolete and surplus equipment to fight our enemies on our behalf, we will later try to extort you. If you don't comply, we will make up outright lies to hurt you.
We will drop our partners on a whim. We are not your friend, do not rely on us, do not trust our promises, do not believe a word we say."
The message he sends is so much worse than his literal words.
Yes, there's so much legitimately wrong with what Trump is doing and how he is doing it that that should be the focus of condemnation. Instead, the entire media establishment has zeroed in on poorly chosen words under the presumption that one can rationally attribute belief states to his literal words. The man is a bullshitter to his core. He is not someone for which literal word choice is reflective of his belief state. At best his words reflect the vibe/directionality of his beliefs. After 10 years of dealing with his personal brand of politics it's just bad faith to pretend otherwise.
I strongly disagree with the direction of your argument [1]. Blatent lies and disinformation must not become the norm, and even less so acceptable, and the media is right to (and must continue to) call them out. Saying, "that's just Trump being Trump", shrugging, and ignoring his literal statements sets a destructive precedent.
And like I said in my other comment, words from politicians and diplomats _are_actions. Diplomatic statements have a direct effect on friends and enemies.
[1] I might have misinterpreted you; please correct me if so.
I have no problem calling out Trump for having a loose relationship with the truth, or calling out the state of politics that someone like Trump could be elected president. But to pretend like the word choice of Trump is reflective of a genuine belief state, and then call out that belief state, is just the sort of bad faith engagement farming that is the cause of the media being so reviled across the board. I'm just tired of the lowest effort maximally inflammatory content being the norm for the media.
There are so many legitimate problems with Trump and his brand of politics that there is no end to the content that could be created highlighting all his failures. I in no way want to just shrug at the state of politics that Trump has created. But we also shouldn't pretend we can just take Trumps words at face value. Trump is not a normal politician, he has an extremely loose relationship with the truth. Attributing belief states to him aside from the most general of vibes is a mistake. These are facts that can't be ignored in good faith when analyzing his statements.
In diplomacy, words are more than mere sound waves emanating from vibrating vocal chords. Words are actions. Ignoring the literal statements of a politician in a diplomatic context is willful ignorance.
The person acting in bad faith here is Donald J. Trump. And I do not think you have a realistic expectation of how people acting in good faith, will respond to someone acting in such atrociously bad faith.
I'm not saying we give him a pass on anything. I'm just saying don't treat him like a man whose brain functions like a normal person's brain does. You can critique him, his vibe, his policies, etc, while also acknowledging that the literal words he says don't necessarily reflect a stable belief state of his brain. It just takes a little more effort, and some self-restraint in not piling on with the low effort reactionary takes, however enticing they may be in the moment.
If no one can understand the belief state of his brain, how can he be trusted to run a nation? A huge part of being President is making deals, which requires other parties be reasonably confident in the outcome of the deal. If they don't understand the belief state of the person proposing the deal, how is that supposed to work?
The most generous interpretation is that Ukraine could've avoided the war if they reached an agreement with Russia back in 2019 after Zelensky had been elected on a peace platform.
An agreement was signed in Paris in 2019 based on Minsk agreements. Angela Merkel wrote in her memoir that "Perhaps there were domestic policy reasons preventing [Zelensky] from accepting the Minsk agreements in their entirety" and Andrii Bohdan, the head of Zelensky's Presidential Administration at the time, said later that they double-crossed Putin.
You keep pushing this crap about Zelensky being at fault, as if Putin ever negotiated in good faith and stood by any agreements. A disgruntled Bohdan's opinion is just that. The only person who did double-crossing was Putin, literally days before the full invasion mocking the Western officials warnings about it.
Don't think nobody sees what you are doing here.
No need to get personal.
I said that this is the most charitable explanation. Obviously Russia started the conflict in 2014 and 2022.
It's impossible to know whether Russia would've honoured these agreements - it definitely has a mixed record. However, it looks increasingly likely that Ukraine didn't honour them. Last time it was just Bohdan and you could say that he's just pissed off with Zelensky but now Angela Merkel basically confirmed it, only without cursing. You should update your beliefs based on that.
Angela Merkel was one of a series of European politicians who rolled out the red carpet for Putin, who welcomed filthy Russian money flowing into Europe, who created a dangerous dependence on Russian pipeline gas, and ended up largely financing Russia's wars. I'm sorry, I really don't care about anything she has to say on the matter. She should crawl into some quiet space to reflect on the damage she did to Germany, Europe, and the world.
They all had multiple chances to stand up to Putin. But the money was so good, and there was so much of it.
Combined with insinuations that Zelensky is a "dictator" who lacks democratic legitimation and with demands that Ukraine pay back hundreds of billions of "aid" in the form of minerals, I take this to mean that Trump is working on an alliance with Putin to divide up Ukraine.
Yes, this is the most cynical and pessimistic interpretation. The alternative I'm willing to entertain is that Trump is a greedy, narcissistic fool who repeats the talking points of anyone who tickles his vanity and offers him a chance for loot, and the most recent one to do that was Putin.
An alternative is that Trump wanted the US to get paid in mineral rights for aid to Ukraine and to do so had to convince Zelensky that, if not paid, the US would abandon him.
It's almost certainly the second thing.
I listened to the Q&A independently and I took his statement to mean something more like "you should have negotiated to prevent the war from starting in the first place." It wasn't meant to blame Ukraine as solely responsible. It was not a prepared statement, so I think journalists are seizing on a overly literal interpretation while ignoring the full context of the exchange.
It's like saying the United States started the war when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Well, maybe the US should have tried negotiating harder in the first place.
Except the US had a significantly larger military, larger population, more natural resources, more industry, and wasn't bogged down in a war with China.
A realpolitik look at international relations necessitates acknowledging a threat of force, even the unfair and immoral threat of force, when choosing policy. If you base your policy on ideals, ignoring the practical responses of authoritarian regimes who don't care about your ideals, you shouldn't be able to claim full surprise if it blows up in your face.
As a historical matter that probably isn't the best example. The US, British and Dutch had embargoed Japan in protest of their military actions in China and Indochina. Japan could either a) do nothing and have their economy totally crippled by a critical lack of oil and rubber, b) give up all their territory in China that thousands of Japanese had fought and died for over years and be totally politically humiliated, or c) attack the US/British/Dutch in an attempt to gain the resources the embargo had cut them off from.
On the day Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, three squadrons of American fighter pilots and their planes were already enroute to China to wage war against Japan, with the express approval of the highest levels of the US government. So the United States government wasn't even really trying to avoid a war at that point, and if they had been it would have been easy to negotiate. Mostly, the US just wanted an excuse to blame Japan for starting it, and they were fool enough to oblige.
There is nothing remotely similar to this in Ukraine's behavior w/re Russia in the leadup to the current war.
As isolated text on a page I would agree with the media's interpretation. Hearing it in context, before reading any headlines about it, I did not take it that way. Why? Because it doesn't fit as well with the central point Trump was making at the time (that Ukraine has already had ample opportunity to negotiate and failed to do so), or statements he has consistently made in the past (that the conflict could have been avoided entirely through the use of threats and negotiation). If his position were really that Ukraine bears full responsibility for starting the war, it seems strange that he would reveal that as a one-sentence aside in the middle of making a different point.
You can see the full remarks here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kATFPOK_sP0
He does leave open the possibility that to avoid the war, Ukraine might have had to give up some territory.
No, it's dumb that he said it. There's some semi-plausible arguments that Ukraine could have avoided the war or ended it by now. They all involve Ukraine giving in to Russian demands. Most notably staying a Russian satellite state like Belarus in the first place. Alternatively, ceding territory to Russia at one of many stages.
On the one hand, it's pretty clear that Russia is going to gain territory through this war, and the only real questions are how much and when. On the other hand, when those are still open questions the bargaining positions should not be ceded to Russia. Even going back to 2014 it's not a good idea to just give an aggressive expansionist country free reign to take from others, because it encourages more of it.
Has anyone else observed a trend in YouTube titles where they get more clickbait-ey? I feel like two years ago some youtube videos had clickbait titles, while others didn't. Now conscientious, staid personality like this dude feels the need to use multiple exclamation points in his titles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGsuOyzyYcI
Or, looking at a guy whose videos I watch a lot, 4 years ago a normal Reinessance Periodization video might be titled something like "11 upright row mistakes and how to fix them" and the picture is an upright row + Dr. Mike; recently about half use caps or exclamation points and maybe 5/6 have some weird facial expression or some such.
Is this just me?
I know a guy who day trades as a living, he's very analytical and loves metrics, spreadsheets, etc. He does video streams on Saturdays as a hobby, and he crunched the numbers on his viewer engagement. According to him, by far the biggest impacts on his viewer numbers were #1) Clickbait thumbnail and #2) Clickbait title. I don't know if this is a result of how YouTube algorithms serve people content or it says something deeper about human psychology. But it definitely works as a method to increase viewership.
As the youth say, sadge
I've also noticed it. Videos also seem more long-winded and full of filler like background information the viewer would almost certainly already know. AI-generated, individualized content will annihilate all this garbage.
So far, the bits of Ai generated content I’ve seen on YouTube are more extreme versions of this, not an alternative to this.
AI will improve.
The have gotten more clickbaity for me, too, but far less pervasively and intensely than what you seem to be describing. It may be catching on more in some genres than others, or you might be watching more clickbait-titled videos than I am and the algorithm is responding accordingly.
It's definitely not all encompassing. My little brother sent me a video yesterday that had accurate titles and hundreds of thousands of views.
I just skimmed my YouTube front page. Most of the titles are simple descriptions, e.g. "A Look at Kirk" or "Geology of the Grand Canyon" or "Some points about caltrops". Several are mildly clickbait-adjacent, e.g. "Why Hannibal Failed" or "How many died in the Mongol conquests". Maybe 10% are moderately clickbaity or worse, like "How We Misunderstood HLILLFORTS" or "Slavery's Most Dangerous Argument" or "Mad Men - BEST LINE EVER",
So, after a few days marking myself disinterested in clickbait videos, this has improved. Thanks for inspiring this strategy.
You're welcome. Glad to hear it seems to be working for you.
Well, gives me hope. Maybe I can train youtube to serve up fewer. It's tricky though because maybe 80% of what I watch is exercise content, and it seems especially endemic to exercise videos.
We differ I guess. I agree with everything you said except for regarding it as neutral. In an emotional sense I guess I aspire to that. I don't seek to take regular offense at video thumbnails any more than I seek to take offense at six bedroom tract homes with a view of the Orange County coastline—but independent of the skillfulness of my response to it, I think the world is worse with clickbait titles.
Clickbait titles are misleading and manipulative, trading on the excitement of teasing one type of content then producing another. It's not usually quite lying, but it often is some flavor of exaggeration. I don't actually blame people for using it, but certainly appreciate people who don't because I like the product, inclusive of the still and title, more. I'm disappointed that the ecosystem requires exaggeration and, I dunno how to put it, something like WOOOAAHH, to make your video viable. A video can be valuable without being astounding, and I'm gradually disliking seeing astounded faces on so many thumbnails; it feels vulgar.
I remember a youtuber once explained his personal experience was that long-time subs will click regardless, but clickbait makes a big difference in attracting newcomers. Yes, he felt a bit scummy. But ultimately decided that exposing his favorite topic to newcomers was more important than the slight loss of integrity.
So I liked Trump's idea of a trilateral agreement between USA, Russia and China of 50% cuts in defense spending. Let's first just assume, that all the details can be worked out to each parties satisfaction. Wouldn't most people like that and think it's a good idea? And then I was told here, that that could never work, because of congress and pork and the jobs created by the defense budget that all congress likes. (And all the people working in these jobs like.) And OK fine, but this looks like a major failing of our government! And is there any way to fix it? It's perhaps like a positive feedback loop... the output grows till it hits some limit. So you fix a positive feed back loop by changing the sign of one of the signals. But that silly idea doesn't help me think about how to fix the government and defense spending. Voters -> congress -> money -> defense -> voters.
Any ideas?
Why would China agree? The status quo works better for them since they are rapidly catching up and placing a limit at 50% of existing spending would fix everyone at the same relative balance as the present day.
I love how is it paired with a demand to EU increase our defense spending to 5 % od GDP. As of 2023, US defense spending is 3.4 % of GDP (source: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/military-expenditure-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html).
If you cut it to 1.7 % and we increase it to 5 %, aren't you afraid that you'll became a victim of European invasion? :-)
The real military budget has grown and shrunk over time. Right now it's at a historical low. We now spend about as much as we did in the 1920/30s after demobilization and before mobilizing for WW2. The US closer to what the US government spent before WW1 (so when there was no major army) than any year during the Cold War. And an additional 50% cut would mean the military budget becomes about what Teddy Roosevelt had.
The idea of a shadowy military-industrial complex that can never be cut because it has huge political sway or because jobs is a popular narrative but not really backed up by anything.
Anyway, the US military and all its support industries (including things like ammunition factories) represent about 2.5% of the workforce. Assuming that a 50% cut leads to a 50% reduction in headcount that means reallocating about 1.25% of the workforce. This would temporarily push the unemployment rate from 4% to 5% which is still below the long run average and is about what Obama had at the end of his term. Hardly a crisis.
I looked this up and it seems to be currently higher than it was during most of the Cold War, adjusted for inflation, can you share your sources?
Sourcing is the DoD, Our World In Data, etc. There's really no dispute on this point. I think you're probably looking at nominal or dollar amounts rather than something like % of GDP.
You’re right, thank you.
If China decides it's "now or never" and invades Taiwan ― because there's a slashed military budget on top of all the various vague indications that Trump wouldn't help Taiwan out ― well, it'll be a crisis for Taiwan, for democracy in general, for nonproliferation[1] and for the thing that matters most of all: the price of your next computer. But don't worry, Trump will surely carve out a tariff exception so you can buy chips from the communists at prices less inflated than they'd otherwise be.
[1] nonproliferation is largely based on the concept that countries need not build nukes because the U.S. or NATO will protect them. (Ukraine, ostensibly under US protection under the Budapest memorandum, may not publicly announce a nuclear program, but if the war slows down or pauses, don't be surprised by the news a couple years after that.)
>Let's first just assume, that all the details can be worked out to each parties satisfaction
I mean, "how do you ensure the US upholds the deal that they signed" is one of the details you had to work out, no? Use whatever diplomatic magic you used to get the treaty signed to get Congress to ratify it.
But if I'm not fighting the hypothetical, what it would probably look like is you give everyone a long timeframe to implement the treaty, and trim the budget slowly over 20 years or whatever. I know Trump is a big fan of bold, sweeping moves that get implemented without regard for side effects, but it's going to take time to dismantle your defense industry anyway, so make use of that time! Let the tank factory finish up its last production run, so people have time to find another job, and give the state some other form of pork to replace it (maybe subsidize the car industry or something to make new jobs for the people you fired).
The government isn't literally incapable of cutting spending, it's just a big vehicle that turns slowly.
This makes sense. NAFTA was a simple idea--no tariffs--but getting it passed involved lots of negotiation on time schedules for phasing out the tariff on particular items, rather than just going to zero tariffs immediately for everything.
This helps the purpose of geopolitical military de-escalation, but as far as balancing the budget goes, a mere renaming is not going to produce a lot of savings.
A while ago I saw a tweet about how J.K. Rowling's views on transgender people have grown more radical over the years. The subtext was that this was surprising or hypocritical. I remember thinking "well, what'd you expect when you tried to run her out of polite society?"
Many people across the political spectrum have a "heads I win, tails we're even" model of politics. Even as they demonize their enemies, the idea that said enemies will take revenge does not occur to them.
What radical views does she hold? I suspect the label "radical" is being stretched here.
In my estimation, the median view on this is that trans women are men and should be treated as such, but that people also shouldn't go out of their way to harass anyone just for being trans if the trans person is minding their own business. Plus maybe some limited accommodation of pronouns purely to avoid social conflict.
To me, "radical" would at minimum involve some kind of advocacy for physical violence, criminalization, or discrimination (beyond treating them according to sex at birth).
Do you know what her views are? I'm going to bet there is a lot of statements taken out of context of whatever her point of view is. (I don't know either, but I've heard the negative stuff. )
As I recall, she avoids stating them. It's more a matter of logically inferring from her behavior. This video explains (if you can overlook Shaun oddly treating anti-abortion as if it were to some extent equivalent to being anti-trans and anti-gay-rights): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou_xvXJJk7k
Sorry no, I'm not going to listen to someone else explain her. I'd maybe listen to some podcast where she talks about it. OK TBH I watched contrapoints talk about JK. I think she did a fair job. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us
There is a podcast where she talks about it: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-witch-trials-of-j-k-rowling/id1671691064
They even have an episode discussing the Contrapoints video and asking Rowling for her response.
>She thinks that trans people are either liars or delusional sick people and in both cases are dangerous to women.
That's not true. What evidence do you have of this? In interviews and in her public writings on the subject she has consistently maintained that she is supportive of trans people, but opposed to allowing biological men into women's spaces because abusers will exploit that to harm women. Have you listened to her interviews in that series? At no point does she say that trans people are liars, or delusional, or dangerous to women. She makes her point very clear: self-id will be exploited by abusers, allowing biological men into women's bathrooms will be exploited by abusers, and silencing those who object to such things with bullying, cancellation, or state action is wrong. She has been pretty consistent on this. Where are your receipts?
> So why shouldn't trans activists (at least the F->M ones, or the M->F ones who haven't had bottom surgery yet) rape Rowling?
Because if they did that, society would round up and kill every transgender person in the country. Which is something they can easily do.
The only thing that ultimately matters is power. The left has proven itself weak and unworthy of existence. They no longer have a future.
"What Rowling's former fans wanted was for Rowling to be reasonable and listen to them with empathy - not to run her out of polite society."
I believe they wanted her to agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness, and when she wouldn't do that they moved on to "Well I guess we have to run you out of polite society now, Look what you made me do!"
I also think her former fans vastly overestimate their ability to "drive her out of polite society"; I suspect her personal life is largely unaffected, and she's still a billionaire (or close enough as makes no difference). But the public and professional consequences are probably still quite infuriating, so now the LGBT+++ community has to live with a furious Rowling.
What should someone who believes that former men should not be housed in women's prisons or able to compete against women in sports be allowed to say about their beliefs?
I get "being civil" as something we should all answer there. But my impression of the response to JK is that her civil responses also got similar or the same backlash and none of her postings seemed that outlandish - if you can recognize and accept that she disagrees with core trans ideology. But even people acting uncivilly should be allowed to speak. For instance, the people agitating loudly for JK to be deplatformed are often very uncivil in their wording and approach.
Surely Rowling can, in fact, say whatever she wants. This is Real America, goddammit. [edit: I was reminded she's in the UK, not just online. Not sure how it works over there.] You can talk about how Hitler did a lot of great things, or how we have the guns and will win a ground war against the wokes in 3 days, or [insert 10,000,000 novel untrue statements here]. If you're Rowling you're not only allowed, you enjoy a vast bullhorn. A hundred million people will hear what you said! But other people are then allowed to be mad about it, and say so.
These debates are rarely about actual free speech. If you want to see an *actual* free speech issue, see my thread on this page about how YouTube has been censoring me for years. I am apparently not allowed to say that there's a Trump/Harris double standard, or describe the term "domestic democratic decline", etc. I've never seen a news outlet cover *that*. (YouTube's action is legal, of course, I just don't think they should.)
Rowling lives in the UK, where free speech is a bit more problematic.
Either way, we've recently lived through an era where "other people are then allowed to be mad about it" has somehow also included hounding people's employers until they get fired and hounding social media until they get removed from the site (which I think you would agree defeats your first paragraph).
"This is the basis of society: when someone acts in a way that damages the social fabric"
People used to (and some still do) say that open homosexuality damages the social fabric. It's the kind of thing that only sounds convincing to someone who already agrees that the behavior is bad. Nobody wakes up in the mourning and thinks "I'm going to damage the social fabric today!"
"Because it seems that Alexander wants to hold Rowling's critics accountable for Rowling's response to criticism."
I didn't say anything about whether Rowling's response was justified. I don't align with either TERFs or wokes, it's like a foreign country's civil war. I was just saying I don't think Rowling's critics should have been SURPRISED at her ideological evolution. And I meant it as a more general point to anyone reading it who might be currently or someday in a position of political power.
Both sides can claim the same arguments here. The following quote:
"This is the basis of society: when someone acts in a way that damages the social fabric, someone else points that behavior out, and then they have to decide whether they want to persist in the behavior (at which point the others in society will likely escalate their grievance) or cease the behavior."
This seems to describe how JK feels about trans people pushing to be in women-only spaces and her calling them out on it. Trans women in women's prisons (or pick whichever argument she's making) "damages the social fabric" and she wants them to stop. They have to evaluate "whether they want to persist" or "cease the behavior."
It's not an argument that she is right and they are wrong, it's an argument that there's no high ground for her opponents to stand on and say that she needs empathy - because it works just as well in reverse. You may not feel that intuitively, but perhaps you should work on your empathy. (Sorry, that last bit was snark and you seem fairly empathetic, but I hope you can see the point that anyone can call for empathy for their preferred social beliefs and there's not really a coherent way to make everyone agree about who gets deferential treatment.)
If we amend "they wanted her to agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness" to "they wanted her to either agree with them and publicly admit that she was wrong and beg forgiveness, or else shut up", does that answer your objection?
That Rowling has gottten worse lately I don't deny. But I don't remember the reaction, back when it all started, being any less shrill than it is now. (The main thing I recall is my bemusement at the idea of such a good gray bien-pensant left-liberal being called a radical *anything*.) That the people she was disagreeing with should want their rebuttal was of course normal and proper; where they lost me was the further implication that the act of saying those things was wicked, in a way that other expressions of political nonsense are not.
The sense of betrayal by a *favorite author* isn't easy for me to relate to: we present-day conservatives necessarily get more practice than most people at separating the art from the artist (though my own favorite author never did anything worse than complain about his "deplorable American cultus"). I think I also draw a sharper distinction than you between group criticism and personal attacks. Imane Khelif sure has a right to feel affronted.
There was a lot of pressure to "cancel" Dave Chappelle, even within the Netflix org, they definitely wanted to "run him out". They were just unable to do so because he's famous and talented (so Netflix higher executives didn't want to part ways with him), and generally operates within a circle with strong-ish free speech norms (comedians are a bit too self-fellating, but it is true that even the left wing ones are more tolerant of offensive stuff than the population they're selected from).
Well what did she say? My memory of her original statement was something like, "I'm fine with people living as the other gender, and changing themselves with surgery and hormones to look and sound more like the gender they feel themselves to be. But it's just not true that being a trans woman or man is the same things as being someone with the female or male genes." That seems reasonable to me. Of course, it's a little vague. What does it really mean to say a trans woman and an XX woman are or are not the same thing? Seems like they're the same thing in some ways and not the same as others. But I think Rowling as reacting against people insisting that a trans woman was exactly the same as a XX woman, and that it was wrong and destructive to say that was not the case.
If Rowling got mad after being attacked for saying the above, what did she say that should as characterized as bullying rather than angry disagreement? And if she has been quoted as saying something godawful, are you sure that's what she actually said?
The original Tweet:
"Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill"
This was in response to Maya Forstater, a consultant whose contract was not renewed because she posted online that trans-women were not women. She sued and in December of 2019 the judge at the initial review found that her beliefs were not protected under law and were "incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others". Rowling's Tweet was in response to that.
You know, in most other contexts, saying X is not a real Y is no big deal. Lots of things don’t match perfectly with the class we usually put them in, and then someone might say, they’re not a real member of the class: Cheezits aren’t real food; AI’s aren’t real minds; the adopting mother isn’t the kid’s real mother.
I can see objecting to not allowing trans women to take a job for which a woman is required. But it seems like madness to me that someone
can be successfully sued for making an “X is not a real Y”statement online.
In a nutshell, Graham Norton said (paraphrased) that, “‘cancel culture’ is just accountability,” and J.K.Rowling equated support for cancel culture to supporting “rape and death threats to those who dare disagree.” Details here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/graham-norton-cancel-culture-jk-rowling-1235241375/
Rather than link to a reliable account, you link to a piece by Rob Beschizza, who seems to be either incompetent or dishonest.
I have have lots of thoughts about this, but here’s the only one I think I can lay out clearly enough to avoid a danger of being entirely misunderstood:
The word ‘transphobic’ now means something like ‘anti-trans.’ I think we would all have a better chance of getting somewhere if we distinguished between the different kinds of negative feelings and opinons somebody can have regarding a trans person.
1) Ewww! A visceral disgust. That feeling we all tend to have about sexual stuff that is not to our taste.
2) They’re sexually dangerous — molest kids, make aggressive sexual moves on people who have shown no sign of interest
3) They’re odd to the point of being crazy. Their thoughts and feelings are utterly different from normal people’s. I can’t even form a model of their minds.
4) They look grotesque (applies to trans people who can’t manage to look much like a natural-born member of the gender the trans person identifies with, or don't try)
5) They’re entitled and whiny. They expect a level of empathy, understanding and accommodation that you can’t reasonably expect, and that hardly anyone gets except from the few people they are close to.
6) I’m furious at them, because a horde of them are attacking me on social media.
7) I think they should not be given certain accommodations (eg, M2F competing in women’s Olympic events) because the accommodations are unfair to so many others.
8) I dislike them and think they’re crazy, bad and dangerous, and don’t think they should be permitted to marry, work in a public-facing job, or be around children.
So the question is, which of 1-8 did Rowling start out with, which does she have now, and how bad was/is it to have the ones she had/has?
Wow, I didn't realize it was that bad. Thanks for the explanation and counter example.
>What you are implying here is that Rowling's views are not genuinely held, but rather a tool of revenge she uses to cause deliberate pain to her critics and people she feels aggrieved by
He didn't imply that. Hostile views formed against people perceived to be hostile to you tend to be genuine
I'm not commenting on the reasonableness of JKR's views. I've not actually paid attention to her since... years ago when Harry Potter hit my elementary school library's bookshelves. My point was that people's reaction to hostility is usually genuine and that AlexTurok was not implying otherwise. If anything, emotional reactions to perceived enemies - as JKR's seems to have been, assuming your depiction is accurate - are more likely to be genuinely held
"be reasonable and listen to them with empathy"
Is this wokespeak for "agree with me?"
Woke people do not listen and are judgmental. Not listening or talking to white people was a founding principle. “Words are violence” is a core principle. “Read the room,” which means conform or be quiet, is a common refrain.
What is probably true is that YOU are empathetic and a good listener, and you are projecting that on the movement you feel you are a part of.
Here is J.K.Rowlings 2020 essay:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200610235421/https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
I don’t see a lack of empathy there.
I’ve never used the platform formerly known as Twitter. My impression is that that platform encourages short, hostile putdowns rather than nuanced dialogue, so I wouldn’t be surprised if discussions there were lacking in empathy on both sides.
The essay accuses men of being dangerous to women and children, because some men are rapists and child abusers. She never claims that trans people are dangerous, she claims that letting men into women's spaces is dangerous: and that the trans movement pushes for making it easier for men to enter women's spaces and harder to remove men from women's spaces.
You should really look more deeply into the case of the Algerian boxer.
Maybe you should refresh your memory on what Rowling said about Khelif:
"Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered."
Even if the accusations of Khelif having XY chromosomes without knowing were 100% true (a big if!), this is an absurd and insulting statement. Rowling believes that someone who was born as a woman, raised as a woman, and who never identified as a man in her life, still somehow grew up to become a misogynist MRA who enjoys abusing women. Because misogyny is stored in the Y chromosome, apparently.
It's one thing to say "intersex people should not compete in the Olympics due to having a biological advantage." It's quite another thing to say "the reason that this intersex person got into boxing is because she's a bad person who enjoys beating women and crushing their dreams."
I know what she said. I suggest you go look at the things that were said about her when this whole thing started. She’s a Scot. She’s feisty. She got pissed off.
I won’t go back and explore the record, but if I remember correctly the first thing she wrote about this, she said transgender women have a place in the world and should be respected, but that place was not in rape crisis centers, women’s penitentiaries and top class women’s sports. And that most of the gripes about her were coming from people who were accusing lesbians of being bigots because they wouldn’t date transgender women. I do not think those are unreasonable positions.
I agree that she has gotten nastier over time, but her starting position was not unreasonable imo. I have read a lot about the Algerian boxer and I don’t think your summation is terribly accurate, but that might be a matter of opinion. One woman’s boxing association had banned her, but for some reason the Olympics had different rules. I don’t know if you watch the fight, but it was a travesty.
That final clause was fat-headed even if you leave politics out of it entirely. What exactly does she think athletic competition *is*?
One would hope it’s not just “some random dude” making these calls.I I am going to reposition myself as neutral on the issue of Imane Khelif. It’s murky and not a hill I intend to die on. The whole issue of trans women in sports is in play and I’m hardly in a position to pretend I’m an expert. I think there are real issues being raised. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the categories.
I really don’t agree with you about Rowling, but what the heck.
If she listened with empathy and still came away thinking things insulting to trans people, would that have worked though? Like, say she thought transness spread by social contagion and regarding it as anything other than mental illness was deeply dangerous or something like that. She was respectful and empathetic to others point of view, but she thought that transness was somehow deeply dangerous and that called for activism somehow or something. Wouldn't she still be viewed as repugnant and people have tried to cancel her and such?
Her main issue was that the rights of biological females were getting trampled on, not that there is something wrong with being transgender. People who are commenting here seem to have come to the controversy late. Does anyone here want to make the case that a transgender woman and a biological female are “women“ in precisely the same sense?
I think I'm understanding you and Rowling could have behaved in an empathetic and logical manner while sincerely holding the view that transness was a harmful phenomona civilization should be putting effort into stopping (or something similarly wont to feel antithetical to a hypothetical trans person feeling valid; I'm kinda extrapolating from conversation's I've had with an Islamic neighbor who felt there was a certain Wrongness to my religion fixable only by converting to his). Could you help me out though and lay it out explicitly: what would empathy + reasonable look like alongside sincerely believing transness is bad and society is handling it poorly?
I asked last month but didn't get any good answers, so I'll ask again...
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.
> - Assume that the current price is efficient and not a bubble.
That's where you're wrong, bucko.
I subscribe to what our favorite bugman calls the "savings theory of money". Although personally, I prefer to think of it as the "cache theory of cash". The idea is that money is *inherently* bubbly. Bubbliness is the sine qua non. Alternatively, "it's the bubble that never pops." In a sibling thread, Wanda says crypto is a ponzi scheme. I'm going to bite the bullet and say "yes, money is a ponzi scheme, in a 'necessary evil' sort of way."
I.e. suppose you want to preserve your wealth into the future. How do you allocate your wealth? Naturally, you're going to park it in whatever asset has the highest expected ROI. And by parking your wealth in this asset, you're going to increase the ROI even further, which will attract other investors. Which is going to increase the ROI even further, which forms a positive-feedback loop. This asset's bubbliness has a tendency to vacuum up the bubbliness of rival securities/commodities with weaker ROI's, sort of like Highlander. The end result is that there's always going to be at least 1 (and ideally, only 1) type of asset that's bubbly, and that asset gets retroactively labeled "money". Tradeability is secondary to value-storage.
"but fance, fiat money doesn't work that way". Yes and I suspect this has some unsavory side-effects. Such as encouraging other assets to become bubbly as well, like housing. Also, by inflating currency, you undermine trust in it. "stimulation via inflation" can alternatively be thought of as "we're gonna ruin the currency and people will flee from it". btw yes, this is widely considered a heterodox opinion. (I've sparred a bit with commenter 1123581321 on this topic, many moons ago. although I dont think we were able to reach an agreement.)
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Regarding the benefit of cryptocurrency specifically (as opposed to money in general), my impression is that there's 3 types of users: the idealists; the shills; and the pragmatists.
The idealists' endonym is "bitcoin maximalists". For them, crypto is political. They prioritize "financial sovereignty". I.e. they don't trust the U.S. Fed to manage the supply of USD responsibly, so they're trying to escape the petrodollar. They also distrust other types of cryptocoins because they're not decentralized enough.
The shills are the types who wanna make a quick buck. "To the moon!", as they say. They use FOMO to try to attract new users to pump up their favorite currency. Rugpulls are common.
The pragmatists are just normies in third-world countries who don't have decent banking institutions. Scott has written about this before, I think. Think places like Venezuela, where the inflation rate is currently sitting at <checks google...> about 59% per annum. very cool! hyperflation = 20%, btw.
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> - ([...] so what happens when it plateaus? Why would people continue to hold it?).
Notice that even if it plateaus, that's still a better ROI than paying the USD tax of 2% inflation.
> (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
Personally, the analogy of choice that I like to use is woodchips. But toenail clippings is also a good one. Anyway, woodchips make a bad currency precisely because they're so inflationary. inflationary = negative ROI. If God commanded that everyone use woodchips as currency, inflation would go through the roof. Because anyone can print woodchips in their backyard. Something like gold, on the other hand, is much harder to inflate. not impossible, but the hardest relative to all (or at least, most) of the alternatives. In fact, it tends to be *deflationary*. Which is why it fulfills its function as money. deflationary currency = positive ROI. As I said earlier, the ROI is the whole point.
(EDIT: I misread you initially. oops. But hopefully you can see the point, anyway. I.e. it's not the total supply of nail clippings that matters. It's the fact that it's easy to inflate <shoots a dirty look at fiat>. crypto and gold are much harder to inflate.)
> And by parking your wealth in this asset, you're going to increase the ROI even further, which will attract other investors. Which is going to increase the ROI even further, which forms a positive-feedback loop.
The feedback loop stops when there's no more wealth to put into the asset though. At that point the price stalls. People get impatient and sell, then the positive feedback loop starts working in reverse.
Rational investors anticipate this happening in advance and don't buy in the first place. This is why a better-than-expected earnings report doesn't kickstart a bubble every time: yes, the ROI might be insane over the course of the day, but investors understand that this is a one-time price correction.
> and that asset gets retroactively labeled "money"
Does it? If you're thinking of gold during the gold standard era, then that definitely didn't have the best ROI at the time (it was pegged at a fixed rate!). Not sure what other asset you're thinking of.
> Notice that even if it plateaus, that's still a better ROI than paying the USD tax of 2% inflation.
Yeah but those aren't the only options. Most people store their wealth in savings accounts with above-inflation interest rates, or in productive assets like equity or bonds. Fiat currency isn't intended to be the main store of wealth, and that's by design: by encouraging people to invest in proper assets, you stimulate growth (as you alluded to).
> In fact, it tends to be *deflationary*. Which is why it fulfills its function as money. deflationary currency = positive ROI. As I said earlier, the ROI is the whole point.
Again, I believe the consensus is that money should be inflationary. ROI isn't the point! It's not a good thing for people to park their wealth in unproductive assets!
I didn't specify any old toenail clippings - they must be mine! Those are only produced at a fixed rate, no matter how much the price goes up. Point is, being scarce is not a sufficient condition for being valuable (although some degree of scarcity might be a necessary condition). You could create a Bitcoin clone with the same code but a different seed, and it would have all the properties of Bitcoin but a very different value.
> People get impatient and sell, then the positive feedback loop starts working in reverse.
It's propped up by caching activity. If there's a bubble in the stock market, you can fall back on bonds. If there's a bubble in the bond market, you can fall back on money. If there's a bubble in the money supply... what are you gonna do, light your money on fire? dump it in the ocean? You probably wanna park all that wealth *somewhere*. And if lots of people have the same idea about which asset to park their wealth in, that asset becomes the new, defacto "money". The bubble never truly dies, it just manifests somewhere else. "The bubble is dead! Long live the bubble!"
> Does it? If you're thinking of gold during the gold standard era, then that definitely didn't have the best ROI at the time (it was pegged at a fixed rate!). Not sure what other asset you're thinking of.
I'm saying that money is a natural attractor basin for caching activity. (for didactic purposes, maybe ROI wasn't the exactly-correct thing to emphasize. More like "the feedback loop is what propels the transition from "not money" to "is money".) If the government wants to intervene with regulations that force everyone to recognize a particular asset as legal tender, it can certainly do that. With the power of violence, all things are possible. I doubt that's how money evolved organically.
> Most people store their wealth in savings accounts with above-inflation interest rates
I can't call this "saving" with a clear conscience. It's asking a bank to issue loans on your behalf. Which is fine, I guess. It's a different risk-profile than stuffing money under a mattress. "No fance, a savings-account is insured by the FDIC. It's risk-free!" Well, I suppose. In an iron-condor-esque sort of way. More precisely, it's risk-free *for depositors* because the government takes on the risk. No free lunch.
> Fiat currency isn't intended to be the main store of wealth, and that's by design: by encouraging people to invest in proper assets, you stimulate growth (as you alluded to).
Right, because growth never has downsides. Malinvestment is just a myth. I thank God every day, for allowing ZIRP to prop up Juicero. :^)
> You could create a Bitcoin clone with the same code but a different seed, and it would have all the properties of Bitcoin but a very different value.
Ye.
I tend to emphasize the "positive-feedback loop" aspect because it generalizes to something I like to call "reflexive propositions". Which can be summarized as "it's true because I say so". E.g. when a pastor pronounces you man and wife, this isn't a reflection of the objective state of the universe, it's a reflection of social reality. Which is, in some sense, completely made-up. The need for caching is what kickstarts a currency into existence. But afterward, the financial value just kinda sustains itself by its own force of will. "Diamond hands!", as the kids say.
It's all very hand-wavy. I remain unconvinced, but I struggle to pinpoint the false assumption.
I think what I was looking for was something more rigorous, probably beyond the scope of a single comment. If you know of any books or long blog posts, please do share
rot13.com
(Since I don't recognize your name, I assume you're new around these parts. rot13 is just a cipher that rotates the alphabet 13 characters forward. follow the link, and copy-paste everything below into the textbox.)
----
V'z n yvggyr fubeg ba nhgubevgngvir fbheprf, ohg V'z nyjnlf qbja gb funer. Vs lbh jnaan xabj ubj *V* jnf pbaivaprq, V oynzr gur ohtzna [0]. Naq gur ohtzna jnf fhccbfrqyl vafcverq ol gur Nhfgevna Fpubby. Gur fcrpvsvp oybtcbfg jurer ohttl qvfphffrf zbargnel cbyvpl sebz svefg cevapvcyrf vf pnyyrq "HE'f Penfu Pbhefr va Fbhaq Rpbabzvpf" [1]. Vg'f abg na npnqrzvp cncre, ohg vg qbrf fgevir gb or n yvggyr zber evtbebhf guna V jnf. Gubhtu nqzvggrqyl, V'ir arire dhvgr haqrefgbbq jung gur ohtzna zrnag ol "Abeznyyl, va n onaxehcgpl, qrog orpbzrf rdhvgl".
Lbh znl nyfb jnag gb purpx bhg uvf oybtcbfg ba Znghevgl Genafsbezngvba [2]. Nxn "gur guvat gung gur Senpgvbany Erfreir Flfgrz qbrf". Juvpu, nppbeqvat gb Nhfgevnaf, vf onq. Naq cebonoyl gur ebbg pnhfr bs gur TSP. (ZOF'f jrer zreryl gur *cebkvzngr* pnhfr.)
Vs lbh jnag na ragver obbx, V erzrzore bapr frrvat gur nofgenpg sbe "Gur Gurbel bs Vqyr Erfbheprf" [3]. Juvpu, nqzvggrqyl, V unira'g ernq. Ohg gur flabcfvf ybbxf njshyyl fvzvyne gb "npghnyyl, fgvzhyhf vf onq". Gurer'f cebonoyl fvzvyne fghss vs lbh cbxr nebhaq gur Iba Zvfrf jrofvgr. Vg nyfb arngyl qbirgnvyf jvgu Miv'f snzbhf cbfg nobhg gur iveghr bs "fynpx" [4].
Abj ng guvf cbvag, lbh'er cebonoyl jbaqrevat "vs snapr unfa'g qbar uvf ubzrjbex, jul vf ur fb pbasvqrag?" Gurer'f gjb ernfbaf: N) nyy guvf rqtl urgrebqbkl bssref gur bayl rkcynangvba bs ovgpbva v'ir frra, gung V svaq fngvfslvat; naq O) V'ir ybat unq erfreingvbaf nobhg gur rpbabzvp begubqbkl naljnl. Nhfgevnavfz whfg srryf yvxr pbzzba frafr, jurernf Xrlarfvnavfz fgevxrf zr nf shyy bs zragny tlzanfgvpf (lrg *pbairavragyl* whfgvsvrf tbireazrag-vagreiragvba).
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[0] "gur ohtzna" vf zl avpxanzr sbe Zrapvhf Zbyqoht. Ur'f pbagebirefvny orpnhfr ur guvaxf qrzbpenpl vf onq. Zbfg bs gur erthynef urer ng yrnfg erpbtavmr uvf anzr.
Va gur cnfg, Fpbgg unf nfxrq hf abg gb rkcyvpvgyl zragvba uvz be AEK ol anzr ba uvf oybt, sbe srne bs tbbtyr qverpgvat gur onyrshy tnmr bs gur jbxr zbo gbjneq FFP. Nf n erfhyg, gur FFP pbzzragnevng jbhyq ersre gb uvz jvgu qhzo avpxanzrf yvxr "ur jub zhfg abg or anzrq". V gel gb novqr Fpbgg'f erdhrfg. Ohg fvzhygnarbhfyl, V svaq gur erdhrfg n uneqre fryy, gurfr qnlf. Fvapr: N) Zbyqoht'f zhpu yrff bofpher guna ur hfrq gb or; naq O) gurl'er obgu ba Fhofgnpx. Fb vg'f xvaqn uneq gb pbzcnegzragnyvmr gurz.
Nyfb, V whfg yvxr hfvat qhzo avpxanzrf sbe sha.
[1] uggcf://jjj.hadhnyvsvrq-erfreingvbaf.bet/2009/08/hef-penfu-pbhefr-va-fbhaq-rpbabzvpf/
[2] uggcf://jjj.hadhnyvsvrq-erfreingvbaf.bet/2008/09/znghevgl-genafsbezngvba-pbafvqrerq/
[3] uggcf://zvfrf.bet/yvoenel/obbx/gurbel-vqyr-erfbheprf
[4] uggcf://gurmiv.fhofgnpx.pbz/c/fynpx
In my opinion, the price of Bitcoin is a bet on its prospect of becoming the de-facto medium of settlement of a significant part of the world economy. So a very simple model would be p(of that happening) * Total value of "that" (that could be, for example, the total amount of currency held in bank reserves for nations that would adopt the bitcoin standard).
The price trend is then a reflection of this eventual value being very, very large, and the probability going from "yeah, sure dude, pass the joint" to "wait, could this actually maybe possibly happen?". Bitcoin has a lot of good things going for it: It's very divisible, easy to transport and exchange, transactions are relatively fast (when compared the layer of money they are supposed to replace) and very traceable, its supply is not subordinated to the whims of a single political actor, it is scarce, and it has the first mover advantage that kicked off the "perpetual motion machine".
The main problem I see, and the reason I think it's not going to succeed is that it is too scarce, and therefore too deflationary: As the adoption of the US dollar (and the size of the world economy) grew, the fed was able to "print" infinite dollars to supply the infinite demand there was for them, this has had many effects that people may or may not like, but one of them is that the value of one dollar in "real goods" terms is more or less stable within a reasonable window of time. If I take a mortgage denominated in bitcoin today, and then it quadruples in value in the following 3 years, what the hell am I supposed to do? There is a hypothetical "steady state" in which this no longer matters and the price is bound to remain stable, but how are we supposed to "make the jump(s, because there'd be several)" seems like an intractable problem.
The steelman for Bitcoin is that it provides a service (payments operating outside of the law) that is valuable and people will pay for, and those "customers" provide a stream of non-speculative revenue that can be used to pay off miners and investors.
However, it seems like Bitcoin is obsolete and not fit for this purpose. The goto cryptocurrency for most payments usage is Tether, because it is designed to act like an actual currency (in particular, being a stable store of value and quickly and cheaply transferable). For users that need true privacy, Monero or ZCash are much better.
I would also like to see this. In my view it doesn't exist. In my view crypto is nothing but ponzi and black market.
Also I don't agree that crypto is scare. Bitcoin itself may be but there's no barrier to creating new coins.
I could imagine a model where being the 'biggest' coin has value, so you can ignore everything that isn't bitcoin. The only fundamental economic value it has, AFAICT, are for low-friction international transfers and illicit activity.
The steelman case for Bitcoin is that it allows people to evade the law and people will pay for that service (Bitcoin proponents usually add a "and that's a good thing" to the end, but you don't have to think that to believe that it provides a revenue stream for Bitcoin).
The real problem is that Tether and Monero are much better suited to this role, making Bitcoin obsolete anyway.
>Account for both supply and demand (yes, I know it's scarce, but so are my toenail clippings!).
It does have at least *some* financial use - drug trade, sending money overseas to countries with unreliable banking systems, online stores run by libertarians who accept Bitcoin as a point of pride, etc. So I think there's nonzero economic value, although I'm not sure how you'd define it in terms of supply and demand.
> sending money overseas to countries with unreliable banking systems
I don't think this is a real usecase for crypto. The part that is actually hard and expensive is the "have branches in the target country that will hand people usable currency or goods". That is the service that people pay Western Union for, and one that cryptocurrencies don't offer at all. The exact form that the 0s and 1s take on the way to your expensive network of agents is completely irrelevant.
Heck, in Arab countries, it's common to do the payments in the form where no money is actually transferred for religious reasons, proving that *you don't actually need money at all* to do the cross-border transfer part of the service.
“ - Assume rational actors.”
Isn’t this a non-starter?
People like to object to this standard economic assumption and I've always found it somewhat sophomoric. 'Rational' doesn't mean cognitively optimal or logical. It just means having a preference and being able to pursue that preference in a coherent way. In no way does it mean that the preference is optimal or even superficially rational. There are economic models of illicit drug use even though doing harmful drugs is obviously irrational.
Ok this makes sense, thanks.
How so? I'm looking for a steelman model here.
I withdraw my objection in light of Wanda T.’s explanation.
With all the political chaos / constitutional crisis, it seems the prediction markets aren't really budging on the US becoming a dictatorship.
Here's this manifold market on Trump ending democracy (currently at 13% that he does): https://manifold.markets/JRR/if-trump-wins-the-2024-election-wil-877b62a380ec
Another on the US still being a liberal democracy at the end of his term: https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti (61% that it will still be a democracy, didn't really fluctuate that much due to the shenanigans)
A Metaculus one on the US becoming a dictatorship before 2100 (25% that it does, again, didn't really budge due to shenanigans): https://www.metaculus.com/questions/15609/us-dictatorship-by-2100/
I just found that second one, 39% chance that a world-historical event happens is rather high odds.
Disappointed I wasn't able to find a market for this in polymarket, as they're betting with real money there and presumable are more accurate.
Have prediction markets been wildly wrong before?
>Another on the US still being a liberal democracy at the end of his term: https://manifold.markets/Siebe/if-trump-is-elected-will-the-us-sti (61% that it will still be a democracy, didn't really fluctuate that much due to the shenanigans)
61% feels high to me, not so much because of Trump (though he may yet have his Andrew Jackson moment - I'd be interested in seeing a market on that...) but because
>https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/when-will-the-first-artificial-general-intelligence-system-be-devised-tested-and-publicly-known-of/
has a median prediction date for at least weak AGI of 2026-09-29, well before the 2028 election.
I'm anticipating a very wild ride, and I'll be surprised if we don't see _some_ sort of major economic and political changes before November 2028. Though I have no idea what the direction of those changes will be.
> Have prediction markets been wildly wrong before?
A prediction market is never "wildly wrong" on a single event. Let's say Trump ends democracy tomorrow... was 13% wrong or right? We can't really say. The correctness of a market is measured by its record of predictions... if things that are predicted at 13% happen half the time, then one could say it's wildly wrong.
There are also sometimes cases where you can just say "come on, that's ridiculous", like when prediction markets showed a non-negligible chance of Trump winning 2020 even months after the election was called.
But yeah, judging prediction track records tends to be difficult and subjective. Even if you have a lot of markets, your choice of which past markets to include or exclude from the record can drastically alter the results.
Would anyone like to explain the idea of being trans to me. I don't really understand it.
Say you are a sensitive man who relates more to women (e.g., you're generally demure, soft spoken, care about how you look, etc...). That's fine. Why not just be that.
Say you are a man who wants to look like a woman. Why not just cross dress?
Say you are a man who wants to experience sex similar to a woman, why not just be into gay sex, and e.g., pegging.
The benefits of having transitional surgery seems small (convenience when cross dressing, and better emulation of sex as a woman) but the downsides seem insane (being forever sterile + major invasive surgery).
I also don't understand the idea of a man claiming to be a woman. Or claiming to feel like a woman. Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
It would be very different if actually sex change were possible and safe (like in the Ian M Banks culture series), I'd totally try being a different gender then (why not?), but to me, having aesthetic surgery that sterilizes you seems pretty unrelated to changing gender.
>Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
Same, and transgender discourse confused me for similar reasons to what you describe. For me, the breakthrough was realizing that so many cisgender people DO feel like a gender and DO have a strong sense of a gender. (So much so that many cis people are uncomfortable playing a character that doesn't match their gender, even in a video game.)
Gender still seems daft to me (can't we all just be ourselves?), but it turns out it's not just trans people with a strong sense of gender!
>Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
Thirded! I think the term for my situation is cis-male-by-default. Being a STEMM (more specifically, chemistry and physics) person is _far_ more central to my identity than my gender is.
Yeah. That does suprise me! I'm glad I'm not the only one confused by this sense.
>Or claiming to feel like a woman. Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender. I'm just me.
That sounds like what I've heard described as being "cis by default". It hasn't been formally studied, as far as I know, but anecdotally that seems to be the exception, not the norm. Most people do feel a strong sense of gender, one way or another, where having your gender affirmed (looking and feeling like your gender, doing gender-coded things, being seen by others as your gender, etc) feels good and having it contradicted feels uncomfortable.
For most people, this sense of gender aligns pretty well with your body and the social/legal gender identity you were born into and it's relatively uncommon to be in situations that go against your internal gender orientation. But it is very common for cis men, for example, to feel distress at not being able to grow a good beard, having a small penis, having androgynous facial features, being mistaken for a woman, doing female-coded things (even relatively minor practical stuff like holding your wife or girlfriend's purse for her), or at having to wear feminine (or effeminate) coded clothing.
For a trans person who hasn't started transitioning, it's common to feel that kind of distress as a background noise thing all the time. It's so pervasive that trans people often have no idea we're trans until well into adulthood, since the distress just feels like a pervasive fact or life, and temporary relief from the distress (e.g. from cross-dressing or role-playing) is experienced as euphoria by comparison to the baseline. Before I realized I was trans, I had been diagnosed for depression and anxiety, was on antidepressants (which made the symptoms more bearable but didn't resolve them).
When Abigail Thorn came out as trans in 2021, she made an hour-long coming-out video giving context the the announcement. In that video, she compared her experience trying to live as a man to working a soul-crushing job that is completely wrong for you, that you didn't choose and don't feel able to quit, and that subtly poisons every aspect of your life. And that everything really did get better for her when she realized she could "quit the job" by transitioning and followed through on that realization. My own experience in these respects mirror hers very closely.
>Say you are a sensitive man who relates more to women (e.g., you're generally demure, soft spoken, care about how you look, etc...). That's fine. Why not just be that.
>Say you are a man who wants to look like a woman. Why not just cross dress?
I already did these things for most of my adult life, at least part time. It was nowhere near enough. Cross-dressing in particular is awkward to do unless you're committing to social transition, since cis people publicly cross-dressing tends to be stigmatized even in relatively liberal settings.
>The benefits of having transitional surgery seems small
Surgery is less central to transition than you seem to be assuming. A lot of us do get or want to get bottom surgery, but it's very common for trans people to not have had any surgery at all or to only have less invasive cosmetic procedures (mastectomy for trans men, breast augmentation for trans women, liposuction, hair transplants, hair removal, etc). Social and medical transition are the much more central aspects of transitioning.
Social transitioning is stuff like name and pronoun changes, voice training, changing how you dress and present yourself, etc.
Medical transition is taking medications that change your hormone balance, usually to close to a cis woman's hormones for trans women or to a cis man's for trans men. Over the course of a few years, this does a lot more than most people suppose to change your body. It also, for many/most people, has a direct effect on mood and mental well-being: biochemical dysphoria, distress from having the "wrong" hormones in your system, seems to be a thing and is also observed in cis people, e.g. men with low testosterone levels or who need to take anti-androgen medications for medical reasons.
I don't understand how a transwoman can accomplish their transition without also having bottom surgery. How can you claim to feel female if you still have a penis?
There's more to gender, and even to physical sex, than genitalia. It's much more common to interact with someone in a gendered way than it is to interact with their genitals.
As for the internal experience of trans women (and trans men) who have not had bottom surgery, it varies by person. The intensity and salience of bottom surgery varies quite a bit. Some of us are entirely satisfied by combinations of social transition, things that hormones can do alone, and relatively minor procedures like hair removal. Others are intensely bothered by our original genitals and want bottom surgery as soon as possible. I think a large majority of us are somewhere in between, where other aspects of transition get us most of the way to where we want to be, but we'd still prefer to have (cis) female genitals rather than our original equipment.
A major factor in not getting bottom surgery is that it is a very big deal to get. It's a major surgery with a long and intense recovery process. It's expensive and often poorly covered by insurance. Typical results are very good, but there's a non-negligible risk of substantial complications, including anorgasmia. There aren't a lot of surgeons who do the procedures relative to the number of potential patients, and the surgeons with the best track records and reputations especially tend to have very long waiting lists. There's time-intensive prep (mostly permanent hair removal from the tissues used to construct the vagina) that's definitely required before you can get the surgery and often before you can even get on the waiting list for the procedure. And while there's a lot less gatekeeping than there used to be, there still is a process that needs to be gone through before having surgery to prove to the surgeon and your insurance company that you understand all the risks and downsides, are competent to give informed consent, and that you're "trans enough" that it makes sense for you to get the surgery. The combined effects of these is that while a very large majority of trans women would absolutely avail ourselves of near-magical sci-fi nanobot surgery that gave us perfect results overnight, most of us haven't had surgery yet and many of us never intend to get surgery.
According to a large 2015 survey of trans folk in the US, 12% of trans women have already had bottom surgery, 54% "want it some day", 22% "not sure if they want this", and 12% "do not want this". For trans men, there are two different types of full bottom surgery (metoidioplasty and phallopasty) that were surveyed separately, which complicates interpretation by making it hard to distinguish between trans men who don't want one procedure because they want the other and trans men who don't want either procedure; what I can glean is that 5% have already had one procedure or the other, 25-44% definitely want one procedure or the other but haven't gotten it yet (depending on how many respondents answered "want it some day" to both to indicate they want one or the other but aren't sure which), at least 49% are not sure, and at most 24% are not interested in either procedure.
Source: pages 101-102 (by in-document page numbers) or 105-106 (by PDF page numbers) of this report:
https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf
"There's more to gender, and even to physical sex, than genitalia. It's much more common to interact with someone in a gendered way than it is to interact with their genitals."
My own difficulty with this is that, aside from the sort of things where genitalia and/or chromosomes were likely to be relevant, I thought we had spent about ninety of the last hundred years trying to shift society towards, "yeah, that stuff isn't hard-coded to gender any more, girls can wear trousers and fly airplanes, guys can talk about their feelings and stay home to raise the kids if they want". And, yeah, nothing is perfect, but we were making really good progress - to the point where my brother can be a stay-at-home househusband with no loss of status and his daughter is a pilot and everyone thinks that's great.
So why is it that now, when we're closer to success than ever before, there's a massive social movement to say "nope, all that stuff is gendered along the traditional lines and you shouldn't feel comfortable doing the Guy Stuff unless you go Full Guy or vice versa"?
>So why is it that now, when we're closer to success than ever before, there's a massive social movement to say "nope, all that stuff is gendered along the traditional lines and you shouldn't feel comfortable doing the Guy Stuff unless you go Full Guy or vice versa"?
I am not saying that. What I am saying is that some aspects of body, appearance, and behavior are culturally gender-coded, and that taken together these things affect how people are perceived both by themselves and others.
I am generally strongly in favor of men and women doing whichever combination of these feels right for them. What feels right to me is mostly female-coded.
"Body" is a big part of the picture here, too. There are a lot of physical changes that are possible without or before bottom surgery. Being on hormones for years has a pretty big effect on secondary sexual characteristics, whether or not you've had bottom surgery. Trans women grow breasts, lose muscle mass and definition, lose body hair, regrow receding hairlines, and have body fat redistribute over time to produce a more feminine figure. Trans men grow beards, gain muscle mass and definition, gain body hair, have their voices drop, and have fat redistribute in the opposite direction. Skin texture and body odors change in either direction. Facial features change subtly but significantly (due to changes in fat distribution, muscle, and connective tissue) to appear more feminine or masculine respectively.
There are also a lot of procedures other than bottom surgery than many trans people opt for. Breasts can be surgically augmented or removed. Facial hair can be permanently removed with lasers or electrolysis. Fat tissue can be surgically removed or transplanted to different parts of the body. Cosmetic surgery can do more to facial features besides what hormones do. And so on.
In general, we perceive most of the people around us as one gender or another, and we largely do this automatically and subconsciously. Most of us only have direct personal knowledge of a very small number of these people's genitals, and then usually only after we've known them a while and already confidently mentally gendered them.
Thank you for that explanation. However, I admit I still can't understand how gender identity can be held separate from genitalia among some trans people.
"But it is very common for cis men, for example, to feel distress at not being able to grow a good beard, having a small penis, having androgynous facial features, being mistaken for a woman, doing female-coded things (even relatively minor practical stuff like holding your wife or girlfriend's purse for her), or at having to wear feminine (or effeminate) coded clothing."
Isn't this all about social conformity though, and nothing to do with gender? For example, in ancient Rome it was considered manly to have a small penis. There's nothing biological about being a man and penis size.
Like it is incredibly common (and expected and part of healthy function) for a adult to want to feel normal and accepted into their society. As such, someone who looks down at themselves as sees a woman's body is going to look around and try and ensure they conform to the expectations society places on people with women's bodies, but nothing in that has anything to do with "feeling like a woman." That is just playing the hand you have been dealt.
I think you are committing the typical mind fallacy and generalizing from your own experience of not having a strong innate sense of gender and only doing gendered things out of a drive for social conformity. That is your own experience, but it is very much not mine (gender incongruity pushes me in the decidedly opposite direction from social conformity in many respects), and it is not what I've heard very, very often from cis people about their experiences.
But how do you deconflate these things? Like, my experience of feeling like a man is not feeling a strong sense of gender. So does that mean that a woman who feels like a man feels like me (i.e., no strong sense of gender). Obviously not. So what does she feel like? How can she know she feels like a man, when she has never been a man.
I can understand her relating to masculine traits (the traits she statistically observes as being associated with men, and the traits society tells her are masculine), but it seems she is just a tomboy (good for her, why not) or someone with masculine tendencies rather than a man "trapped in a woman's body."
How do you deconflate being unhappy with who you are, with the desire to be someone anyone else, with the desire to be of the opposite gender. Given nobody can ever know what it feels like to be anything other than what they are (or have been), it seems strange to me to so confidently assert you are fundamentally of a gender you have no experience of.
You are being civil, but you do come across as trying to make the case there’s something bogus about the wish to change genders. How about coming at the question another way.? Ask somebody trans to tell you about times when the feeling of being the wrong gender was really powerful and times after changing genders that it felt really right.
Or try to think of things you have experienced that might be analogous to gender dysphoria. Let’s say you are short and hate it — have a feeling that this small body just does not represent your actual dignified self. (Even though being tall is not something tall people think about all the time. In that way it’s like gender — males don’t think all the time about being male). If there was a procedure that’s not too dangerous that would allow you to change your height you would probably undergo it. But there isn’t, so you have no choice but to put up with being short. But it may bother you for your whole life.
If you do not have a discontent of that sort about your body, you probably at least know some cis men who do, and can it least
form a mental model of what that’s like. Ok, so consider the possibility that gender dysphoriafeels like height dysphoria, but considerably stronger.
Another analog: Being in a situation where everybody has the wrong idea of you. Let’s say you go to some demonstration to photograph it You personally think the cause is not worthwhile and the demonstrators are silly. But the demonstrators don’t know that, and are giving you thumbs up and trying to chat with you. Meanwhile, people of your own persuasion, standing in the sidelines, are looking at you disapprovingly. It’s unpleasant, right? So consider the possibility that males who have the feeling that they are really women have that misperceived feeling all the time when they are in public looking male.
Big picture: Try your best to form a model of someone else’s experience. If that’s simply impossible, you can challenge them to prove they’re
not just making something up. But lead by trying to understand.
>Given nobody can ever know what it feels like to be anything other than what they are (or have been), it seems strange to me to so confidently assert you are fundamentally of a gender you have no experience of.
I have lived as a cis man. During that time, I've tried out various combinations of being gender-conforming and gender-noncomforming. Gender nonconforming felt quite a bit better than being gender-conforming in most cases. I have also lived as a trans women and vastly prefer it to living either as a gender-conforming or a gender-noncomforming cis man.
The standard answer to "how do you know" is to try gender exploration in safe contexts and see how it feels, to learn about what medical transition can and cannot do to your body and think hard about whether or not those things seem desirable to you, and if get to a point where you're pretty sure you want the effects of medical transition, then give hormones a try and go off of them if you start not liking the effects.
It is a genuinely difficult question for many of us. Some trans people have a very strong intuitive sense of being a different gender from a very young age, but it's also very common to be completely oblivious to anything other than a generalized sense of wrongness until well into adulthood.
But that is not the same as being. That is just the feeling of seeming. Indeed, a man might say enjoy dressing as a woman, talking as a woman, etc... but that just means he likes those things (good for him), but that doesn't mean he knows anything at all about what it is to be a woman. He just has some experience of seaming to be a woman.
I don't understand why there needs to be a category or a category flip. A man can just enjoy dressing and talking as though he were a woman. There's nothing wrong with it. Similarly a woman can just enjoy seeming like a man. There's nothing wrong with it. Why the need to redefine these people as being or a different gender than they factually are.
> Gender nonconforming felt quite a bit better than being gender-conforming in most cases.
Could you expand on that a bit? Exactly how did being conforming feel bad?
Biology and culture mix in complex and not-fully understood ways. It's definitely not all one thing or the other.
The examples you have though: penis size, facial hair are demonstrably cultural, in that cultures vary as to whether or not these traits are considered masculine. There's nothing particularly complex or misunderstood about that particular claim. It is clearly 100% social constructed. You could make an argument that on average cultures are more likely to associate big penis with masculinity say, but that is besides the point. In any given culture, the association a person makes is 100% driven by culture
There are cultures in which men are normally clean-shaven. But even in these, to the extent I am familiar with, the ability to grow a beard is seen as masculine (desirable in men and undesirable in women) and the contrary is seem as either feminine or childish.
The ideal of penis size and shape varies quite a bit by culture, yes. It's not completely arbitrary, though: I've heard of cultures where the smaller side of medium was the ideal, but I know of none where a micropenis was the ideal. But as far as I know, having a penis (and moreover having one that approximates the cultural ideal) is considered a core masculine trait just about everywhere.
Disclaimer: I don't identify as trans, I just personally know a *lot* of trans people
> Speaking personally, I don't feel like any gender.
IME, this is actually the main difference between you and (most) trans people.
People who identify as trans in an impermissive society (which, despite the impression you might get online, applies to everywhere except the most liberal enclaves of the SFBA) are largely those who have such a strong sense of which gender they are - or more often, which gender they are *not* - that they want to brave the significant downsides of presenting as trans and transitioning. They usually are people that experience a visceral negative reaction to seeing themselves in the mirror as their agab (inducing self-hate and depression).
That said, I don't think your sense of gender is as absent as you think. As a thought-or-real experiment, I suggest dressing up in drag - no shaving or contouring, just makeup on your normal face, preferably with as much of your body hair exposed from your frilly dress. Now look at yourself in the mirror - really look at yourself. I would be surprised if you *didn't* feel some sense of deep discomfort or wrongness. That's the sort of feeling my trans friends report all the time. (And if you truly don't feel any sort of discomfort at that, I'd actually describe you as GNC or nonbinary, not that I would suggest that you need to alter your life at all for that label)
When I was little child, I used to like wearing dresses, and it's a pretty standard thing for women to want to apply female makeup to their partners, and a few girlfriends have done that to me. I don't find any of that uncomfortable or strange. Personally, I'm comfortable in a dress (kinda fun, to dress up in a partner's clothes say, etc..), but I don't really have any strong desire for it, and I definitely don't want the social stigma associated with it.
To me, dressing up as a women and exploring ideas of feminity seems pretty normal and part of masculinity, e.g., the ancient Greeks, e.g., rockstars from 20/30 years ago (like David Bowie). I find that all so much more normal and healthy seaming than being Trans (e.g., actually having a sterilizing invasive produce / claiming to be something one is clearly biologically not).
>I find that all so much more normal and healthy seaming than being Trans (e.g., actually having a sterilizing invasive produce / claiming to be something one is clearly biologically not).
You're conflating "being trans" with "wanting to medically transition". That's perfectly understandable if your only exposure to it is mostly conservative people yelling about it online, but it's going to give you a warped view of the community. There are a lot of people who stay at just the level you described of gender-nonconformity, and most that do transition start with that, and only go on HRT after seeing friends and loved ones react positively to it.
Bowie himself is not evidence against transness, but rather evidence that people outside the gender binary have always existed, our ways of talking about them have just changed. I'm not saying that's good or bad, it just is. (Bowie, for the record, had a well-documented romantic relationship with a trans woman)
Also, the obsession with "sterilization" always struck me as gross and controlling, as if not being able to generate children is some sort of defect. Many people do not want to ever be pregnant, and that's not mental illness. And it's easy to see why! Birth control sucks in many cases! Being pregnant has huge health risks! Do you have similar confusion over men who get vasectomies?
Would you, personally, jump at the chance to make it so that every time you had sex, there was a risk that you would have a child grow inside of you for 9 months? If the answer is no, why do you think people who are born like that are somehow wrong if they want to change it?
(I won't even get started on the biological truth argument, since it's clearly incoherent)
I think you are correct I conflated being trans with wanting to (or having already) medically transitioned. Thank you for identifying that
Also re unplanned pregnancy, unfortunately that is basically the defining characteristic of being a woman, in that it has evolutionarily shaped women's instincts, and massively shaped how cultures frames and interacts with women. It seems bizzare to me for anyone to claim to be a woman, when they have no biological connection to that defining and shaping property.
I do not know how to explain that "women are defined primarily by their ability to bear children [for me, a man]" is a fundamentally regressive and misogynist view that you should not be proudly re-iterating.
Your argument isn't event coherent here - we were talking about the sterilization of *trans men*, and you're suddenly talking about *trans women*. If your views were consistent here, this would be the opposite of what you're arguing - that by sterilizing themselves, they're cutting themselves off from their "defining characteristic", making themselves "biologically" man.
But that's clearly not the case, and frankly you seem to be reasoning backwards from a discomfort with not being able to define women based on whether you could get them pregnant.
That's understandable! As a man, your instincts have been "evolutionarily shaped" by your imperative to get women pregnant. It's shaped the culture you grew up in and how you were taught to interact with women, and altered the framing of how you interact with them. It's certainly good that you're asking questions about this, since it's a difficult thought pattern to move past in the journey for rationality.
How and why is it misogynist to say that women are defined by the ability to give birth?
I would equal say that men are defined by the ability to sire children. Is that misandry to you?
I don't appreciate the tarring of the view point, especially as you don't bother to actually articulate how it is wrong.
I made it clear what I meant by the term defined by: a) the difference between these two classes emotions and instincts are mainly shaped by this key characteristics, and b) the way human cultures treat each class is mainly shaped by this key characteristic.
Both a) and b) are as I understand them, uncontroversial scientific consensus (i.e., Evolutionary Biology 101 and Anthropology 101). Why do you find these facts misogynistic?
There's nothing wrong with being able to sire children or birth children, nore does anyone have an obligation to carry out the defining feature of their class. For example, gay men are still men, but that doesn't mean that if a gay man gets into a subway care late at night with a single woman the woman might be subconsciously or consciously afraid. That's is just the biological reality of the female and male experience. You seem to want to deny people's basic emotional lives.
Anyway, my main point was if you are man, and you cut of your penis, and create a wound shaped like a vagina you do not become a woman. You are unlikely to have the female fear of men. And it is unfair to women to say you are one. It fundamentally cheapens their lived experience.
I mean, gender non-conformity is perfectly understandable to me. I just don't understand the claim of "being" another gender.
You "feel like" you are another gender. You aren't literally the other gender. And I find it a bit insulting to people who have grown up in that gender, who actually are of that gender, to have others claim that the two experiences equate.
Why is it insulting? It doesn’t affect my manhood if someone else also considers himself a man. There is not a limited supply of masculinity in the world.
It is potentially insulting because each group (men and women) has it's own unique experiences, including hardships. For example, men generally experience a lot of rejection by women and have to grow to deal with that. While, women generally experience a lot of unwanted attention from men, and have to grow to deal with that.
If you've never had these formative experiences (e.g., being embarrassed in front of your peer group for starting periods early or late) then it's not really fair to claim you are one of that group.
It's a bit like say an Asian suddenly painting their skin black and claiming to be Black. I think generally society recognizes that they are not Black, and that it is insulting to the Black community to recognize them as such (i.e., because they lack the shared life experiences of someone who actually grew up Black)
The point is the sterilizing is irreversible. That's a huge huge deal. If say at age twenty you decide to undergo such an operation, you are massively restricting the abilities of your future selves to perform one the grandest gifts in the entire universe: the creation of new life.
We would, I think be deeply appalled by a twenty year old deciding to cut of their arm, and I think the reason for that is that it's not just their arm, but the arm of all their future selves too. You take one of the most important and significant decisions you can make (having children) away from yourself.
I'm 43. I was 41 when I started transitioning. I already have a child, and my wife and I already decided that we didn't want more. Many cis men and women in my situation get themselves electively sterilized anyway.
People who think they might want to have children in the future when they start their transitions often have sperm or egg samples harvested and preserved, for use in artificial insemination or IVF later on if desired. It's common for doctors to recommend this before starting hormones, since hormones often interfere with fertility, and it's almost universal practice for doctors to recommend it again (including the option of going off hormones temporarily to recover fertility) before bottom surgery.
That makes sense. Yeah, I think I find that a lot more relatable (doing it late in age once your sense of self is stable, and after kids).
Preserving sperm and egg samples also makes a good deal of sense. I'm glad that is (hopefully) standard practice
I'm not disgusted by body integrity dysphoria (i.e., the desire). I am repulsed by the idea of someone cutting off their own limbs (i.e., the act), and I believe society is in broad agreement with me here (as is a normal psychological safe guard against doing such!)
Although, if it's part of a religious ritual and associated with gaining status... Then maybe it is more palatable. The main objection is that it seems like major irreversible self harm.
Where technology such that limbs could be regrown, then I'd have no problem with it.
The problem with identifying one's sense of gender as *absent* is that even without an internal feeling of wrongness, I imagine many people would feel an external feeling of "I don't want to be treated the way that I imagine the rest of the world would treat me if looked like an unusually masculine woman, or an unusually feminine man."
For me, when I try to perform your thought experiment (admittedly, in my head, and not with actual makeup), this external feeling (whether it is real or imagined in my circle of friends and acquaintances, in particular) is sufficiently strong that I find it hard to tell whether I also have an internal feeling of wrongness.
But isn't this just all the desire to seem normal? Like I don't care if I'm perceived as feminine, but I do care if I'm perceived as weak or low status, etc... and certain cultures associate being a masculine woman as being bad, and a feminine man as being bad, but none of those associations seem anything like biological. It's all just culture.
Historically, America has a hell of a lot more anti-femine men and anti-masculine women sentiment than Europe, where I think people are more comfortable with androgyny and people just being however they are.
It seems there is a massive and unexamined conflation between the desire to confirm and seem normal and gender, and it kind of distrurbs me that it seems so unexamined.
That's the thing, though. I admit it's not a perfect metaphor, but my understanding is that for a lot of trans people, the "external" experience you're describing is very similar to what they feel all the time - and being misgendered is the same feeling you're describing as being perceived as a very "masculine woman" or "feminine man".
But that's completely non-biological. It mostly has to do with what I imagine would get me stuffed into a trash can by bullies when I was in middle school.
Most trans people put up with dealing with a lot *more* of the experience I'm describing for the sake of something that they care about more strongly.
And for an even more comprehensive resource, there's the Gender Dysphoria Bible, which is a commonly-recommended community guide for people who newly realize they are (or might be) trans and their friends and family members:
https://genderdysphoria.fyi
But isn't this going to be an incredibly ideologically slanted text that presupposes loads of things.
You are being civil, but you do come across as trying to make the case there’s something bogus about the wish to change genders. How about coming at the question another way.? Ask somebody trans to tell you about times when the feeling of being the wrong gender was really powerfull and times after changing genders that it felt really right.
Or try to think of things you have experienced that might be analogous to gender dysphoria. Let’s say you are short and hate it — have a feeling that this small body just does not represent your actual dignified self. You have little choice but to put up with being short, but you may be bothered by it your whole life. (Even though being tall is not something tall
people think about all the time.). If there was a procedure that’s not too dangerous that would allow you to change iyoir height you would
probably undergo it. But there isn’t, so you have no choice but to put up with being short. But it may bother you for your whole life. If you do not have a discontent of that sort about your body, you probably at least know some cis men who do, and can it least
form a mental model
of what that’s like. Ok, so consider the possibility that gender dysphoriafeels like height dysphoria, but considerably stronger.
Another analog: Being in a situation where everybody has the wrong idea of you. Let’s say you go to some demonstration to photograph it
You personally think the cause is not worthwhile and the demonstrators are silly. But the demonstrators don’t know that, and are giving you thumbs up and trying to chat with you. Meanwhile, people of your own persuasion, standing in the sidelines, are looking at you disapprovingly. It’s unpleasant, right? So consider the possibility that males
who have the feeling that they are really women have that misperceived feeling all the time when they are in public looking male.
I value your observation regarding the way I am engage and asking questions.
Your thoughts experiment about being short:
In this scenario isn't the whole deal not that the guy is short and "feels like he should be tall" but rather the guy is unhappy with how society treats short people, and is jealous of taller people.
In terms of how I'd attempt to help such a man, I'd try and help him no longer define himself through a perceived negative society.
But I think if I said that was my default approach to someone saying they were trans (e.g., they're unhappy being a man, and I try and counsel them to no longer define themselves according to societies view of masculinity, but instead just be themselves) people would potentially say that is trans phobia.
I don't think you've got the short guy right. Didn't you ever hate anything about the way you look, even when you were in your teens? Hating one's appearance really does not have much to do with the actual disadvantages of having a certain feature that is a negative by conventional standards. It's mostly an inability to escape the feeling of actually being ugly, lame and inferior, as though the physical flaw were a manifestation of one's essential self. Maybe you need to think of a situation where somebody's flaw is way worse than being short. Let's say the guy has cerebral palsy, and one of his arms is permanently bent in to a sort of preying mantis position, and he has involuntary facial grimaces. No, these deformities don't say anything whatever about his smarts, dignity, and worth, but I hope you get that it is quite hard for people in that situation to fully free themselves from the feeling of being grotesque and inferior. And you would not get anywhere telling somebody in that situation that they are as good as everybody else. People have been telling them that their whole life. If you said it, you'd be about the thousandth person to do so. And they already know it's true. but there's a part of their mind that is not on board with it.
You don't sound trans phobic, more like you're sort of stuck on the idea that nobody could really, deeply want to change their gender, and preoccupied with finding some way to prove that's the case. It's possible you're right, but the info you need is what trans people felt that led them to taking hormones, getting surgery, etc and you're so busy arguing you don't get much info about that. And you're missing some easy-to-understand things. For instance, one of your arguments is that women who feel they are men think all the time about being men, whereas real men do not. Ergo a woman who thinks all the time about how she's really a man can't be someone who is, in some sense, male, because she is not thinking like a real male. Come on! That's like saying that someone whose heart is set on becoming rich is not cut out to be a wealthy person, because wealthy people mostly take their advantages for granted -- they don't go around thinking "I'm rich, I'm rich" all day. The way it works is that somebody who wants something they do not have thinks about the thing all the time. Once they get it, they don't. That, rather than a radical flaw in their supposed maleness, is what explains the preoccupation with being male you see in women with gender dysphoria.
If you want to understand a perspective, then reading texts written from that perspective can be a useful source of data.
For sure, but I want to see the perspective challenged. Like I feel there is this huge void in assumptions between my (doubtless naive) understanding of trans philosophy and experience and my own experience and framing of the world.
Obviously nobody owes me any explanation on the topic, and so I especially appreciate you guys taking the time to engage! (Particularly as it is doubtless a sensitive topic)
Thank you! I will have a look at it. I just have not yet. I do appreciate you guys answering and engaging!
One of the concerns that gets raised here occasionally is the idea that much of the industrialized world is going to be in trouble soon because of low birth rates and associate problems, with too many old unproductive people being supported by too few working younger people.
Is there a country where this has already happened, and which is already facing hard choices or kind of going to shit because of a messed-up population pyramid?
Japan is the best example, as they've had the lowest fertility for the longest period of time, but they aren't yet at the point of demographic collapse that's normally talked about.
Their working age population peaked in 1995, and their total population peaked in 2007. The ratio of elderly to productive people is currently about 70%, and will increase farther once the late 1960's baby boom ages into retirement (starting about now).
Their debt is 200% of GDP, and likely to increase farther as GDP declines. Their interest rates have been effectively zero or negative for the past 25 years, so this high debt-to-GDP ratio has been serviceable (interest rates are not a significant portion of government revenue), but they recently raised the yield to .5%. Servicing this debt will start to become very expensive very quickly if they are forced to continue raising this rate. This will either necessitate higher borrowing, making the problem worse, money printing, risking spiraling inflation, or higher taxes, making the quality of life for the citizens worse.
Of course no one really knows what happens to a high debt-to-gdp country when its GDP is declining, tax revenues are shrinking, and debt continues to grow. Maybe the deflationary pressure of a shrinking population is balanced by the inflationary pressure of high debt servicing costs, which leads to stabilization in decline, as we've seen with them in the past. Maybe at some point the whole system becomes fundamentally unsustainable, and we see a serious economic crisis.
From the perspective of tourists, Japan is an amazing place. From the perspective of working-age Japanese, they are working quite hard for diminishing returns to their quality of life. Of course emigration isn't really a feasible option for almost everyone, so the average Japanese just deals with the hand they are dealt, focuses on the work in front of them, and sucks it up. Even if they are living at a lower quality of life than their parents, and their children will probably do the same, there is no other choice.
Either way, the future prospects for Japan's youth are fundamentally worse than their parents. The international influence of Japan is on the downswing, and innovation has been on the decline for decades. The 4 decades of stagnation they've experienced may seem like it's no big deal, but there is a very big difference between where they are, and where they could have been without the stagnation. There is no reason to think the problem will get any better, and many reasons to think it will get much worse.
The fertility-doomers are relying on projection and prediction, which isn't certain, but looking at Japan, and South Korea will be the best examples to see how bad things can get. At least Japan is an island, but South Korea has an ideological neighbor to the North who is constitutionally bound to make them cease to exist. A declining pool of military-aged men isn't exactly a desirable thing when faced with that, and if the result of declining fertility in SK is civilizational suicide, then I think the people worrying about it were right to do so before the serious negative results played out.
Edit: Did I say 200% debt to GDP? Googling it it's actually 263% of GDP. Even a 0.5% interest rate becomes very expensive at that level. They are paying about 8.5% of government revenue on interest payments, which is likely to increase as older debt is renewed at positive interest rates.
>Did I say 200% debt to GDP? Googling it it's actually 263% of GDP. Even a 0.5% interest rate becomes very expensive at that level. They are paying about 8.5% of government revenue on interest payments, which is likely to increase as older debt is renewed at positive interest rates.
I believe a lot of that debt is in the government's hand, so it's kind of taking from one pocket and putting it into the other. Still, a very grim outlook.
Another detail: Japan has actually managed to sort of stabilize its birthrate, it used to be considered comically low, but now it's middle of the pack for first world countries, and genuinely good for east asia, in most of the rest of the world, the trend is for the decline to continue, Korea could have catastrophic outcomes in about 80 years.
Yes and no. The bank of Japan owns about half of Japanese government debt. Its liabilities are exactly as large as its assets though, so it’s not like the government can just not pay back that debt and walk away Scott free.
Source: https://www.boj.or.jp/en/statistics/boj/other/acmai/release/2025/ac250210.htm
The government owes money to the bank of Japan which owes money to commercial Japanese banks which owe money to businesses and consumers who owe money to each other, etc. etc.
The Bank of Japan holding much of the debt definitely puts them in a good position, and makes default impossible absent political deadlock, but it doesn’t mean the debt is somehow less consequential for the stability of the economy.
If managed well, which Japan honestly seems to be doing, it just looks like everyone gets poorer over time. Lower standards of living, less ability to make purchases. If Japan were open to it, it would also make immigrants better able to purchase land and housing and move to the country.
The only real question is if the reductions are across the board or more concentrated in certain demographics. They could make the decision to reduce retirement benefits, forcing people to work longer and making redistribution less painful for the youth. The alternative seems unworkable, as the youth get squeezed more and more and then 1) stop having kids, making the long term problem worse, or 2) leave the country, potentially causing a death spiral as the tax and worker bases both collapse.
Those options aren't necessarily the case, but definitely a failure mode of poor planning if they make the working population cover too much for the older non-working population.
Japan is definitely doing exceptionally well, but I wouldn’t be so sure with other countries. France erupted in protests when they raised the retirement age a couple of years, and will probably do so again if there is another increase.
Japan is productive, conformist and homogenous, with few foreign commitments to uphold or international influence to worry about, which I think gives them a very strong position to weather the decline. Their country may end up with a population half as large by 2100, but if things don’t literally collapse I think it’ll be alright.
Countries with fertile minorities (like many European countries) or with less conformist cultures will have a harder time. At some point a low fertility majority will have their influence challenged by a growing high-fertility minority, which can be a seriously destabilizing force.
Israel will be an interesting example to look at. The “far-right” parties there will necessarily gain strength as the Haredim grow in proportion while the secular Jews decline. Not necessarily an optimistic picture for those of us who support and wish to propagate more liberal values.
Agreed that demographic changes can disrupt a stable process. Japan being historically anti-immigrant may actually help it quite a bit compared to the alternative where the aging workforce is propped up by culturally different immigrants. And who would blame the immigrants in 20-30 years who don't want taxed like crazy to maintain high standards of living for an aging and unproductive population? That would be like the scenario of the youth getting squeezed I mentioned, but without those same older people being your parents and grandparents who you might value for other reasons.
Basically every country with an old age dependency ratio over ~30 has suffered economic stagnation from that time. This isn't directly related to birth rates but obviously that's one of the main ways of getting new people. And in some countries the only way due to hostility to immigration or inability to assimilate immigrants. That includes Japan but it also includes large parts of Europe.
I think Japan is the canonical answer? At least the place where the demographic transition happened first. Not sure how they are dealing with it.
They definitely have very low birth rates. And they have been trying to do something about it. But I haven't seen any signs that it is actually causing problems. Like, I haven't seen anything about Toyota, say, having trouble hiring enough junior staff.
I mean, there is the longstanding Japanese economic malaise, now in its fourth decade. Perma recession is not nothing.
No, it isn't.
Still though, Japan's fertility rate -- and South Korea's and Singapore's and Italy's and a couple other developed nations -- has been well under replacement level now for decades. A gentile type of stagnation is far from ideal but also isn't the kind of collapse that keeps getting predicted.
Perhaps in the long run, a stagnation phase lasting a couple of generations will turn out to have been the first step _towards_ inevitable economic and social collapse. I do get the arguments for that, but also get the counterarguments to it.
Overall point is simply that it is a _prediction_ not a proven fact.
yeah, and AI may very well upset the gameboard, one way or another, before the long term has a chance to come to pass.
Seconded!
One thing Japan is doing is investing heavily into robotics, so yes, I expect some form of AI being both necessary and having an impact.
(heh that should read "genteel" not "gentile"....)
Hmm... Interesting point. It is interesting that the PRC and the USA are leaders in AI (yes, EU, you have a presence too...). _Mostly_ this is just to be expected from technology centers ... but perhaps a part of the "damn the torpedoes!" race to AGI is the awareness of the PRC and USA rulers of the demographics of their work forces... It is going to be a wild ride.
Many Thanks! Well, I've seen left wing analysis that the low TFRs are why we are hearing a "push for wage slaves", for a higher TFR, from our rulers.
AFAIK, the "damn the torpedoes!" level of pushing for AGI as fast as possible seems new, starting with Trump's taking office. At the AI safety summit, Vance even explicitly gave safety concerns a negative weight, which is not something I've seen before.
It would be interesting to know how much of this is driven by wanting AGI workers, and how much is military (presumably secret classified projects).
Now, _personally_, I just want to _see_ AGI, so I'm glad to not see the labs chained up like civilian nuclear power was, with a 50 year hiatus. On the other hand, it would be nice if there was at least a _little_ control over the initial conditions, so that if we actually _do_ wind up building an ASI, it doesn't immediately try to grab every atom it can get its "hands" on in support of the first goal it was tasked with...
I'm trying to get into AI, using the Claude Sonnet API for translation. However, no matter what I try, it has a tendency to randomly cut off the input early (E.g. 400-500 tokens when the normal output would be 1500 tokens). I know it is *capable* of doing the full translation because it does successfully translate other things of the same length, but even repeated instructions not to truncate output don't seem to stop it.
Here's the system prompt I'm using:
You are a highly skilled translator with expertise in many languages. Your task is to accurately translate the pvodied story from Japanese into English while preserving the meaning, tone, and nuance of the original text. Please maintain proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the translated version. Output only the translation, and be sure to translate the entire chapter. Do not truncate the output. Do not say '[Continued in next part due to length...]'. Do not say '[Continued in next response due to length limit]'. If you fail to translate the entire story or truncate the response in any way, you will be fired.
I have a friend who uses ChatGPT in a production system to generate clickbait headlines for ads. There's a 32-character limit for headlines and he found that the LLM is MUCH better at conforming to that limit if he threatens it. Part of his prompt is "if you go over 32 characters then 1 million innocent children will be tortured to death."
What `stop_reason` are you getting back?
There's no "stop reason" or anything shown in the API response. The text part just cuts off early for no reason (and it ends in "[Continued in next part due to length...]", so Claude even knows that it is doing this intentionally).
If so then either their API reference is wrong (many such cases) or you've got some sort of middleware in the way - an overly rigid sdk library or something.
It's pretty clear that the truncation is coming from the LLM itself because a) it doesn't always do this and b) the message at the end varies.
I just learned that DOGE has its own twitter account where it posts constant updates. Is this kind of public outreach on xitter likely to increase public support for DOGE? Or will it mostly be seen by people who already support DOGE?
For example, https://nitter.poast.org/DOGE/status/1890849405932077378#m
"US taxpayer dollars were going to be spent on the following items, all which have been cancelled:
- $10M for "Mozambique voluntary medical male circumcision"
- $9.7M for UC Berkeley to develop "a cohort of Cambodian youth with enterprise driven skills"
- $2.3M for "strengthening independent voices in Cambodia"
- $32M to the Prague Civil Society Centre
- $40M for "gender equality and women empowerment hub"
- $14M for "improving public procurement" in Serbia
- $486M to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening,” including $22M for "inclusive and participatory political process" in Moldova and $21M for voter turnout in India
- $29M to "strenghening political landscape in Bangladesh"
- $20M for "fiscal federalism" in Nepal
- $19M for "biodiversity conversation" in Nepal
- $1.5M for "voter confidence" in Liberia
- $14M for "social cohesion" in Mali
- $2.5M for "inclusive democracies in Southern Africa"
- $47M for "improving learning outcomes in Asia"
- $2M to develop "sustainable recycling models" to "increase socio-economic cohesion among marginalized communities of Kosovo Roma, Ashkali, and Egypt""
>$486M to the “Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening,” including $22M for "inclusive and participatory political process" in Moldova and $21M for voter turnout in India
<mildSnark>
Given who the USA political process has chosen as its presidential candidates over (at least!) the last three elections, it seems a trifle ... counterintuitive that we should be giving electoral advice to anyone else.
In how many tongues can we make "Marginally Lesser Evil! Marginally Lesser Evil!" the election day victory chant?
</mildSnark>
People who were opposed will stay opposed because it confirms their priors, and vice versa. Factoids don’t do much to change people’s minds.
Surely there are still some people who are on the fence or have little to no awareness or preexisting opinion on DOGE?
Yes, and approximately zero of them are likely to follow Twitter at all.
It has the potential to be a great propaganda win for them and puts their opponent's on the defensive. Most people are not going to be in favor of $21 million for voter turnout in another country, especially one that seems fairly stable. Trying to defend that starts with understanding why it exists, what it does, and why the US has to be the one to pay for it (instead of, say, India). That's multiple levels to lose your audience or fail to convince even the ones still listening later.
Of course, that only works for cuts that are broadly popular. If they are making unpopular cuts or ones in programs that sound good, then the reverse can be true as long as an opponent is able to broadcast those cuts instead.
Yea but that assumes the xitter account reaches the persuadable people rather than it mostly preaching to the choir. I suspect you'd be right if their tweets were seen by every American
For propaganda purposes, it probably works better reaching the already supportive instead of the people prone to be against the cuts. It helps shore up support. I doubt there's any cut that would be persuasive to those who are already predisposed against Trump/Musk. Even if they hear about it and would be open to the cut from someone they trust, they're going to be critical. The same is true in reverse, that those who trust Trump/Musk (or have no trust for their opponents) are more likely to believe that the cuts are good.
I think it will build support. Checking out the recent posts (they claim) there are literally millions of people 120+ who are eligible to collect social security. How many are actually receiving benefits I have no idea, but if that number is more than like, 10, it's some pretty obvious fraud that seems to validate their existence.
So apparently Musk can't tell a difference between "database of all people ever assigned an SSN" and "database of people receiving benefits".
At this point I don't understand how SpaceX rockets manage to routinely deliver their payloads.
Musk is much too busy to really work on SpaceX, and has been for a long time. Of course, the public image he fosters is that he works 28 hours a day, 10 days a week. How is this possible, you ask? Simple really, he just gets up a bit earlier in the morning and works through the weekend.
I wrote a comment about Musk's involvement in his various companies two Open Threads ago:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-367/comment/91180074
I read your comment there and pretty much agree. A shame, really to see a once-in-a-generation brilliance-level engineering mind turn into a doge xitting on a living room carpet.
I blame sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Specifically, too many drugs, not enough rock'n'roll, and grimey sex.
"A 2023 audit of Social Security revealed that 18.9 million people in the Social Security database were listed as 100 years or older. This is compared to Census Bureau data, which found only 86,000 people in the U.S. were living past the age of 100.
However, the vast majority of those listed in the database were not still receiving monthly checks, with 18.4 million who had not earned benefits for 50 years and likely deemed dead. Only 44,000 were still earning checks, with just 13 of those listed as age 112 or older."
So, the number appears to be 13 over 112, which seems like a plausible number of people over 112 in the entire US.
https://www.newsweek.com/social-security-over-100-payments-elon-musk-claims-2032774
Did they also mention the cancer research? If not, maybe that would be a nice reply.
(You would probably just get blocked, though.)
I don't have a xitter account and I haven't read much of what's on the DOGE page
You have a point. It's to their advantage getting to choose which cuts are broadcast and which are not
Regarding (3), I'd forget Broader Impact sections in grants, since that stuff can be satisfied without DEI rhetoric.
Instead, I would focus on the "Broadening Participation" initiative by NSF:
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/initiatives/broadening-participation
An example program under this initiative that I've had to deal with is "Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC)", which impacts the computer science community under the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). See:
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22125/nsf22125.jsp#q7
In outward facing statements, BPC aims to help under-represented groups: women, Blacks and African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and persons with disabilities. In practice, BPC is DEI.
An Example: The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC...no, not "Sex and the City") program lists a 2023 budget of 69 million USD (still thinking of sex?) for an anticipated 75 awards. Of those awards, 25 are anticipated to be Medium-sized (600K to 1.2 million), and each such grant MUST have a BPC plan. That is, roughly 33% of the submitted proposals are required to submit plans that advance DEI goals -- your proposal will not be accepted without a BPC plan.
There are many other programs with sizable budgets within CISE that have the same requirement. And that's only CISE...
To be fair, if its specifically intended to "broaden impact" and is targeted at minority groups, I'd expect "so how does your project achieve the goal of getting more disabled female Alaskan Hawaiians in computing?" to be a requirement.
That's separate from "does this actually achieve the aims we want?" and that's where if it's not doing anything, it can be cut. I agree that if the project is not about "we are trying to train disabled female Pacific Islanders from Puerto Rico about cybersecurity" then it's a useless requirement that could easily be omitted.
I'm not sure I understand your post, but let me try to respond as best I can. I remember you (fondly) from the SSC days, so you'll let me know if I missed your point.
Say a couple CS profs write a medium-sized grant proposal for developing machine-learning (ML) methods for detecting fraud in the US food stamp program. The main research has nothing to do with minorities (or people of any skin color, really). Yet, the proposal must still have an attached BPC plan that details how this proposal will help under-represented groups.
In these plans, I've seen things like "I'll go teach ML in high schools with lots of black students", "I'll be funding a black PhD student", "I'll go give a presentation about opportunities related to ML at an HBCU" (I'm using black students as a common example). I've even seen someone claim that they had undergone implicit bias training.
It might sound unobjectionable, but it already puts me on edge for at least a couple reasons:
1) Why should I be restricted to helping people based on race? I'd rather try to increase the number of US citizens in our PhD programs, where their dearth is verging on a national security problem (e.g., many jobs at national labs require a security clearance).
2) As a researcher, I'm decent in a narrow sliver of computer science. I (and many others like me) are not a good choice as societal architects. This is not why I went into science, and forcing me to do wastes time that I could (and should) be using to do the research in my proposal.
But it gets worse, because in my experience, there are knock-on effects:
3) Researchers in the areas of sociology, education, and childcare see the monetary incentives of being attached to NSF grants. This money is 10x to 100x what they would be able to get in their respective fields. Our own sociology department is 90%+ white and at least 30% do research on race/racism. These people write papers and hold workshops/conferences addressing (in part) how CS suffers from various types of racism. They chip away at the notion of merit, which is perhaps the only reason that the sciences have arguably faired better than less-objective disciplines. All of this allows them to enlarge their stake at NSF and how BPC plans (and other initiatives) become required.
4) In response to this success, NSF (along with collaborators like the CRA), increase their BPC activities along with spawning more jobs in those organizations.
5) Department heads and deans see that funding dollars are tied to BPC and other DEI initiatives. So, they set up committees to facilitate BPC, set up offices of DEI within colleges (rather than just at the university level), centers for inclusive computing and so forth, and BPC committees in departments. More DEI jobs are born.
6) The competition for DEI funding gets stiffer, so more workshops/activities are required. You can go to the LEVEL UP (see my comment below) workshops funded by 1 million in tax payer dollars, whose premise is "Computing education continues to face challenges around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessible learning" to meet with NSF program officers that manage DEI/BPC/EDU-related grants.
7) All of this reinforces the narrative that CS is an irredeemably racist discipline. The irredeemable part is key, since now many livelihoods/careers are tied to these BPC/DEI funding dollars. You get (in my opinion, silly) articles written like this about the state of CS (see the third proposal):
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/why-universities-must-resist-gpa-based-enrollment-caps-in-the-face-of-surging-enrollments/
8) And all the while, there are people like me, who were told this is just a minor add-on, but now we're being asked to count the number of minority students in my classes (the university seems reluctant to get involved, even though they have the data, for reasons that I could speculate on), write a couple pages on how I did (or did not) attain my DEI goals for the next annual review, and prepare for the next accreditation visit from ABET with their new DEI goals!
And now, raising any concerns is potentially career ending, since if the wrong people at NSF get wind of it, you can kiss funding goodbye, and you become a pariah at both the department and college level, since many of those people have big DEI dollars and money is what matters (in my experience, department heads, deans, and provosts ultimately don't care where the money comes from.)
Ugh.
And btw, that grant about the food stamp fraud? It's not wholly fabricated, although I changed some minor details (it wasn't my proposal). The feedback on the research component was strongly positive, but it got sunk on the BPC component because "it's not clear this work will help minorities". My take? I guess making sure that people aren't abusing the food stamp program (i.e., depriving those who actually need the food) isn't worthy, since either they don't belong the right under-represented group, or the abusers might have the wrong skin color. Go figure.
Many Thanks for your detailed explanation of what was happening as a result of BPC!
That whole argument here took place without this important contextual info. Wow. Thanks for the info. So do you know whether BPC is shut down, or on some list of programs to be investigated or de-Woked?
I don't know if BPC plans will continue to be required. To my knowledge, the webpages for BPC are still up and running. The real test will be whether BPC plans are still required for future medium-sized grant proposals.
The NSF's explicit "Broadening Participation in STEM" program was created in the late 1980s and began operating in federal fiscal year 1990. You can easily find and read (as I just did) a 25-year report on it that was published in 2016. It has been a part of NSF grantmaking continuously under presidents Bush41, Clinton, Bush43, Obama, Trump, Biden. Neither the first Trump administration nor the Biden administration made any changes to it.
I'm not claiming that Biden or any single president is responsible for BPC. I am claiming that BPC, in its current state, is horrible. Also, I'm highlighting a component of NSF that seems to be flying under the radar, but which blatantly pushes DEI.
1) A good example is Departmental BPC Plan Workshop series on YouTube. See 3:17 of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GgdvdOMbZ4&list=PL6AeXx75lHyz482to0DgAIPuY2DfgKd8g&index=5
where the discussion of quotas arises, and Dr. Jeffery Forbes -- who is an NSF Program Director -- suggests that a way to circumvent the legal issues is to couch these diversity targets as "goals". This is part of a CRA YouTube series on Departmental BPC plans. Note the BLM poster in the background.
Or see 1:20 of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2mSegTF8-A&list=PL6AeXx75lHyz482to0DgAIPuY2DfgKd8g&index=6
where one of the organizers suggests ways to innocuously push for a departmental BPC plan (and earlier at 0:21, where she says that "you're not committing your department to anything"... yeah, right).
2) You'll have noticed in 1) above that the Computing Research Organization (CRA)---a major CS professional organization--is also heavily involved with BPC. There are also responsible for:
BPCnet.org
which has been revised recently, but it (again) illustrates the coordination on BPC between NSF and CRA. They are again pushing *department*-level BPC documents (not just the individual BPC plans to be attached to proposals). Example BPC goals from BPCnet are (were?) embedding DEI metrics into the tenure process, hiring an outside consultant for any hiring decisions to correct biases, and making DEI goals mandatory for annual reviews.
3) A third example is the LEVEL UP workshops funded by a 1 million NSF grant (CNS-2246079):
https://cra.org/level-up/
Note on the overview tab, we have "Computing education continues to face challenges around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessible learning". So, very much DEI (and quite uncomfortable to attend).
Have you sent an email to whitehouse.gov about this? Even (if necessary) an anonymous email might help.
I haven't, but I'll take a look at this, thanks.
I have emailed Edward Blum, Christopher Rufo, Robby Starbuck, and I've posted about it to the DOGE team in the hopes they would take notice. However, no replies, and I sadly suspect it is not a big-enough fish for them to consider (and it seems somewhat out of scope for Blum). So, perhaps BPC will continue to hang in there and find renewed life whenever the next Democratic president is elected.
I've been watching the conference on censorship in the sciences, and a lot of scientists are deeply concerned with the DEI stuff, and apparently there was a major spike with Biden (due to executive orders) as well as cultural zeitgeist.
In particular, one talker claimed that roughly 12% of science funding goes to DEI initiatives (i.e., actively undermining meritocracy).
Anyone here used to be a software developer that then transitioned to something else? I find myself wanting to do something either more people-oriented or with a mission more higher-impact and benevolent than building web sites/apps for clients.
I left the software industry in my early fifties after realizing I felt unfulfilled and things were never going to get better. I went back to school, with plans to retrain as a medical technician. I'm happy to be out of software, but retraining is definitely a long road, particularly in the medical field, since it is so credentialist.
If you can stand the day to day work of software development, you could try looking for a dev job building something for an industry that does more obviously worthy work, like the first responders.
Alternately, if you just want more contact with people and more of a chance to see that what you are working on really helps people, you could transition into something closer to customer support.
I had a weird, not-easy-to-replicate transition from a brief career in software to a more people oriented career (I work in the medical field). I’ll still try and offer thoughts you may find relevant.
Pros: more interesting work, more personally fulfilling, more benevolent (at least, people think it is)
Cons: software has a better combination of money and work-life balance
I don’t regret my choice, but I’m more ambivalent about it than I expected. The longer I go, the more I miss the money and work-life balance I could have had. I wonder if a good therapist when younger could have helped me sublimate my need for fulfillment as a software dev into other things, like my personal life. I certainly would have had a higher impact earning to give as a software dev (or pivoting to AI safety). Perhaps if I toughed it out longer, I would have found ways to make software more fulfilling/tolerable. However, at the moment, I am mostly content with my choice.
Used to be a software developer, then transitioned to being a rationalist meetup coordinator. It's sure a lot more people-oriented. The impact is a lot fuzzier and harder to measure.
I'll defend building web sites and apps as pretty great for the world- I used to be mostly in ERP and PLM software (if you're not familiar with the terms, think "software for manufacturers" and you're close enough) and think the products I worked on made a lot of products incrementally cheaper and higher quality- but admit they had the usual benevolence of the butchers, brewers, and bakers. If you want to moonlight in benevolence a bit, something I used to do was offer to upgrade or maintain local charities websites for cheap/free. They really appreciated it.
I know of two software people who went into being therapists, and they seemed mostly happy with it. I don't have a lot of detail there other than counting datapoints.
Similar sentiment except that client/public facing work exhausts me.
I switched to teaching computer science for a few years, but then switched back.
Advantages of teaching: gender ratio of teachers makes dating much easier for a guy; the work can feel really meaningful (depends on the class). Disadvantages: some kids can be extremely annoying.
Advantages of programming: money, lots of money. Recently also work from home.
I feel like I should switch to something else, maybe a teacher, because I'm so afraid of getting fired or let go all the time. Tech is in such a bad state right now, and I'm so worried I'll be thank to get a job. Of course, leaving because I'm afraid if losing my job is a self fulfilling prophecy. But something about getting fired seems so much worse than leaving, like really uncomfortable as the whole team looks down on you.
Anyone who can teach high school math is not going to ever be out of a job.
Like in a college as a professor?
It was a high school.
Why specifically is it bad for Elon Musk and DOGE to have access to “sensitive” government financial records? I’m not talking about classified defense information, I mean stuff like treasury payments and IRS records. I’m not really interested in whether it’s legal (that’s a different conversation), only what the damage is expected/possible to be. Why is it important that this data be private anyways?
A lot of stuff goes on tax returns. Charitable donations (not political ones, but still), gifts above ten grand or so, the name of every employer you've ever worked for, performed services as an independent contractor for. It makes sense that you would want the IRS to have this information, but you probably don't want a political operative to have them.
With that information, Elon Musk could pretty easily build a hit-list of exactly where to apply the most financial pressure to outspoken critics of the Trump organization, he could also just use it in a private capacity, as it would immediately give him the edge over every competitor.
Its interesting to note that, traditionally, conservatives have been at the forefront of fighting all disclosure requests to the government wherever possible, for exactly the reasons outlined above. The Koch brothers went to war with CA, and Kamala Harris specifically, over whether they should be required to report the names of donors to one of the organizations they founded (this one was political in nature), and they argued there was no way the government could even be trusted to have that information, and they won.
So on the one hand, the conservatives were making pretty good points. On the other, every day they don't fight Elon tooth and nail they look like massive hypocrites.
I've long been against the government having all of that information. It doesn't make me happy that Musk has it, but I don't feel much different from when other people had it. Governments have been known to breach the information, including on purpose to hurt political enemies.
That you now understand conservatives more is good. The only workable alternative is for the government to get and keep less information.
> I’m not talking about classified defense information
You probably should be, since DOGE accidentally leaked details on the NRO's budget (aka, "how much is the US spending on spy satellites"?)
One reason to keep sensitive records secure is to prevent little oopsies like that. DOGE had good intentions in that case - make it easier for people to see where their tax dollars are going - but because they were reckless they accidentally leaked information that shouldn't be made public. Next time, they might accidentally leak social security numbers, or tax returns. It's not merely "what would Elon want to do with your social security number?" But "who else will be able to get your social security number by the time Elon is done with his unsupervised move-fast-and-break-things experiment?"
From the Associated Press:
"In an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday, a White House official clarified that Elon Musk is not the administrator of the newly formed entity -- seemingly contradicting public statements by Trump. Since announcing DOGE in December 2024, he has routinely referred to Musk as its leader.
However, according to Office of Administration Director Joshua Fischer, Musk is a "non career special government employee" who serves as a senior adviser to the president. The filing compared Musk's role to that of Anita Dunn, a longtime political advisor who served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden.
The filing did not provide any information about who oversees DOGE, other than ruling out Musk."
Also:
"In an order issued late Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC ruled that DOGE should be considered an "agency" though he noted how the Trump administration is 'curiously' avoiding that label. 'This appears to come from a desire to escape the obligations that accompany agencyhood - such as being subject to the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedures Act -- while reaping only its benefits,' U.S. District Judge John Bates wrote."
Also:
"Judge Tanya Chutkan - who held a hearing Monday in a case that challenges the breadth of Musk's authority - raised concerns about the 'unpredictable and scattershot' methods employed by DOGE. 'DOGE appears to be moving in no sort of predictable and orderly fashion,' Chutkan said. 'This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency to have access to the entire workings of the federal government, fire, hire, slash, contract, terminate programs....'
Also:
CNN learned this morning via a FOIA request that the administration has quietly fired the Office of Personnel Management's "privacy team" and several other officials of that agency which oversees the government's personnel-related compliance with relevant laws. That move "limits outside access to government records related to the security clearances granted to Elon Musk and his associates" which was the topic of the FOIA request. "Members of OPM’s communications staff and employees who handle FOIA requests were also fired."
Judge Chutkan, quoted above, has just denied the plaintiffs' request for a temporary restraining order (TRO). The legal standard for a TRO is quite high and the judge ruled that the plaintiffs (22 state attorney generals) had not successfully shown "imminent, irreparable" harm.
Judge Chutkin rejected the administration's request to dismiss the case and its core claim that Musk’s role violates the Appointments Clause (U.S. Constitution, Art. II, § 2, cl. 2). The judge wrote today that Musk has not been confirmed by the Senate yet appears to be exercising unchecked executive power; that the plaintiffs’ claim raises serious separation-of-powers concerns; and that the defendants [the administration] have conceded in her courtroom that DOGE "has no clear legal authority for some of its actions".
The two parties are ordered to propose by tomorrow a briefing schedule for a preliminary injunction motion. A preliminary injunction has a lower urgency threshold than a TRO but still requires evidence of harm.
Well then you have a very different working definition of "actual concerns" than I do.
FOIA enables citizen oversight of the government by letting journalists request records on what the agency has been doing. DOGE has been very secretive about what they're doing to the Treasury systems, and it would be good to have independent verification that they are not doing silly things with the government's money.
The Privacy Act prevents the government from disclosing your personal information without a good reason. DOGE has access to systems with very personal data, like your Social Security number and tax returns, and it would again be good to have oversight to make sure that that data doesn't end up in the wrong hands (or on servers of questionable security like the new ones DOGE installed to do their work).
The Administrative Procedures Act creates formal procedures for informing the public about what your agency is doing, allowing comment on new rules being created, etc. Similar to FOIA, this allows for citizen oversight of the newly created agency which has claimed near-total authority over government spending.
The APA also sets rules for judicial review of agency actions, in particular the requirement that agency rules cannot be "arbitrary and capricious." This prevents Elon Musk from deciding to cut off federal funding to your city because the mayor said something mean about him.
You'll note that all of these basically boil down to "we don't trust the government not to abuse its power," which is something that I would normally expect conservatives to be a fan of.
How about: The government, and its agents, should follow the law. Rule of law is kind of a big deal, given what happens in its absence.
Could, sure. But since that overview would amount to reciting the logic and contents of those laws, each of which of course is easily findable online both in full and in summary, and I made a personal resolution a while back to ignore online sea lions -- I'll pass.
I suppose it depends on what level of data they want. If it's "how many people in the million dollar plus tax bracket versus the ten thousand dollar one", that should be accessible. If it's "I want the tax records of John Smith, 590632 Hummingbird Lane" then no, not unless they have a very good reason (e.g. John Smith is money laundering for a cartel under the pretence of running a charity for one-legged puppies).
Because it is against the law for one.
Two because we have no idea what they intend to do with these records. Think of all the effort trump spent in 2016 to NOT release his tax returns. Now elon has everyone's. If we believe trump had legitimate reason to not release his then we should also believe it's not good for Elon to have access to them all.
Third, it can be used for black mail or to pursue politically motivated prosecution of trump/elon enemies.
Finally, there is no evidence that they are handling this information with the security considerations it requires. They have already posted an unsecured database to the doge website and have been using communication methods not approved for government use. Maybe today Elon has this but tomorrow China does. What is the danger if China has this data?
"Think of all the effort trump spent in 2016 to NOT release his tax returns. Now elon has everyone's."
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? If it was vital to have Trump's tax returns in 2016 so the opposition election campaign could prove he, uh, wasn't a real billionaire, then it's good for everyone's records to be accessible in the interests of transparency and the rest of it!
Okay, the ostensible reason was to make sure the obligatory audit on a sitting president was done, according to this:
https://thehill.com/business/3785840-why-democrats-released-trumps-tax-returns/
"Democrats are also calling out the ‘two-tiered tax system’
Trump’s returns display sophisticated accounting whereby income from investments was offset by large, distributed business losses that reduced his tax liability. In 2020, the last year Trump was president, he didn’t pay any income tax at all.
Tax experts say his techniques are not atypical and are just some of many methods that are widely used by people with a lot of money to pay less in tax. These maneuvers can range from using bank loans backed by stock portfolios to obtain cash to combining trusts with annuities to keep money away from the government over the course of generations.
This sophistication is another source of anger for Democrats and is something they want to call attention to through the release of Trump’s returns.
“Trump’s returns likely look similar to those of many other wealthy tax cheats — hundreds of partnership interests, highly-questionable deductions, and debts that can be shifted around to wipe out tax liabilities,” Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a statement on Wednesday.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has sounded similar notes about how taxes work in the U.S.
“At the core of the problem is a discrepancy in the ways types of income are reported to the IRS: opaque income sources frequently avoid scrutiny while wages and federal benefits are typically subject to nearly full compliance. This two-tiered tax system is unfair and deprives the country of resources to fund core priorities,” she said in a statement on congressional tax compliance proposals in 2021."
I thought I remembered them looking for his tax returns before he was elected, but whatever. So if we need to make sure Trump is paying his taxes and the two-tier system is not operating but all citizens are treated the same, then having everyone's tax records for inspection is the way to do it, right? If the IRS isn't performing its duties, someone has to check that. I'm sure the Democrats won't object to checks on "Did Nancy Pelosi declare all her stock gains?"
"But the release of the returns is also about beating Donald Trump
While Democrats have couched the release of the returns in a broader policy discussion, it’s just as much about politics and defeating a political rival.
Trump incensed Democrats during his presidency for the ways he broke presidential norms that extended beyond his refusal to release his tax returns. His prolific use of social media and his public castigation of judges and other public officials whom presidents usually don’t criticize changed the tone of political discourse in the country, much to the anger of the opposition party.
“When we win this election, and we have a new president of the United States in January, and we have a new secretary of the Treasury, and Richie Neal asks for the president’s returns, then the world will see what the president has been hiding all of this time,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in 2020.
The revelation of Trump’s huge business losses, which were presaged by years of investigative reporting, undermine the image of Trump as a successful, self-made businessman projected by TV shows like “The Apprentice” and that he ultimately capitalized on to win the presidency.
“Donald Trump had big deductions, big credits, and big losses — but seldom a big tax bill,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) said in a statement on Tuesday. “This inquiry has unearthed many questions about how someone who claimed to be so rich can avoid so many taxes.”
"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? If it was vital to have Trump's tax returns in 2016 so the opposition election campaign could prove he, uh, wasn't a real billionaire, then it's good for everyone's records to be accessible in the interests of transparency and the rest of it!"
Really? The giant false equivalency here didn't give you the tiniest bit of pause?
In 2016 Trump was running to be president of the United States: THE most powerful elected office anywhere. What's more, he was doing so completely voluntarily: if he didn't like any particular expectation that came along with the office, he could just as easily not run. Now, it's fair to debate whether "releasing tax returns" IS a reasonable expectation to place on somebody running for that office. But it is NOT fair or honest or reasonable to say that John Q. Taxpayer--who is running for no public office and had no choice whatsoever in the matter--should have his personal records made accessible to everyone *on the same grounds.*
Please do some basic consistency-checking of your own arguments before you post paragraphs on the subject. That is a real bare minimum of intellectual courtesy, and I know you're capable of much, much better reasoning and argumentation than this.
What is the point of this linked article and why did you copy so much of it into your response?
Trump is well within his right to not-release his tax returns. What I am saying is that if he believes they are so important to keep private, why does he not believe that is also true of the American people he is suppose to serve.
Please refrain for referencing any past administrations in your reply as they are not consequential.
I think there's some relevance here when an IRS contractor released Trump's tax returns in a purely political move. If we're concerned with non-IRS employees having access, it seems like a contractor having done the actual thing we're worried about Musk doing is more than relevant.
If you think of them as purges instead of cuts then it starts to fit a little better. But you are right he shot any authoritarian ambitions in the foot by simply destroying departments instead of trying to systematically replace everyone in them with his cronies.
That is phase 2, and it is ongoing. Easier to torch the whole place and then rebuild it with the people you want than to infiltrate.
>Because it is against the law for one.
Can you explain that in more detail please because I have a hard time understanding how the executive branch could in principle have any legal constraints on what it does with its own data. DOGE is operating on behalf of the President, who has absolute authority to access whatever federal data he wants to. The President has absolute authority to declassify anything he wants to. Perhaps there is some minor procedural quibble to be made, but I simply don't see how there is any substantive argument to be made that DOGE doesn't have the legal authority to access anything the President wants it to.
>absolute authority to access whatever federal data he wants to.
Why do you believe this? Can you provide any reference that shows the president has this power?
Article II of the US Constitution. The President is the head of the Executive. Absent specific legislation which says otherwise - and I'm aware that some of that exists - he has broad discretion to manage all Federal agencies as he sees fit.
Which specific section and clause of article 2 gives him broad discretion to manage all federal agencies as he sees fit?
Article II, Section 1, Clause 1.
The answer you're looking for appears to be in IRC 6103.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6103
Generally speaking, this makes any "disclosure" of IRS returns and return information by any IRS official a crime, unless it falls into one of the enumerated exceptions provided in the statute.
One might argue that sharing information within the executive branch is not considered "disclosure," but that cuts clearly against the grain of the statute, which provides specific exceptions for when disclosure within the executive branch is *allowed*.
For example, the DOJ cannot simply look at returns whenever it wants. 6103(h)(2) provides that disclosure is only permitted "[i]n a matter involving tax administration... to officers and employees of the Department of Justice... personally and directly engaged in, and solely for their use in [the case]" and only if certain factors are met." Likewise, disclosure to the President himself is limited to specific written requests by the President "signed by him personally" which state "the name and address of the taxpayer whose return or return information is to be disclosed, the kind of return or return information which is to be disclosed, the taxable period or periods covered by such return or return information, and the specific reason why the inspection or disclosure is requested."
So 6103 plainly does apply to disclosures from the IRS to other entities or agencies within the executive branch. That's not to say that information cannot be shared, but it is very much not as simple as "DOGE is operating on behalf of the President, who has absolute authority to access whatever federal data he wants to." The gathering of taxpayer data is one of the most intrusive things the Federal Government does - and even Presidents do not have carte blanche to simply say "DOGE can go through all the taxpayer data and do whatever it wants with them." Short of providing a written order with the name and address of every American along with specifying the specific reason for the disclosure, that information is in a lockbox, even for Presidents. Ability to classify and declassify information doesn't come into it - that's under another regime for national security.
Oh sure, I'm aware that the IRS presents a special case - as you correctly point out, there's specific legislation there. But most of the pearl-clutching I see is about general 'data privacy' issues and not tax returns. Are you aware of any legislation which affects non-IRS data?
It's not "pearl-clutching" to note that unelected, unauthorized, unaccountable people are accessing the tax records of every American.
The IRS does not present a special case. There are multiple laws limiting how government data can be access and by whom. Restricting the power of the executive is a main goal of these laws. A core principal of the US governmental system is that the executive is not supreme and its power is restricted by the legislature.
Ok, but government data can be accessed by the agency which collects and uses it, correct? And the President has broad discretion to direct the agencies to act in accordance with his political goals. With the exception of the IRS, I would like to know what specific legislation you think prevents the President from using the data a Federal agency has in order to analyze the structure and performance of that agency.
I seem to remember being accused of "pearl-clutching" by the same commenter in the recent past.
The lawsuits are alleging violations of the Privacy Act of 1974, which covers all federal agencies.
I don't see how that applies. The data in question aren't being used against citizens, they are being used to analyze the behavior of various Federal agencies. Data aren't being disclosed, they're being used by the Federal government itself, which is something that already happens. Again, I understand that the IRS presents a special case, but auditing e.g. the US Treasury to see where its money goes is just the Federal Government analyzing data it already has access to.
Are you suggesting that if the President decides to look deeply into the exact details of, say, a particular DoE project to ensure that it meets his political priorities that he is in principle prevented from doing so?
Yes, but who enforces such laws? Obviously, the executive branch. And under Dogeian Legal Theory, the executive branch can carry out its responsibilities however it wants... which can include basically doing the opposite.
I could explain it to you, but it would be too much trouble.
This isn't Reddit. The whole point of this place is to take the trouble.
My apologies for not bothering. There is a very cogent explanation of the issue further down on this thread. It seemed to waste of energy to do it twice.
Not too much trouble to explain to me that you're above it all though? You get to be self-righteous but don't have to expose your terrible reasoning to cross-examination. How convenient for you!
I’m not above it all, I’m lazy.
But your stated assumption that my reasoning is terrible, even though I didn’t offer it up, goes a long way towards explaining my laziness.
Someone who comments that they're above commenting doesn't exactly recommend their powers of either logic or civility.
Too lazy to debate but not too lazy to snark. Ain't you a peach!
Especially for treasury data since it's quintessentially not private data *from the government*--it is entirely government work product, and already subject to auditing requirements, as well as accessible with only minimal controls to Treasury employees. So any privacy interests are already forfeit, as it's accessible to externally unknown bureaucrats on a daily basis.
Some pieces of tax returns are more protected, but those are already accessed regularly by line IRS agents
One significant difference is that traditional accessing of this information would leave a trail of logs that can be audited and any unauthorized accessing of the records can be prosecuted. The IRS agent that released trump tax docs was convicted for doing that.
Elon and his team have not statutory authority to access this data and have not passed security checks. By law they are not authorized to access these records.
That assumes the conclusion. They are members of an official government body with explicit oversight of all government IT data and processes. Established by Obama for this exact purpose (although with different intended targets, of course). Their appointments followed established procedures.
>They are members of an official government body
Not according to the White House!
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/17/doge-administrator-elon-musk-00204639
"In a three-page declaration, a top White House personnel official revealed that Musk’s title is “senior adviser to the president,” a role in which he has “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”"
Have you ever worked for a government agency or a very large corporation? There are hundreds of regulations and standards around the accessing, storing, and changing of data. You may not agree with these and there are legitimate debates to be had about their role, but they do exist and they would, in a sane world, prevent Elon and his minions from access this data (not to mention that few of them would ever pass a security check).
Obama established the office of digital services to play a consulting role for other agencies to modernize their systems. There is no need to access private data to do that.
Any competent, security conscious IT team would want to have access to the least amount of sensitive data possible. The concept is called "Least Privileged Access" and is standard across the industry. A private company giving access to team in the way DOGE has gotten access would be exposing themselves to dozens of lawsuits.
Having oversight of IT doesn't mean having full, unrestricted access to everybody's tax returns. You can oversee the technology development for something without having infinite access to it.
Exactly - this is actually a core IT security principle called Segregation of Duties. Just because someone oversees IT systems or development doesn't mean they should have access to the actual sensitive data - that's like saying a bank's security system installer should have access to everyone's safe deposit boxes.
People with no knowledge of basic IT practices, data privacy laws, or the fundamental principals of the US government sure seem pretty confident in their assessment of what's going on in this administration. Going to give me an aneurysm.
Re: the new SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/hey-3
If you don't care to read it, in the comic, a (sympathetically portrayed) woman suggests that a (straight white) man become "a whole person".
When did this become an acceptable thing to say to another human being? This isn't the first time I've seen this turn of phrase, and calling someone "not a whole person" (or otherwise they wouldn't need to *become* one) *to their face* is among the most dire insults I can think of. IMO, this is one step away from just telling them, "I don't think you have any rights that I am bound to respect." I'm seriously getting some Three-Fifths Compromise vibes from this.
Two points:
1. “Whole” here is being used in its sense as the opposite of “broken”, not in the sense of “incomplete”.
2. I’m curious what your opinion is on the use of “NPC” as an insult.
"NPC," just like "not a whole person," is the language of the slave pen and the concentration camp.
"NPC" is the new "sheeple". So, yes, dehumanizing insult.
It's a comic. What part *anywhere* in the conversation gave you the impression that this was supposed to be a realistic exchange, featuring things that would or should actually be said in real life?
(But also, as others have pointed out, you're reading the phrase very differently from the obvious intent.)
I really don't get what you're talking about. Not being a whole person doesn't mean you aren't worthy of rights. It's a critique that there are fundamental parts of being alive you haven't experienced and developed. And while I haven't seen this language used before I could totally imagine this being applied to people of any race/gender.
I think what matters is how people use it and what implications they draw.
In the past a whole person might be called a Renaissance man, I think?
Is there some culture out there that says if you're not both emotionally mature and have a career and have a family and have traveled the world, you can't vote, or something like that?
If someone called me not a whole person I would...honestly open mindedly listen to that critique?
So, for example, if the man in this comic had told the woman that only by having children could she be a "whole person" you believe that the proper response is for her to open mindedly listen to the critique?
I happen to think that both parties listening to the other, if they were willing to do so, is actually a good outcome. I don't believe that the majority of people who find this comic validating would find the alternative acceptable.
Yeah, I think having kids is part of a 'whole' life experience, for both men and women.
SMBC is about entertainment, not some political propaganda outlet. The point isn't really to 'validate' anything.
Maybe we have very different views on what this comic is supposed to be? It's a half joke half perspective, there's thousands of strips, some politically correct some not etc.
There is a whole world of difference between being a bad person and not being the best person one could be. Not being a "whole" person clearly belongs to the latter category, and I believe you are wrong to put it in the former.
1) The guy spends the first three panels talking about his existential malaise in terms taken straight from a pop psychology article about What’s Wrong With Men. He’s using that as a pickup line.
2) That’s the joke.
Edit: actually, it occurs to me that you think Zach is saying this about men, rather than a fictional character saying this about another fictional character.
I don’t think this is how satire works.
It has always been acceptable to say (or imply) that, just couched in different terms.
Re the comic itself, the trope is to marry a chubby dependable guy with feelings, then lose all sexual attraction to him and lust after the jacked bad boys, possibly cheating with them.
My mother once told me about a patient of hers who was having difficulties in her marriage.
She had noticed she was aging out of the marriage market and married a longstanding friend, with whom she had a child. She reported (to my mother, her gynecologist) that he was a caring husband, a stable provider, and an excellent father. Also, she didn't find him "exciting" and was planning to leave him.
It's just one of those comics he does once in a while to appease the sensibilities of his radlib audience, I don't have a good feel of how much of it he actually believes.
He really has very little in common with Old Zach; I have to wonder how much editorial control his wife exerts.
I'm going to admit I haven't been keeping up with the comic, so I don't know how often he does this now, but it didn't seem that frequent to me, and I'm more prone to believe in audience capture than to lay the blame upon his wife.
"I'm gonna marry a guy who's chubby and has people feelings."
-LOL.
Yeah, that was a good one. Clearly she's holding out for Elon.
Disclaimers: I am not a spiritual person.
I agree, it is an insult to imply that someone is not a "whole person" in the context you have in mind. However, those connotations did not come to mind for me when reading the comic.
I believe the comic is a commentary on the fundamental shift in heterosexual relationships and a critique of popular masculinity movements.
My quick reading of the comic:
1. The man expresses feelings of purposelessness as an opener to a woman (likely a stranger) whom he sees as a conquest.
2. The man's admissions seem quite unattractive, but the woman gives him the benefit of the doubt and asks if he's working on himself.
3. The man essentially answers "no" by stating all the ways that he is working on himself, which are improvements that are valued more by other men than by women.
4. The woman expresses her type.
5. The man ironically responds "gay."
Personally, I was triggered by the word "wisdom," which for me provides a context to interpret "becoming a whole person." The word "wisdom" has spiritual connotations for me. I am not familiar with Buddhism, but there is a concept of oneness, wholeness, etc. that might relate here.
Some men's clubs/circles are spirituality-based, some are psychology-based, some are a mixture. "Being whole" does not necessarily have spiritual connotations, it may just mean not feeling empty, or feeling connected and purpose-driven, etc. I see Neal commented below with some sites which give some definitions of wholeness.
These two are not a match. Next.
> but the woman gives him the benefit of the doubt and asks if he's working on himself.
I can't really read the comic that way. The dialogue isn't between the characters. It's a didactic treatise for the benefit of the reader.
The "for the better, right?" meme works the same way. ( https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/for-the-better-right ) The dialog isn't there as something the characters say to each other. It's there as a thought process that you, the reader, are supposed to follow.
I think you're reading too much into an arbitrary word choice. Replace "whole person" with "emotionally and intellectually mature person" and see if it makes you feel better.
I'm not saying that I agree with the thrust of the comic (I most certainly do not), but please let's not resort to language policing. If you're going to criticize something, at least criticize a fair and reasonable interpretation of the intended meaning. In this case that was most definitely NOT "straight white men are inherently not whole people".
No, the intended (though veiled and context-dependent) meaning is that "not whole people are inherently straight white men."
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_theory
I feel like you're fixating on the fact that he's a straight white man, but the text of the comic only even acknowledges this in the sense that the guy in question suggests it's "gay" to be a chubby guy with "people-feelings". The author is a straight (so far as I know; married to a woman, at least) white man so this seems pretty clearly a commentary on a certain type of toxic masculinity rather than a giant demographic group.
It's not actually very important, and I was only dwelling on it because of Wanda's comment. However, could you imagine a straight white man telling a non-SWM that they aren't a "whole person"?
> could you imagine a straight white man telling a non-SWM that they aren't a "whole person"?
I mean, are they saying things to me like “I’m gonna go to the gym and get absolutely jacked in a way that is mostly physically appealing to other men, then get painful height-increasing surgery, inject my balls with testosterone, and spend my nights on offensive shitpostin because the amphetamines won’t let me sleep?”
Because, speaking as a SWM, I might not say phrase it all new agey like “work on being a whole person” but I sure as shit would tell them that’s not normal and they should get help.
... Yes? Because I don't see what the one has to do with the other in this case. The context is about a character who makes extremely terrible life choices, not the Three-Fifths Compromise.
My interpretation of that speech is that learning to find self-worth apart from female approval is the sort of thing that would make him a desirable mate. Which, honestly, is nothing new. Women hate needy men and that comic is essentially a lampoon of the common (implicit) male sales pitch of "you should love me so that I can feel validated by you." Don't get me wrong, I fully concede that the subtext is women looking down their noses at incels and smugly confirming their own moral superiority, but so what? That's what every group does in one way or another. Ingroup preference is an essential and healthy aspect of the human experience. The only objection I have is that feminists and other disadvantaged groups have attempted to grab the moral high ground in order to monopolize the social acceptability of expressing ingroup preferences. I dislike the feminist undertones of that comic but the substantive message is bog standard redpill wisdom: if men want women to find them attractive then they should just do what they've always done and outcompete them.
> I fully concede that the subtext is women looking down their noses at incels and smugly confirming their own moral superiority, but so what? That's what every group does in one way or another. Ingroup preference is an essential and healthy aspect of the human experience.
"Ingroup preference" seems like the wrong way to describe the preference of a group of women for one group of men over another group of men.
The relevant ingroup is composed of women who justify their preferences with the logic espoused in that comic. The comic is a celebration of that logic and the humor only appeals to those who approve of it.
So, in this example of ingroup preference, who's the ingroup member receiving the preference, and who's the outgroup member being dispreferred?
The comic starts with a litany of complaint by the guy about his lack of meaning due to a lack of prospects where he can justify his existence merely by acquiring and materially providing for a family. She offers an alternative that isn't dependent on others' dependence on him, and he calls that gay. It's not his identity that's the problem, it's his attitude, and he's trying to stubbornly make it her problem instead of pursuing independent solutions on his own. That's a bad look for him, and that's the whole joke.
The Straussian reading is that the woman was "negging" him. Also she made it clear that she was not interested in marriage. In other words, she signals being ready for a one-night stand.
This reading also works. She could be sarcastic.
Just seems like the typical SMBC comic, which is not-funny lecturing by woman to dumb guy or guy to dumb guy.
It's SMBC, it's not at all representative of how real people talk to each other. I agree that suggesting someone is not a whole person is a rather serious insult, and presumptuous too: presumably the person saying that is self-labelling as "whole".
I would also note that it seems to be unidirectional: is there a belief that women need to become whole persons as well to secure a partner?
That said, I think the facts on the ground favor the woman though, men really do need to become whole persons if they want to secure a stable relationship with someone they're FUCK YES about, at least if they don't have overwhelming hotness/charisma (and even then, I think they'll have trouble holding onto anyone if they're not whole). Can probably be skipped if you're willing to settle though. Or if they're lucky, luck is such a heavy element on all this stuff.
And if there isn't similar pressure on women (not sure), that's by and large on us for selecting so hard for beauty.
"I would also note that it seems to be unidirectional: is there a belief that women need to become whole persons as well to secure a partner?"
Um, yes, definitely. It might not be phrased in the same way. But I guarantee you that anyone giving this advice to men would have very, very similar advice for women: don't define yourself around your (real or potential) romantic or sexual relationships. Figure out who you are and what you want *besides* romantic or sexual fulfillment. If you can't do that, your relationships are likely to be bad for you, bad for your partner or both.
This comic seems like something out of the movie, "The Invention of Lying," where everyone is honest and just speaks their mind.
I think that's generally part of the SMBC style. (Often, it's part of the joke for a character to say something outright instead of saying something that implies it.)
You fundamentally misunderstand my objection. I consider calling someone "not a whole person" to be *beyond the pale* in ANY context. Telling ANYONE that they are less of a person and more akin to an object is COMPLETELY unacceptable in civilized society.
You have become the thing you hated.
I explicitly said that this was NOT the first time I had seen the phrase. It is explicitly *always* a condescending, dehumanizing insult.
Also, general life advice: when you see a post you don't like, maybe try actually reading it instead of assuming you know what it says.
I don't think "whole person" has an agreed upon definition, that reddit post is precisely asking about what "whole person" means.
Most people really would probably be offended if someone told them they're not a "whole person".
Saying someone is not whole is saying they're lacking in a vague undefined way. I'm not going to try a real world experiment of telling people they're not whole people (even if I think it's true most people are not whole people), I'm pretty sure it's not going over well. So yeah, it's offensive even if there isn't a precise, agreed upon definition for 'whole person'.
>Second, certainly being whole is better than being incomplete, and so telling someone they aren't whole amounts to a negative assessment, but that doesn't make it an insult.
Go around telling people "you aren't a whole person" then. You won't, for understandable reasons
"I'm assuming you have no evidence for this assertion, given that it contradicts your previous sentence that no one agrees on what "whole person" means."
I assume you were motivated to find a "contradiction" and found one.
I think that the AI safety frame should be replaced by an AI security frame, with an emphasis on the new (old?) logic of re-emerging realist international relations approaches. What do you think?
(Relatedly, I would also be happy to receive specific or general feedback on this: https://cyril.substack.com/p/the-paris-ai-action-summit-2025 )
>AI must be counted among the threats to a winning coalition and as a direct threat to states. AI is not just another contested technology — it is a sovereignty risk, a security event,11 and a potential adversary in its own right.
Fair. As a citizen, I'm skeptical that there are such things as "safe states". Both the previous administration and the current one strike me as acting against the interests of large fractions, perhaps the majority, of USA citizens. I don't trust corporations either, but I distrust them somewhat less than my legal rulers.
I think it should be replaced by an "AI loyalty" frame, emphasizing both the difficulty a government faces in ensuring the loyalty of a citizen armed with superintelligence, and the difficulty any person faces in ensuring that a superintelligence is loyal to him. "Loyalty" is also a frame that would particularly appeal to the current US government.
In contrast, the "security" question of getting AGI before China is well covered and discussed these days, and also somewhat superfluous to discuss in that the profit motive leads to roughly the same decisions as the security motive.
I'm starting to hate thought experiments. I first started noticing this with the blow up over PEPFAR and how the drowning child thought experiment was brought up, and then people tilted at the thought experiment, when the PEPFAR situation can just be analyzed directly with no drowning children or suits being brought up.
I've realized its very dubious that the thought experiment is really teaching you anything about a real world situation, and that honestly pretty much any real world situation can just be analyzed or debated directly, without setting up an illusory scenario to prime some intuitions and then trying to transfer the intuitions developed in the illusion to the real world.
Anyway, I like this blog:
https://desystemize.substack.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-cant-you-die
And this post is going to say something about AI and intelligence, but it's taking a circuitous road through the meta of the Geoguesser game and I am very annoyed and wish he would just get right into it.
Still a very good blog, wish he published more often.
I agree very much about thought experiments. But they still serve a purpose. The goal is to get you to think about a situation in a simplistic narrative (which is why I don't care for them) in order to isolate specific angles for review.
The key to using them is to avoid taking the conclusions and running with those in the implied direction. You take the new conclusion and put it back into reality, and see if it works. Hopefully the outcome is to determine why you feel a certain way about the situation and better understand your reasoning. Just using the intuition pump from the thought experiment seems much more likely to lead to an error when applying that reasoning to other situations/real life.
What I object to most is thought experiments where the "assumption" is something I think is not possible. Looking at the Chinese room and the zombie examples specifically. If you assume something false is true, you can derive anything.
I agree about p-zombies, but I think the Chinese room experiment is actually useful -- albeit for the opposite of its intended purpose -- precisely *because* it's impossible. Showing why the Chinese room couldn't exist is useful for demonstrating why we should assume that advanced AIs can actually think and not merely imitate thinking.
Two propositions:
(a) There is no such thing as coherent reasoning about ethics.
(b) Thought experiments are useless for reasoning about ethics.
I'm open to the possibility that both (a) and (b) are true and I'm open to the possibility that neither (a) nor (b) is true, but I'm very skeptical of the claim that (a) is false but (b) is true. I notice that in fields where I'm very confident that one can reason in a coherent, externally verifiable way, thought experiments (or their equivalents) are everywhere.
I feel like I never use thought experiments in my field (software development). I'm wondering if I ever see thought experiments outside ethics and AI X-risk.
You never consider hypotheticals in software development?
Hypotheticals there are things that can literally happen to my code, thought experiments are more things that will never literally happen.
The drowning child scenario is clearly something that could happen (and probably has, many times). Heck, the trolley problem is also something that could happen. Now, the point of them isn't really to reason about that specific scenario, so much as to reason about edge cases in a way that (hopefully) gives you more insight.
Do your hypotheticals never touch on edge cases? Do you never use them to try to create bounds or guardrails or heuristics to deal with unexpected behavior? My own programming experience is more limited, but that sure seems like it's a pretty important part of the process to me.
The thing about edge cases is that you typically end up running into them in production if you didn't think about them. Not quite the same as hypotheticals.
I would claim that testing is equivalent to thought experiments. Test inputs are purportedly analogous to production inputs, but simpler and easier to verify. If the code fails on test inputs you can be confident that, if it does not fail on production inputs, at least it is not working on production inputs for the reasons you think it is. Similarly, thought experiments are supposed to be stripped down, simplified versions of actual conundrums which retain the essential features being used in the argument. If the conclusion being argued fails in the thought experiment, you can at least be confident that even if the conclusion holds in the actual conundrum it does not hold for the reasons being argued.
For the PEPFAR thing, people were modifying the original thought experiment to be a scenario where there's thousands of drowning children every day on your walks, or even that your own child is drowning and people are asking you to ignore your child to go save the other children. It was a pointless digression that was only possible because of the thought experiment being brought up. You could say they were bad thought experiments because they don't really match the PEPFAR situation, but then, even the original thought experiment doesn't really match, as saving that one child is far more laborious and expensive for that one individual, than running PEPFAR is for USG. The thought experiment just added a bunch of confusion.
It doesn't sound pointless to me. If your answer for one drowning child is "yes, of course I would save them" and your answer to thousands of drowning children every day is "meh" or even "I'll save a few of them, but ignore the rest" then you know that somewhere in between 1 and "several thousand" is some sort of unexpected reversal or inconsistency. Your internal algorithm works in a way that you might not have originally expected. It might be *uncomfortable* to consider, but it certainly doesn't sound *pointless*.
(None of that means that people were doing this well, or framing things in sensible ways, or anything like that. Just that the basic intuition doesn't seem too off-base.)
Getting bogged down in irrelevant details is not particular to thought experiments. I would still maintain that if there is no way to consider to moral conundrums (conundra?) as functionally equivalent, thereby enabling a thought experiment, then there is no such thing as reasoning about morality.
I have a similar reaction to thought experiments, though I generally use the term analogies. Some people prefer analogies and story-like ways of thinking and navigating the world. For example, think about how popular parables are, especially in religious communities. People approach moral decision making through the lens of culture and the biases come with it. Bland scenarios with some millions of dollars thrown in are not seen as relevant to everyday experience, they are not relatable, and do not get shared on social media as much as a feel-good or rage-bait analogy would.
The point of analogies (or thought experiments) is to emphasize some particularly salient aspect of the situation you are considering. They serve a useful function.
Agreed. Thought experiments are for illuminating intuitions that have no direct real-world comparison. They are great if we're trying to demonstrate that 99% of people are willing to sacrifice some small amount of personal utility to save the life of a child, and that can even be extended to cases more general than the normal drowning child argument.
What thought experiments aren't for is dealing with practical problems right in front of us. The fact you would save a drowning child really has almost nothing to do with USAID, since if you can draw the connection that the government should tax people to prevent deaths overseas, this principle generalizes that you should tax people a whole lot more so long as the domestic quality of life doesn't drop below what can be helped overseas.
A perfect thought experiment for USAID would be so specific, it would parallel the actual conditions 1:1, at which point we should just discuss USAID itself instead of abstract moral principles made clear by an imperfect analogy.
Yeah. Most non-physics thought experiments are really bias smuggling exercises, even if not intentionally so. The drowning child one especially do.
And I only exempt physics thought experiments when they can be formalized and checked. And mainly because things like relativity don't have strong emotional/"moral" resonance for most people and are comparatively easy to make everything else really be equal.
" Most non-physics thought experiments are really bias smuggling exercises"
EXCUSE ME. It is perfectly lawful and responsible bias-importation. Only people irrationally committed to impeding the free movement of biases would frame it as "smuggling."
OK, in all seriousness, I'd say "bias transplantation" would actually be an apt description. The point is to take an existing bias and see how it fares in a different environment.
At the end of the day, whatever crazy maths you use to model the fine details of the universe needs to add up to normality. Maps can be wrong, and this is a basic litmus test for problems with a theory - if something significantly different from the actual world around us emerges from a model, something has gone wrong with the model. Maps are also necessarily inaccurate; when handed a map, comparing parts of it to actual reality will give you some idea of how inaccurate it is.
Human beings have very strong moral intuitions about things. These are often complex and not consistent, because humans are inconsistent bundles of complex values and rules that grew organically; so a theory of morality is going to end up having situations where it throws some of these under the bus in order to satisfy the rest, and throws away nuance in favour of parsimony.
This, then, is what thought experiments are for: they provide tools to highlight to the irrational parts of you that something is about to get thrown under the bus, so you can confirm for yourself how much that matters to you; and also tools to help identify when and how much gets thrown under the bus, because a theory that fails to match your moral intuitions more often than it succeeds will not be very useful for you.
Smuggling biases and intuitions in is the entire point.
I was going to object by bringing up Einstein, but you've got a point. I still see value in thought experiments though, which are useful for questions other than moral ones (where I don't think there's any objective truth).
I could accept that some are useful under restricted circumstances. But most of the ones I see around me don't even come close. Including the ones I've made myself.
This is probably my own bias, but "rationalist" thought experiments, especially about AI risk, have been among the least honest, the most affected by "I've got fancy words to stampede you into accepting my prophecy of doom and make you be in awe of my brilliance" syndrome.
Turing's incompleteness theorem is essentially a thought experiment, as he never actually built a Turing machine. But most AI talk does not rise nearly to that level of formal proof.
I think the point here is that thought experiments often just implicitly assume the hidden beliefs of their originators, not that nobody is ever allowed to conceal their perspectives in any situation.
You make sure you're self-aware enough to be explicitly aware of your own biases and to be able to analytically decouple them from your worldview. Also make sure that the person you're talking to is capable of doing the same.
If you try to "smuggle in" biases while talking to someone who doesn't share them then you're likely to just start an unproductive shouting match.
That's difficult to do regardless of your approach to the conversation. In the general case, communication just fails.
By being open about what your priors are, instead of trying to use verbal/intellectual judo to get them to swallow them without realizing it?
And another phrase for what I mean here is "assuming the conclusion." The thought "experiments" aren't actually set up honestly (whether knowingly so or not, I'm not claiming intentional bad faith, at least not always)--they're designed to drive to the conclusion the proponent had already settled on.
Talking honestly is presumptuous? Either I'm confused here or...something.
I have yet to see thought experiments outside of physics, and even then only when done under very restricted conditions, provide any value to a conversation.
I have seen honest, open discussions about how each person sees the real world have value.
As is said, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference but in practice there is.
The issue with thought experiments it's that you can start attacking features of the thought experiment instead of engaging with the concrete situation. The PEPFAR situation is no mystery, you can look at the facts and make a decision based on them.
Even trolley problems are questionable, some utilitarians conclude from it that doctors should actually be allowed to kill a random patient to harvest the organs to save 5. They know that's unworkable in the real world, but then, there doesn't seem to be a particular reason that the world couldn't be shifted to a state where that is reasonable.
His come many Nobel laureates have children? If it's so competitive, and surely children hurt one's professional productivity, wouldn't we expect the very tail of the productivity distribution to be childless? In the same way that many are first-born.
Is being productive professionally correlated with having children? Does everyone have children in the relevant cohorts? Something else?
I know a few Nobel prize winners. All have children. This post assumes (i) having children hurts one's "productivity," and (ii) Nobel prize winners are weirdly inhuman.
It does assume (i) explicitly, feel free to disagree.
I don't think it assumes (ii), because the choice to have children is made before the Nobel prize is awarded, so the prize could select for childless ones.
I knew a nobel laureate who was unusual for bringing his children into work/meetings quite a lot. Didn't seem ot hurt their productivity much.
People aren't robots and trying to act like they are and optimize for one type of output probably is a bad idea. I'm sure many people find inspiration from their children. Or have an easier time working in general if they also fulfill other drives like hunger and desire to reproduce.
I've a vague memory of research which found that men with a family earned more than similar men without one, controlling for other factors. Something about baseball contracts I think.
This was presented as a perception thing - family men are 'seen as more reliable' or something. But what if there's another effect that in some way increases the productivity of those who become parents?
I've no idea what that could be, but it's not unreasonable that parenthood creates certain marginal benefits which would help those in the pool for a Nobel prize.
A) Most Nobel laureates do their award-winning work before they're 30 so they don't yet have kids. B) I'd imagine that most of them have spouses who do most of the child rearing anyway.
Are future Nobel laureates much more productive, as in work invested, than their peers, rather than being similarly productive but more talented+smarts-assisted-lucky?
Would be interesting to see if in the years leading up to their Nobel work, were laureates publishing more, getting more grants, mentoring more people, etc.
A point for is that obviously a Nobel gives a high lower bound on how much work you put in. A point against is that extra productivity on its own is a competitive advantage mostly in situations where you have high competition chasing the same goal with similar methods, which I think is rare among Nobels
You are basically asking "why do so many Oscar winning actors have kids, doesn't that make them less productive?". Productivity has basically no impact on who wins and Oscar just like it has very little impact on who wins a Nobel.
To win an acting oscar you have to be a good actor, but many people are good enough. What you need is the right script, with the right director, in the right year. There is a lot of chance there.
To win a Nobel you have to be a great scientist, but many people are good enough. What you need is the right topic, with the right discovery, that will have the right impact many years after your discovery.
So it doesn't matter how productive you are.
Additionally:
People who win the Nobel may have done that work when they were young and hadn't had kids yet.
Most work that has won Nobels was done many decades ago when having kids was expected. Maybe this will change in the future.
Having kids is very rewarding for many people and that may lead to a more fulfilling life in all areas including their research.
People who win nobel prizes and people who have kids may have some other common trait we haven't identified.
You'd need a lot more data related to this topic to draw any conclusions.
Is this true for female nobel laureates?
"Levi-Montalcini's father, Adamo Levi, was an electrical engineer and mathematician, and her mother, Adele Montalcini, was a painter...Adamo was not supportive of women attending college as it would intrude in their ability to tend to the children and house."
...
"Levi-Montalcini never married and had no children."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini
How much childcare do Nobel-level scientists do? I’m guessing not much.
I would wager that the typical Nobel laureate does quite a bit more childcare than the typical fortune 500 CEO or cabinet level government official. Bearing in mind that the childcare is typically done decades before the Nobel prize or C-suite promotion or cabinet level appointment arrives.
- Research is extremely subject to diminishing returns to effort. Putting in 12 hours of work a day may not actually get you any more progress than putting in 6.
- You could ask the same question about heads of state, fortune 500 CEOs, major movie stars...
Yeah, but if putting in 12 hours a day is just 1% more productive than 6 hours, we’d still expect Nobel Prize winners to put in 12 hours or be outcompeted for that 1% edge.
Thats only true if you know what effort will increase your changes of a nobel prize which is very unlikely.
Same goes for politicians and CEOs.
Do you have children? I have two, age 8 and 5. There's no way they're not hurting my productivity. Though I suppose you could reduce the impact by being an effectively absent parent, but then why have children at all?
I have two children, younger than Adrians (so take much more energy to care for), and one with a severe health problem. I am just as productive if not more productive now than I was before I had them. Just after kids are born you are less productive because you are sleep deprived but once you are through that period it's the same.
You have less *free* time. But there is no guarantee that free time == productive time.
> You have less *free* time. But there is no guarantee that free time == productive time.
Yes, but it sure does put an upper bound on it. I'm definitely wasting less of my time on unproductive activities, but I can't say for certain if it's because I have less free time, or because I'm getting more ambitious and more acutely aware of time running out.
Maybe it varies from person to person.
Compared to my pre-children self, I think I work harder but produce less genuinely good work. In the hours I spend at my desk I'm working hard rather than goofing off because I understand now that my time is precious.
But all the really good work I've done in my life, I did in quiet moments when I had time to process everything, like going on quiet three-hour walks to nowhere in particular. I don't have time to go for quiet three-hour walks any more. So I'll probably never have an actual good idea again.
I'm starting to suspect that some of your comments seem to be optimised for something other than promoting good conversation.
Given the history of high achieving people, whether trying for Nobels or not, having a strong wife supporting the family, I think his comment was not out of line. It's culturally jarring because of the direction society has taken, but 60 years ago the response would have been that this was obvious to the point of not needing to be said.
It's also the cultural technology that allowed high achieving people to still have kids. I'm pretty convinced that the social approach of two high achieving people marrying each other is a bad approach that will damage society. I do not believe it's possible to consistently raise children well with two high achieving parents, because the time demands are too great. Two capable people, sure, but only if one gives up on many of the achievements they might have otherwise attained in order to put more effort into the children.
You are writing in a way that makes it sound like you are making snide remarks. If that is not your intention, you should probably give more thought into how your message might be recieved. F.ex. the commenter below you is making basically the same remark as you in a more neutral and less offensive way.
Women win Nobel prizes.
Hi! I am in a peculiar sexual situation, and I was hoping someone here may have some insight on it
I'm a 31-yo guy, and a week ago I had my first sexual experience (never too late for success I guess!)
It was really nice, my partner was great, and I am proud to report that I gave her an orgasm
However I couldn't come myself, despite being very aroused and my partner really wanting to help. What's weirder is that later I tried to masturbate and still couldn't.
Two days later, we saw each other again, and we couldn't have sex for logistical reasons but there was a lot of flirting and heavy petting. By the end my testicles were extremely painful (though still a lovely afternoon all things considered). And yet afterwards, nothing.
That was 5 days ago! Still nothing to date.
Since then whe has been traveling pretty far away. We've been exchanging some suggestive texts, I regularly fantasize about her, I have trouble focusing on anything complicated, and I have erections galore.
I initially speculated that it was stress (even though I felt relatively calm), but I've been sleeping well, and despite the distraction and the occasional testicular pain I feel quite good emotionally.
I tried watching porn etc, no effect, I just get bored. I've never experienced this state before.
I asked Claude what it thought but it gave me boilerplate "oh you just need to get used to the new situation, or maybe you're too stressed, if nothing changes a week from now you should see a Professional"
But this seems more like psychology than urology (otherwise why would it occur at this precise moment?), so any intervention is likely to have a small effect size. Besides, I know LLMs have their faults but how is a random doctor going to help if Claude has no idea?
We're planning to meet again this weekend, if I'm still in the same state then I guess I'll be a very altruistic partner again lol
But at some point she's gonna wonder what's wrong (even more than she did the first time I mean). I'm happy to tell her the facts but I'd also like to be able to explain them.
Does anyone know about this phenomenon, or have any idea what could be going on?
Or maybe you know someone I could get in touch with
Thank you!
I don't think this is that weird - lots of people experience some kind of dysfunction when they have a new partner and find it goes away over time.
Hey brother, first of all, congratulations on getting laid! I'm proud of you.
As to you anorgasmia, does stimulation still feel good to your penis? Pleasurable sensations that build up but no climax? It sounds like it probably does but it's not clear to me from what you wrote.
The sudden onset makes me think the opposite of what you conclude. Are you taking any medications? There are surprisingly many prescription and otc drugs that can do this to someone. SSRIs are notorious causes of anorgasmia. Many other psych meds can do it also. Less well known culprits include corticosteroids, hair loss medications, beta/alpha blockers etc. Even otc things like Benadryl or Robitussin (dextromethorphan) can make it difficult to bust a nut. Maybe you have been undertaking a program to become more attractive to ladies in order to increase the likilhood of having sex? And you started taking Propecia for male pattern baldness? Or perhaps you have had a cold for the past week and are taking cough syrup?
If you can rule out medications, maybe have your estradiol and prolactin levels checked. Excess levels of either or both of those can make it very difficult to cum. Do you have any gynocomastia? That can be a pretty good sign that you may have excessive levels of either or both of these. You might think "I don't think my estradiol is high because my high libido indicates I have plenty of testosterone." Lots of t can cause lots of estradiol though as it is made from testosterone via the enzyme aromatase. It is the ratio of estradiol to testosterone that is important, so test for test also. Are you on HRT by any chance? Maybe you started taking testosterone and this helped you finally reach home base but also elevated your estradiol and took the bang out of it?
Good luck figuring this out, and definitely keep trying. I hope your partner has a good time helping you. Try to cultivate a mindset and atmosphere of playful exploration and make it fun for her!
Hi! Thanks for the kind words and for the thorough response
Hmm good question, I would say yes although I'm not sure because it's part of a gestalt right? (the gestalt is obviously pleasurable)
I'm not on any meds apart from Ritalin, but I've been taking it for a long time with no sexual side effects, and I haven't taken it consistently the past few days anyway. No cold either.
Also, it seems like a weird coincidence that I would start having side effects right when I start having sex?
No identifiable hormonal changes either.
Yep that's the plan!
Ritalin is known for causing orgasm issues. All adhd meds are. Yeah, it's a bit weird that you only experience side effects when you start having sex, but orgasming from masturbation is much easier and quicker than from having sex. The prolonged stimulation really sabotages the whole thing while on stimulants. I personally gave up having sex while on adhd meds pretty much immediately once I started taking them and now time my entire sex life around them.
In way, that's a good problem to have, congratulations on losing your virginity! Did you feel like there were any specific impediments to having sex that you had to overcome to get to this point?
Indeed! Thanks
Oh yeah definitely, I made a lot of progress in my ways with the ladies, I used to be very out of touch about how dating works for example
To summarize, I was a very prude teenager (I didn't even masturbate until 19 years of age if you can believe it - I have trouble believing it myself).
Then I became a repressed feminist that almost completely conflated courting and aggression (kind of what Scott Aaronson describes).
Then I started getting into dating apps seriously, but you know, they're terrible (for most guys at least). A string of first dates going nowhere, because of my idiosyncrasies I'm sure, but also because of bad luck (like, two girls who liked me had to move away soon after).
I still feel like my future sex life may not be amazing
I was very lucky to match with this girl who seems very fond of me and makes everything feel easy, so if it doesn't last I'll still have trouble getting back in the game. I'll probably be a bit more confident in the future though.
Regarding the future encounter, don't worry too much, if she brings it up just make it clear it's not about her and point to how it should be evident that she is attractive to you and that you enjoy the whole thing etc.
That aside and plainly put, you haven't been able to orgasm since then? Even without being generally stressed, pressuring yourself to orgasm can be very counter-productive, this often becomes an obstacle too with a partner.
Yes I was planning on saying something like this (I mean I probably will even if I reach orgasm tbh)
Indeed I haven't, that is what's weird to me
I mean I don't feel like I'm pressuring myself but I guess I am on some level, it's just strange that I would have to
Whatever I'll just enjoy this while it lasts! It's a superpower in a way haha
> "But at some point she's gonna wonder what's wrong (even more than she did the first time I mean). I'm happy to tell her the facts but I'd also like to be able to explain them."
There's a non-zero chance she's going to want to internalize this as being something to do with her not being desirable, but there's also a good chance she won't! Dan Savage and other sex advice columnists have written a lot about how certain kinds of male performance issues are a result of being over-stimulated.
As a woman, my advice would be to *EXPLICITLY* frame this in a *JOKEY* way that's incredibly complimentary / flattering to her, e.g., "I'm so crazy into you, I can't even come!"
All right, I'll look for some Savage content about this!
Thanks
I am surprised I have never heard of this before, and also I'm wondering how to square that in an evolutionary framework
Thanks for the tip!
I'm quite confident I have made her feel desired so far, hopefully this feeling lasts
This is extremly common, to the point of being almost unremarkable. Yes, the first time most guys have trouble. It's just nerves. Nothing more, nothing less.
My advice? Try using alcohol. A glass of wine or two makes you less prone to overthinking.
I feel like you haven't read my entire comment but I'll reply to the alcohol part
It's kind of strange but alcohol makes me nervous and jumpy, not sure it would help
Besides I had drunk a bit the first time
Ah, having too *much* alcohol can sometimes impact things for men. Maybe abstain the next time, and just focus on the fun.
There is a vast, overwhelming likelihood that this will work itself out. I know it's easy for everyone else to say "no big deal, just relax," but.. seriously, try to relax about the "when." If not the next time you're together, then it'll be the time after that. No biggie.
Oh no it wasn't too much either! I felt fine.
Also I haven't drunk since, it doesn't explain the lack of orgasms when masturbating.
You're very kind! I'm actually not too worried I think, mainly puzzled
There's a lot going on in your brain the first time, and clearly afterwards too. Similar experience here. Worrying about it is the very best way to not come.
Now that you know you can pleasure your partner, focus on that and take pleasure in that. That's the performance she'll care about. Then the rest should happen on its own.
Oh that's definitely my intent!
To be clear it's the best kind of trouble to have imo
Thanks for the reassurance
The aliens with spaceships the size of small moons, which some of you may remember from SSC or DSL, are back. They recently read 2001, and have decided that monoliths are super fun. To that end, they are offering us 10,000 monoliths, each measuring 10 m by 40 m by 90 m. The monoliths are made of artificial dark gray granite, and their measurements are precise to the millimetre. Where do we want them placed?
(To anticipate the most obvious shenanigans, the monoliths will be placed, not dropped or thrown, and will only the placed with the approval of prevailing local authorities, whatever they may be, including land owners.)
Only accurate to the millimeter? Sloppy!
The only correct choice is to set them upright, about 50 meters apart, and then push over the first one.
Maybe there's a business opportunity in refining 100,000-ton rocks into micrometrically precise 100,000-ton rocks. Maybe.
L1 Lagrange point please, to counteract global warming.
The crosssectional area of these monoliths is only about 36 square kilometers. The crosssectional area of the planet is a bit more than a hundred million square kilometers. So even all of these monoliths together would intercept only a tiny fraction of the sunlight the planet receives, probably not enough to make a difference. Cool idea, though.
I say we go all Chairface Chippendale and have them placed on the moon so as to spell out something amusing. Or maybe they could be arranged to form a QR code pointing to a certain Rick Astley song.
Another possibility would be to have them form Orthanc.
Around the crest of Devil's Tower, Wyoming. Give me time to set up a raised foundation, so that we can double tier them. If they don't mind a little customization, please just carve the words "Fortress of Solitude" just above a gate.
What is their surface friction? Can they be placed "laying down" on their largest area face?
Depending on the answer, I'm thinking highways, missing cheap-ish access construction.
If not, maybe a wall. Don't tell POTUS.
We'd get more value out of a cards-castle-style tower on which we could build a space elevator, but I can't think of a set of characteristics that'd keep it up after they leave. They're either too light to stand the wind, or too heavy for the ground below to support.
For a placed apart possibility, maybe we could build apartment towers on the cheap around monoliths placed for the purpose.
Yea I was thinking space elevator too, though you're right it almost definitely wouldn't be stable enough to last
I would like to use the monoliths for some sort of construction, but I'm not sure what project would be best. Is there bridge or causeway that needs to be built somewhere? Maybe the Indonesians would be interested.
Placed end to end, the monoliths would make a wall 900 km long, 40 m tall and 10 m thick. Happy birthday, Donald.
900 km is only 559 miles, not enough to cover the southern US border.
That's true. But it's a formidable obstacle that I expect the coyotes would prefer to mostly go around rather than through, so the border as a whole would become incrementally harder to cross and easier to patrol.
They're pretty smooth, sort of like finely cast but unpolished concrete. You can have them placed in any orientation.
Beside Stonehenge, because why not? Give the druids and the conspiracy theorists something to occupy themselves with!
I say go all in and save a some, drop a couple of them in the Bermuda Triangle, another wherever Atlantis is supposed to be, and a fourth one in a random spot in Antarctica.
Don't forget R'lyeh!
R'lyeh is supposed to be at Point Nemo, right?
So I have read, but I have been too fearful to test it.
If you're a mathematician or theoretical computer scientist who wants to work on AI alignment, consider expressing interest in my mentorship programme: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m4NMk6EinRzvvvW5Y/gauging-interest-for-a-learning-theoretic-agenda-mentorship
Also, please send it to relevant people that you know.
I'm confused by why all of a sudden several large left-leaning corporations (Google, Meta, ...) scaled back their DEI efforts. I mean, why now? If they're useless, they were useless before. I don't think those were driven by government requirements, they were scaled up after George Floyd. Has the moment passed and now is just a good time (why?)?
Are they pandering? I seen to recall the previous Trump election sparked backlash and resistance, not compliance.
Any ideas?
The same reason that they were introduced in the first place: PR departments doing their best to strategically construct a public facade that they believe is likely to attract more people than it repels, given where they see the culture wars going over however long their next planning cycle is.
Compare how Chinese censorship works: the government, by and large, does not explicitly order specific companies to censor specific things, or make explicit what it wants censored. Instead, when something takes place that the government sufficiently dislikes, they ensure that all involved are punished incredibly harshly. Entities operating in China are highly incentivised to avoid the punishment, and therefore impose their own self-censorship regime which is much harsher than anything that could be enforced with explicit, gameable rules.
We have the same thing happening here: instead of dismantling the punishment ray, we have turned it around 180 degrees, and everyone is scrambling to leave the new kill zone.
Lots of interesting comments. Thanks everyone!
I think my model was that these corporations were being held hostage by their very woke employees who are willing to quit en masse or something. The fact that it changed now, with no apparent change in the workforce, and a relatively small nudge, seems to disprove that model.
There has been a pretty big change in the workforce, though. There have been a number of very large layoffs across the tech sector. Big names like Google and Meta both laid off many employees in the last year or two. Whether they were targeted to woke employees specifically or just changed the balance of power relative to tech employers, that's a big enough difference that the employees have less ability to hold the employer hostage to ideological stances.
I happen to think that's not the real reason companies took those stances, though. I think true believer employees was just the extra push that made it more difficult to do otherwise, but the real pressure was from public opinion which seemed strongly in favor of DEI programs (which was probably false but seemed likely to be true in at least some areas).
Part of it is legal changes (e.g. the SC killing affirmative action at colleges) and a change in public opinion. Part of it is pandering to Trump, who has proven himself to be transactional and vindicative, and has almost unchecked power now.
At my job they basically admitted (internally) that it was because of the trump administration's hostility and didn't constitute a change in anyone's belief about anything.
Preference cascade.
It's not just limited to things like big American companies which are directly subject to pressure from the current administration, I've also seen a flood of random newspaper articles, not all from the US, suddenly hitting the "well actually well-intentioned DEI initiatives aren't necessarily all good" narrative.
The equilibrium where everyone secretly hated DEI programs but were afraid to say so publically collapsed with surprising speed once it became safe to start peeling back on the whole DEI thing.
It is indeed pandering. The current administration has made it clear they're VERY hostile to DEI and will be investigating it aggressively.
Having said that I also worked at one of these companies for years and their DEI efforts were also pretty demonstrably useless (you could see their published diversity numbers) so they were really also pandering before.
> I'm confused by why all of a sudden several large left-leaning corporations (Google, Meta, ...) scaled back their DEI efforts.
Didn't see anyone else mention it, but DEI programs cost money. Corps in the US collectively spend more than $8B annually on DEI programs, and it's almost pure deadweight loss, because the main result is paying a bunch of sinecures to lower the average quality of your workers to meet arbitrary diversity requirements.
The instant you can stop paying that $8B without being crucified by the public, you do so.
DEI programs are nothing but lawsuit (and bad publicity) insurance. Google doesn't want to be picketed by angry activists, or sued by the DOJ for discrimination. The current administration has eliminated both of those risks, at least for now. Also it's signaled that the DOJ is going to aggressively pursue anti-white discrimination and so companies are scrambling to get out of the line of fire.
> I don't think those were driven by government requirements
Debated: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
I think Zupancic and Ahponen below raise a lot of good points--Trump's advisors are more serious about using existing laws to go after DEI this time, legal momentum against it is building, and yes they are pandering. Always pays to keep the people who write regulations on their side.
One thing I haven't heard is that I also think a lot of the media's arguments about Trump being a budding authoritarian may have actually convinced people they're going to wind up in a concentration camp if they fight him. In short, true or false (we'll see), it kind of backfired. "The government's going to be like the Nazis? Oh crap, I better get on their good side so I don't wind up in the oven!"
They were useful in that having them made sure that the administration would not investigate you for something or would be more lenient if they do.
The new admin has different political sensibilities, so the utility of the DEI is gone/negative
Were they useless? Well that's a loaded question. There were definitely some True Believers but mostly it was/is woke capitalism:
https://www.thecorporategovernanceinstitute.com/insights/lexicon/what-is-woke-capitalism/
Someone makes a big splash about "ethical investing", companies can see the money flowing to that, they all issue Mission Statements about how they're the mostest ethicalest progressive ever. Same way rainbow flags are everywhere for Pride Month.
We've just had this discussion in relation to government grants, so when DEI was flavour of the month and you needed to slap it all over your brand in order to retain market share and avoid boycotts, that's what you did. Now the new administration is off the progressive train, so the wind has changed direction and the big corporations are trimming their sails accordingly.
At the very least, it permits them to scrap expensive initiatives and cut jobs for downsizing reasons.
What's important to note is the lack of evidence that large American employers ever substantively changed the way they treat their employees.
That's the whole thing, and the same with governments of the time - something easy to do that cost nothing (relatively), appearing to tackle Pressing Social Issues but with no real change at bottom. Rainbow pasta for Pride Month, as it were. Nobody buys pasta because "yippee, now we got gay pasta!"
'We accept and support your right to be your authentic self, but we'll still throw you on the scrap heap the second it increases the share price by a fraction of a cent'.
While I am generally supportive of equality initiatives, I've always been pretty meh about DEI statements. They resemble the "This is Drug Free Zone" statements I used to see posted on the wall in high school.
Mind you, I think an actually effective inclusion program would be well worth the resources...
Because they were always illegal and it is possible that resources will now go into chasing them in a way that wasn't true in Trump's first term or under Biden.
Interesting! Why weren't they in Trump's first term?
Most of the "woke" stuff only dates back to 2020. Things were very different during Trump's first term.
Very different kind of people around Trump, he has much more energetic advisors this time.
I think Hanania also deserves some share of the credit/blame. Trump's circle is full of people who have absorbed his ideas.
It often takes time to realize mistakes, and then to organize a response. In general, current left-leaning initiatives often follow a trajectory where at first it is claimed that something one might find very desirable for moral/ideological reasons is also just plainly beneficial in economic and/or personal terms. There were A LOT of studies & articles espousing the value of diversity.
For example, McKinsey - I have a friend who used to work there -in particular made a big show of claiming that a whole bunch of progressive ideas are just really great for company culture. This gave them access to a giant market of socially conscious companies/NGOs that would normally have been cynically inclined towards them. Likewise, a lot of *their own employees* were very morally split on working for such a questionable company, and this gave them an easy out: We can consult companies on moral behaviour that is also to their own benefit! They organized workshops, they collected & summarized many different sources that gave the impression of overwhelming evidence of the benefits of DEI.
And to be clear, they were by far not the only ones. It's just a generally very appealing thing to tell yourself, so it didn't take much work to talk many people into it, who then started spreading the gospel based, which was then often spread as evidence itself.
But once you started seeing people getting into positions of power they're clearly not remotely qualified for, and you see how large initiatives, costing lots of manpower & money, begin with lofty ambitious only to end up somewhere between "ineffectual" and "negative value", at some point it just becomes very difficult to deny how big the mistake was. I've been almost my entire adult life at university, and I only really realized the extent of how far off-course we've strayed (though in a more general sense, DEI is merely a tiny sliver of this) sometime at the end of my PhD / at the beginning of my Postdoc.
Diversity is good for an organization, but the problem with this management strategy, like almost all of them, is that to do it right requires more resources than most American corporations are willing to invest in their employees. To take this example, the original studies were mostly focused on "diversity of ideas"--i.e., insights, opinions, personal backgrounds, life experiences, and so forth. You can't capture that with skin color alone.
It goes even deeper. In order to capitalize on a diversity of opinions within your workforce, management has to actually care what the opinions of their workforce are. And be willing to act on them. The power dynamics within most corporations, shall we say, offer a challenge.
So employee diversity development programs didn't work, not because the underlying idea is flawed, but because of how moderns corporations are structured.
And then there were the people who weren't on board with diversity campaigns, but were coming around to the idea that different ideas increase the chance of success, followed that idea to the conclusion that since political views were also ideas, and pretty important ones, a diversity of those would likewise be a good strategy... and noticed that diversity proponents appeared to be systematically *eliminating* political diversity.
Given that, word got around fast that diversity of ideas wasn't actually the supporting argument.
Technically, this falls under your explanation of management not actually caring about workforce opinions, but I get the sense that the political flavor drew the most attention at first. Realization that any workforce views were generally dismissed was (I think) more of a background annoyance that got highlighted by the political version. It was probably important, admittedly, driving a continued general disdain for diversity campaigns even when the political drama faded.
I wonder how replicable all those studies were. If they're like pretty much anything else in social studies, they don't.
McKinsey has done four studies, which makes it pretty clear that their initial findings weren’t just a statistical anomaly.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact
Victor linked to one meta-analysis. A peer reviewed meta-analysis that looked at gender diversity found a positive correlation between long term financial performance and female presence in a firm’s top management team (pg. 1231, unfortunately a free account is required to read the article).
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26398522
You can find more if you search. In short, the positive correlation between diversity and financial performance seems to be real. That in turn suggests, but does not prove, that increasing diversity improves financial performance.
Re the McKinsey studies:
https://econjwatch.org/articles/mckinsey-s-diversity-matters-delivers-wins-results-revisited
>In a series of very influential studies, McKinsey (2015; 2018; 2020; 2023) reports finding statistically significant positive relations between the industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margins of global McKinsey-chosen sets of large public firms and the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives. However, when we revisit McKinsey’s tests using data for firms in the publicly observable S&P 500® as of 12/31/2019, we do not find statistically significant relations between McKinsey’s inverse normalized Herfindahl-Hirschman measures of executive racial/ethnic diversity at mid-2020 and either industry-adjusted earnings before interest and taxes margin or industry-adjusted sales growth, gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, and total shareholder return over the prior five years 2015–2019. Combined with the erroneous reverse-causality nature of McKinsey’s tests, our inability to quasi-replicate their results suggests that despite the imprimatur given to McKinsey’s studies, they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.
No comments as to the reliability of the above or the four examined studies, but I don't think anyone who's skeptical of social science studies is going to be convinced simply by referring to even more of them
Of course they aren't, at least not in the general sense. But social sciences have been very proficient at a certain bait-and-switch since pretty much since their inception: It's simultaneously a "young, soft science" that can't be expected to hold the levels of rigour that are normal in the established hard sciences so we should let them get away with questionable papers, but then in the media and politics it's presented with a confident "the science says", taking advantage of the good reputation of other fields.
We should decide on one or the other, science can't afford to let them continue if it wants to keep its role.
There is empirical support for the positive effect of diversity programs on organizational performance: https://www.ucdenver.edu/docs/librariesprovider68/default-document-library/jmna-articles-bonuscontent-2.pdf
The person you responded to criticized the validity of social science papers and to rebut him you linked a meta analysis of social science papers. You're either not the sharpest tool in the shed or you're under the impression that this is like reddit where you can drop a link to dunk on someone safe in the knowledge that no one will actually click and read any of it (actually, I have my doubts that you even read what you linked)
Good points! But why now? The timing near the change of administration is coincidental?
No, not at all. Remember the stages of knowing in poker terms?
Level 1: I know
Level 2: I know that you know
Level 3: I know that you know that I know
...
Since DEI concerned morals, it wasn't enough to know. Even if it may be blindingly obvious to you, it might be social suicide to openly state so. Here at university, it still is for many topics. You need the knowledge that enough people agree with you *AND* the knowledge that these people also know it.
Elections and the polls running up to them serve as exactly this. Trump is just neither a very sympathetic nor trustworthy person and would never get remotely near any office unless people are very unhappy with the status quo. The fact that so many people are willing to vote for him is clear evidence that many people are pissed off about exactly those things he is constantly talking about - immigration, government inefficiency/waste, DEI, you name it. In addition, the cost/benefit is clearly very different now - pre-Trump, in fact also under the first Trump administration since he was so ineffectual back then, even if you and all your friends may know that DEI as practiced is bullshit, you could still expect free money if you signalled your allegiance publicly.
They're pandering.
More specifically, presuming that their previous adoption of such programs was a form of virtual signalling, their showy rejection of such programs now is a virtue signal for another form of a virtue.
Bud Light is a great example of how this pandering blew up in their faces. The brand was stagnant, younger drinkers were turning away from beer, so in order to revitalise the brand and draw in new customers, the marketing exec decided on the worst possible solution: use an influencer like Mulvaney whose appeal mostly is "shilling cosmetics and fashion", so if you're expecting hordes of 17 year old girls to start drinking your beer good luck with that, insult your core customer base ("frat boys" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2915545/Video-Bud-Light-VP-talks-pivoting-brands-fratty-touch-humor.html), make it sound like you're only trying to exploit LGBT for brand purposes (I think the marketing lady is sincere in her liberal beliefs, but the pivot sounded like opportunism), and drop all the previous iconic advertising during the stupidest time possible to do so - before all the big summer sporting events where your established customer base will be drinking your pisswater.
Established customers switched to rival brands (a lot of which were still owned by the same parent company), the new young women'n'hip guys market didn't appear to replace them, and the company see-sawed between trying to win back customers with obvious pandering, which was insulting, and trying to stave off criticism that they were now 'throwing trans people under the bus'.
The brand sales have improved, but they're still not back to where they used to be, so you can say the marketing (to improve sales and expand to a new customer base) failed, indeed failed drastically:
https://nypost.com/2025/02/08/business/bud-light-hasnt-recovered-from-dylan-mulvaney-controversy/
There's ways to do this: if you're going to use a trans person to sell beer, then pick a trans man who looks like he drinks beer, not a gay guy doing a cosplay as Audrey Hepburn. You want to get women drinking beer? Then do an ad campaign with women drinking beer, again not a drag performance which is as fake as wooden lettuce.
EDIT: Guinness is about as staid and "dad beer" (or even "granddad beer") as you can get, yet it surged in popularity so much that there was a shortage in England at Christmas. This was down to an authentic influencer movement, not one stage-managed by the brand. *That's* how you do it:
https://www.timeout.com/london/news/why-is-guinness-so-popular-right-now-121824
https://www.reddit.com/r/beer/comments/1h6srtd/the_simple_reason_why_guinness_is_surging_in/
Nobody has ever adequately explained to me how the Mulvaney thing was itself insulting to anybody.
For a couple of reasons. First, the problem that the marketing manager was addressing was "Bud Light has a reputation as the beer of older men - dads or guys who started drinking it in college twenty years ago. We need to bring in new customers, young men and importantly young women. What do they care about?" and her answer was "progressive shit" (not that she phrased it like that). So the first problem there was "we're telling our established and loyal customers that they don't mean shit to us, and in fact they embarrass us". That's the trouble with doing a video interview where you explain how the 'fratty image' of Bud Light is the one you want to lose. You're telling your existing customers "piss off, your money was good enough for us but we're now chasing the rainbow instead".
You shouldn't be surprised when your customers then, indeed, do piss off to other brands.
So secondly, of all the people they could have picked - and it wasn't a formal partnership, it was the marketing whizzes deciding "who is the current hot Instagram influencer?" and they then sent Mulvaney some mocked-up promotional cans - they picked someone who was already mildly controversial for the wrong reasons.
My own view is that Mulvaney is not, or was not, actually trans: the whole "my year of girlhood" thing started off a a gay guy who is an entertainer being stuck in isolation during the Covid lockdown, he started doing these video clips as an act, and suddenly he got picked as the new trans star so he was riding that gravy train as hard as he could.
That's bad enough, but eh, if some grifter wants to grift, who cares? It's just that Mulvaney rode it all the way to "Biden invite to the White House" and personally I find the "woo-hoo, let's normalise the bulge! girl power!" performance extremely grating, to the point I wanna punch him inna snoot. No shit, ordinary women don't have penis bulges:
https://www.instagram.com/transstudent/p/CnijPvoLpNR/?hl=en&img_index=1
To me, he's just a very irritating bad drag act and he's not even funny. Lily Savage in her hey-day, now there's a woman believable as Bud Light drinker (or at least, beer drinker):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9l3_PIdZi0
So just on the basis of "I think this idiot is annoying beyond belief", that's not the kind of vibes you want associated with your brand when marketing.
And then the whole thing blew up, and it became "you troglodyte transphobes" and yeah. Stupid moves all round, but what really annoyed the 'right side of history' set was that the boycott lasted and worked. It was all expected to blow over and not do anything, but the brand took a definite hit, sales dipped to the point they were trying to literally give it away, and they've never recovered back to what they were.
Plus, the new market of young drinkers never materialised, so they drove off market share of old reliable customers and didn't replace them, which is a failure by any measure.
Thirdly, you're trying to sell beer. Why are you getting a face who is promoting things like tampons and makeup? Who is Mulvaney's audience? Are they really going to switch to beer (when the whole point of the slump is that young drinkers are turning away from beer) and more importantly to "ugh, that's what my uncle drinks"?
I haven't watched any of Mulvaney's performances, so I can't speak to that, but I imagine most veteran Bud Light drinkers hadn't, either.
What you first said strikes me as most resonant: Bud Light's then-customers probably perceived the Mulvaney campaign as a deliberate attempt to shun them. The method they chose didn't really matter. If Bud Light's marketers ran an unironic campaign of "Fat-Ass Americans in the Heartland Suck, amirite? C'mon, coasties!", it would have had the same effect without making even one reference to trans people.
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm. I realize there's a lot of political controversy around transgender people, but how is paying one to be in an ad campaign actually an insult to anybody?
I have noticed over the past few weeks that this user has a pattern of imagining things that aren't true, and proceeding to criticize or mock what they've imagined.
Didn't pay Mulvaney, so far as I know, but it's the wrong face to represent 'drink our beer'. It's like picking the president of PETA (if they have a president) for an "eat more beef" marketing campaign. And Mulvaney is just annoying and talentless (to me, anyway).
That would require honesty on the part of large corporate advertisers. Problem there.
True, but on the other hand, who expects honesty from advertisers? The most we can look for is "Okay I know they're trying to manipulate me, but at least they're not insulting my intelligence while they do it. I know they think I'm dumb, but they're not stating that overtly".
God bless the woman, but why on earth did she think "Bud Light + Dylan Mulvaney - genius stroke of viral advertising!"
They weren't trying to get Trans people to drink their beer. That's, what, 2% of the population? They were trying to get all the young people who think Trans is transgressive and cool to drink their beer. So how sophisticated the ad had to be depends on how sophisticated you think that target demographic is.
Having had researched various issues related to water intrusion in a condo building I’ve realized that… almost every (99%?) American buying real estate is hiring a so-called “inspector”, which is a guy who goes around the property, checks whether plugs are working, takes note of various minor issues such as “creaky floors” and charges you $500-750 for this.
Meanwhile for $1500 you can hire an actual envelope and/or foundations expert who will carefully measure everything using non invasive (thermal/radio sensors) or minimally invasive (pin moisture sensors), plus use an extensive experience in dealing with failed buildings to give a an actual capital-I inspection. And they’ll do this not just inside the unit (if it’s a condo) but around the entire building! You also very rarely see agents deep dive into board meeting notes with Straussian reading and a vocabulary of evasive language that boards use to hide major problems.
Am I misunderstanding something or is nearly everyone buying real estate pretty much going in blind for… no good reason at all?
Same thing for things like moisture sensors: almost nobody places them around the building’s envelope, foundation, and roof to detect problems early, even though like $300 in investments will easily save you $50-100k down the line. And people constructing new houses for themselves almost never demand that the builder put in these sensors during construction, thus making it very hard to find problems before the warranty runs out. How is that possible? Why is everyone so nonchalant about property they own?
The proper core function of generalist building inspectors is to identify things that are worth having a specialist look at in detail.
Sure, you can pay $1500 to get a thorough specialist examination of the foundation. That still leaves the wiring, plumbing, HVAC system, and roof that could also undergo the same level of scrutiny. That's five inspections instead of one, which is pretty expensive in terms of both time and money.
If instead you get the generalist inspection first and then get specialists to look at potential major issues, you might only have to have the generalist inspection. If you need specialist inspections on top of it, you likely only need one or two. And those inspections are likely to be more targeted (making them less work, less potential liability, and more likely to result in a paid job) so the specialists will often do them for free as an opportunity to give you a quote for fixing the issue.
That said, the quality of generalist inspection reports varies wildly, and it requires some skill and diligence (which most buyers lack in one particular or the other) to read the reports critically and judge which issues call for a follow-up inspection.
I’ve never once heard of the “$500 guy you hire before signing the contract” recommending someone to hire a specialist.
An envelope specialist should be able to evaluate the foundations, the exteriors and the roof all at once (I have a 40 page PDF report of just that I can email you if you want as a reference). The plumbing, wiring and HVAC are usually far less costly to repair than any issues with the building envelope. They’re almost never a catastrophic risk for the building because you can always add leak sensors for the plumbing, shut off power if you have wiring issues or get a portable AC while the central one is broken and being repaired.
If you have a PDF example of a generalist inspector actually giving rock solid advice and suggesting X/Y/Z specialist is invited I’d love to read it!
"suggesting X/Y/Z specialist is invited" is routine to the point of overuse in my experience. The domain of my experience reading inspection reports is single-family residential properties, mostly in the southern Bay Area but also a couple in Washington State and Wisconsin.
The far more common failure mode I've seen is to suggest a specialist for practically everything in the report, which is almost as bad as not recommending specialists at all. I've seen two or three that actually seem to do a decent job of flagging high-priority issues separately, but even those are excessively cluttered with "We recommend evaluation by a qualified electrical specialist" boilerplate on the lower-priority items. I don't think I have seen any that I consider to be "rock solid advice".
Oh, yes, absolutely, there's always some BS disclaimer about how you should call up <literally every specialist out there> to be sure. What's missing is "there's some suspicious cracks in the basement I've noticed on my infrared camera, go talk to XYZ to triple check, and if confirmed ask for a $100k concession".
Hand-wavingly: people are getting $500 inspectors to get a mortgage, and are those $1500 experts even on the list of people the mortgage company will consider as valid to sign off on a mortgage?
They won’t, no. If you’re taking out a mortgage, you can hire the cheapest inspector in town to get the “formal seal of approval” and then also hire an actual envelope engineer to validate the sanity of your investment.
Why don’t the banks enforce the higher standards. They have rights to the collateral after all.
Someone's done the calculation and determined the current system is good enough.
Any tips for finding such an envelope/foundations expert? Even very basically "what do you search for"?
We have a tiny bit of mysterious water damage in a bathroom and I would be delighted to pay someone to use minimally invasive sensors to find out where it's coming from...
1. Are you sure it's not a leaky pipe or valve? If not, call a licensed plumber first. My rule of thumb: get someone under age 40, who's in good shape. Plumbing is a very hard job, don't hire someone who can't do it physically.
2. If you're sure it's not a leak or a plumber says he doesn't know, Google "<your city> envelope inspections <condo or single family home>" or "<your city> envelope engineer".
Another option that works: lookup as much detail as you can about your building via your HOA's documentation list or via your county's parcel viewer portal. Paste the info + photos of the water damage into GPT o3-mini, ask for advice.
P.S. If you want, DM me your phone number, I can either root cause or tell you whom to call over a 10-minute video call.
Because they have other priorities. Most people want to do what they do well, and leave all the rest of it to someone whose job it is to do that thing. That's why we trust our lives to doctors, despite all the problems they have. A property, regardless of how much it is worth, is worth less than one's life. It's just pattern matching. They feel insecure in their ability to understand how to protect a real estate investment long term, so they look for an expert to do it for them. Of course that opens them up to being taken advantage of. Yet these same people very likely do their own jobs competently.
I *am* saying 'hire an expert' :-) Just *hire a PROPER expert*!.
Sadly, one must first have a degree of expertise in order to identify which the proper experts are.
Used to be true! But now a solved problem thanks to LLMs. It completely smashed the 'expertise wall' out of existence and made it possible for non-experts to have a 90th percentile expert on every area of human endeavor in their pocket. You still need experts but only those in the top 10%, which AI can help you identify.
More like 50th percentile enthusiastic amateur, due to limitations in the training data.
Mind you, there are use cases where being able to summon a 50th percentile amateur in any field of study on a minute's notice can be quite useful, and many more when it is at least entertaining. But there are also cases where it can lead you dangerously astray, particularly if you mistake it for a 90th percentile expert.
1st, even if that's true, most people don't know that yet.
2nd, is that really true? Aren't LLM's still prone to making things up, regurgitating the popular wisdom found online?
1) yep but only a matter of time
2) OpenAI deep research has now smashed that concept and tossed it away
Hi, I'm on the board of my self-managed shitty condo building, I can answer your question!
It's not nonchalance. It's just pure, blissful ignorance; the kind of ignorance which is *so* ignorant, it doesn't even know how to research what it doesn't know.
I am very, *VERY* horribly the most knowledgeable and qualified owner in our 12-unit self-managed building on the topic of HOA management, building construction, reserve studies, and so on. I say that my comparative expertise is "horrible" because I don't have any aptitude in engineering and mathy stuff (interpretations of the CC&Rs, I'm much better with).
My condo is my first and only home. I had to learn everything on the fly after I volunteered to be on the Board mostly only to properly oversee reconstruction after a broken pipe flood. Then I became the one who talked to all the experts, like the HOA's lawyers, onsite reserve study assessors, mitigation companies, insurance agent, contractors, leak detection companies, and on and on. I learned how much more is involved than I'd ever thought to ask about.
I know just a *little* bit, but compared to how my fellow neighbors know virtually *nothing at all,* I am a veritable sage of wisdom. And now I can never leave the Board because my extremely minor competency is all we have protecting us from great doom.
Also, when asking why other people seem to be stupid, it's a good idea to remember that most people aren't "smart" enough to be routinely curious about what they don't know and/or to worry what they might be wrong about. That isn't you, though! You're asking a question, you're clearly literate and, being an ACX reader/commenter, it's statistically likely that you have an above-average IQ, so you probably can't *really* model the mindset of an illiterate-ish person with an "average" or below-average IQ (Scott explains why in my favorite essay of his, Different Worlds, here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/).
But people with average and below-average IQs are the majority of the population, and a lot of them are just smart enough to make enough money to buy a condo but not smart enough to know they don't know enough about condo buildings, and likely not literate enough to do the research on what they need to know. They're "nonchalant" because they don't really have the basic *capacity* to be "chalant."
(I know that sounds kind of elitist and arrogant, so FWIW, let me hasten to add that I consider myself to be only slightly above average in IQ, above average in literacy, but amongst the dumbest of the ACX readers and/or commenters. I'm only *just* smart enough to be able to ask, "wait, am I wrong about this?")
Hmm. I imagine a lot of very smart people with high academic IQs are hiring the €750 guy and not the $1500 guy because they aren’t really interested in this stuff. A guy who works construction, or adjacent, lower on measured IQ, would care.
In any case it seems to me that the better inspection should be mandatory.
Yeah, but the fact that the $1500 guy exists isn't widely published (and thus known). I did a shitton of research before buying my condo and it never came up. I never heard of an envelope engineer until I ordered the very first reserve study for my condo building, and the architect who walked the site recommended hiring one (and had to explain what it was).
Hah I guess you're right, but even "high IQ" people in my circle have all paid for a "$500 guy who tells you one plug doesn't work" vs a "$1500 guy who'll tell you the third level has a ton of trapped moisture under the brick facade". That included *myself* a few years ago as I just blindly trusted "the experts". So I think it's not just about smarts, its also about a very strong push for "don't question the pros" that's persists in our society.
A "$500 guy who tells you one plug doesn't work" is a perfect description of yer standard building inspector. Always finds small/obvious issues, never serious problems.
I do have networked moisture sensors all around the house, the difference between shutting water within minutes of a leak starting vs. hours can easily run into five-figure savings.
In addition to the homeowner ignorance problem that afflicts residential property generally, condominiums suffer from a more specific conflict-of-interest problem that leads to deferred maintenance and property degradation.
Condo associations charge monthly fees that are supposed to cover both ongoing operating expenses (mowing lawns, plowing snow, etc) and large, infrequent capital expenses (roof replacements, parking lot repaving, major HVAC/plumbing/electrical upgrades, etc).
The monthly condo fee is easy to determine and known to everyone, including prospective buyers. It's effectively part of the owner's mortgage payment. But the years-in-the-future costs that these fees ostensibly cover are difficult even for experts to determine precisely, and are basically opaque to people who don't have construction or property management expertise.
In any condo association, some condo owners are in for the long haul and others plan to sell before too long. Owners who plan to sell in the short-to-medium term are acutely aware that a higher monthly fee will translate into a lower sale price for their units. So they're strongly incentivized to fight to keep the fee as low as possible, even if that results in deferred maintenance and a higher net present cost of future work. The buyer of their unit will focus like a laser on the fee, but probably won't notice minor deferred maintenance. The higher cost of this approach will be borne years later by the new buyer in the form of a special assessment.
The condominium legal structure wasn't really allowed in the US until the 1960s, so the phenomenon of older condo buildings that need major upgrades is fairly recent, and this conflict-of-interest problem is likely to cause more issues going forward.
The conflict-of-interest problem is what annual reserve studies are supposed to combat (I mean, in addition to helping HOAs plan a budget for future work, haha).
Ideally poorly funded reserves will impact the value of a given unit enough to motivate current owners not to defer saving for large future expenses.
It's been a while since we've had a unit sell in my building, but I always told the prospective buyers who wanted to talk to me as the HOA's representative to read the reserve study EXTREMELY CAREFULLY and be very, very aware that we have huge expenses coming up, in the form of special assessments, monthly dues, or both, and then make their choice accordingly.
I think we need to make being elitist and arrogant OK again. Sometimes it's true.
Just wanted to chime in and say my experience is very similar to yours, even though I live in a coop and am not on the board.
Coming in, I imagined the experience with the whole thing would be like a little democracy. How else could you co-own a building? I mean, there's always something to do around a house, so I imagined there would be some sort of culture-structure in place for everyone to chip in with these little chores.
Not only is that absent, but he coop is divided into roughly three groups: the elite (board), the unwashed masses (the vocal complainers), and the silent majority. The board takes care of taxes and major repairs. They do a decent job of it. The silent majority occasionally lends a hand with a problem, but otherwise just enjoys living their life. The unwashed masses are the people who continuously emit complaints and similar noises. The main door lock sticks, why doesn't someone do something about it? The heat hasn't kicked in yet, why doesnt someone do something about it? My package is missing, why doesn't someone do something about it?
The worst, pardon my language, shitstorm occurred when the cold season set in. One of the unwashed complained that the temperature in their unit is below the legal level (not sure that even applies to coops) and that their kids are cold. Then another unwashed added in that no one should go cold, especially kids, and when will somebody do something? Then it continued on this way, with each of the unwashed saying things like "I vote for" (who called for a vote?) or "I support you" (do words translate into joules?) and other noises.
This was tragic to behold because the person who began the thread did so also last year and apparently did nothing in between to improve their apartment, which, as it turned out, had customized its windows, making the owner responsible for them instead of the coop. I expect the same to repeat next year.
So yeah, just to summarize: Christina is right about most people not being able to take action to address object level problems.
Amazing! I'm stealing "people who continuously emit complaints and similar noises" for future use :-)
Hah!
I recognize the three groups, although the board isn't as elite as I would like it to be. The three other "elite" people in the building are all wanting to avoid joining to board because it's way too much work.
I imagine myself as being in that group too (the elite but avoiding).
Part of me would enjoy it because I like fixing things and making systems better. But I already have a bunch of that stuff in my own life. What would sweeten the deal would be to do it in a group of cooperators. Then we could really make something beautiful here. But there aren't enough cooperators soy efforts would mostly be met with "... when will the board take care of MY problem???", which just isn't too enticing.
One person--who built the rooftop deck, and the bike storage racks, and reorganizes the basement to max out storage space, and a few others things left last the board and the building last year in a huff. I'd rather not get into the same position.
I hope you make it through alright :)
The commons: what a tragedy, amirite?
Great name for a musical
"Almost" has the letters in alphabetic ordering. "Sponge" in anti-alphabetic ordering.
Which are the longest words with those properties? Who can find the longest word in any other language?
I got nerd sniped by this comment so I wrote a script to check, using a list of over 460k English words that I found online.
The longest alphabetically sorted words: aegilops, Echinops (8 characters). The list of words with 7 characters: Adelops, alloquy, Babbitt, Baggott, beefily, begorry, belloot, billowy, Cahilly, deglory, egilops, Elmmott, Gabbert, Iacchos, Iachimo, Kaffirs, Ladinos, Mallory, Mellott, Sachiko, Schloss, Schnorr, Uccello, Vachill, Waddell, Wilmott.
The longest reverse alphabetically sorted word: trollied (8 characters). The list of words with 7 characters: poongee, sniffed, snigged, soogeed, spiffed, sponged, spoofed, spooked, spooled, spooned, trigged, trolled, troolie, vroomed, woolled, wronged.
In German, the longest word I can find in https://github.com/cpos/AlleDeutschenWoerter is bekloppt (8 characters, very appropriate: "dopey"). Second place bemoost (7 letters, "mossy"). In reverse, only six letters: rollig, sonnig, völlig, wolkig, Yuppie.
Mildly surprised to see that "mossy" is a German word. I assume it's a loanword, but I wouldn't expect it to be common enough to loan.
No, "bemoost" is the German word for English "mossy". Sorry about the confusion, just because "mossy" happens to be in alphabetic ordering, too!
Disappointing performance by French, by the way. Only six letters, come on? "Accent", "billot" and the like? Reverse, seven letters, "voligée", although conjugations feel a bit like cheating.
PS: Dutch does much better: AFKNOOPT, BEEKLOOP, BIJKOOPT, BIJLOOPT, VUURROOD, WROKKIGE
Lots of your first list (Babbitt, Baggott, Cahilly, Gabbert, Iacchos, Iachimo, Kaffirs, Ladinos, Mallory, Mellott, Sachiko, Schloss, Schnorr, Uccello, Vachill, Waddell, Wilmott) don't meet the criteria. Are you ignoring the first letter?
Oh no, let me guess. You compared ASCIIbetically and the capitals come before the lower case.
Yeah, it was late at night and I was thinking in terms of ASCII. At the time of writing that it made perfect sense. I'm still a bit embarrassed that it got past me.
Bingo!
Am I misunderstanding? Babbit and baggot both seem out of order to me, with an 'a' after a 'b'?
LLMs solve such problems easily provided you have a wordlist. o3-mini-high solved it on its first attempt, but I'd guess weaker models would be able to as well. Here is an example: https://gist.github.com/JonasMoss/31c5489d25998ce07bf01d5b68bf2078 (I'm not giving the answers right here in case other people want to try. But the LLMs were also able to find the correct words themselves, without programming! So cheating is definitely possible here ;))
o3 is literally the first model that does not produce complete garbage in tasks like this.
(The real question is, is this a genuine improvement in general reasoning, or did the running joke about the number of r's in "strawberry" stung so much that they finally specifically trained it to do letter-parsing.)
Might be in the training set.
Without programming? I assume that this is the sort of thing that (say) ChatGPT solves by generating some Python code and running it behind the scenes.
I am genuinely interested in hearing a non-Trumpist steelman/give an argument in favor of the current direction of the Trump administration. Is there a perspective in which this is positive for the US, for the world?
The best I can do is say that the US sees its share of global wealth and power as destined to slowly shrink (in relative if not absolute terms), and is seizing this sort of last opportunity as the global hegemon to restructure global politics and economics in a way that benefits US national interests in the long term. What I can't get over is that is that it seems like if this were done in a more thought-out way with buy-in from major allies it would be much more effective. Can anyone help me with this steelman?
" seizing this sort of last opportunity as the global hegemon to restructure global politics and economics in a way that benefits US national interests in the long term."
Global politics and economics were *already* structured to benefit U.S. national interests. They have been for ~80 years. One could argue (I suppose) that they could be re-structured to allow for even more benefit, but that runs into two problems.
First, when you're already doing (by any objective measure) better than any nation in history, there aren't likely to be many (and perhaps not any) ways to do better still relative to others. But there are *guaranteed* to be lots of ways to make things worse. It makes for a pretty bad gamble.
Second, Trump doesn't seem to have the *slightest notion* of how the structures that have enabled decades of American prosperity actually work. One can tell, because he's started to undermine pretty much all of them, without any assurance of producing *anything* of tangible value in return.
(I apologize that I'm unable to provide a steelman. There are some stated goals that I could steelman, but the actions themselves don't seem well-chosen to actually enact the goals, and I can't fast talk my own brain past that. One cannot believe black is white by an effort of will.)
As a steelman, I'd go with this: If Donald Trump succeeds at everything he is trying to do, most of it will be very good for the United States of America and much of it will be very good for the world. Specifically,
He's trying to seriously curtail a bloated bureaucracy and overbearingly intrusive regulatory system that has often focused on justifying its own existence by making people laboriously seek fifty-three different kinds of permission before they're allowed to do anything good or productive, which has been a drag on American economic development for generations. And it's a waste of money at the source,
He's trying to reduce the national debit, or at least slow its growth, in part by the aforementioned cuts to wasteful bureaucracy, in part by tax *rate* cuts which (coupled with the reduced regulatory burden) are meant to facilitate so much economic growth that tax *revenues* will increase. I believe the national debt is the biggest threat to the United States in this generation, so if I thought this would work I'd be entirely in favor of it.
Obviously, the war on "woke". Social Justice is not intrinsically a bad thing, and once upon a time (before it acquired its current names) was a very good thing. But it has long since passed the point of diminishing marginal returns, refighting civil-rights battles that were won decades ago and finding increasingly small populations of the "oppressed" that we are to devote ourselves to helping, causing far more in the way of collateral damage to the innocent-but-insufficiently-woke that can be justified by t he meager benefits. So long as we don't undo the victories that were legitimately won in the past, we'd be better off with the whole movement gone. And better still if it were just greatly reduced in power and refocused on the few worthy causes that remain, but that's probably not on the table.
He's trying to enhance America's image on the world stage, in ways that don't involve fighting bloody useless wars to show how badass we are. The United States of America has been an underappreciated Force for Good in the world for almost a century, and more of that would be better for almost everybody (but still won't be appreciated).
He's trying to bring a lasting peace to Ukraine and Gaza; hard to find fault with that,
And, of course, he wants to Make America Great Again. Enough said.
That's the steelman, but Donald Trump is not the Man of Steel. He doesn't have a clue how to really accomplish any of these things except the "fire lots of bureaucrats" and "destroy woke" part, and he's got only half a clue on those. He doesn't have the kind of people on his team who are going to help him find the solutions, either. So he's going to fail at most of this, and in the places where he even half-succeeds the unintended consequences will cause far more harm than good. They'll also broadly discredit *any* attempt to solve these problems, or even to think of them *as* problems.
" in part by tax *rate* cuts which (coupled with the reduced regulatory burden) are meant to facilitate so much economic growth that tax *revenues* will increase."
This would be plausible if the tax rates were punishing. Cut 70% to 60%, sure - you just increased "take-home" earnings by whopping 33%, while reducing your revenue by 14%. Now, cut 35% to 30%: you reduced your revenue by same 14% while increasing take-home earnings by... drum roll... 8%. The economy would have to become 17% bigger to compensate for the 14% revenue reduction, while the private sector earnings increased by only 8%. How on Earth is that growth supposed to be stimulated by such modest increase?
Once the rates are in the bottom third it becomes increasingly impossible to add enough economic growth to compensate for cuts. But to realize this, one needs to understand how percentages work, and of course it's hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it, BUT it is impossible for a man to understand something when his identity depends on not understanding it.
Thus the "tax cuts pay for themselves" mantra from the usual suspects.
Did you miss the part where I pointed out that Donald Trump doesn't have a clue how to accomplish any of these things and so will mostly fail? Because yes, this is one of the ways he will fail.
He's not alone; "tax cuts will make us stronger and solve the deficit because something something Laffer Curve" has been a Republican mantra for a long time. And there are circumstances when cutting tax rates is the revenue-maximizing move, at least in the mid- to long term, but we aren't in anything like those circumstances.
We're in agreement. I meant to elaborate on the math behind the tax cuts, re-reading it now I realize it came off as a rebuttal. It wasn't my intent, sorry about that.
No problem; thanks for the clarification.
You assume his goal is to look out for US interests. It's not. It's to aggrandize himself, and as for his officials, to further the reactionist movement worldwide at the expense of non-reactionist ideology and individuals in both the US and worldwide.
One can easily say the same thing about people who praise Trump for prioritizing US interests.
There's no plausible national security justification for effectively going to war against Canada like Trump is though.
To counter China, you want allies, not enemies. And Canada is a natural and longstanding ally.
I said nothing about GDP or national security, but ok:
To use your example, If Trump wanted to have more steel made in the US, which is a great goal I would wholeheartedly support, he would...
you know he has no clue, right? he has no clue what's involved in making more steel in the US?
... anyway, he would get US Steel, etc. executives summoned and grill them about the obstacles to producing more steel, timelines for same, etc. Then summon some national statistics bureaucrat who can produce the numbers for domestic steel consumption and what gaps imports are currently filling (oh, never mind, Musk fired the bureaucrat). Then create a National Steel Production Increase Plan. Once there's a clear path to producing enough domestic steel to satisfy the domestic demand with some slack for emergencies, etc. announce future tariffs coming into force.
Instead, the idiot is slapping - who do you think pays the tariffs, China? - slapping an increase of production cost on domestic manufacturers who cannot turn on a dime and replace the steel from the current suppliers (sorry, I keep dropping these questions - do you know what's involved in qualifying a new supplier? because I'm sure Trump doesn't know shit). Such security! Much winning! Very steel! The original Doge is spinning in her grave.
Trump has rightly recognized the US is in decline and can no longer afford to maintain an empire. That's what we see now. End of empire means ceding spheres of influence to China and to regional powers. I suspect he will make a deal with China that sees the US withdraw from Asia and China pull back from influencing in the Americas.
For America, it's not great. Losing an empire rarely makes people richer. But it is probably better than a more chaotic withdrawal that would be forced anyway in a few years time. And Trump can probably sell it to people in a way that looks like winning regardless.
For the rest of the world it is mixed. Probably a period of some chaos and uncertainty. Definitely nuclear proliferation - I would not be surprised if Germany, Poland, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Saudi, South Korea, and Japan are all nuclear powers by 2030. For China it is a great opportunity to shape the world to their liking. For Europe too, if they can come together and seize the moment.
All in all its an inevitable moment. It could have come later. But the end of the American Empire had to come some time and Trump is at least bringing it about in a less chaotic way than it might have been. Hence all the talk about him avoiding World War III - moments when a rising power challenges the existing power are dangerous. The world has the choice between World War III, a new Cold War, or American retreat. Fortunately Trump has chosen the most peaceful path.
> End of empire means ceding spheres of influence to China and to regional powers.
Empire also means ceding spheres of influence. We've never had an Emperor of the World in fact. (We have had equivalent titles, like King of the Universe, but those are always coupled with titles that reflect a more limited and also more real authority.)
If an empire is no longer growing it is declining. No one in history has maintained a territorially stagnant empire for long.
Well, sure, in the sense that 300 years is a good run for an empire and 200 is about average, no one has ever maintained a stable one "for long".
But there's been plenty of maintaining a shrinking empire for, say, 140 years. The Southern Song dynasty conventionally goes from 1127-1279.
Well sure. Trump that might pull that off if he refocuses on the Americas and leaves the rest of the world. That would be the best case outcome for the US. The other outcome would be overextension and inevitable collapse.