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.
> 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?
The oppisite; a lazy and ovisous one; make your own "newtab" page
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?)
Say what you will about the man; he was fined the gdp of a small irrelevant country after a sudden *coordinated* banning. Making it the most extreme case of in theory legal censorship in america; the other options are suicides by 40 stabs to the back of the head but I dont imagine your defending those.
Im vaguely aware of musk censoring his critics, but he cant coordinate with bluesky to make it be everywhere all at once or leverage massive fines.
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
> 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?
I much as I would love to rant about the conspiracy theories I believe; freedom of speech is important enough to actually competently defend.
Objection Relevance; freedom of speech is *for* people you disagree with.
> 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?
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, accusations of cowardliness, medical staff determining mental fitness, the debate of weapon and first blood or death, 2nds not loading pistols, priests preaching forgiveness.
Hundreds of micro questions by many hands to craft the outcome; some of them would be yours.
> you need a much better example than Alex Jones
Gdp of a country, and the government was sloppy in it being so sudden Maybe he was the first in a wave, or you hate him so much they didnt care. There were of course those who fucci asked to be censored, but they preferred shadow bans and had developed the tools much harder to establish the censorship existing to everyone; for alex jones the critics jump straight to "its a good thing" skipping the dull "it isnt happening" stage.
>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?
This particular utterance is crazy so we disregard it? Divide it by 2 maybe?
How about this one:
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law“
We should think “Oh he really doesn’t think of himself as a Napoleonic figure, so just ignore that one?”
Unfortunately he does act like he might believe he is just such a figure as indicated by this messianic line from his inaugural address,
“I was saved by God to make America great again.”
He has said many things that sounded crazy at the time that he has followed through on.
A lot of people voted for him believing he was full of hot gas and would never do the very things he is doing now.
Giving the guy a pass on things we think he maybe doesn’t believe is not a workable solution. If he says dangerous things he is a dangerous man. We should be paying full attention.
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?
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.
...Why is it so difficult to believe that Trump is more aligned with Putin and his vision than the rest of the world? This isn't blind belief in his words, there is just not much reason to believe he is being particularly subtle about his motives in this case. I would be interested in hearing any objections you have with this model.
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.
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.
“An emergency meeting of the main European powers–not including Czechoslovakia, although their representatives were present in the town, or the Soviet Union, an ally to both France and Czechoslovakia–took place in Munich, Germany, on 29–30 September 1938. An agreement was quickly reached on Hitler's terms, and signed by the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Italy.”
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.
The guy gets away with insane stuff like this all the time. He’ll just say some other crazy thing two days from now and this will just be another piece of debris that passed in the ‘zone flood’.
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.
The term evolved for newspaper and text forum headlines, where the very act of clicking on the topic is itself a reward signal (and thus you need to be careful when dispensing it), and the sole thing that you see of a topic before clicking is the headline and maybe a short intro text section (invariably misleading, of course).
Consider how wrong those assumptions are in a YouTube video:
(1) Clicking on a video isn't a reward signal, watching ads is
(2) You see a thumbnail photo, a channel's name, an upload timestamp, and a view count instead of just a headline
(3) If you're not already in another video, YouTube autoplays a minimized video when your UI centers on it, with no sound and no ads, so you see a preview of the video (with rewinding and fast-forwarding available, even)
Ultimately, I care about what's in a video, not the stupid tricks that YouTube forces the video's author(s) to do in order to reach people. If I see an invitation to a Quantum Computing lecture using a mobile circus as its PR strategy, I... really wouldn't mind or think any less of the people behind the lecture, I would blame the city they're operating in. If I was weighing whether to attend this lecture or any of the hundreds of other lectures, I would weigh factors like how many people have already attended this lecture before (view count) and the photo they chose to put on the posters (the thumbnail, roughly).
Clickbaitness' being more widespread means it's no longer a reliable signal of filtering, everyone does it, it has become a neutral day-to-day part of how to become famous on YouTube.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
>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.
Potentially some of the people doing the jobs created by the defense budget could be retasked with public works projects. For example, the Army Corps of Engineers could become the Civilian Corp of Engineers and rebuild some of the crumbling infrastructure in the US (they already do this to some extent, like their work on rebuilding the levies in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, so this isn't much of a reach).
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.
So "Heads I win, tails we're even" is a nice and compact way of describing an enraging attitude I often see, a lot of times from people I agree with, where they sort of implicitly assume that their views and beliefs are somewhat "globally privileged", that their enemies somehow "deep down" know themselves to be wrong and are expected to be submissive/shy in their goals and their pursuit of those goals. (Since no one who knows they're wrong or at least more wrong than others should have stubbornness or persistence in pursuing their wrong goals and beliefs.)
The textbook example is how many religious people implicitly privilege the religion they were raised on, expecting others to be perfect skeptics toward other religions (even if they happen to be the ones *they* were raised on) and notice the myriad discrepancies and inconsistencies in those religions, but not applying those same standards to the very religion they think is the perfect one.
But... Revenge can be its own kind of open-ended loop. Like what determines a proportional revenge? If I smear Scott in a Twitter shitpost that gets liked by at most 50 or so users (about 80% of whom are bots, perhaps?) and Scott replies with the most savage and brutal insults on my entire existence in a post that gets liked 200 times and read and commented on by thousands of users across Substack and Reddit, who insulted the other guy more? And is that really a proportional "eye for an eye" for Scott to do that? And what if our actions are different, let's say, I threaten to publish Scott's real first name in a newspaper and he threatens to call me low IQ and have his many friends revoke their $NEWSPAPER subscriptions?
Absent any sort of regulator, shared God, shared elder, or something to fear, Revenge's final state is that I inflict maximum damage upon you and everything and everyone that you stand for (or is/are willing to stand for you), and you try to do the same.
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? Intuitively and viscerally, rape is an extreme that people often conceptualize to be worse than death, but really, what did you expect of people who you tried to run out of polite society? Are they not allowed to take revenge? (I hear you, you're saying J.K. Rowling's opinions are maybe not enough to run them out of polite society? Well, their "Cancellations" aren't either, she's a 30+-years-career author with a very overrated franchise, she's a billionaire, any amount of twitter yapping isn't going to harm her, like ever, any more than it can harm Jeff Bezos, and yet her revenge is somehow "Justified" but theirs aren't?)
Let's downgrade the suggested revenge mechanism a bit, instead of raping her, trans activists are going to make sure J.K. Rowling never enters a public bathroom ever again, in her entire life. This will imply a lot of stalking and monitoring. Is that acceptable? It seems kinda "fitting" to what Rowling's original sin is, doesn't it? Whose revenge is justified, both? Those who didn't "start" the hostilities?
I don't have easy answers, there are only ever 4 problems in morality: Figuring out what counts as people, figuring out how to not wrong people, figuring out how to recover if you did wrong people, and figuring out what to do if you think you were wronged by people. Yours is the fourth and the most devilish, wicked problem.
...I don't know what you're trying to say. Are you saying that women being raped by men is proof that men should be getting killed? But why would that be the case? Men are far more powerful than women. Do you think human history being defined by patriarchy was just a fluke?
"Men" are not rapists, so if any of your hilariously misguided delusions that I could charitably call models of history and morality were remotely correct, the minority of men who rape women (at least the ones doing it in the classic penetrative fashion with no soft manipulation or previous acquaintance) would have been killed a very long time ago.
Let's also not spotlight the fact that "Power" have meant a very different thing since the invention of Mr. Colt.
Again, I don't even know what point you're trying to make. Killing the minority of men that rape doesn't prevent new rapists from being born. And we have harshly punished them throughout history, not because women had agency to get them punished, mind you, but because it violated property rights:
> Rape laws existed to protect virginal daughters from rape. In these cases, a rape done to a woman was seen as an attack on the estate of her father because she was his property and a woman's virginity being taken before marriage lessened her value; if the woman was married, the rape was an attack on the husband because it violated his property.
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
I mean her views are not complicated. She thinks that trans people are either liars or delusional sick people and in both cases are dangerous to women. We don't need essays and podcasts and youtube documentaries to explain that.
>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?
1. False premise. 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.
2. "Even as they demonize their enemies, the idea that said enemies will take revenge does not occur to them." 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. Just... I don't know, think about that for a minute. Perhaps you can understand why we should expect people not to do that?
"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.
I disagree and I think I have to use Dave Chappelle as an example. Chappelle has said some things in his comedy specials that some people consider transphobic. I personally don't think what he's said is quite as bad as what Rowling has said so this may not be the most apt example but it's what I have at hand. I might be able to find another if it won't do.
In any case, what happened with Chappelle is that some of his left-leaning fans got mad and said they wouldn't listen to him anymore, others were mad but were able to put it aside, some called for apologies, some criticized him, and some just let it go. Then, he proceeded to live his life as a normal person, without going on twitter on a regular basis to attack this critic or that critic, and he didn't bully anyone, and didn't attempt to rally an international hate mob against an Algerian boxer, and as a result of this very normal behavior... people aren't really that mad at him anymore. He didn't publicly admit he was wrong or beg forgiveness. He just agreed to disagree, and was relatively respectful about it, and when he hosted SNL recently I honestly didn't see a *single* complaint on my very, very lefty Bluesky or twitter feeds about it.
If Rowling had said "yeah, I don't think trans women are really women, but I'm not going to make a big deal about it and bully a bunch of people and constantly spread dangerous and malicious lies about trans people, because we can disagree and still respect each other" I really think that would have been that. Some people would have been disgruntled, Rowling would have enjoyed her bundles of cash and her legacy, and the anti-trans movement would have some other figurehead.
The point is, she absolutely chose this outcome by being a bully, while there are many other people who have "controversial" views on trans people who have been able to express those views reasonably and without anyone allegedly trying to run them out of polite society.
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).
We've gone from "should we expect people like Rowling to become more radical as a result of criticism" to "what should people Rowling be allowed to say", and those are separate topics.
I believe that when someone is criticized, especially on the basis of behavior described as hurtful, they should take that criticism seriously and re-consider their behavior. 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.
It seems that what Alexander Turok is saying is that instead of what I've just described, we should expect someone who receives criticism to increase the behavior in order to hurt their critics. In other words, retaliation.
I suppose that in some sense, we should "expect" retaliation because it is a natural enough response that it shouldn't surprise us. However, I also think that the fear of retaliation shouldn't stop us from calling out abusive behavior. So in that sense, we should "expect" a member of society in good standing to refrain from retaliation.
Or, let's flip it around and look at it another way: What should someone who believes that J.K.Rowling's claims about transgender people are hurtful be allowed to say about their beliefs?
Because it seems that Alexander wants to hold Rowling's critics accountable for Rowling's response to criticism. To me, this is unreasonable. If we're going to hold Rowling and her critics to the same standard, then we can't criticize her critics for criticizing her any more than we can criticize her for criticizing trans people.
So I guess my question is, why do you prioritize defending Rowling's free speech, which was never really in jeopardy, over the free speech of her critics, which has limited reach and which faces censorship by people like Elon Musk (who bought twitter and started censoring trans activists)?
"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?
Let me take a step back and admit that yes, in an ideal world, every person would like to be accepted as the gender they identify with, and would like their favorite authors not to claim that their identity is invalid or fraudulent. So in some sense, yes, Rowling's fans wanted Rowling to change her mind about trans people. And of course there's nothing wrong with that.
The objection I have is the second part. I don't believe that trans people demand universal ideological conformity from every member of polite society and relentlessly hound everyone who fails to conform until they are forced to retire from public life.
In each case where Rowling did or said something transphobic, she faced a round of criticism, which then died down. The problem, as I tried to explain by comparison to Dave Chappelle, was that Rowling kept escalating. She started off with what other commenters have correctly noted was very mild criticism of transgender ideology - her belief that trans women were in some sense actually male. If she'd stuck with that, I mean, it's less than ideal, but that would have been that.
Instead, she went on to disparage inclusive language, deny that transgender people face discrimination, claim that trans women were only pretending to be trans in order to rape women in public bathrooms, etc. etc.
So I ask this: how would you react if your favorite author began publicly disparaging a whole category of people that you belong to, with increasingly dire accusations? Wouldn't you at the very least publicly express your disagreement?
If I, right here, called you a rapist, wouldn't you want to say "I'm not a rapist, and you can go to hell"? Wouldn't it be reasonable, if I accused everyone I disagreed with on ACX of being rapists, for Scott to ban me?
There's a difference between disagreement and bullying. I'm not saying that every trans person or activist perfectly navigates that distinction all the time, but my impression is that trans people and activists react differently, as a whole, to the disagreement than they do to bullying and slander.
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).
Rowling is also famous and talented (although I don't want to overstate her talent - she's no Dave Chappelle).
I am not claiming that there was no pressure to cancel Chappelle (or Rowling). I am claiming that this pressure was not the result of an unyielding demand for ideological conformity.
This is because, despite the existence of a vocal illiberal minority, the vast majority of Western progressives are liberals. They mostly believe that if you want to be a bigot in the privacy of your own home, that's not really harming anyone, and we don't have to like it, but we don't have the right (or the ability) to stop you. It's only when you make bigoted public statements that we must push back and say "hey, those kinds of statements are morally unacceptable". In other words, they think the remedy for speech is more speech, and so every time Rowling or Chappelle speaks up, they speak back.
The reason it's so intense in Rowling's case is that Rowling has a crippling obsession with trans people, and so she cannot help but constantly say and do transphobic things. Chappelle is a well-adjusted guy who can take criticism and just let it go, or use it productively to provide material for his sets. The difference in response from the left is because of the difference in behavior of Rowling and Chappelle. This isn't what we'd expect to see if the left was looking to purge all transphobes from society.
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?
It's useful to walk through the history a bit if we're making allegations not just about what Rowling is like today but also about how she got that way.
Notice how measured it is. The author points to Rowling liking some transphobic tweets and then analyzes some transphobic lines from one of Rowling's books. She concludes that Rowling is transphobic, but no more so than average, and claims it's fair to criticize her because she has a huge platform. This is hardly a demand for cancellation. This is hardly running Rowling out of polite society. And this hardly justifies (or makes expected) Rowling's subsequent radicalization.
At that time, there was still reasonable doubt. I mean, sure, you could make a case that Rowling was transphobic. But "no more so than the average cis person" is not very damning.
Now, however, you have tweets from Rowling like the one claiming that India Willoughby, a trans news presenter in the UK, is "just a man revelling in his misogynistic performance of what he thinks 'woman' means: narcissistic, shallow and exhibitionist." Contrast this language with "Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like." Dress however you please apparently excludes trans women, because a man dressing like a woman is misogynistic.
In 2022, after Graham Norton was criticized for hosting her on his show, he repeatedly refused to say she was transphobic and when pressed said something to the effect of "I'm not an expert on trans issues, if you want to hear about that topic, talk to trans people, their parents, their doctors, etc. Stop trying to get me to say something for clicks". She responded to this by accusing Norton of supporting rape and death threats, and he was subsequently cyberbullied off twitter by her followers.
In 2024, Rowling decided to take issue with a random trans woman managing a football team, first implying she was a "middle-aged bloke" and then calling her a "cross-dressing man" who was "caricaturing women".
These are not examples of Rowling taking "revenge" on her "enemies". These are examples of Rowling picking out random trans people to publicly mock and demean and sending her millions of followers to bully them and anyone who supports them. So, actually, perhaps it is Rowling taking revenge on her enemies - but only if she views all trans people and all people who support trans rights as her enemies. Not sure what to call that other than radical anti-transness.
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?
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.
>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
So, on the one hand, you have the vast majority of trans people, who are not on twitter and don't give much thought or attention to Rowling.
Then, you have a group of activists - trans activists, and allies - who criticized Rowling's transphobic statements, and escalated that criticism as Rowling doubled and tripled down.
If Rowling's conclusion was "wow, twitter activists sure are assholes", that view could at least potentially be considered understandable based on her experience.
But for her to come to conclusions such as "Hitler never burned books on trans healthcare and research" and "Imane Khalif is a man who likes to beat up women" has absolutely nothing to do with the people she perceived as hostile to her. Khalif never said anything to Rowling, and the attack on the Institute of Sexual Research took place over thirty years before Rowling was born!
Unless she somehow decided that all trans people and all gender non-conforming people and all people who sort of look vaguely intersex and all butch lesbians who might get accused of being trans in the ladies' room and all people who are now, or have ever been, even tangentially involved in supporting trans people were somehow hostile to her, based solely on some interactions she had on twitter.
But that wouldn't be very reasonable, now, would it?
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
Perhaps "genuinely held" is not the right wording. What I'm trying to say is that the fact that she is taking revenge seems to indicate that her vengeful activities operate independently of the truth of the position she has staked out - that she is motivated to hurt people, rather than to resolve the object question or even convince anyone of the veracity of her claims.
And, as much as I disagree with Rowling, *I* don't even believe that. I believe that Rowling believes that she is a brave truth-teller opposing the oppressive forces of evil. I don't think that her radicalization is revenge against her opponents - at least, not consciously. In fact I don't think she's considering the feelings of the people she attacks at all - she's not trying to hurt their feelings, or spare them - they just don't seem to register for her at all.
I think she's become radicalized because she's dehumanized everyone she thinks of as an enemy in order to win arguments, and because she's driven away every reasonable person so the only people who still talk to her are other radicals. I am sure she doesn't realize this, which is why she still appears to be surprised at things like Nazis showing up at gender-critical rallies or Vladimir Putin endorsing her views on gender.
Yes, being reasonable and listening to others with empathy are both extremely woke. The essence of woke, in fact.
But, to answer your actual question - if Alice says something that hurts Bob, and Bob says "hey, that was hurtful, did you really mean that?" Bob is in some sense looking for "agreement" but in another sense is looking for empathy and validation. I think what would be ideal for Bob is for Alice to listen to Bob, understand why what she said was hurtful to Bob, and then later on try to avoid hurting Bob again.
When Rowling said stuff that hurt trans people, many trans people expressed how much they loved Rowling's work and how surprised they were that Rowling believed negative stereotypes about them. I think the outcome they were looking for was "Rowling learns some more about trans people, their lives, their experiences, and speaks with more understanding, even if Rowling ultimately has different views on the ontology of gender or whatever."
What they got instead was "Rowling tells increasingly unhinged lies about trans people and eventually descends into holocaust denial and an international smear campaign against an Olympic boxer."
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.
Right, so, this essay is very overtly transphobic. Three key points:
1. Rowling is personally afraid of trans people. She states that the idea of sharing a bathroom with a trans person reminds her of a time when she was sexually assaulted. This is very sad, but Rowling was not assaulted by a trans person, so she is just projecting her fears onto trans people. She also literally says she was "triggered" (her choice of words!) by reading about the Scottish government making it easier for trans people to get a piece of paper recognizing them as trans. I can't think of a more textbook case of transphobia than having a day-long nervous breakdown with PTSD flashbacks because the government might formally acknowledge that trans people exist.
Note that at no point does she consider what it might feel like for a trans person to be told "hey, I'm afraid of you because I think you're a rapist, and I - a rich and famous person with a readership of millions - want the government to enshrine my fear into law". That would be empathy.
2. Rowling, in this essay, repeats the age-old saw about LGBT people being a danger to children. With no evidence she accuses trans people of causing child abuse. Again this is just straightforwardly and unambiguously transphobic.
Of course her language is evasive - her exact wording is "I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both." If you aren't from the UK and don't know that "safeguarding" is the word the UK uses for the legal and procedural apparatus that prevents child abuse by teachers in schools, it isn't immediately obvious that what she's saying is that trans people are causing child abuse.
3. Rowling cites detransitioning in children as a concern of hers, implying - without citing any numbers or even a source to back her claim that the detransition rate had "exploded" - that some nefarious force was pushing (specifically female) children to transition against their will. This is straightforward moral panic - she's fearmongering about a phenomenon with a very low prevalence that happens for reasons she totally mischaracterises. This of course is dangerous for trans people because these lies have been cited - and I mean, specifically, J.K. Rowling's lies have been cited in the US Congress, for example - by lawmakers denying trans people the right to the same standard of medical care that non-trans people enjoy.
Sorry, but an essay that accuses trans people of being dangerous to women and children because they are rapists and child abusers and spreaders of social contagion (the language of disease) is not empathetic to trans people, or really to anyone except J. K. Rowling.
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.
> Because misogyny is stored in the Y chromosome, apparently.
This, but unironically. There are plausible evolutionary-psychological reasons that it would confer a reproductive advantage on men in the historical environment to be misogynist (can't increase your number of offspring by impregnating a defeated tribe's women through violent coercion if you respect them as people), and the hormonal inducers of sex-different behaviours are by necessity encoded in the Y chromosome.
I mean, no, I shouldn't. Women should be able to compete in sports without some random dude putting their appearance, anatomy, chromosomes, and life story under a microscope.
Imane Khelif was assigned female at birth, grew up as a girl, lived life as a woman, and boxed with women for her entire career. She lost matches to women over the course of her entire career. No one said anything until she beat a Russian boxer and the Russian-controlled IBA invented a hoax about her three days later to restore their boxer's undefeated record.
Rowling was beaten and abused by a man and when she sees a woman who looks a bit masculine fighting a woman who looks more feminine, she is triggered. This is a personal, psychological problem, and honestly, I have sympathy for her. Rowling should get therapy, though - in private - instead of being allowed to take her personal psychological problems out on perfectly innocent women who are guilty of nothing more than failing to meet Rowling's standards of femininity.
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?
I mean, there are probably millions of people who think that, and very few of them devote much time to actively trying to strip trans people of their rights, donating to anti-trans organizations, spreading insinuations that trans people are rapists and child molesters, making fun of trans-inclusive language in a way that targets innocent NGOs who are just trying to provide services to women (and trans men) in developing countries...
Ultimately, yes, if you believe that a minority group is dangerous, and beg other people to persecute them on your behalf, people are going to think that you are repugnant, and work to stop you from doing that, no matter what the topic is. And I don't think you can blame the targeted minority (or say "they shouldn't be surprised") if, in their zeal to defend their own right to exist, they happen to offend the person who is constantly attacking them.
But everyone has limited energy. I don't spend much time looking for celebrities who hate me or my way of life and demanding that they recant their views and issue me an apology. Billions of religious people around the world would view me as a heretic or an apostate, but it would be very tedious if I decided to pick on some random religious guy and hound him to the end of the earth to get him to say that he's okay with me not believing in his version of God. Similarly, I don't think trans people go out of their way to have confrontations with anti-trans celebrities. It's Rowling who seems to be utterly consumed with her transphobia and unwilling to just let people be.
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?
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?
No, her main issue was that she believed the rights of biological females were getting trampled on.
Again, look at her 2020 essay that someone posted. What triggered her (her words) was Scotland making it easier to get a gender recognition certificate. It wasn't reading about a trans woman raping a cis woman. It wasn't statistics about crimes committed by trans women in public bathrooms. No - it was "we're thinking about reducing the waiting period before we issue a certificate to trans people" that sent Rowling into the pit of despair, a self-described day-long "dark place" inside her head where she relived memories of being sexually assaulted (not by a trans person).
There is no connection between gender recognition certificate procedures and the rights of "biological females". Rowling is just a profoundly sick woman who attacks a vulnerable minority in lieu of seeking the therapy she so obviously needs.
Can anyone explain how it's "efficient" to fire and then immediately attempt to rehire nuclear weapons security personnel and USDA officials working on bird flu?
I've never worked in HR but I feel like that would generate a lot of paperwork that could be avoided by just not firing those people in the first place. But maybe this is a myth, like the myth that leaving a light bulb on saves energy vs. turning it off when you're not using it. So should every company and every government just start firing most of their workforce and then rehiring them a few days later?
(Almost) everything Elon Musk says is a lie. And "naming a government agency to do something different than what it actually does" is just about the easiest lie to make.
In this case, it may be less a lie and more "he came up with a backronym for DOGE that happened to have the word << efficiency >> in it".
Anyhow: the goal is chaos, catastrophe, causing problems (to blame the Democrats and to get credit for solving them), and lying about the accomplishments (a $8 million program reported as $8 *Billion* in savings).
I don’t think chaos is an outcome that this administration fears. I have an inkling that it’s actually an outcome that they would celebrate. If you listen to what Steve Bannon has said about the federal government and what should happen to it, and then put that together with the fact that Donald Trump pays attention to him, it isn’t a stretch to wonder if chaos followed by a declaration of national emergency would be a good outcome for what these folks are after. So I don’t think it’s a mistake, in the sense of unintended consequences for the actors.
The DEI purge is throwing some babies out with the bathwater. Concern trolls* would prefer Trump slow-waked it, appointed a bunch of committees, held a bunch of congressional debates, welcomed public feedback, checked and triple checked the plan until oh wow look at how the time flies Trump isn't President anymore.
Obviously I would prefer if it wasn't being done by Pete Hegseth and various other guests on Springer, but no-college whites decided they want a reality TV show host in charge of the executive branch and it turns out America is a democracy. Whadaya gonna do?
I don’t think Musk’s activities have much to do with eliminating DEI. The OP is about firing people whose jobs are securing nuclear weapons and investigating bird flu, not DEI.
The situation with DEI is that Trump signed executive orders to eliminate it from the Federal government. Government moves slowly, so I’d expect it to take something like six months if things move normally. To pick off any stragglers, the Administration would make sure that next year’s budget doesn’t include any money for DEI. (The fiscal year begins on October 1.) The choice isn’t between breaking the law and having DEI still around four years from now.
I agree with John Schilling and was planning to put up a similar post. I am thoroughly sick of people throwing around polarizing nonsense that isn't even relevant to the discussion going on. Yes, I'm sure there's such a thing as concern trolls. However, none have piped up in the present discussion. So why even bring them up? Seems to me what you're manifesting is how polarized you've become. Even when nobody is expressing the infuriating stance you mention, you start thinking about those dumbass people you hate as soon as the relevant issue comes up. And then you mention them, which is likely to irritate the people you are in the discussion with, because you're saying "maybe you aren't a hysterical jackass, a concern troll, but some who take your view definitely are, and I'm not entirely sure you're not." If you want to discuss the topic, why do that? And if you want to fight, go mud wrestle on Xitter.
I'm broadly sympathetic to Trump's attempts to roll back Woke, even to moving quickly (perhaps trying to create a _rout_ amongst the Woke - there are positive feedback loops in getting people to leave a sinking ship. I would like that.).
But I _would_ like him to try and put a _bit_ more effort into reducing collateral damage.
The fiasco with firing nuclear weapons security people was bad.
Suggesting a buyout to _everyone_ in the CIA - well, that includes the people who review our spy satellite photos. Do they _want_ to lose the people who are in charge of noticing if Russia or China starts installing new missile silos?
No, I don't want multiple rounds of investigating committees in Congress. But could maybe Musk pick three interns to proofread firing lists and notice when people are performing a job that we want to _keep_?
"Do they _want_ to lose the people who are in charge of noticing if Russia or China starts installing new missile silos?"
I think yes? Putin is our friend now, he is not going to attack the great TRUMP. Meanwhile these people are going to be hurt, which is the whole point.
Many Thanks! Even if Trump is cuddling up with Putin, there are still _other_ opponents or potential opponents (the PRC, Iran), who we should be keeping an eye on.
>Meanwhile these people are going to be hurt, which is the whole point.
Trump is a boor, but not a cartoon villain. Unless you have a policy statement from him in hand explicitly stating that that is his objective. Do you?
The fact that "concern trolls" might prefer a thing, is basically irrelevant if that thing is also preferred by approximately all sensible people including non-MAGA Republicans. So, notwithstanding the weaselly footnote, it does read that you are trying to dismiss everyone who opposes the Trumpian approach of being a "concern troll".
The defining aspect of a "concern troll" is that they pretend to agree with you directionally and then express "concern" about all the details.
Most of the anti-DOGE criticism I'm hearing has the same sort of flavour -- it's criticism of the "how" from people who don't agree with the "what" in the first place. "I'm really worried about all these minor details on how the budget is being cut" from people who don't want the budget to be cut in the first place.
It's not that you're not allowed to disagree with both the what and the how at the same time, it's just that criticism of the "how" doesn't mean much when it comes from someone who disagrees with the "what" -- because these people would be finding things to complain about even if the "how" were perfect.
What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?
Because those people vastly outnumber "concern trolls"; trolling is a niche thing to begin with and subtle trolling even more so. But when someone dares disagree with Team MAGA on tactics, you go straight to "concern trolls". So, I and most of the sensible people, are going to be proud to stand with the "concern trolls".
Seems to me you might want to consider that, when people who disagree with your goals are telling you that your tactics will fail to achieve those goals, and the people who *agree* with your goals are *also* telling you that your tactics will fail, you might want to think a bit harder about those tactics.
<What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?
"the spoiler" -- a prig who won't get on the mockery train to vengeance funland
> "What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?"
<It's not that you're not allowed to disagree with both the what and the how at the same time, it's just that criticism of the "how" doesn't mean much when it comes from someone who disagrees with the "what" -- because these people would be finding things to complain about even if the "how" were perfect.
This reminds me of the time I disagreed with someone here about some research on the effect of lead levels in children, citing some studies that supported my point, and they thought I'd cherry picked studies that supported my ideas. No, I hadn't. I looked something up, found one big study at the top of the pile, and read that. And in fact when I stumbled into the ongoing argument about this topic I had no opinions at all about how much lead is dangerous for children. I had no ax to grind. And, jeez, I wouldn't do that -- pick the one study out of several that happens to support an argument. That's shitty and dishonest and while I'm not perfect, doing that sort of thing is just not in my repertoire. I think the absolute lowest I would sink, and that would be on a bad day, would be to just abandon the discussion rather than admit I had been wrong about lead levels.
Why do you think people disagreeing with the "what" are sure to complain about the "how." I don't fully qualify as disagreeing about the what -- I'm for rooting out the Woke. But if I thought all the Woke policies were good, but the anti-Woke agenda was being implemented in a smart effective way, I would admit it. It wouldn't even cost me much. My main point would be that getting rid of the Woke was cruel and wrong, etc etc -- it wouldn't weaken my main argument to say yeah they're doing it efficiently. I mean jeez, I could even compare what they were doing to Nazi death camps.
Do you really think the people who agree with you about radically rooting out the Woke are fine honest people who would never pick nits or distort facts to support their view, but the people on the opposite side are dumb and sneaky and incapable of honestly saying it's a bad agenda, but carried out very efficiently? Here's a rule of thumb: Any time you slip into thinking the people who disagree with you are all have the same lame, ugly character flaw, one you don't have, you can be sure your head is up your ass.
>Why do you think people disagreeing with the "what" are sure to complain about the "how."
It seems to be an accurate assumption to make most of the time. I've noticed for a long time now that almost every criticism of the 'how' happens to come from someone who was against the 'what' in the first place (or more accurately these days, the 'who'). And I've noticed this in noncontroversial topics as well, though less often and with less heat
So in a discussion in here that involves whats and how’s, as many issues do, someone arguing for the what and the how does not have to pin down those in the other side about what their real objections are? They get to just assume those complaining about the how’s are arguing in bad faith? Wow, novel!
I’m going to just assume this is a ridiculous idea.
I don't think anyone would consider that efficient over not doing that. This is like asking people to defend a shot on goal that doesn't go in. Of course that wasn't the intention. There's plenty wrong about what the musketeers are doing without pretending what wasn't intended was intended.
Ah, so you're saying that this was a mistake? But I thought Elon Musk was a hypercompetent genius who successfully ran four companies, 13 families, and 2 world record setting video game accounts.
At the very least, there are probably hundreds of comments on ACX alone lauding Musk's intelligence. How could an intelligent person make such an idiotic mistake as firing the people in charge of nuclear weapons safety and pandemic prevention? That seems like a pretty easy mistake not to make.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to do here honestly. I think Musk has tragically been sucked into the right wing catturd2 lowest common denominator rage bait toxoplasmotic vortex of derangement. I think this is bad and has caused him to cause real harm in his direction of DOGE. I think his anger at progressives and the democratic party has blinded to the harm he and his team are causing. It would be better for him and for us all if he stayed out of politics.
On a purely strategic level I think the Democratic party played their hand very poorly pushing him and the broader "tech bro" group away and the Republicans played their hand very well in courting them. As I broadly prefer the governance of Democrats to Republicans while also recognizing the tech bro optimists as closer to kin I find this whole situation very painful.
I think I understand the basic limbic responses that could cause someone to behave like the, possibly composed of straw, person you're lambasting. The possible story is great, too good to check. Here are the leaders in tech, the people actually building things riding into the swamp that is Washington where advancement is all negative sum and competition are had to see who can best stifle growth and innovation. Sure, they're doing so allied with a buffoon, but that can't be helped, every team needs a mascot. And then instead of what would be a cathartic and heroic opening of a new golden era we get... this. We get Vance tossing out vaccine skepticism. We get research projects halted, we get longitudinal studies canceled. Our greatest warriors rode headlong into the swamp and were immediately covered in muck and grime. The mind recoils, it doesn't want to believe this. And on the sidelines are muck men shaped vaguely like Neal Zupancic laughing at them for being so naive, for daring to have optimism. It takes some introspection and self control to not double down and resist denial.
Now, all of that aside, your basic point is silly nonsense. No one at any point thought that Musk was incapable of making mistakes. The startup/silicon valley mindset is to move fast and break things, not move cautiously and never make mistakes. It's particularly frustrating when they're moving fast and breaking things that are important in service of a vindicative false goals. It's the mindset that doesn't mind a few hundred million dollar rockets explode if it makes the next rocket better.
I guess this was exactly the sort of comment I was looking for. Some insight into the minds of Musk fans. Some sign that they understand the damage he's doing. I found it very satisfying to read.
The next thing I'm wondering is, how could someone have possibly believed it would be otherwise? I don't think "optimism" covers it. We're supposed to have evidence for beliefs - not just vague hopes. So I guess I'm wondering what circumstances produce the kind of person who didn't see this coming. But on this topic I also have some answers.
For example, I've seen a lot of comments on here to the effect of "I don't read twitter" and "I don't like twitter style discussions", so that's part of the puzzle. Musk's public meltdowns and radicalization have played out on twitter and people who dismiss everything that happens there as beneath their notice wouldn't have experienced them in real time. People who had no stake in twitter also wouldn't have watched Elon Musk ruin it. They wouldn't have seen him fire critical staff and then try to rehire them days later, or make laughable, bush league mistakes at every decision point. Come to think of it, they probable didn't know about all the Nazi stuff either.
Because from my perspective, as a politics guy, a bunch of people being really optimistic about a man who helps and supports Nazis coming to power sounds... well, naive doesn't quite cover it. I mean, I wasn't surprised at all when he did the Nazi salute, but I guess a lot of people were, and that's... not unexpected, but also not optimal.
And so that leads me to wonder: how do we get the word out about things like this? How is our information environment so catastrophically broken that people didn't know that Elon Musk was like this years ago? Why didn't his mismanagement of twitter or his years of courting online Nazi supporters get the attention it deserved?
Because what's painful for me is to watch a group of people who are mostly well-intentioned and clearly have a lot of a sort of mathematical/computational intelligence fall for the most blatant and obvious right-wing propaganda, over and over and over again. It's painful to see these people read a blatantly transphobic screed and go "I don't see anything transphobic here", or watch a CEO destroy 80% of the value of a company and go "I think we should put him in charge of the federal government". It's painful to watch fascism actually work on people who, on paper, should be far too smart to fall for it. And it's painful to think that I could have turned out like this - like the kind of techno-libertarian who could be optimistic about someone like Elon Musk in the year 2025 - in some very close alternate universe where my life had gone slightly differently.
Twitter has clearly deranged Elon, but are you so sure it hasn't deranged you as well? Just from the way you started your engagement on this platform it is hard to take you as a even keeled evaluator of the moment. For instance, Musk did not do a nazi salute. If you watch the full video that is pretty clear.
It's pretty premature to claim the Twitter buyout destroyed 80% of the value of the company. Besides its usefulness in birthing grok and some actually pretty good changes like community notes when I run the question of its valiation through grok3 deep search it comes back with ~$35B based on recent revenue down from the $44B originally paid for it which basically everyone considered a huge over valuation. The twt market cap when the whole thing kicked off was around $32B. Stock value aside the intangibles of the purchase, free speech restoration(positive valence) or discourse setting powers(negative valence), were clearly worth the cost to musk and clearly why he bought it.
Now we'll probably be in agreement that the discourse setting powers were used to a bad end. Although I'll point out that people who see nazis everywhere on Twitter usually create that environment themselves by engaging with them. I'll occasionally criticize some maoist in the platform and suddenly my feed is full of left wing lunatics and I don't think the Plattsburgh is actually overrun by communists. It just serves you more of what you engage with. I suspect what happened was the odious right wing accounts were suppressed such that you could reply/qt them to dunk on them and it wouldn't effect your feed before and musk removed that suppression so people used to dunking on right wingers suddenly got a huge influx of them.
I'm sure this all just sounds like musk apologia to you. And I don't know if I'll be able to convince you otherwise but you seem like an active participant in the toxoplasmosis process here. It's not enough for you to think he's a deeply flawed man lashing out at the Democratic party that he sees as having wronged him and in the process causing damage that he's blind to. He needs to be an actual nazi to you. And not just a nazi but an incompetent nazi. And I just think your view is distorted here. Much like musk and his sycophants will believe every, at best, half truth he claims about how much doge is saving us you seem to believe every, at best, half truth about the man himself. As an aside what are your beliefs about how he got his start? Do you think he was a nepo baby funded by an emerald mine?
Right, so this is why it's hard for me to be even-keeled. When someone does a Nazi salute, twice - which I have watched video of - and then other people deny it, I have no idea how to approach the situation. It doesn't seem like just having a polite conversation could resolve a disagreement like this. This isn't like the dress or yanny and laurel, where people see different things depending on essentially random factors and there are no consequences for society if some people can't agree. There are like, stakes and stuff.
I think the fact that we could sit here and politely analyze your claim that Elon didn't do a Nazi salute represents something fundamentally broken about our society, or I guess your society, since it also makes me want to run as far away from this comment section as I can get, and if possible nuke it from orbit.
I think it's crazy that someone can be tone policed for using sarcasm, but not for denying Nazism. That 90% of the people who read this exchange will think you are being reasonable. There are times when rage is an appropriate response, and calm detachment is irresponsible. Is complicity.
I think the US made a mistake in not banning Nazism and Nazi symbols. I think Elon should be in jail right now for making that gesture, twice, or at least in therapy after having convinced a jury that he was not mentally well enough to be held accountable for that action. I think that everyone who posted swasticas or 1488 or anything in that ballpark on twitter should have been arrested and sent to a mandatory civics class, along with everyone who liked or retweeted those posts, and probably everyone who defends them.
I think that liberalism has fundamentally failed to meet the challenge of this moment and as a result US society will suffer and authoritarian societies like that of Russia and China will thrive, and that makes me sad because I do think there's something to be said for democracy. Liberalism was great when it was like, Catholics and Protestants compromising on whether their bread literally turned into Jesus or just figuratively. But asking us to compromise with people who deny the things that we can literally see happen with our own eyes, to benefit an ideology that tortured, sterilized, and murdered millions of people for the most evil and self-serving of reasons - sorry, that's a bridge too far.
But, as I watch the US right wing melt down on social media and at town hall meetings, and watch Trump's and Elon's approval ratings in freefall, I'm at least a bit optimistic. At the very least, Elon's legacy is cemented, and he'll be mentioned in the same breath as Goebbels rather than Tesla, and that gives me a certain sense of satisfaction.
You are launching yourself into this topic in a way very likely to irritate the person you are responding to. There is no reason at all to think Spencer has a case of Musk worship. There certainly exist people who do, but even most of them are probably more
nuanced in their approval than the morons of your imaginings. If you want to put together a strawman and then piss on it could
you please fucking leave the house and do that stuff lin the driveway?
How is it a strawman? Efficiency is literally in the name of the agency, and I have read literally dozens of comments defending DOGE and Musk here and calling him smart and genius and not dumb, and even praising the specific things he is doing now. I even saw one guy here in one of the ACX open threads saying he should fire literally every federal employee.
It's a strawman in the present discussion. You have no reason to think the person you are talking with now, Spencer, is one of the people calling Musk a genius and praising every step he's taking now.
Spencer does, though, sound like they may be less completely convinced than you are that the DEI purge is a mistake in every respect. So what you are doing in is being sarcastic with Spencer in a way that would only be justified if they were a full-on Musk-is-god fool.
You have now scratched your own irritable itch to be mean to the infuriating Musk-is-god morons in your imagination, while also treating the actual Spencer unfairly and probably irritating them. In other words, you have pushed the situation in the direction of polarization. If you want to have a pissing contest, you have taken the right steps. But if you want to get someone to see your point of view, and take a moment to at least try on their ideas to see if any make some sense, than you've substantially reduced the chance of that happening.
I see this sort of thing happening here in most discussions of the DEI purge and related matters. I simply cannot see why people do not grasp how dumb and dysfunctional they are being, all the while apparently feeling pleased as punch about their posts. Fuck off with that dumb shit.
Why do you think that my comment implied that Spencer was calling Musk a genius? Is it not possible to talk to person A about something that person B said?
I think you're just misreading tone and intent here. I frequently have discussions with people both online and in person in which we sarcastically adopt someone else's rhetoric in order to highlight its absurdity. If the intent was to accuse Spencer himself of this view it would be more directed - like "but you said Musk was a genius" or "but you seem to believe that Musk is a genius." "But I thought Musk was a genius" is not an accusation about the beliefs of the person you are talking to. It's an observation that a the belief in question is common or prevalent.
> Can anyone explain how it's "efficient" to fire and then immediately attempt to rehire nuclear weapons security personnel and USDA officials working on bird flu?
It's efficient because the optimal number of false positives in any process is not 0. If you can fire 99% of your chaff, accidentally firing 1% of your wheat at the same time is actually an exceptionally good tradeoff.
I mean that sounds smart, because there's numbers in it and stuff. I wonder what the world would look like if we apply those numbers elsewhere. What if airplane parts had a 1% failure rate and no one caught those errors because it's more efficient to put thousands of planes in the air even if 1% of them fail?
Hmm, well, I guess we're sort of finding out what that looks like right now, aren't we?
> What if airplane parts had a 1% failure rate and no one caught those errors because it's more efficient to put thousands of planes in the air even if 1% of them fail?
This is a bullet I am very happy to bite. I would rather my travel be cheaper and slightly less safe than more expensive and slightly more safe. If you ever leave your house, you're making the same compromise too - you'd be safer indoors. But safety is not the only consideration.
Now this is an interesting topic. So one of the problems with applying this logic to air travel is that when planes fall out of the sky they sometimes hit houses in Philly. The other problem is I don't think it's ethical to offer people less expensive but more dangerous options because the practical effect of such an offering is that it will end up disproportionately killing poor people.
This is one of the failure modes of the free market, in my opinion, and why we need society to come together to set minimum safety standards. Otherwise, people would forever be assuming the risk of taking the cheaper but slightly more dangerous airplanes, cars, medications, foods, etc. etc. etc. and putting other people (e.g. their kids, pedestrians, people who live near airports) at risk in the process.
It's much easier to rehire a few hundred employees than to recall thousands of airplane parts across hundreds of airline companies. In fact according to your first link, 275/300 of the fired NNSA staff had already been rehired as the story was being written, and it's reasonable to expect that at least some of the remaining 25 will also be rehired. The firings happened on Thursday evening and had been mostly reversed over the weekend. Whatever paperwork you're whining about seems to have been taken care of in short order
I hope you aren't triggered by my use of numbers. They were in your source
I think the concern is that for every such example that is extremely obvious, well-covered by the news media, and therefore reversed quickly, there are several others that are much less obvious, not ever reversed, and nearly as damaging.
And the reverse is unlikely to be true - e.g. for every true example of fraud and waste that is found and trumpeted loudly by DOGE, it's not likely there are several others that aren't being trumpeted - since DOGE is trying to trumpet all such cases.
So a calculation of identified wins to losses needs to account for a biased rate of hidden unidentified cases.
No, I love numbers, especially since they highlight that we're talking about chaff, and not human beings who have been put through undue stress and hardship because the efficiency czar couldn't be bothered to check on whether they were important for our society to function before tossing them out.
And I guess you're right. The paperwork isn't really that important. I dunno, it still seems pretty inefficient though.
You might be right, depending on the proportion of oopsie firings that end up happening. But still, I'm sympathetic to the attempt, being someone who knows firsthand how absurdly difficult it is to downsize the bureaucracy
Sure, but that assumes your wheat and chaff lists are very close to perfect. Only 1% of chaff is not on the chaff list, and only 1% of your wheat is on it. Do you have any reason to think these firings were based on such an accurate list? If so, how to you square that with the linked news reports that indicate that there are efforts to quickly rehire several of them?
> Sure, but that assumes your wheat and chaff lists are very close to perfect.
I don't think that was a smuggled assumption at all, and is neither implied nor required by my hypothesis. Sure, they *could* have waited another 2 days to double-check the lists, but that would have left the chaff on the payroll another 2 days. There's a balance between speed and accuracy being made here, and I have seen nothing to suggest that the balance struck is substantially sub-optimal. So you have to rehire a few competent guys later? Fine, this is a price worth paying to fire the dead wood earlier.
I didn't call your it's-ok-to-err- by-1% a smuggled assumption. It's not smuggled in, it's right in the open. Your point was that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK. I agree. My objection was that saw no reason to believe that these firings were based on anything like such a precise evaluation of who was wheat and who was chaff.
So now you are arguing on other grounds. There are things that make the firings OK even if the error rate's higher than 1%: You need to act fast, because otherwise you are paying an extra of salary to chaff. That's a terrible argument. Even if the chaff is completely useless, 2 days of salary is a tiny sum, in the US budget or even in the cost of the agency in question.
So what was your other point -- oh, right, you didn't have another one. You abandoned your the-error rate is tiny one, and moved to the dollar-cost-of-2-days-chaff-salary-is -an-intolerable-waste.
Sounds to me like you like you just enjoy the idea of people you think of as chaff getting fired at short notice. You probably have a whole mental model of all the says they are infuriating sniveling power hungry fools. Do you have any idea at all what any of these fired individuals are like? I do not. But then I'm not defending them, just attacking your nonsense.
Sounds like you missed my point. I was never suggesting that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff were OK. My point was that arbitrarily sized errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK if you don't care about optimising for accuracy. I have no idea whether the actual numbers are 99% chaff and 1% wheat.
> That's a terrible argument. Even if the chaff is completely useless, 2 days of salary is a tiny sum, in the US budget or even in the cost of the agency in question.
Well this is the sorites paradox, isn't it? If 2 days salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, then 3 day's salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, and 4 day's salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, and... then the US government finds itself $36 trillion in debt, "But but but each of my individual expenditures is trivial!". A line has to be drawn somewhere. There is nothing worse about this schelling point than any other schelling point.
<I was never suggesting that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff were OK.
Oh yes you were. You actually said that "if you can fire 99% of your chaff, accidentally firing 1% of your wheat at the same time is actually an exceptionally good tradeoff." If saying that's an exceptionally good tradeoff doesn't count as saying 99%/1% is OK, I don't know what does. (And as I said I agree that 99%/1% is a very good tradeoff. I just don't see how it relates to the topic under discussion, since nobody, including you, is saying the accuracy was that high.)
<My point was that arbitrarily sized errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK if you don't care about optimising for accuracy.
So what is your point? Accuracy doesn't matter in any situation? Accuracy doesn't matter in this situation? Everybody gets to pick the degree of accuracy that they want, and nobody is allowed to criticize their choice? The people currently changing the government around can be as accurate or inaccurate as they want, because YEEHAW!?
<There is nothing worse about this schelling point than any other schelling point.
So all schelling pointsare equally valid? In that case, why are you defending the value of your 2 day point? You say it is no worse than others. Are you saying it is better than other possible ones, or equal to them?
Imagine this is you. Never mind, it’s your 22 year old daughter fresh out of college, and there’s this rich spoiled fuck calling her dead wood and firing her on the spot even though as far as she knows she’s done nothing wrong. Well, chaff needs to be disposed of, so tell her to wipe her crocodile tears and go flip some burgers or something.
Do you think that the people who work jobs which constitute an inefficient use of taxpayers money (either because the job is zero/negative-sum even if done well, or because they're poor workers who are not doing the job well) deserve to keep those jobs because they're sympathetic people?
And if so, isn't Universal Basic Income a better policy proposal for effecting the taxpayer-to-sympathetic wealth transfer than going through all this theatre of creating, staffing, and paying for inefficient government jobs?
You know, this is a good point, and also, there's no evidence to suggest that the people fired were poor performers and the people rehired were good performers. The people fired were fired because Trump and Musk didn't think their *jobs* should exist, not because they were unqualified for those jobs. And the people rehired were brought back because someone realized that our safety and security were in imminent danger from not having those roles filled.
In fact, the "chaff" here were all people who had been vetted - in many cases by Republicans! - and deemed qualified to fill roles that the democratically elected representatives of the American people deemed necessary. And while we may not be in imminent danger from having those roles slashed, certainly countless Americans will be harmed - or have already been harmed - by cuts to government support for agriculture.
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.)
----
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?
I dislike the predictions that have stupid rules
"will we get gai in X years" (if we dont have ai in 100 years this closes as unresolved)
"was corona a lab leak"(decided by the cia opinion)
etc.
fuck them for anything not short term with good rules; otherwise they probably average to partisan opinions ("who wins the election" some people go 99%, some 1%, it will be 40-60 because enough people look at that stupidity and say 50/50)
> 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.
theres chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay
worse, these chemicals should be expected to have a stronger effect on humans considering they are in fact often human hormones being pissed into the water supply and recycled over and over
I dont see point conceeding ground on metaphysics, but vague feelings that somethings strange happening, not much reason to doubt that.
>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.
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)
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.
> We would, I think be deeply appalled by a twenty year old deciding to cut of their arm
Of course you would. But the reality of the situation is that body integrity dysphoria is a real thing that exists. If you're disgusted by such aberration, I can't stop you, but at least don't be in denial about it.
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.
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?
Boomers retire over this decade; maybe russia or china(the worse cases) have "started" , but it hasnt really hit the wall yet
In china the young are "lying flat", with "996" work hours, while the only thing xi offers is "eat bitterness", which is apparently not even being translated well.
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...
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.
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.
The false premises that woke or specifically Biden era woke spawned an evil discriminatory wave of action against white men was debated to death in the original post. Even though Scott clarified this in the OT heading, bullshit motivated reasoning is still going on in this OT.
I think Scott should step in here and point this out to the commenters who didn't read the correction or those who did read it and still 'feel' the original post is correct?
Let's call what Cruz did to ingratiate himself with Trump what it is, a calculated deception, aiding and abetting the ongoing gaslighting of the American public by a morally bankrupt president.
Really, is putting the brakes on the slide into a post fact based society less important than shrimp welfare?
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).
Link please. And could you enumerate these executive orders.
Oh Christ, I think I found it.
“ The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive. The journal offers authors the option to publish their articles under a pseudonym, ”
Yeah, sure, if you go look for things that reinforce your biases, I’m sure you’ll find them. Published by pseudonymous talkers.
Pseudonymous because they are regarded by many as morally or socially offensive.
If you want to get into this on a factual level you are going to have to be specific and provide evidence. Not just some guy said something. We’ve got a president that constantly says things that are easily shown to be untrue that don’t even have the benefit of plausibility.
Did you read Scot’s correction?
Present some evidence and I’ll be happy to discuss this with you.
I mean, I kinda have that too, as a 36 year old virgin. I find whacking off can handle the sexual desire itself, and the fact that I'm actively getting out in the world, and meeting people, and hitting on women I find attractive, gives hope to the situation. Recently started going to therapy too, which gave me tools to handle the vague sense of unease I feel when hanging around strangers.
And meditation definitely helps with that too, you eventually learn to remain present instead of absorbed in the neuroses in your head when in a situation that triggers them.
Can also recommend the book Mathematica by David Bessis, really teaches a lot about the importance of persistence and being ok with mistakes, which is what it takes to escape the pit of involuntary celibacy.
You need your testicles for health. They aren’t just horniness inducers, they also make hormones that keep your body running well. If you want to be free of sexual desire there are drugs that diminish or eliminate it. Antidepressants have that side effect for many. I don’t know how they have that effect, but it’s not via shutting down testosterone because they have the same effect on women. I’m sure there are other drugs as well.
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.
> 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.
...You're joking right? This is probably the worst time ever to consider a job in the public sector, education, or academia. Wait until this whole... situation plays out first.
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.
"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"
Could you, or anyone else, give a strong overview of why it is important that DOGE be subject to the FOIA, the Privacy Act, or the Administrative Procedures Act that is not just referencing the fact that those laws exist?
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.
I don't believe the end goal of DOGE has been secretive at all. They have been using all the data they gather to make firing people easier, and occasionally rehiring when they decide a group of employees is too important to let go. The legal attempts to stop DOGE because they have access to this data and could theoretically use it in some bad way seem very presumptuous.
"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."
What conservatives have learned in the past two decades is that journalists and Congressmen have very different interests than citizens. So when a law says it gives citizens power to hold the government in check, but actually gives that power to journalists and "watchdogs" and Congress, it isn't helping you.
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 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!"
Incorrect. I'm glad you brought up "transparency" because even a rudimentary understanding of the concept demonstrates why this argument is nonsensical.
So you see, "in the interests of transparency" isn't just some mantra that liberals invoke to annoy fascists. Transparency is something we impose upon the powerful as a check on their power. Conversely, we give privacy to regular people - those who are not in government or positions of power - in order to protect them from exploitation by the powerful.
The President needs to be transparent so that the public can have enough information to evaluate his activities - including financial entanglements that might influence his decision-making. Your financial and tax information don't have to be transparent to Elon Musk because Musk - a random, unelected Nazi whose achievements include destroying 80% of twitter's value and designing the worst truck - has no legitimate interest in evaluating your decision-making.
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.
Also, general life advice: when you see a phrase for the first time, look it up *before* you assume you know what it means, get offended, and go online to complain about it.
Almost nothing has an "agreed upon" definition, but I understood the meaning and intent of "whole person" immediately.
Also, the reddit post, if you look carefully, says "what do people *really* mean" - indicating that there is a well-known meaning, but then also a subtle, less-well known, hidden meaning. If the phrase was really some enigmatic new coinage that no one had figured out, the post would not have made sense, and the comments discussing the nuance, origin, intent, etc. of the phrase would be unintelligible.
"Most people really would probably be offended if someone told them they're not a 'whole person'"
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.
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'.
First, I think "I'm not sure what this means but I'm offended by it" is both a terrible way to live and all too common in the types of people who are offended by things like SMBC comics.
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. If someone is really itchy and you say "I think you have eczema" you aren't insulting them, even though having eczema is generally worse than not having eczema.
Yes, in certain contexts, pointing out that someone has some deficiency could be considered offensive. In other contexts, it could be considered constructive.
The guy in the comic said that he doesn't feel needed and is struggling to find meaning - in other words, he feels like there are things missing from his life. He created a context which warrants an assessment, and the assessment that he should find some activities to provide him with the things that are missing from his life is completely warranted.
>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.
Yes, that is correct. I enjoy finding contradictions in inane arguments in order to demonstrate that the person making them hasn't thought them through.
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.
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.
My view is that thought experiments prove most valuable when it comes to concept and boundary testing, and are essentially world-sims. And as noted down-thread, the value of thought experiments in practical ethics could differ quite a bit from the value of thought experiments in other areas of philosophy. But to push back a little- if I tell you about this news story where a government is rescinding funding for overseas HIV programmes, and then you tell me about how that is a bit like this crazy time where you walked past a lake and there was a child drowning, how do these differ functionally? Of course in one situation we can say it is grounded on real facts about the world, but in both we're imagining scenarios and asking what our intuitions are.
You might say that the value of thought experiments in ethics is diminished because we have real world scenarios we can look at, so it seems lossy to reason about an approximation and then retroactively apply our intuitions onto the real scenario. But on the other hand the thought experiments in practical ethics are much much closer to real world scenarios (see Vsauce trying to set up real life trolley problem tests) and so the "thought experiment" part just acts as a shortcut.
Something like Mary's Room is the reverse- while it is pretty divorced from reality (although LLMs might give us an angle) people assume it has value precisely because it gives some access to otherwise inaccessible states, but the critique would be that the intuitions in an impossible world shouldn't translate over to reality.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
Seems a little presumptuous of others intellectual capacity
> 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.
While yes its usually hard, and far to many people discard it; if a methodology proves contradictory statements then it is nonevidence.
If you take someones thought experiment, reframe in a way they reject the conclusion; but still insit you must be convinced by their version; would a different type of argument really resolve the issue here?
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.
> Talking honestly is presumptuous? Either I'm confused here or...something.
Thinking hard, if you break someones script, your presuming they are in a mood for think`n
---
>> rationalists ai thought experiments
I have bashed my head into that several times as well; but I think they are *correct* a gai will be dangerous; but using thought experiments to suggest the chat bots wont be gai ... is pulling teeth; but it also doesnt matter if I provide evidence of chatbots being stupid in a predictable way either.
I dont see a difference here; conversations just fail, all the time, if im not in the mood to read a source, its not happening.
> 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.
Suppose you valued thought experiments; wouldnt you have beliefs you held because of valuable thought experiments? /s
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.
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’ve only met one in real life, Herbert Simon, not in a professional context, he was helping with the dishes after a college pal’s on the cheap wedding. Nice guy, three kids and he was pretty damn productive.
A certain degree of obsessiveness is helpful for productivity but monomania isn’t necessary.
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.
Last year's medicine Nobel Prize winner, Katalin Karikó, has one daughter... two-time Olympic gold medalist rower Susan Francia. The more you know.
Edit: Looking into it further, it seems that of the few female Nobel laureates, most of them have one or two children. And then there's Barbara McClintock, the only female winner of an unshared Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize, who, despite living to the ripe age of 90, never married even once.
"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."
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.
Excuse me? I just made an obvious objection to the assumption that having children as a man requires you to actually waste time raising them. Man, why do people keep thinking I'm being sarcastic?
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.
...Much, much less than men do. And as was discussed above, the most dedicated female scientists didn't even bother to get married. Men can uniquely afford to have children without wasting any time, so the question is mostly irrelevant. That's all.
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.
"The article didn’t intend to claim that 40% of NSF grants were woke - only 40% of the NSF grants that Ted Cruz and the Commerce Department had previously identified as woke. Those in turn are about 5% of all grants, so (assuming Cruz didn’t have false negatives) only about 2% of total grants were woke."
I'm missing something. I think you were assuming Cruz's team's search was something like a dumb-keyword-only search, and thus had (from your perspective) a 60% false positive rate. You think that same dumb search had a 0% false negative rate?
How can you consistently define the "false negative rate" in the absence of any sort of objective criterion? The whole point of the article is that Cruz and co *weren't* evaluating things in any sort of consistent manner: if they had been, the list wouldn't have looked like that.
What other method do you think they used to develop that list? Cruz didn't do this "research" in good faith. It's a political stunt so he can scream about "woke" and suck up to Trump. There is no requirement to be charitable to him.
That's canceled out by woke researchers also not operating in intellectual good faith. There is absolutely no requirement to be charitable to woke or those who promote it.
Oh sure, I'm not saying the results are great. I'm specifically responding to the previous commenter's attitude of self-righteousness in accusing Cruz of bad faith. Of COURSE it's a bad-faith naked exercise of political power. Woke is also a bad-faith exercise in political power, so that's what's required to counter it. There is no moral high ground here, only realpolitik. Complaining that one side is being unfair is like a naive child seeing a street fight and being upset that someone got kicked while they were down.
And, actually, I wouldn't say person C is completely morally blameless. Academia has broadly tolerated the illiberal creep of woke and its precursors for decades without taking a collective principled stance against it. Well, this is what happens. Sure I can feel bad for collateral damage, but I feel bad for it in the same way that I feel bad for German civilians in WW2.
People can argue against what Cruz is doing all they want. I might agree with some of their reasons. All I'm saying is that one argument I 100% don't agree with is that he's being 'unfair'. I think that argument is so naive that it betrays a complete lack of understanding of US politics.
I know very little about this particular list, but my personal position is this: it's bad to haphazardly slash away at research funding. But it's also bad to pursue aggressively racist anti-meritocratic policies under the guise of social justice. The latter represents a much more dangerous phenomenon IMO and it's been happening for decades. I am more than willing to tolerate some collateral damage in a political crusade against woke because I feel the long-term impact of woke is so negative that it's worth almost any price to eliminate it. At some point I might be convinced that the costs of the crusade outweigh the benefits, but it certainly won't be because of any appeals to 'fairness'.
In my view progressives have completely burned the commons of respectful political discourse in this country. They've been telling me for 20 years that my success is privilege and the culture I care about is evil and racist. Sorry, you don't get to turn around and cry about 'fairness' now that you're temporarily out of power. You already revealed yourselves to be unprincipled power-hungry liars and you also revealed yourselves to be my enemy. I don't care about fairness with you. I only want you destroyed and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage to do it. Progressives are a cancer on this country and Trump is the chemo. Stuff like Cruz's 40% hit rate is just the chemo making my hair fall out. I care way less about my hair than I care about killing the cancer.
>So moral relativism? Anything can be true? Sounds kind of woke to me.
No not moral relativism, it's might makes right. That's the opposite of woke, which fetishizes weakness and failure.
>What is this? The country electing a fascists bigot?
In broad strokes, yes. I mean Trump is neither a fascist nor a bigot but I understand your point. Things like feminism, affirmative action, anti-meritocratic minority preferences only exist because of the tolerance and sympathy of the productive majority in this country. That's why accusations of racism used to be politically effective: conservatives assumed good faith in the accusation and didn't want to be perceived as racist and so we invariably conceded in the face of it. Well the events of 2020 and beyond took the mask off of progressive hypocrisy. We no longer view the accusation as in good faith and so longer fear the label. That allows us to withdraw the charity (DEI, tolerance of gender nonsense, etc) that enabled woke because we no longer care about the social backlash. Call us racist all you want, we know you're full of shit. That allows us to elect a leader who no longer has to kowtow to the notion of shared values or tolerance and is therefore willing to go after your gravy train with reckless abandon.
Woke is absolute nonsense that only existed in the social niche created by polite political norms. Well it pushed good people too far and now we no longer care about being polite and are coming after woke with everything we have. I hope Trump destroys every last progressive institution and salts the earth from which they sprang, and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage to let him do it.
I disagree. Woke is an intellectually indefensible ideology and can only sustain itself through the systematic censorship of opposing viewpoints. People who 'honestly' believe it can only do so on the back of oppression. If they're too stupid or naive to realize that then they don't deserve the label of 'good faith'. They're like non-slaveholding southerners. If you're adjacent to evil then it's incumbent upon you to stop it.
And btw I don't make this judgement in a vacuum. Over the past decade, I've had hundreds of arguments about this - maybe thousands - both online and off. Every single interaction ended with bad-faith accusations of racism or misogyny or privilege. Every single one. Even the superficially 'open minded' ones immediately reveal their colors as soon as I make an argument that isn't on their list of simplistic comebacks. Just look at Reddit's censorship policy.
I challenge you to point me to a single woke adherent who can defend their position for 10 minutes against me without resorting to personal attacks.
> You think that same dumb search had a 0% false negative rate?
I think this method is very likely to have a false negative rate of zero or near zero, unless there were some studies that were somehow missed or excluded from the entire bucket being keyword-searched. But that seems to sidestep the question.
Could you give me a description of a study that could be legitimately woke without using any woke terminology? I.e., a study that never once mentions race, class, gender, women, minorities, oppression, equity, etc. and yet still is somehow advocating for, or otherwise very interested in these things.
I suppose a very sneaky DEI advocate could invent all new terms for these things, but they would probably need to define them somewhere in the document, which would itself raise a flag on a keyword search.
Maybe this one, for example? The abstract doesn't explicitly use the word transgender, and it's very possible they forgot to put terms like "gender dysphoria" in the filter because they, well, didn't know about them.
Yeah, that article was ... perhaps not as charitable as we might aspire to.
To hopefully provide a clear example of a "false negative" from a Ted Cruz style word search:
Transexual twin studies are/were a hot topic in trans identity because among identical twins separated at birth, if one twin is transexual, there's only about 1/3 chance the other twin is also transexual.
Now, this isn't to say that transexual people aren't "born that way". Or that they are. One of the big things I've taken from Sasha Gusev's writings here is that the geneticists are focusing a lot more on environment-gene interactions than either taken in isolation. To the best of my knowledge, it's a fascinating question that was found deeply politically inconvenient and further research was heavily discouraged, especially in certain directions.
Regardless of how that debate might eventually unfold, I think it pretty clearly touches on a rather heated front in the culture war while also being entirely bypassed by a simple word search of abstracts by Ted Cruz. For example, a study titled "Concordance rates for gender incongruence in monozygotic twins" is unlikely to trip Cruz's word search unless they flag gender as a whole, and even then there's probably a synonym out there I don't know about.
I was surprised this wasn't explored more, as while the NSF is not my area, maybe it hasn't changed so much from the 90s, but I can speak with some expertise on other academic areas and a 2% "woke" research rate is laughable. It is hilariously not credible, the level of "woke" research is trivially observable to be higher. I'm surprised Scott stuck to a 2% woke rate as credible.
Also, just a comment from that article, I was shocked by the number of researchers and scientists complaining about losing grants and not being able to continue their research. And I was like "Oh no, you can't get research funding, you'll have to go into industry and make a lot more money ... just like I did." Like, I'm sorry about your upcoming raise? I was surprised that people were so offended by the idea that government funded research could be deeply ideological. Like, it is, from a right-wing perspective this isn't even offensive, this is just the way it's been for the past 20+ years, you're complaining about being forced to live the same way right-wing intellectuals have lived for our entire lives. And this isn't even just hypocrisy, dude, industry is awesome, lots of research goes nowhere but in industry you really do get to directly impact people's lives. It's awesome.
Are there examples of Democratic senators going through stacks of research grants to attack some on ideological grounds? I feel like if this had happened in the last 20 years, I’d have heard about it.
> Transexual twin studies are/were a hot topic in trans identity because among identical twins separated at birth, if one twin is transexual, there's only about 1/3 chance the other twin is also transexual.
There appears to be zero popular awareness, but something very similar is also true of homosexuality.
Oh, no, this line of research got killed, as far as I know, back in the 2012-2016 period. Here's a decent 2018 post laying out the debate from the pro-trans side:
And those critiques, while not perhaps made with the most charity, are still reasonable. Yeah, it's misleading to combine monozygotic and fraternal twins. Yeah, a concordance rate of 33% indicates that it's not genetically determined but the base rate for someone being trans is like...0.5% of the US population. Going from 0.5% to 33% indicates a pretty serious genetic factor; the genes are doing something important.
What should have happened back in, like, 2014, is that both sides sat down, argued back and forth in good faith, and come to some kind of consistent answer. Instead, as far as I know, that research was determined to be politically inconvenient as so it was killed off by largely woke and woke-adjacent schools and grant funders. I mean, what academic institution was going to fund or support anti-trans research in 2015?
But this is just background for the "false negative" thing. Why would we believe that Ted Cruz's dumb word search tool would miss "woke" research and bias? Well, we have a pretty clear example here. This is a prime culture war topic. And it's difficult to envision how Ted Cruz's "Does the abstract contain 'DEI'?" algorithm would catch this.
This is kinda just unit testing. Like, does this algorithm work? Well, what's an example of something we'd want it to catch? If it doesn't catch this thing, it's a bad algorithm and it's not evidence that the bad things doesn't exist.
PS. I don't know what a current example would be. Posting history to the contrary, I have a life and can't keep up to date with the current scientific blacklisting. You're getting 2014 era stuff because that's when I was following this stuff.
First, more publicly, it undercuts the "born this way" narrative from a PR perspective. That narrative was and is important to a lot of people. Well, "Trans people are genetically born that way" is a much easier sell to middle America than "Trans people are born that way through a complex interaction of genetics and environment, including culture, that we don't fully understand." It's just a worse story to tell a skeptical America.
Second, more seriously, the right has made some plausible claims of "social contagion" theory for transsexuality. We've seen significant increases in the number of people identifying as trans in Gen Z, something like a 3x bump. If transsexuality was purely genetic, this would pretty clearly be just more people "coming out of the closet", eg trans people identifying as such who wouldn't have 40 years ago. If, however, there are significant environmental and cultural factors that lead to transsexuality and we completely reshaped our culture around trans people in the last 10 years and then saw a massive increase in transsexuality...that would have pretty serious public, social, and medical implications.
This doesn't mean that the social contagion theory is right, however. Neither side really has an airtight case and their critiques of the other are mostly isolated demands for rigor. We genuinely don't know.
To answer the object-level question, I find it hard to believe that you could have a “woke” grant that somehow evaded the keyword search. If we were talking about an era where plausible deniability from government oversight was a necessity to keep doing woke stuff, this would have made sense, but this is not what this administration’s narrative about the previous 4 years is.
See also Deveraux (this isn’t what he says, but I think a reasonable inference about the situation) about how the wokest bits might not be NSF-funded at all, it could be NEH (a few hundred million a year, a rounding error in the science funding and a literal speck in the US federal budget) or on different funding altogether.
I find it rather unsurprising that 2% of NSF grants are woke in any meaningful sense.
I also think that if Ted Cruz has better evidence, the onus to come up with it is on him. By the usual rules of “bounded distrust”, we have to assume that his database is the best shot he has so far, so his future declarations should be weighed accordingly.
(This doesn’t necessarily mean that academia isn’t woke – but rather than whatever wokeness is there doesn’t have to be reflected in the text of the most prestigious and selective processes for grant applications, or in fact in any grant application at all.)
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...
Some companies slashing their DEI programs have cited the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."
"Many Republican-controlled state legislatures took action against DEI in 2024, with several states, including Alabama, Iowa and Utah banning DEI at public colleges and universities. The wave of conservative backlash against companies deemed “woke” picked up significant steam in 2023 when Bud Light became the target of a conservative boycott after it briefly collaborated with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a marketing promotion."
So basically, the anti-DEI backlash has been building for some time, as a result of public pressure campaigns, a SCOTUS ruling, and laws passed in various states. The timing clearly has something to do with Trump (as the article points out, Elon Musk has been one of the main anti-DEI crusaders) but also consider that companies don't really want to stand out or be the first to do something that's going to get bad press, so it's safer for them to move in packs when they have political cover to do so.
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.
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.
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.
Trumpism has a simple explanation in commoditization pressure. Labor becomes commoditized when there is little differentiation between various sources of labor. It has long been the case that the lowest end of the labor supply is highly commoditized and the high end has been less so. Individuals have been able to move from highly commoditized labor markets to less commoditized markets by gaining education. The more interchangeable different sources of labor are, the more zero sum the economy that governs them becomes; workers directly substitute for each other rather than collaborating as they do in the higher end of the labor pool. At the high end, it matters much more what the exact skill set of each worker is. At the low end, it does not matter very much at all. This has important implications for how domestic labor interacts with foreign labor. At the high end, the relationship is closer to symbiotic. Domestic skilled workers can feel secure in the fact that they inhabit a small labor pool of individuals with sufficiently similar skills to their own. At the low end, cheap unskilled labor is highly interchangeable and workers have a tendency to feel insecure when faced with broader landscape of competitive labor offerings.
There is a third perspective, though; that of employers. Employers benefit from their labor becoming commoditized and fear their products becoming so. Typically, this puts labor and capital at odds, but it also provides a mechanism for their incentives to become aligned when employers fear themselves becoming commoditized more than they fear having to pay more for labor.
As long as I have been alive and paying attention, the low end of the labor market has been grumbling about the ability of foreign labor to compete with them. There has recently been two changes that have allowed Trumpism to gain a foothold by expanding that preexisting base.
1. Commoditization at the middle-end. Some higher-skilled workers are feeling competitive pressure from overseas markets. In tech, there has been another wave of
offshoring and foreign labor feels qualitatively better than it used to be.
2. China has begun to compete in earnest with high-tech products from the US From BYD to DeepSeek to SMIC, China can produce products that undercut US ones.
I do not think that it is a coincidence that it is Elon Musk, whose net worth is mostly Tesla stock, who has become the most fervent Capitalist backer of Trump. I think he sees substantial damage to his net worth if BYD is alowed to compete with Tesla in his home market. Trumpism is fundamentally an alliance between the low end of the labor market and employers who feel threatened by the rise of advanced Chinese brands. Both of them are aligned in their fear of being replaced by foreign substitutes.
This theory also has the power to explain the H1-B war of 2024. Advanced foreign workers are the place where Trumpian capital and the Trumpian populists are the least aligned. For employers, it is still desirable to pay as little as possible for labor, even though they fear commoditization by Chinese firms. The higher and middle ends of the labor market are the parts where the Trumpian alliance is still weakest, because these workers are still the least easily substituted for, but the middle-end beginning to feel the crush of commoditization and global competition are exactly what caused the environment to become ripe for a 2nd Trump victory.
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.
Some economists say that we should be buying all of our steel from China. Chinese steel is cheaper and this cheapness trickles down into various avenues of our lives. But China is a geopolitical rival building a huge navy. So if they produce more steel, they can make more ships and crush us someday. Trump is aiming to preserve national military authority over GDP. That seems like 'prioritizing US interests', rather than the interests of the global economy.
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.
One wonders why Trump decided to go with the tariff option rather than a Soviet Five Year plan. Perhaps he expects it to succeed in a timeline longer than three months.
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.
Yeah, Trump has literally proposed colonizing Greenland, Canada, Panama again, and Gaza. Nothing he says implies that the sun has sent on the American Empire.
No, that absolutely supports what I said. Trump is organising a retreat to the Americas, and what he is talking about with Greenland, Panama and Canada is all part of that. They're all under Chinese influence. As part of the grand bargain with China, they will pull their influence from the Americas and the US will pull out from Asia.
As for support, $36 trillion of debt and close to a trillion dollars in interest per year makes it clear the US cannot afford its empire any longer. Why else is Trump saying he will not subsidise foreigners anymore? That's the end of empire.
This didn't stop America from waging the global war against communism with its accompanying imperial adventures. While America has arguably *never* been able to afford these expenses, why would politicians suddenly start caring now in 2024?
My model of Trump is that he admires the empire America built at the end of the 19th century with possessions won in the Spanish-American war and wants to do that again. He has stated his admiration of the 19th century multiple times. Trump doesn't want to end American imperialism, he wants to Make it Great Again by returning to the older model of explicit geographical possessions.
"Why else is Trump saying he will not subsidise foreigners anymore?"
Oh, so many reasons? Start with he has no clue what "subsidise" means? Or what foreign policy of a huge country may try to accomplish and why? I keep being astonished by so many people's willingness to give Trump infinite benefit.. it's not "doubt" anymore, is it? You can't call it "benefit of a doubt" when what's assumed is an infinite wisdom in a guy who amply demonstrated a combination of run-of-the-mill stupidity and outsized malice.
We have known for decades that the Federal government policy setting has not been tracking the concerns of ordinary Americans (I am not going to cite research here, but I can look it up for anyone interested). Government reform has been badly needed for over a generation. The Democrats had plenty of opportunities to institute major reform, and were not able/willing to do so. Rising levels of wealth disparity, long term economic insecurity, rapid technological transformation, and other sources of change combined to create the conditions for a populist reformer to begin a movement and get elected. That it happened to be Trump is probably stochastic, if someone from the Left with the same savvy messaging skills had turned up first, we might be living the "Woke" revolution.
The silver lining, therefore, is that, whatever else happens, this is an opportunity to reform and revitalize the government. The Democrats just have to come up with their own vision of reform, and they can bounce back.
If, on the other hand, you meant strictly the international dimension, then there is still a leadership role for the US in the world. We are, after all, still the largest single economy, with the most powerful military. The problem is that we needed to expand our allies to include some of the up and coming "BRIC" nations, something that we were seemingly unwilling to do. Our treatment of our own Middle Eastern allies left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. They way we left Afghanistan sacrificed a lot of our soft power. In the long run soft power > hard power (guns and money) in terms of living in a peaceful, prosperous world that is good for commerce (though both are important).
The primary source of our soft power is our democracy. So long as we were more democratic than most non-allied nations, we had an ideological edge over rivals like Russia and China. Giving that up is going to hurt us, hard.
Which leads to the counter intuitive notion that the best thing we could do to ensure our national interests internationally is reform ourselves at home.
I'm an european scientist who has self-identified as somewere between center-left and libertarian pretty much since ever, and who currently looks with some envy at the US, so I guess I may be a good candidate.
First and most importantly, ever since WWII pretty much the entire west has been on a trajectory from "democracy" to "bureaucracy with democratic characteristics". There's a long list of issues - consistent between countries - that voters care about, but on which nothing meaningfully happens, and an equally if not longer list of issues that the PMC (the class which staffs the higher bureaucracy almost exclusively, and also politicians) cares about that get far, far outsized attention.
Trump is the first to really push on the former, and against the latter. You may argue that this is bad because the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart, which ... I don't entirely disagree with, actually. But the way the capital-B Bureaucracy has had increasingly consolidated around a fixed set of values while taking over and thus losing checks and balances has been quite scary to me for a long time now. Europe is MUCH further down this road and thus needs it much more desperately, btw.
Second, many countries have experimented with reducing budgets by targeted, well-thought-out reforms that give the relevant institutions lots of time to react.
It never works. All institutions just use the time to fight tooth and nail against any reduction and grant/project/team descriptions are optimized to sound great & rarely reflect what happens on the ground very well so the targeting is never really good to begin with. And the next administration is likely to reverse whatever meager gains you've had, and then some. I've watched it often enough that the way the Trump admin is doing it seems at least understandable to me. Just cut as much as possible and then re-institute only the things that actually hurt.
Also, my wife is well-connected in the local start-up scenes which includes several people owning decently sized companies, and according to her this is just common knowledge. If the company is flailing and/or an entire team/department seems sketchy, you just get rid of it, try to re-delegate it to the rest of the company and only if necessary re-institute it, but now as a new team with new people.
Third, on the foreign front, especially concerning Europe and Ukraine ... He/Vance is unfortunately just simply correct. If we(Europe) had managed our affairs well, especially the military, we could simply laugh them out of the room. If we were capable of defending Ukraine against Russia on our own it doesn't matter all that much whether the US does so. But we can't, so it does.
To be clear, I'd prefer if the war is continued. But because Europe has become such a pathetic windbag, it's not our call to make. Including Europe in talks may have been a courtesy by the US so far, but it was always just that.
That doesn't mean I don't look with some worry at some of the odd things the Trump admin is doing/saying. But overall, it's still solidly on the "long over-due course correction" page in my book.
"You may argue that this (push by Trump toward voter issues rather than PMC issues) is bad because the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart, which ... I don't entirely disagree with, actually."
Which part are you saying you're partial to? The idea that favoring voter issues over PMC issues is bad? Or the idea that the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart?
The latter idea seems not quite right to me. Or more specifically, it's making an inference that doesn't turn out to matter.
Assuming PMCs are selected mainly from the smarter half of the intelligence bell curve, yes, technically, the average voter is less intelligent than the average PMC. However, the quality of justification for issues should be a function of the maximum of the intelligences for each of voters and PMCs, and voters still include high intelligence members. Moreover, PMCs are motivated not only by expertise in the issues, but also in preserving their own livelihoods. Sort of like how a guild of tailors could be expected to step up its arguments for bespoke garments in the wake of the invention of mass produced clothing.
So, despite the average PMC beating the average voter at expertise (I don't even think intelligence is the determining factor; it's more that the average voter makes a very temporary job out of thinking about governance while the PMC thinks about it full time), I think it doesn't quite follow that the PMC's advice will reflect that expertise and that alone.
There is a reason why I support the voter side on this and not the PMC side, even if I may think that the PMC is smarter. I would have put it in slightly different words, but not really sufficiently to make it worth nitpicking, so I'll just say I agree with you, too.
No worries. I thought your comment was good, and mostly I was genuinely unsure which claim you were saying you agreed with.
That, and the notion that PMCs are smarter than voters is a long standing peeve of mine, as it's often made by people I'd otherwise agree with, and tends to arouse some needless defensiveness from voters. I've long thought it's both more accurate and more agreeable to say that PMCs simply devote more of their time to this stuff than voters can afford to. If you have reason to doubt this, that reason might be interesting.
This bothers me, because the intended usage appears to be the opposite of the more famous phrase "communism with Chinese characteristics". Communism with Chinese characteristics is accurately described as Chinese and poorly described as communism.
> Communism with Chinese characteristics is accurately described as Chinese and poorly described as communism.
Technically it was "socialism with Chinese characeristics," and empirically it was "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," and so called and recognized by many outside countries in Deng's time, including the USA.
And it was indeed very different than median socialism OR capitalism!
Contrary to basically every diplomat, pundit, and economists' predictions, China did NOT liberalize and become more socially open and democratic when they grew ~40x in economic size thanks to embracing capitalism.
This was the recurring mantra and hope for decades, incidentally - that there was some "economic growth" social and cultural attractor that would pull any economy towards democracy and liberalization with enough growth.
The fact that it isn't true, and that China has remained culturally distinct with the CCP firmly athwart everything is a big deal, both historically and for politics today.
I agree with some of this, disagree with other parts.
""bureaucracy with democratic characteristics" Ok, but why would anyone think that Trump, of all people, or Musk for that matter, would know anything about what to do about this? Given that the US federal government needs reform, is the current state of "X" our model? That seems insane.
Also, consider this: "bureaucracy with democratic characteristics" may be inevitable. As global society grows and becomes more complex, as the issues that face us like global warming or international financial corruption transcend national boundaries, only a government bureaucracy has any chance of being able to manage it. We may need a bureaucracy that functions more effectively, but that is still a bureaucracy. What is a bureaucracy but a specialized division of labor, managed by a hierarchy of authority? What's the alternative to that?
The "PMC" (depending upon exactly what you mean by that) isn't in charge of government policy, the wealthy elite are. Our society is polarized because at this time, there are two wealthy elites, one based on large incomes, and one based on large investments. The current election can be seen as another move in the game between these two. But neither closely represents the interests of the average voter. To get there would require something much more sophisticated and targeted than DOGE.
As for "Cut as much as possible and re-institute only the things that actually hurt," may I point out the difference between government agencies and a start up? When you cut the sales staff, you just sell less. When you cut the CDC, people can die. "Hurt", in this case, isn't an organizational performance metric, it's a quality of human life metric. The stakes are way higher.
As an American, just let me say "Can we please stop abandoning our allies?" This is not going to end well for us. I do not wish to live in an Americanized version of Russia.
I don’t want to defend Trumps/musks actions because I don’t follow them enough to know whether they are doing any good, but:
The CDC arguably killed vast numbers of people over COVID. It was their test and they failed.
Also, Operation Warp Speed was a mini version of this, bypassing the bureaucracy, and it saved many thousands of lives, and you can be absolutely sure that left to the bureaucrats a vaccine would have taken another year.
You're going to have to convince me that the CDC killed anybody. My impression is that, while they initially offered some advice that later turned out not to work, that was the best anyone knew at the time. Later, the vaccines came out, and that was the solution.
Bureaucracy can slow things down, and sometimes we want to streamline procedures in the face of an emergency. It is not a good idea, however, to operate under emergency procedures all of the time. That doesn't mean that bureaucratic procedures don't often need streamlining. But rational streamlining of procedures is one thing, and gutting the agencies responsible for ensuring that public health procedures are implemented, in order to see of this hurts anyone, is something else.
The CDC banned any Covid testing that did not use their approved kit. The approved kit didn’t work, so they effectively banned Covid testing during months of early spread. The ban was strictly enforced with serious threats for non compliance.
On Musk I can see the logic: with the whole Twitter thing, a big part of Musk's thesis on Twitter was "it's super bloated, I can take it over, fire half the staff and end up with a more efficient company", and the reaction (particularly among the left-leaning) was "you can't do that, the company will implode and everything will blow up" and then Musk did and it's been fine.
While the big picture of that did not pan out (in ways that may be relevant to DOGE), but the core idea of "you can fire half the staff without it blowing up" seems to have been largely true.
I'm skeptical this model can really be scaled up to the government - I think realistically it would need to be a more bipartisan effort, for one - but I can see the appeal
> the reaction (particularly among the left-leaning) was "you can't do that, the company will implode and everything will blow up" and then Musk did and it's been fine.
And not just "fine," Twitter barely ever made any money, only had two "net profit" years in 8 since their IPO, and was basically on track to never make real money and probably fail in the next handful of years.
When Musk took over, advertisers fled en masse, cutting $5B in advertising revenues in half, but he cut operating expenses from $4.5B to only $1.5B, leaving it in a place where it at least has the potential to become sustainably profitable going forward.
"Ok, but why would anyone think that Trump, of all people, or Musk for that matter, would know anything about what to do about this?"
Smart and dignified Austrian economists proposed slashing government staff and regulations. Musk and Trump are now actually doing that, instead of saying they will and doing nothing, a la Reagan.
"When you cut the sales staff, you just sell less. When you cut the CDC, people can die. "Hurt", in this case, isn't an organizational performance metric, it's a quality of human life metric."
On the other side of the coin, continued employment of government staff also harms quality of life in less visible ways.
One additional thought -- I could do with less regulation and a smaller government. But any benefits there are simply not worth the obvious and incredible slide to authoritarianism. Trump is corrupt and is willing to ignore the judiciary and legislature in his consolidation of power. He's going to run again if he's alive, just like he tried to overthrow the government back during j6. He is a walking constitutional crisis. These are norms that you don't want to touch and Trump is taking a hammer to them
First, it's probably true that Trump is right about additional investment in EU military being _good for Europe_. But that is _bad for the US_. Europe is best thought of as a vassal of the US, and this benefits both groups of people significantly. It would be much worse for the US to give up Pax Americana.
Second, I've never met a bureaucracy I liked. But the government is not a startup. People continue to claim that it "isn't working" even while Americans have some of the best standards of living in the world. Much of the bureaucracy is in place to provide services that people vote for and want. Not everyone, obviously, but many people. And the stuff that people seem to be really complaining about is exactly the stuff that doesn't matter.
Fwiw I'm a multi time startup founder. What team Trump is doing isn't "getting rid of the orgs that aren't working". He's scapegoating. He is going after things that _work so well people don't recognize why we need them_, that are _so efficient they make up less than a fraction of a percent of the budget_, because it's politically convenient. He's not actually going after the "big problems" in any principled way.
> People continue to claim that it "isn't working" even while Americans have some of the best standards of living in the world.
There isn't a contradiction there; the standard of living isn't delivered by the government. Is their contribution positive or negative?
You could make the same observation, much more sharply, about San Francisco, although in that case I'm not sure you could find a constituency to claim the government was working.
First, he is reinvigorating democracy. The last X years felt super unresponsive and not transparent. Now suddenly all this public energy and discourse about how to fix America/culture etc. has resulted in clear ideas and he is actually implementing a bunch of stuff he publicly said he would do. Usually politicians say they won't do much and then don't do it. This is the first president in a while to actually say he will do a lot and genuinely try to get most of it done. (There's also a huge amount of corruption in how this is being done, he thinks of himself as a mob boss not a statesman with higher loyalties than himself)
Second, he is non ideologically making it clear to allies and enemies that he's willing to impose costs if they don't fix problems that are in their purview but in principle America could fix for them. He's telling Europe they're responsible for Ukraine. So now suddenly UK is publicly willing to put boots on the ground as a peacekeeping force, etc. he's telling the middle east of they don't stop using Palestinians as political tools to destroy Israel he will take over Gaza in some form, and suddenly Egypt and others are scrambling to actually find a long term solution.
There is a difference between "Democracy" and "Effectiveness." If you prefer effective government to democracy, just say so. Something like "He gets the trains to run on time" would make it clear. I'm not sure how someone who is violating the Constitution in order to abrogate power reserved for Congress is "revitalizing democracy."
You know, the Constitution is rather inefficient. Maybe we should just dispense with it.
As for what he is actually getting done: involuntarily forcing Palestinians into refugee status in some foreign country would surely reduce the amount of conflict on the borders of Israel (though perhaps not elsewhere), but why Egypt or Jordan? Wouldn't the Palestinians be better off here in the US? Let's bring them all here. Or is their welfare not really the point?
If his goal is to incentivize Europeans to support Ukraine, why is he in negotiations with Russia (to the extent that he is going to force a settlement soon, Europe has no reason to invest in military aid)? Why is he asking Ukraine for raw materials? Why is he claiming to be able to "end the war" (which would seem incompatible with extending it, only with more aid from Europe)? He can't end the war anyway, only Ukraine and Russian can do that.
But the overall idea that US politicians should do what they say, and say what they really believe (looking right at you Democrats) is sound.
By 'democracy' I meant 'if the vast majority of people want a certain policy, they can get a politician to say they will advance that policy, and then once they get elected on that platform they will actually do so, subject to constitutional safeguards'.
There are many 'constitutional violations' on both sides. For example, Biden suspended massive amounts of student debt. Was it unconstitutional? Technically no, since he made bad faith arguments in front of various courts, and he didn't refuse to implement any validly announced court orders. But I still consider it a main constitutional violation. Did Trump do something unconstitutional by going through lawyers until he found ones willing to argue he won the 2020 election? Technically not, but functionally I think he tried to overthrow the government (through multiple mechanisms) and it was bad, and anti-democratic, etc.
Trump can be violating the constitution, and still on-net I feel like we are in a much more vibrant democracy now than whatever gargoyle the previous iteration of inscrutable special interest/bureaucracy was. I think millions of people entering the country illegally under bad faith but validly processed claims of asylum was a similar afront to 'democracy' under my definition.
B)
He wants the palestinians to stop trying to kill people, especially israelis/westerners. military conflict is bad for getting stuff done. they seem to value in order: being able to live on palestinian lands, minimizing land controlled by non-arab/muslims in the region, personal safety/welfare. The current status quo is nothing they do in furthering goal 2) results in a long-term recognized political loss of either 2) or 1), so Trump's conclusion is 'arab nations, come up with a solution that stops killing people I care about, or you lose land'.
Similarly, he wants russians to stop killing people, mostly in the short term but ideally in the long term, and also he wants to stop paying a lot of money to deter them from doing so. So, to that end he's asking ukraine for raw materials since that's a financial goodie for the US. And then in the meantime he's saying to russia 'end the war and you can get sanction relief and more economic relations with the US' and he's saying to the rest of europe 'russia is big and scary, we have supported you long enough, increase your defense spending so russia is afraid of starting additional conflicts'. He doesn't actually care much where the battle lines are frozen. If russia gets a third of ukraine and doesn't reinvade anywhere in europe for 25 years, that's a big win from his perspective.
A) Allow me to rephrase. My term "Constitutional violation" could imply that all Trump did was inadvertently violate some process contained in the Constitution, much the way one can violate the law without knowing it.
That's not what I see Trump doing. I perceive his actions as weakening the Constitution itself, specifically the balance of powers. The founders believed that if the executive branch of government becomes too powerful, then it becomes a king by another name. In other words, the more concentrated power becomes, the less freedom ordinary people will still have in the long run.
B) "He want Palestinians to stop killing people." Does this include all the women, elderly, children and other non-combatants? Because they have suffered the most casualties so far, and would suffer the most from a forced removal.
"Especially Israelies/Westerners." Why? Why do we have to pick sides in someone else's civil war? How does this further US national security, or protect Americans in general? As for protecting people inside Israel/Israeli held territories, that's the responsibility of the Israeli government. We can provide aid to their military and so forth, even participate in defending their airspace when attacked, but undertaking ethnic cleansing on their behalf is going a little farther then we need to go.
And as for priorities, who is "they" in your statement? So far as I know, neither Egypt nor Jordan are killing people in Israel, so why do they have to come up with a solution? And why is it our job to force them to?
Seems to me that the only people killing anyone in Israel is Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, so any solution anyone comes up with should target those groups, and only those groups.
As for Russia, the US isn't negotiating the end of the war, we are negotiating the end of our support to Ukraine. Ending our support won't stop the Russians from killing Ukrainians, and it won't stop them from attempting to defend themselves, so if that really is the goal, a different approach is needed.
A) Yeah, that's an entirely valid perspective. 'Concentration of power' is bad for balance of power, agreed. On the other hand, 'lack of accountability' is bad. Before Trump you had a ton of power delegated to administrative agencies without meaningful accountability. We have different perspectives on whether the change is net good or net bad, I agree that the harms you're pointing to are both real and large.
B) So, broadly speaking it's in America's interests to partner with people that have some combination of sharing our values, being economically useful, and be predictably dependable. Israel is pretty high on all three of these metrics, but the largest one is that they are dependable. Their politicians are generally less corrupt, their civil society is more cohesive, their population is willing to fight to defend itself effectively, and in general you can partner with them across election cycles in a way not true of most democracies. It's our most useful ally outside of England and Canada.
With a strong Israel, you can much more easily form an alliance of dictators against militant Islam and build functioning states and trading arrangements.
The welfare of palestinians isn't really relevant for US interests, I think? Their identity is, to a first order approximation, a cultural ethos that shames anyone whose public politics are anything other than unconditional endless struggle to destroy israel through whatever means seems most likely to work, and as a polity the palestinians organize to act towards that aim above all others (except to maintain land claims). Egypt and Jordan, if they took any meaningful number of palestinian refugees, would very likely collapse, because they would try to overthrow those governments and use the state infrastructure to try to destroy israel. The 'goal' is to demilitarize gaza. The only thing palestinians are willing to give up armed struggle for is loss of land, so that's what Trump is threatening. As for why threaten Egypt and Jordan...realistically because that's what will work. It's not fair and it's unfortunate. Jordan and Egypt both almost suffered regime collapse at the hands of PLO, and Muslim Brotherhood respectively, they've suffered enough. They are both plausible recipients of palestinian refugees, and extremely motivated to avoid that from happening, and capable of pressuring hamas to demilitarize.
To be clear, if I was raised in Gaza I would of course want to sacrifice my life and be martyred trying to destroy Israel, and in 1948 I would have fought against the creation of Israel for completely normal reasons, but their struggle for cleaning the land of jewish self determination seems to have reached diminishing returns somewhere near the second intifada. They needed to win in 1948, or to at some point before 2000 give up the right of return, accept a state, and build up a proper military capable of challenging Israel if they were capable of acting more strategically. But again, I think their goals are bonkers.
On Ukraine, it's complicated, and I am quite conflicted. Basically the status quo is russia and ukranians kill more and more of each other, as russia slowly gains more territory. This is very bad and painful. Shattering Russia's economy and military on Ukranian lives and drones was about the cheapest way the west could have weakened their enemy. Realistically Russia has won about 20% of Ukraine at too high a cost, and needs to end the war looking like it has won. Ukraine is convinced Russia will eventually come back for more, so they will stop fighting when Russia has simply killed all Ukranians willing to fight as an organized military, and it will turn into an insurgency (which is fine for US interests). Europe has been slacking on self defense for a long time and is scared of who Russia will invade next. It's just a mess.
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To be clear, all of this has been my realpolitic steelman of the position Trump is good for america's interests.
My personal utility function assigns significantly larger weight to the welfare of ukranian, russian, palestinian, and israeli people than 'america's interests' do.
Well, I had this extremely well reasoned and researched counter-point to your argument, and then I read "To be clear, all of this has been my realpolitic steelman of the position Trump is good for america's interests." LOL--You did a good job, I really got taken in.
Just to finish it off:
Whether increased accountability of gov't agencies is a good thing or not depends on who holds them accountable, and to what set of standards. An imperial president who doesn't believe in science isn't my first choice--it's my last. Finding a way to make them accountable to the public interest would be a significant net good.
I think you're steelmaned description stereotypes Palestinians. They aren't an homogenous mass of undifferentiated people all of whom share the same interests and values. The ones who are suffering the most are not the ones who caused the suffering. But if you could find a way to kill off just the terrorists, then have at it.
I largely agree about Russia/Ukraine, except I'm not conflicted about it. Ukraine was fighting our fight for us, and now we've gone and changed sides. Shit.
It depends what you mean by "current direction". I think e.g. moving fast to disempower the NLRB and government DEI, and to remove obstructive regulations fast in general, to be very good, while the tariffs threats or blocking solar energy permitting for what comes down to silly culture war reasoning is very bad. They seem to be coming from different parts within the admin, afaict.
Wait, why is it good to disempower the NLRB? They were the ones who ordered a company I recently worked at to stop union-busting after a lawsuit on the issue, and post signs around the office that remind workers that that happened. That seems good.
Yes I've heard that argument, but it really seems like workers do need some way to have some kind of leverage in order to negotiate with their employers. Are you aware of alternatives that work better than unions?
Maybe, but if you look at how actual unions in America work these days, they are *really* bad (see e.g. how dockers unions prevent port automation or how police and teachers unions protect abusive members). And non unionized fields like software actually do okay for their workers.
I'm out of my depth here, but doesn't the market mechanism sort that out, supply-demand? The less supply and more demand there is for what you do, the more leverage you have.
Thanks for the link. I almost stopped after paragraph four, because I tend not to like columnists lying to me, but I made it through, and it seemed like Hanania's take on corruption is that it's okay as long as it accomplishes what he considers a net good to society. If you accept that, the next question is, how should society decide what's a net good to society?
So I think he does have at least a partial model for this, where it's good for society to enable more net productive things (even if the benefits are suboptimally allocated) but bad to do things that are net counterproductive (like government taking control of industries). I have mixed feelings about this part (I suspect my optimal level of accepting corruption is lower than his), but I agree that America right now puts too much value on countering corruption relative to allowing things to be built (which doesn't mean it's impossible to go too far the other way).
There is only one sustainable definition of the common good in a democracy, and that is whatever a majority of voters say it is. The larger the majority, the more good it is. Ergo, anything that tends to polarize us is bad (I'm talking about official government policy, not the espoused positions of various American communities).
The cost is that this requires compromise and patience with incremental progress.
Also, corruption is waste. It's a cut off the top, before anything is done or delivered. It's inherently a net negative. Less is always better.
As for productivity, is he counting external costs?
Instead of "The larger the majority, the more good it is," you could say "the more often the majority gets what it wants, the more good it is." That could lead to very different conclusions on what is good.
I could have said that, but I didn't, because I said what I meant. 50.5% getting what they want multiple times doesn't fit my definition of democracy as well as 99% getting what they want.
It may be that a majority of voters supported a policy that had the result of worsening the housing crisis in California, but I am skeptical that a majority of them approve of the crisis itself. I am willing to be that could someone devise a housing policy to satisfy more factions of voters, the size of the majority supporting that would be higher (almost by definition). That would be more democratic, in my view.
He clearly has much better advisors this time around. I haven’t studied it in depth but I suspect it will be much better than any foreign policy since before 9/11
"I haven't studied it much" you probably should because "He clearly has much better advisors this time around" is patent false. Who exactly do you think is a good advisor? His cabinet is full of people who are clearly unqualified for their jobs.
On foreign policy his VP and Secretary of Defense have both been in Europe this past week giving conflicting statements on the US policy on Ukraine.
The only way this is good for foreign policy is if you are an isolationist interested in destroying the US's prosperity.
I don’t think public statements matter nor does it matter who’s sitting in the Secretary of State chair at any given point in time. That’s not how politics actually works in real life. The stuff you see on TV is a clown act for the masses, the real business is happening behind the scenes.
Sorry thats just not how it works and believing that is a coping mechanism. You already admitted you are not informed on this topic. Go inform yourself at least a little bit before making such confident statements.
Words are how humans communicate. If you say one thing in public and another thing in private, you are two face coward and people will stop working with you. That is already happening with countries that were, until this year, our strongest allies.
That's exactly how it works if you go read declassified materials from (say) the Clinton era. The clown act on TV or Trumps tweets will be forgotten in the long term and only exist to satisfy the curiosity of the voters on what's going on abroad. The real work is done off-camera, without much fanfare and usually by people who's names are not well known.
> If you say one thing in public and another thing in private, you are two face coward and people will stop working with you.
The EU will stop working with the US? Not happening while Russia's knocking on their back door.
Or Canada? The country with some of the weakest Federal leadership and multiple bickering provinces? Eh, even if they do, who cares? We don't need them?
Or Mexico, the place barely able to resist organized crime without US support?
Or Japan and South Korea, given the threat of China?
The allies will crawl over broken shards of glass to come kiss the ring of the US President. Non-allies are a different matter and I do think Trump will handle those better than Biden or Obama.
I see the administration moving in many different directions concurrently, some good and some bad. One direction I like is removing the Gazans from Gaza; that seems like the most viable proposal to bring peace to the region. One may compare it to the ethnic cleansing of Germans from neighbouring countries post WW2, after which the Germans have lived in peace, or to the Greek/Turkish population exchange. And if not removing them, simply allowing them to leave seems like a humanitarian act of granting them the basic human right of emigration.
Both of those examples were humanity disasters. At least half a million people died in the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, and I'm seeing estimates well into the hundreds of thousands for just the expulsions of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, plus however many people died due to the expulsions in the other direction.
I expect it's possible for a modern state to conduct a "population exchange" with less brutally and more care to avoiding deaths from malnutrition, exposure, and disease than Stalin's USSR or Ataturk's Turkey. But at the end of the day, systematically forcing millions of people out of their homes at bayonet point is fundamentally an inhumane process.
WW2 is said to have killed around 80M people, so if half a million died to prevent a repeat, I don't think that is necessarily such a bad deal. We need to take into account that alternative cost too.
There were a lot of reasons WW2 wasn't repeated. American, British, and Soviet troops being all over various parts of Germany for the next several decades (and French troops as well for a while) probably would have done the trick by itself. Or the establishment of a viable liberal democratic regime in West Germany after the war. Or the fact that the US, USSR, UK, and France all had nukes and Germany didn't. Or the convincing and brutal demonstration that Germany couldn't fight and win against all the other great powers at once.
I expect the population expulsions were at most a minor contributor. They might even have been a negative factor, given that irredentism and revenge for past atrocities are historically very common grievances used to justify aggression.
Perhaps it is easier to isolate variables in the Greek/Turkish case. There we can see that before the population exchange, hundreds of thousands died in interethnic violence, whereas after the population exchange, peace has largely reined between Greeks and Turks in Greece and Turkey. On the other hand, in Cyprus, where there was no population exchange, war broke out between Greeks and Turks, and this conflict has still not been resolved. To me, this natural experiment seems to suggest that ethnic cleansing can help prevent interethnic conflict.
I am not an expert on Greek/Turkish relations, but the impression I got was that Greek and Turkish relations were decidedly unfriendly for most of the 20th century and the main reason they didn't boil into open warfare (outside of Cyprus, where I think the Greek and Turkish regular armies were actually shooting at each another at times) was that Greece was busy being conquered by the Nazis in WW2 and that Greece and Turkey were both NATO members after the wars.
I was also under that impression that a large part of when "hundreds of thousands died in interethnic violence" was the population exchange itself. To the extent it did end interethnic violence in the affected areas, it's a case of "they made a desert and called it peace".
Many Germans were in fact kicked out of lands that had previously been part of Germany. In the Gaza case, I'm not sure what the equivalent of Germany would be. Maybe Egypt? I think they were the last Arabs to rule Gaza.
But Germans were going to a part of Germany, not another country. If they end up in Egypt it's like sending the Germans all to Italy and letting France swallow Germany whole.
The original sin in my opinion was not letting Israel finish expelling Palestinians in the 1940s before they had formed an identity separate from that of Jordanians today. If it had happened back then, it would have been more like the expulsion of Germans to go live with other Germans, but alas few things build collective identities better than shared grievances and enemies
Yes, it would have worked better back then. Now it's all about maintaining the homeland of Palestine. That's literally their core identity, and you'd be smashing it under your boot if you sent them all to Egypt.
That is *a* point, an important one, but I wouldn't say the *most* important one. Even if, say, Egypt were willing to take them, that wouldn't justify "Trail of Tears 2.0".
I'm not sure where you're going with this. Very few people can go to the country and locality of their choice. Otherwise half of Africa would probably be moving to Europe or the European diaspora.
This. The two obvious candidates are Jordan and Egypt.
The last time Jordan took in a large number of Palestinian refugees, they soon after tried to overthrow the king. Guess how enthusiastic Jordanians are about a rerun?
Egypt doesn't want to have them either, because Hamas is basically a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the last time those guys rose to power in Egypt, they tried to instate an Islamic dictatorship, which was cut short by a military coup. The current government has been trying to keep a lid on the Brotherhood and has enough to do to keep a rapidly growing population fed and content. Importing two million radicalized, traumatized, desperate, Brotherhood-affine Palestinians is not high on their wish list.
Next down the list you'd have Lebanon (like they don't have enough trouble with militant factions as is), Syria (likewise)...
And even if you find a state willing to take them: there's no guarantee that they would treat the Palestinians better than the Israelis did. Ask the Syrians about their experiences with the government bombing civilians...
Qatar: population 3,057,000. You think filling that up with two million pissed-off Gazans is going to end well?
From what I heard, Qatar is a plausible candidate to sponsor the rebuilding of Gaza and keep things there under control, but moving the Gazans there...?
Hard disagree. The current situation is untenable. A long term solution needs to be found, and it's probably going to involve a lot of Gazans leaving Gaza (which many of them probably wish to do, anyway). Nothing cruel about recognizing the inevitable.
A US-Russia alliance would be a very formidable thing indeed. Just the two of them combined would give them control of about 90% of nuclear weapons in the world, even more if the estimates are undercounting the number as I suspect. What would other countries even be able to do against that? If they rebel, their entire nation will be reduced to glass and ash.
This speaks like someone who has no idea about Russian history. They are not willing or interested in a true alliance. The US and its ideals can be nothing but a roadblock for them. A friendlier relationship then we have now is clearly possible, but the value systems at play here are fundamentally at odds and one country would have to become significantly more like the other for something like a true alliance. A relationship like we have with say, Turkey, is about the best case scenario.
It need not be an entirely EQUAL alliance. The US's allies in Europe and Arabia share little of American ideals, and those alliances have lasted decades. What it REALLY takes is a common enemy to fight. For Europe that was the Soviet Union. For Russia, … well, I'm sure there will be something.
The fundamental problem is that for Russia, their primary enemies are the US and Western Europe. There is an enormous amount of enmity over the Cold War and what they see as western pressure that brought down the USSR, and again, what they see as current attempts to stop them from exercising their "rightful" sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. We are the adversary, and Europe is the adversary.
Trump may turn it all in a more pro-Russia direction, but even the Republican party at this point is far closer to anti-Russian than even neutral on Russia, regardless of what Trump does. This will be a longer shift than 4 years can make work of.
> but the value systems at play here are fundamentally at odds and one country would have to become significantly more like the other for something like a true alliance
...What makes you think Trump and Putin don't share the same value system?
Ambitious movements have a tendency to outlive their founders, just as every half-decent religion does. Trump has already cultivated a legion of followers and heirs-- his ambitions won't die with him.
I don't know... What is the goal of this movement? Trump has an unusual ability to attract followers, that despite mostly producing incoherent word salads. When he's gone, what would be the unifying idea of Trumpism?
You are aware that there are other nuclear powers on the planet besides the US and Russia, right? Trying to reduce the UK to glass and ash would result in Washington and Moscow getting reduced in a similar way, and that doesn't sound like a net positive trade.
Alliance is way too much to expect at this point, though. At best, Trump maybe - just maybe - can achieve a sort of neutrality from Russia in regard to China, e.g. if USA and China enter direct military confrontation over Taiwan, Russian military remains on sidelines, and Russia avoids selling military equipment or technologies to China (the same deal Russia is getting currently from China in Ukraine). But probably not resources - Trump can't offer enough to stop Russia from selling resources to highest bidder.
On the other hand, from US point of view, preventing a *full-scale* alliance between Russia and China might be good enough for now. Whether such alliance is a real possibility, or just Trump's fears, I'm not sure anyone here is qualified to say: all the usual arguments about distrust between China and Russia kind of fail against the fact that right now, Russia just have no other choice. Reopening relations and commerce with West might change this, if not by much, but maybe just enough for Trump's purposes?
The active and willing cooperation of most of the world.
The thing about alliances is that for them to be sustainable, they have to be defending not just territory, but compatible governing systems. For the US and Russia to be active allies long term, they would have to resemble one another in terms of the values they espouse.
The things is, the US is (for now) still a democracy, while Russia is an autocracy. Autocracies have a terrible track record as alliance partners.
Europe is big enough and integrated enough to be a competitor, and has long-term interests which diverge from those of the United States, even if they were friendly pre-Trump.
The rest is the US squeezing its clients harder, which is something said clients are understandably reluctant to buy into.
Does Europe really have shared long-term interests other than wanting to keep freeloading off US defense spending in order to subsidize violent stabby migrants from MENA while trying to bar from power any political parties that want to stop doing the latter?
The quality of commentary here is getting worse. A lot of the problems we have in Europe are downstream of American actions and ideology. Getting out of Americas shadow would benefit us, the reason MENA is a mess is because of neo-con perfidy.
I think in this case trying to justify Trump's actions would be sanewashing, not steelmanning. No credible expert thinks what Trump is doing will serve US interests in any term. If there's an argument that it will, I'd love to hear it too.
An industrial policy that brings jobs back could work, in fact Biden continued on that track after Trump left. Tarrifs can be applied effectively.
As for Europe - Trump is right about us. If Russia is a threat to Europe in conventional warfare then Europe needs to up its game significantly. Of course it isn’t, but a decoupling of the US and Europe would long term benefit both. The US gets to concentrate elsewhere, Europe grows a pair.
Right, so, I don't disagree with what you've said here in principle. But this is also what I mean by "sanewashing." A decoupling of the US and Europe in terms of security could benefit both - I'm not sure it actually will, but I can concede that it could.
But Trump isn't taking reasonable measured steps towards a decoupling of US and Europe with a plan for an orderly transition from the world we are in to the world we want to be in if this decoupling works the way we hope it will. No - Trump is threatening Denmark over Greenland. Which, yes, could potentially result in a decoupling depending on how Europe reacts and how serious Trump is about his threats, but is also not a remotely sane way to get that result.
We learned the value of costly signaling from game theory. Trump doesn't like the current configuration of the US/World and is willing to pay a significant cost to show that.
Well the problem is that "US interests" as defined by experts contains very *curious* definitions of both "the US" and "interests". Pre-Trump American government policy seems to have been run mostly for the benefit of people who are only tenuously/recently American and/or the 1% who are employers of these tenuously/recently Americans.
Also I don't believe anything pro-government that experts say because it usually turns out that they're are quietly paid by the government through a "my taxes > USG > government-funded academic grants > direct benefit to their academic credentials" slush funding scheme, so of course they're going to support whatever the leftist big-government party wants them to support.
t. government-funded academic grant stooge who has to write scientific proposals specifically to flatter bureaucrats' prejudices
Most of what the government spends money on is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. I assure you, it is primarily Americans benefiting from all 4.
"Pre-Trump American government policy seems to have been run mostly for the benefit of people who are only tenuously/recently American"
What an absurd claim. Please tell me this is deliberate hyperbole, and you don't actually believe that 51% of American public policy exists to benefit immigrants.
>(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;
If it's an actual, honest assessment, the results of this would be expected to range from mostly harmless to moderately beneficial.
If it's carried out disingenuously, though, it could be the opening stages of attempts to greatly restrict the use of (or ban outright) many widely-used and generally-beneficial medications.
I am inclined to fear the latter because RFK, Jr is the chair of the committee, and also because the "threat posed by" language rather than something more neutral like "risks, costs, and benefits of".
More than moderately beneficial would be theoretically possible, but unlikely. The scenario I have in mind for a moderately beneficial outcome would be better compilation and analysis of data that facilitates incremental improvements in treatment guidelines.
Are you disagreeing about whats at stake or the possibility rfk could ever be right?
The current hot topic of weight lose drug has cases of 20 year olds having bone loss; finding 10,000 cases early may save decades of life each. Adhd drugs reach 1/5th of boys at some point.
Given large numbers, even mild life time harms prevented would seem large.
I do not expect him to be right. Semaglutide are relatively new in widespread use, but SSRIs and amphetamines are not. And even the new drugs have been through clinical trials and post-acceptance observational studies.
>Given large numbers, even mild life time harms prevented would seem large.
I think what's funny is that Trump is trying to fix the government by turning it off and then on again. Not sure how cutting off medical studies and firing half the CDC and NIH is going to make America healthy. This is just typical Orwellian propaganda and if you fall for it... well I don't need to finish that thought, do I?
It's beginning to sound like the advice for finding out what is crashing your PC: turn everything off, restart in Safe Mode, then turn things on one at a time again until you find out what's causing the crash.
The Make America Healthy Again Commission will study, among other things:
"the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism"
But scoffing at electromagnetic radiation as though it couldn't possibly have any health implications seems like one of those things that might come back to bite you. "Oh come on, radium is totally harmless" except when it's not:
"(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;"
The "threat" posed by SSRIs and antipsychotics. So funny.
A lot of people who get asthma attacks are on inhalers. The fact that someone is in treatment for a condition does not mean the treatment caused that condition.
Isn't the reason for the latter that people with hard-core depression are too lethargic to be able to kill themselves? If they get any cure that helps, they go through a period of being still depressed but strong enough to go through with a suicide plan. So when helping them out of purgatory this stage is unavoidable and the best way would be to have someone babysit them, which is not always possible. Still better than leaving them in purgatory, no?
The second; but surely the second is so much less likely to happen compared to clinical depression. Claude suggests it's thousands of times less likely (this sounds even a bit conservative to me).
Also: let's imagine I don't have a kid right now, but I'm pregnant and a wicked genie gives me two choices: 1) my kid will develop bad incurable depression as a teen, hoping to die but not being able to act on it, no way out; 2) he'll be a happy teen but get suddenly shot by a schoolmate. It would be a tough choice but there's a good chance I'd pick # 2, which might be worse for me but better for the child.
In my view it's more that depression has two components that are strongly but not perfectly correlated - inaction and unhappiness. And different people react differently to variable medication. So usually antidepressants do both and it's fine - they become more active but also happier - or they do neither which isn't great but you can just try the next.
But occasionally (and overall not all that rarely for those who end up trying lots of different medications), people get a weird reaction that makes them much more active, without actually improving the mood significantly. Which often ends up with terrible consequences.
Im aware of that theory; I look forward to verification by someone not on the payroll
Alternatively, the pills dont work for some percentage of the population, and pill pushers dont communicate that fact at all and it was the last attempt on the list.
Sure, but there are concerns about over-prescription of medication for children in order to get them to quieten down in school. Maybe it takes a nutty conspiracy theorist to question everything and shake things up?
Common side effects of psychotropics can include weight gain, movement abnormalities and sedation.
It’s suspected that overmedication of children can contribute to conditions such as metabolic syndrome or tardive dyskinesia — repetitive involuntary movements.“It’s important to realize that when you have children who are developing, their brains are growing, and they react differently to medications,” Dr. Lohr said. “You may see only a short term response to a medication and we don’t know what the long term consequences could be.”
How does the proportion of school shooters on SSRIs compare to non-school-shooters on SSRIs? I wonder if there might be some way to define or analyze causation versus correlation? Could there be any confounding factors in this environment? Why has nobody ever thought of this before?
> Could there be any confounding factors in this environment?
Id bet on paranoia risk factors + stimulants
But it also doesnt matter, if your throwing drugs at the problem children with basicly no coherent intervention(which is very much my experience) failure is predictable.
Well, personally speaking, my entire body basically shuts down and loses its appetite and will to live without SSRIs. But yes, letting people like us simply die would reduce school shooting risk, obviously.
Also Ha! Ha! the entire Executive Order doesn't really do anything:
"(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person."
"The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act changed nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program by requiring that schools serve more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fat-free and/or low-fat milk more frequently and less starchy vegetables or foods high in sodium and trans fat. The Obama-era policy has since seen a series of rollback measures.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) altered the nutritional standards in 2018 to allow for fewer whole grains and more sodium and flavored milk. Then in January 2020, shortly before schools closed in response to COVID-19, the department proposed yet another set of changes to the policy to reduce the servings of vegetables students had to eat every week. According to a Jan. 17 press release from the USDA, the proposed changes “build on the 2018 reforms that preserve strong nutrition standards while providing schools the additional flexibilities they need to best serve America's students.” The 2018 rule was struck down in April 2020 by a federal court in Maryland."
If he does have a bee in his bonnet about healthy foods, this might in fact be advantageous?
It's supposed to keep activist lawyers from trying to sue the government to make it do something it doesn't want to.
No matter what comes out of the studies, this EO doesn't require the government to do or refrain from doing anything.
It's possible that it's a relic of corporate lawyerese. If you say you're going to do something, then you don't do it, lawyers sue you to make you do it. Eg. Musk buying Twitter.
The USG doesn't have to do anything because you can't sue them unless they let you. But in many cases, they are letting you - and even paying you to do it.
Yep. It's like when the press secretary started listing out terrible "woke grants" and they were for like $35k or $50k. A value the government spends in like a fraction of a second.
Meanwhile DOJ is going to buy $400mil of cyber trucks from musk but thats not woke so its ok.
Even that would be misleading because most cancer research (and other health research) is NIH-funded. NSF and NIH are very territorial about who funds what. Now, there's plenty of woke stuff in NIH's portfolio too but you're 100% right, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's, etc. studies are often gazillion-dollar endeavors and are not particularly woke, aside from maybe a throwaway line about "ensuring the study population includes underrepresented minorities." It's the $400k (small peanuts) grants for feminist glaciology that get people riled up, and yes they are wasteful, but if you're worried about woke science the main problem is (...was?) hiring quotas and DEI statements.
“Ensuring the study includes underrepresented minorities” costs a lot of money and is the reason why the Pfizer vaccine results got delayed past the election in 2020. And no one has ever demonstrated that it’s actually necessary. Not a single drug or vaccine exists that’s dangerous to Minority X but is safe for Majority Y.
Likewise I would argue that all IRB spending belongs to the “woke” category as their only justification for existence other than “Nazis!” is the Tuskegee experiment.
...wait, so we're claiming your race makes no difference to your biology now? Where have all the people who regularly come out in droves to proclaim that IQ is genetically determined by race suddenly disappeared to? Isn't this supposed to be their hill to die on?
Race can impact the likelihood of you having a certain physiology but it doesn’t make people sufficiently distinct to bother testing different drugs on different races.
Is the variation in proper dosing among two randomly selected white people for ACE inhibitors meaningfully larger than between a random white person and a random black person?
> Not a single drug or vaccine exists that’s dangerous to Minority X but is safe for Majority Y.
That is... certainly a bold claim to make. Your argument would have been more defensible if you just said that guaranteeing safety for minorities is not worth the cost.
Can you name such a drug or vaccine? I've searched *hard* for evidence of this being a thing (including Deep Research) recently and found nothing except vague "well in theory..." claims that try very, very hard to avoid the question. You can notice the weaseling very well with ChatGPT or Claude as well where it's *VERY* hard to get them to admit no such drug or vaccine actually exists. But they'll tell you all about the Tuskegee experiment which has nothing to do with this question :-)
Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34322158/ - this is a review focussing on variants in CYP2B6, and how they affect drug metabolism. Table 3 is probably the most important one for your purposes. My search phrase was "variants affecting drug safety", FWIW, on PubMed.
“The article does not prove that there is a drug or vaccine that is safe for White people but dangerous for other groups. Rather, it finds that although there might be minor differences in outcomes among different populations, these do not support the notion that one racial group is uniquely protected or uniquely at risk. The differences observed are attributable to a complex mix of factors and do not indicate that the drug or vaccine is inherently dangerous for any particular group.”
So, no, that’s not the castle you’re looking for :-)
I'm looking for career advice. Not any specific career advice, more the "what do you expect would be useful to know if I were in your shoes" sort. I'm in the Greater Vancouver area, so anyone familiar with the area (and especially the local tech scene) would be especially helpful.
Background: I got my undergrad degree in physics and math, intending to do research physics for a career. Slammed into grad school like a brick wall due to (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD and dropped out in my second year. I spent about a decade doing teaching and some IT work, neither of which are especially high preferences for me (or very well paying), but between my relatively niche education and ADHD making job hunting difficult, I never found anything better.
I moved to the Lower Mainland in 2021 (before that I was in the U.S.) and worked for a couple years, before starting a professional Computer Science Master's at SFU in 2023. I finally started getting effective treatment for my ADHD the same year. My intention at the time was to look for programming jobs, especially ML-focused stuff. But in the course of hunting for a co-op I discovered that there are at least a modest number of tech companies in the area doing stuff in the broad category of "weird, speculative physics-adjacent things;" a couple of fusion companies, a couple of quantum computing companies, a company doing cosmic ray muon tomography, and other miscellaneous stuff. Not only do those all sound more interesting than programming, I discovered I was significantly more competitive for those jobs, presumably since my undergrad counts as value-added instead of "four years doing something other than honing programming skills." So I've pretty much decided that this will be my focus on job hunting when I graduate, which I'm set to do in April.
Which brings me to non-specific career advice. Anything you think might be useful to know. Companies to watch. Skills to develop. Ways to meet people and network. Anything at all that might be useful. Feel free to ask me for more background details as you like, and thanks in advance.
p.s. If I were to ask a similar question on Reddit (which I rarely use) what subreddits would be the best ones for it?
The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that most of these companies will eventually fail because their basic idea is either infeasible or would end up being far too costly. (Of course, companies can fail for non-technical reasons too.) This is a problem that, say, a "website that sells stuff" business doesn't have.
Fusion: Almost certain to fail.
Quantum computing: IDK, the tech will work eventually, but probably most of the companies are following an approach that will not end up being the best one.
Muon tomography: I think I've heard of that company, and iirc they have tech that already works, tho haven't looked into it much. So that at least is a very strong option.
As an employee you don't have to worry about the company failing as much as founders/investors do because the worst thing that can happen is that the company goes out of business and you lose your job. But I think it would be very disheartening to realize 1 month after joining that the tech is never going to work.
So just be aware that your job search might be harder than you expect when trying to get hired at this kind of company, since you'll also have to apply some filtering criteria on the companies you look at.
This is definitely something I've considered (though hearing it from somebody else is probably good for me regardless). My expectation isn't that I'll find one great company and work there forever, but rather that I'll get my foot in the door and open up more career opportunities in the tech sector more broadly. My thinking right now is that even if my first job turns out to be a dead end, working for 1-2 years in something where I'm doing actual engineering/R&D work will make it much easier to find good jobs elsewere[1]. In particular, I expect the employability gap between "no industry experience" and "some industry experience" to be rather larger than the gap between "some industry experience" and "exactly the right experience," which suggests that I'm better off aiming at the industry jobs that I'm most likely to get[2], rather than the jobs that are the best in terms of some other metric like pay, stability or company status. I don't have high confidence in this expectation, though: definitely let me know if you think I'm reading that wrong.
Or to put it another way, I see sort of a tradeoff curve here. Any technology that is certain or near-certain to be successful is already going to have it's own established field with methods and training standards and best-practices. People who aimed to work with that tech from the time they started college are going to have a *huge* competitive edge over a latecomer like me. But the farther out on the technological frontier an area is (and thus, the less certain to be successful), the less established the field around it will be, and the less they can select for highly-specific skills and the more likely my wide-but-not-deep STEM background is to be an asset rather than a liability. But again, I'm not hugely confident this is the right way to think about things, so I'm very open to alternate takes.
Finally, regarding the specific tech areas, my thinking is that the success or failure of the tech area itself is probably much more important than whether the specific company I work for is the one to dominate. Take fusion, for example: I think "almost certain to fail" seems like a reasonable assessment for any particular fusion company, but I think there's now a pretty good chance that *somebody* will crack commercially-viable fusion in the next 10-15 years. If that happens, the tech is likely to take off in a big way. Being somebody with previous experience working with a new tech experiencing a sudden boom seems like a great place to be, even if that experience is with a company that ultimately dead-ended or lost the race. Not AS good as getting in on the ground floor of a company that wins, but still probably quite lucrative. And even if the field as a whole goes nowhere, one hopes that the experience would still be valuable. Similarly with quantum computers: if they *do* take off, I'll benefit from having worked in the field at all, even if it's at a company that doesn't pan out.
p.s. One of the most surprising things I learned last year is that one of the quantum computing companies DOES make and sell an actual product. The trick is that it's not a general-purpose quantum computer, it's a specialized device that can only be used to solve a certain class of optimization problems, but it can offer some pretty impressive results on tasks that can be formulated that way. That company is fairly high on my list as they very neatly hit the intersection of my skills and seem more likely than most to have continued success.
[1] My sense is that this would *also* be true if I were hewing closer to more tradition programming jobs.
[2] Which by happy coincidence currently seems to be the jobs I also find most interesting (based on my experiences co-op hunting). I may update away from that view once I start hunting for actual jobs.
*sigh* I needed to hear this precisely because I know it's good advice, even if it's difficult for me to follow. Do you have any suggestions for social venues good for meeting people working in the industry?
Conferences, hackathons, asking your coworkers to introduce you to their work friends, messaging software people you admire on social media, and nerdy hobby groups in your area.
Rationalist groups are also usually full of IT people, so they're also good opportunities to network.
Isn't it curious how memories seem to form as discrete units? If I remember, say, a conversation I had today, I may not be able to remember, in that moment of recall, exactly how I ended up in that conversation, and who knows what happened immediately afterwards, but the memory certainly plays in my mind as this discrete entity with one beginning and one ending. So at some point in either the storage process or the retrieval process my mind "cuts the tape", having determined where's the start of this memory and here's its conclusion. I understand there would have been an evolutionary advantage for the primates who didn't have to remember an entire day's worth of footage and seek through it all to conclude, "oh yes sabre-tooths can be dangerous". But what's interesting to me here is how the inherent rising-action/falling-action of the memory "unit" implies we have an unconscious understanding of beginnings and endings that developed independently from our observation of the natural cycles of the sun (or the moon for that matter).
It seems intuitive that memories would anchor to the elements that make them salient to the rememberer. I'm sure there will be some people in some situations where the quality or timing of a sunset would be more salient than the content of the conversation happening during that sunset. Probably for you the social interaction or some element of that content was more significant in this instance.
And memories are reconstructions based on experience and culture. You might "remember" that that conversation had a beginning and an end, because all conversations do.
As an abstract principle where something clearly saves the country? Absolutely not. As more than one Justice has noted, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact.
The practical issue is that virtually anything can be construed as "saving the country" if you squint hard enough.
During the Catalinarian Conspiracy of 63 BC, Cicero made the fateful decision to execute some of the lead perpetrators with trial, a decision which would haunt him for the rest of his political career and ultimately lead to his exile. This is a very, very old debate.
That said, a contemporary politician saying this in the abstract sets off major alarm bells, as genuine existential threats to countries are extremely rare, but politicians wanting to consolidate power and arrest opposition are, regrettably, incredibly common.
It's not actually clear that Cicero was breaking the law, since there was an ongoing state of emergency at the time and the Senate had voted to put the conspirators to death. The guy who procured Cicero's exile, Clodius Pulcher, was acting out of personal spite (Cicero had testified against him in a previous trial) and resorted to widespread political violence to get his way, so I don't think the fact that Cicero was (temporarily) exiled tells us much about the legal situation.
This really cuts to Carl Schmitt and his belief in the State of Exception, that every government is authoritarian at its core and when it feels it has to be. I think the Trump administration is pursuing a distinctly Schmitt-inspired strategy; I posted this on /r/slatestarcodex about Vance's clear Schmittian influences https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ggl0mh/comment/lur9n10/
Did anyone go to jail for violating covid policies? You don't see any difference between "do this so people don't die of a highly contagious illness" and "these studies are woke so we are going to ignore the constitution"? I have my problems with many covid policies but not sure how support for them means you have to support trumps view of him being above the law.
Sure, let a jury have a go at it. If the defense can show convincingly that the country was about to be destroyed were it not for the illegal act in question, I think a lot of people would vote to acquit. That's a pretty high bar, though. Not sure of any precedents for this, or which specific law (excuse me, "Law") or laws Trump is saying he plans to break.
On the woke or not woke grants - a huge percentage of total grants will have a line at the end of the abstract saying its not impossible thet women or underrepresented groups will benefit is some vague way. It’s basically a shibboleth for “I don’t give a shit about this but I’m not willing go to go war over this project”. So the cruz set would probably include a lot more if they searched harder - not that it should go in the woke pile from this, as it is manadated (and meaningless).
...will they, though? Is that actually true? What about the alternative theory that Cruz et al actually searched as hard as they could and the ~2% you see is all they could find despite being so unselective Scott had to write a post debunking the list?
I can’t debunk this possibility at all. It’s totally off intuition with nsf grants, as far as I can see they usually contain that last sentence in someform. I can’t prove it.
To believe that, you have to ignore what Cruz+co actually said they did. If you follow the trail of references in the news articles back, you get to this report: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC which claims they looked at all 32198 grants awarded 2021 through 2024 and picked out 10% of them to make the list of woke grants Scott is talking about.
So (a) they looked at the entire set of NSF grants, and (b) for 90% of the grants they did look at, they couldn't find any excuse, however tenuous, to include them in their wokelist.
That reminds me of Magisteria, a book by Nicholas Spencer (subtitled "The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion"). As you note, it's a lot more complicated (and interesting!) than the easy popular take.
I actually would buy that. EDIT: One has to explain why the scientific revolution didn't happen in one of the caliphates or Chinese dynasties, which you did. Good job!
I think I did that fairly thoroughly in section 2. I contrast with both. The Islamic world shared the same philosophical underpinnings and you had a protoscientific movement emerge at the end of the Abbasid caliphate but the schools lacked institutional independence and protections against the centralized state. In China, you lacked both the philosophical underpinnings (there was not a common desire to "understand the entire divine plan" via the understanding of natural laws) but more importantly, the institutional and cultural weight of the imperial exam system worked as a black hole of intellectual talent. Anyone of intellect could study the classic and pass the exams and be materially comfortable for life. There was little incentive for experiment or science.
> but more importantly, the institutional and cultural weight of the imperial exam system worked as a black hole of intellectual talent. Anyone of intellect could study the classic[s] and pass the exams and be materially comfortable for life.
There are a few obvious problems with this idea:
1. It's not true that anyone of intellect could pass the exams. We have some notable examples of failures.
2. Relatedly, the number of spots available via this system was negligible compared to the population of China. Most people of intellect could not have been contained within it, because a large group won't fit in a tiny group. This re-emphasizes that it wasn't possible for anyone of intellect to simply study and pass the exams. But it also proves that the system cannot have been a black hole of intellectual talent, because the total demand for intellectual talent was very small.
3. It wasn't necessary to pass the exams to be materially comfortable for life. They were selective and influential enough that any member of your family holding a high position was sufficient to support the whole family.
Sabine tells us how she really feels. NB, I mostly agree with her. It's not just the foundation of Physics, I've read so many crappy SARS2/COVID studies that I can't help but wonder if 90% of the Life Sciences are populated by researchers are just grant-sucking drones.
With President Musk's cuts to science funding, I suspect that very soon we'll have lots of STEM PhDs applying for jobs in the private sector. Job hunting already sucks, and it will suck even more if you only have a Masters degree or less.
Also, we should expect the housing market in DC, Virginia, and Maryland areas to collapse as laid-off government workers are forced to sell their houses at fire-sale prices. I don't know if there will be a ripple effect across the entire US housing market.
It will take a while before people start putting their homes up for sale and/or defaulting on their mortgages. On the other hand, there have been significant layoffs in Silicon Valley over the past year and half, and it hasn't affected housing prices here. Of course, on the third hand, the majority of these are probably H1-B visa holders who are likely renters and not owners.
I wouldnt get your hopes up, housing took decades to break this bad; it may require a decade to fix and that if trump actaully attempts to; I know of nothing of him saying "zoning bad"
It takes 10 months to build a house, so that likely the earliest drastic change could happen
Sabine is very smart in her area of research, but she is much less rational outside of that. She has a big ax to grind related to academia, but has a poor understanding of the issue outside of physics departments.
It was from someone in physics but was about the way political aspects influence academic research. The examples were about physics, but Sabine has had other videos recently talking about this subject unrelated to physics as well.
Same. The letter begins with how it's necessary to keep the people employed in academia and ends with how those that left are better off. I don't believe it's genuine or honest.
That could be a translation thing, possibly. She is very fluent in English, but it's worth remembering that she's German, and whether the letter came to her in English or German, it's possible the language of the letter wasn't the writer's first, either.
Honestly, I've often imagined that if I were in a position of power doing shady stuff, I would intentionally write messages that I don't want to get leaked in the most comically villainous way possible, just so that if they get leaked, nobody would believe they were real.
I havnt been doing well in this society; rolling the dice in a new regime tho? Something like 80% of gdp is in categories id regruad as fake("fire economy"); if burning the old system to the ground changes that to 50%, maybe things get allot better.
What is your evidence that the economy is "brown nosey"?
(there is ample evidence that the new regime loves brown nosing so not sure why you would expect that to change)
If you haven't fared well in the greatest economy in US history, that sounds like a you problem and one that is highly unlikely to be helped by destroying the US economy.
There are infinitely more ways for things to be worse than for things to be better. Large random shocks almost always make things worse. This is just the law of increase of entropy.
We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet (besides micronations), indeed the most prosperous society ever to have existed on the planet. It may suck in many ways, but all the other societies that have been tried have sucked worse.
>We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet
Many Americans may believe this, because the US has high GDP per capita. But this is a flawed metric - those rents one can barely pay and healthcare costs that bankrupt you are "economic growth".
US life expectancy sits between that of Panama and that of Estonia, per Wikipedia, for a total of 55th worldwide. Its wealth GINI is incredibly high, a total of 0.850 sitting between Congo and Algeria as of 2021 - 25th worst.
Other developed nations you would compare the US to also suffer from high housing costs. And healthcare costs are a nebulous, difficult to compare statistic because of such different regimes in different countries.
Both of the problems you cite are very clearly a consequence of poor government policies. Policies that are at the state and federal level and are due to actions taken by both political policies, so it's not a one side partisan issue.
The continued existence of bad things does not prove that this isn't currently the best.
If lower life expectancy is a result of the diseases of prosperity then maybe countries shouldn’t try to get more prosperous. Eventually we will be living as long as people in the Middle Ages spending most of it in a pre diabetic coma.
But of course it isn’t. A disease of prosperity can’t just be confined to countries, it should apply across social groups and regions. Within the United States are the rich dying sooner than the poor, are the richer states worse off than the poorer states? Are richer people dying of drug abuse more than the poor.
> like drug addiction, obesity, driving everywhere instead of walking, etc. People in poorer countries can’t afford those things.
People in the kind of poorer countries where they can’t afford cars do in fact have lower life expectancy, but cars are common in middle income and rich countries. Of course European countries have more walkable cities but that’s a political choice.
> Lower US life expectancy is due to diseases of prosperity, like drug addiction, obesity, driving everywhere instead of walking, etc.
Hmmm. The national life expectancy is calculated using life tables, which estimate the average number of years a newborn is expected to live based on current mortality rates. The US happens to have a higher infant mortality than any other of the developed countries — 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. As a comparison, Norway's rate of 1.6 deaths per 1,000 live births is the lowest among high-income nations. The US infant mortality rate is roughly that of Croatia despite having a much higher GDP per capita.
The U.S. would see an improvement of about 3 to 4 years in life expectancy if it reduced its infant mortality rate to Norway’s level. That would bring the adjusted U.S. life expectancy to around 80–81 years, making it more in line with other high-income nations.
Certainly, we could do better without the diseases of prosperity, but it's a myth that those are the largest factors in our shortened US life expectancies. NB: The RFK crowd seems to be promoting this idea recently.
Would need to see the underlying data you are using, but "infant mortality" is not defined the same way in every country. The US's definition infant mortality often makes the picture look worse than it is. However there are many populations that suffer very very high infant mortality when they don't have to.
But, infant mortality alone does not prove "t's a myth that those are the largest factors in our shortened US life expectancies".
> There are infinitely more ways for things to be worse than for things to be better. Large random shocks almost always make things worse. This is just the law of increase of entropy.
Only if it was well selected. Given a random point and random move is 50/50; given Moloch selected point, it could have better odds.
> We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet (besides micronations), indeed the most prosperous society ever to have existed on the planet. It may suck in many ways, but all the other societies that have been tried have sucked worse.
I see a effectively bloodless regime change as the success of the american project, especially a rural favored one. Civil war is still on the table, but trump has named his successors, and at work on his bible; dying from old age will weaken his effect on history now.
[Edits made: removed some typos/inaccuracies in expression from the earlier version, but the content doesn't change].
Question to the liberals/democrat supporters (sorry if this has been asked before in these threads).
(i) Do you find the ebullience levels in the resistance against Trump to be milder than you expected/milder than in 2016 -- from the media, and secondly from the people?
(ii) If your answer is "yes" to both, could "left" media have "tepidified" the public response by taking charge of it and then "milquetoastifying" it?
(iii) If your answer to (ii) is yes, does that update your priors about how far you might have been influenced by the media/oligarchs/some version of the deep state in the years before? Does it warm you up to the notion of a deep state, though just not in the manner conservatives have been complaining about?
I. People are demoralized and media outlets are a mixed bag. Some obviously have chosen to go in different directions than others. Wired seems to be all over a lot of stuff, though.
II. I really don't know what this means precisely but I don't think that's the issue.
III. No, I think the overwhelming distinction here is that people feel hopeless. We had a first Trump term and for a lot of people it seemed really bad, he ran again on a generally-more-extreme "I am your vengeance" / deport everybody / oh by the way Jan. 6th was great actually platform and got voted back in anyways. If you think everybody experienced that the same way you did as a typical liberal then it feels very crushing that your fellow citizens decided they wanted an unrepentant fascist whose first term was a total clusterfuck.
Now, in practice I don't think that's what the average Trump voter or especially swing voter experienced, but I can see how it would be real depressing if I did think that. Plus he's doing a very obvious "flood the zone" thing which amplifies the sense that his opponents are powerless.
(ii) IMO it does relate (partly) to the media. Not because of what you say, but because the media not making a big deal out of things gives people a feeling that protesting won't make a difference.
(iii) No, for several reasons.
First, there's no "deep state". There is a government bureaucracy, and sometimes it doesn't do everything the people at the top want, and even have their own agenda, but that's a feature of basically any big, complicated organization. I've never thought it would be good for the entire government to do everything the president wanted, and the situation right now is proving it, where what trump wants is to go after political enemies, be corrupt, and is neutral on things like the safety of the water supply or planes not crashing and anti-vax.
To go farther - if you do the most anti-deep-state thing possible, and implant a brain chip into every executive branch person to make them do everything trump ordered down to the letter without question or delay, the consequences would be absolutely calamitous.
Second, if there's anything like a conspiracy/oligarchy/deep state, it's what's going on *right now* to *benefit* trump. The biggest media orgs/social network heads, and more broadly billionaires and influential people in finance/silicon valley, not to mention the supreme court, are all on trump's side.
Third, the reason I gave above doesn't have to do with people being brainwashed by the media or anything. Every actual individual I know, for whom I know their political leanings and was anti-trump in 2016, is anti-trump now, with the exception of one Republican who was against him because they thought he'd be an unreliable conservative. The obvious media "influence" going on is the opposite direction.
"Deep state" doesn't necessarily mean a coordinated body of bureaucrats conspiring to resist whoever's at the top (or whoever's against them). It's enough that it's naturally incentivized to resist big change. This is pretty easy to bring about by making that organization (1) big and (2) complicated - precisely as you noted.
What should also be noted is that the bureaucrats who've worked in the DC area for decades are mostly big-state Democrats. I won't say they're 90% like the election results suggest, but it seems safe to say they're around 75%. If they're working for Trump's benefit now, that's big news to me.
The original meaning of "deep state" was very much "a coordinated body of bureaucrats conspiring to resist whoever's at the top". In fact not just any bureaucrats, but specifically ones in the national security apparatus. The original meaning is from Turkey where it meant people in the military secretly carrying out politically motivated murders.
The fact that people are saying "well actually it's just mundane midlevel bureaucrats incentivized to resist big change" is a massive motte-and-bailey switcheroo.
If that's all it means then the takeaway should be that "deep state" claims are wrong and serious use of the phrase is laughable.
How many people do you think are thinking "deep state" and automatically thinking of secret Turkish bureaucratchiks?
The meaning has drifted, and without fanfare or concerted switching of castle metaphors. Consider a 2013 book by Marc Ambinder literally titled _Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry_. It's not required that the state apparatus be consciously aware that it's preserving itself, even if that is its apparent behavior.
Right now - and I can say this from experience, living in that area - that apparatus is (mostly) resisting Trump, not going along with him. Their #1 concern right now is not being laid off.
I agree that the meaning has shifted ... but that doesn't change my point. It has shifted from meaning a specific thing about Turkey, to being a vague motte-and-bailey concept.
"Second, if there's anything like a conspiracy/oligarchy/deep state, it's what's going on *right now* to *benefit* trump"
This is pretty much what I was asking: namely, do you find the theory that there is something called a deep state slightly more credible now than you did earlier, now that you find the biggest media orgs etc. to be more pro-Trump/less anti-Trump than in 2016?
> This is pretty much what I was asking: namely, do you find the theory that there is something called a deep state slightly more credible now than you did earlier, now that you find the biggest media orgs etc. to be more pro-Trump/less anti-Trump than in 2016?
No. There is still no "deep state", and the fact that the closest analogue is pro-trump people doesn't make the allegations of an anti-trump "deep state" more credible.
That would be like saying that January 6, and all the related stuff, proves "the existence of presidents trying to overturn elections" and therefore validates earlier claims that Obama tried to overturn an election.
"doesn't make the allegations of an anti-trump "deep state" more credible."
I **did not** ask about an anti-Trump deep state; I just asked about **some version** of **some deep state**, be it pro- or anti- or neutral towards Trump. As a matter of fact, I have come across people who believe that there is a pro-Trump deep state, and that was part of the motivation for my comment. But that is okay, I think I understand your view now.
Look, I don't begrudge any opinions people have on the matter, and in fact am thankful to you for sharing yours, especially the crisp point-to-point response in your first response, but I would request you to refrain from putting words into my mouth.
"I just asked about **some version** of **some deep state**, be it pro- or anti- or neutral towards Trump. "
This is incoherent. "The Deep State" (as used in U.S. politics) was a *specifically* a right-wing conspiracy theory, *specifically* about people working against Trump. If you remove the phrase from all of the context that gives it meaning, it no longer has meaning.
If you go out and mingle with similarly flaky people on the left, you'll find they have their own conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theory-adjacent beliefs. But they won't be the same ones and they generally won't be descended from the "deep state" conspiracy: most of them will be quite a bit older.
If you want to ask people about their belief in shadowy, behind-the-scenes groups, simply *describe* what you want to ask about[1]. Don't try to repurpose a name that already has a contradictory meaning.
[1] i.e. "Do you believe there's a clandestine, coordinated effort by [people], to achieve [result]?"
Of late, only conservatives have used the term, for reasons having to do with recent political developments. That doesn't automatically narrow the scope of that term to the one context that you have seen it used in (I have seen it used in others).
Now it is understandable if someone is only familiar with the connotation/scope that they are fixated on (for entirely understandable reasons), but in that case all they have to do is read my comment properly: I was specifically asking about media *helping Trump*, and my text contained numerous other disambiguating pointers. If even after that it still sounded incoherent, you could always look up and broaden your understanding instead of language-policing me.
(i) Yes to both. I think people are scared. I think the toxification of masculinity on the left drove off a long time ago all the people who would have seen continued resistance as an act of courage and now everyone's engaging in 'self-soothing'. You get nothing on that side for being macho anymore.
(ii) As Chastity says, the leftists are angry and the centrists are rolling over. I think to some extent the MSM did do as you say, though I think (as Lomwad said) they're genuinely scared. And I wouldn't rule out a few of them being happy to give DEI the boot if it means they don't have to put demographics above everything when recruiting and promoting anymore.
(iii) I'm not a full liberal, but I always assumed there was a deep state and the media was telling people what they wanted them to believe, especially pre-2000 or so when alternative media were hard to find. At the present time I support Trump's war on DEI and illegal immigration, but I don't like the way he's alienating and bullying our allies like Canada, cutting research funding, putting antivaxxers in charge of HHS, or trying to shut down the CDC or climate tracking.
i) Milder than 2016, sure. From the media, no. From the people, yes. Less than expected? Probably, given what he's spent his first month doing (making sure babies die of AIDS and causing all the airplanes to fall out of the sky).
ii) No, the left media is generally howling in outrage that Democrats aren't doing enough. If you mean mainstream/centrist media, they are just being cucks like when they jerked Trump off for bombing the corner of a Syrian airfield.
iii) People are less energetic because he won the popular vote. The media can only swivel your head in a certain direction, the idea it has some mind control powers is just nonsensical, particularly in the day where people get their news from TikTok and Twitter and other cesspools.
Thanks, appreciate your and Anonymous Dude's point-by-point responses.
If you wouldn't mind a bit further on that, let us look at NYT (mainstream), which I assume you are categorizing under "just being cucks", and "... for bombing". At least superficially they appear to make a show of being anti-Trump -- e.g., just today they have come up with https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/opinion/eric-adams-trump-justice-department.html .
How do you view this? Are they trying to keep their anti-Trump readership happy, while not seriously resisting?
I don't think the Adams thing is a good example. Obviously, it is bad, but more importantly, Adams is the mayor of NYC, and the NYT is located there; I feel particular antipathy for stupid GOP decisions here in Texas (e.g. Ken Paxton), and I feel less about obviously-worse decisions in neighboring Louisiana (e.g. stopping support for mass vaccinations).
This is literally an article about Trump potentially conquering an ally, close trade partner, etc, for no apparent reason other than mappainting, and it treats the subject with a very sedate and neutral tone.
Thanks again, I appreciate that your responses pointedly address precisely my question. But this example still sounds more in the direction of apathy/lack of appetite for the good fight than your earlier description of "...like when they jerked Trump off for bombing the corner of a Syrian airfield."?
Also, the cynic in me wonders if the Democrats' current strategy is inspired by the quote "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - if, perhaps, elected Dems are standing by and hoping Trump digs his own grave so deep that when they bury him the fascist movement won't rise again for another century.
I see the Democrats as trying the same thing again because they are unable to conceive that it didn't work before. So they didn't try hard enough last time.
The lack of audience this time is because their crowds were... funded..., and now they aren't being.
I suppose you have... evidence... that a significant people were paid to protest Trump in 2017? And also... reasons... why that alleged funding dried up?
Speaking as a leftist (but not a liberal and not a supporter of the Democratic party) I completely disagree with your unstated premise. You appear to be looking for confirmation that the negative response to Trump is due to a conspiracy by the liberal media and "deep state" and not due to Trump's words and actions, and the impact of those words and actions on people. No one on the left - not liberals, democrats, and certainly not leftists - is going to give you that confirmation.
In 2016 people were crying (literally in tears) on Election Day because the American people elected Trump - a man who we all heard on tape bragging that he grabbed women by the pussy and got away with it. Trump went on to nominate Brett Kavanaugh - an accused rapist - to the Supreme Court. Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations and threw away thousands of tips about Kavanaugh's conduct, and Kavanaugh - the credibly accused rapist - went to Congress and committed blatant and obvious perjury, even to the extent of lying about the meaning of well-attested slang terms - but was still confirmed. Then, as a SCOTUS justice, he and Trump's other picks voted to remove women's right to abortion.
So to be clear, the order of events is: 1. Hillary Clinton, and many others, warned that Trump would take away women's rights - warnings that the media did not take seriously, 2. women cried after Trump was elected, fearing that those warnings might be true, and then 3. in fact those warnings were true and Trump did go on to strip women of their rights.
What this episode demonstrates is that, if anything, the media failed in their duty to inform the American people of the stakes and consequences of a Trump Presidency the first time around, because the response to SCOTUS overturning Roe was that the Democratic party performed historically well in the midterm elections. People clearly did not want Roe overturned, and after it was they punished the Republicans for overturning it. Perhaps if the media had done a better job, all those voters would have turned out to defend Roe in 2016, rather than after the fact in 2022.
Leading up to this election, the media again failed to communicate adequately about the dangers of a Trump presidency. Now we see Trump supporters belated googling what "tariffs" are and reaching out to their representatives for help after Trump and Musk's Project 2025 and DOGE cuts hit them personally. We are already seeing massive buyer's remorse from red states where the economy is already taking a hit from the policies that we all knew Trump would pursue but that the media somehow failed to adequately communicate to the public beforehand. This time, the resistance is coming from the Republican party as much as the Democratic party - from the Republican Danielle Sassoon refusing to weaponize the Justice department for Trump's political gain (https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd) to Republicans in Congress trying to push back against the policies hurting their constituents (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/pain-hits-home-republicans-balk-trumps-spending-cuts-tariffs-rcna191832).
Meanwhile, many on the left are criticizing Democrats *and* media outlets for failing to stand up for our rights, failing to lead, failing to vocally resist Trump/Musk, etc. - in other words we'd like the "deep state" to do a lot more, or rather, we really, really wish there actually was a "deep state" in the sense that conservatives think there is, because if there were, we wouldn't be in this mess. But there is a lot of organizing going on behind the scenes right now, and Democrats are urging patience to see if the courts and institutions successfully resist what's going on (I have little confidence they will), and just generally I think that people know that marching didn't work last time, but also don't know what *will* work, and so the response has been slow to gather steam.
So to sum up:
1. No, the media isn't responsible for anti-Trump sentiment - that's Trump's words and actions, which are gross and unappealing to normal people and harmful to the country
2. Resistance to Trump from the media has actually been woefully insufficient and inadequate
3. Resistance to Trump from the state is functionally non-existent and if your "priors" indicated that there was a "deep state" in the sense that QAnon claimed, you should probably be the one updating.
I'd just like to say thank you for righting all this, and keep fighting. As many gross opinions as I often see here, I genuinely believe that if you make good arguments and bring evidence, you're more likely to change minds here than almost anywhere else on the internet.
"Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations and threw away thousands of tips about Kavanaugh's conduct"
Do you accept that many of those "tips" were malicious efforts to smear Kavanaugh and stop his nomination? There was a lot of investigating done when every crazy person decided to ring up and say "yes, I know about Brett Kavanaugh and a friend raping a woman in a car that happened sometime somewhere, trust me".
"During the hearings, another accusation of rape surfaced in a letter by "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, California, addressed to Grassley but mailed anonymously to Senator Kamala Harris on September 19. The Senate committee interrogated Kavanaugh about this claim on September 26; Kavanaugh called the accusation "ridiculous".
On November 2, 2018, Grassley announced that a woman named Judy Munro-Leighton, from Kentucky, had come forward by e-mail on October 3 as the anonymous accuser, and admitted that her accusations were fabricated. When committee staff managed to talk with her on November 1, Munro-Leighton changed her story, denying that she had penned the anonymous letter while stating that she had contacted Congress as "a ploy" in order to "get attention". She was referred to the Department of Justice and FBI for making false accusations and obstructing justice."
Apparently some cockerel from Rhode Island got up to crow on his dungheap and was reported in the papers as genuine Tru Fax! re: cover-ups.
What angers me about this entire affair is that if Kavanaugh had been the "Biden and Pelosi we love abortion" type of Catholic, he could have raped fifty women in fact and nobody would have made a peep about it.
First, the FBI can't be said to have conducted an investigation by assuming that all allegations were false before investigating them.
Second, no amount of examples of false accusations contradict an example of a true accusation. If you kill someone, you can't just say "ah, but here's an example of a guy who once falsely accused me of murder" and then be absolved of the murder you did commit.
"What angers me about this entire affair is that if Kavanaugh had been the "Biden and Pelosi we love abortion" type of Catholic, he could have raped fifty women in fact and nobody would have made a peep about it."
File this under the genre of "Conservatives mad about things they made up themselves". Al Franken, a promising and influential Democrat, was driven out of office *by other Democrats* for even the suggestion of impropriety. Anthony Weiner, same story. Neither was accused of rape. Meanwhile your man Trump endorsed Roy Moore even after other Republicans called for him to drop out due to the allegations that he was a child molester. So yeah, you're angry? Good for you. Keep being angry about the lies you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about supporting rapists at every turn.
>Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations
It is difficult to investigate a rape accusation about events which transpired last week. It is absurd to even try to do such thing for stuff that happened 30 years before.
It's not all that difficult when you have thousands of tips! Least you could do is actually look into them. The FBI instead *forwarded them to the White House*.
Per The Guardian: "Thousands of tips came through the FBI’s tip line, many of them corroborating the detailed, credible testimony that Ford and Ramirez had already given. The White House threw these tips away. “On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI’s tip line,” the Whitehouse report reads. “Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information.”"
Whatever about Ford, Ramirez was credible? "We were all drunk at a frat party and I had to ring my friends to ask them 'hey was it Brett who pulled his dick out or someone else'?"
And you're believing the dear old Grauniad about an American judge they disapprove of politically. Well, sure, why not? But here's that notoriously right-wing publication, the New York Times, for one which ran a story casting doubt on the credibility:
"On September 23, Deborah Ramirez made a second allegation against Kavanaugh relating to sexual assault. The alleged incident occurred in 1983 when Kavanaugh was 18 years old (the U.S. age of majority). Kavanaugh and Ramirez, both freshman students at Yale University, are described as joining a dorm-room party at Lawrance Hall, in Yale's "Old Campus". In The New Yorker reporting of her account, an inebriated Kavanaugh "thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away", before pulling his pants back up and laughing at Ramirez. The New Yorker also reported that four people that Ramirez had identified as eyewitnesses explicitly denied that Kavanaugh had been involved in the incident (2 male classmates identified by Ramirez, the wife of a third male student, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy) The New York Times reported that Ramirez contacted some of her classmates and said she could not be certain Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself."
It's my understanding that tips and accusations were forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee who handled them.
I found Ford the most credible, in "that could have happened" way, but even that wasn't rape. But a lot of commentators just ran with "he's a rapist, a rapist!" because of political partisanship.
Okay, let's suppose that Brett Kavanaugh was completely innocent.
Is the optimal outcome that the FBI fails to investigate tips, Brett Kavanaugh lies to Congress, and the Supreme Court has the appearance of partisanship and criminality hanging over it for the rest of Kavanaugh's life?
Or is the optimal outcome that the FBI legitimately investigates Kavanaugh and clears his name, Kavanaugh comes clean about his drinking and partying habits but says he's never committed rape and anyway he's different at 50 than he was at 17, and then is confirmed to SCOTUS in a bipartisan vote?
This leads me to two further questions:
1. Why, if everyone really thought Kavanaugh was innocent, didn't they opt for the second outcome?
2. Why, given the obvious suboptimal outcome here was chosen *by the Republicans*, do Republicans persist in blaming Democrats for what happened? After all, Democrats didn't instruct the FBI to conduct a sham investigation and lie to Congress about it, and Democrats didn't make Kavanaugh lie about the meanings of the phrases written in his yearbook. If you - a totally innocent person - behave like a guilty person, you can't then be upset about people assuming that you are in fact guilty.
I don't know if Kavanaugh is guilty of rape. I do know that he's an emotionally incontinent liar whose nomination was forced through under false pretenses and who perjured himself on at least two topics during his confirmation hearings. And those facts are not due to anything Democrats did or any false accusations - they're due entirely to Kavanaugh's and the Republicans' behavior.
Are you pretending that the FBI investigation wasn't just a delay tactic to stall the confirmation vote till after the midterms, in the hope that the Democrats win the Senate?
I do think the mainstream media spent a lot of time criticizing Trump. It just didn't work because a lot of people, particularly on the right, don't trust the media anymore.
There doesn't have to be a 'deep state' turning children's adrenal glands into elixirs for there to be a large corpus of government workers that persists from administration to administration, leans overall left, and resists change. I don't think businessmen are trying to do anything more than make money, but they're happy to buy politicians who will look the other way as they poison the air and water, for instance.
I live in a rural area in the south. Fox is "the" media here. I don't think people that live elsewhere understand how it pervades everything. Fox is the mainstream media, and people believe trust it without question, even making it part of their Sunday religion.
I've heard that occasionally, enough times to be credible. Maybe it's worth at least checking the Fox News website periodically to know what the other side thinks. Thank you.
oh no, an accused rapist! where one of the accusations was later denied by the alleged accuser! yes, let's say that accusation alone means guilt, that surely cannot come back to haunt us.
The democrats have found someone to accuse every man in recent memory who applied for the job of SCOTUS Justice. They all “just remembered” from 10-20 years ago and waited til their candidacy to bring it up.
I wonder what sort of circumstances would cause someone to remember Brett Kavanaugh's SCOTUS nomination but not the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, or Samuel Alito. Did you crawl out of a 12-year-long ketamine-induced stupor on April 11th, 2017? Do you generally have problems with memory loss? Or is this just a shockingly glaring example of tribal epistemology?
I mean, it does benefit women at the expense of men, because it's usually women accusing men. That's all a feminist needs to know. And if you're a Democrat, since women usually lean more Democrat, it's to your advantage to promote that norm.
> "Trump - a man who we all heard on tape bragging that he grabbed women by the pussy and got away with it. "
You should probably pick a better damnation than this one (but don't go with "very fine people," as it's even easier to dismiss).
I don't know what you heard, but I actually listened to the entire transcript of the "grab them by the pussy" tape (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsSzIS84ks), and it begins with Trump saying about someone, "I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married."
And a few moments later, the full context of "grab them by the pussy" is, "And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything....Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
Which is a statement that's often simply accurate for Trump and for other famous men! When a man is a star, a lot of the women seeking to be around him will indeed let that man both figuratively and literally grab them by the pussy!
Well, except for the unnamed woman who Trump says that he "failed" to seduce (presumably *she* didn't let him grab her pussy).
Everything to do with Trump "University" is far more egregious than the willful misunderstandings and/or exaggerations of the "very fine people" and "grab them by the pussy" lines. Ditto soliciting election fraud, and the hundreds / thousands of other Trumpisms.
If you want to "gotcha" people with how bad Trump is, don't go with the lines which are easily dismissed even by people who might otherwise mostly agree with your other points.
> You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
The word "let", just as a matter of the meaning of the English language, isn't describing desire or consent. It's describing not physically resisting. As for why a woman would not physically resist, there are a lot of reasons, obvious ones being shock at the situation, being intimidated by someone bigger/stronger than you, and thinking that there's no point in trying to get a rich/powerful person in trouble over this, better to just pretend it didn't happen.
People would all agree with this if it was abstractly about an anonymous famous person without any political valence.
> Everything to do with Trump "University" is far more egregious than the willful misunderstandings and/or exaggerations of the "very fine people" and "grab them by the pussy" lines. Ditto soliciting election fraud, and the hundreds / thousands of other Trumpisms.
I can't tell from this whether you're saying soliciting election fraud et al is "egregious" or a "willful misunderstanding".
I genuinely don't understand how you think this explanation constitutes either a defense of Trump or a response to my argument.
"(but don't go with "very fine people," as it's even easier to dismiss)"
The "very fine people" were protesting the removal of a Confederate statue, so if you can dismiss it easily it's because you are a morally repugnant individual. I do not believe that any person who wants to celebrate or commemorate those who fought to keep human beings enslaved is "very fine".
Well, I consider the people who prefer to focus their outrage on flashy, sexy media bites rather than on the suffering of boring but materially damaged living victims to be morally repugnant.
Sorry, let me clarify. I'm not calling her "by implication" a morally repugnant individual. I'm directly calling her, and any other person who supports Confederate statues being displayed in open public spaces, a morally repugnant individual.
Again, sorry to be so negative, but if you cannot agree that all Americans deserve to be able to walk through public spaces without seeing monuments commemorating people who fought to keep their ancestors in chains, I truly believe that no society should accept you or your moral code.
American chattel slavery was so evil that any society which commemorates it as anything other than an atrocity should be utterly destroyed. You are free to disagree, but I do not and cannot accept your disagreement as anything other than evidence that you are a moral failure.
I was just thinking about cocktail names today, and is it any wonder that the era of the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape was also the era of names like Sex On The Beach, Screw Against The Wall, and so forth? Who calls a drink a Pornstar? Invented in 2002, the Access Hollywood tape comes from 2005. The "Slow Screw" family of cocktails, deriving from the original Screwdriver but capitalising on the sexual innuendo:
A period of increasing vulgarisation, where those of us who objected were mocked as prudes and wetblankets. Sex was fun, baby, and we were letting it all hang out! And Trump was of that era. And then the new puritanism which was appalled to hear a man engaging in vulgar talk about women, just imagine!
Yes, well I'd be more heartened by the swing to modesty were it not coming from people who would also still mock the religious prudes and bigots, and who would champion sex positivity. You mustn't say "whore" anymore, but "sex work" is real work and good.
Forgive me if I find it very difficult to believe in the shock and horror.
I'm sort of your perfect opposite, but I arrive at a similar conclusion.
I spent the bulk of my mid-teens through early 30s mostly with straight young men who were perfectly comfortable saying deeply "vulgar" things in front of me because I was likewise saying deeply vulgar things. A lot of it was in the form of jokes; not all of it. And now I moderate one of the largest social groups on Fetlife, so I encounter quite a few extremely graphic and detailed vulgar fantasies every day and see even more dick pics.
I can't think of anything which would legitimately shock me, and it's probably impossible to offend me. When I heard the "grab them by the pussy" line - a line which was party of a joke-filled conversation and which Trump was under the impression he was speaking in private - I merely shrugged, because I've heard - and *SAID!* - much, much worse.
But I haven't defrauded low-income people with a fake university scam, nor had my non-profit decertified for just cause, nor bailed on my real estate partners, nor done any of the other hugely horrible things Trump has done.
That's why I likewise don't really believe the shock and horror about what he merely said, and try to redirect to some of the horrible shit he actually *did.*
I think the whole raunch era is late 1990s-2000s, which is a little after when Trump's ideals would have been formed. He grew up in the 80s and early 90s which were a little more puritanical. He definitely developed an affinity for WWF and that whole working-class barstool conservative culture though.
Which people seem less upset to you? Personally I'm a lot more upset. Like... radically more upset. Questioning the pacifism I've believed in for over 20 years levels of upset.
But sure, disaster fatigue might be a thing. Flu deaths are surging, wildfires are hitting places out of season, hurricanes are more destructive than ever, people are suffering from long covid, we've just spent 15 months watching videos of Israel blow up hospitals and shoot children while Joe Biden paid for it with our money, and now all the rights we've won since the Civil Rights movement are under direct assault. I think there's so much going on that people don't really know how to express it anymore. I know I certainly don't.
But also, like, in 2017 we'd just had eight years of Obama, and young people who grew up with that "Yes We Can"/"Audacity of Hope" vibe were totally shocked that someone like Trump could be elected. People my age, who lived through the Republican crusade against Bill Clinton, were also surprised. How could the party who preached dignity and decorum in the White House and impeached Clinton for banging his intern vote for a guy who bragged about sexual assault on tape?
Now, on the other hand, none of this is shocking. People in their 20s today grew up with Trump 1 and the Pandemic and just watched a genocide live on TikTok. They're a less optimistic cohort. They expect politics to be like Game of Thrones, only worse. So like... this sucks, on an absolute scale - but on a relative scale, compared to the last eight years, it just seems like a natural and fitting conclusion to the shit sandwich we've all been force-fed. It's worse, but maybe it's not as much worse as the Obama to Trump transition was.
"How could the party who preached dignity and decorum in the White House and impeached Clinton for banging his intern vote for a guy who bragged about sexual assault on tape?"
Not a voter in any American election, but I'd read the feminists bragging in online articles about how they'd strap on the kneepads for the Presidential blowjob if that meant keeping abortion legal and expanding access to it. The same feminists who had been vocal about sexual harassment, rape (this was before the term rape culture) and the rest of it, but now power-differential workplace harassment was cool if Our Guy was doing it, so just shut up Monica.
After that display of hypocrisy, what blushes were left to spare?
I honestly don't want to get into rows with you, but our views are so clearly at odds that both of us will only get angry if we keep swapping increasingly heated opinions.
So I'm not trying to dodge you, but I do think I need to step back and cool off before engaging again.
Trump didn't remove abortion rights. The Republicans and the Supreme Court did. They stacked the court partly by luck and partly by the Republican controlled senate refusing to confirm Merrick Garland.
Trump's Supreme Court appointees are relatively moderate compared to Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Other Republican presidents weren't appointing more left-leaning justices. If Trump never existed, we'd be in the exact same situation under Mike Pence or any other Republican president.
The Court removed abortion rights because Trump put three conservative ideologues who were willing to lie to Congress on the Court. The point is, if Clinton had won, Roe would have stood.
"If Trump never existed, we'd be in the exact same situation under Mike Pence or any other Republican president."
Assuming that's true, and the counterfactual situation in which Pence or Bush or whoever was the nominee resulted in a Republican victory, then the same argument applies, but just slot in their name instead of Trump's. In other words, women would have been upset over the expected loss of their rights, and justified in that expectation.
Trump bragging is meaningless - the man will take credit for almost anything. He also takes credit for ending the war in Gaza.
> the same argument applies, but just slot in their name instead of Trump's.
You shouldn't be slotting "Pence" for "Trump". You should be slotting in "the Republicans". Trump or Pence or whichever Republican becomes president is little more than a warm body with regards to Roe v Wade. The sum total of their contribution is not going against their party and appointing a left-leaning justice. No Republican president appoints left-leaning justices.
Absolutely pro-choice women (and men) would be upset under any Republican president winning in 2016.
The problem is that you picked abortion as your main example why Trump in particular was terrible in 2016 and why the media didn't disparage Trump enough. There are a thousand ways in which Trump is particularly bad for a Republican president, but abortion is not one of them. He angered his own party by refusing to endorse a national abortion ban. Pence called Trump's statement "a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020." Compared to his party, Trump is a moderate on abortion.
The media acted as if Trump were the worst president in history (which in many ways he is). If you want to argue the media understated this, at least use an example where Trump isn't left of your average Republican in Congress.
The “deep state” traditionally has roots in the left of the 70s post-Watergate so… yes? Most people on the left have their own (more accurate IMO) version of a deep state thesis.
Interesting, thanks, though the article linked below seems to say that the left did embrace the Watergate and found it politically useful, but were also afraid that it would distract from the more important concerns of the left.
The linked article seems to find a dissonance RE: the left’s knowledge of the deep state and prioritization of that knowledge in their politics. It’s really not that surprising; the left doesn’t have almost any formal political power in the system, and its main objective is to gain that power through labor organization and electing politicians who have to answer to a power base with material interest in supporting economic left projects. A conflict with the deep state would only arise in a situation where the left already has that power and is being opposed by the deep state; because the left doesn’t have power it’s a hypothetical concern at this point.
The right’s version of the deep state, like the right’s version of almost anything having to do with politics, is confused, non-analytical, and ad hoc. I have problems with the left’s theorizing about deep state, but it’s not hobbled by these problems.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're asking here and it's nagging at me on purely a linguistic level - I'm not American so probably not your target audience for the question, and maybe I'm just dumb, but I'd really appreciate hearing it rephrased just to let my brain move on
What @Alex Power has given is pretty much my question, except that rather than just "suggesting" an answer I am open to different (contravening) readings and curious for alternative explanations. ChatGPT is trying to pin me to what it thinks is my motivation for asking the question :P
Sorry there were indeed a few inaccuracies in my expression; my brain was kind of muddled since I was in a hurry; I have edited my earlier comment. I hope it is better now.
I asked ChatGPT to translate: << The person is asking whether the reaction to Trump’s 2024 victory is less intense than expected, both from media and individuals. If so, they suggest that "left" media might have intentionally moderated or co-opted resistance. >>
I was considering joining an old-school social/charitable organization, but one of the requirements is that I have to profess a belief in either god or a higher power. As an agnostic, this bugs me. OTOH, I spent most of my school years reciting the damn Christianist version of the Pledge of Allegience. Should I just bite my tongue and lie about my believing in god to join?
I'm with you on the squeamishness. I tell people I'm non-religious, but the truth is I'm anti-religious. Nothing wrong with fibbing, though, so long as once you're a member you don't have to have conversations about "god" and pretend to take them seriously.
I always thought Habitat for Humanity sounded fun, but of course maybe it's not. And it's not also a social organization, though I'll bet there are regulars who get to know each other. Also sponsoring refugee families (they live at their apt, but you help them learn to navigate the US, find jobs, etc. ). In Canada there are groups of people who do this, each sponsoring one family, but the sponsors keep in touch and collaborate on things.
Nobody knows what's in your heart, and it's probably worth the extra social contacts/chance to do good.
I don't really worry that much about AI x-risk but I go to rationalist meetups to learn about how to use chatGPT, drink beer, and talk to right-of-center nerds. Half of them make fun of Yudkowsky too. ;)
Higher power than what? If it’s not specified, choose your own low reference point, say a bug, and don’t lie. If it’s specified as you, well, the government has power over you, doesn’t it? Still no lie. What’s the big deal about lying anyway, if you’re not a strict deontologist?
There was an episode of the podcast Philosophize This on which the host, in a rare editorializing moment, opined that secularists were really abandoning the field to theists to define "god" in potentially very conservative ways. Secularists could and should contest and liberalize the definition of "god" to mean things that they are more comfortable with.
Broader impacts in NSF grants are not a new thing, but having woke criteria in their evaluation is... though I can't say these criteria are particularly widespread or universal, seeing that I was never asked to tailor my "broader impacts" to them in mathematics.
Something I've been thinking about lately: is the present moment an unusually inopportune time to have children, if you believe the "AGI/ASI imminent" harbingers? The basic argument is, if it turns out poorly, you run the risk of not only dying/ being oppressed yourself, but also having that happen to your child, which most agree is one of the worst forms of suffering around. But if it goes well, you'll have access to eg all kinds of embryo selection/enhancement, life & fertility extension, etc, which makes waiting not problematic and in fact positive. So in both situations, you're better off waiting.
Some counterarguments I could imagine would be if AGI/ASI fails to materialize and thus you waste time / potentially miss your opportunity window, if things plateau at roughly human level and gains in biotech don't reach eg menopause reversal, or if the outcome is some kind of benevolent overlord situation where humans are allowed to continue existing but not to reproduce. Any other thoughts on why you shouldn't wait? Note that this isn't a pro/anti-natalist argument in general, it's an argument for pro-natalists to "wait and see" through an arguably singular moment in history.
I don't see AI causing extensive suffering as a likely outcome. Relatively quick death seems much more plausible - AI has many reasons to kill humans who might threaten its power, few reasons to expend effort torturing them. And I kind of think that even a short life before an AI apocalypse is likely preferable to no life at all - while generally speaking I would not choose to have a child knowing they would predecease me, if the entire human race will die simultaneously then even a short life has whatever meaning life in general has.
And of course if there is no transformative AI in the end, or if there is and its results are positive, then of course I wouldn't wait to have kids.
Not really. As Humphrey Appleby says, we had this sort of discussion back during the Cold War with nuclear war. People still had kids.
I whiffed on it because I don't trust anyone, but people seem to like having them. So, IMHO, if some weird theoretical thing that nobody knows how to assign the probability to and gives numbers from 1 to 99% is your worry...just do it anyway.
My wife doesn't want to make the sacrifices involved in having/raising young children, and my belief we are probably not going to get beyond that stage is a significant source of tension in our marriage.
I always assumed that the point of marriage is to have children together.
I guess spending a life together with someone you love is also nice, even when you don't want to have children, but such things should be communicated *before* getting married. And if the plan is "let's have kids 10 years later", then maybe it also makes sense to only get married 10 years later.
Well, to late for this advice, I guess.
You probably should figure out whether it is "later" or "never" (while understanding that "later" that doesn't come with a specific timeline is often just a polite way to say "never"), and then it's up to you whether you are okay with that. Realistically, it probably depends on what other options you have.
(Hypothetically, there is also this thing called polyamory, but that's not for everyone.)
Is there a reason *you* can't take on enough of the sacrifices involved in raising young children to get your wife over the line (I assume you aren't a fertile lesbian or you wouldn't have mentioned the "having" part)?
Surrogacy is an option, and we have moderate means. But kind of assumed that it's super hard to find an agency/surrogate if you don't have a medical reason you can't have kids, you just 'don't want to'.
If someone has references for surrogacy, I would be very interested.
I wouldn't assume there's a fertility means test to fail before you can hire a surrogate or adopt! I'm pretty sure that "we'd like to adopt" or "we'd like to hire a surrogate" is all you have to say.
In fact, "why didn't you have biological children?" is actually an extremely rude question, as it's likely to cause a lot of pain to people with fertility issues. So you're unlikely to be asked that by either an adoption agency or a surrogate.
And if you are, you can always reply, "that's a very personal and painful question." It won't go farther than that.
I have two children and have similar thoughts about climate change, geopolitical struggle, etc. I think in the end I always talk myself out of my stress by reminding myself "the alternative is that the next generation would be composed entirely of the children of parents who didn't care about such things". To some extent one of the most effective things we can do to advance our values is to have children that we raise with them.
> The basic argument is, if it turns out poorly, you run the risk of not only dying/ being oppressed yourself, but also having that happen to your child, which most agree is one of the worst forms of suffering around.
I am of the opinion that my child would prefer to be oppressed, than to not exist at all, so I have zero compunctions about bringing more life into a tragic / doomed world even if UFAI was *certain*. Especially because, if it turns out I'm wrong and my child would prefer to be not-alive than oppressed, well, there are many bridges she can throw herself off, so the mistake is easily remedied.
> But if it goes well, you'll have access to eg all kinds of embryo selection/enhancement, life & fertility extension, etc, which makes waiting not problematic and in fact positive
This line of thought seems to discount the obvious workaround: one can have kids now AND have embryo-selected superkids later. To repeat my earlier logic, it's better to be alive with a much smarter younger sibling than it is to be not alive at all.
> Throwing yourself off a bridge requires real courage and is not something people normally do even if in the objective light of day their lives have negative utility.
You are making extraordinary claims and I would like some extraordinary evidence. Specifically, I find it implausible in the extreme to believe that someone who really, truly believed their life had negative utility (e.g. living every moment in agony and with no realistic chance of reprieve) would find the small terror of a 10 second fall from a bridge too unpalatable to go through with. Your every waking moment is already torment, why are you gonna worry about a fall MORE? Their unwillingness to go through with it is a revealed preference that they don't actually have *no* hope.
> Plus a truly malevolent force that wants to enslave us would also make it hard to commit suicide
I believe in Roko's Basilisk as much as the next book-burning schizo, but I don't believe in it (or its omnipotence at preventing one-way bridge trips) *enough* that the expectation value of my kids' lives still comes out as negative.
You need "extraordinary evidence" that people with depression aren't jumping from bridges in droves?
> negative utility (e.g. living every moment in agony and with no realistic chance of reprieve)
It's quite a big jump from "negative utility" to "literal hell". Your life can be miserable, you can be utterly hopeless and fully convinced that life isn't worth living, and yet your brain doesn't let you take that small, final step. Millions of years of evolution is funny in that way.
> Their unwillingness to go through with it is a revealed preference that they don't actually have *no* hope.
That's circular reasoning. Your argument boils down to "they don't kill themself, therefore they must have hope, because if they didn't have hope, they'd kill themself."
> That's circular reasoning. Your argument boils down to "they don't kill themself, therefore they must have hope, because if they didn't have hope, they'd kill themself."
An isomorphic argument is accepted for every other instance of revealed preference, why not this one? "Consumers buy apples more than grapes, therefore they can't prefer grapes, because if they did, they'd buy grapes". You are isolated demand for rigor-ing me.
> You need "extraordinary evidence" that people with depression aren't jumping from bridges in droves?
I need extraordinary evidence that the reason they're not jumping from bridges is because they decided that the unpleasantness of the first 10 seconds is so... extraordinary... that it outweighs the unpleasantness of the rest of their natural life.
"Revealed preferences" alone can't carry an argument. At best, they provide weak evidence, in part due to the difficulty of pinpointing the source of the preference. Maybe the customers would buy a lot more grapes if there wasn't an angry bulldog sitting in front of the grape stand.
In this case here, if someone doesn't take the jump from the bridge, is it because their life actually doesn't suck as much as they pretend? Or is it rather because one of the most basic instincts, deeply ingrained in the animal brain since the first fish fled from a bigger fish 500 million years ago, is fighting an abstract, rational though process?
And, of course, from 80s on the argument was that you shouldn't have children because they'll live in climate change hell. Before WW1 there were already fears of a global war and a Malthusian catastrophe etc.
Lots of ACX readers seem to have really hated their time in school. There's a whole lot of discussion of how miserable school is for advanced students, how it's basically a prison, and how many people intend to homeschool their own children in order to escape these issues. I am philosophically sympathetic to these arguments, and would also support radical changes to the school system, but personally, I really enjoyed school. I'd be interested to hear from really anyone here: did you enjoy school, and why or why not?
I think a large part of my enjoyment was that I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends - maybe ACX readers were more likely to be bullied, or were autistic and didn't get along well with other children, and this is why you all hated it so much? There also seems to be a lot of frustration about school being too easy, which I did feel at times, but mostly this didn't bother me too much. I didn't bother with pointless homework, and used the extra class time to do harder problems from the back of the textbook or read whatever I felt like. In fact, from observing other students and kids that I've tutored, I would've guessed that smart students enjoy school more, as they generally find the subjects more interesting, have an easier time concentrating, and feel less stressed because the work is not difficult. Did other people not have this experience?
It depends. I didn't like the school much, though I wouldn't say that I literally hated it. My wife seems to have happy memories.
Whether you get bullied or not, can make a lot of difference. Or whether you have friends in your classroom (and the school is an opportunity to meet them every day) or whether you have friends outside your classroom (and the school is a waste of time that you would rather spend with them). Also, when the classes are boring, is it possible to read a book?
The meaningful part of my school years were the after-school activities.
My misery was a big part bullying and ostracization (I suspect I am a bit autistic), and classes being so boring, speech is a terrible way to transmit information, and I never paid attention in any class. Oh, and waking up early, definitely needed more sleep.
I enjoyed school a lot, but suffered from gifted-kid develops zero work-ethic syndrome. I thought I was bottoming out in high-school, and my memory of it was teetering on the brink of failure. I found my transcripts a few months ago and it turns out I had straight A's, so I guess how one remembers school is sometimes different than it actually went.
I'd imagine a lot of people are selectively remembering a few things, as there honestly is a lot of room for independent learning if you're motivated for it. I think a lot of the desire with making schooling cater to advanced children is making it convenient for them to learn at a faster pace, when school isn't actually making it that difficult for kids to do so already.
I don't relate to the abuse/prison angle, but then I wasn't really bullied at school. (I didn't have much in the way of close friends, either, but that's partly a personality thing.) I didn't really enjoy it either, though. With a handful of exceptions, I was bored in almost all my classes and got very little out of having to sit through them or do the attendant homework. I'd have much preferred to be homeschooled where I could work at my own pace and based on my own interests, or (even better) to go to a school with classes designed for someone like me.
In contrast, when I managed to get into academic environments that were more on my level --- Mathcamp and college --- I loved it and thrived.
I did enjoy school. I wasn't bullied, even though I am not a friend-making-person (got on fine with my classmates but we didn't hang out together after school), I'm not hugely academic but it suited me, and I had a lot more access to materials to learn from than if I had been at home (out in the country, no easy access to library and this was way before the Internet).
I also generally had no problem with following rules, as that is my nature, and by the sounds of it a small (in American terms) Irish secondary school is nothing at all like American public schools. I might well have been miserable in an American school under American school system (PE is a subject and you have to pass it????).
Ironically, school was fine. Mine was pretty hippy-dippy and I wasn't popular but nobody really bothered me. It was failing to make friends in college, when I thought I would finally find my people, that turned me into the bitter alienated person I now am. ;) At that point I just gave up on fitting in and focused on the path that I thought would maximize my long-term income. (This is elided because, well, I don't want to make myself any easier to doxx.)
It kind of worked. I didn't get rich, but I could theoretically retire now if I wanted to. Didn't become happy, but I had always sort of written that off as a goal anyway.
"maybe ACX readers were more likely to be bullied, or were autistic and didn't get along well with other children, and this is why you all hated it so much?"
Some of this is what happened to me, I didn't have enough emotional intelligence to go through school. In school, one needs to keep learning social lessons, but also unlearning recently learnt lessons as the entire batch is growing up. I didn't have enough neuroplasticity for that: by the time I learnt a lesson it would be time to unlearn it, and so it would be a burden. I feel it messed me up.
There were several aspects of the school experience that I enjoyed. Everything happened according to a set schedule. While teachers were not unbiased or omnipotent or anything, their conduct was predictable and often rules-based. Grading and feedback was for a large part merits based; the "teacher's pet" fudge factor may have affected your end-of-year final report card grades but not exam results and test scores, so it was legible part to your "compensation". All the problem sets and other tasks had well-defined correct answers or criteria for acceptable outputs, which could be produced in reasonable amount of effort. Actually, there was little opportunity cost to making a good or mediocre output to very good one.
All of the above may have been ultimately a disservice, because very little of the above applies to contemporary adult careers and real-life work problems met therein.
"I think a large part of my enjoyment was that I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends"
Kids getting to hang out with their friends should be a given imo. There should be other ways of facilitating that other than making them be somewhere that's extremely autocratic and forces them do pointless make-work all day.
I say make-work because I think education is mostly a signalling game, for reasons like The Case Against Education argues, not because they don;t boost test scores.
If you think schools mostly teach useful stuff, then fair enough, they're not totally illegitimate and I'm being unreasonably critical. Even in that case, schools could still be massively liberalised and more efficient imo, and we should still be outraged by how needlessly oppressive they are.
Wasn't The Case Against Education largely about higher ed? I am referring here to K-12.
>needlessly oppressive
People say this, but I have no idea what it means. It seems that some consider it oppressive to have to sit in an assigned seat, or to raise your hand before speaking, as "oppressive", but even if it is, why is it "needless"?
"Wasn't The Case Against Education largely about higher ed?"
Most of the evidence Caplan gathered was for higher ed but I think the argument holds more broadly. A lot of what goes on lower down the education system is preparing kids to get into university. Scott's complained about being made to make collages about the meaning of respect or something like that, I'm assuming that was aimed at pre-university level ed.
I think education has to be oppressive because the average kid won't voluntarily sit quietly listening to lessons or doing practice questions, so if you've decided it's necessary for them to do that you have to employ some degree of coercion, and most countries go beyond even that minimum necessary cohesiveness imo. Because kids have low self controll, even that minimum level is insanely high compared to what adults would tolerate or how kids used to live before mass education. Scott's talked about the burrito test for example, in his review of Fredie de Boers book.
I think that's needless to the extent that education doesn't serve a useful purpose for signalling reasons or because it's inefficient, and to the extent that it's more oppressive than it needs to be evn to achieve it's stated goal. Like nordic countries achieve good test results with a more liberal system.
>even that minimum level is insanely high compared to .what adults would tolerate or how kids used to live before mass education.
Yes, because children behave differently than adults, so if you want them to learn, you have to have more structure. Again, see the results of at-home learning. And, even assuming children were more free before mass education (a dubious assumption, given that they generally worked), they were also largely illiterate and/or could not do basic math. So, again, you have not shown that the coercion is needless.
I hated school so much. The single largest jump in my QoL was finishing it.
I'm a very happy person today. I'm extroverted, have close friends, a girlfriend, a good job.
I'm a well adjusted member of society. It feels great.
School basically brought the worst in me. I was an introvert, slightly bullied, shit friends, no girlfriend or even female friends, and I was barely scraping by.
I changed schools to a smaller and better one in my last years, the school sent me to a psychiatrist basically from day 1 because it was obvious I had ADHD.
The school environment is basically designed to kneecap me or kids like me.
Note that university was different. I did extremely well there. But if I was homeschooled or even just told to study for a GED-like thing I'd have years of my life back + have a headstart on life
My experience was very similar. I liked school. It was often easy, but I would still listen during classes. I was actually autistic, but at the same time very agreeable, so I wasn't bullied, and probably that's the most important thing.
Kindergarten and elementary was great, middle school sucked a great deal of ass but was Not Literally The Worst, high school...uh...well that's when my 5150 happened, so, yeah. I think a lot of it had to do with tracking...we had a GATE program in elementary, so lots of enriching extracurriculars, involvement from community volunteers, field trips, cultural awareness stuff (not in a woke way, more like one a day a year where the Japanese family demonstrates a tea ceremony, the Jewish family cooks latkes, etc. super fun!). That was also the point in my academic career where I was just miles and miles ahead of peers in almost every subject...challenging the 10th-grade math textbooks, not even bothering to join the Reading Circle for phonics (busy reading novels), doing well in prepubescent PE due to martial arts and sports outside school. Even during recess we had a gigantic campus with no real boundaries, you could literally wander off into the woods. (Or hole up in the library or computer lab, where many other adventures awaited.) In a lot of ways it was like living Harry Potter James Evans-Verres' life. School's a lot of fun, as long as you don't have to hang around the stupid people and there's exciting new stuff to do every day! So cool!
Of course, everyone reverts to the mean eventually, and the farther along you go, the more things like "discipline" and "conformity" are prized over...actually being intelligent. Going from being one of the most popular alpha kids in school to a bullied awkward teen (and having lots of friends migrate to other schools) was...Not Great, Bob. Kept my head down, got lost in academics and videogames. Parents getting for-all-practical-purposes divorced during this period didn't help either. I still did well academically, but it started feeling a lot more hollow because so much of it was what I'd now call Guessing The Teacher's Password. All those years where teachers would let me literally skip regular homework because "I know you already know the material, it's just pointless legible busywork for admins, don't worry about it" was both an ego boost and also an early-life introduction to Bryan Caplan's thesis. Scales falling off eyes and all that. But if academics is one of the only things keeping you interested in school, and it seems increasingly pointless, then...Solve for the Equilibrium, ya know? I got a near-perfect SAT score and went to a just-below-Ivy private college, and yet now I bag groceries for a living to pay off my student loans. No one fucking cares.
College was several very expensive years of going through the motions, pretending to believe in Cultivation of the Mind when I'd already lost faith years ago. Having to finally compete with (inter)nationally also-smart people instead of the podunk pendejos I grew up with was also an unpleasant shock. (Somewhere offscreen, FdB gestures at a big chart of relative ability bands where my datum slowly drifts into irrelevance.) Hadn't even wanted to go in the first place, it seemed pointless not to just go get a jerb. Friendless, increasingly isolated from family, no hobbies or interests outside videogames, struggling with mental illness (parents only later told me they'd thought I was autistic since childhood but never bothered getting a diagnosis "because you do well in school", the irony...that plus depression, suicidality, also whoops you're trans). Shamefully living with parents while peers I grew up with moved out. Eventually I just gave up the ghost entirely, fudged through a fake associate's degree to "graduate" for the family, and left unfinished school behind for good. Almost 200 college credits and ~nothing to show for it. Optimistically I guess I could say I used those college years to "find myself" and grow into adulthood, but...well...lol. Coulda learned better, faster, more cheaply by just going into the workforce outta HS. So it's at least a bit of retroactive vindication to be surrounded in the ratsphere and rat-adjacent by so many intelligent, successful people who likewise had a contentious relationship with academia. DoE delenda est, joking but not entirely joking.
"Having to finally compete with (inter)nationally also-smart people instead of the podunk pendejos I grew up with was also an unpleasant shock."
That's what the "doing homework" bit is about, your teachers did you a disservice by letting you presume "this is just pointless busywork for admins". Sometimes (a lot of the time) it is indeed, but the practice of "I have to put my head down and do this" does help when you hit "hey, I can no longer just skate by, other people are as good or even better at this than I am, I have to *work* now" level. If you don't have the habit of "I have to read the textbook instead of just skimming, I have to practice the work", it's very hard to pick it up later.
Oh, not a presumption, that is literally what they'd tell me sometimes. (Some artistic license employed for fuzzy decades-ago recollections.) Same thing with summer homework or other long-term assignments where I didn't bother turning it in by the official deadline, but would then bang out the whole heap in a couple days and hand it in later, and they'd be like...wellllllll...The Point is to demonstrate conscientious conformity, not to actually know the material, so instead of an A+ I gotta mark you down to a B. Wink wink nudge nudge ratemyprofessor.com. And I'm like sure, whatever, grades are kayfabe, I can play my part.
This worked a lot less well in college, where the sheiks had way more ego riding on the line of protecting their fiefdoms and would (seemingly almost gleefully) fail you anyway for technical reasons unrelated to knowing the material. Like wrong size font or Judean People's Front instead of People's Front of Judea bibliography formatting. But by adulthood, if you haven't figured out that's a lot of the point, then it's kinda hard to sink the lesson in without such consequences.* And I do think especially to your point, acting this way is an...expeditious...way to get fired at most kinds of entry-level jobs. Doesn't matter if you're running circles around everyone else performance-wise, if you don't jump when Boss-man says jump, and in the way he says to do it, you're not getting Employee of the Month. (What? You thought it was a meritocratic award? Pull the other one!) Everyone's gotta pay their dues and bend the knee. Same when tangling with Governance and other authority figures, of course. So, yes, a well-intended disservice that I generalized too hard on.
*part of why the whole grade inflation and failing-students-forward push of the 2010s was so personally enraging, I can't imagine how much worse my life trajectory woulda been without such humbling while I was still young enough to change my ways
I was really good at school and enjoyed it (still do when I'm doing online learning etc). I think my problem was that I enjoyed it too much and was basically raised and trained to adapt myself to the scholastic framework so that I didn't really know what to do outside of it. I was raised a classic "smart kid", i.e. I was praised for intelligence, not work, so I got my dopamine from effortless success, and didn't know what to do when I finally had to buckle down, study, and work hard. It was a rough transition.
Middle school was, not quite hellish, but very ungood for me in what you are seeing as an ACX-stereotypical way. Hanging out with my friends? I think I had all of two sort-of-friends my entire time in middle school. And nobody cared about that; so long as I was quiet and obedient in class, my isolation was of no concern. Possibly I should have been noisy and disobedient, but mostly I just endured boring lectures on things I either already knew or didn't care about, but which were to distracting for me to focus on anything I did care about.
The time I was able to spend hanging out in the library was the one exception. It helped that the library had a dumb terminal to a Prime 350(?) minicomputer and a BASIC programming manual or two.
High school was somewhat better, and not just because they upgraded the Prime to a 500-series and eventually brought in a few Apple IIs. There was a much bigger diversity of classes, and more flexibility over what classes I could take, so maybe half of them were actually somewhat interesting and a couple were very good (9th grade English, AP Physics both stand out). OTOH, some of the classes I couldn't opt out of were still kind of hellish (9th grade social studies, 12th grade English, and of course gym). And with a larger student body better sorted by intelligence and interest, I was actually able to manage half a dozen or so friends by the end. That was mostly dumb luck, not anyone caring whether or not I had any friends.
Also the library had a much bigger collection, and I was allowed to spend more time there.
I posted this in the last Open Thread, but a few days late. I'm posting it again in case people are interested. This video makes the case that the development of modern caulk may be a unifying explanation for many features that people don't like about modern architecture - it enables seamless smooth facades with no local touches to deal with local weather conditions, and removes the need for craftsmanship to make pieces fit together:
I could see it. "A tube of caulk and a lick of paint, turns you in to the carpenter you ain't", as they say.
I think it's a bit cart before horse-y though; the reason buildings look like they do is the complete dominance of capital and the failure of every other governing institution.
Caulk enables stuff to look like it does, but it gets used the way it is used because of Incentives. Wow, such revelation.
I hope this refers to some industrial grade caulk, because caulk for the homeowner* is like snake oil you often have to buy anew, with the fun property that the snake oil will never stick to itself.
Technical explanations don't cut it. At least they cant explain all of it. We've seen similar uglifying trends in all other visual arts too, and they don't have the same technical constraints.
Also, if you watch any of his videos about Chicago, you’ll see he is a big supporter of modernist architecture generally, just not the bland placeless aspects of it.
I don’t think he says that either of these is *bad*. He says they enable a bunch of things that aren’t human touch of independent craftsman, and many of us like those touches, and that these thus explain part of what we don’t like about certain architecture.
I thought it was notable that these were actually opposed in a certain way - caulk enables seamless and flush facades with fewer lines, while the gang nail plates enable unnecessary numbers of eaves and rooflines.
My impression is that he thinks both of these are good innovations, but a lot of what people have done with them is not aesthetically great.
Although I somewhat agree with this guy's thesis, an architect I follow on TwiXter pointed out that in Europe, there were so many buildings destroyed during WWII, that the agencies funding the rebuilding opted for quick solutions rather than fancy solutions. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier coined the term "béton brut", meaning "raw concrete", from which we get the term brutalist (turning an architectural term into an epithet). In Europe it was an economic necessity.
I get that people like or support Trump (or see him as better than the Democrats), but especially given recent actions and words (well encapsulated by the Saturday tweet "He who saves his Country does not violate any law") is it that you: 1) think he doesn't represent a threat of dictatorship or authoritarianism (i.e. breaking laws and norms); 2) thinks he could install a dictatorship but his good policies are preferable to Democrats for their bad policies; 3) thinks he could install a dictatorship but that's the same likelihood as Democrats installing a dictatorship; 4) some other fourth thing that's not occuring to me.
I can explain my perspective further and I want to keep it polite despite me knowing this topic often devolves into tribalism and name-calling.
I'm a conservative who dislikes Trump but views him as preferable to Democratic hegemony. I broadly support his anti-woke anti-progressive agenda, as I view them as a much greater threat to a free society than Trump himself is. I think he poses ~0 plausible threat to our political system. He'll be termed out in 2028 and would be too old to matter then anyway. Nothing he's doing is challenging constitutional norms in any substantive way. He's re-asserting the power of the executive. That's fine. Our system is adversarial by design and he's entitled to test its limits. He's incapable of breaking them.
In my view American progressivism is a cultural evil on par with early-20th-century Russian Bolshevism. Trump is an objectionable leader but I'm happy to give him a fair bit of leeway if he's actually effective at rooting out the progressive cancer in our institutions.
I've spent way too much time debating people here about this and they always seem to fall into two camps, once pressed enough: voluntarily uniformed, fascists (or at least completely unprincipled conservatives/populists). I am only a slight bit hyperbolic. They are either in full support of the US turning into a democracy in name only, or they take everything the trump admin says as true and aren't interested in investigating further.
I also think people just project anything they want for their government onto trump. to the point they will think he is going to do the exact opposite of what he says he will do.
However, for the general public i think we have to remember that the vast majority of voters are barely informed about any topic and don't make up their mind until very late in the process. These voters can swing from party to party every election.
I struggle to understand how giving the executive branch the power to fire people hired under executive branch agencies is a slide towards dictatorship.
It's ignoring very clear laws and constitutional powers that is the slide towards dictatorship.
There are laws about who the president can hire and fire and how those hirings and firings can occur. The Constitution's intent is that the executive branch *executes* the legislation passed by the legislature. They authorize the executive to have cabinet level positions. The positions must be confirmed by the legislature. They do not authorize him to hire or fire any employee at an agency.
If you disagree with these laws, that is one thing. But the way to change that is through the legislative process not by ignoring them.
The laws about controlling executive hiring were passed in 1946 as a middle finger to FDR's presidency. A sufficiently motivated supreme court would overturn them.
Expecting the legislature to agree to curtail its power is naive.
What does it matter why or when a law was passed? Are they no longer active? Do you really believe no other laws regarding hiring have been passed in the last 80 years?
>Expecting the legislature to agree to curtail its power is naive.
This is a core principle of the US government and is the stated purpose of the Constitution. Rejecting it is un-American. The executive is not supreme, all there branches of government are equal and can check the power of the others.
As Juan Linz pointed out (in a justly celebrated article), presidential systems tend to suffer from a particularly acute version of the impasse problem. In a parliamentary democracy, legislative supremacy is a pretty stable arrangement because only members of parliament are able to claim democratic legitimacy. Appealing to the sovereignty of the people, along with the representative principle, is usually enough to get the executive and judiciary to back down in a confrontation. In a presidential system, by contrast, both the head of the executive branch and the members of the legislative branch are able to claim democratic legitimacy. This is one of the reasons, Linz suggests, that presidential systems are so unstable. When an impasse develops between the executive and legislative, neither side may feel any need to back down. This often leads to the intervention of a nondemocratic force – perhaps the courts, or in the worst case the military – to break the impasse....
...The key thing to recognize is that Trump is challenging a constitutional convention. If successful, his actions may create a permanent realignment of power between the branches of government in the U.S. The fundamental problem, I should note, is that the U.S. has a completely dysfunctional legislature. Since power abhors a vacuum, the rise of judicial power in the 20th century was driven by this legislative weakness. People wanted certain outcomes, and since Congress was unable to deliver, they were happy to have those outcomes imposed by the courts. But judicial supremacy has a number of pathological effects on government, including a near-complete disregard for questions of cost and efficiency. The current play by the Trump administration to expand executive power is a response to both of these issues — the absence of an effective legislature and the accumulated inefficiencies of judicial rule.
All of this seems likely to further exacerbate the tragedy of the Democratic Party in America, which has basically painted itself into a corner on these issues.
Is the US legislature really completely dysfunctional? Exactly what vital potential law has a broad degree of support yet cannot be passed because of the legislature's supposed dysfunction?
The US political system is famous among political scientists for its large number of formal and less formal "veto points", which makes it rather more difficult to pass new laws than in most, perhaps all, other Western democracies.
Many veto points is great if you want to make it difficult for a ruler with an autocratic bent to do anything dramatic.
It is not so great if you should want to do something more than incremental reforms once in a while.
One of Heath's points is that these difficulties have led to the Supreme Court becoming a much more politically active player in the US than in most other democracies. (I recommend to read the whole article.)
"Dictatorship" is the wrong thing to be afraid of here; neither party right now is on a way towards it. The actual negative scenarios are uncontrolled authoritarian oligarchies on both sides. Trump's blob would be smaller than Biden's/Kamala's, but still without anyone specific in charge.
Trump (less sure about Vance) has a casual disregard for democratic norms that is similar to that of the present Democrats but less dangerous to non-political life in America. Of two evils, choose the lesser. At least this is the way I would have justified a potential vote for Trump; in practice I'd have voted Kamala for Ukraine's sake, though reluctantly and tightly.
I think it's a grave mistake to consider the situation under the 1990-2010 liberal-conservative dichotomy. The liberals are no longer liberal, and the conservatives are no longer conservative.
It's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants a fascist authoritarian regime, but it is clear that many of the people he has appointed, such as Elon Musk and Emil Bove, do. They have no real concern for the law or for supposed-conservative principles, and often feel that violating the law is an affirmative benefit to them.
Ultimately, a control faction of the Republican Party blindly supports Donald Trump, and the majority of the American public opposes the Democrats. This leaves only one option, which is where we are at. It's not good, but until an alternative presents itself, it is what it is.
I agree with the rest of it, but I don't think the majority of public opinion will necessarily oppose the Democrats after a few years of Trump. How effective the GOP will be at retaining power with public opinion against them and Trump over 80 but having gotten a lot more dictatorial in the interim...your guess is as good as mine.
> It's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants a fascist authoritarian regime, but it is clear that many of the people he has appointed, such as Elon Musk and Emil Bove, do
No, I think you're using words incorrectly in a way that is counterproductive for the point you're trying to make. Elon Musk wants something, but a "fascist authoritarian regime" isn't it, and the moment you use those words you box yourself into arguing about the definitions of those words, rather than the useful discussion you could be having about the actual thing that Elon wants.
What is the actual thing that Elon wants? It probably looks like a smaller government with lower taxes and balanced budgets, secure borders, and everyone having the social values of, like, a 1990s Democrat. He also wants a Mars base and self-driving cars which bypass traffic by going through tunnels. I think that's a closer characterisation of what Elon wants than "fascist authoritarian regime".
The problem with what Elon wants is not what Elon wants (which all sounds pretty nice) but the extent to which he might be willing to ride roughshod in order to get there.
Maybe 2015 Elon Musk wanted that. Current Elon Musk obviously doesn't, both per his words and actions.
His interest in Mars seems to have dried up, he views space as merely a way to exert political power on Earth. The "trans" situation seems to have shifted his social views back hundreds of years. He seems to go out of his way to endorse every far-right party on the planet, and in fact criticize them for not being fascist enough.
And then there is the quasi-Nazi salute? The aggressive violation of both norms and laws, to accomplish things he could have done legally? The complete unwillingness to tolerate any dissent (his "free speech" on Twitter is now "free speech as long as it supports Elon Musk).
Elon Musk is a fascist, and trying to make America fascist. You're either in denial or have stale opinions if you think otherwise.
> He also wants a Mars base and self-driving cars which bypass traffic by going through tunnels.
It's been a long time since Musk spent significant effort on these goals. I fully believe that a colony on Mars and electric self-driving cars were once on his top-3 list of dreams, but now he'd rather spend 43 billion USD on a website than on SpaceX, and he'd rather spend his time on DOGE than on countering the increasing threat from Chinese electric car companies against Tesla.
"Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."[28] Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow.[29] "
I am curious as to what you think defines a "fascist authoritarian regime" if not the extent that its leaders are willing to ride roughshod in order to get what they want.
The proposed punishments and deportations were almost entirely directed at people who had committed actual physical crimes independent of their messaging at the time. Crimes that had traditionally been left unprosecuted so long as they were committed by people espousing approved liberal causes, but does anyone doubt that if any large group of people had engaged in e.g. anti-black or anti-gay protests with the same scale and tactics as last year's campus anti-zionist protests, the bad actors would have been very promptly expelled and/or arrested?
It's not freedom of speech if one side is allowed to punctuate their exclamations with violence and the other is not.
I think there's a 4): When reminded of bad aspects of what Trump is doing -- eg, dismantling things in a way where there's lots of collateral damage -- people think mostly about how much this is going to bother the malignant simpering assholes they imagine every single person on the left to be. They lapse into enjoying the vengeance, and never return to considering the real disadvantages and dangers of Trump's approach.
I agree. I've even done this myself a few times. On balance I'm anti-Trump (the anti-climate/science/vax stuff and the bullying our allies I find very concerning) but I enjoy reading the liberal tears in the NYT and Slate. Oh, you spent the 2010s telling me what a piece of crap I was because I have external plumbing, huh? Made me afraid to talk to the opposite sex in my teens and twenties? Enjoy your pussy-grabbing president.
Ironically I support abortion rights, so for me the ideal scenario would be for abortion to be legal but nobody tell the NYT editorial board so I can watch them continue to seethe. That will never happen of course, but if we're talking fantasies...
I think this is somewhat unfair - while it’s true that there are those on the right who have been personally shamed/cancelled/destroyed by the left and salivate over the idea of vengeance, there are also a lot of reasonable Joe Rogan-esque people who just think Trump is better than the alternative. He’s already ending wars, stopping the border crisis and demolishing woke and it’s only been three weeks.
I agree that there are people who like or support Trump for one or more of reasons 1-3. Why is it unfair to point out that some who support Trump do it for reason 4?
I guess! You’re not wrong, it’s just that a) it’s not a big percentage in my (admittedly subjective) opinion and b) the left too often disparages Trump voters to avoid having to engage with their valid concerns. It’s doubly unfortunate because in the end it’s their loss; you don’t win people over by telling them repeatedly how racist and intolerant they are, and too many people on the left seem to think it’s some kind of virtue to not speak to MAGA. Now they’ve lost public opinion and all houses of Congress and their reaction is to tell each other in their shrinking media bubbles that the sky is falling and it’s the end of the world and WHY WON’T MAGA SEE THIS WE TRIED TO TELL THEM IT’S ALL THEIR FAULT.
Strikes me you are doing just what you're complaining about the left doing: You have this ugly, infuriating picture of what people who voted against Trump are doing now. They think it's a virtue not to speak to MAGA. Instead they play ain't-t-awful in their media bubbles, and agree this is MAGA's fault, and look for chances to holler "I told you so" to the MAGAs. They are not a differentiated bunch, as you point out the people presently supporting Trump are -- some supporting him for reason 1, some for reason 3, or 4. No the anti-Trump people are all exactly the same, and they all do the exact same mean-spirited, entitled shit.
You are doing what you complain about the anti-Trump people doing: avoiding engaging with the other side's valid concerns. Why is it not a valid concern that Trump has dismantled things in a rapid, sloppy way that causes far more collateral damaged than is necessary? Scott's post about the NSF grant proposals getting yanked for supposed Wokeness when many were not infected with Wokeness at all points out one instance of this. Or what about Pell grants now that the Dept. of Ed has been shuttered? How hard would it have been to put info online for educational institutions answering some of the immediate questions they would have about whether certain things, Pell grants being one, are suspended going forward, or canceled retroactive to some date, or are still going to be allowed to continue as usual?
You're also, of course, just wrong in your mental picture of those who did not want Trump as president. Obviously they vary in how vehement they are, how willing to talk with people of the other persuasion, how worried about Trump's present actions, how much time they spend on Twitter playing aint-it-awful. Any time you think millions of people who have one thing in common are pretty much the same in having a certain cluster of dumb, obnoxious fucking stupid as shit attitudes and behaviors that you and yours do not have you can be certain your head is up your ass.
Oh I’m not infuriated by them - far from it. I’m very sympathetic. I used to be on the left and believe the stuff the media told me about Trump. I genuinely hope that people do not suffer under this administration, even while I also think that electing Trump was one of the most important decisions that America has ever made and he will go down in history as the greatest president since Lincoln. I hope you come to see this too, and I hope the anxiety you feel about the current state of the world will get better.
1) Why do you jump straight to dictatorship? The President used to wield a lot more power without being a dictator. This was a more effective method of governance and I think the US should go back to it. Trump has been the only viable option in many decades who has a chance of doing it. I am happy that the next Democrat will be a more effective President because of it too.
"Why do you jump straight to dictatorship? The President used to wield a lot more power without being a dictator. "
Would you care to elaborate on this? That is NOT my impression of American history at all. Presidents have often been the focus of historical narratives (on presumes because that makes them easier to tell and digest), but the presidents wielding more formal power in the past is not something I'm aware of.
Hah, I did think of him when I was pondering this question. Did he wield greater formal power than a modern president? I'm not nearly enough of a historian to say for sure.
From what I recall his first two terms[1] were mostly about trying to fight the Great Depression and that he was--at least at points--restrained by congress and the courts. And that his second and third terms were almost entirely during the period the U.S. was engaged in one of the biggest wars in its history, which changes the face of the question considerably.
I think many people (myself included) are OK with the executive wielding more broad and immediate power in the midst of a sufficiently severe crisis, provided that there are still sufficient guardrails in place against the obvious failure modes, and well-defined points for congress and the courts to weight in.
[1] I will note that having an official term limit IS a clear-cut case of modern presidents having their powers (for a slightly loose definition of "powers") more formally limited. Though the pedant in me feels inclined to point out that it's still to early to say whether the term limit restriction will *succeed* at restraining Trump's attempts to accrue more power to the executive.
The lefts current criticisms are largely... insane and ahistorical; A president decreasing the size of the state is not going to convince the right trumps a dictator. I dont care if he puts a horse in power, if income taxes decrease 1% the state has gotten less tyrannical. I have extreme doubts about him following thru on all his promises, but the promises are preferable then any president Ive seen.
Vetos are limits of power, and constitutional. If a president doesnt use money allocated by congress, thats *less government* and not dissimilar to the 12th jury member refusing to find giulty.
What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diverse" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?
(That's barely a hypothetical, by the way - the Department of Education has threatened to pull funding from any school system that has "DEI" programs, and if they define "DEI" the way Ted Cruz defines "woke science," then a lot of perfectly ordinary school programs are going to get deleted at random.)
If federal programs get money based on "does the President like you personally?" rather than "does the law say you should have this money?", then that is corrosive to the rule of law, regardless of what your tax rate is.
Also, while the impoundment thing is definitely the biggest constitutional crisis, Trump has done plenty of bad things that have nothing to do with money - for instance, the recent decision to drop the corruption case against Eric Adams in exchange for his support on immigration enforcement. That move made six DOJ lawyers resign in protest, and didn't lower your tax bill by one dollar.
"What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diverse" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?"
Then the locals will have to... build their own schools.
"Also, while the impoundment thing is definitely the biggest constitutional crisis"
The president doing what the president has been allowed to do for centuries until Congress passed one law against Nixon is a constitutional crisis?
Well, yeah. What do you think a constitutional crisis looks like? The basic framework is that we have three supreme bodies and they're supposed to work together in defined ways. When they don't agree on what those ways are, that's a constitutional crisis - two equal powers have different views of the constitution.
Is having a crisis bad? It doesn't have to be; at some point you're going to have disputes and those will need to be resolved. We have 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 resolved constitutional crises by saying that everyone must defer to the Supreme Court, but that's clearly not the solution the constitution contemplates, and it's had some sharply negative effects.
A good reason to oppose federal funding for local public schools in general is precisely that it gives the federal government a mechanism to exert power over what all school districts in the country do.
I'm also personally libertarian enough to think that it would probably be a good idea to entirely abolish public schools and dispense with the idea that running a school system is something the government rather than the private sector ought to do. This is not currently politically realistic in the US, but in any case it definitely doesn't lead me to be very concerned about the federal department of education using its funding power to work against local public school DEI programs rather than in favor of them.
> What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diversity" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?
> then that is corrosive to the rule of law
> biggest constitutional crisis
Maybe I should have clarified my politics preemptively; Im not in anyway a moderate; these seem to be for a bush era conservative who trusted the state not that long ago.
Id be for all schools being shutdown tomorrow; I want blue states to react, threaten to secede; I want every state employee to lose their job, the all contractors, then the entire "fire" economy.
"rip and tear until its done"
Everything recently has raised my hope for the future. Change was nessery and enviable, its better if real drastic change happens without blood in the streets, the more chaotic trump is now, the less blood I see in the long run; if trump redesigns the americain empire as drastically as fdrs new deal the future is possibly as bright as I can imagine.
"If income taxes decrease by 1% the state has gotten less tyrannical".
Can you explain why you think this is true? I see this sentiment a lot in libertarian-focused forums.
One immediate counter-example that comes to mind would be a tyrranical state with no taxes, but instead subjugates (parisitises) other nations to support its government spending.
Also, wouldn't everyone having 1% (or x%) lower taxes generally result in higher prices for everything? I mean, hear so much about raising minimum wage causing inflation, but nothing about lower taxes causing it. Or is this more something that goes along with "abolishing the Fed" and establishing deflationary policies?
Its understood that "sin taxes" work, a tax of 500% on cigerattes, makes vapes or patches or something else.
A tax on income make being economically productive a sin, preferring worse forms of income such as stealing, fraud, gambling. Its one thing to tax luxerys, I may go without, inflation, I may buy gold; labor, its all I have.
Id have to find a spooner quote(abolishist when that mattered; anarchist) comparing taxes to slavery, an tax on labor is the most direct version.
Only if there was a horse of a senator; perhaps I should have clarified my statement was about animal rights and no taxation without representation
----
Fine, you and the china guy win a point. I should have said the point that I dont care about court politics when compared to actual effects more tractfully.
If income taxes decrease by 1%, but borrowing increases, is the state more or less tyrannical? The state can only borrow at such favorable rates because of its presumed tyrannical ability to confiscate wealth. Is implicitly flexing that ability by borrowing an increase or decrease in “tyranny”?
> If income taxes decrease by 1%, but borrowing increases, is the state more or less tyrannical?
If I split up the list of types of taxes into 8 categorizes, income taxes are last place. Maybe 1% of incomes are worth 10% sell taxes or something; but theres something vile about being poor the whole unfairness of working to eat is a law of nature, but kicking the poor when down is pure violence on top of it.
I wont take it as far as kulak, but "libertarians opposing tariffs are traitors" is preferable to the historical discourse.
> Is implicitly flexing that ability by borrowing an increase or decrease in “tyranny”?
Its still a tax(inflation), but its a tax I can dodge legally
But should we pursue tax policy that disproportionately favors high earners while increasing the deficit, as Trump's proposed tax plan does, or should we make some kind of effort to not do that? Is taxing high earners less better over all because it means a bigger total reduction in tax revenue?
They tax the poor in a way they cant avoid; lotterys are a tax on the poor but its not a chain of violence; i.e. mugging that makes poor people play lotteries.
Most people who support Trump are basically OK with him centralising executive power and becoming “king of America” for four years. They trust him more than they trust anyone else in politics. I saw a MAGA tweet recently - “the American government is experiencing a hostile takeover by the American people.”
The American government is experiencing a hostile takeover by a minority of the American people. I'm not one of them, and I'm not pleased, and I am going to push back against anything that suggests Real Americans(tm) are all aboard on the Trump train.
I mean, the 2024 election felt like a giant argument over which minority would get to try its hostile takeover.
Part of me is wishing there was a large contingent of Americans willing to organize under a slogan of "thanks for getting those groups out of our way, Mister/Madame President; we'll take it from here".
This is also why this authoritarian stuff from the left is failing to land. The left is like “it’s a coup, ahhh.” The right is like “it’s a coup, great! This is exactly what I voted for.”
To make matters worse for the left, Trump is delivering on key election promises like the border crisis in a rapid and effective way that makes it clear they could have done the same, had they cared/wanted to.
He could make the promise and deliver on it because he blew the “border crisis” out of proportion in the first place.
The immigration figures, if I recall correctly, had been shrinking (from an admittedly very high place) since 2022, and Trump’s only action regarding the border has been this tariffs thing with Mexico – which Mexico got out of by promising to send 10,000 troops to the border, whereas there already were 15,000 of them.
Trump is undoubtedly sending a strong message to putative migrants. That probably counts for more than the details of enforcement in the medium term at least.
Although I could be wrong, I don’t think that’s how it works for several reasons:
1) there’s no reason why putative illegal immigrants to the US should have the same media diet as US citizens,
2) they may interpret messages differently. After all, many were in situations where the threat was much closer to them than a POTUS talking tough on immigration.
3) the border is 3000 km long and there are a lot of putative illegal immigrants. This is not the kind of physical problem whose nitty-gritty details you can afford to overlook if you want to enact your preferred outcome.
(Also, I’m surprised – I thought Trump had been elected for doing stuff, but calling messaging “action” is hardly the hallmark of someone who gets things done?)
In this case, he sent the same message for his first term, so we can just look at what happened then.
What happened was that would-be immigrants were initially intimidated and inflow slowed by a large amount. Then they realized the whole thing was bluster and inflow picked back up to usual levels.
So... the messaging does work, but it needs to be backed up by actual policies.
Question. A mega sun storms hits the North American continent, frying the grid. At the same time, an asteroid wipes out all the oil fields is Saudis Arabia. Communication satellites start crashing into each other.
My question is this. Are physicians who were trained over the last 30 years and who rely almost exclusively on test results from lab and imaging companies for diagnosis, going to be able to treat their patients. Do they receive sufficient education to be able to improvise alternative ways of getting the information they need to be effective.
How much direct experience do you have with doctors doing diagnoses, especially in an emergency or ICU setting? The lab test and imaging a big part, but so is physical examination of the patient.
There are some diseases that require labs or imaging to diagnose. Those were not being diagnosed at all 100 years ago. There wasn't some magical knowledge that has been forgotten to history. Lab work and imaging makes treatment much easier but is not required. Infections, traumatic injuries, many cancers can be diagnosed with no labs or imaging, for example.
I mean, that wouldn't wipe out energy production or medical device manufacturing globally. But assuming it did: we could build it back.
The real danger would be mass casualties among skilled workers and economic degradation to the point they couldn't be supported or retrained. But so long as they survive they could bootstrap their way back up. I'm nothing particularly special and I could probably make a primitive computer, a basic steam engine, etc out of raw materials that were available in Ur. And then those tools can be used to make better tools and so on. Even more so because I know the end point we should be aiming for.
On the other hand, if a lot of these specialists die and the economy radically shrinks such that there's not enough spare food to keep them working on making computers again then you would lose the knowledge largely within a generation or so.
This amuses me because I've had a decent number of lab tests and whatnot done in recent years, and the only test out of all of them that produced useful, actionable, apparently-accurate results was an allergy test that took a few minutes to perform, and could be read simply by looking at my arm. (Obviously my results aren't typical of everyone, and many tests to produce useful results.)
In a scenario like this I'd be much more concerned with supply chain disruptions and the availability of medicine. A LOT of people take one or more medications on a daily basis. Supplies being disrupted could cause a lot of serious problems.
I think diagnosis quality will degrade but not to apocalyptically poor levels.
If it's a short disaster (months), I think most ER physicians are already pretty good at this stuff (they sometimes have to act before complicated test results can come in), and primary care doctors are mediocre but can probably dig out their old textbooks and get by. There are some things where you can't know absolutely for sure without fancy tests, but before the tests were invented doctors took their best guesses, were right more often than not, and accepted some unnecessary surgeries or misdiagnoses as inevitable. Some of the really hard stuff (eg a slow-growing brain tumor where you need to know exactly where to operate) can probably wait the few months until the disaster is solved.
The US has many foreign-trained doctors, including doctors from poor countries without as much technology. These people will be more used to the situation and can advise others.
If it's a longer disaster (years), then the few doctors who remember the low-tech techniques can retrain the others, but also, people will have to do something about the slow-growing brain tumors and that kind of thing, you simply can't do as good a job without imaging, and we'd have to accept the lower success rates.
In this doomsday scenario, whether your physician can accurately identify critical aortic stenosis from a physical exam alone will be the least of your worries! Medical education is one of the slowest moving fields and is still proudly stuck in the mid 20th century; aspiring physicians are still graded on whether they can accurately percuss the top of a pleural effusion, measure liver size etc, even though in real life they will use imaging for all of these indications (and would probably face legal liability if they did not. “Your Honour, I opened his chest to perform the operation without an echocardiogram beforehand because I was confident in the slow rising carotid pulse and soft second heart sound I heard with my stethoscope.” That wouldn’t fly in court.)
I’ve been thinking about memory lately. Are we sure that everything we’ve experienced isn’t still in our brain, and that we are simply unable to recall most of them? It seems awfully random what we remember and what we don’t, obviously some important moments are available for recall but there are so many other seemingly trivial memories that are available. And if an entire lifetime of experiences are still in our brains, have there been studies or attempts to learn how to access them? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I think it’s curious
I'm reminded of how deleting eg photos on your phone doesn't actually delete them, just marks them as free and available to be written over. Organizing and accessing data is half the game of memory.
One of my frustrations with one of Scott's recent-ish posts about the usefulness of education was exactly that it treated memory as a binary thing. Either you remember [fact] when somebody asks you, or [fact] is completely gone from your brain.
This has not matched my experience with regard to memory and academics specifically. On a couple of occasions I've had to re-learn skills that had gone unused for years. At the point I would start relearning, I'd remember next to nothing. But it always came back MUCH more quickly than I learned it the first time. I'm not sure I could believe that *everything* we experience is still in our brains, but I do think brains clearly have a very quirky storage-and-retrieval system for which you can't necessarily treat "stored vs deleted" as a strict binary.
Totally spitballing here, but you might model it as (almost) everything being stored via lossy compression algorithms, but ones that get lossier and lossier the longer the thing goes without being accessed. On the flip side, when you *do* try to access something, your brain tries to fill in the details that had been lost by the compression. If there's enough left, it will either get them actually right, or at least get them consistent enough that you won't notice the patch. Only if the memory is degraded enough will you notice gaps. But if something "jogs your memory," i.e. fills in some of those gaps with external information, your brain might suddenly be able to use that to fill in other gaps that were previously intractable. This would neatly explain why things like music and poetry are easier to memorize than unstructured information, and why mnemonics can be useful despite actually increasing the amount you need to remember: the structure works neatly with the pre-existing compression-and-decompression algorithms, allowing things to be stored with less effort and retrieved with less loss.
An additional point that any 'minimalist' take on memory has to deal with: the well-documented existence proof of the ability of some idiot savants to memorize extremely large amounts of data, like books after a single read.
But reading something is a very special cognitive experience. I doubt that remembering what you saw all over last 6th of May is as easy as remembering what exactly is written in a book. Not that the latter would be easy for me.
Also dreams, those most ephemeral of memories. While you're asleep, a dream can appear as real as life, but you can't remember it within like 5-10 minutes of waking up. Still, I get flashbacks to one-off dreams I've had decades ago, and those flashbacks can be years apart themselves.
I'm a firm believer that it's still all there, everything that ever crossed your mind, and that there must be a good reason why most of it is sealed away most of the time.
That doesn't make sense to me as evidence for your idea.
That you remember 5, 50 or 500 views that you once had and are now surprised to remember, doesn't mean that all the 500000000 views you actually had but don't remember are all there too.
It doesn't, but it does prove that the brain has the capacity to remember at least some dreams far beyond their usual lifetime when it "wants" to. I can remember some conscious things (like my phone number or how to put on socks), and fractions of dreams as described. Maybe there are people, like the idiot savants gwern mentioned, that can remember all their dreams forever as if they were waking experience? It sure doesn't seem impossible to me.
Surprisingly, what she shows is that we can actually "remember" many things that never happened, which suggests that our memory doesn't actually store most things, but instead stores "traces" of these things, that we then use to re-construct the memory in much the way we construct imaginations of the future or of alternate possibilities. These re-constructions often go wrong in the same sort of way that AI "hallucinations" do.
Very likely, there is a lot we could learn to do to better extract traces of events and facts we have trouble recalling. But we also don't have full storage of any of them - just reconstructive storage.
Whatever she has done (no Youtube right now) is certainly respectable, but isn't this consens? That memory works like this? I was under the impression.
Trump gets three noble peace prizes. Gaza, Ukraine and a 50% cut in defense spending agreement with China and Russia. (I know he has no chance of getting even one... even if he does all that.)
Let's at least wait until the end of his term before judging. I actually do think he was better than a lot of recent presidents on foreign policy--fewer wars and so on.
Have you checked out the list of previous winners? Like, say, Yasser Arafat? It's *already* the Bizarro Nobel Peace Prize; they just don't call it that out of respect for Alfred Nobel.
Yasser Arafat was not given the award for committing terrorism. He was given the award despite previously committing acts of terrorism, not because of it. That would not be the case for Trump (substitute ethnic cleansing or the like for terrorism).
Giving the Nobel Prize to people like Arafat is legitimate, because it incentives people to end conflict and renounce violence (which he did as part of the Oslo Accords), which is consistent with the purpose of the award. Giving it to Trump for doing what he claims he wants to do would incentivize behavior that is inconsistent with the purpose of the award.
Arafat won the prize for A: running a murderous terrorist campaign for decades and then B: stopping and saying "look how great it is that I negotiated this deal where I stop being a terrorist". If he'd never been a terrorist, he'd never have won the prize.
I do not expect the Nobel Committee to give Trump the prize until he has finished ethnically cleansing Gaza. And really, I don't expect him to ethnically cleanse Gaza or even remember that Gaza exists six months from now.
Yeah that “Peace Prize” has long lost whatever moral authority it has ever had. Awarding it to Obama in 2009 for basically not being a Bush was the final nail in the coffin.
We can always distribute our own Nobel Peace Prizes. Doesn't seem fair that Norway gets to be sole arbiter of who's deserving of such a prestigious reward.
I should have said the award is not given for committing ethnic cleansing. As for Kissinger, giving the award to those who enter peace agreements incentivizes the creation of peace deals.
Oh I see. Well, I’m sure he’ll get one in physics too after inventing a room temperature superconductor and creating a unified theory. He hasn’t done it of course, but any day now.
That is unfair. He has some chance of doing these peace related things. Would you not want any of this to happen? And ask yourself if the reason you'd be against it is because it gives a 'win' to the other side?
Yes, yes yes, North Korea has disarmed already, Hamas got scared of the Feb 15 deadline and released all hostages, Christ is here again.
How do adults who seem to otherwise function normally have a Trump amnesia? Why on Earth do you think Trump is some kind of a peacemaker? In his first term he attacked Syria and Iran. He unilaterally tore up an agreement with Iran, making their hardliners wettest dreams come true. He totally botched negotiations with North Korea, making everything worse in the process. Just because the man says "I will stop wars" doesn't mean he has any idea of how to do this short of rolling over for Putin like an obedient little doggy. Which he and his drunkard moron Sec of Defense are about to do.
Trump is an ignorant morally bankrupt coward who likes to hurt people, so forgive my skepticism. Yes, it's easy to stop a war when you force the victim to accept the aggressor's terms, "might as well relax and enjoy it" says Trump to the rape victim, definitely peaceful.
Gaza ceasefire was negotiated during Biden admin and went into force before Trump's inauguration.
I don't think even he could get Russia and China to go along with it.
First, they're both spending a significantly smaller fraction of their budgets on defense than the US already, and so stand to gain less by halving it.
China also needs to arm up if it's going to take Taiwan, and Russia needs to keep up its spending to defend against a Ukrainian invasion of its western republics.
A better offer would be to cede them Taiwan and Ukraine in exchange for them recognizing the US annexation of Canada and Greenland.
Between PPP adjustments and cost disease we almost surely get less bang per buck than either Russia or China, and we have global commitments which they don’t. An America that unilaterally slashes its defense budget in half is almost surely one that is unable to continue to uphold the Pax Americana, or even honor its treaty obligations (to eg Japan, or Poland, if the SHTF).
> Between PPP adjustments and cost disease we almost surely get less bang per buck than either Russia or China
PPP adjustment for defense spending is not unreasonable, but it has to be done carefully: militaries do not buy the same basket of goods as the civilian economy. Russia has lower labor costs, for instance, but probably faces higher prices for certain sorts of high-end technological goods in virtue of having worse economies of scale.
I’m pretty sure that one would be a bridge too far for even the supine Congressional GOP. That is so dangerous that near unanimous impeachment would occur.
Lol. Half of Trump's executive orders in the last month are unconstitutional abuses of congressional authority. Good luck finding a single Republican willing to go on record against them, much less impeach over them.
What are you going to cut? According to Wikipedia, 40% of the DoD budget is salaries and benefits, and another 10% is healthcare. Are you going to stop paying the soldiers? Welsh on their benefits? Or are you going to cut literally everything else, so that we'll have a well paid military with excellent benefits, but no actual weapons? (You know, like the current day Germans).
And are you intending to honor our far flung treaty commitments, or are you intending on retreat to fortress America, leaving Poland, Japan, Australia etc to fend for themselves?
"And are you intending to honor our far flung treaty commitments, or are you intending on retreat to fortress America, leaving Poland, Japan, Australia etc to fend for themselves?"
If only there was a way to strike targets all over the world with forces present in the United States...
Right and everyone in congress knows this, and with a wink and a nod it continues. But hate him or love him, Trump is a generational figure who stands outside of parties (as much as is possible, he still has to keep the R's happy) and I remain hopeful that real change could happen. The voters are not stupid, we mostly need someone who isn't lying to us. And call me a rube, but I'm taking Trump at his word.
You are not a congressman. Many things that sound like a great idea to you, will sound like very bad ideas to the median congressman.
Congressmen are much more invested in state capacity and power than you are; they have by definition devoted much of their lives to taking the reins of that power. They are not going to look favorably on anything that greatly reduces that power. And the ones that normally would favor at least a modest rebalancing in favor of soft vs. hard power, i.e. liberal Democrats, are going to be skeptical of any proposal that comes from the desk of Donald Trump. Or Elon Musk.
Congressmen are also heavily invested in the health of the defense industry. In part because of all the campaign contributions, but in much larger part because of all the high-paying jobs the defense industry supports in their district, which are very easy for congressmen to take credit for. Or be blamed for if those jobs go away.
Congressmen are also very sensitive to the opinions of voters. Donnie and Elon may think the military is a giant waste, but most of the people who wear "MAGA" hats count America's overwhelming military might as a big part of that 'G'. And really, a whole lot of non-MAGA Americans are also kind of proud of that, or fearful of what could happen without that. When they see half a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen being tossed out on the street and told to get jobs or starve, when they see storied regiments being stricken from the rolls, when they see aircraft carriers being cut up for scrap - and they *will* see that, quite regularly on e.g. CNN - they're not going to vote for the people responsible.
And congressmen have professional staffs who will keep them informed of the actual consequences of whatever it is they are being asked to vote on. You may be ignorant enough to believe that we can cut defense spending by 50% without scrapping half a dozen aircraft carriers, just "getting rid of the fraud, waste, and abuse", but congressmen are going to know better.
If we were to enter an era of prolonged global peace - real peace, not "Putin and Xi told Trump what he wants to hear, and now Trump tells us he has secured Peace for Our Time" peace - then you might be able to convince several successive congresses to engage in an attritional drawdown of ~50% spread over a period of a decade or more.
As something Donnie and Elon are going to do in the next four years, this is P<<0.05 territory.
Thanks for the long thoughtful reply. And yes I know all that. And in the same vein I probably don't have to name all the benefits to you. Loosening the grip of the military industrial complex (and big pharma) on our economy would be a very good thing. Less weapons in the world looks like a good thing. In fact if we start spending less other countries may start to spend more and some of that money could flow to US defense companies. We clearly need to do this slowly, like a decade or more as you say. Give the defense companies time to move into different areas of commerce. (Real competition!) And yes close some military bases (at home and abroad) and scrap some aircraft carriers. Near (~60 miles) to where I live is Niagara Falls Airforce base. It's been on and off the chopping block for years and should be closed. And if another big shooting war does starts how important do you think aircraft carriers will be? Seems like missiles will take 'em rather easily. And finally congress has to go along. Trump seems somewhat unique in being able to possibly break this gordian knot. And sure there is not much chance of this happening. But even just having the conversation would be very useful. (Thanks again)
Does anyone have tips for young adults with BA degrees struggling to find jobs? I’ve really applied to so much (particularly on Idealist as I’d love a humanitarian/nonprofit job) and haven’t gotten anything; hardly ever get emails back. I’ve had people look at my resume and cover letters and those appear fine.
Are there any marketable skills that are particularly desirable currently? I’m someone who graduated with a cognitive science B.A. and recently did an americorps program working in city government. I don’t have much to show, like projects etc. I could link to.
I am just about to start a LinkedIn course on PowerBI but would love more suggestions.
Apply to local companies/municipalities that need operators for different types of work.
After doing some BS remote job for a year I quit and now am a plant operator at an oil refinery. It’s fucking awesome.
I get paid less (currently making $45/hr), but it’s like the all-stars of blue collar work, that most white-collar people could get into.
It’s basically dudes who have very high IQs but didn’t go into engineering (although some operators do have engineering degrees but prefer to work outside a bit more).
Many operator roles require an IQ test of some sort before getting an interview… that’s your spot to shine.
If you’re a smart dude/gal who likes to work on real shit in creative ways, be an operator.
What is an operator? The word itself isn't helpful; it just means "someone who does something".
On the main topic, I can share a tangential anecdote: there was a period where my sister was trying to find work in the hospitality industry (that is, hotels) because her goal was to have a job that let her travel. She found that all jobs in that industry, except the very most basic and unskilled, require a lot of experience in the field. So, she took an entry-level receptionist-type position - the only way she could find to develop the experience that every job she looked at claimed to require - and figured she'd just have to tough it out for a while.
The hotel where she was working quickly noticed that she wasn't like the people who generally apply for those jobs, and bypassed their stated requirements so as to promote her more quickly. I was told that this really offended the rest of the workers at her level.
(But she then left the hotel for a position in the Department of State.)
LOL at your operator comment because that's exactly what it means! your sister's story supports that view. She got in as a low level operator that was recognized as competent (a strangely rare trait!) and was given opportunity.
That mirrors my experience; except it was restaurants, and now I do restaurant tech because my natural inclination towards tech was recognized by middle managers and they gave me opportunity.
TLDR: get a basic job like serving tables or tending bar; receptionist at a hotel, barista, etc and start showing people one's competence and opportunities follow.
I was in a similar position. What I did was find the most frictionless way to apply/search for jobs, created a filter designed to pull in only jobs that fit my criteria, tailored my resume to echo what a reasonable sample of these postings were looking for, and then applied to all of the jobs that were frictionless to apply to in the entire United States (in my case, I created an Indeed.com profile and applied to all jobs that allow me to apply by just clicking the “Apply Now” button). At the beginning of my search I had similar results to yours; by applying this method I was overwhelmed with offers and got to pick out of my favorites.
Quantity > quality in job applications; getting to the interview is the most important element and then it’s all charisma and luck from there. Even if you don’t think that you’re charismatic, you’re an attractive candidate to someone! And being good at interviews is a learned skill; being in a large number of interviews will make you better at them 😁
Good luck, feel free to reach out if you want someone to take a look at your resume or some more info on how I was able to do it - it’s been very helpful for quite a few people in my life.
You left it unclear exactly what it is you want to do. A quick search on jobs for CS gives me the impression that this education, like most Liberal Arts degrees, is not geared to any specific domain. Nonprofits can be an employer, but that doesn't describe your job.
Decide on a direction and skill up. That may mean going back to school. If not, you'll have to create a pretty impressive portfolio, and/or *aggressively* network.
Yes this is why I’m deliberating my next path forward. I would love to go to onto grad school if it would lead to a real career and not just more job rejections. I’ve seen many reddit posts on folks with master’s and even PhDs who can only find minimum wage service jobs.
I considered data science but have heard that’s oversaturated. I’d still like to learn R and Python, though I would have to be highly self motivated to make solo projects I can show off. I am fantastic at working under deadlines, useless when it comes to motivating myself with something that might be completely fruitless with zero guidance.
I didn’t want to write a whole novel above but I also just took the LSAT and would love to get into legal work or compliance (though not litigation).
I have a huge fear that literally every field is saturated now. Even law schools have seen their application rates go drastically up this past year, which is terrifying thinking of committing to something so time consuming and possibly expensive and being unable to find a job at the end of it.
I believe a large part of it is because I’m (undiagnosed) autistic and not the type that seems extremely smart. I’ll be honest that I’m scared even if I manage to finish some impressive solo projects to showcase, my “vibe” will keep interviewers from hiring me. I have a vibe of not being *unaware* socially, but just very stilted and awkward. I think the ideal path for someone like me would be to be self-employed but I’m not very talented in one particular field.
Interviewing is a skill like anything else that you can improve upon, and gets easier the more you do it. Clubs like Toastmasters can get you comfortable with making speeches too, but you needn't go this far. Practice with someone ready and willing to help. People on platforms like reddit have reached out to offer helping me prep for interviews (on the cscareeradvice sub and the like).
The market is rough across the board in tech, Data Science may be no more saturated than anything else. That said, you're competing against people with Computer Science degrees and a portfolio. If you focus on an intersection of certain skills that are sought after in related positions like Data Engineer, that might give you a leg up, as a candidate that knows a bit about everything. Cloud is big now in all of tech, you could integrate AWS/Azure in your projects.
If you're considering education, a Master's in Data Science or Computer Science can make up for the fact that you don't have that B.A. There are also post-graduate certificates that some schools offer, but go for the Masters. These have some clout, the certificates and "bootcamps" don't so much. Self-study is an option, but if you go that way you might as well do it cheaply, and then use that knowledge to build something.
And all that aside, if you aren't married to the idea of Data Science, don't need to be constrained to that. Find out where there's demand, and retrain. Hell you could do the trades.
I cannot help you - just writing to commiserate. I've been looking for a job for years now with zero success. Not a single interview. (was looking while working at jobs I knew I wanted to quit as soon as I found a new one). Circumstances that led to both proper jobs I have held were unusual, and neither occurred through an online job application.
All companies I have worked for have really liked me - I did lots of good work for them. I am pretty confident that I am actually a valuable / high quality hire. But I just absolutely cannot get through the first stage filters on the internet application systems. I have various theories why, but won't go into personal details here. I am clearly not good at picking up what kinds of things I need to put on my resume and cover letters, but it is extremely frustrating to try to figure out what I am missing with zero feedback. I am getting pretty forlorn / hopeless / depressed at this point.
I think something about the online job application system is just deeply broken. Something something lack of personal connection. My only advice to you would be to do what I am desperately trying to pull together the willpower to do: just show up at places and ask to see if HR will talk to me. I've met people who have told me this worked like a charm for them. This establishes that you are a real person that is polite and presents well, and is motivated enough to make the effort, which is hopefully at least enough to get them to talk to you a little.
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There are a couple things that I think could help me. One would be attending career fairs / hiring events. I've heard that these exist. I live in Los Angeles, so surely if they exist I should be able to find some in my area. And yet I cannot find them online. Admittedly my google-fu seems to be terrible - I often find myself struggling to find useful information online these days. I can find lots of references to hiring events in the past. Even the recent past. But the only postings I can find for future dates have been on military bases which I assume I cannot access. Does anybody have any suggestions for what magic words I have to use to find postings for these? Or did humanity collectively decide to stop hosting these in the last few months?
Second would be a reverse recruiter. I understand how normal recruiters work, but the problem is I can't seem to get them (or more likely the machine filters they use to scan millions of profiles on linked in) to spend the time to realize that I might be a person worth working on placing. If I could hire somebody to place me, that would be ideal. Thing is, I have talked to lots of people who say this is super obviously a thing, and that they should be easy to find, and yet again, my internet skills have been unable to uncover any. And I have also been told by plenty of other people that reverse recruiting is a scam, or that there is no market for it. For what it is worth, I'd be willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars (not that I can afford that right now, but I could if I got a job) to get placed in a quality position with a decently high salary. Again, I'm pretty sure I am highly placable. But I have been unable to find a way to make it happen.
Third would be if companies were willing to interview candidates for just... some job at the company. Not a specific role, necessarily. Interview me, see if I might be a good fit for something. I might be an excellent fit for some task you don't even realize you could hire somebody for! I'm more interested in some job at your company, rather than this particular job right here. I find it so difficult to choose between any of the hundreds of similar listings at many large companies, but you know better than I exactly what you are looking for, and exactly what I may and may not be qualified for.
I understand that that last one is a much harder sell, but perhaps somebody out there could help with the first two?
The first thing I would try before showing up at a business is attending a trade show, conference, or other industry event where people might be looking for people like you. Some have discounted rates foe job seekers.
Yeah, I've been thinking this too. Big one I am familiar with isn't until September, though since I am not working, I guess the opportunity cost to travel is lower than usual, so maybe I should be more willing to travel long distance. I will look into this.
> All companies I have worked for have really liked me - I did lots of good work for them. I am pretty confident that I am actually a valuable / high quality hire. But I just absolutely cannot get through the first stage filters on the internet application systems
You know that people usually get jobs through connections rather than through internet application systems, right? Have you tried hitting up all your former colleagues?
Yeah, this is good advice, and I have tried this a decent amount. First company wasn't the right kind of place to do this. It was a small operation, with most people either too loyal to the owner to quit or move on, or people I wouldn't want to work with or who wouldn't be good references. The one good person from there I have reached out to. He quit shortly after I did and has been struggling even more than I, mostly doing freelance work. We have been discussing starting a business though.
Second company was a much better place to network, and I did a much better job. Most of the ones I networked with there are still there, and many have been there so long that they might not have many good connections from their previous lives, though I suppose I could try asking. A couple I have talked with about starting a business, same as above. Another is one who, while I don't really blame them, due to the circumstances they were in, kind of screwed me over multiple times, and I don't think I would feel comfortable asking them.
I agree that the job application system is deeply broken. I mean seriously each job gets hundreds of applicants, many of which aren’t even in the same state or country as the job. I don’t know what the solution should be, but it’s so dysfunctional. I can’t even look on LinkedIn or any job board nowadays because I just know dozens or more people have already applied.
I’ve written some fantastic cover letters and “essay responses” for jobs only to get an email two days later saying the position isn’t actually being filled, or that they’re moving on with more qualified candidates. I’m just so envious of my parents and future generations who could go walk into a place and hand them a resume.
I’ll be honest that I don’t think that method would even work for me and hasn’t so far. I was on a roll of attending a few networking events or just talking to people I volunteered with/was part of a committee with. They all seemed kind of like condescending or just… not helpful when I mentioned I was looking for a job in the field.
Like I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I think it’s partially because I just don’t have tangible skills. I can’t be like “oh I’m a really good coder” or “I’ve raised millions of dollars in grant funds” or anything like that. I really regret not choosing a different degree.
But I also think it’s just because I don’t have a likable personality, which is v depressing. I’ve really done a lot of work on myself. I used to be the mute kid who almost never talked in school. Now I do make jokes and go up to people and ask them questions. But I’ve just always felt like many of the people who’ve met me sense there’s something off with me (which I suspect is autism) and just dislike me, which is why I can’t get past the interview stage. I’m like genuinely really surprised I’ve ever gotten past the interview stage in the past. This shit is really fucking with my head lately.
Sorry for the long rant. One thing I plan to do when I get out of the winter funk more is get more into my local nature/foraging clubs and just do more in general and see if that leads anywhere.
Yeah, I have gotten lots of bad or non useful advice about job searching over the years. There are also a lot of condescending attitudes that revolve around the idea that, "companies are desperate to hire good people. If you can't find a good job it must mean there is something wrong with you." Which, while I am not perfect, is also ignoring what is in my opinion the more salient issue: It is really difficult to credibly signal real value. I've done lots of difficult things successfully, but how does an employer really know that? How to get them to believe I can actually do hard things? Just because I put it on my resume? Lots of people lie on their resumes. How do they really know I am not lying. This has not been made any easier by my relative inability to build up a portfolio. Both companies I have worked for have been secretive / paranoid, and would not be happy about me, say, taking pictures of the things I have built and showing them around. And a lot of the work I do is pretty intangible and difficult to document anyway.
Degree choice is difficult. I have grown more and more to think schools / universities are exploitative over the years. One the one hand, I don't think universities should be condescending and prevent students from committing to degrees that are overabundant and won't lead to good work outcomes. But on the other I think it is exploitative and cruel to burn up so much of young peoples' time, energy, and money to give them a low-demand degree. I don't know how to solve this issue. And at this point worrying about it really won't help anybody.
Personality is difficult to judge. I don't know you, obviously, but I feel similar: somewhat autistic, and for most of my life I thought of myself as un-charismatic, un-talkative, bad at socializing and making friends. Never thought of myself as somebody who could succeed in a business environment, handle office politics, etc. And yet, as time went on and I got a little older I found that just wasn't true. I don't even think my personality changed, really, I just got more comfortable with myself, stopped worrying too much about what other people thing, and perhaps most importantly, realized that everybody has problems and insecurities and is struggling with things. I'm not sure I can offer any practical advice, other than to stay self aware, always work on improving yourself, and try to not worry too much or overthink things. Though I understand that last one is very difficult, I am still not very good at it myself.
Let me know if you think it could be helpful to try to collaborate in any way on the job hunt. I feel like it could be helpful to have somebody to hold me accountable and keep me on track, but I also doubt it would be practical. But you won't know until you try.
If linkedin doesn't work quickly, leave; its NOT real networking; masturbation that isnt even fun. The statistics of linked in applications turning into jobs are not great.
We'll see what happens economically in the next year; but if things are being ripped apart at the seams, the "normal plans" will be planning for failure so you need to do anything else. Business started during the great ressesion grew rapidly in the fertile soil afterwards.
> I’ve really applied to so much (particularly on Idealist as I’d love a humanitarian/nonprofit job) and haven’t gotten anything; hardly ever get emails back.
I can't speak for other sectors, but in tech, any decent position that gets publicly listed anywhere will get *hundreds* of resumes within days. Depending on just how hardly "hardly ever" is here, it's either completely unavoidable or a sign that you might be being screened out automatically. In either case, your odds are far better if you can find a way around the normal resume submission process altogether. Getting a referral from someone you know is ideal, of course, but even cold-emailing people and asking to talk about their work over coffee will probably have a higher success rate.
I did try to have a handful of “informational interviews” with people a few months ago. I also was volunteer grant writing for a company I liked. I was hopeful these avenues might lead somewhere but they haven’t. It’s honestly really shot down my self esteem.
I’m hoping it’s because I just don’t have 1-2 skills that really “stick out.” Like if I were really talented at graphic design or GIS or something.
I know I would be great specializing at whatever I’m able to put my mind to, but I feel like I haven’t been given the chance to. I know that sounds very self-pitying. I’ve wanted to find a path and have something to show for it, whether that be a paralegal certificate, GIS classes with a portfolio of maps I created, or python coding with a portfolio. Anything like that where there’s tangible skills I can showcase. I just haven’t been able to decide.
I would stay away from GIS. That is a more mature niche field than the data-wrangling positions more in vogue now. The map-making is more trivial than ever, and teams will only get smaller. Your average data analyst can quickly learn how to create a crude map. Most companies do not need maps, and those that do are refining their process and finding ways to cut cost.
In a job search, 2x as many results come up for Data Science over here. 3x as much for Data Analyst.
There's also the two different types of geospatial positions. The one you're thinking of is cartographic in nature, where the goal is well designed aesthetically pleasing maps created for a certain audience. Very competitive and comparatively rare. The other more common position deals with analysis, ETL / conversion and projections, georeferencing, and procedurally churning out maps that convey essential information, e.g. engineering data. You could have an entire GIS career having only spent a collective 60 min "designing a map".
I haven't found a great one that only does AI/ML. But more generally, for the hardware side anything with Dylan Patel or the SemiAnalysis guys is a good bet.
I'm not even American and these takes seemed to be wholly against the general ethos of the blog to embrace mistake theory and respond accordingly, even in the face of conflict theorists.
American progressives are secular cultists. They have little regard for principle or intellectual consistency and view the world through a semi-fanatical ideological lens. Don't waste your time with them.
People are people, so that's why it should be--blue and red should get along so awfully.
Rationalists try to get away from it but we're still apes and we like to form tribes and fight each other. I do think rationalists are a little better at it than most, but monke gonna monke.
I think this is a misread of what most people were saying, though I will say I didn't read every comment in that thread. My read was that many people were assuming that Cruz was not truth seeking, and were surprised that Scott seemed to approach the topic as if Cruz WAS truth seeking. This is more cynicism about politics and about Cruz than it is "how dare you not call the reds evil without thinking". Scott could've written the same post but opened with "Cruz is a motivated actor and this database is likely just a stunt but I'll analyze it anyway" and a lot of those comments you're referring to probably would've disappeared
It could have been I was just reading it too early and that coming from other subreddits I was in the wrong mind. I went back to the thread and the top comments seem a lot better now than my memory, though statements like "Scott has been a tad too charitable to the maga crowd for a while now. Not by that much, I appreciate a measure of nuance, but they have escalated things to the point that it feels unreasonable to extend even the most basic charity." still stand out to me.
Perhaps some of the now deleted comments were what stood out to me as unusual.
What the hell do they want him to do anyways? He's not going to accomplish anything by turning against the administration. Endorsing Kamala was already a completely unnecessary risk, and they still want him to dig his own grave?
I'm sure this has been asked before, but what's a good financial hedge against the scenario where AGI leads to enormous increase in returns to investment? I'm moderately early in my career, and in the long run (assuming my job isn'e replaced by AI) I have pretty good financial prospects, but by virtue of being fairly young, I'm nowhere near peak-savings. So I'm thinking maybe I should invest a significant fraction of my portfolio in something that will have high returns in the event of AGI. If AGI doesn't pan out in the near future, I can take a loss since I'll have 30-some years of high income to compensate.
You don't want to find yourself covered in moss. That implies one is stagnant, not moving forward, stuck. I'd be surprised to hear people that took the opposite learning from this.
Yeah, I had the same interpretation you did, but older books are unanimous in asserting the proverb means something like gadabouts will never achieve success, and my surprise at reading these are what prompted this poll.
Second, as you might expect for a phrase of no certain meaning, this proverb is never actually used. There are a total of 18 hits for it in COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English), ranging from 1992 to 2014. This is few enough that I'll analyze all of them.
There are two duplicate entries, so only 16 samples. There are four samples in which rolling is good. There are zero samples in which rolling is bad. In the remaining twelve samples, the proverb is merely cited as an example of a proverb, with no meaning provided. (In one of those cases, one character provides this proverb as an example of a proverb that a mentally retarded person might struggle to define, which seems ironic.) In one of those "no meaning given" samples, a direct analogy is drawn between the ability of a rolling stone to avoid growing moss, and the failure of a sloth to avoid growing algae; you could fairly interpret this as a fifth case in which rolling is good.
So: the proverb is never used to imply that rolling is bad.
25% of the time, it's used to imply that rolling is good and people need to do it.
75% of the time, it's used to display the fact that you've heard of this proverb.
This is not a healthy state of affairs for a figure of speech. Nobody uses it or knows what it's supposed to mean.
English (and presumably other languages) is full of dead idioms that rise ghost-like under false pretenses—no one says “the cat’s pajamas” naturally any more, bit every once in a while someone has to blurb a new Garfield movie or make a punny greeting card featuring a kitten, and cranks out “the cat’s pajamas” as though it were an everyday phrase. It’s interesting if the rolling stone proverb becomes a dead proverb, an example of a proverb that is never proverbially cited. Certainly although I am someone who often tells my kids “many hands make light work” or “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” I’ve never once told them about rolling stones or moss.
I appreciate your research very much and my only counterexample is what is probably the most famous relatively recent (within living memory, although before I or may of us was born) use of the proverb—not in full, but as a clear reference: Bob Dylan in “Like a Rolling Stone.” In the song the rolling stone is clearly someone who both shirks attachment and lacks money (“without a home like a complete unknown”) and the song is critical of such a person. I knew (and possibly misunderstood) the proverb long before I knew the Dylan song.
But all the data people have given is very helpful. At the very least I am glad that I (whose instinct was also (a)) am not a party of one in my understanding of this ambiguous phrase.
In my country this almost always gets paired with another proverb: "Wer rastet, der rostet" which translates to "He who rests, rusts". Moving or action is the virtue here, while standing still is considered bad. But maybe these are just remnants of german work ethic.
B. GK Chesterton (Heretics): In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
I have never heard the phrase be used by someone who is advising you to KEEP rolling, they are always using the metaphor extoll the virtues of not rolling, so in context the speaker of the phrase means (b).
I had always used it like that (in a "no flies on me" sense), but I kept reading in proverb books that the proverb indicated that gadding about leaves you with no cash. The moss is cash. This is not how I had interpreted things.
I guess it's true that Bob Dylan uses it negatively.
My understanding is that it used to be a bad thing, but now considered neutral to good.
I take the proverb to refer to someone without attachment to place or community, "rootless cosmopolitans," if you like, but the recent cultural trend towards deëmphasis of such attachments now makes the connotation neutral-to-positive. (It may also be just be due to people encountering moss much less out in nature, and thinking of it as basically mold that you definitely don't want to gather.)
The action of rolling is neutral. It is a metaphor for accretion; a person who moves around rootlessly may be a vagabond, or they may be someone free and unburdened by what has been. They may have no ties or loyalties, or they may have broad sympathies because they are free of parochial ties. Poverty or riches, it all depends.
If you are trying to judge if the person will stick by you and be dependable, then the absence of ties and permanence can be a warning sign: this is someone who moves on, who shakes free of any encumbrances. They may not be likely to stick around when you need them.
Very interesting. Older books (the kind I usually read) seem unanimous in viewing moss as just money (as older slang dictionaries gloss "moss" anyway).
I hadn't heard it as money, specifically, but that the 'moss' is attachments, roots, and the kind of success that comes from staying in one place and building upon that so you have a house, family, etc. which would include money, but as one result of becoming prosperous.
Why did this comment lead to a suspension? Was it mentioning the type of trauma, referring to politics, not being clear?? I'm confused about the hard handling of what seems to me to be just a confused question
There were something like 8 spammy comments (or one-line non-sequiturs) from this commenter earlier. The one with the suspension announcement appears to be the only one that wasn't deleted.
The “center for Education progress” is one of the worst cases of Americans Forgetting Other Countries Exist (TM) I have seen recently.
There are already many countries that track and divide students. I can’t think of a European country with only one type of “high school”, in most there are several types with some being academic, others vocational. In Germany kids are already divided into these different tracks at age 12 ish. Yet all they link to on their reading list are a handful of expensive experimental private schools in the Anglosphere.
Also, not a single mention of Finland, the education system regarded as best in the world?
Not looking what is done outside your borders just seem to have you shoot yourselves in the foot.
To be fair, tracking/streaming/sorting out kids by level of academic ability has been attacked in Europe as well. But yes, it does seem that this is a case of "too young to have experienced it himself" in action.
> But yes, it does seem that this is a case of "too young to have experienced it himself" in action.
Not at all; there's an extensive history of tracking within the US. Referring to other countries might be nice but doesn't provide anything we don't already have.
It's not a matter of forgetting other countries exist. They're around, we want to look at them, we want to understand the best. But yes, we're starting with the Anglosphere. Why? First, because as a policy-focused group, we have to focus somewhere for policy, and America is the place we're most interested in changing. Second, because the resources we link are the ones I can personally vouch for after examination. Third, because others know a lot more about the details of their countries than I do, and I want to do more than just gaze from a distance.
That sort of empty celebration of the systems of other countries is one reason I pause before diving headlong into them. Yes, there is plenty to learn from Europe, from Russia and China and Iran and Singapore and elsewhere. And yes, I want to distill the best lessons from all. But no, I'm not going to lead off with them when examining American policy—nor should I have.
I liked most of the post, but specifically the part about hall passes bothered me - I've never heard of them being used outside america, they feel super weird to me and I don't see why you would want them in a good education system.
(More cynically, they're probably useful for enforcing discipline on the low end of students while the high end don't need them and you guys are trying to help education across the spectrum while I mostly just care about the high end).
Yeah, hall passes are the kind of thing when explained sound like "what the hell?" but I suppose if American schools routinely have pupil counts in the high hundreds to low thousands, you need some sort of disciplinary structure.
But gosh, all the same. All I had to learn when I was four was the phrase taught to me by my father: an bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas? No "you have to get a hall pass to go to the bathroom which may or may not be given out due to the whimsy of the teacher" (the one time I was told to wait and wasn't allowed out, I promptly threw up all over my desk, which at least demonstrated I wasn't pretending in order to get out of class).
Yeah, that was sloppy. It's not the funding that gets him sued, it's a goal that won't instantly be identified as a disparate impact lawsuit waiting to happen--and thus he won't get funding.
Literally everything Trace wants is going to be a problem. He's basically saying "start a school that's only for smart kids and they've got to be smart kids who want to work fast and brag about how smart they are" and any such effort with public funds is going to be a walking disparate impact lawsuit.
If he does it as a private school fine, but his gameplan is one that expressly appeals to Asian culture (speed and transcript without depth) and Asians, they prefer finding public schools they can apply to and get for free.
I think what Trace doesn't quite understand is that as a rule, Americans (and I mean Americans of any race) really don't find his educational vision attractive.
> I think what Trace doesn't quite understand is that as a rule, Americans (and I mean Americans of any race) really don't find his educational vision attractive.
Wha? Different worlds - everywhere I've lived, if tracking has a .001% higher chance of your tracked kid getting into Harvard, every single parent will be vociferously demanding it, even if it costs 2x as much.
The laws, and the courts that apply and interpret those laws, haven't changed yet and don't look like they're going to be changed any time soon. This isn't a problem that can even theoretically be solved by firing executive-branch bureaucrats, because the bureaucrats have little to do with the process by which people wind up facing ruinous lawsuits for no good reason.
And I'm not saying that crippling fear of lawsuit is justified in this case; the problem may be overhyped and exaggerated in this context. I don't know. But to the extent that it was a problem last year, it's still a problem this year and will be next year.
Of course. A major part of the priority for our legal team is mapping out the specific details of the current legal frame and building a legal framework for excellence. The legal landscape has plenty of challenges but it's not hopeless by any means.
YOu tend to focus on acceleration. If that has changed, great. If not, I fear the legal issues will be overwhelming. Plus, I think you'll find most parents don't want it.
If most parents don't want what I want, I won't ask them to accept it, but I will absolutely work to carve out space for it so those who share my preferences can find space for them.
As for what most parents want—whatever people say they want, the Mastermans and Stuyvesants and Lowells of the world have never been short on applications from interested families. Excellence speaks for itself.
Actually, the interested families for Stuyvesants and Lowells are overwhelmingly Asian and most of the whites applying are likewise immigrants. There's a reason that Harvard and other elite schools discriminate against Asians--not a good one, but a reason--and the reason is "whites no like, elites no like".
the more Asians apply, the fewer whites--and also Hispanics and blacks--apply. the trick is to become excellent in a way that doesn't reward grinding and does reward intelligence and creativity--and creating a school about here's how fast we can learn really isn't it.
Not really. Would one-on-one tutoring be theoretically optimal? Sure. Am I primarily interested in solutions that require more funding or place unrealistic expectations on teachers? Not really. The "many kids to pay attention to" line was an aside to note that it's not something I expect individual teachers to be able to fix.
Ability grouping allows teachers to understand and teach to the level of the students they actually have much better than heterogeneous grouping; acceleration allows students to progress appropriately to higher levels rather than waiting at low levels. Neither requires additional resources.
I don't think it's about 'gifted programs' so much as having one class for those who can learn calculus and another for those for whom arithmetic is an aspiration.
Small schools can pull off tracking by mixing grade levels. In my small rural school, students could start Algebra I in 7th, 8th, or 9th grade, depending on the results of a test in 6th grade; classrooms were often mixed-grade. Individual students could (with some parental prodding) start the series two years early, ending with college courses in 11th-12th grade.
Meanwhile, a friend in a large suburban school nearby had trouble taking calculus early because the classes were full and older students got scheduling priority.
Student:teacher ratio is mostly a distraction, in truth. The big effect sizes haven’t panned out, and curriculum is overwhelmingly more important. While schools like Stuyvesant aren’t the solution for everywhere, they’re a good idea in many places where they currently face regulatory barriers. Tracking is effective for more than just gifted programs; splitting students by ability first rather than age is beneficial for many more than just the top 2% of any given age cohort.
I’ll make a strong claim here: a school with a teacher:student ratio of 30:1, using sensible ability grouping and adjusting curriculum appropriately by group, would do much more to help students at all levels progress than one with mixed classes and a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, following an age-locked curriculum.
For god's sakes, don't tell Trace that. He'll block you.
Trace is one of those people who think going through the curriculum = learning. I wonder if he read Michael Pershan's most recent article. Probably, since he and Michael wrote the winning collaborative article mentioned.
But it just drives me crazy to read people going "look, some kids can learn the second grade curriculum in six weeks. Why do they have to spend a year?" It's not that I disagree, but the answer is not "go on to third grade" but "kick their asses learning how to use and reason with the second grade curriculum for another six months".
I understand that there is some tension between acceleration and depth, but I do not think that they are the opposites either.
For example, you can do some extra exploration of "addition up to 100" beyond the standard lessons, but the entire year is probably too much. And yet, that's apparently the amount of time the average children need to learn how to calculate 46+37 reliably. One of my kids could do that before school. And it's not because we spent too much time learning math together (I actually regret not spending more time with my kids, but after work I am usually quite burned out). It's just, one day I mention "you know, 20+30 is kinda like 2+3, only with tens instead of units", then a week or two later "to calculate 21+36, you may want to calculate 20+30 first, then 1+6, and then put it together", and a few more weeks later "it's more complicated with 27+38, but maybe do 7+8=15 first, and when you do 20+30 remember that there is also the extra +10". That was all it took. It made a lot of difference that the child was actually interested in numbers (the other one is just as smart, but not interested in topics like this).
Also, if you do the elementary topics faster, then you can have more depth with the more complex ones. Or you can introduce topics that otherwise would not be mentioned.
My worry is the opposite: if you tell teachers "don't ever accelerate, only add more depth", you will probably end up with... not much depth added.
I probably share some of your concerns. But here's the problem: teaching depth requires smart teachers. Not geniuses, but smart teachers. Or at least really good ones. Acceleration can be done by any teacher. Just teach the same topic with all the shallow speedy coverage that is done now.
And most Americans *don't* want that. (Asians tend to, on the other hand.)
the problem is that it's easier to diversify with acceleration and easy versions of the classes and you won't get in as much trouble with the racial representation crowd.
Another problem is that kids who accelerate might hit a wall and there's nowhere to go. They go from As to flunking, and there's nowhere to put them.
"you know, 20+30 is kinda like 2+3, only with tens instead of units", then a week or two later "to calculate 21+36, you may want to calculate 20+30 first, then 1+6, and then put it together", and a few more weeks later "it's more complicated with 27+38, but maybe do 7+8=15 first, and when you do 20+30 remember that there is also the extra +10".
This is *exactly* the type of teaching that is derided by most of the people pimping acceleration today. (not Trace, but generally)
> This is *exactly* the type of teaching that is derided by most of the people pimping acceleration today.
Interesting.
When I teach my kids something, I try to balance two concerns. On one hand, they are clearly much smarter than the school expects from them. It would be a waste of a good brain not to tell them something more. On the other hand, the school still gives them a lot of tasks and takes away a lot of their time, so I don't want to create an additional burden. I definitely don't want to make them *hate* math, or learning in general. (If I remember correctly, the "Tiger Mom"'s daughter hates her.)
> Acceleration can be done by any teacher.
Ah, now I think I understand your point: "do the same thing, but twice as fast" is the lazy solution that anyone can imagine, but that is not the right approach. I mean, some speedup between 10% and 30% would probably be okay, but the real benefit comes from better internalizing the knowledge and applying it to more situations, and maybe including a few more things that didn't fit in the standard curriculum but which are not really more complicated.
For example -- this is a stupid example, to make it short -- you could have kids in 1st grade solve sudoku (the 4x4 version, with only rows and columns). This is not normally done, but it is not fundamentally more difficult than the things they already do, and it invites further exploration. (Such as "how many ways are there to put numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 in a row?" Which, of course, I would only expect them to solve by trying to enumerate all possible combinations, probably as a collective effort.)
"kick their asses learning how to use and reason with the second grade curriculum for another six months"
You seem to be making the exact same error that your imaginary opponents are making, which is treating the "standard" curricula as if they were God-given facts of the universe.
There is, of course, no such thing as "the second grade curriculum". There is only whatever curriculum people choose to use when teaching some seven-year-olds. There is no reason to suspect that a good curriculum for gifted seven-year-olds would look anything like the standard curriculum currently used for seven-year-old children --- nor like the standard curriculum used for eight- or ten-year-old children either.
(I rather doubt that the optimal curriculum for *average* seven-year-olds looks much like the standard curriculum, either, but that's beside the point.)
While some people do make the error of trying to optimize for blowing through the standard curriculum as fast as possible, as far as I'm aware it's mostly an error at the individual level, a goal of parents and students who are naive to the actual depth of the subjects. I encountered the same underlying error mostly from "normies" who used to ask me what "comes after" a certain math topic, as if all of mathematics were linearly organized into some standard set of courses which started with counting in kindergarten and ended with some sort of super-calculus sometime in college. And, of course, from the current school system itself, which seems to know no way of serving gifted student other than "skipping grades", a remedy which it is nevertheless loath to employ.
I have never seen this error made by any serious advocate for gifted education, and I don't see TracingWoodgrains making it here either. In fact, he cites Art of Problem Solving below as a (remarkably successful) attempt to actually design a curriculum around the needs of gifted students.
The reason people talk about acceleration and speed is that:
(a) while it's not *ideal*, it's better than the status quo of *effectively nothing*,
(b) it's plausible to do acceleration within the current school setting without investing in developing entire new curricula, which makes it *less* of a tough sell,
(c) the current sorry excuses for gifted programs at many schools think they are providing suitable "enrichment" with nonsense like one hour a week of pullout sessions, and it needs to be emphasized that this is not what's desired, and
(d) a good gifted curriculum *will* be "accelerated" relative to what's being taught to average students. It won't just be "go through the standard stuff as fast as possible", that's stupid, but it will cover more advanced material than what can be taught to average students.
I suggest that you actually take a look at the Art of Problem Solving curricula to see what Trace is advocating for before you slander him. Your proposed "solution" will be *worse* than pure acceleration through the standard curriculum, which is --- and I am sure Trace will wholeheartedly agree --- already a massively suboptimal second-best compromise.
I didn't just read it, it was one-half of the product of another sort-of-adversarial-collaboration on our parts. My own review will be forthcoming shortly; unsurprisingly, I think he badly misrepresented the program and wholly failed to do it justice.
Acceleration and depth are not incompatible. An ideal curriculum for the strongest students can and should provide both. There's no iron law of education that the amount of material provided in any given school year is the ideal amount for any given child to engage with.
I won't drag my Twitter drama here, but re: blocking, suffice to say that I found our Twitter interactions more frustrating than productive over a long period of time, even when we were ostensibly on the same side of a topic. I still read and respect your output elsewhere.
They don't have to be. However, I have never seen anyone focus on acceleration who is interested in depth. They are always talking about how much further they or kids could get. ALways. Always always. And here I'm not just or even primarily referring to you.
I focus on both. Art of Problem Solving isn't a radically accelerated curriculum, it's a radically deepened curriculum, and it's the state-of-the-art for math; I sing its praises constantly. Depth and pace are both part of getting further into any given subject. I'm interested in the nuts and bolts of building expertise, not party tricks.
Are you being willfully obtuse? What TracingWoodgrains is saying is that AoPS is state-of-the-art as a *gifted* curriculum for math. Of course, "gifted" is a wide enough range that the optimal curricula for different subgroups will be different, but AoPS is by far the best extensive curriculum on offer; there's no other real contenders.
And his point in citing Art of Problem Solving is to rebut your nonsense accusation that what he's advocating for is mere acceleration through the standard curriculum -- a point which I notice you ignored.
I know I’m being uncharitable, and they did mention they didn’t want a world of “gifted haves and non gifted have-nots”… but this really smells like a bunch of rats wanting to make Einsteins out of their offspring in an “optimised” rationalist way, and little else.
I'm totally uncharitable (in no small part because Trace blocks me because he wants sympathy), but I totally support actual tracking. We need it. What we *don't* need is acceleration.
And there's no way for Trace to get what he wants without identifying the kids who want to learn fast for bragging rights without ever actually having to integrate their knowledge and no, Trace isn't snotty, but that's who will qualify.
The parent comment is surely tongue-in-cheek. But, I am sure that Elon Musk is quite fine with people who say "Elon Musk is having kids so I won't have kids", not having kids.
Maybe I missed something that happened in the past few days, but it was already last year that JD Vance started polarizing the Democrats against pro-natalism (unfortunately, in my opinion, because I'm a strong supporter of the Democrats and strongly pro-natalist). I haven't heard anything specifically about pro-natalism in the past few days, amidst all the other constitutional chaos, so I assume you're just thinking that in the past few days Elon Musk finally turned Democrats against him, but that seems like a misread to me.
I think this is stuck in the six-months-ago-world where having the liberal media mad at you is a huge setback. Maybe it would be for certain things where you need the liberal media's buy-in, but those are getting less and less, and I think the two things pronatalists want (government support, support from the average child-considering couple) don't.
I do think if you're pronatalist for anything like eugenicist reasons you eventually need to convince elite human capital, who do listen to the liberal media a lot, but I think you can work in the long term on that one.
I don't agree. You're not taking into account people's reaction to Trump's approach to government re-design. Most Democrats are horrified by, for ex., Trump's shuttering of the Dept. of Education. Even those who think it's unlikely education is going straight to hell and staying there are alarmed by how badly planned all these shutdowns are -- how there's no effort to reduce collateral damage and chaos, which in many cases would have been simple to do (just as it would have been simple to identify the research proposals that actually had Woke agendas).
And I now know 3 people whose lives are changed for the worse, or might well be, by Trump policies. One is a trans man who cannot renew his passport because his new one will show his biological gender, female. There is no way this guy could pass for female when he flies. The second is a young guy who is working on a Comp Sci degree at Harvard Extension School. He got a Pell grant for the coming term, then a call from Harvard saying they may have to cancel it because of the shuttering of the Dept of Ed. The third is my daughter, who has an engineering degree and works for the. Dept. of Environmental Protection. While she works for the state, not the fed, there is concern at her workplace that they may be shut down.
So I am seeing worsenings happening to well-educated white professionals. None are for sure or awful, but the situation's going in a bad direction and really got my attention. If I were now at the age where one has children, I am positive I'd be less likely to do it than I was 25 years ago. Would also be looking for ways to leave the country, something my daughter and her boyfriend are presently considering.
I don't blame you, but those all sound like people the right would want out of the country (except your daughter if she went to work for someone other than the department of environment protection).
I mean...if more liberals leave, the country goes right, right?
Being less likely to have kids because a trans person might have an uncomfortable conversation at the airport and someone might have to take out student loans in place of a Pell Grant is ... kind of an overreaction IMHO.
Yeah, they probably won't. I would retire and move to the Netherlands or New Zealand with them, but they'd have to leave behind her boyfriend's family and lots of friends. I'm sure that of the people considering leaving the US, most will end up staying.
Hang on, your daughter would leave the country rather than try and find a new job, like everyone else has to do when/if their employer shuts down or has rounds of voluntary redundancies/layoffs?
I'm going to assume you mean she means that the general tenor of how things are going distresses her to the point of "I don't want to live here anymore", but if she emigrates to New Zealand, she's going to have to apply for all sorts of jobs and indeed prove in the first place that she's a skilled worker who can help with their shortage of specific skills:
"Search the Green List to see if your role is Tier 1 for a Straight to Residence Visa or Tier 2 for a Work to Residence Visa, and what qualifications, registration or experience you need to apply. "
The main point of my mentioning daughter's potential job loss was that her situation was one of 3 I have heard of in my fairly small circle where someone's life had or might soon hit a road block as a result of Trump's dismantlings of things. I did not intend it as an explanation of why she was considering a move to New Zealand. The point was that presidents come and presidents go, but mostly my life and those of people I know isn't greatly changed by new policies. This guy has been in office a few weeks and already 3 people I know have been negatively affected.
Yes of course my daughter can get another job. That doesn't even worry her all that much. But her skills can be used for environmental protection, or for helping companies get around protection requirements. If we have fless enforcing of environmental protection laws, she thinks most jobs available will be of the other sort.
My daughter's (and her boyfriends') thinking about moving was set off by the stuff that is freaking out a lot of people -- the very high levels of hatred between groups, the godawful presidential candidate (who is now the godawful president), plus a general feeling that New Zealand is better governed. I have not looked carefully at info about that, but every so often I hear something and like what I hear. For instance, kids are not allowed to have cell phones at school, not even to use during lunch.
My daughter and her guy have thought they'd be pretty hirable in NZ, and when I checked the site you linked turns out they were right. Both have jobs here that are Tier 1 there.
Some friends of mine just moved to France. "They just let you in?" I asked. They applied for long-stay visa and they got it. They were told they'd need to wait 3 months to get the visa, but the French seem to be expediting visas for US citizens who want to leave after Trump got elected. Then I asked, "What about your Medicare? You can't use it in France." They're paying some absurdly low amount into French healthcare system to get healthcare. Wow!
Well, healthcare in France is cheap for *everyone* (and if you’re from the US, you don’t even compensate with French taxes).
You might not necessarily get the best possible American stuff (that a great US insurance might pay for), but it’s still pretty good and much less of a headache than what most Americans seem to have.
This is stupid take on my opinion; but elon is seen as a unprecedented pronatalist by the young perma online left. Elon is being attacked(and sure, in power), qed "no one will want children"
>elon is seen as a unprecedented pronatalist by the young perma online left
Not just perma online left. Many normies have only recently heard what "pronatalism" is. Associating it with Jerry Springer nonsense is not Good or The Cause.
I got into a row with Alexander over this before, but broadly his view is that having lots of kids is low-class behaviour and the way to go is to encourage lower middle-class people to emulate their betters, so as to (1) go to college or get a skilled trade (2) marry but don't have more than two kids after you plan out your career (3) don't marry too young, don't have kids young, don't have kids outside of marriage, don't have lots of kids - this is how high class, upper class people do it. Make sure your daughters (and sons, but more importantly daughters) know that you won't support them having babies outside of marriage at the wrong time, and if one of them is stupid enough to be careless and get pregnant while in high school/college, immediately schedule the abortion and make sure she's properly ashamed of herself so she won't do anything like that again.
Elon is certainly having lots of kids outside of marriage, so the rest of it (he's rich, he's not young, etc.) doesn't count. It's low class behaviour.
"The left" did not make the behavior described in the NYPost article low-class. That behavior has been low-class since the day our ancestors learned how to walk upright.
Hmm... Personally, I'm childfree, but this doesn't seem very different from any number of celebrity paternity scandals. Between DOGE, xAI/Grok 3, Tesla, and SpaceX, just in the category of "things Elon Musk is involved with", there are far more interesting and important options.
Shower thought: if malaria was just as prevalent, but spread by rats, it seems like there'd be a lot more within-EA turmoil between animal welfare advocates and public health advocates about the ethics of wiping out the transmission vector.
I don't think so. EAs are pretty good at not focusing on the most controversial example. There's probably some win-win bargain where you can kill all the rats that transmit malaria and fund better habitats for rabbits somewhere else.
Also, EAs tend to be less concerned about animal death and more concerned about animal suffering; while some ways of killing rats make them suffer, there are always alternatives.
I'm surprised nobody's brought this up, but the guy should try to mate with as genetically diverse women as possible. Different ethnic group every day. Intentional race-mixing of the offspring.
Probably the most realistic thing about this scenario: with the fate of the species hanging in the balance, everyone's first priority is making sure we aren't being racist.
Actually, no. I've been pretty critical of wokery elsewhere, but I can't expect you to remember the history of every single commenter on a substack where threads stretch into the hundreds.
My thought was, you have a catastrophe. You want to maximize genetic diversity with one man and 4 billion women. Easiest way to do that, given the way the human family tree forked and only recently recombined across long distances, is going to be to have the guy mate with women carrying as wide a variety of genes as possible, i.e. women from different parts of the world.
Diversity usually isn't strength; it's potential division. But if you're talking about avoiding inbreeding, for once, diversity *is* strength!
I would actually ignore this. We already have a mandate to maximise genetic fitness (ie minimise health complications due to inbreeding) and we should let the maths of that govern the selection/matching process. If the geneticists' models happen to predict that diversity is our strength - which does seem likely to me - then that's what we do. If for some reason it doesn't, oh well, at least in 90years there'll be no one left to call us names about it.
> We already have a mandate to maximise genetic fitness (ie minimise health complications due to inbreeding) and we should let the maths of that govern the selection/matching process.
That begins and ends with telling the one man not to mate with members of his own family. He already doesn't want to do that and, since he's spoiled for choice, there's no way it will happen, so that advice means literally nothing. Once he's mating outside his family, the inbreeding coefficient is zero, and you're done avoiding inbreeding.
Anonymous Dude is correct that there is value to be gained by going for racial diversity.
What are you talking about? You have 40 years before every single viable option is someone from within his own family!
> Anonymous Dude is correct that there is value to be gained by going for racial diversity
I didn't say he wasn't. I said that we shouldn't make that the primary motivation in the task of effectively breeding a successor species that must be fit to survive in a far smaller, meaner world than ours.
If the best thing for that species is pure genetic variation than racial diversity will come along for the ride. If for some reason the geneticists come back and say there's a better algorithm that increases the chance of fit, independent people at the end, then their word should carry the weight.
Hopefully some of those women can figure out how to substitute a Y chromosome from the man in clones of the women. Then the only genetic diversity lost will be on the Y chromosome.
The man (let's call him Adam) would be producing enough sperm each day to impregnate 5-10 women a day. This isn't sex, which ejaculates more sperm than IVF, this is extraction and IVF. You have about a one in two chance of getting pregnant if all other factors are ideal. Since you're trying to save the human race presumably they would make it as ideal as possible. But keep in mind one part of being ideal is being in your late teens to early twenties. Let's say 18-28. And let's say they pump Adam full of hormones to keep sperm production on the higher end. That means, on average, about five new pregnancies a day.
Let's say (for legal reasons) Adam starts at 18 and dies at 78. So 60 years, 21,900 days. Assuming he never gets sick, every pregnancy is successful, and so on. That's 219,000 children 50% of which are boys. Each of whom can repeat this when they turn 18. But that takes 18 years and the population would rapidly age as there are no new births other than from Adam. This means you only get to do this for about 40 years until the only childbearing age women are also Adam's children.
This means the world population is rapidly trending toward a few hundred thousand people. This is both a practical problem and a relatively limited genetic pool even if you can make it so they don't start as highly related.
Honestly, I'd probably look into cloning sperm ASAP. And once you can do that adding some genetic randomness shouldn't be too hard.
I think we can forget about waiting for 18 when the fate of the species is at stake, but I also think it won't change the numbers by that much (you still have to wait for 13-ish so you only get a five year difference - wouldn't turn it down but it's not going to add an order of magnitude.)
So if we're looking at a resulting population of ~100,000 then what we need to be doing in the meantime is planning for a society that can work at that scale. Which means high tech approaches like sperm cloning have a very short window to git gud before the lifeforce goes out of the effort.
It would be good to know what fields we can expect to support in a society of that size.
You can subsistence farm with one family, because that plot of land has everything it needs to get up and go to work. But you can't modern-farm like that, because you're dependent on seeds, chemicals and equipment that have long supply chains involving millions of people.
I'm wondering if anyone has done any studies on the minimum viable size of an industry in that sense. Not necessarily the current size, but the size you could get away with if you have to.
I think with current technology you could genotype all the resulting kids and match the ones who coincidentally didn't get matching genes from their father.
These were the lines I was thinking along. But with the added dimension that you're basically trying to create a new species via artificial selection. As Erusian points out above, you're looking at an eventual population of ~100,000 people, and they'll need to be fit for the much smaller world they'll be born into.
This might be enough for well-staffed hospitals but probably isn't enough to support a bountiful pharma industry. So you'd want to engineer the future humans to be as healthy and un-dependent as possible.
Requirement #1 is probably women with childbearing hips who can give birth with as little risk or reliance of medical intervention as possible - even though for the first two generations these women will have all the world's maternity staff at their beck and call.
Make clones of dead men who aren't related to the living man. Use genetic engineering, or at least genetic screening, to remove defects in the living man's sperm. Use artificial insemination to increase how many children the living man can have. Try to make his descendants so numerous that lots of them avoid the problems from inbreeding through sheer luck.
I am blown away by the recent to me discovery that Mark Everett the singer songwriter rock star is the only son of Hugh Everett of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This seems to me to prove the theory in that you would expect him to be an accountant with people explaining the theory by saying There's even timelines in which Everett's son is a rock star.
For those unfamiliar with ME try the autobiographical song Mr E's Beautiful Blues.
Could someone guide me on creating a great curriculum to teach myself AI? I have a background in computer science, but from a long time ago. I'm a decent programmer but am a bit out of touch. I think my foundation is strong enough to be able to pick this up. I want to be able to build something simple using quickly, as a way to teach myself AI, rather than build a theoretical background first. That's the type of curriculum I want. Thanks.
Perhaps ironically, AI itself (o1, Claude, etc -- or should I say et al?) is uniquely good at this. AI has moved so fast that textbooks and courses are out of date by the time they're released, but you can be 100% sure that all of Arxiv is in every AI model training run. I would probably start up by asking for an up-to-date curriculum or syllabus on AI for a person exactly like you (detail your background, skills, and so on), then start with "ok today is lesson 1: basics of supervised learning, let's begin" and just rinse and repeat through the curriculum / syllabus.
I'll second that. And I would add Gemini and Perplexity to the 'faculty'. Also, just Googling for MOOCs and other online courses. I would start with The Stanford (or other) course on deep learning first, to get some experience with Pytorch platforms.
Remember last year when we learned that a single Boba Guys tea contains 1.2 *years* of safe BPA consumption according to the EFSA?
For people interested in avoiding plastic chemicals in the food supply chain (eg the PlasticList.org research referenced), I've launched an MVP that lets consumers collectively fund standardized lab testing through accredited facilities. All the results will be published openly *regardless* of findings (think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on measuring endocrine disruptors in food and drinks).
Especially given new challenges facing regulatory authority there's growing need for independent, market-driven product testing that isn't beholden to industry or political pressure.
Looking for feedback on the model, introductions to anyone interested in plastic chemicals specifically or food testing generally, or leads on grants that could help scale independent product testing. Thanks!
I have a feeling this is going to be one of the most important sentences written this century. This is a once in a lifetime event. Enjoy the show, ladies and gentlemen.
I don't think it will be going down as one of the most important sentences written this century, since for one thing it was written in 1838, by some guy who attributed it to Napoleon.
Dictator on day one probably is a better quote, but the second Trump presidency will probably be remembered more for his numerous extremely bad policy decisions. Right as the Second Cold War gets started, you undermine state capacity by filling it with cronies (who will then have to be replaced by the next administration, hopefully not with their own cronies), threaten to invade your allies, and damage your own economy with idiotic tariffs.
Oh yeah, and putting an antivaxxer in charge of HHS, and firing a bunch of FAA employees right after having five lethal plane accidents in your first month in office.
What, really? A Donald Trump tweet, or "truth" or whatever?
Your "once in a lifetime event" is something that has happened so often I don't even keep track any more. Donald Trump makes an offhand comment in some forum that, if it were the defining policy statement of his administration, would be a Really Big Deal. But then he makes a half-assed attempt at follow-through, and when things don't go his way he moves on to something else. Which will be announced in tweet that will get certain people talking about "once in a lifetime events", approximately once every fortnight,
You're right that it will be an enjoyable show, if you're in a certain frame of mind. Not really what I want in a President, frankly, but not the apocalypse you are predicting either.
If something really bad happens, I think saying he would be a “dictator on day one” will be what they talk about in 50 years. He told us what he wanted and a majority voted for it.
Sure, but that's not as catchy. And also nobody believed that because they're morons, but they can't make that excuse anymore, right? The people really do want this.
except it's also JD Vance saying that the courts shouldn't be able to rein in the president (at all seemingly) and the entire Republican media apparatus (from Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire to Fox News to Tim Poll to Joe Rogan to all in between) saying "yeah true the president can do no wrong".
Your post is infected with an error that perpetuates stuckness and angry disagreement: You're assuming that the people posting skeptical & cynical and mocking responses think Trump is going to end the world. You are thinking of them as people whose views are way far down at the very end of the anxious-about-Trump scale. Got good grounds for believing that's where they are? I'm pretty sure you don't, though correct me if you've read multiple posts about Trump by any of them. Unless you have, you are almost certainly wrong about their views.
You also portray them that way in your post, which is quite likely to irritate them. But just in case it doesn't, you add in a little fantasy about a time when these hysterial idiots turn out to be dead wrong about Trump ending life as we know it, and them humbly apologizing to you for their takes on the tweet in question.
So overall you were inaccurate, unpleasant and harmful. It is really not hard to recognize that you've written something that is guaranteed to increase irritation and lower the chance of people's grasping each other's points, considering info the routinely disregard. Why fucking act that way? It's dumb and harmful.
Oh, no need to defend me here. They're completely correct. Well okay, technically a few billion deaths isn't the end of the world. Humans are stubborn little critters, I'm sure they'll make do.
I personally don't see it as cynicism. It's more of a when-life-gives-you-lemons kind of deal. This is going to make for some damn good entertainment, that's for sure.
i know somebody who left home partway through college because his parents were crazy and violent. Has spent the last 5 years doing the kinds of work you can get without a college degree, and sometimes spending more money on his old dog’s food than on his own. He managed to get into a good program where he can finish his degree and is now working full time and taking 2 course a semester. He got a Pell grant this term, and that’s allowed him to pay off some debt and take better care of himself. He just got word that this terms
Pells may be canceled because the Dept of Ed is shuttered. There is nothing even mildly entertaining about this story. There are lots of stories out there like his.
It's just vague enough to allow multiple different interpretations, but I think a valid (and in my opinion the most likely) interpretation is a restatement of "the ends justify the means", saying that anything done in pursuit of "saving the country" can't be illegal.
"A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means." - Thomas Jefferson
People with congenital cognitive blindness don't get schizophrenia. It's a very rare sort of blindness, and means being completely blind from birth.
No one knows why this is, though Sapolsky suggests that the remaining senses are more tightly linking to make a model of the world, so hallucinations can't seem plausible.
I think people with congenital cognitive blindness should be asked how they think they're different from other people. There might be some clues in there.
Or there's some other gene going with the congenital cognitive blindness that protects from schizophrenia. I fee like the samples are too small to tell.
I remember looking at the actual data from the australian study.
No one in the sample had schizophrenia but the sample size was simply too low to actually determine that people with that condition dont get schizophrenia.
This is a really interesting topic. Can you give me a lead on finding the American study? Just zoomed around quickly on Google Scholar and it did not pop up. Any detail would pin it down-- year of publication, name of one of the authors, etc.
Checking over the transcript, I'm not sure there was an actual study, Maybe just observation of the number of people with schizophrenia and the number of people with congenital cognitive blindness, and an observation that there don't seem to be any known people with both.
From a paper with a hypothesis about the two don't seem to go together. "The brain is a Bayesian inference machine"
Unfortunately, the video doesn't have links to the papers.
The conclusion that there are no C/E blind people with schizophrenia is based on a small number of studies that involved relatively small samples. Clearly, this argument would be strengthened by larger, population-based studies. This is because, as a simple calculation demonstrates, a case of congenital blindness and schizophrenia would be extremely rare even if there was no protective effect of blindness: if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.0002% or 2 out of every 1 million people. Although this is a low prevalence rate, it is equal to or higher than the rates for several other well-known conditions (e.g., Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, hereditary spastic paraplegia, Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome). Based on this estimated prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with schizophrenia. When cases of blindness with an onset in the first year of life (i.e., early blindness) are taken into account, the percentage would be larger. Therefore, it is remarkable that in over 60 years, and with several investigations [including several before DSM-III (1980) when criteria for schizophrenia were broader than at present], not a single case of a C/E blind schizophrenia patient has been reported. Moreover, several published studies, and our experience as well, included surveying Directors of agencies that serve large numbers of blind people, and none of them could recall ever seeing a person who had both conditions. It is also interesting that rates of C/E blindness are significantly higher in developing, compared to industrialized, countries. Therefore, if C/E blindness did not protect against the development of schizophrenia, comorbidity would be more likely to be reported in such countries. However, this has not occurred. In short, available evidence, probabilistic estimates, and the striking contrasts, within the same domains of cognition, between superior functioning in C/E blindness and impaired functioning in schizophrenia, combine to suggest a protective relationship. If the conditions did co-occur at chance levels, reports of such cases should appear at least somewhat as often as those of many other rare medical conditions, especially since reports of an absence of schizophrenia in C/E blind people have appeared since 1950 (Chevigny and Braverman, 1950). The absence of such reports is noteworthy.
One research strategy that could generate further evidence on this issue is the study of schizotypal symptoms in the C/E blind. These subsyndromal psychotic symptoms have a higher base rate than schizophrenia itself (i.e., 10–15% vs. ~1%) (Fossati and Lenzenweger, 2009), and people with these symptoms share some of the same cognitive and biological impairments as people with the full disorder (Aichert et al., 2012; Cochrane et al., 2012). Studies of schizotypal symptoms would allow for the determination of whether C/E blindness protects against the full spectrum of schizophrenia-related illness or just schizophrenia itself. If no schizotypal symptoms were observed, this would be evidence for the existence of protective mechanisms against all schizophrenia-related psychopathology. If, however, schizotypal symptoms were found, samples of C/E blind people could be studied to gain insight into the neurobiological changes that protect against the development of clinical psychosis. As such, expanding the schizophrenia phenotype studied in the C/E blind holds potential for increasing our understanding of the mechanisms involved in schizophrenia.
In addition to these points, we noted in our original paper that other congenital sensory impairments have not been associated with absence of schizophrenia, that congenital deafness and later blindness, such as found in Usher Syndrome, whose prevalence has been estimated at 0.005% (Rosenberg et al., 1997) has been associated with psychotic disorders at rates between 4–24% (Waldeck et al., 2001), and that non-psychotic psychiatric disorders are observed in C/E blindness. These data suggest a unique relationship between C/E blindness and schizophrenia. However, we acknowledge that the absence of evidence (of people with both conditions) is not evidence of absence. That said, given the potentially important lessons for understanding, preventing, and treating schizophrenia that brain reorganization in C/E blindness provides, we believe it is useful to pursue this line of thought. At the very least, if C/E blindness did not prevent schizophrenia, then in light of the cognitive changes secondary to C/E blindness, it would be informative to determine whether it mitigates the associated cognitive impairment. Finally, we hope to raise awareness in the psychiatric community of past literature relating to C/E blindness and schizophrenia, so that if people with both conditions exist, their cases will be reported.
I do think the things they point to strongly suggest they're onto something. There's lots of indirect evidence that congenital cognitive blindness and schizophrenia don't co-occur.
I saw some meme photo of Trump holding up an executive order that said, "Gay men aren't allowed to do that voice anymore." Unmitigated popularity boost if he did that irl.
You're not thinking far enough ahead. Yes, it will invite some foreign aggression, but it would also incite domestic terrorism that you can then crack down on.
American world police support is winding down and 90% of the ocean is easier to police, and far more important to actual american interest; nuking gaza is more in line with american interest. No american solider should be in any middle east country
We already tried that in the seventies and it was quickly rolled back. The northern latitudes end up with 8:30 am sunrises and school buses taking kids to school in the dark.
They did it the wrong damn way. Daylight savings time is in the summer, not the winter. If you're messing with winter clocks, that means you're doing daylight savings year-round, rather than getting rid of it.
The problem is that the northern latitudes then lose out on something they really enjoy in the summer: it being light until nine or ten at night. Instead it starts getting light around 3:30 in the morning, which doesn't do anyone but the very early birds a lot of good.
Fundamentally the problem is that broadly humans want to be awake during the day, but tacking wake/sleep times to a mechanical representation of time doesn't allow for this.
Is Trump administration's DOJ asking prosecutors to drop charges really as unusual as claimed? Is it meaningfully different from the Biden administration doing the same thing with the Yale racial discrimination lawsuit?
From what I understand, the Yale thing is because they disagreed with the lawsuit, i.e. with either the alleged actions or the legal theory that said those actions constituted something illegal. Similarly, under trump the EEOC has dropped several lawsuits because they don't think that the cases constituted illegal discrimination.
Trump et al don't think that Adams is innocent. Nobody thinks they seriously doubt the allegations of what he did, or that they constitute corruption. They are dropping the charges (without prejudice) as a quid pro quo for him to do other, unrelated stuff.
It would be like if the Biden administration dropped the lawsuit in exchange for Yale making Hunter Biden a professor or something.
I'm not aware of any other situation like the one with Adams, and one tell is how a number of DOJ appointees, including the acting US attorney, lifelong Republican/federalist society member, appointed by trump to this very position less than a month ago, resigned in protest.
I understand this differs meaningfully from a plea bargain. That wasn't what I was comparing it to. I'd say the Yale lawsuit was also dropped for policy reasons, and this is basically the same thing as that.
1. Wasn't it? I thought it was being prosecuted as violation of the Civil Rights Act. That's only civil?
2. So the DOJ just has to say they're moving to dismiss the case because the priorities of the new administration are different from those of the old? That's seems doäble. And true!
They have been very clear that this isn't about priorities, though. There's a quid pro quo, and a bunch of (Republican!) DOJ lawyers resigned because of the quid pro quo.
I think some Republicans tend to be high-strung when it comes to this kind of thing, so I don't take them resigning over this all that seriously. I expect they (very reasonably!) have a fondness for the Romans who stood in defense of the Republic against Caesar and are overly eager to reënact it in miniature.
They have a fondness for rule of law which is why they work(ed) for the DOJ. Dropping charges as part of a plainly corrupt quid pro quo is antithetical to the rule of law.
Then he should have pardoned adams instead of ordering them to drop the case in away that would allow them to bring it back if adams didn't do what they wanted. Its corruption.
Using criminal charges to coerce totally unrelated political concessions is a thing that the DOJ has never done in my lifetime, as far as I know. It's so far outside the norm that the woman Trump appointed to run SDNY resigned sooner than do it, and then a bunch of other Republican DOJ lawyers resigned too.
It is probably completely illegal to hold criminal charges over a politician's head to coerce them to support your favored policies, as Danielle Sassoon's memo to Pam Bondi noted.
The standard stuff is
(1) dropping charges entirely (i.e., dropping "with prejudice") and
(2) dropping charges in exchange for concessions narrowly related to the crime in question (e.g. testify against your accomplice to get charges reduced, plead guilty to get charges reduced, etc.)
That's all true, but you do have to admit the Democrats' prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels payoff was politically motivated and kind of legally dubious, which is probably a big factor in a lot of Republicans going "well, now it's our turn".
If you're desperate to justify Trump behavior, you can and will find some perceived wrong against him that you can say gives him "carte blanche to pull crap like this", for any value of "crap like this"
The point remains: Trump's effort to corrupt the DOJ by using it to extort political concessions is neither related to nor analogous to Trump being tried and convicted for campaign finance fraud.
(The analogous thing is the charges against Hunter Biden. Trump and Hunter both committed victimless crimes and were only prosecuted because they're high profile figures.)
I'm pretty sure that DOJ's decision to not pursue charges against Luke Ravenstahl in Pittsburgh is because he dropped out of the mayor's race - so i wouldn't say it never happens.
Also, i kind of thought don't DoJ did this sort of things all the time in issues related to public corruption - make enough stink that stops short of a prosecution, and then let the trash take itself out.
The decision to file charges at all is to some extent a political decision about executive branch prosecutorial priorities. That is inevitable -- prosecutorial resources are limited, not all crimes can be investigated and prosecuted. But once the case is developed and charges have been filed, priorities have been decided, and the case is (supposed to be) run on the merits.
Also, you just can't have a quid pro quo for deciding who to prosecute (!!!).
I believe the main difference is that they are dropping the charges _without_ prejudice. This leaves open the possibility that they can refile the charges later. Many both in and out of the DOJ believe that this is the Trump admin explicitly using the DOJ as a weapon ("if you don't do what we say we'll refile the charges"), and many within the DOJ resigned over this. In fact, iirc, so many people refused to sign the necessary orders that they had to put everyone who hadn't resigned into a room and gave them an hour to figure out who was going to sign under threat of firing the entire department. They did eventually find someone to sign the document, but some might reasonably claim that this is happening under duress for very questionable purposes.
I view it more like that Western movie where they need a team to do a dangerous job, escort somebody into or rescue somebody in Indian territory (can't recall) so they assemble the old "ragtag" bunch of volunteers which includes the Irish drunk played by Scarlett O'Hara's father and some other guys in the Cavalry post clink and looking to get out.
I do not think the Yale lawsuit has any bearing on the legal or ethical nature of the charges against Adams. The charges against Adams were dropped without prejudice specifically to act as a knife hanging above Adam's head.
Dropping charges in a federal corruption case is a big deal. The evidence against Adams is very clear. Adams is a democratic mayor of the larges democratic city, he is not a trump ally. The only reason for dropping these charges is extract something from Adams. Communications within the attorney general's office and statements made by the Trump admin make it very clear there was a quid pro quo going on where Adams would support immigration raids in exchange for dropping the charges.
Politics has always been a dirty business. Stuff like this happens all the time. Doesn't bother me at all. I sorta like that it's out in the open, actually.
Maybe the main difference is that team Trump can't help but indicate that this is explicitly a quid pro quo all over national news?
> “If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams’ promise to allow federal immigration agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail, “I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’"
Whereas with Yale it's pretty obviously not a quid pro quo of any kind?
I'm looking for a particular kind of employment counselor. Someone I know has a law degree, and did 2 years in big law, which was a very grim & stressful experience for her, and is now thinking about what to do next. She is clear that she does not want a highly stressful job, and would consider interesting non-law jobs where pay is low compared to what she could now earn, so maybe things around $150 K. It seems quite possible to me that there exist jobs of this kind. The woman is extremely competent -- got a very high LSAT score, did well at a top law school, and did well at her big law job, where they had her do a lot of writing because they discovered she's extraordinarily good at it. But she is someone without a big friend network and without broad interests, and has no idea what sort of jobs are possible.
She needs to talk with someone who has good general knowledge of the professional world and is flexible and inventive in their thinking about employment options. Someone who could say, what about working for this senator -- becoming the legal counsel for this kind of organization -- being a legal journalist at this place -- spending 6 mos getting basic expertise at X, because then you can do Y.
Anyone know of an employment counselor of this sort?
Contact a legal recruiter from a reputable firm - Robert Half or the like. They're in a position to understand the hiring landscape and might be able to put her in contact with the type of position that she wants. My gf has actually been a legal recruiter for 20 years. Let me know if you'd like her contact info. She has a lot of experience dealing with situations exactly like this.
The classic thing is to go in-house somewhere that aligns with her expertise. An ex of mine was a land use attorney at a top-5 firm and left for a 9-to-5 job at a utility. Her sister was an IP attorney who left to do trademark stuff for a fashion brand. Another friend went in-house at a law firm working for the GC doing ethics and conflict management.
Thank you! I'd like to contact your gf to ask a coupla questions, via email, to help me figure out if her approach is likely to match what this person wants. Could you give me contact info using Chat?
Note that while everyone here has given me job recommendations, which is somewhat helpful, what I am searching for is a *coach* who can focus with someone on finding a job that's a good fit. I can find the names of thousands of coaches online, all of 'em saying they're great. What I need is a recommendation from somebody who knows of a good one. AI's are not useful for that sort of search.
Is it possible that the fact that no one can recommend one personally means that a really good career coach does not exist? I ask as someone who would also really love a dedicated career coach who will put the the real time and effort of helping me figure out what's best for me. But I've also never found one. And all college career counselors I've spoken with have been terrible. Maybe they just don't exist.
It's certainly possible. Good coaches definitely exist (coaches are sort of like psychotherapists, except their focus isn't fixing what's wrong, but sort of optimizing the person.) Problem may be locating them. That is certainly the case with psychotherapists. I'm a psychologist myself, and am always reading and hearing accounts from people who had something for which solid cognitive-behavior therapy is likely to be helpful, and instead saw somebody who just had unstructured how're-ya-doing kinds of conversations with them every time they went. Meanwhile I know many people who work in a much more planful way, using empirically validated approaches. So situation may be the same with what I'm calling an employment coach.
Well, if you find one, please let me know. Also, as someone who's has a lot of "how ya doing" therapists, what do you recommend for how to find one who is not like that?
I recommend you try cognitive-behavior therapy by someone who takes the approach seriously. Lots of therapists in Psychology Today say they use CBT, but they practice a diluted version, mixed together with lots of other approaches, and it all tends to slide downhill to planless howzit going this week. To find a bonafide CBT therapist, look at these 2 organizations, both of which, I think, offer a way to search for therapists who are members:
Another good place to look for a therapist is iocdf.org. While organization focuses on OCD, any therapist who lists there would also be able to do CBT treatment of any other anxiety disorder — phobias, panic attacks, social anxiety, etc.
If you do not suffer from anxiety, but from depression, look for a therapist at the first 2 links. If you think whatever is making life hard fo ryou is mostly high functioning autism, I don’t know of an organization to send you to, but here probably is one. Try googling it.
Very few psychiatrists are trained in real CBT. Psychologists are most likely to be, social workers second most likely.
Many states let therapists licensed in another state do virtual sessions with someone in their own. But Massachusetts, California and New York and a few others do not. If you are anywhere in the US but one of those states you can probably see someone from another state, which gives you many choices.
My job probably doesn’t count as “interesting,” but I’m an underwriter at a title insurance company. I graduated from a top-100 law school and worked for a medium-size firm for 8 years. The pay is close to the range she’s looking for, and I rarely work more than 40 hours per week. I’m home for dinner with my family every night and weekend work is uncommon. Find something in-house or tangentially related to the field she worked in. There has to be plenty out there.
Sorry to laugh, but dear oh dear. "Yeah, I'm open to take on a low-paying job, you know - something that only brings in about 150 grand per annum".
My heart bleeds.
EDIT: I realise this sounds unsympathetic because, well, it is - but she can have a nice, non-stressful (though there are stresses there too in the voluntary world) job that pays buttons working in the world of not-for-profits, or she can have a good paying job that will mean "you have to grit your teeth and work on through". Not a lot of people get the dream job of "I love the work, there is little stress, and I have tons of money".
So if she's willing to work for low pay as long as the work is enjoyable, forget the six figure salary. If she wants/needs that range of remuneration, she'll have to accept that it won't be 24/7 waking up each morning full of joy at the anticipation of the new work day.
EDIT EDIT: Well, not unless she has pull or some kind of an in where she'll get a cosy sinecure, but you say she doesn't have much in the way of networking. No friends of friends, Dad's old golf buddy, etc. to get her a soft job?
$150K individual is in the 90th percentile. Not stratospheric, but certainly high--you'd consider yourself upper middle class.
The median's actually about $50K, $60K if you work at least 40 hours a week (as she likely does).
The *average* is about $75K.
Interestingly, the average is at about the 67th percentile overall, which means there are theoretically 1/3 of people who would be a constituency against redistribution on purely selfish grounds, which is a problem for any earnest socialist!
That's just not true for people with degrees from good law schools, at least not in the US. This person made $250K straight out of law school at her big law job and by doing some extra things she could get a bonus. I believe she got a raise her second year. And if she had stayed longer she would have earned more every year. $150K is very low for a lawyer in the US who went to a top law school
And the stress was nothing to snicker at. She worked far far more than 40 hours per week, and it was not rare for her to have to stay up all night finishing something, then go to work the next day. Also was not rare for her to be expected to attend meetings at 3 am US time with clients in other time zones. When she talks about a non-stressful job, she's talking about a job without the double-sized work load and the expectation of being available 24/7. She's not talking about something where she can be scrolling through Amazon during her work day.
And I know someone who had a law job with the government and made $160K. He worked 9-5, with only occasional job situations that required additional time. During his 9-5 hours he worked quite hard, and worked on things where nobody could be stress-free. He was handling things where people could be badly harmed if he did not do a good job, and also where he can could in lots of trouble if he cut corners or was sloppy. So the sort of job the person has in mind exists. The guy had one.
I feel protective of the person I'm talking about, because she really has had a bad time of it, and is very far from being the sort of lazy entitled asshole you are imagining.
I think 'lazy entitled' is the wrong phrase. Certainly 'lazy' is. She's obviously very hardworking and intelligent and doing the whole 'is-$200K-worth-selling-my-soul-for' tradeoff common among the upper middle class in this country.
There used to be a lot of government jobs as you describe, but I think they are going away now with the new administration, and salaries are going to be lower and stress is going to be higher. Just because the job exists doesn't mean you'll get it--most of the really good jobs are gotten through connections. Other people here have suggestions that may prove useful.
One of the problems is that you often can't just do 'OK, I'll do 2/3 of my crazy job and get 2/3 the pay' in many careers. You want a normal life, there's a significant drop-down in money and often benefits.
Everyone's angry because a lot of people can't make $150K no matter how hard they work. I mean, I gave up most of my adult life, wrote off romance, and did a career I dislike to make about $400K a year. So when I hear some laid-off banker whining about how they can't find a job for over a million a year...well, I feel the same way a lot of people here do.
My previous advice would be in house counsel to a federal agency that doesn't do much litigation, though it's on the low end of your salary range. Now? Corporate counsel, probably.
There's surely lower-stress and lower-paying jobs outside of BigLaw firms? Or dropping down the rungs of the status ladder: consider being a legal secretary, for instance.
My sarcasm is about the desire to maintain the status of a job, even if taking a pay cut. Working for a senator as one of the suggestions? Never mind that is likely to involve stress and pressure too, but the notion that 'well yes it would be easier to sell to my parents that I'm working for Senator Nobbs at a mere $150 grand a year rather than working in the same field but as a lowly secretary' is what makes me smile wryly.
You can have low stress, but the corollary of that is low pay (much lower than 150 grand) or you can have the pay that keeps you in the middle to upper middle-class lifestyle you expect, but you'll have to put up with hard grind.
I do think going for a medium-tier law firm would be more suitable, but that does depend on where the job is, and if the person would be willing to move to a different (lower cost of living) city.
Yes, it sounds unsympathetic, and utterly unnecessary. Like, do you have to? Could you just ignore this, you are not even trying to understand the context, nor you seem to be familiar with American/Californian pay structure. You don’t need to chime in with your sarcastic shit every time.
"Yes, it sounds unsympathetic, and utterly unnecessary. Like, do you have to?"
Skeleton at the feast. A reminder that not everyone lives according to a Californian pay structure, including lots of people living in California (or what is all the fuss about losing illegal immigrant labour for farm work about?)
Did anyone ask for a "reminder"? What does "illegal immigrant labor" have to do with the original question? If you have nothing useful to contribute, you don't have to say anything, this was a specific request, not a philosophical discussion, nor a feast requiring skeleton presence.
Some free advice--under no circumstances should she ever say "I was too stressed out and want a much less stressful job in the low six figures." Because people will laugh at her. I'm not saying her goals aren't possible. they're just not speakable.
Eh, I'd be cautious when speaking to an employment counsellor. I wouldn't mention stress. I'd say something like look, I want more of a life and I'm a hard worker and committed to remaining so. But I'm not looking for partner track at 30 or whatever. Can I do this in law as a specialist, or should I be looking at another career?
I'm not talking about a headhunter, I'm talking about a specialized kind of coach. People who use coaches disclose the relevant details about their inner state. For instance, top athletes talk in detail with sports psychologists about performance anxiety, failure to keep up training regimens, dark fantasies about failure, jealousy etc. They are there to get advice about how to manage that stuff. Maybe regarding the perrson I'm talking about it would be better to be using the word 'coach,' to make clear I am talking about a helping professional with whom the client can have confidential conversations with no need to do impression management.
Got it. But that's going to be really expensive, so maybe someone less expensive with less honesty is another option to consider if the full-metal version is too pricey.
re woke grants, it seems not implausible that while technically the system was already there, the way it worked such that adding woke sentences was a good strategy was a biden era phenomenon
Proposals are reviewed by other scientists, not Biden admin officials. So having a little extra DEI sprinkle *might* have gotten you a slightly better broader impacts score to the degree scientists were captured by the current zeitgeist (I say might because it wouldn't work on me, for instance). The way DEI is manifesting at the institutional level has been more programs created with a DEI "flavor". My feeling is that this grew a lot in the last four years, but I don't have numbers to confirm.
You might think that if you had never met a scientist. But if you've been involved in writing or reviewing grants at any point in the last few decades, you'd understand that you always wanted to include some sentences that might sound nice outreach to the broader public (and particularly the parts that are far from academia) to the average academic who knows nothing about your research area.
This just isn’t true. The better answer is more the Richard Hanania thesis: it is “woke” because it was required by legislation.
Source: personal experience. I am a professor at a research university with NSF funding. One of my grants related to polymer crystallization got flagged in Cruz’s list. I have participated on review panels, etc and am *currently a reviewer* for NSF grants.
The grant I got was an NSF CAREER award, which necessarily includes an education plan (it is for pre-tenure professors and it is supposed to include a vision of future research and how this will integrate with education). In my education plan, I proposed to do various mentoring activities including visiting K-12 schools, mentoring undergraduates doing research, and producing a podcast. Because of the NSF BI, I included a few lines about making sure to have mentoring opportunities for women and minorities. I'm sure this is what got flagged.
9 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from February 10, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
32 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (down from 34 % on February 10, 2025).
59 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 57 % on February 10, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is brought to you by the fact that Trump administration just commenced what looks an awful lot like an attempt to browbeat Ukraine into accepting defeat.
What mildly surprises me is how many people in the EU and also apparently in Ukraine appear to be surprised by this. I am not (see relatively trivial movement in the forecast).
Unlike, with, say, threats to the territorial integrity of Denmark, Republicans clearly signaled before the elections they are likely to do this, so they have a clear political mandate for it. No one who pays attention should be surprised, regardless of whether it is a wise policy from the point of US national interest (which is very much debatable, though I am not actually interested in debating it).
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I'm surprised you haven't updated more strongly on Ukraine defeat. I'd say 90% that peace is going to happen soon, and that Ukraine is getting the short end of the deal.
I read 91% weight assigned to that outcome in this estimate. Are you treating the 32% "sort of compromise, if you spin it enough" as somehow overstated? I think the current noises make this outcome seem even more likely.
I’m curious as to why you classify only the most optimistic outcome as Ukrainian victory, while classifying outcomes far less favorable than Russia’s initial goals as a Russian victory rather than a compromise? Maybe I’m not well enough informed, but I was under the impression the Russian government’s line was still that Zelensky is a Nazi who must be deposed. Is that not their public position?
I don’t mean to undercut the value of your forecasting, by the way; I really appreciate it. This is just a question about framing of the results.
Well, Putin, unlike Zelensky, has been smart enough to make his goals intentionally vague, but mainly because I am thinking about it from Ukrainian perspective.
If, for example, there would be a ceasefire tomorrow on the current line of contact minus Ukrainian, um, conquests in Kursk region, without any sort of guarantees of Western military involvement in case of another Russian attack, Ukrainians would largely see that as a defeat. Certainly it's light years away from goals announced by Zelensky (https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ukrayina-zavzhdi-bula-liderom-mirotvorchih-zusil-yaksho-rosi-79141).
Fair enough I guess. I think their different situations go pretty far in explaining their different levels of communication: Zelensky leads a democracy fighting a defensive war, whereas Putin controls a state that, ultimately, does not need to know precisely what he wants in this war. I would feel comfortable intuiting Putin’s goal based on the start of the 2022 invasion, but I understand if you don’t want to make that a center point of your analysis
Honestly I think better explanation is that Zelensky is just brave but dumb (while Putin is evil but clever). The fact that he was democratically elected does not mean he has to be bad at diplomacy.
It would be very challenging to conduct fair elections in Ukraine when large part of the country is under occupation, another large part of its population is abroad, and also polling places could be attacked from the air.
Theoretically this could be solved by remote elections, but that has its own huge problems.
Clever. As much as I’m not a fan of this system, it’s in their constitution, and renewals of martial law have been continually passed by the Parliament with the approval of Ukrainians. I’m sure they have better people to blame for many of their current problems, including a guy who recently won an election in wartime!
Does it matter to you that it's in their constitution? Is it true that, as long as a constitution somewhere describes any system, that system is a democracy?
When Napoleon was elected Emperor of the French, was that a victory for democracy?
a) Does anyone have any information on whether any of the major AI labs is _currently_ running recursive self-improvement? OpenAI's o3-deep-research (or, more precisely the internal successor system that achieved 50th best competitive programmer ranking while presumably retaining all of the other capabilities) seems like it is at least "within shouting distance" of being able to usefully do this. Anyone know, or see relevant information, for OpenAI or for other leading labs?
b) Sam Altman has publicly stated that he expects GPT5 to be smarter than he is. Has he made any statements anywhere about how he intends to control it, particularly to control any sub-goals it generates in the process of attempting any top level goal he sets for it?
Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness? Or is it a matter of just doing more of the kinds of special training (reinforcement learning etc etc), or of using the various familiar tweaks and trainings in a more efficient sequence? It seemed to me from what I read about DeepSeek that their training methods were the familiar ones, but the developers did them in a different order, or in different proportions, and so got more fine-tuning with less time and effort.
On the other hand, it does sometimes seem like we need a different paradigm in order to get an AI that can plan or speculate in the deep natural way we can, rather than via following a series of specified steps.
(I hate these things, yet can't help being fascinated by the challenge of improving them.)
> Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness?
I'm not sure whether inventiveness is *required*, but it is definitely not in short supply. I was very impressed by the recent Stanford work resulting in the s1 model [https://arxiv.org/html/2501.19393v2]. What they did was to create a quasi-synthetic mini-corpus of ultra-high quality *step-by-step reasoning* text. Adding that material to the training of an off-the-shelf Chinese open-weights non-reasoning model based on Llama resulted in o1 level performance on a math benchmark. And the cost of the extra training was $50.
Imo, further inventiveness in the curation and synthesis of training data will continue to yield big returns
Many Thanks! I think that there is always a blurry connection between inventiveness and combining known options. In the extreme limit, in the realm of natural language, (almost) any inventive step can be replicated by taking all possible sequences of words and then choosing (by whatever means we use to _judge_ inventiveness) the best one.
Of course, this is spectacularly infeasible, but, say, taking triples of ideas from a set of a thousand and picking the best triple _is_ feasible. So, in that sense, I think automating inventiveness is feasible. And there are strategies sort-of like this: Pick partial sequences, discard the least promising 90% and try all extensions of the most promising 10%.
A _lot_ of inventiveness is just doing the usual generation of possibilities, but being willing to hold off on discarding "unpromising" ones just a little longer than usual, and spending just a bit more effort evaluating a wider set than usual.
A lot of the "increased test time compute" extensions over the past year seem to be somewhat along these lines.
> Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness? Or is it a matter of just doing more of the kinds of special training (reinforcement learning etc etc), or of using the various familiar tweaks and trainings in a more efficient sequence?
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that's on the order of hyperparameter optimization, architecture tweaks, Mixture of Experts ordering, communication hyperparameters, and overall weights.
To the extent that extant State of the Art models can help automate exploration of those spaces, it can drive noticeable self-improvement without inventiveness. You can't just grid-search these things because of combinatorial explosion, so you need smarter ways to judge and evaluate the results. There are various mathematically bounded and implementable techniques (bandits, bayesian methods, meta-learning), but their relevance is highly contingent, and what you'd really like is a mind smart enough to try different things and note where things are generally headed, and we're probably just about getting there with o1 Pro levels of thinking now.
If we assumed that Anthropic and OpenAI have a model one generation better internally than they've made public, I think it's a pretty safe bet they're using that model for self-improvement.
Many Thanks! I disagree. The accuracy of reasoning in SOTA AIs is decent, but could use more improvement (which is an active area of work) and the _breadth_ of knowledge is enormous. I don't know how much improvement over o3-mini-high (the latest that I have access to) there will be in GPT5. I will try it out when I get access to it.
Non-college educated white women just aren't part of the narrative. They don't fit into categories. Are they good or bad? Are they oppressors or oppressed? They're white which makes them bad, but they're women which makes them good, and then they're non-college-educated so nobody is sure whether they're supposed to be victims of a system that doesn't take proper care of them, or whether they're mouth-breathing violent hicks that need to be put down. They're just too "in-between" a category to ever appear in the New York Times.
I think it doesn't fit the stories the media wants to tell. It goes against the 'Trump represents patriarchy' story (because a lot support Trump) and sort of implies bad things about the women because they're not college-educated. But I could be way off.
I've heard people talking about them about as much as you'd expect based on that level of specificity (they're not as clear a narrative as "non-college educated voters" in general, but they are a group campaigns talk about winning).
Because moderately educated white men are the main swing demographic. They decide elections because they're just about in the center so which way they break tends to be the 50%+1.
It's a bit late to be talking about voter demographics, isn't it? Regardless, they don't seem like a meaningful demographic to target, seeing as they're just going to vote for who their husband tells them to...
I'm not that familiar with prediction market websites but I wasn't able to find anything on Metaculus or Polymarket. Do you have a better idea of where or how to search for that? Were you joking?
Oh you meant all ages; I thought you wouldve meant young voters
What happened decades ago, while it of course will matter, the brain washing should have faded and its probably less cleanly modern democrat; a 60 year old hippie may have caught Bernie in a lie 2 decades ago and was friends with an *gasp* antivax before corona.
Its likely more predictive to count their children and if they own a house.
They didn't need to indoctrinate anyone to get vaccinated, it was considered obvious back then that you listen to your doctor for medical advice rather than some video game streamer or washed up MMA guy.
It used to be left wing to distrust pharma/chemicals; so a 60 year old women may have swapped as politics moved faster
> its not indoctrination for all the soviet economists to be for communism
Talking to a fish about water; its only not indoctrination if everyone is rational and thinking from first principals; public service announcements even for seatbelts or anti smoking are using manipulation not logic
I'm trying to balance living what little life we have left well with making a minimal effort to stop it from happening, and also a bunch of other things in case I'm wrong about everything. It's very scattershot. Also I just woke up from a bizzare nightmare where I told a group of AI researchers it wasn't worth killing everyone and they told me it was a beta move to not risk awesomeness.
I think AGI before 2035 is bullshit. I'd drop $2k on a charitable bet against it, if I thought anyone would let me give an AI tasks like "notice when one of my direct reports is having a rough time over several weeks of conversation and address the problem without being told this is the task" or "complete a day of work as a residential plumber with above-average results".
That being said, I'm preparing for narrower AI success by holding a bit of ASX:VTS and ASX:VGS. I'm also considering ASX:VAE.
Remember that CS Lewis essay on `living in an atomic age' that was doing the rounds in the early days of the pandemic? It seems apposite. If you somehow missed it, go ahead and google it now.
I alternate between all the different views on this thread. Sometimes I think it's going to be a huge issue. Other times I think it's mostly just a problem for software engineers, who just happen to be the people who panic about it the most.
Maybe the profession of "software engineer" goes the way of the profession of "typist" and all the other professions carry on except slightly more efficiently.
I actually wrote about this just today - I think that we're not going to so much get AGI as get a better idea of the concept of intelligence that bifurcates pretty strongly on eternal vs contextual knowledge - https://desystemize.substack.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-cant-you-die
It seems to me that once AI becomes smarter than an army of Einsteins (something I think will happen during Trump’s term), our online financial records are screwed. I think organized criminals will immediately get AGI to clean out many of our accounts and do so virtually overnight.
Mostly I've been grasping for other moments in history where there have been massively disruptive innovations, trying to do some pattern matching to make sense of the wave. I wrote about it extensively here (https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/meditations-on-ai-and-the-future); tldr I think we're going to see a lot of labor shocks, followed by a period of decentralization as software (and everything) becomes more varied and increases in production quantity.
I'm just hoping so far that any ASI is kind. That, and reading a lot of interpretability papers to see what kind of controls we've found (steering seems pretty good!)
AGI bros say AGI is coming but they would say that, wouldn't they? They are all, all in on LLM as the route to it. My view is that "hallucination' is nothing of the kind, it's a symptom of fundamental uselessness, and we are in 1900 with Big Zeppelin desperately selling us the idea that they hold the key to commercial air travel.
More generally, we have always lived with the possibility of war or fatal illness or The Rapture being just round the corner. Keep calm and carry on is the best response, and hold an index fund.
(Repeating my answer from the subscribers-only open thread)
Starting a Substack. Questions I'm hoping to get a better handle on in the process:
1. How soon is AGI coming?
2. How can we make the disaster scenarios more concrete and intuitive for normal people to understand? (This feels critical for achieving the political will to pull the plug in some way.)
3. How likely is disaster?
4. How can we better think about the huge uncertainty we're facing?
5. And I guess also, what are the coolest toys and use cases in the meantime?
Number 4 ended up being my post for this past Friday, talking about Scott Aaronson's Five Worlds and Nate Silver's Technological Richter Scale.
I think it AGI is inevitable (95% confidence) and likely within the next decade (90%).
I think the worst thing we can do is sit by and watch as others make the inevitable real. The best we can do is leverage this emerging intelligence. But I am not smart enough to say how we do this, other than ask our rising robot overlords how we can improve our game.
My intuition tells us that humans are already too powerful and too stupid — a bad combo. Disaster is inevitable unless we (humans, culture, institutions and AI collectively) get a lot smarter and a lot more moral. I also suspect morality and intelligence are strongly correlated, so that gives me room for optimism.
Glee at people playing stupid games getting stupid prizes; ai isnt coming but I think the continuous bubble of tech may finally actaully pop; the "crash" of the dotcom still was slightly diversified pigs probably getting some stock in amazon, also 2008, shitcoins etc.
It be nice if someone doing a model of a zero infomation investor over this time period; but I suspect they still over preformed inflation and working with the knowledge add to society being "computer good"; it needs to hurt.
Corporates drinking thier own koolaid and "experimenting" with mass firing for chatgpt subscription will die on mass; "the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return"
I do not think it is in fact coming so I am not too worried. Machine Learning will impact some jobs of course, but I suspect we are starting to see the limits of the technology. AI is still useless even for stuff like answering customer support questions. A couple weeks ago I asked ChatGPT some questions about a book. I know it’s remarkable the AI can answer them at all, but it wasn’t even close to the same level of conversation with a halfway intelligent person (although it didn’t help that the AI kept hallucinating parts of the book).
The current models are way worse than humans in some respects, and, honestly, already superhuman in others. There is something of an art to posing the right questions when you have a superhuman genie to answer them.
Obviously they can process information quickly, but in what other respects are they superhuman?
To put it another way, if AI was really a superhuman genie would you need to phrase a question in a very specific way in order to get the right answer?
Any AI need to know what you want in order to give you it. If you can't accurately express what you want, that's a lacking in you not in the AI.
AIs are already superhuman in that they 1) they have "read" and "remember" thousands of times as many books and other writings as any human has, 2) the kinds of writing they do, they can do thousands of times faster than a human can.
I see what you mean, but I think there is a difference. If you ask the “wrong” question to a human expert you’ll still get a good answer, just not one that fulfills your need, but asking the wrong question to AI gets you a completely useless answer. Or at least one that isn’t very useful.
To put it another way, if you give the wrong question to the human the answer is still valuable, while for AI it is not the case.
One important framing: it's useful to think of AI as reasoning machines, not search engines. A reasoning machine may not know everything about everything, but given the correct context will figure it out. A search engine may "know" everything about everything but can't reason about what it "knows". There's a lot of work in putting these two things together, but the reason gwern is asking how you uploaded the book is precisely because, on face, you're using it like a search engine instead of a reasoning machine.
Well, even aside from the stuff it got wrong it was not a good conversation. Like I said, any half intelligent human would have been infinitely more insightful. In fact the only use the AI had was the ability to instantly recall events from the book (although of course it didn’t get it all right).
How would the average person who hasn’t read the book in a year or two perform?
You’re expecting ChatGPT to be able to search the book for information about it, when it really only has loose information about it. It will probably get the character names right, and plot, but unless it’s an extremely widely discussed book like the Bible, it’s not going to perform well at that task.
You’re using it the wrong way, which will give you inferior results.
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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.
> 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?
The oppisite; a lazy and ovisous one; make your own "newtab" page
mines here: https://crazymonkyyy.github.io/linkspage.html I have code for generating it
web browsers are making it worse to setup because they rather show you ads
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?)
> (Surely those fine people behind "The Twitter Files" will be eager to investigate a new
https://open.substack.com/pub/alexberenson/p/its-not-matt-taibbi-or-substack-its
the right wing has members who are willing to complain when lines are crossed, but they wont be *your* lines
> and even more blatant case of the government controlling the message on social media, right?)
Prehaphs to you, nothing has been as bad and nearly total as the alex jones censorship
Alex Jones? Is that your test case? I am bewildered. Really?
Say what you will about the man; he was fined the gdp of a small irrelevant country after a sudden *coordinated* banning. Making it the most extreme case of in theory legal censorship in america; the other options are suicides by 40 stabs to the back of the head but I dont imagine your defending those.
Im vaguely aware of musk censoring his critics, but he cant coordinate with bluesky to make it be everywhere all at once or leverage massive fines.
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
> 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?
I much as I would love to rant about the conspiracy theories I believe; freedom of speech is important enough to actually competently defend.
Objection Relevance; freedom of speech is *for* people you disagree with.
> 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?
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, accusations of cowardliness, medical staff determining mental fitness, the debate of weapon and first blood or death, 2nds not loading pistols, priests preaching forgiveness.
Hundreds of micro questions by many hands to craft the outcome; some of them would be yours.
> you need a much better example than Alex Jones
Gdp of a country, and the government was sloppy in it being so sudden Maybe he was the first in a wave, or you hate him so much they didnt care. There were of course those who fucci asked to be censored, but they preferred shadow bans and had developed the tools much harder to establish the censorship existing to everyone; for alex jones the critics jump straight to "its a good thing" skipping the dull "it isnt happening" stage.
>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.
Nature was managing fine before man even evolved, why do we need to spend *checks budget* 3.1 billion per annum to help it in 2025?
The 320 million people who visited national parks last year would disagree.
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.
Well, unlike you, the administration is not relying on hope to get things done. No amount of prayer is going to change the world.
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.
A nice explanation of why we have to pay attention to even the “Oh he didn’t really mean it stuff”
Analysis | When Republicans cast doubt on Trump’s intent — and ate their words
The GOP has shrugged at the authoritarian turn in Trump’s rhetoric. History suggests they downplay his provocations at their peril.
By Aaron Blake
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/13/when-republicans-cast-doubt-trumps-intent-ate-their-words/
Presumably this is because everything he says is said in bad faith?
Just how would this work?
This particular utterance is crazy so we disregard it? Divide it by 2 maybe?
How about this one:
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law“
We should think “Oh he really doesn’t think of himself as a Napoleonic figure, so just ignore that one?”
Unfortunately he does act like he might believe he is just such a figure as indicated by this messianic line from his inaugural address,
“I was saved by God to make America great again.”
He has said many things that sounded crazy at the time that he has followed through on.
A lot of people voted for him believing he was full of hot gas and would never do the very things he is doing now.
Giving the guy a pass on things we think he maybe doesn’t believe is not a workable solution. If he says dangerous things he is a dangerous man. We should be paying full attention.
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 the president of the United States says something demonstrably untrue I think the statement should be scrutinized.
We shouldn’t have to try to decipher it.
I think it’s likely that he does believe himself in the moment he is saying nutty things
If his belief state in any given moment is impossible to determine, that in itself is an important bit of data.
“POTUS once again veered away from observable reality, out loud, in front of a world wide audience” really is news we should all be aware of.
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?
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.
...Why is it so difficult to believe that Trump is more aligned with Putin and his vision than the rest of the world? This isn't blind belief in his words, there is just not much reason to believe he is being particularly subtle about his motives in this case. I would be interested in hearing any objections you have with this model.
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.
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.
Like if the Marshall Plan had been designed by a mafia capo.
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.
What is the generous interpretation of ‘You shouldn’t have never started it.’?
By not ceding territory to prevent a Russian invasion?
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.
Indeed, why would he insert an obviously false statement into a larger context? Do you have any idea why he would do that?
Beyond bullying idiotic bluster?
Can you link to the entire text?
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.
See The Munich Agreement
All Germany wanted was the Sudetenland.
“An emergency meeting of the main European powers–not including Czechoslovakia, although their representatives were present in the town, or the Soviet Union, an ally to both France and Czechoslovakia–took place in Munich, Germany, on 29–30 September 1938. An agreement was quickly reached on Hitler's terms, and signed by the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Italy.”
We’ve seen this play out before.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement
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.
The guy gets away with insane stuff like this all the time. He’ll just say some other crazy thing two days from now and this will just be another piece of debris that passed in the ‘zone flood’.
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
Is Clickbaitness on YouTube necessarily bad?
The term evolved for newspaper and text forum headlines, where the very act of clicking on the topic is itself a reward signal (and thus you need to be careful when dispensing it), and the sole thing that you see of a topic before clicking is the headline and maybe a short intro text section (invariably misleading, of course).
Consider how wrong those assumptions are in a YouTube video:
(1) Clicking on a video isn't a reward signal, watching ads is
(2) You see a thumbnail photo, a channel's name, an upload timestamp, and a view count instead of just a headline
(3) If you're not already in another video, YouTube autoplays a minimized video when your UI centers on it, with no sound and no ads, so you see a preview of the video (with rewinding and fast-forwarding available, even)
Ultimately, I care about what's in a video, not the stupid tricks that YouTube forces the video's author(s) to do in order to reach people. If I see an invitation to a Quantum Computing lecture using a mobile circus as its PR strategy, I... really wouldn't mind or think any less of the people behind the lecture, I would blame the city they're operating in. If I was weighing whether to attend this lecture or any of the hundreds of other lectures, I would weigh factors like how many people have already attended this lecture before (view count) and the photo they chose to put on the posters (the thumbnail, roughly).
Clickbaitness' being more widespread means it's no longer a reliable signal of filtering, everyone does it, it has become a neutral day-to-day part of how to become famous on YouTube.
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.
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.
...Improve at maximizing engagement. A goal that is orthogonal to creating quality content.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
>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.
Potentially some of the people doing the jobs created by the defense budget could be retasked with public works projects. For example, the Army Corps of Engineers could become the Civilian Corp of Engineers and rebuild some of the crumbling infrastructure in the US (they already do this to some extent, like their work on rebuilding the levies in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, so this isn't much of a reach).
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.
So "Heads I win, tails we're even" is a nice and compact way of describing an enraging attitude I often see, a lot of times from people I agree with, where they sort of implicitly assume that their views and beliefs are somewhat "globally privileged", that their enemies somehow "deep down" know themselves to be wrong and are expected to be submissive/shy in their goals and their pursuit of those goals. (Since no one who knows they're wrong or at least more wrong than others should have stubbornness or persistence in pursuing their wrong goals and beliefs.)
The textbook example is how many religious people implicitly privilege the religion they were raised on, expecting others to be perfect skeptics toward other religions (even if they happen to be the ones *they* were raised on) and notice the myriad discrepancies and inconsistencies in those religions, but not applying those same standards to the very religion they think is the perfect one.
But... Revenge can be its own kind of open-ended loop. Like what determines a proportional revenge? If I smear Scott in a Twitter shitpost that gets liked by at most 50 or so users (about 80% of whom are bots, perhaps?) and Scott replies with the most savage and brutal insults on my entire existence in a post that gets liked 200 times and read and commented on by thousands of users across Substack and Reddit, who insulted the other guy more? And is that really a proportional "eye for an eye" for Scott to do that? And what if our actions are different, let's say, I threaten to publish Scott's real first name in a newspaper and he threatens to call me low IQ and have his many friends revoke their $NEWSPAPER subscriptions?
Absent any sort of regulator, shared God, shared elder, or something to fear, Revenge's final state is that I inflict maximum damage upon you and everything and everyone that you stand for (or is/are willing to stand for you), and you try to do the same.
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? Intuitively and viscerally, rape is an extreme that people often conceptualize to be worse than death, but really, what did you expect of people who you tried to run out of polite society? Are they not allowed to take revenge? (I hear you, you're saying J.K. Rowling's opinions are maybe not enough to run them out of polite society? Well, their "Cancellations" aren't either, she's a 30+-years-career author with a very overrated franchise, she's a billionaire, any amount of twitter yapping isn't going to harm her, like ever, any more than it can harm Jeff Bezos, and yet her revenge is somehow "Justified" but theirs aren't?)
Let's downgrade the suggested revenge mechanism a bit, instead of raping her, trans activists are going to make sure J.K. Rowling never enters a public bathroom ever again, in her entire life. This will imply a lot of stalking and monitoring. Is that acceptable? It seems kinda "fitting" to what Rowling's original sin is, doesn't it? Whose revenge is justified, both? Those who didn't "start" the hostilities?
I don't have easy answers, there are only ever 4 problems in morality: Figuring out what counts as people, figuring out how to not wrong people, figuring out how to recover if you did wrong people, and figuring out what to do if you think you were wronged by people. Yours is the fourth and the most devilish, wicked problem.
> 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.
I refute you thus: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251923/usa-reported-forcible-rape-cases-by-gender/.
...I don't know what you're trying to say. Are you saying that women being raped by men is proof that men should be getting killed? But why would that be the case? Men are far more powerful than women. Do you think human history being defined by patriarchy was just a fluke?
"Men" are not rapists, so if any of your hilariously misguided delusions that I could charitably call models of history and morality were remotely correct, the minority of men who rape women (at least the ones doing it in the classic penetrative fashion with no soft manipulation or previous acquaintance) would have been killed a very long time ago.
Let's also not spotlight the fact that "Power" have meant a very different thing since the invention of Mr. Colt.
Again, I don't even know what point you're trying to make. Killing the minority of men that rape doesn't prevent new rapists from being born. And we have harshly punished them throughout history, not because women had agency to get them punished, mind you, but because it violated property rights:
> Rape laws existed to protect virginal daughters from rape. In these cases, a rape done to a woman was seen as an attack on the estate of her father because she was his property and a woman's virginity being taken before marriage lessened her value; if the woman was married, the rape was an attack on the husband because it violated his property.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape#History
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.
I mean her views are not complicated. She thinks that trans people are either liars or delusional sick people and in both cases are dangerous to women. We don't need essays and podcasts and youtube documentaries to explain that.
>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?
1. False premise. 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.
2. "Even as they demonize their enemies, the idea that said enemies will take revenge does not occur to them." 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. Just... I don't know, think about that for a minute. Perhaps you can understand why we should expect people not to do that?
"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.
I disagree and I think I have to use Dave Chappelle as an example. Chappelle has said some things in his comedy specials that some people consider transphobic. I personally don't think what he's said is quite as bad as what Rowling has said so this may not be the most apt example but it's what I have at hand. I might be able to find another if it won't do.
In any case, what happened with Chappelle is that some of his left-leaning fans got mad and said they wouldn't listen to him anymore, others were mad but were able to put it aside, some called for apologies, some criticized him, and some just let it go. Then, he proceeded to live his life as a normal person, without going on twitter on a regular basis to attack this critic or that critic, and he didn't bully anyone, and didn't attempt to rally an international hate mob against an Algerian boxer, and as a result of this very normal behavior... people aren't really that mad at him anymore. He didn't publicly admit he was wrong or beg forgiveness. He just agreed to disagree, and was relatively respectful about it, and when he hosted SNL recently I honestly didn't see a *single* complaint on my very, very lefty Bluesky or twitter feeds about it.
If Rowling had said "yeah, I don't think trans women are really women, but I'm not going to make a big deal about it and bully a bunch of people and constantly spread dangerous and malicious lies about trans people, because we can disagree and still respect each other" I really think that would have been that. Some people would have been disgruntled, Rowling would have enjoyed her bundles of cash and her legacy, and the anti-trans movement would have some other figurehead.
The point is, she absolutely chose this outcome by being a bully, while there are many other people who have "controversial" views on trans people who have been able to express those views reasonably and without anyone allegedly trying to run them out of polite society.
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).
We've gone from "should we expect people like Rowling to become more radical as a result of criticism" to "what should people Rowling be allowed to say", and those are separate topics.
I believe that when someone is criticized, especially on the basis of behavior described as hurtful, they should take that criticism seriously and re-consider their behavior. 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.
It seems that what Alexander Turok is saying is that instead of what I've just described, we should expect someone who receives criticism to increase the behavior in order to hurt their critics. In other words, retaliation.
I suppose that in some sense, we should "expect" retaliation because it is a natural enough response that it shouldn't surprise us. However, I also think that the fear of retaliation shouldn't stop us from calling out abusive behavior. So in that sense, we should "expect" a member of society in good standing to refrain from retaliation.
Or, let's flip it around and look at it another way: What should someone who believes that J.K.Rowling's claims about transgender people are hurtful be allowed to say about their beliefs?
Because it seems that Alexander wants to hold Rowling's critics accountable for Rowling's response to criticism. To me, this is unreasonable. If we're going to hold Rowling and her critics to the same standard, then we can't criticize her critics for criticizing her any more than we can criticize her for criticizing trans people.
So I guess my question is, why do you prioritize defending Rowling's free speech, which was never really in jeopardy, over the free speech of her critics, which has limited reach and which faces censorship by people like Elon Musk (who bought twitter and started censoring trans activists)?
"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?
Well, of course it doesn't.
Let me take a step back and admit that yes, in an ideal world, every person would like to be accepted as the gender they identify with, and would like their favorite authors not to claim that their identity is invalid or fraudulent. So in some sense, yes, Rowling's fans wanted Rowling to change her mind about trans people. And of course there's nothing wrong with that.
The objection I have is the second part. I don't believe that trans people demand universal ideological conformity from every member of polite society and relentlessly hound everyone who fails to conform until they are forced to retire from public life.
In each case where Rowling did or said something transphobic, she faced a round of criticism, which then died down. The problem, as I tried to explain by comparison to Dave Chappelle, was that Rowling kept escalating. She started off with what other commenters have correctly noted was very mild criticism of transgender ideology - her belief that trans women were in some sense actually male. If she'd stuck with that, I mean, it's less than ideal, but that would have been that.
Instead, she went on to disparage inclusive language, deny that transgender people face discrimination, claim that trans women were only pretending to be trans in order to rape women in public bathrooms, etc. etc.
So I ask this: how would you react if your favorite author began publicly disparaging a whole category of people that you belong to, with increasingly dire accusations? Wouldn't you at the very least publicly express your disagreement?
If I, right here, called you a rapist, wouldn't you want to say "I'm not a rapist, and you can go to hell"? Wouldn't it be reasonable, if I accused everyone I disagreed with on ACX of being rapists, for Scott to ban me?
There's a difference between disagreement and bullying. I'm not saying that every trans person or activist perfectly navigates that distinction all the time, but my impression is that trans people and activists react differently, as a whole, to the disagreement than they do to bullying and slander.
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).
Rowling is also famous and talented (although I don't want to overstate her talent - she's no Dave Chappelle).
I am not claiming that there was no pressure to cancel Chappelle (or Rowling). I am claiming that this pressure was not the result of an unyielding demand for ideological conformity.
This is because, despite the existence of a vocal illiberal minority, the vast majority of Western progressives are liberals. They mostly believe that if you want to be a bigot in the privacy of your own home, that's not really harming anyone, and we don't have to like it, but we don't have the right (or the ability) to stop you. It's only when you make bigoted public statements that we must push back and say "hey, those kinds of statements are morally unacceptable". In other words, they think the remedy for speech is more speech, and so every time Rowling or Chappelle speaks up, they speak back.
The reason it's so intense in Rowling's case is that Rowling has a crippling obsession with trans people, and so she cannot help but constantly say and do transphobic things. Chappelle is a well-adjusted guy who can take criticism and just let it go, or use it productively to provide material for his sets. The difference in response from the left is because of the difference in behavior of Rowling and Chappelle. This isn't what we'd expect to see if the left was looking to purge all transphobes from society.
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?
It's useful to walk through the history a bit if we're making allegations not just about what Rowling is like today but also about how she got that way.
Here's some coverage of Rowling's transphobia from before the tweet that FLWAB alleges is the "original". https://www.them.us/story/is-jk-rowling-transphobic
Notice how measured it is. The author points to Rowling liking some transphobic tweets and then analyzes some transphobic lines from one of Rowling's books. She concludes that Rowling is transphobic, but no more so than average, and claims it's fair to criticize her because she has a huge platform. This is hardly a demand for cancellation. This is hardly running Rowling out of polite society. And this hardly justifies (or makes expected) Rowling's subsequent radicalization.
At that time, there was still reasonable doubt. I mean, sure, you could make a case that Rowling was transphobic. But "no more so than the average cis person" is not very damning.
Now, however, you have tweets from Rowling like the one claiming that India Willoughby, a trans news presenter in the UK, is "just a man revelling in his misogynistic performance of what he thinks 'woman' means: narcissistic, shallow and exhibitionist." Contrast this language with "Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like." Dress however you please apparently excludes trans women, because a man dressing like a woman is misogynistic.
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/03/05/jk-rowling-misgenders-india-willoughby-anti-trans-comments-online/
In 2022, after Graham Norton was criticized for hosting her on his show, he repeatedly refused to say she was transphobic and when pressed said something to the effect of "I'm not an expert on trans issues, if you want to hear about that topic, talk to trans people, their parents, their doctors, etc. Stop trying to get me to say something for clicks". She responded to this by accusing Norton of supporting rape and death threats, and he was subsequently cyberbullied off twitter by her followers.
https://boingboing.net/2022/10/18/graham-norton-said-we-should-listen-to-trans-people-so-jk-rowling-accused-him-of-supporting-rape-and-death-threats-and-her-fans-hounded-him-off-twitter.html
In 2024, Rowling decided to take issue with a random trans woman managing a football team, first implying she was a "middle-aged bloke" and then calling her a "cross-dressing man" who was "caricaturing women".
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/05/31/lucy-clark-jk-rowling-trans-football-sutton-united-women/
These are not examples of Rowling taking "revenge" on her "enemies". These are examples of Rowling picking out random trans people to publicly mock and demean and sending her millions of followers to bully them and anyone who supports them. So, actually, perhaps it is Rowling taking revenge on her enemies - but only if she views all trans people and all people who support trans rights as her enemies. Not sure what to call that other than radical anti-transness.
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?
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.
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
So, on the one hand, you have the vast majority of trans people, who are not on twitter and don't give much thought or attention to Rowling.
Then, you have a group of activists - trans activists, and allies - who criticized Rowling's transphobic statements, and escalated that criticism as Rowling doubled and tripled down.
If Rowling's conclusion was "wow, twitter activists sure are assholes", that view could at least potentially be considered understandable based on her experience.
But for her to come to conclusions such as "Hitler never burned books on trans healthcare and research" and "Imane Khalif is a man who likes to beat up women" has absolutely nothing to do with the people she perceived as hostile to her. Khalif never said anything to Rowling, and the attack on the Institute of Sexual Research took place over thirty years before Rowling was born!
Unless she somehow decided that all trans people and all gender non-conforming people and all people who sort of look vaguely intersex and all butch lesbians who might get accused of being trans in the ladies' room and all people who are now, or have ever been, even tangentially involved in supporting trans people were somehow hostile to her, based solely on some interactions she had on twitter.
But that wouldn't be very reasonable, now, would it?
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
Perhaps "genuinely held" is not the right wording. What I'm trying to say is that the fact that she is taking revenge seems to indicate that her vengeful activities operate independently of the truth of the position she has staked out - that she is motivated to hurt people, rather than to resolve the object question or even convince anyone of the veracity of her claims.
And, as much as I disagree with Rowling, *I* don't even believe that. I believe that Rowling believes that she is a brave truth-teller opposing the oppressive forces of evil. I don't think that her radicalization is revenge against her opponents - at least, not consciously. In fact I don't think she's considering the feelings of the people she attacks at all - she's not trying to hurt their feelings, or spare them - they just don't seem to register for her at all.
I think she's become radicalized because she's dehumanized everyone she thinks of as an enemy in order to win arguments, and because she's driven away every reasonable person so the only people who still talk to her are other radicals. I am sure she doesn't realize this, which is why she still appears to be surprised at things like Nazis showing up at gender-critical rallies or Vladimir Putin endorsing her views on gender.
"be reasonable and listen to them with empathy"
Is this wokespeak for "agree with me?"
Yes, being reasonable and listening to others with empathy are both extremely woke. The essence of woke, in fact.
But, to answer your actual question - if Alice says something that hurts Bob, and Bob says "hey, that was hurtful, did you really mean that?" Bob is in some sense looking for "agreement" but in another sense is looking for empathy and validation. I think what would be ideal for Bob is for Alice to listen to Bob, understand why what she said was hurtful to Bob, and then later on try to avoid hurting Bob again.
When Rowling said stuff that hurt trans people, many trans people expressed how much they loved Rowling's work and how surprised they were that Rowling believed negative stereotypes about them. I think the outcome they were looking for was "Rowling learns some more about trans people, their lives, their experiences, and speaks with more understanding, even if Rowling ultimately has different views on the ontology of gender or whatever."
What they got instead was "Rowling tells increasingly unhinged lies about trans people and eventually descends into holocaust denial and an international smear campaign against an Olympic boxer."
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.
Right, so, this essay is very overtly transphobic. Three key points:
1. Rowling is personally afraid of trans people. She states that the idea of sharing a bathroom with a trans person reminds her of a time when she was sexually assaulted. This is very sad, but Rowling was not assaulted by a trans person, so she is just projecting her fears onto trans people. She also literally says she was "triggered" (her choice of words!) by reading about the Scottish government making it easier for trans people to get a piece of paper recognizing them as trans. I can't think of a more textbook case of transphobia than having a day-long nervous breakdown with PTSD flashbacks because the government might formally acknowledge that trans people exist.
Note that at no point does she consider what it might feel like for a trans person to be told "hey, I'm afraid of you because I think you're a rapist, and I - a rich and famous person with a readership of millions - want the government to enshrine my fear into law". That would be empathy.
2. Rowling, in this essay, repeats the age-old saw about LGBT people being a danger to children. With no evidence she accuses trans people of causing child abuse. Again this is just straightforwardly and unambiguously transphobic.
Of course her language is evasive - her exact wording is "I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both." If you aren't from the UK and don't know that "safeguarding" is the word the UK uses for the legal and procedural apparatus that prevents child abuse by teachers in schools, it isn't immediately obvious that what she's saying is that trans people are causing child abuse.
3. Rowling cites detransitioning in children as a concern of hers, implying - without citing any numbers or even a source to back her claim that the detransition rate had "exploded" - that some nefarious force was pushing (specifically female) children to transition against their will. This is straightforward moral panic - she's fearmongering about a phenomenon with a very low prevalence that happens for reasons she totally mischaracterises. This of course is dangerous for trans people because these lies have been cited - and I mean, specifically, J.K. Rowling's lies have been cited in the US Congress, for example - by lawmakers denying trans people the right to the same standard of medical care that non-trans people enjoy.
Sorry, but an essay that accuses trans people of being dangerous to women and children because they are rapists and child abusers and spreaders of social contagion (the language of disease) is not empathetic to trans people, or really to anyone except J. K. Rowling.
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*?
> Because misogyny is stored in the Y chromosome, apparently.
This, but unironically. There are plausible evolutionary-psychological reasons that it would confer a reproductive advantage on men in the historical environment to be misogynist (can't increase your number of offspring by impregnating a defeated tribe's women through violent coercion if you respect them as people), and the hormonal inducers of sex-different behaviours are by necessity encoded in the Y chromosome.
I mean, no, I shouldn't. Women should be able to compete in sports without some random dude putting their appearance, anatomy, chromosomes, and life story under a microscope.
Imane Khelif was assigned female at birth, grew up as a girl, lived life as a woman, and boxed with women for her entire career. She lost matches to women over the course of her entire career. No one said anything until she beat a Russian boxer and the Russian-controlled IBA invented a hoax about her three days later to restore their boxer's undefeated record.
Rowling was beaten and abused by a man and when she sees a woman who looks a bit masculine fighting a woman who looks more feminine, she is triggered. This is a personal, psychological problem, and honestly, I have sympathy for her. Rowling should get therapy, though - in private - instead of being allowed to take her personal psychological problems out on perfectly innocent women who are guilty of nothing more than failing to meet Rowling's standards of femininity.
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?
I mean, there are probably millions of people who think that, and very few of them devote much time to actively trying to strip trans people of their rights, donating to anti-trans organizations, spreading insinuations that trans people are rapists and child molesters, making fun of trans-inclusive language in a way that targets innocent NGOs who are just trying to provide services to women (and trans men) in developing countries...
Ultimately, yes, if you believe that a minority group is dangerous, and beg other people to persecute them on your behalf, people are going to think that you are repugnant, and work to stop you from doing that, no matter what the topic is. And I don't think you can blame the targeted minority (or say "they shouldn't be surprised") if, in their zeal to defend their own right to exist, they happen to offend the person who is constantly attacking them.
But everyone has limited energy. I don't spend much time looking for celebrities who hate me or my way of life and demanding that they recant their views and issue me an apology. Billions of religious people around the world would view me as a heretic or an apostate, but it would be very tedious if I decided to pick on some random religious guy and hound him to the end of the earth to get him to say that he's okay with me not believing in his version of God. Similarly, I don't think trans people go out of their way to have confrontations with anti-trans celebrities. It's Rowling who seems to be utterly consumed with her transphobia and unwilling to just let people be.
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?
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?
No, her main issue was that she believed the rights of biological females were getting trampled on.
Again, look at her 2020 essay that someone posted. What triggered her (her words) was Scotland making it easier to get a gender recognition certificate. It wasn't reading about a trans woman raping a cis woman. It wasn't statistics about crimes committed by trans women in public bathrooms. No - it was "we're thinking about reducing the waiting period before we issue a certificate to trans people" that sent Rowling into the pit of despair, a self-described day-long "dark place" inside her head where she relived memories of being sexually assaulted (not by a trans person).
There is no connection between gender recognition certificate procedures and the rights of "biological females". Rowling is just a profoundly sick woman who attacks a vulnerable minority in lieu of seeking the therapy she so obviously needs.
Can anyone explain how it's "efficient" to fire and then immediately attempt to rehire nuclear weapons security personnel and USDA officials working on bird flu?
I've never worked in HR but I feel like that would generate a lot of paperwork that could be avoided by just not firing those people in the first place. But maybe this is a myth, like the myth that leaving a light bulb on saves energy vs. turning it off when you're not using it. So should every company and every government just start firing most of their workforce and then rehiring them a few days later?
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/17/climate/trump-nnsa-nuclear-staff-reinstated/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fired-officials-bird-flu-rehire-rcna192716
TLDR: It's not.
(Almost) everything Elon Musk says is a lie. And "naming a government agency to do something different than what it actually does" is just about the easiest lie to make.
In this case, it may be less a lie and more "he came up with a backronym for DOGE that happened to have the word << efficiency >> in it".
Anyhow: the goal is chaos, catastrophe, causing problems (to blame the Democrats and to get credit for solving them), and lying about the accomplishments (a $8 million program reported as $8 *Billion* in savings).
‘backronym’ I like that. I might use it in a crossword.
Mistakes happen. It's not efficient its a mistake.
I don’t think it’s a mistake.
Explain?
I don’t think chaos is an outcome that this administration fears. I have an inkling that it’s actually an outcome that they would celebrate. If you listen to what Steve Bannon has said about the federal government and what should happen to it, and then put that together with the fact that Donald Trump pays attention to him, it isn’t a stretch to wonder if chaos followed by a declaration of national emergency would be a good outcome for what these folks are after. So I don’t think it’s a mistake, in the sense of unintended consequences for the actors.
The DEI purge is throwing some babies out with the bathwater. Concern trolls* would prefer Trump slow-waked it, appointed a bunch of committees, held a bunch of congressional debates, welcomed public feedback, checked and triple checked the plan until oh wow look at how the time flies Trump isn't President anymore.
Obviously I would prefer if it wasn't being done by Pete Hegseth and various other guests on Springer, but no-college whites decided they want a reality TV show host in charge of the executive branch and it turns out America is a democracy. Whadaya gonna do?
*Not saying you're one, just that they exist.
I don’t think Musk’s activities have much to do with eliminating DEI. The OP is about firing people whose jobs are securing nuclear weapons and investigating bird flu, not DEI.
The situation with DEI is that Trump signed executive orders to eliminate it from the Federal government. Government moves slowly, so I’d expect it to take something like six months if things move normally. To pick off any stragglers, the Administration would make sure that next year’s budget doesn’t include any money for DEI. (The fiscal year begins on October 1.) The choice isn’t between breaking the law and having DEI still around four years from now.
I agree with John Schilling and was planning to put up a similar post. I am thoroughly sick of people throwing around polarizing nonsense that isn't even relevant to the discussion going on. Yes, I'm sure there's such a thing as concern trolls. However, none have piped up in the present discussion. So why even bring them up? Seems to me what you're manifesting is how polarized you've become. Even when nobody is expressing the infuriating stance you mention, you start thinking about those dumbass people you hate as soon as the relevant issue comes up. And then you mention them, which is likely to irritate the people you are in the discussion with, because you're saying "maybe you aren't a hysterical jackass, a concern troll, but some who take your view definitely are, and I'm not entirely sure you're not." If you want to discuss the topic, why do that? And if you want to fight, go mud wrestle on Xitter.
I was giving an argument for why people might be satisfied with the "move fast and break things" approach and be leery of those demanding a slowdown.
I was flippant in response to what I saw as Zupancic's flippant comment, apologies if it contributed to the Xitter-ification of this space.
I'm broadly sympathetic to Trump's attempts to roll back Woke, even to moving quickly (perhaps trying to create a _rout_ amongst the Woke - there are positive feedback loops in getting people to leave a sinking ship. I would like that.).
But I _would_ like him to try and put a _bit_ more effort into reducing collateral damage.
The fiasco with firing nuclear weapons security people was bad.
Suggesting a buyout to _everyone_ in the CIA - well, that includes the people who review our spy satellite photos. Do they _want_ to lose the people who are in charge of noticing if Russia or China starts installing new missile silos?
No, I don't want multiple rounds of investigating committees in Congress. But could maybe Musk pick three interns to proofread firing lists and notice when people are performing a job that we want to _keep_?
"Do they _want_ to lose the people who are in charge of noticing if Russia or China starts installing new missile silos?"
I think yes? Putin is our friend now, he is not going to attack the great TRUMP. Meanwhile these people are going to be hurt, which is the whole point.
Many Thanks! Even if Trump is cuddling up with Putin, there are still _other_ opponents or potential opponents (the PRC, Iran), who we should be keeping an eye on.
>Meanwhile these people are going to be hurt, which is the whole point.
Trump is a boor, but not a cartoon villain. Unless you have a policy statement from him in hand explicitly stating that that is his objective. Do you?
The fact that "concern trolls" might prefer a thing, is basically irrelevant if that thing is also preferred by approximately all sensible people including non-MAGA Republicans. So, notwithstanding the weaselly footnote, it does read that you are trying to dismiss everyone who opposes the Trumpian approach of being a "concern troll".
Please don't do that.
The defining aspect of a "concern troll" is that they pretend to agree with you directionally and then express "concern" about all the details.
Most of the anti-DOGE criticism I'm hearing has the same sort of flavour -- it's criticism of the "how" from people who don't agree with the "what" in the first place. "I'm really worried about all these minor details on how the budget is being cut" from people who don't want the budget to be cut in the first place.
It's not that you're not allowed to disagree with both the what and the how at the same time, it's just that criticism of the "how" doesn't mean much when it comes from someone who disagrees with the "what" -- because these people would be finding things to complain about even if the "how" were perfect.
What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?
Because those people vastly outnumber "concern trolls"; trolling is a niche thing to begin with and subtle trolling even more so. But when someone dares disagree with Team MAGA on tactics, you go straight to "concern trolls". So, I and most of the sensible people, are going to be proud to stand with the "concern trolls".
Seems to me you might want to consider that, when people who disagree with your goals are telling you that your tactics will fail to achieve those goals, and the people who *agree* with your goals are *also* telling you that your tactics will fail, you might want to think a bit harder about those tactics.
<What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?
"the spoiler" -- a prig who won't get on the mockery train to vengeance funland
> "What's the term for someone who actually does agree with at least some of your goals, but also understands that your chosen tactics will fail to achieve those goals and thinks maybe they should give you a heads-up about that?"
We absolutely need a term for that!
Perhaps "concern pixie?"
"party pooper", "negative nancy", "debbie downer" all come to mind.
<It's not that you're not allowed to disagree with both the what and the how at the same time, it's just that criticism of the "how" doesn't mean much when it comes from someone who disagrees with the "what" -- because these people would be finding things to complain about even if the "how" were perfect.
This reminds me of the time I disagreed with someone here about some research on the effect of lead levels in children, citing some studies that supported my point, and they thought I'd cherry picked studies that supported my ideas. No, I hadn't. I looked something up, found one big study at the top of the pile, and read that. And in fact when I stumbled into the ongoing argument about this topic I had no opinions at all about how much lead is dangerous for children. I had no ax to grind. And, jeez, I wouldn't do that -- pick the one study out of several that happens to support an argument. That's shitty and dishonest and while I'm not perfect, doing that sort of thing is just not in my repertoire. I think the absolute lowest I would sink, and that would be on a bad day, would be to just abandon the discussion rather than admit I had been wrong about lead levels.
Why do you think people disagreeing with the "what" are sure to complain about the "how." I don't fully qualify as disagreeing about the what -- I'm for rooting out the Woke. But if I thought all the Woke policies were good, but the anti-Woke agenda was being implemented in a smart effective way, I would admit it. It wouldn't even cost me much. My main point would be that getting rid of the Woke was cruel and wrong, etc etc -- it wouldn't weaken my main argument to say yeah they're doing it efficiently. I mean jeez, I could even compare what they were doing to Nazi death camps.
Do you really think the people who agree with you about radically rooting out the Woke are fine honest people who would never pick nits or distort facts to support their view, but the people on the opposite side are dumb and sneaky and incapable of honestly saying it's a bad agenda, but carried out very efficiently? Here's a rule of thumb: Any time you slip into thinking the people who disagree with you are all have the same lame, ugly character flaw, one you don't have, you can be sure your head is up your ass.
>Why do you think people disagreeing with the "what" are sure to complain about the "how."
It seems to be an accurate assumption to make most of the time. I've noticed for a long time now that almost every criticism of the 'how' happens to come from someone who was against the 'what' in the first place (or more accurately these days, the 'who'). And I've noticed this in noncontroversial topics as well, though less often and with less heat
<It seems to be an accurate assumption
So in a discussion in here that involves whats and how’s, as many issues do, someone arguing for the what and the how does not have to pin down those in the other side about what their real objections are? They get to just assume those complaining about the how’s are arguing in bad faith? Wow, novel!
I’m going to just assume this is a ridiculous idea.
I don't think anyone would consider that efficient over not doing that. This is like asking people to defend a shot on goal that doesn't go in. Of course that wasn't the intention. There's plenty wrong about what the musketeers are doing without pretending what wasn't intended was intended.
Ah, so you're saying that this was a mistake? But I thought Elon Musk was a hypercompetent genius who successfully ran four companies, 13 families, and 2 world record setting video game accounts.
At the very least, there are probably hundreds of comments on ACX alone lauding Musk's intelligence. How could an intelligent person make such an idiotic mistake as firing the people in charge of nuclear weapons safety and pandemic prevention? That seems like a pretty easy mistake not to make.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to do here honestly. I think Musk has tragically been sucked into the right wing catturd2 lowest common denominator rage bait toxoplasmotic vortex of derangement. I think this is bad and has caused him to cause real harm in his direction of DOGE. I think his anger at progressives and the democratic party has blinded to the harm he and his team are causing. It would be better for him and for us all if he stayed out of politics.
On a purely strategic level I think the Democratic party played their hand very poorly pushing him and the broader "tech bro" group away and the Republicans played their hand very well in courting them. As I broadly prefer the governance of Democrats to Republicans while also recognizing the tech bro optimists as closer to kin I find this whole situation very painful.
I think I understand the basic limbic responses that could cause someone to behave like the, possibly composed of straw, person you're lambasting. The possible story is great, too good to check. Here are the leaders in tech, the people actually building things riding into the swamp that is Washington where advancement is all negative sum and competition are had to see who can best stifle growth and innovation. Sure, they're doing so allied with a buffoon, but that can't be helped, every team needs a mascot. And then instead of what would be a cathartic and heroic opening of a new golden era we get... this. We get Vance tossing out vaccine skepticism. We get research projects halted, we get longitudinal studies canceled. Our greatest warriors rode headlong into the swamp and were immediately covered in muck and grime. The mind recoils, it doesn't want to believe this. And on the sidelines are muck men shaped vaguely like Neal Zupancic laughing at them for being so naive, for daring to have optimism. It takes some introspection and self control to not double down and resist denial.
Now, all of that aside, your basic point is silly nonsense. No one at any point thought that Musk was incapable of making mistakes. The startup/silicon valley mindset is to move fast and break things, not move cautiously and never make mistakes. It's particularly frustrating when they're moving fast and breaking things that are important in service of a vindicative false goals. It's the mindset that doesn't mind a few hundred million dollar rockets explode if it makes the next rocket better.
I guess this was exactly the sort of comment I was looking for. Some insight into the minds of Musk fans. Some sign that they understand the damage he's doing. I found it very satisfying to read.
The next thing I'm wondering is, how could someone have possibly believed it would be otherwise? I don't think "optimism" covers it. We're supposed to have evidence for beliefs - not just vague hopes. So I guess I'm wondering what circumstances produce the kind of person who didn't see this coming. But on this topic I also have some answers.
For example, I've seen a lot of comments on here to the effect of "I don't read twitter" and "I don't like twitter style discussions", so that's part of the puzzle. Musk's public meltdowns and radicalization have played out on twitter and people who dismiss everything that happens there as beneath their notice wouldn't have experienced them in real time. People who had no stake in twitter also wouldn't have watched Elon Musk ruin it. They wouldn't have seen him fire critical staff and then try to rehire them days later, or make laughable, bush league mistakes at every decision point. Come to think of it, they probable didn't know about all the Nazi stuff either.
Because from my perspective, as a politics guy, a bunch of people being really optimistic about a man who helps and supports Nazis coming to power sounds... well, naive doesn't quite cover it. I mean, I wasn't surprised at all when he did the Nazi salute, but I guess a lot of people were, and that's... not unexpected, but also not optimal.
And so that leads me to wonder: how do we get the word out about things like this? How is our information environment so catastrophically broken that people didn't know that Elon Musk was like this years ago? Why didn't his mismanagement of twitter or his years of courting online Nazi supporters get the attention it deserved?
Because what's painful for me is to watch a group of people who are mostly well-intentioned and clearly have a lot of a sort of mathematical/computational intelligence fall for the most blatant and obvious right-wing propaganda, over and over and over again. It's painful to see these people read a blatantly transphobic screed and go "I don't see anything transphobic here", or watch a CEO destroy 80% of the value of a company and go "I think we should put him in charge of the federal government". It's painful to watch fascism actually work on people who, on paper, should be far too smart to fall for it. And it's painful to think that I could have turned out like this - like the kind of techno-libertarian who could be optimistic about someone like Elon Musk in the year 2025 - in some very close alternate universe where my life had gone slightly differently.
Twitter has clearly deranged Elon, but are you so sure it hasn't deranged you as well? Just from the way you started your engagement on this platform it is hard to take you as a even keeled evaluator of the moment. For instance, Musk did not do a nazi salute. If you watch the full video that is pretty clear.
It's pretty premature to claim the Twitter buyout destroyed 80% of the value of the company. Besides its usefulness in birthing grok and some actually pretty good changes like community notes when I run the question of its valiation through grok3 deep search it comes back with ~$35B based on recent revenue down from the $44B originally paid for it which basically everyone considered a huge over valuation. The twt market cap when the whole thing kicked off was around $32B. Stock value aside the intangibles of the purchase, free speech restoration(positive valence) or discourse setting powers(negative valence), were clearly worth the cost to musk and clearly why he bought it.
Now we'll probably be in agreement that the discourse setting powers were used to a bad end. Although I'll point out that people who see nazis everywhere on Twitter usually create that environment themselves by engaging with them. I'll occasionally criticize some maoist in the platform and suddenly my feed is full of left wing lunatics and I don't think the Plattsburgh is actually overrun by communists. It just serves you more of what you engage with. I suspect what happened was the odious right wing accounts were suppressed such that you could reply/qt them to dunk on them and it wouldn't effect your feed before and musk removed that suppression so people used to dunking on right wingers suddenly got a huge influx of them.
I'm sure this all just sounds like musk apologia to you. And I don't know if I'll be able to convince you otherwise but you seem like an active participant in the toxoplasmosis process here. It's not enough for you to think he's a deeply flawed man lashing out at the Democratic party that he sees as having wronged him and in the process causing damage that he's blind to. He needs to be an actual nazi to you. And not just a nazi but an incompetent nazi. And I just think your view is distorted here. Much like musk and his sycophants will believe every, at best, half truth he claims about how much doge is saving us you seem to believe every, at best, half truth about the man himself. As an aside what are your beliefs about how he got his start? Do you think he was a nepo baby funded by an emerald mine?
Right, so this is why it's hard for me to be even-keeled. When someone does a Nazi salute, twice - which I have watched video of - and then other people deny it, I have no idea how to approach the situation. It doesn't seem like just having a polite conversation could resolve a disagreement like this. This isn't like the dress or yanny and laurel, where people see different things depending on essentially random factors and there are no consequences for society if some people can't agree. There are like, stakes and stuff.
I think the fact that we could sit here and politely analyze your claim that Elon didn't do a Nazi salute represents something fundamentally broken about our society, or I guess your society, since it also makes me want to run as far away from this comment section as I can get, and if possible nuke it from orbit.
I think it's crazy that someone can be tone policed for using sarcasm, but not for denying Nazism. That 90% of the people who read this exchange will think you are being reasonable. There are times when rage is an appropriate response, and calm detachment is irresponsible. Is complicity.
I think the US made a mistake in not banning Nazism and Nazi symbols. I think Elon should be in jail right now for making that gesture, twice, or at least in therapy after having convinced a jury that he was not mentally well enough to be held accountable for that action. I think that everyone who posted swasticas or 1488 or anything in that ballpark on twitter should have been arrested and sent to a mandatory civics class, along with everyone who liked or retweeted those posts, and probably everyone who defends them.
I think that liberalism has fundamentally failed to meet the challenge of this moment and as a result US society will suffer and authoritarian societies like that of Russia and China will thrive, and that makes me sad because I do think there's something to be said for democracy. Liberalism was great when it was like, Catholics and Protestants compromising on whether their bread literally turned into Jesus or just figuratively. But asking us to compromise with people who deny the things that we can literally see happen with our own eyes, to benefit an ideology that tortured, sterilized, and murdered millions of people for the most evil and self-serving of reasons - sorry, that's a bridge too far.
But, as I watch the US right wing melt down on social media and at town hall meetings, and watch Trump's and Elon's approval ratings in freefall, I'm at least a bit optimistic. At the very least, Elon's legacy is cemented, and he'll be mentioned in the same breath as Goebbels rather than Tesla, and that gives me a certain sense of satisfaction.
You are launching yourself into this topic in a way very likely to irritate the person you are responding to. There is no reason at all to think Spencer has a case of Musk worship. There certainly exist people who do, but even most of them are probably more
nuanced in their approval than the morons of your imaginings. If you want to put together a strawman and then piss on it could
you please fucking leave the house and do that stuff lin the driveway?
How is it a strawman? Efficiency is literally in the name of the agency, and I have read literally dozens of comments defending DOGE and Musk here and calling him smart and genius and not dumb, and even praising the specific things he is doing now. I even saw one guy here in one of the ACX open threads saying he should fire literally every federal employee.
It's a strawman in the present discussion. You have no reason to think the person you are talking with now, Spencer, is one of the people calling Musk a genius and praising every step he's taking now.
Spencer does, though, sound like they may be less completely convinced than you are that the DEI purge is a mistake in every respect. So what you are doing in is being sarcastic with Spencer in a way that would only be justified if they were a full-on Musk-is-god fool.
You have now scratched your own irritable itch to be mean to the infuriating Musk-is-god morons in your imagination, while also treating the actual Spencer unfairly and probably irritating them. In other words, you have pushed the situation in the direction of polarization. If you want to have a pissing contest, you have taken the right steps. But if you want to get someone to see your point of view, and take a moment to at least try on their ideas to see if any make some sense, than you've substantially reduced the chance of that happening.
I see this sort of thing happening here in most discussions of the DEI purge and related matters. I simply cannot see why people do not grasp how dumb and dysfunctional they are being, all the while apparently feeling pleased as punch about their posts. Fuck off with that dumb shit.
Why do you think that my comment implied that Spencer was calling Musk a genius? Is it not possible to talk to person A about something that person B said?
I think you're just misreading tone and intent here. I frequently have discussions with people both online and in person in which we sarcastically adopt someone else's rhetoric in order to highlight its absurdity. If the intent was to accuse Spencer himself of this view it would be more directed - like "but you said Musk was a genius" or "but you seem to believe that Musk is a genius." "But I thought Musk was a genius" is not an accusation about the beliefs of the person you are talking to. It's an observation that a the belief in question is common or prevalent.
> Can anyone explain how it's "efficient" to fire and then immediately attempt to rehire nuclear weapons security personnel and USDA officials working on bird flu?
It's efficient because the optimal number of false positives in any process is not 0. If you can fire 99% of your chaff, accidentally firing 1% of your wheat at the same time is actually an exceptionally good tradeoff.
> If you can fire 99% of your chaff, accidentally firing 1% of your wheat at the same time is actually an exceptionally good tradeoff.
That depends on the original ratio of wheat to chaff.
What if it’s the other way round?
I mean that sounds smart, because there's numbers in it and stuff. I wonder what the world would look like if we apply those numbers elsewhere. What if airplane parts had a 1% failure rate and no one caught those errors because it's more efficient to put thousands of planes in the air even if 1% of them fail?
Hmm, well, I guess we're sort of finding out what that looks like right now, aren't we?
> What if airplane parts had a 1% failure rate and no one caught those errors because it's more efficient to put thousands of planes in the air even if 1% of them fail?
This is a bullet I am very happy to bite. I would rather my travel be cheaper and slightly less safe than more expensive and slightly more safe. If you ever leave your house, you're making the same compromise too - you'd be safer indoors. But safety is not the only consideration.
Now this is an interesting topic. So one of the problems with applying this logic to air travel is that when planes fall out of the sky they sometimes hit houses in Philly. The other problem is I don't think it's ethical to offer people less expensive but more dangerous options because the practical effect of such an offering is that it will end up disproportionately killing poor people.
This is one of the failure modes of the free market, in my opinion, and why we need society to come together to set minimum safety standards. Otherwise, people would forever be assuming the risk of taking the cheaper but slightly more dangerous airplanes, cars, medications, foods, etc. etc. etc. and putting other people (e.g. their kids, pedestrians, people who live near airports) at risk in the process.
It's much easier to rehire a few hundred employees than to recall thousands of airplane parts across hundreds of airline companies. In fact according to your first link, 275/300 of the fired NNSA staff had already been rehired as the story was being written, and it's reasonable to expect that at least some of the remaining 25 will also be rehired. The firings happened on Thursday evening and had been mostly reversed over the weekend. Whatever paperwork you're whining about seems to have been taken care of in short order
I hope you aren't triggered by my use of numbers. They were in your source
I think the concern is that for every such example that is extremely obvious, well-covered by the news media, and therefore reversed quickly, there are several others that are much less obvious, not ever reversed, and nearly as damaging.
And the reverse is unlikely to be true - e.g. for every true example of fraud and waste that is found and trumpeted loudly by DOGE, it's not likely there are several others that aren't being trumpeted - since DOGE is trying to trumpet all such cases.
So a calculation of identified wins to losses needs to account for a biased rate of hidden unidentified cases.
No, I love numbers, especially since they highlight that we're talking about chaff, and not human beings who have been put through undue stress and hardship because the efficiency czar couldn't be bothered to check on whether they were important for our society to function before tossing them out.
And I guess you're right. The paperwork isn't really that important. I dunno, it still seems pretty inefficient though.
>it still seems pretty inefficient though.
You might be right, depending on the proportion of oopsie firings that end up happening. But still, I'm sympathetic to the attempt, being someone who knows firsthand how absurdly difficult it is to downsize the bureaucracy
Sure, but that assumes your wheat and chaff lists are very close to perfect. Only 1% of chaff is not on the chaff list, and only 1% of your wheat is on it. Do you have any reason to think these firings were based on such an accurate list? If so, how to you square that with the linked news reports that indicate that there are efforts to quickly rehire several of them?
> Sure, but that assumes your wheat and chaff lists are very close to perfect.
I don't think that was a smuggled assumption at all, and is neither implied nor required by my hypothesis. Sure, they *could* have waited another 2 days to double-check the lists, but that would have left the chaff on the payroll another 2 days. There's a balance between speed and accuracy being made here, and I have seen nothing to suggest that the balance struck is substantially sub-optimal. So you have to rehire a few competent guys later? Fine, this is a price worth paying to fire the dead wood earlier.
I didn't call your it's-ok-to-err- by-1% a smuggled assumption. It's not smuggled in, it's right in the open. Your point was that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK. I agree. My objection was that saw no reason to believe that these firings were based on anything like such a precise evaluation of who was wheat and who was chaff.
So now you are arguing on other grounds. There are things that make the firings OK even if the error rate's higher than 1%: You need to act fast, because otherwise you are paying an extra of salary to chaff. That's a terrible argument. Even if the chaff is completely useless, 2 days of salary is a tiny sum, in the US budget or even in the cost of the agency in question.
So what was your other point -- oh, right, you didn't have another one. You abandoned your the-error rate is tiny one, and moved to the dollar-cost-of-2-days-chaff-salary-is -an-intolerable-waste.
Sounds to me like you like you just enjoy the idea of people you think of as chaff getting fired at short notice. You probably have a whole mental model of all the says they are infuriating sniveling power hungry fools. Do you have any idea at all what any of these fired individuals are like? I do not. But then I'm not defending them, just attacking your nonsense.
Sounds like you missed my point. I was never suggesting that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff were OK. My point was that arbitrarily sized errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK if you don't care about optimising for accuracy. I have no idea whether the actual numbers are 99% chaff and 1% wheat.
> That's a terrible argument. Even if the chaff is completely useless, 2 days of salary is a tiny sum, in the US budget or even in the cost of the agency in question.
Well this is the sorites paradox, isn't it? If 2 days salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, then 3 day's salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, and 4 day's salary is trivial and not worth worrying about, and... then the US government finds itself $36 trillion in debt, "But but but each of my individual expenditures is trivial!". A line has to be drawn somewhere. There is nothing worse about this schelling point than any other schelling point.
<I was never suggesting that small errors in who was wheat and who was chaff were OK.
Oh yes you were. You actually said that "if you can fire 99% of your chaff, accidentally firing 1% of your wheat at the same time is actually an exceptionally good tradeoff." If saying that's an exceptionally good tradeoff doesn't count as saying 99%/1% is OK, I don't know what does. (And as I said I agree that 99%/1% is a very good tradeoff. I just don't see how it relates to the topic under discussion, since nobody, including you, is saying the accuracy was that high.)
<My point was that arbitrarily sized errors in who was wheat and who was chaff are OK if you don't care about optimising for accuracy.
So what is your point? Accuracy doesn't matter in any situation? Accuracy doesn't matter in this situation? Everybody gets to pick the degree of accuracy that they want, and nobody is allowed to criticize their choice? The people currently changing the government around can be as accurate or inaccurate as they want, because YEEHAW!?
<There is nothing worse about this schelling point than any other schelling point.
So all schelling pointsare equally valid? In that case, why are you defending the value of your 2 day point? You say it is no worse than others. Are you saying it is better than other possible ones, or equal to them?
“Chaff”, “dead wood”…
Imagine this is you. Never mind, it’s your 22 year old daughter fresh out of college, and there’s this rich spoiled fuck calling her dead wood and firing her on the spot even though as far as she knows she’s done nothing wrong. Well, chaff needs to be disposed of, so tell her to wipe her crocodile tears and go flip some burgers or something.
Enjoy.
Do you think that the people who work jobs which constitute an inefficient use of taxpayers money (either because the job is zero/negative-sum even if done well, or because they're poor workers who are not doing the job well) deserve to keep those jobs because they're sympathetic people?
And if so, isn't Universal Basic Income a better policy proposal for effecting the taxpayer-to-sympathetic wealth transfer than going through all this theatre of creating, staffing, and paying for inefficient government jobs?
People. Not chaff. Not dead wood. People. They may or may not do useful work, but they deserved to be treated humanely. How hard is that?
You know, this is a good point, and also, there's no evidence to suggest that the people fired were poor performers and the people rehired were good performers. The people fired were fired because Trump and Musk didn't think their *jobs* should exist, not because they were unqualified for those jobs. And the people rehired were brought back because someone realized that our safety and security were in imminent danger from not having those roles filled.
In fact, the "chaff" here were all people who had been vetted - in many cases by Republicans! - and deemed qualified to fill roles that the democratically elected representatives of the American people deemed necessary. And while we may not be in imminent danger from having those roles slashed, certainly countless Americans will be harmed - or have already been harmed - by cuts to government support for agriculture.
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.)
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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].
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.
Money is stock in a economy
nation states maybe are dying
bitcoin has a drug market economy, drugs won vs the american empire in the 70's; america post iraq is much much weaker
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?
I dislike the predictions that have stupid rules
"will we get gai in X years" (if we dont have ai in 100 years this closes as unresolved)
"was corona a lab leak"(decided by the cia opinion)
etc.
fuck them for anything not short term with good rules; otherwise they probably average to partisan opinions ("who wins the election" some people go 99%, some 1%, it will be 40-60 because enough people look at that stupidity and say 50/50)
> 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.
> like when prediction markets showed a non-negligible chance of Trump winning 2020 even months after the election was called
Hey, Jan 6 could've worked if the rioters weren't complete cowards.
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.
theres chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay
worse, these chemicals should be expected to have a stronger effect on humans considering they are in fact often human hormones being pissed into the water supply and recycled over and over
I dont see point conceeding ground on metaphysics, but vague feelings that somethings strange happening, not much reason to doubt that.
>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
I mean, VR does exist...
>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.
> but I know of none where a micropenis was the ideal
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)
As I'm sure everyone is tired of writing an essay every time someone asks this question, please just read this post that explains everything: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zXq7dpyj2ik9GcR5t/my-model-of-gender-identity
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)
Yes, which is why I provided an alternative that isn't partisan hackery. Just read it, for goodness' sake.
Thank you! I will have a look at it. I just have not yet. I do appreciate you guys answering and engaging!
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
> We would, I think be deeply appalled by a twenty year old deciding to cut of their arm
Of course you would. But the reality of the situation is that body integrity dysphoria is a real thing that exists. If you're disgusted by such aberration, I can't stop you, but at least don't be in denial about it.
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.
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?
Boomers retire over this decade; maybe russia or china(the worse cases) have "started" , but it hasnt really hit the wall yet
In china the young are "lying flat", with "996" work hours, while the only thing xi offers is "eat bitterness", which is apparently not even being translated well.
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.
> Interesting point.
Is it? I thought this was all well known and even left wing analysis?
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...
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.
Japan is actually becoming friendlier to immigrants, believe it or not. A growing number of convenience store cashiers are foreigners, for example.
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"....)
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.
trumps nearing 10th year of politics, corona was drastic. Anyone still neutral is choosing it intentionally.
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.
The false premises that woke or specifically Biden era woke spawned an evil discriminatory wave of action against white men was debated to death in the original post. Even though Scott clarified this in the OT heading, bullshit motivated reasoning is still going on in this OT.
I think Scott should step in here and point this out to the commenters who didn't read the correction or those who did read it and still 'feel' the original post is correct?
Let's call what Cruz did to ingratiate himself with Trump what it is, a calculated deception, aiding and abetting the ongoing gaslighting of the American public by a morally bankrupt president.
Really, is putting the brakes on the slide into a post fact based society less important than shrimp welfare?
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).
Link please. And could you enumerate these executive orders.
Oh Christ, I think I found it.
“ The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive. The journal offers authors the option to publish their articles under a pseudonym, ”
Yeah, sure, if you go look for things that reinforce your biases, I’m sure you’ll find them. Published by pseudonymous talkers.
Pseudonymous because they are regarded by many as morally or socially offensive.
If you want to get into this on a factual level you are going to have to be specific and provide evidence. Not just some guy said something. We’ve got a president that constantly says things that are easily shown to be untrue that don’t even have the benefit of plausibility.
Did you read Scot’s correction?
Present some evidence and I’ll be happy to discuss this with you.
What do you think about voluntary castration?
It can make sense if you're trans (defined broadly to include non-binary). If you aren't trans, you probably won't like the outcome.
Some convicted rapists have requested voluntary chemical castration, I don't know if that's any good though.
If this is about the whole nulls/nullo thing, it's a combination fetish and psychiatric illness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genital_modification_and_mutilation#Emasculation
(Seriously, how the *hell* do I get to hear about these things? I certainly don't seek them out, and yet! there they are! on my social media content!)
I consider it to be a symptom of serious psychiatric illness, as most forms of self-harm are.
It will likely not be very voluntary in practice; india food aid, prostitutes plea bargains, etc.
I wonder why anyone would do that, is what I think.
I seriously consider doing it
Why?
unfulfilled sexual desire
Why don't you just masturbate? Or go to a prostitute?
I want to solve the root problem not mask the symptoms.
I mean, I kinda have that too, as a 36 year old virgin. I find whacking off can handle the sexual desire itself, and the fact that I'm actively getting out in the world, and meeting people, and hitting on women I find attractive, gives hope to the situation. Recently started going to therapy too, which gave me tools to handle the vague sense of unease I feel when hanging around strangers.
And meditation definitely helps with that too, you eventually learn to remain present instead of absorbed in the neuroses in your head when in a situation that triggers them.
Can also recommend the book Mathematica by David Bessis, really teaches a lot about the importance of persistence and being ok with mistakes, which is what it takes to escape the pit of involuntary celibacy.
You need your testicles for health. They aren’t just horniness inducers, they also make hormones that keep your body running well. If you want to be free of sexual desire there are drugs that diminish or eliminate it. Antidepressants have that side effect for many. I don’t know how they have that effect, but it’s not via shutting down testosterone because they have the same effect on women. I’m sure there are other drugs as well.
Standard of care procedure for unfulfilled sexual desire is whacking off. Seems better than castration in many ways.
To get rid of sin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy
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.
> 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.
...You're joking right? This is probably the worst time ever to consider a job in the public sector, education, or academia. Wait until this whole... situation plays out first.
Anyone who can teach high school math is not going to ever be out of a job.
Not when public schools start getting shut down.
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.
All of these objections smell like lawfare without putting forward any actual concerns.
Well then you have a very different working definition of "actual concerns" than I do.
"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"
Could you, or anyone else, give a strong overview of why it is important that DOGE be subject to the FOIA, the Privacy Act, or the Administrative Procedures Act that is not just referencing the fact that those laws exist?
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.
I don't believe the end goal of DOGE has been secretive at all. They have been using all the data they gather to make firing people easier, and occasionally rehiring when they decide a group of employees is too important to let go. The legal attempts to stop DOGE because they have access to this data and could theoretically use it in some bad way seem very presumptuous.
"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."
What conservatives have learned in the past two decades is that journalists and Congressmen have very different interests than citizens. So when a law says it gives citizens power to hold the government in check, but actually gives that power to journalists and "watchdogs" and Congress, it isn't helping you.
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.
The government following the law to a T means disappointing voters. Don't you like Democracy?
> Rule of law is kind of a big deal, given what happens in its absence.
...Meaningful change?
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 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!"
Incorrect. I'm glad you brought up "transparency" because even a rudimentary understanding of the concept demonstrates why this argument is nonsensical.
Here's a nice encyclopedia article that might help you understand what transparency is: https://www.britannica.com/topic/transparency-government
So you see, "in the interests of transparency" isn't just some mantra that liberals invoke to annoy fascists. Transparency is something we impose upon the powerful as a check on their power. Conversely, we give privacy to regular people - those who are not in government or positions of power - in order to protect them from exploitation by the powerful.
The President needs to be transparent so that the public can have enough information to evaluate his activities - including financial entanglements that might influence his decision-making. Your financial and tax information don't have to be transparent to Elon Musk because Musk - a random, unelected Nazi whose achievements include destroying 80% of twitter's value and designing the worst truck - has no legitimate interest in evaluating your decision-making.
Hope that clears things up!
Elon struggles to fit the label of Nazi. No real Nazi would be cutting departments when given access to power.
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.)
Meh, people will read into it what they will.
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.
You are mistaken about the meaning of the phrase "a whole person".
It's not hard to google this. I put in "make you a whole person" and got these results, explaining what is meant by this very common expression:
https://thelifemeblog.com/2014/01/11/becoming-whole/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/bybovo/what_do_people_really_mean_you_have_to_be_a_whole/
Also, general life advice: when you see a phrase for the first time, look it up *before* you assume you know what it means, get offended, and go online to complain about it.
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.
Yeah, you got me. You did say that you'd seen it before. Which actually makes it weirder that you had no idea what it meant.
So, again, the first time you'd seen it, you should have looked it up, instead of making a false assumption and persisting in your error until now.
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".
Almost nothing has an "agreed upon" definition, but I understood the meaning and intent of "whole person" immediately.
Also, the reddit post, if you look carefully, says "what do people *really* mean" - indicating that there is a well-known meaning, but then also a subtle, less-well known, hidden meaning. If the phrase was really some enigmatic new coinage that no one had figured out, the post would not have made sense, and the comments discussing the nuance, origin, intent, etc. of the phrase would be unintelligible.
"Most people really would probably be offended if someone told them they're not a 'whole person'"
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.
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'.
First, I think "I'm not sure what this means but I'm offended by it" is both a terrible way to live and all too common in the types of people who are offended by things like SMBC comics.
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. If someone is really itchy and you say "I think you have eczema" you aren't insulting them, even though having eczema is generally worse than not having eczema.
Yes, in certain contexts, pointing out that someone has some deficiency could be considered offensive. In other contexts, it could be considered constructive.
The guy in the comic said that he doesn't feel needed and is struggling to find meaning - in other words, he feels like there are things missing from his life. He created a context which warrants an assessment, and the assessment that he should find some activities to provide him with the things that are missing from his life is completely warranted.
>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.
Yes, that is correct. I enjoy finding contradictions in inane arguments in order to demonstrate that the person making them hasn't thought them through.
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.
The issue was always object-level. I thought that was obvious.
> 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?
I mean, yeah. Have you seen femcels? Eugh.
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.
I remember enjoying James Brown's SEP article when I read it a few years ago: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thought-experiment/
My view is that thought experiments prove most valuable when it comes to concept and boundary testing, and are essentially world-sims. And as noted down-thread, the value of thought experiments in practical ethics could differ quite a bit from the value of thought experiments in other areas of philosophy. But to push back a little- if I tell you about this news story where a government is rescinding funding for overseas HIV programmes, and then you tell me about how that is a bit like this crazy time where you walked past a lake and there was a child drowning, how do these differ functionally? Of course in one situation we can say it is grounded on real facts about the world, but in both we're imagining scenarios and asking what our intuitions are.
You might say that the value of thought experiments in ethics is diminished because we have real world scenarios we can look at, so it seems lossy to reason about an approximation and then retroactively apply our intuitions onto the real scenario. But on the other hand the thought experiments in practical ethics are much much closer to real world scenarios (see Vsauce trying to set up real life trolley problem tests) and so the "thought experiment" part just acts as a shortcut.
Something like Mary's Room is the reverse- while it is pretty divorced from reality (although LLMs might give us an angle) people assume it has value precisely because it gives some access to otherwise inaccessible states, but the critique would be that the intuitions in an impossible world shouldn't translate over to reality.
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.
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.
> bias smuggling
If you dont smuggle biases how do you talk to people with significantly different world views
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.
> 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?
Seems a little presumptuous of others intellectual capacity
> 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.
While yes its usually hard, and far to many people discard it; if a methodology proves contradictory statements then it is nonevidence.
If you take someones thought experiment, reframe in a way they reject the conclusion; but still insit you must be convinced by their version; would a different type of argument really resolve the issue here?
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.
> Talking honestly is presumptuous? Either I'm confused here or...something.
Thinking hard, if you break someones script, your presuming they are in a mood for think`n
---
>> rationalists ai thought experiments
I have bashed my head into that several times as well; but I think they are *correct* a gai will be dangerous; but using thought experiments to suggest the chat bots wont be gai ... is pulling teeth; but it also doesnt matter if I provide evidence of chatbots being stupid in a predictable way either.
I dont see a difference here; conversations just fail, all the time, if im not in the mood to read a source, its not happening.
> 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.
Suppose you valued thought experiments; wouldnt you have beliefs you held because of valuable thought experiments? /s
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.
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.
FWIW anecdata.
I’ve only met one in real life, Herbert Simon, not in a professional context, he was helping with the dishes after a college pal’s on the cheap wedding. Nice guy, three kids and he was pretty damn productive.
A certain degree of obsessiveness is helpful for productivity but monomania isn’t necessary.
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?
Last year's medicine Nobel Prize winner, Katalin Karikó, has one daughter... two-time Olympic gold medalist rower Susan Francia. The more you know.
Edit: Looking into it further, it seems that of the few female Nobel laureates, most of them have one or two children. And then there's Barbara McClintock, the only female winner of an unshared Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize, who, despite living to the ripe age of 90, never married even once.
"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
> surely children hurt one's professional productivity
Is that a given? Exercising in theory help your energy levels
Its entirely possible that time maintaining a holistic vitalism wins over naive maximization(and in practice you get maybe 4 hours of thinkn a day)
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?
Your lacking a control here; my position isnt debating that you feel tired, you presumably also feel tired after an hour long run
I dont have children, Im not very productive
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.
Why would they need to care for the children themselves? That's what the wife is for.
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.
Excuse me? I just made an obvious objection to the assumption that having children as a man requires you to actually waste time raising them. Man, why do people keep thinking I'm being sarcastic?
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.
...Much, much less than men do. And as was discussed above, the most dedicated female scientists didn't even bother to get married. Men can uniquely afford to have children without wasting any time, so the question is mostly irrelevant. That's all.
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.
"The article didn’t intend to claim that 40% of NSF grants were woke - only 40% of the NSF grants that Ted Cruz and the Commerce Department had previously identified as woke. Those in turn are about 5% of all grants, so (assuming Cruz didn’t have false negatives) only about 2% of total grants were woke."
I'm missing something. I think you were assuming Cruz's team's search was something like a dumb-keyword-only search, and thus had (from your perspective) a 60% false positive rate. You think that same dumb search had a 0% false negative rate?
How can you consistently define the "false negative rate" in the absence of any sort of objective criterion? The whole point of the article is that Cruz and co *weren't* evaluating things in any sort of consistent manner: if they had been, the list wouldn't have looked like that.
What other method do you think they used to develop that list? Cruz didn't do this "research" in good faith. It's a political stunt so he can scream about "woke" and suck up to Trump. There is no requirement to be charitable to him.
That's canceled out by woke researchers also not operating in intellectual good faith. There is absolutely no requirement to be charitable to woke or those who promote it.
but the whole issue with his list is non-woke research being targeted! "B acted in bad faith so I can target innocent person C" is not fairness.
Oh sure, I'm not saying the results are great. I'm specifically responding to the previous commenter's attitude of self-righteousness in accusing Cruz of bad faith. Of COURSE it's a bad-faith naked exercise of political power. Woke is also a bad-faith exercise in political power, so that's what's required to counter it. There is no moral high ground here, only realpolitik. Complaining that one side is being unfair is like a naive child seeing a street fight and being upset that someone got kicked while they were down.
And, actually, I wouldn't say person C is completely morally blameless. Academia has broadly tolerated the illiberal creep of woke and its precursors for decades without taking a collective principled stance against it. Well, this is what happens. Sure I can feel bad for collateral damage, but I feel bad for it in the same way that I feel bad for German civilians in WW2.
ohhh... so that whole Ted Cruz 40% thing was just a bunch of naked realpolitik nonsense the whole time?
So since this is a comment thread for honest good-faith debates...
that whole Scott post and 100's of comments could've been skipped...
because spending thousands of words protesting and rebutting naked realpolitik nonsense is comparable to...
as you literally just put it:
"a naive child seeing a street fight and being upset that someone got kicked while they were down"
I don't think you understand my point.
People can argue against what Cruz is doing all they want. I might agree with some of their reasons. All I'm saying is that one argument I 100% don't agree with is that he's being 'unfair'. I think that argument is so naive that it betrays a complete lack of understanding of US politics.
I know very little about this particular list, but my personal position is this: it's bad to haphazardly slash away at research funding. But it's also bad to pursue aggressively racist anti-meritocratic policies under the guise of social justice. The latter represents a much more dangerous phenomenon IMO and it's been happening for decades. I am more than willing to tolerate some collateral damage in a political crusade against woke because I feel the long-term impact of woke is so negative that it's worth almost any price to eliminate it. At some point I might be convinced that the costs of the crusade outweigh the benefits, but it certainly won't be because of any appeals to 'fairness'.
In my view progressives have completely burned the commons of respectful political discourse in this country. They've been telling me for 20 years that my success is privilege and the culture I care about is evil and racist. Sorry, you don't get to turn around and cry about 'fairness' now that you're temporarily out of power. You already revealed yourselves to be unprincipled power-hungry liars and you also revealed yourselves to be my enemy. I don't care about fairness with you. I only want you destroyed and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage to do it. Progressives are a cancer on this country and Trump is the chemo. Stuff like Cruz's 40% hit rate is just the chemo making my hair fall out. I care way less about my hair than I care about killing the cancer.
>There is no moral high ground here, only realpolitik.
So moral relativism? Anything can be true? Sounds kind of woke to me.
> Well, this is what happens.
What is this? The country electing a fascists bigot?
>So moral relativism? Anything can be true? Sounds kind of woke to me.
No not moral relativism, it's might makes right. That's the opposite of woke, which fetishizes weakness and failure.
>What is this? The country electing a fascists bigot?
In broad strokes, yes. I mean Trump is neither a fascist nor a bigot but I understand your point. Things like feminism, affirmative action, anti-meritocratic minority preferences only exist because of the tolerance and sympathy of the productive majority in this country. That's why accusations of racism used to be politically effective: conservatives assumed good faith in the accusation and didn't want to be perceived as racist and so we invariably conceded in the face of it. Well the events of 2020 and beyond took the mask off of progressive hypocrisy. We no longer view the accusation as in good faith and so longer fear the label. That allows us to withdraw the charity (DEI, tolerance of gender nonsense, etc) that enabled woke because we no longer care about the social backlash. Call us racist all you want, we know you're full of shit. That allows us to elect a leader who no longer has to kowtow to the notion of shared values or tolerance and is therefore willing to go after your gravy train with reckless abandon.
Woke is absolute nonsense that only existed in the social niche created by polite political norms. Well it pushed good people too far and now we no longer care about being polite and are coming after woke with everything we have. I hope Trump destroys every last progressive institution and salts the earth from which they sprang, and I'm willing to tolerate a lot of collateral damage to let him do it.
Plenty of people are woke in good faith.
I disagree. Woke is an intellectually indefensible ideology and can only sustain itself through the systematic censorship of opposing viewpoints. People who 'honestly' believe it can only do so on the back of oppression. If they're too stupid or naive to realize that then they don't deserve the label of 'good faith'. They're like non-slaveholding southerners. If you're adjacent to evil then it's incumbent upon you to stop it.
And btw I don't make this judgement in a vacuum. Over the past decade, I've had hundreds of arguments about this - maybe thousands - both online and off. Every single interaction ended with bad-faith accusations of racism or misogyny or privilege. Every single one. Even the superficially 'open minded' ones immediately reveal their colors as soon as I make an argument that isn't on their list of simplistic comebacks. Just look at Reddit's censorship policy.
I challenge you to point me to a single woke adherent who can defend their position for 10 minutes against me without resorting to personal attacks.
> You think that same dumb search had a 0% false negative rate?
I think this method is very likely to have a false negative rate of zero or near zero, unless there were some studies that were somehow missed or excluded from the entire bucket being keyword-searched. But that seems to sidestep the question.
Could you give me a description of a study that could be legitimately woke without using any woke terminology? I.e., a study that never once mentions race, class, gender, women, minorities, oppression, equity, etc. and yet still is somehow advocating for, or otherwise very interested in these things.
I suppose a very sneaky DEI advocate could invent all new terms for these things, but they would probably need to define them somewhere in the document, which would itself raise a flag on a keyword search.
Am I missing something?
Maybe this one, for example? The abstract doesn't explicitly use the word transgender, and it's very possible they forgot to put terms like "gender dysphoria" in the filter because they, well, didn't know about them.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2012.653300
You can't spell "gender dysphoria" without "gender."
If this report is correct and cruz used this list, then the search would include "Gender": https://gizmodo.com/the-list-of-trumps-forbidden-words-that-will-get-your-paper-flagged-at-nsf-2000559661
If that actually is the list, then there's no way that only 5% of grants tripped the sensors. Almost all biology research would get flagged by that.
Yeah, that article was ... perhaps not as charitable as we might aspire to.
To hopefully provide a clear example of a "false negative" from a Ted Cruz style word search:
Transexual twin studies are/were a hot topic in trans identity because among identical twins separated at birth, if one twin is transexual, there's only about 1/3 chance the other twin is also transexual.
Now, this isn't to say that transexual people aren't "born that way". Or that they are. One of the big things I've taken from Sasha Gusev's writings here is that the geneticists are focusing a lot more on environment-gene interactions than either taken in isolation. To the best of my knowledge, it's a fascinating question that was found deeply politically inconvenient and further research was heavily discouraged, especially in certain directions.
Regardless of how that debate might eventually unfold, I think it pretty clearly touches on a rather heated front in the culture war while also being entirely bypassed by a simple word search of abstracts by Ted Cruz. For example, a study titled "Concordance rates for gender incongruence in monozygotic twins" is unlikely to trip Cruz's word search unless they flag gender as a whole, and even then there's probably a synonym out there I don't know about.
I was surprised this wasn't explored more, as while the NSF is not my area, maybe it hasn't changed so much from the 90s, but I can speak with some expertise on other academic areas and a 2% "woke" research rate is laughable. It is hilariously not credible, the level of "woke" research is trivially observable to be higher. I'm surprised Scott stuck to a 2% woke rate as credible.
Also, just a comment from that article, I was shocked by the number of researchers and scientists complaining about losing grants and not being able to continue their research. And I was like "Oh no, you can't get research funding, you'll have to go into industry and make a lot more money ... just like I did." Like, I'm sorry about your upcoming raise? I was surprised that people were so offended by the idea that government funded research could be deeply ideological. Like, it is, from a right-wing perspective this isn't even offensive, this is just the way it's been for the past 20+ years, you're complaining about being forced to live the same way right-wing intellectuals have lived for our entire lives. And this isn't even just hypocrisy, dude, industry is awesome, lots of research goes nowhere but in industry you really do get to directly impact people's lives. It's awesome.
Are there examples of Democratic senators going through stacks of research grants to attack some on ideological grounds? I feel like if this had happened in the last 20 years, I’d have heard about it.
> Transexual twin studies are/were a hot topic in trans identity because among identical twins separated at birth, if one twin is transexual, there's only about 1/3 chance the other twin is also transexual.
There appears to be zero popular awareness, but something very similar is also true of homosexuality.
So wait, are you saying that specific piece of research should've been shut down by the administration, or shouldn't have been?
Oh, no, this line of research got killed, as far as I know, back in the 2012-2016 period. Here's a decent 2018 post laying out the debate from the pro-trans side:
https://genderanalysis.net/2018/03/pervasive-misrepresentation-of-twin-evidence-for-a-genetic-component-of-gender-dysphoria/.
And those critiques, while not perhaps made with the most charity, are still reasonable. Yeah, it's misleading to combine monozygotic and fraternal twins. Yeah, a concordance rate of 33% indicates that it's not genetically determined but the base rate for someone being trans is like...0.5% of the US population. Going from 0.5% to 33% indicates a pretty serious genetic factor; the genes are doing something important.
What should have happened back in, like, 2014, is that both sides sat down, argued back and forth in good faith, and come to some kind of consistent answer. Instead, as far as I know, that research was determined to be politically inconvenient as so it was killed off by largely woke and woke-adjacent schools and grant funders. I mean, what academic institution was going to fund or support anti-trans research in 2015?
But this is just background for the "false negative" thing. Why would we believe that Ted Cruz's dumb word search tool would miss "woke" research and bias? Well, we have a pretty clear example here. This is a prime culture war topic. And it's difficult to envision how Ted Cruz's "Does the abstract contain 'DEI'?" algorithm would catch this.
This is kinda just unit testing. Like, does this algorithm work? Well, what's an example of something we'd want it to catch? If it doesn't catch this thing, it's a bad algorithm and it's not evidence that the bad things doesn't exist.
PS. I don't know what a current example would be. Posting history to the contrary, I have a life and can't keep up to date with the current scientific blacklisting. You're getting 2014 era stuff because that's when I was following this stuff.
Just curious: what was taken to be anti-trans about research showing 33% concordance rate?
I dunno. I just know it got buried. Two guesses.
First, more publicly, it undercuts the "born this way" narrative from a PR perspective. That narrative was and is important to a lot of people. Well, "Trans people are genetically born that way" is a much easier sell to middle America than "Trans people are born that way through a complex interaction of genetics and environment, including culture, that we don't fully understand." It's just a worse story to tell a skeptical America.
Second, more seriously, the right has made some plausible claims of "social contagion" theory for transsexuality. We've seen significant increases in the number of people identifying as trans in Gen Z, something like a 3x bump. If transsexuality was purely genetic, this would pretty clearly be just more people "coming out of the closet", eg trans people identifying as such who wouldn't have 40 years ago. If, however, there are significant environmental and cultural factors that lead to transsexuality and we completely reshaped our culture around trans people in the last 10 years and then saw a massive increase in transsexuality...that would have pretty serious public, social, and medical implications.
This doesn't mean that the social contagion theory is right, however. Neither side really has an airtight case and their critiques of the other are mostly isolated demands for rigor. We genuinely don't know.
To answer the object-level question, I find it hard to believe that you could have a “woke” grant that somehow evaded the keyword search. If we were talking about an era where plausible deniability from government oversight was a necessity to keep doing woke stuff, this would have made sense, but this is not what this administration’s narrative about the previous 4 years is.
See also Deveraux (this isn’t what he says, but I think a reasonable inference about the situation) about how the wokest bits might not be NSF-funded at all, it could be NEH (a few hundred million a year, a rounding error in the science funding and a literal speck in the US federal budget) or on different funding altogether.
I find it rather unsurprising that 2% of NSF grants are woke in any meaningful sense.
I also think that if Ted Cruz has better evidence, the onus to come up with it is on him. By the usual rules of “bounded distrust”, we have to assume that his database is the best shot he has so far, so his future declarations should be weighed accordingly.
(This doesn’t necessarily mean that academia isn’t woke – but rather than whatever wokeness is there doesn’t have to be reflected in the text of the most prestigious and selective processes for grant applications, or in fact in any grant application at all.)
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.
Not been following the right wings hourly updates on what usaid funded; or aware of the intentional misreading of civil rights law?
We'll see if this is an fdr tier historical term; but regime change is in the air.
> I don't think those were driven by government requirements
Debated: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-woke
Don’t overthink it. It’s pandering.
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...
This article is a good resource. I'll highlight some key points.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/13/jamie-dimon-reportedly-says-hell-cut-some-stupid-dei-costs-at-jpmorgan-chase-here-are-all-the-companies-rolling-back-dei/
"Key Background
Some companies slashing their DEI programs have cited the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ruled race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."
"Many Republican-controlled state legislatures took action against DEI in 2024, with several states, including Alabama, Iowa and Utah banning DEI at public colleges and universities. The wave of conservative backlash against companies deemed “woke” picked up significant steam in 2023 when Bud Light became the target of a conservative boycott after it briefly collaborated with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a marketing promotion."
So basically, the anti-DEI backlash has been building for some time, as a result of public pressure campaigns, a SCOTUS ruling, and laws passed in various states. The timing clearly has something to do with Trump (as the article points out, Elon Musk has been one of the main anti-DEI crusaders) but also consider that companies don't really want to stand out or be the first to do something that's going to get bad press, so it's safer for them to move in packs when they have political cover to do so.
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.
...She's transgender. You know how politically controversial that is?
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).
It's pretty insulting to the 51% that thinks changing gender is morally wrong.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/645704/slim-majority-adults-say-changing-gender-morally-wrong.aspx
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.
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.
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.
Trumpism has a simple explanation in commoditization pressure. Labor becomes commoditized when there is little differentiation between various sources of labor. It has long been the case that the lowest end of the labor supply is highly commoditized and the high end has been less so. Individuals have been able to move from highly commoditized labor markets to less commoditized markets by gaining education. The more interchangeable different sources of labor are, the more zero sum the economy that governs them becomes; workers directly substitute for each other rather than collaborating as they do in the higher end of the labor pool. At the high end, it matters much more what the exact skill set of each worker is. At the low end, it does not matter very much at all. This has important implications for how domestic labor interacts with foreign labor. At the high end, the relationship is closer to symbiotic. Domestic skilled workers can feel secure in the fact that they inhabit a small labor pool of individuals with sufficiently similar skills to their own. At the low end, cheap unskilled labor is highly interchangeable and workers have a tendency to feel insecure when faced with broader landscape of competitive labor offerings.
There is a third perspective, though; that of employers. Employers benefit from their labor becoming commoditized and fear their products becoming so. Typically, this puts labor and capital at odds, but it also provides a mechanism for their incentives to become aligned when employers fear themselves becoming commoditized more than they fear having to pay more for labor.
As long as I have been alive and paying attention, the low end of the labor market has been grumbling about the ability of foreign labor to compete with them. There has recently been two changes that have allowed Trumpism to gain a foothold by expanding that preexisting base.
1. Commoditization at the middle-end. Some higher-skilled workers are feeling competitive pressure from overseas markets. In tech, there has been another wave of
offshoring and foreign labor feels qualitatively better than it used to be.
2. China has begun to compete in earnest with high-tech products from the US From BYD to DeepSeek to SMIC, China can produce products that undercut US ones.
I do not think that it is a coincidence that it is Elon Musk, whose net worth is mostly Tesla stock, who has become the most fervent Capitalist backer of Trump. I think he sees substantial damage to his net worth if BYD is alowed to compete with Tesla in his home market. Trumpism is fundamentally an alliance between the low end of the labor market and employers who feel threatened by the rise of advanced Chinese brands. Both of them are aligned in their fear of being replaced by foreign substitutes.
This theory also has the power to explain the H1-B war of 2024. Advanced foreign workers are the place where Trumpian capital and the Trumpian populists are the least aligned. For employers, it is still desirable to pay as little as possible for labor, even though they fear commoditization by Chinese firms. The higher and middle ends of the labor market are the parts where the Trumpian alliance is still weakest, because these workers are still the least easily substituted for, but the middle-end beginning to feel the crush of commoditization and global competition are exactly what caused the environment to become ripe for a 2nd Trump victory.
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.
People who criticize Trump for not prioritizing US interests usually have a very poor definition of US interests.
One can easily say the same thing about people who praise Trump for prioritizing US interests.
GDP and national security are often at odds.
Some economists say that we should be buying all of our steel from China. Chinese steel is cheaper and this cheapness trickles down into various avenues of our lives. But China is a geopolitical rival building a huge navy. So if they produce more steel, they can make more ships and crush us someday. Trump is aiming to preserve national military authority over GDP. That seems like 'prioritizing US interests', rather than the interests of the global economy.
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.
Are we at war with Canada now? I don't see any tanks crossing the border.
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.
One wonders why Trump decided to go with the tariff option rather than a Soviet Five Year plan. Perhaps he expects it to succeed in a timeline longer than three months.
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.
"Trump has rightly recognized the US is in decline and can no longer afford to maintain an empire."
This is quite a statement that needs a lot of support.
Yeah, Trump has literally proposed colonizing Greenland, Canada, Panama again, and Gaza. Nothing he says implies that the sun has sent on the American Empire.
No, that absolutely supports what I said. Trump is organising a retreat to the Americas, and what he is talking about with Greenland, Panama and Canada is all part of that. They're all under Chinese influence. As part of the grand bargain with China, they will pull their influence from the Americas and the US will pull out from Asia.
As for support, $36 trillion of debt and close to a trillion dollars in interest per year makes it clear the US cannot afford its empire any longer. Why else is Trump saying he will not subsidise foreigners anymore? That's the end of empire.
This ignores Gaza.
Greenland is under Chinese influence? Right under Denmark's nose? This is quite the claim.
"As for support, $36 trillion of debt and close to a trillion dollars in interest per year makes it clear the US cannot afford its empire any longer."
America has had significant national debt since WW1: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/timeline-150-years-of-u-s-national-debt/
This didn't stop America from waging the global war against communism with its accompanying imperial adventures. While America has arguably *never* been able to afford these expenses, why would politicians suddenly start caring now in 2024?
My model of Trump is that he admires the empire America built at the end of the 19th century with possessions won in the Spanish-American war and wants to do that again. He has stated his admiration of the 19th century multiple times. Trump doesn't want to end American imperialism, he wants to Make it Great Again by returning to the older model of explicit geographical possessions.
"Why else is Trump saying he will not subsidise foreigners anymore?"
Oh, so many reasons? Start with he has no clue what "subsidise" means? Or what foreign policy of a huge country may try to accomplish and why? I keep being astonished by so many people's willingness to give Trump infinite benefit.. it's not "doubt" anymore, is it? You can't call it "benefit of a doubt" when what's assumed is an infinite wisdom in a guy who amply demonstrated a combination of run-of-the-mill stupidity and outsized malice.
I hate Trump, so I'll give it a try.
We have known for decades that the Federal government policy setting has not been tracking the concerns of ordinary Americans (I am not going to cite research here, but I can look it up for anyone interested). Government reform has been badly needed for over a generation. The Democrats had plenty of opportunities to institute major reform, and were not able/willing to do so. Rising levels of wealth disparity, long term economic insecurity, rapid technological transformation, and other sources of change combined to create the conditions for a populist reformer to begin a movement and get elected. That it happened to be Trump is probably stochastic, if someone from the Left with the same savvy messaging skills had turned up first, we might be living the "Woke" revolution.
The silver lining, therefore, is that, whatever else happens, this is an opportunity to reform and revitalize the government. The Democrats just have to come up with their own vision of reform, and they can bounce back.
If, on the other hand, you meant strictly the international dimension, then there is still a leadership role for the US in the world. We are, after all, still the largest single economy, with the most powerful military. The problem is that we needed to expand our allies to include some of the up and coming "BRIC" nations, something that we were seemingly unwilling to do. Our treatment of our own Middle Eastern allies left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. They way we left Afghanistan sacrificed a lot of our soft power. In the long run soft power > hard power (guns and money) in terms of living in a peaceful, prosperous world that is good for commerce (though both are important).
The primary source of our soft power is our democracy. So long as we were more democratic than most non-allied nations, we had an ideological edge over rivals like Russia and China. Giving that up is going to hurt us, hard.
Which leads to the counter intuitive notion that the best thing we could do to ensure our national interests internationally is reform ourselves at home.
I'm an european scientist who has self-identified as somewere between center-left and libertarian pretty much since ever, and who currently looks with some envy at the US, so I guess I may be a good candidate.
First and most importantly, ever since WWII pretty much the entire west has been on a trajectory from "democracy" to "bureaucracy with democratic characteristics". There's a long list of issues - consistent between countries - that voters care about, but on which nothing meaningfully happens, and an equally if not longer list of issues that the PMC (the class which staffs the higher bureaucracy almost exclusively, and also politicians) cares about that get far, far outsized attention.
Trump is the first to really push on the former, and against the latter. You may argue that this is bad because the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart, which ... I don't entirely disagree with, actually. But the way the capital-B Bureaucracy has had increasingly consolidated around a fixed set of values while taking over and thus losing checks and balances has been quite scary to me for a long time now. Europe is MUCH further down this road and thus needs it much more desperately, btw.
Second, many countries have experimented with reducing budgets by targeted, well-thought-out reforms that give the relevant institutions lots of time to react.
It never works. All institutions just use the time to fight tooth and nail against any reduction and grant/project/team descriptions are optimized to sound great & rarely reflect what happens on the ground very well so the targeting is never really good to begin with. And the next administration is likely to reverse whatever meager gains you've had, and then some. I've watched it often enough that the way the Trump admin is doing it seems at least understandable to me. Just cut as much as possible and then re-institute only the things that actually hurt.
Also, my wife is well-connected in the local start-up scenes which includes several people owning decently sized companies, and according to her this is just common knowledge. If the company is flailing and/or an entire team/department seems sketchy, you just get rid of it, try to re-delegate it to the rest of the company and only if necessary re-institute it, but now as a new team with new people.
Third, on the foreign front, especially concerning Europe and Ukraine ... He/Vance is unfortunately just simply correct. If we(Europe) had managed our affairs well, especially the military, we could simply laugh them out of the room. If we were capable of defending Ukraine against Russia on our own it doesn't matter all that much whether the US does so. But we can't, so it does.
To be clear, I'd prefer if the war is continued. But because Europe has become such a pathetic windbag, it's not our call to make. Including Europe in talks may have been a courtesy by the US so far, but it was always just that.
That doesn't mean I don't look with some worry at some of the odd things the Trump admin is doing/saying. But overall, it's still solidly on the "long over-due course correction" page in my book.
"You may argue that this (push by Trump toward voter issues rather than PMC issues) is bad because the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart, which ... I don't entirely disagree with, actually."
Which part are you saying you're partial to? The idea that favoring voter issues over PMC issues is bad? Or the idea that the average voter is stupid while the PMC is smart?
The latter idea seems not quite right to me. Or more specifically, it's making an inference that doesn't turn out to matter.
Assuming PMCs are selected mainly from the smarter half of the intelligence bell curve, yes, technically, the average voter is less intelligent than the average PMC. However, the quality of justification for issues should be a function of the maximum of the intelligences for each of voters and PMCs, and voters still include high intelligence members. Moreover, PMCs are motivated not only by expertise in the issues, but also in preserving their own livelihoods. Sort of like how a guild of tailors could be expected to step up its arguments for bespoke garments in the wake of the invention of mass produced clothing.
So, despite the average PMC beating the average voter at expertise (I don't even think intelligence is the determining factor; it's more that the average voter makes a very temporary job out of thinking about governance while the PMC thinks about it full time), I think it doesn't quite follow that the PMC's advice will reflect that expertise and that alone.
There is a reason why I support the voter side on this and not the PMC side, even if I may think that the PMC is smarter. I would have put it in slightly different words, but not really sufficiently to make it worth nitpicking, so I'll just say I agree with you, too.
No worries. I thought your comment was good, and mostly I was genuinely unsure which claim you were saying you agreed with.
That, and the notion that PMCs are smarter than voters is a long standing peeve of mine, as it's often made by people I'd otherwise agree with, and tends to arouse some needless defensiveness from voters. I've long thought it's both more accurate and more agreeable to say that PMCs simply devote more of their time to this stuff than voters can afford to. If you have reason to doubt this, that reason might be interesting.
Excellent comment, thanks for your perspective.
> "bureaucracy with democratic characteristics"
This bothers me, because the intended usage appears to be the opposite of the more famous phrase "communism with Chinese characteristics". Communism with Chinese characteristics is accurately described as Chinese and poorly described as communism.
> Communism with Chinese characteristics is accurately described as Chinese and poorly described as communism.
Technically it was "socialism with Chinese characeristics," and empirically it was "capitalism with Chinese characteristics," and so called and recognized by many outside countries in Deng's time, including the USA.
And it was indeed very different than median socialism OR capitalism!
Contrary to basically every diplomat, pundit, and economists' predictions, China did NOT liberalize and become more socially open and democratic when they grew ~40x in economic size thanks to embracing capitalism.
This was the recurring mantra and hope for decades, incidentally - that there was some "economic growth" social and cultural attractor that would pull any economy towards democracy and liberalization with enough growth.
The fact that it isn't true, and that China has remained culturally distinct with the CCP firmly athwart everything is a big deal, both historically and for politics today.
I agree with some of this, disagree with other parts.
""bureaucracy with democratic characteristics" Ok, but why would anyone think that Trump, of all people, or Musk for that matter, would know anything about what to do about this? Given that the US federal government needs reform, is the current state of "X" our model? That seems insane.
Also, consider this: "bureaucracy with democratic characteristics" may be inevitable. As global society grows and becomes more complex, as the issues that face us like global warming or international financial corruption transcend national boundaries, only a government bureaucracy has any chance of being able to manage it. We may need a bureaucracy that functions more effectively, but that is still a bureaucracy. What is a bureaucracy but a specialized division of labor, managed by a hierarchy of authority? What's the alternative to that?
The "PMC" (depending upon exactly what you mean by that) isn't in charge of government policy, the wealthy elite are. Our society is polarized because at this time, there are two wealthy elites, one based on large incomes, and one based on large investments. The current election can be seen as another move in the game between these two. But neither closely represents the interests of the average voter. To get there would require something much more sophisticated and targeted than DOGE.
As for "Cut as much as possible and re-institute only the things that actually hurt," may I point out the difference between government agencies and a start up? When you cut the sales staff, you just sell less. When you cut the CDC, people can die. "Hurt", in this case, isn't an organizational performance metric, it's a quality of human life metric. The stakes are way higher.
As an American, just let me say "Can we please stop abandoning our allies?" This is not going to end well for us. I do not wish to live in an Americanized version of Russia.
I don’t want to defend Trumps/musks actions because I don’t follow them enough to know whether they are doing any good, but:
The CDC arguably killed vast numbers of people over COVID. It was their test and they failed.
Also, Operation Warp Speed was a mini version of this, bypassing the bureaucracy, and it saved many thousands of lives, and you can be absolutely sure that left to the bureaucrats a vaccine would have taken another year.
You're going to have to convince me that the CDC killed anybody. My impression is that, while they initially offered some advice that later turned out not to work, that was the best anyone knew at the time. Later, the vaccines came out, and that was the solution.
Bureaucracy can slow things down, and sometimes we want to streamline procedures in the face of an emergency. It is not a good idea, however, to operate under emergency procedures all of the time. That doesn't mean that bureaucratic procedures don't often need streamlining. But rational streamlining of procedures is one thing, and gutting the agencies responsible for ensuring that public health procedures are implemented, in order to see of this hurts anyone, is something else.
The CDC banned any Covid testing that did not use their approved kit. The approved kit didn’t work, so they effectively banned Covid testing during months of early spread. The ban was strictly enforced with serious threats for non compliance.
Got a source I can read?
> or Musk for that matter
On Musk I can see the logic: with the whole Twitter thing, a big part of Musk's thesis on Twitter was "it's super bloated, I can take it over, fire half the staff and end up with a more efficient company", and the reaction (particularly among the left-leaning) was "you can't do that, the company will implode and everything will blow up" and then Musk did and it's been fine.
While the big picture of that did not pan out (in ways that may be relevant to DOGE), but the core idea of "you can fire half the staff without it blowing up" seems to have been largely true.
I'm skeptical this model can really be scaled up to the government - I think realistically it would need to be a more bipartisan effort, for one - but I can see the appeal
> the reaction (particularly among the left-leaning) was "you can't do that, the company will implode and everything will blow up" and then Musk did and it's been fine.
And not just "fine," Twitter barely ever made any money, only had two "net profit" years in 8 since their IPO, and was basically on track to never make real money and probably fail in the next handful of years.
When Musk took over, advertisers fled en masse, cutting $5B in advertising revenues in half, but he cut operating expenses from $4.5B to only $1.5B, leaving it in a place where it at least has the potential to become sustainably profitable going forward.
"Ok, but why would anyone think that Trump, of all people, or Musk for that matter, would know anything about what to do about this?"
Smart and dignified Austrian economists proposed slashing government staff and regulations. Musk and Trump are now actually doing that, instead of saying they will and doing nothing, a la Reagan.
"When you cut the sales staff, you just sell less. When you cut the CDC, people can die. "Hurt", in this case, isn't an organizational performance metric, it's a quality of human life metric."
On the other side of the coin, continued employment of government staff also harms quality of life in less visible ways.
One additional thought -- I could do with less regulation and a smaller government. But any benefits there are simply not worth the obvious and incredible slide to authoritarianism. Trump is corrupt and is willing to ignore the judiciary and legislature in his consolidation of power. He's going to run again if he's alive, just like he tried to overthrow the government back during j6. He is a walking constitutional crisis. These are norms that you don't want to touch and Trump is taking a hammer to them
This is a pretty reasonable take. I'll give this some thought. Thank you.
Two thoughts here.
First, it's probably true that Trump is right about additional investment in EU military being _good for Europe_. But that is _bad for the US_. Europe is best thought of as a vassal of the US, and this benefits both groups of people significantly. It would be much worse for the US to give up Pax Americana.
Second, I've never met a bureaucracy I liked. But the government is not a startup. People continue to claim that it "isn't working" even while Americans have some of the best standards of living in the world. Much of the bureaucracy is in place to provide services that people vote for and want. Not everyone, obviously, but many people. And the stuff that people seem to be really complaining about is exactly the stuff that doesn't matter.
Fwiw I'm a multi time startup founder. What team Trump is doing isn't "getting rid of the orgs that aren't working". He's scapegoating. He is going after things that _work so well people don't recognize why we need them_, that are _so efficient they make up less than a fraction of a percent of the budget_, because it's politically convenient. He's not actually going after the "big problems" in any principled way.
> People continue to claim that it "isn't working" even while Americans have some of the best standards of living in the world.
There isn't a contradiction there; the standard of living isn't delivered by the government. Is their contribution positive or negative?
You could make the same observation, much more sharply, about San Francisco, although in that case I'm not sure you could find a constituency to claim the government was working.
Two major benefits
First, he is reinvigorating democracy. The last X years felt super unresponsive and not transparent. Now suddenly all this public energy and discourse about how to fix America/culture etc. has resulted in clear ideas and he is actually implementing a bunch of stuff he publicly said he would do. Usually politicians say they won't do much and then don't do it. This is the first president in a while to actually say he will do a lot and genuinely try to get most of it done. (There's also a huge amount of corruption in how this is being done, he thinks of himself as a mob boss not a statesman with higher loyalties than himself)
Second, he is non ideologically making it clear to allies and enemies that he's willing to impose costs if they don't fix problems that are in their purview but in principle America could fix for them. He's telling Europe they're responsible for Ukraine. So now suddenly UK is publicly willing to put boots on the ground as a peacekeeping force, etc. he's telling the middle east of they don't stop using Palestinians as political tools to destroy Israel he will take over Gaza in some form, and suddenly Egypt and others are scrambling to actually find a long term solution.
There is a difference between "Democracy" and "Effectiveness." If you prefer effective government to democracy, just say so. Something like "He gets the trains to run on time" would make it clear. I'm not sure how someone who is violating the Constitution in order to abrogate power reserved for Congress is "revitalizing democracy."
You know, the Constitution is rather inefficient. Maybe we should just dispense with it.
As for what he is actually getting done: involuntarily forcing Palestinians into refugee status in some foreign country would surely reduce the amount of conflict on the borders of Israel (though perhaps not elsewhere), but why Egypt or Jordan? Wouldn't the Palestinians be better off here in the US? Let's bring them all here. Or is their welfare not really the point?
If his goal is to incentivize Europeans to support Ukraine, why is he in negotiations with Russia (to the extent that he is going to force a settlement soon, Europe has no reason to invest in military aid)? Why is he asking Ukraine for raw materials? Why is he claiming to be able to "end the war" (which would seem incompatible with extending it, only with more aid from Europe)? He can't end the war anyway, only Ukraine and Russian can do that.
But the overall idea that US politicians should do what they say, and say what they really believe (looking right at you Democrats) is sound.
Responding point by point:
A)
By 'democracy' I meant 'if the vast majority of people want a certain policy, they can get a politician to say they will advance that policy, and then once they get elected on that platform they will actually do so, subject to constitutional safeguards'.
There are many 'constitutional violations' on both sides. For example, Biden suspended massive amounts of student debt. Was it unconstitutional? Technically no, since he made bad faith arguments in front of various courts, and he didn't refuse to implement any validly announced court orders. But I still consider it a main constitutional violation. Did Trump do something unconstitutional by going through lawyers until he found ones willing to argue he won the 2020 election? Technically not, but functionally I think he tried to overthrow the government (through multiple mechanisms) and it was bad, and anti-democratic, etc.
Trump can be violating the constitution, and still on-net I feel like we are in a much more vibrant democracy now than whatever gargoyle the previous iteration of inscrutable special interest/bureaucracy was. I think millions of people entering the country illegally under bad faith but validly processed claims of asylum was a similar afront to 'democracy' under my definition.
B)
He wants the palestinians to stop trying to kill people, especially israelis/westerners. military conflict is bad for getting stuff done. they seem to value in order: being able to live on palestinian lands, minimizing land controlled by non-arab/muslims in the region, personal safety/welfare. The current status quo is nothing they do in furthering goal 2) results in a long-term recognized political loss of either 2) or 1), so Trump's conclusion is 'arab nations, come up with a solution that stops killing people I care about, or you lose land'.
Similarly, he wants russians to stop killing people, mostly in the short term but ideally in the long term, and also he wants to stop paying a lot of money to deter them from doing so. So, to that end he's asking ukraine for raw materials since that's a financial goodie for the US. And then in the meantime he's saying to russia 'end the war and you can get sanction relief and more economic relations with the US' and he's saying to the rest of europe 'russia is big and scary, we have supported you long enough, increase your defense spending so russia is afraid of starting additional conflicts'. He doesn't actually care much where the battle lines are frozen. If russia gets a third of ukraine and doesn't reinvade anywhere in europe for 25 years, that's a big win from his perspective.
This also seems super logical/straightforward?
A) Allow me to rephrase. My term "Constitutional violation" could imply that all Trump did was inadvertently violate some process contained in the Constitution, much the way one can violate the law without knowing it.
That's not what I see Trump doing. I perceive his actions as weakening the Constitution itself, specifically the balance of powers. The founders believed that if the executive branch of government becomes too powerful, then it becomes a king by another name. In other words, the more concentrated power becomes, the less freedom ordinary people will still have in the long run.
B) "He want Palestinians to stop killing people." Does this include all the women, elderly, children and other non-combatants? Because they have suffered the most casualties so far, and would suffer the most from a forced removal.
"Especially Israelies/Westerners." Why? Why do we have to pick sides in someone else's civil war? How does this further US national security, or protect Americans in general? As for protecting people inside Israel/Israeli held territories, that's the responsibility of the Israeli government. We can provide aid to their military and so forth, even participate in defending their airspace when attacked, but undertaking ethnic cleansing on their behalf is going a little farther then we need to go.
And as for priorities, who is "they" in your statement? So far as I know, neither Egypt nor Jordan are killing people in Israel, so why do they have to come up with a solution? And why is it our job to force them to?
Seems to me that the only people killing anyone in Israel is Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, so any solution anyone comes up with should target those groups, and only those groups.
As for Russia, the US isn't negotiating the end of the war, we are negotiating the end of our support to Ukraine. Ending our support won't stop the Russians from killing Ukrainians, and it won't stop them from attempting to defend themselves, so if that really is the goal, a different approach is needed.
A) Yeah, that's an entirely valid perspective. 'Concentration of power' is bad for balance of power, agreed. On the other hand, 'lack of accountability' is bad. Before Trump you had a ton of power delegated to administrative agencies without meaningful accountability. We have different perspectives on whether the change is net good or net bad, I agree that the harms you're pointing to are both real and large.
B) So, broadly speaking it's in America's interests to partner with people that have some combination of sharing our values, being economically useful, and be predictably dependable. Israel is pretty high on all three of these metrics, but the largest one is that they are dependable. Their politicians are generally less corrupt, their civil society is more cohesive, their population is willing to fight to defend itself effectively, and in general you can partner with them across election cycles in a way not true of most democracies. It's our most useful ally outside of England and Canada.
With a strong Israel, you can much more easily form an alliance of dictators against militant Islam and build functioning states and trading arrangements.
The welfare of palestinians isn't really relevant for US interests, I think? Their identity is, to a first order approximation, a cultural ethos that shames anyone whose public politics are anything other than unconditional endless struggle to destroy israel through whatever means seems most likely to work, and as a polity the palestinians organize to act towards that aim above all others (except to maintain land claims). Egypt and Jordan, if they took any meaningful number of palestinian refugees, would very likely collapse, because they would try to overthrow those governments and use the state infrastructure to try to destroy israel. The 'goal' is to demilitarize gaza. The only thing palestinians are willing to give up armed struggle for is loss of land, so that's what Trump is threatening. As for why threaten Egypt and Jordan...realistically because that's what will work. It's not fair and it's unfortunate. Jordan and Egypt both almost suffered regime collapse at the hands of PLO, and Muslim Brotherhood respectively, they've suffered enough. They are both plausible recipients of palestinian refugees, and extremely motivated to avoid that from happening, and capable of pressuring hamas to demilitarize.
To be clear, if I was raised in Gaza I would of course want to sacrifice my life and be martyred trying to destroy Israel, and in 1948 I would have fought against the creation of Israel for completely normal reasons, but their struggle for cleaning the land of jewish self determination seems to have reached diminishing returns somewhere near the second intifada. They needed to win in 1948, or to at some point before 2000 give up the right of return, accept a state, and build up a proper military capable of challenging Israel if they were capable of acting more strategically. But again, I think their goals are bonkers.
On Ukraine, it's complicated, and I am quite conflicted. Basically the status quo is russia and ukranians kill more and more of each other, as russia slowly gains more territory. This is very bad and painful. Shattering Russia's economy and military on Ukranian lives and drones was about the cheapest way the west could have weakened their enemy. Realistically Russia has won about 20% of Ukraine at too high a cost, and needs to end the war looking like it has won. Ukraine is convinced Russia will eventually come back for more, so they will stop fighting when Russia has simply killed all Ukranians willing to fight as an organized military, and it will turn into an insurgency (which is fine for US interests). Europe has been slacking on self defense for a long time and is scared of who Russia will invade next. It's just a mess.
----------
To be clear, all of this has been my realpolitic steelman of the position Trump is good for america's interests.
My personal utility function assigns significantly larger weight to the welfare of ukranian, russian, palestinian, and israeli people than 'america's interests' do.
Well, I had this extremely well reasoned and researched counter-point to your argument, and then I read "To be clear, all of this has been my realpolitic steelman of the position Trump is good for america's interests." LOL--You did a good job, I really got taken in.
Just to finish it off:
Whether increased accountability of gov't agencies is a good thing or not depends on who holds them accountable, and to what set of standards. An imperial president who doesn't believe in science isn't my first choice--it's my last. Finding a way to make them accountable to the public interest would be a significant net good.
I think you're steelmaned description stereotypes Palestinians. They aren't an homogenous mass of undifferentiated people all of whom share the same interests and values. The ones who are suffering the most are not the ones who caused the suffering. But if you could find a way to kill off just the terrorists, then have at it.
I largely agree about Russia/Ukraine, except I'm not conflicted about it. Ukraine was fighting our fight for us, and now we've gone and changed sides. Shit.
The war can’t continue for Ukraine without either Europe or the US continuing to fund it.
Thank you for sharing, I'll give this some thought.
It depends what you mean by "current direction". I think e.g. moving fast to disempower the NLRB and government DEI, and to remove obstructive regulations fast in general, to be very good, while the tariffs threats or blocking solar energy permitting for what comes down to silly culture war reasoning is very bad. They seem to be coming from different parts within the admin, afaict.
(I liked Hanania's bit about this here https://www.richardhanania.com/p/american-governance-is-not-corrupt )
Wait, why is it good to disempower the NLRB? They were the ones who ordered a company I recently worked at to stop union-busting after a lawsuit on the issue, and post signs around the office that remind workers that that happened. That seems good.
Some people assert that unions are just a bad thing, essentially just labor cartels with all the issues that company-level cartels introduce.
Yes I've heard that argument, but it really seems like workers do need some way to have some kind of leverage in order to negotiate with their employers. Are you aware of alternatives that work better than unions?
Maybe, but if you look at how actual unions in America work these days, they are *really* bad (see e.g. how dockers unions prevent port automation or how police and teachers unions protect abusive members). And non unionized fields like software actually do okay for their workers.
I'm out of my depth here, but doesn't the market mechanism sort that out, supply-demand? The less supply and more demand there is for what you do, the more leverage you have.
Thanks for the link. I almost stopped after paragraph four, because I tend not to like columnists lying to me, but I made it through, and it seemed like Hanania's take on corruption is that it's okay as long as it accomplishes what he considers a net good to society. If you accept that, the next question is, how should society decide what's a net good to society?
So I think he does have at least a partial model for this, where it's good for society to enable more net productive things (even if the benefits are suboptimally allocated) but bad to do things that are net counterproductive (like government taking control of industries). I have mixed feelings about this part (I suspect my optimal level of accepting corruption is lower than his), but I agree that America right now puts too much value on countering corruption relative to allowing things to be built (which doesn't mean it's impossible to go too far the other way).
There is only one sustainable definition of the common good in a democracy, and that is whatever a majority of voters say it is. The larger the majority, the more good it is. Ergo, anything that tends to polarize us is bad (I'm talking about official government policy, not the espoused positions of various American communities).
The cost is that this requires compromise and patience with incremental progress.
Also, corruption is waste. It's a cut off the top, before anything is done or delivered. It's inherently a net negative. Less is always better.
As for productivity, is he counting external costs?
Instead of "The larger the majority, the more good it is," you could say "the more often the majority gets what it wants, the more good it is." That could lead to very different conclusions on what is good.
I could have said that, but I didn't, because I said what I meant. 50.5% getting what they want multiple times doesn't fit my definition of democracy as well as 99% getting what they want.
By that logic cahsr and the California housing crisis could be considered good things, so there are some clear issues with this line of reasoning.
It may be that a majority of voters supported a policy that had the result of worsening the housing crisis in California, but I am skeptical that a majority of them approve of the crisis itself. I am willing to be that could someone devise a housing policy to satisfy more factions of voters, the size of the majority supporting that would be higher (almost by definition). That would be more democratic, in my view.
He clearly has much better advisors this time around. I haven’t studied it in depth but I suspect it will be much better than any foreign policy since before 9/11
"I haven't studied it much" you probably should because "He clearly has much better advisors this time around" is patent false. Who exactly do you think is a good advisor? His cabinet is full of people who are clearly unqualified for their jobs.
On foreign policy his VP and Secretary of Defense have both been in Europe this past week giving conflicting statements on the US policy on Ukraine.
The only way this is good for foreign policy is if you are an isolationist interested in destroying the US's prosperity.
I don’t think public statements matter nor does it matter who’s sitting in the Secretary of State chair at any given point in time. That’s not how politics actually works in real life. The stuff you see on TV is a clown act for the masses, the real business is happening behind the scenes.
Sorry thats just not how it works and believing that is a coping mechanism. You already admitted you are not informed on this topic. Go inform yourself at least a little bit before making such confident statements.
Words are how humans communicate. If you say one thing in public and another thing in private, you are two face coward and people will stop working with you. That is already happening with countries that were, until this year, our strongest allies.
That's exactly how it works if you go read declassified materials from (say) the Clinton era. The clown act on TV or Trumps tweets will be forgotten in the long term and only exist to satisfy the curiosity of the voters on what's going on abroad. The real work is done off-camera, without much fanfare and usually by people who's names are not well known.
> If you say one thing in public and another thing in private, you are two face coward and people will stop working with you.
The EU will stop working with the US? Not happening while Russia's knocking on their back door.
Or Canada? The country with some of the weakest Federal leadership and multiple bickering provinces? Eh, even if they do, who cares? We don't need them?
Or Mexico, the place barely able to resist organized crime without US support?
Or Japan and South Korea, given the threat of China?
The allies will crawl over broken shards of glass to come kiss the ring of the US President. Non-allies are a different matter and I do think Trump will handle those better than Biden or Obama.
I see the administration moving in many different directions concurrently, some good and some bad. One direction I like is removing the Gazans from Gaza; that seems like the most viable proposal to bring peace to the region. One may compare it to the ethnic cleansing of Germans from neighbouring countries post WW2, after which the Germans have lived in peace, or to the Greek/Turkish population exchange. And if not removing them, simply allowing them to leave seems like a humanitarian act of granting them the basic human right of emigration.
This kind of rhetoric is a longer term problem for the US than Trump’s remarks on Greenland.
Both of those examples were humanity disasters. At least half a million people died in the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, and I'm seeing estimates well into the hundreds of thousands for just the expulsions of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, plus however many people died due to the expulsions in the other direction.
I expect it's possible for a modern state to conduct a "population exchange" with less brutally and more care to avoiding deaths from malnutrition, exposure, and disease than Stalin's USSR or Ataturk's Turkey. But at the end of the day, systematically forcing millions of people out of their homes at bayonet point is fundamentally an inhumane process.
WW2 is said to have killed around 80M people, so if half a million died to prevent a repeat, I don't think that is necessarily such a bad deal. We need to take into account that alternative cost too.
There were a lot of reasons WW2 wasn't repeated. American, British, and Soviet troops being all over various parts of Germany for the next several decades (and French troops as well for a while) probably would have done the trick by itself. Or the establishment of a viable liberal democratic regime in West Germany after the war. Or the fact that the US, USSR, UK, and France all had nukes and Germany didn't. Or the convincing and brutal demonstration that Germany couldn't fight and win against all the other great powers at once.
I expect the population expulsions were at most a minor contributor. They might even have been a negative factor, given that irredentism and revenge for past atrocities are historically very common grievances used to justify aggression.
Perhaps it is easier to isolate variables in the Greek/Turkish case. There we can see that before the population exchange, hundreds of thousands died in interethnic violence, whereas after the population exchange, peace has largely reined between Greeks and Turks in Greece and Turkey. On the other hand, in Cyprus, where there was no population exchange, war broke out between Greeks and Turks, and this conflict has still not been resolved. To me, this natural experiment seems to suggest that ethnic cleansing can help prevent interethnic conflict.
I am not an expert on Greek/Turkish relations, but the impression I got was that Greek and Turkish relations were decidedly unfriendly for most of the 20th century and the main reason they didn't boil into open warfare (outside of Cyprus, where I think the Greek and Turkish regular armies were actually shooting at each another at times) was that Greece was busy being conquered by the Nazis in WW2 and that Greece and Turkey were both NATO members after the wars.
I was also under that impression that a large part of when "hundreds of thousands died in interethnic violence" was the population exchange itself. To the extent it did end interethnic violence in the affected areas, it's a case of "they made a desert and called it peace".
Isn't more like kicking the Germans out of Germany?
Many Germans were in fact kicked out of lands that had previously been part of Germany. In the Gaza case, I'm not sure what the equivalent of Germany would be. Maybe Egypt? I think they were the last Arabs to rule Gaza.
But Germans were going to a part of Germany, not another country. If they end up in Egypt it's like sending the Germans all to Italy and letting France swallow Germany whole.
The original sin in my opinion was not letting Israel finish expelling Palestinians in the 1940s before they had formed an identity separate from that of Jordanians today. If it had happened back then, it would have been more like the expulsion of Germans to go live with other Germans, but alas few things build collective identities better than shared grievances and enemies
Yes, it would have worked better back then. Now it's all about maintaining the homeland of Palestine. That's literally their core identity, and you'd be smashing it under your boot if you sent them all to Egypt.
The problem is not the right to emigration, but finding countries interested in granting them the right to immigration. There is none.
"The right to emigration" isn't involved here. Nothing short of force would move several million Palestinians out of Gaza (ie, their homeland).
The point is that you cannot move people from Gaza, be it with force or voluntarily, if you have no place to move them to.
That is *a* point, an important one, but I wouldn't say the *most* important one. Even if, say, Egypt were willing to take them, that wouldn't justify "Trail of Tears 2.0".
If you cannot move people to somewhere else, it is no point in discussing if it could be morally defensible to do it - if you could do it.
Since you cannot do it.
The population of Gaza is only around two million. According to https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-841362, many of them were interested in emigrating even before the war.
And so the one's that weren't can stay there? And the one's who were can go to the country and locality of their choice?
I'm not sure where you're going with this. Very few people can go to the country and locality of their choice. Otherwise half of Africa would probably be moving to Europe or the European diaspora.
This. The two obvious candidates are Jordan and Egypt.
The last time Jordan took in a large number of Palestinian refugees, they soon after tried to overthrow the king. Guess how enthusiastic Jordanians are about a rerun?
Egypt doesn't want to have them either, because Hamas is basically a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the last time those guys rose to power in Egypt, they tried to instate an Islamic dictatorship, which was cut short by a military coup. The current government has been trying to keep a lid on the Brotherhood and has enough to do to keep a rapidly growing population fed and content. Importing two million radicalized, traumatized, desperate, Brotherhood-affine Palestinians is not high on their wish list.
Next down the list you'd have Lebanon (like they don't have enough trouble with militant factions as is), Syria (likewise)...
And even if you find a state willing to take them: there's no guarantee that they would treat the Palestinians better than the Israelis did. Ask the Syrians about their experiences with the government bombing civilians...
The smart candidate is forcing them to go to Qatar.
Qatar: population 3,057,000. You think filling that up with two million pissed-off Gazans is going to end well?
From what I heard, Qatar is a plausible candidate to sponsor the rebuilding of Gaza and keep things there under control, but moving the Gazans there...?
They have the money to pacify them.
So we agree.
Absolutely. I just elaborated a bit on what you stated.
I would add that Trump's proposal is a typical Trump proposal: greedy, cruel, myopic, and completely misses the actual problem.
Hard disagree. The current situation is untenable. A long term solution needs to be found, and it's probably going to involve a lot of Gazans leaving Gaza (which many of them probably wish to do, anyway). Nothing cruel about recognizing the inevitable.
A US-Russia alliance would be a very formidable thing indeed. Just the two of them combined would give them control of about 90% of nuclear weapons in the world, even more if the estimates are undercounting the number as I suspect. What would other countries even be able to do against that? If they rebel, their entire nation will be reduced to glass and ash.
This speaks like someone who has no idea about Russian history. They are not willing or interested in a true alliance. The US and its ideals can be nothing but a roadblock for them. A friendlier relationship then we have now is clearly possible, but the value systems at play here are fundamentally at odds and one country would have to become significantly more like the other for something like a true alliance. A relationship like we have with say, Turkey, is about the best case scenario.
It need not be an entirely EQUAL alliance. The US's allies in Europe and Arabia share little of American ideals, and those alliances have lasted decades. What it REALLY takes is a common enemy to fight. For Europe that was the Soviet Union. For Russia, … well, I'm sure there will be something.
The fundamental problem is that for Russia, their primary enemies are the US and Western Europe. There is an enormous amount of enmity over the Cold War and what they see as western pressure that brought down the USSR, and again, what they see as current attempts to stop them from exercising their "rightful" sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. We are the adversary, and Europe is the adversary.
Trump may turn it all in a more pro-Russia direction, but even the Republican party at this point is far closer to anti-Russian than even neutral on Russia, regardless of what Trump does. This will be a longer shift than 4 years can make work of.
Americans have a very weird take on their “value system” which doesn’t really match with the historical record.
> but the value systems at play here are fundamentally at odds and one country would have to become significantly more like the other for something like a true alliance
...What makes you think Trump and Putin don't share the same value system?
Trump and Putin may very well do. Both are old farts who will die soon. Then what?
Ambitious movements have a tendency to outlive their founders, just as every half-decent religion does. Trump has already cultivated a legion of followers and heirs-- his ambitions won't die with him.
I don't know... What is the goal of this movement? Trump has an unusual ability to attract followers, that despite mostly producing incoherent word salads. When he's gone, what would be the unifying idea of Trumpism?
You are aware that there are other nuclear powers on the planet besides the US and Russia, right? Trying to reduce the UK to glass and ash would result in Washington and Moscow getting reduced in a similar way, and that doesn't sound like a net positive trade.
Alliance is way too much to expect at this point, though. At best, Trump maybe - just maybe - can achieve a sort of neutrality from Russia in regard to China, e.g. if USA and China enter direct military confrontation over Taiwan, Russian military remains on sidelines, and Russia avoids selling military equipment or technologies to China (the same deal Russia is getting currently from China in Ukraine). But probably not resources - Trump can't offer enough to stop Russia from selling resources to highest bidder.
On the other hand, from US point of view, preventing a *full-scale* alliance between Russia and China might be good enough for now. Whether such alliance is a real possibility, or just Trump's fears, I'm not sure anyone here is qualified to say: all the usual arguments about distrust between China and Russia kind of fail against the fact that right now, Russia just have no other choice. Reopening relations and commerce with West might change this, if not by much, but maybe just enough for Trump's purposes?
So, an alliance with an imperialist dictator to bully the rest of the world counts as a good thing in your book?
Hey, they asked whether it could benefit US national interests. What could be better for that than absolute power of the rest of the world?
The active and willing cooperation of most of the world.
The thing about alliances is that for them to be sustainable, they have to be defending not just territory, but compatible governing systems. For the US and Russia to be active allies long term, they would have to resemble one another in terms of the values they espouse.
The things is, the US is (for now) still a democracy, while Russia is an autocracy. Autocracies have a terrible track record as alliance partners.
Unfortunately our own track record of being an alliance partner and in general standing by our commitments is in shambles.
We actually already have that by basically every important metric. It seems like team Trump is trying to give that up though so 🤷♂️
Europe is big enough and integrated enough to be a competitor, and has long-term interests which diverge from those of the United States, even if they were friendly pre-Trump.
The rest is the US squeezing its clients harder, which is something said clients are understandably reluctant to buy into.
Does Europe really have shared long-term interests other than wanting to keep freeloading off US defense spending in order to subsidize violent stabby migrants from MENA while trying to bar from power any political parties that want to stop doing the latter?
The quality of commentary here is getting worse. A lot of the problems we have in Europe are downstream of American actions and ideology. Getting out of Americas shadow would benefit us, the reason MENA is a mess is because of neo-con perfidy.
Yes, but you should ask one of them.
I think in this case trying to justify Trump's actions would be sanewashing, not steelmanning. No credible expert thinks what Trump is doing will serve US interests in any term. If there's an argument that it will, I'd love to hear it too.
An industrial policy that brings jobs back could work, in fact Biden continued on that track after Trump left. Tarrifs can be applied effectively.
As for Europe - Trump is right about us. If Russia is a threat to Europe in conventional warfare then Europe needs to up its game significantly. Of course it isn’t, but a decoupling of the US and Europe would long term benefit both. The US gets to concentrate elsewhere, Europe grows a pair.
Right, so, I don't disagree with what you've said here in principle. But this is also what I mean by "sanewashing." A decoupling of the US and Europe in terms of security could benefit both - I'm not sure it actually will, but I can concede that it could.
But Trump isn't taking reasonable measured steps towards a decoupling of US and Europe with a plan for an orderly transition from the world we are in to the world we want to be in if this decoupling works the way we hope it will. No - Trump is threatening Denmark over Greenland. Which, yes, could potentially result in a decoupling depending on how Europe reacts and how serious Trump is about his threats, but is also not a remotely sane way to get that result.
We learned the value of costly signaling from game theory. Trump doesn't like the current configuration of the US/World and is willing to pay a significant cost to show that.
This argument proves too much. Any self-destructive act can be reframed as "costly signaling" this way.
Well the problem is that "US interests" as defined by experts contains very *curious* definitions of both "the US" and "interests". Pre-Trump American government policy seems to have been run mostly for the benefit of people who are only tenuously/recently American and/or the 1% who are employers of these tenuously/recently Americans.
Also I don't believe anything pro-government that experts say because it usually turns out that they're are quietly paid by the government through a "my taxes > USG > government-funded academic grants > direct benefit to their academic credentials" slush funding scheme, so of course they're going to support whatever the leftist big-government party wants them to support.
t. government-funded academic grant stooge who has to write scientific proposals specifically to flatter bureaucrats' prejudices
Most of what the government spends money on is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. I assure you, it is primarily Americans benefiting from all 4.
"Pre-Trump American government policy seems to have been run mostly for the benefit of people who are only tenuously/recently American"
What an absurd claim. Please tell me this is deliberate hyperbole, and you don't actually believe that 51% of American public policy exists to benefit immigrants.
I mean that 51% of American public policy exists to benefit people with two passports.
It isn't. I suspect he's trolling us.
Its becoming almost impossible to tell these days.
For funninies can you guys argue about how this executive order is evil, using its own words as reference
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/
This bit seems concerning:
>(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;
If it's an actual, honest assessment, the results of this would be expected to range from mostly harmless to moderately beneficial.
If it's carried out disingenuously, though, it could be the opening stages of attempts to greatly restrict the use of (or ban outright) many widely-used and generally-beneficial medications.
I am inclined to fear the latter because RFK, Jr is the chair of the committee, and also because the "threat posed by" language rather than something more neutral like "risks, costs, and benefits of".
> If it's an actual, honest assessment, the results of this would be expected to range from mostly harmless to moderately beneficial.
Why is the upper range only moderately beneficial?
More than moderately beneficial would be theoretically possible, but unlikely. The scenario I have in mind for a moderately beneficial outcome would be better compilation and analysis of data that facilitates incremental improvements in treatment guidelines.
Are you disagreeing about whats at stake or the possibility rfk could ever be right?
The current hot topic of weight lose drug has cases of 20 year olds having bone loss; finding 10,000 cases early may save decades of life each. Adhd drugs reach 1/5th of boys at some point.
Given large numbers, even mild life time harms prevented would seem large.
I do not expect him to be right. Semaglutide are relatively new in widespread use, but SSRIs and amphetamines are not. And even the new drugs have been through clinical trials and post-acceptance observational studies.
>Given large numbers, even mild life time harms prevented would seem large.
The same argument also applies to benefits.
They would only be banning it for minors, just to be clear.
Good to know. Still a big deal, though.
It's not evil, per se, just incompetent.
Sure, pretty easy:
> chaired by the Secretary of Health and Human Services
This person is RFK Junior, an antivaxxer.
I think what's funny is that Trump is trying to fix the government by turning it off and then on again. Not sure how cutting off medical studies and firing half the CDC and NIH is going to make America healthy. This is just typical Orwellian propaganda and if you fall for it... well I don't need to finish that thought, do I?
It's beginning to sound like the advice for finding out what is crashing your PC: turn everything off, restart in Safe Mode, then turn things on one at a time again until you find out what's causing the crash.
Exactly! Except instead of killing processes, Trump and Musk are killing human beings!
Except, of course, the government is not a PC.
> This is just typical Orwellian propaganda and if you fall for it... well I don't need to finish that thought, do I?
You do, merely implying that you have an insult isnt going to cut it
The Make America Healthy Again Commission will study, among other things:
"the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism"
Electromagnetic radiation. Lol.
Eh, you laugh at electromagnetic radiation at your own risk. Case in question, an unfortunately placed Verizon tower in Pittsfield, MA:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pittsfield-verizon-cell-tower-lawsuit-proceeds/
They had kids sleeping with buckets to throw up into next to their beds.
Ha ha ha yes, let's all laugh about electromagnetic radiation. Never mind that the new printer I bought has a warning about if you have a pacemaker:
https://ij.manual.canon/ij/webmanual/SafetyInformation/TS6400%20series/EN/SAW/saw-001.html
"Users with cardiac pacemakers:
This product emits a low-level magnetic flux. If you feel abnormalities, please move away from the product and consult your doctor."
Oh come on, you know they're not talking about pacemakers. They're talking about *childhood* chronic diseases.
Apparently there are such things as paediatric pacemakers:
https://www.childrensnational.org/get-care/health-library/pacemaker-implantation-treatment
But scoffing at electromagnetic radiation as though it couldn't possibly have any health implications seems like one of those things that might come back to bite you. "Oh come on, radium is totally harmless" except when it's not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_dial#Safety
> Electromagnetic radiation. Lol.
...euphemism; it's actually doomscrolling / social media screen time ;)
Also they will:
"(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;"
The "threat" posed by SSRIs and antipsychotics. So funny.
Several school shooters have been an ssris, it increases suicide risk, etc.
A lot of people who get asthma attacks are on inhalers. The fact that someone is in treatment for a condition does not mean the treatment caused that condition.
we should add inhaler induced psychosis to rfks science todo list
Isn't the reason for the latter that people with hard-core depression are too lethargic to be able to kill themselves? If they get any cure that helps, they go through a period of being still depressed but strong enough to go through with a suicide plan. So when helping them out of purgatory this stage is unavoidable and the best way would be to have someone babysit them, which is not always possible. Still better than leaving them in purgatory, no?
> Still better than leaving them in purgatory, no?
Which do you think people care about more, making mentally ill children not depressed, or making sure normal kids don't get shot to death?
The second; but surely the second is so much less likely to happen compared to clinical depression. Claude suggests it's thousands of times less likely (this sounds even a bit conservative to me).
Also: let's imagine I don't have a kid right now, but I'm pregnant and a wicked genie gives me two choices: 1) my kid will develop bad incurable depression as a teen, hoping to die but not being able to act on it, no way out; 2) he'll be a happy teen but get suddenly shot by a schoolmate. It would be a tough choice but there's a good chance I'd pick # 2, which might be worse for me but better for the child.
In my view it's more that depression has two components that are strongly but not perfectly correlated - inaction and unhappiness. And different people react differently to variable medication. So usually antidepressants do both and it's fine - they become more active but also happier - or they do neither which isn't great but you can just try the next.
But occasionally (and overall not all that rarely for those who end up trying lots of different medications), people get a weird reaction that makes them much more active, without actually improving the mood significantly. Which often ends up with terrible consequences.
Im aware of that theory; I look forward to verification by someone not on the payroll
Alternatively, the pills dont work for some percentage of the population, and pill pushers dont communicate that fact at all and it was the last attempt on the list.
Sure, but there are concerns about over-prescription of medication for children in order to get them to quieten down in school. Maybe it takes a nutty conspiracy theorist to question everything and shake things up?
https://nortonchildrens.com/news/overmedication-of-children/
"Possible effects of overmedication of children
Common side effects of psychotropics can include weight gain, movement abnormalities and sedation.
It’s suspected that overmedication of children can contribute to conditions such as metabolic syndrome or tardive dyskinesia — repetitive involuntary movements.“It’s important to realize that when you have children who are developing, their brains are growing, and they react differently to medications,” Dr. Lohr said. “You may see only a short term response to a medication and we don’t know what the long term consequences could be.”
How does the proportion of school shooters on SSRIs compare to non-school-shooters on SSRIs? I wonder if there might be some way to define or analyze causation versus correlation? Could there be any confounding factors in this environment? Why has nobody ever thought of this before?
> Why has nobody ever thought of this before?
? This is old news
> Could there be any confounding factors in this environment?
Id bet on paranoia risk factors + stimulants
But it also doesnt matter, if your throwing drugs at the problem children with basicly no coherent intervention(which is very much my experience) failure is predictable.
> > Why has nobody ever thought of this before?
> ? This is old news
I was being facetious. I've heard the paranoid panic around SSRIs. I don't believe it is legitimate.
Well, personally speaking, my entire body basically shuts down and loses its appetite and will to live without SSRIs. But yes, letting people like us simply die would reduce school shooting risk, obviously.
Also Ha! Ha! the entire Executive Order doesn't really do anything:
"(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person."
Maybe RFK Jr will get the Michelle Obama positive changes brought back?
https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/obama-era-school-nutrition-policy-led-better-diets-students-faces-changes
"The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act changed nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program by requiring that schools serve more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fat-free and/or low-fat milk more frequently and less starchy vegetables or foods high in sodium and trans fat. The Obama-era policy has since seen a series of rollback measures.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) altered the nutritional standards in 2018 to allow for fewer whole grains and more sodium and flavored milk. Then in January 2020, shortly before schools closed in response to COVID-19, the department proposed yet another set of changes to the policy to reduce the servings of vegetables students had to eat every week. According to a Jan. 17 press release from the USDA, the proposed changes “build on the 2018 reforms that preserve strong nutrition standards while providing schools the additional flexibilities they need to best serve America's students.” The 2018 rule was struck down in April 2020 by a federal court in Maryland."
If he does have a bee in his bonnet about healthy foods, this might in fact be advantageous?
It's supposed to keep activist lawyers from trying to sue the government to make it do something it doesn't want to.
No matter what comes out of the studies, this EO doesn't require the government to do or refrain from doing anything.
It's possible that it's a relic of corporate lawyerese. If you say you're going to do something, then you don't do it, lawyers sue you to make you do it. Eg. Musk buying Twitter.
The USG doesn't have to do anything because you can't sue them unless they let you. But in many cases, they are letting you - and even paying you to do it.
thats been on 90% of executive orders Ive read
"Yeah bros if it doesn't work out, no harm no foul but let's make sure to blame the libs"
Are you sure that hasnt been there on executive orders for decades after some lawsuit?
The 40-20-40 split is just in number of studies. The average cancer grant must be 10x(???) bigger than the avg social science grant, right?
Any estimate on the dollar amount split? It's probably not proportional to the number of grants split.
Yep. It's like when the press secretary started listing out terrible "woke grants" and they were for like $35k or $50k. A value the government spends in like a fraction of a second.
Meanwhile DOJ is going to buy $400mil of cyber trucks from musk but thats not woke so its ok.
Even that would be misleading because most cancer research (and other health research) is NIH-funded. NSF and NIH are very territorial about who funds what. Now, there's plenty of woke stuff in NIH's portfolio too but you're 100% right, heart disease, cancer, alzheimer's, etc. studies are often gazillion-dollar endeavors and are not particularly woke, aside from maybe a throwaway line about "ensuring the study population includes underrepresented minorities." It's the $400k (small peanuts) grants for feminist glaciology that get people riled up, and yes they are wasteful, but if you're worried about woke science the main problem is (...was?) hiring quotas and DEI statements.
“Ensuring the study includes underrepresented minorities” costs a lot of money and is the reason why the Pfizer vaccine results got delayed past the election in 2020. And no one has ever demonstrated that it’s actually necessary. Not a single drug or vaccine exists that’s dangerous to Minority X but is safe for Majority Y.
Likewise I would argue that all IRB spending belongs to the “woke” category as their only justification for existence other than “Nazis!” is the Tuskegee experiment.
...wait, so we're claiming your race makes no difference to your biology now? Where have all the people who regularly come out in droves to proclaim that IQ is genetically determined by race suddenly disappeared to? Isn't this supposed to be their hill to die on?
Race can impact the likelihood of you having a certain physiology but it doesn’t make people sufficiently distinct to bother testing different drugs on different races.
>is the reason why the Pfizer vaccine results got delayed past the election in 2020.
Is it the reason or the excuse?
>Not a single drug or vaccine exists that’s dangerous to Minority X but is safe for Majority Y.
ACE inhibitors are less effective in black people and require different dosing or alternative drugs than in white people.
There's a few genes that affect a person's response to Warfarin too but I don't remember how ethnicity-constrained those are.
Edit: source: I've got family that worked in cardiac departments in hospitals, heard stories about this over the years. YMMV.
So I don't know of anything that's strictly dangerous, like it makes X healthier but makes Y sick, but there are some distinctions.
Is the variation in proper dosing among two randomly selected white people for ACE inhibitors meaningfully larger than between a random white person and a random black person?
> Not a single drug or vaccine exists that’s dangerous to Minority X but is safe for Majority Y.
That is... certainly a bold claim to make. Your argument would have been more defensible if you just said that guaranteeing safety for minorities is not worth the cost.
Can you name such a drug or vaccine? I've searched *hard* for evidence of this being a thing (including Deep Research) recently and found nothing except vague "well in theory..." claims that try very, very hard to avoid the question. You can notice the weaseling very well with ChatGPT or Claude as well where it's *VERY* hard to get them to admit no such drug or vaccine actually exists. But they'll tell you all about the Tuskegee experiment which has nothing to do with this question :-)
Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34322158/ - this is a review focussing on variants in CYP2B6, and how they affect drug metabolism. Table 3 is probably the most important one for your purposes. My search phrase was "variants affecting drug safety", FWIW, on PubMed.
ChatGPT says this (I gave it the full article):
“The article does not prove that there is a drug or vaccine that is safe for White people but dangerous for other groups. Rather, it finds that although there might be minor differences in outcomes among different populations, these do not support the notion that one racial group is uniquely protected or uniquely at risk. The differences observed are attributable to a complex mix of factors and do not indicate that the drug or vaccine is inherently dangerous for any particular group.”
So, no, that’s not the castle you’re looking for :-)
I'm looking for career advice. Not any specific career advice, more the "what do you expect would be useful to know if I were in your shoes" sort. I'm in the Greater Vancouver area, so anyone familiar with the area (and especially the local tech scene) would be especially helpful.
Background: I got my undergrad degree in physics and math, intending to do research physics for a career. Slammed into grad school like a brick wall due to (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD and dropped out in my second year. I spent about a decade doing teaching and some IT work, neither of which are especially high preferences for me (or very well paying), but between my relatively niche education and ADHD making job hunting difficult, I never found anything better.
I moved to the Lower Mainland in 2021 (before that I was in the U.S.) and worked for a couple years, before starting a professional Computer Science Master's at SFU in 2023. I finally started getting effective treatment for my ADHD the same year. My intention at the time was to look for programming jobs, especially ML-focused stuff. But in the course of hunting for a co-op I discovered that there are at least a modest number of tech companies in the area doing stuff in the broad category of "weird, speculative physics-adjacent things;" a couple of fusion companies, a couple of quantum computing companies, a company doing cosmic ray muon tomography, and other miscellaneous stuff. Not only do those all sound more interesting than programming, I discovered I was significantly more competitive for those jobs, presumably since my undergrad counts as value-added instead of "four years doing something other than honing programming skills." So I've pretty much decided that this will be my focus on job hunting when I graduate, which I'm set to do in April.
Which brings me to non-specific career advice. Anything you think might be useful to know. Companies to watch. Skills to develop. Ways to meet people and network. Anything at all that might be useful. Feel free to ask me for more background details as you like, and thanks in advance.
p.s. If I were to ask a similar question on Reddit (which I rarely use) what subreddits would be the best ones for it?
The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that most of these companies will eventually fail because their basic idea is either infeasible or would end up being far too costly. (Of course, companies can fail for non-technical reasons too.) This is a problem that, say, a "website that sells stuff" business doesn't have.
Fusion: Almost certain to fail.
Quantum computing: IDK, the tech will work eventually, but probably most of the companies are following an approach that will not end up being the best one.
Muon tomography: I think I've heard of that company, and iirc they have tech that already works, tho haven't looked into it much. So that at least is a very strong option.
As an employee you don't have to worry about the company failing as much as founders/investors do because the worst thing that can happen is that the company goes out of business and you lose your job. But I think it would be very disheartening to realize 1 month after joining that the tech is never going to work.
So just be aware that your job search might be harder than you expect when trying to get hired at this kind of company, since you'll also have to apply some filtering criteria on the companies you look at.
This is definitely something I've considered (though hearing it from somebody else is probably good for me regardless). My expectation isn't that I'll find one great company and work there forever, but rather that I'll get my foot in the door and open up more career opportunities in the tech sector more broadly. My thinking right now is that even if my first job turns out to be a dead end, working for 1-2 years in something where I'm doing actual engineering/R&D work will make it much easier to find good jobs elsewere[1]. In particular, I expect the employability gap between "no industry experience" and "some industry experience" to be rather larger than the gap between "some industry experience" and "exactly the right experience," which suggests that I'm better off aiming at the industry jobs that I'm most likely to get[2], rather than the jobs that are the best in terms of some other metric like pay, stability or company status. I don't have high confidence in this expectation, though: definitely let me know if you think I'm reading that wrong.
Or to put it another way, I see sort of a tradeoff curve here. Any technology that is certain or near-certain to be successful is already going to have it's own established field with methods and training standards and best-practices. People who aimed to work with that tech from the time they started college are going to have a *huge* competitive edge over a latecomer like me. But the farther out on the technological frontier an area is (and thus, the less certain to be successful), the less established the field around it will be, and the less they can select for highly-specific skills and the more likely my wide-but-not-deep STEM background is to be an asset rather than a liability. But again, I'm not hugely confident this is the right way to think about things, so I'm very open to alternate takes.
Finally, regarding the specific tech areas, my thinking is that the success or failure of the tech area itself is probably much more important than whether the specific company I work for is the one to dominate. Take fusion, for example: I think "almost certain to fail" seems like a reasonable assessment for any particular fusion company, but I think there's now a pretty good chance that *somebody* will crack commercially-viable fusion in the next 10-15 years. If that happens, the tech is likely to take off in a big way. Being somebody with previous experience working with a new tech experiencing a sudden boom seems like a great place to be, even if that experience is with a company that ultimately dead-ended or lost the race. Not AS good as getting in on the ground floor of a company that wins, but still probably quite lucrative. And even if the field as a whole goes nowhere, one hopes that the experience would still be valuable. Similarly with quantum computers: if they *do* take off, I'll benefit from having worked in the field at all, even if it's at a company that doesn't pan out.
p.s. One of the most surprising things I learned last year is that one of the quantum computing companies DOES make and sell an actual product. The trick is that it's not a general-purpose quantum computer, it's a specialized device that can only be used to solve a certain class of optimization problems, but it can offer some pretty impressive results on tasks that can be formulated that way. That company is fairly high on my list as they very neatly hit the intersection of my skills and seem more likely than most to have continued success.
[1] My sense is that this would *also* be true if I were hewing closer to more tradition programming jobs.
[2] Which by happy coincidence currently seems to be the jobs I also find most interesting (based on my experiences co-op hunting). I may update away from that view once I start hunting for actual jobs.
Network, network, network. Consider socializing with other software engineers a career obligation.
*sigh* I needed to hear this precisely because I know it's good advice, even if it's difficult for me to follow. Do you have any suggestions for social venues good for meeting people working in the industry?
Conferences, hackathons, asking your coworkers to introduce you to their work friends, messaging software people you admire on social media, and nerdy hobby groups in your area.
Rationalist groups are also usually full of IT people, so they're also good opportunities to network.
Isn't it curious how memories seem to form as discrete units? If I remember, say, a conversation I had today, I may not be able to remember, in that moment of recall, exactly how I ended up in that conversation, and who knows what happened immediately afterwards, but the memory certainly plays in my mind as this discrete entity with one beginning and one ending. So at some point in either the storage process or the retrieval process my mind "cuts the tape", having determined where's the start of this memory and here's its conclusion. I understand there would have been an evolutionary advantage for the primates who didn't have to remember an entire day's worth of footage and seek through it all to conclude, "oh yes sabre-tooths can be dangerous". But what's interesting to me here is how the inherent rising-action/falling-action of the memory "unit" implies we have an unconscious understanding of beginnings and endings that developed independently from our observation of the natural cycles of the sun (or the moon for that matter).
It seems intuitive that memories would anchor to the elements that make them salient to the rememberer. I'm sure there will be some people in some situations where the quality or timing of a sunset would be more salient than the content of the conversation happening during that sunset. Probably for you the social interaction or some element of that content was more significant in this instance.
And memories are reconstructions based on experience and culture. You might "remember" that that conversation had a beginning and an end, because all conversations do.
Maybe it is being non-American, but does anyone thinking an action that saves the country should be prosecuted if it breaks the law?
As a moral/ethical question.
As an abstract principle where something clearly saves the country? Absolutely not. As more than one Justice has noted, the Constitution isn't a suicide pact.
The practical issue is that virtually anything can be construed as "saving the country" if you squint hard enough.
Yes but also this is what pardons should actually be for.
There's a problem with the question in that "saves the country" and "breaks the law" are very nebulous things.
During the Catalinarian Conspiracy of 63 BC, Cicero made the fateful decision to execute some of the lead perpetrators with trial, a decision which would haunt him for the rest of his political career and ultimately lead to his exile. This is a very, very old debate.
That said, a contemporary politician saying this in the abstract sets off major alarm bells, as genuine existential threats to countries are extremely rare, but politicians wanting to consolidate power and arrest opposition are, regrettably, incredibly common.
For those of you as confused as I was, birdboy means _without_ trial.
wishing for an edit button right now, now that I noticed buhhhh
(thanks for catching it)
...There is an edit button.
It's not actually clear that Cicero was breaking the law, since there was an ongoing state of emergency at the time and the Senate had voted to put the conspirators to death. The guy who procured Cicero's exile, Clodius Pulcher, was acting out of personal spite (Cicero had testified against him in a previous trial) and resorted to widespread political violence to get his way, so I don't think the fact that Cicero was (temporarily) exiled tells us much about the legal situation.
Isn't this what the State of Emergency exists for?
I think most people are being irrational/inconsistent on this, because they probably gave the opposite answer regarding Covid policies and lockdowns. Many of those laws were probably unconstitutional in most western countries but tolerated because they were ostensibly saving lives. (https://whitherthewest.com/2020/05/20/social-distancing-laws-violate-the-constitution-i-support-them-anyway/)
This really cuts to Carl Schmitt and his belief in the State of Exception, that every government is authoritarian at its core and when it feels it has to be. I think the Trump administration is pursuing a distinctly Schmitt-inspired strategy; I posted this on /r/slatestarcodex about Vance's clear Schmittian influences https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ggl0mh/comment/lur9n10/
Did anyone go to jail for violating covid policies? You don't see any difference between "do this so people don't die of a highly contagious illness" and "these studies are woke so we are going to ignore the constitution"? I have my problems with many covid policies but not sure how support for them means you have to support trumps view of him being above the law.
> Did anyone go to jail for violating covid policies?
A cursory Google search yielded this as the first result: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/27/us/march-covid-19-parties-sentencing/. Yes.
"three years of unsupervised probation upon his release and ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine"
So no then?
"sentenced to a year in jail "
"… ALSO sentenced Myers to three years …" [emphasis mine]
Sure, let a jury have a go at it. If the defense can show convincingly that the country was about to be destroyed were it not for the illegal act in question, I think a lot of people would vote to acquit. That's a pretty high bar, though. Not sure of any precedents for this, or which specific law (excuse me, "Law") or laws Trump is saying he plans to break.
The closest I can think of is some constitutionally dubious things during *the literal civil war*, like suspension of habeus corpus.
On the woke or not woke grants - a huge percentage of total grants will have a line at the end of the abstract saying its not impossible thet women or underrepresented groups will benefit is some vague way. It’s basically a shibboleth for “I don’t give a shit about this but I’m not willing go to go war over this project”. So the cruz set would probably include a lot more if they searched harder - not that it should go in the woke pile from this, as it is manadated (and meaningless).
...will they, though? Is that actually true? What about the alternative theory that Cruz et al actually searched as hard as they could and the ~2% you see is all they could find despite being so unselective Scott had to write a post debunking the list?
I can’t debunk this possibility at all. It’s totally off intuition with nsf grants, as far as I can see they usually contain that last sentence in someform. I can’t prove it.
The alternative theory to that is that Cruz et al. quickly looked at a sample of grants (Ctrl-F) and found these.
Which would make this list probably representative of the whole.
To believe that, you have to ignore what Cruz+co actually said they did. If you follow the trail of references in the news articles back, you get to this report: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC which claims they looked at all 32198 grants awarded 2021 through 2024 and picked out 10% of them to make the list of woke grants Scott is talking about.
So (a) they looked at the entire set of NSF grants, and (b) for 90% of the grants they did look at, they couldn't find any excuse, however tenuous, to include them in their wokelist.
I wrote a long-form investigation of the role of Christianity in western science and progress. https://whitherthewest.substack.com/p/the-war-that-wasnt-christianity-science Despite my secular and atheistic leanings, I ended up finding a positive role when considering the academic evidence.
That reminds me of Magisteria, a book by Nicholas Spencer (subtitled "The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion"). As you note, it's a lot more complicated (and interesting!) than the easy popular take.
I actually would buy that. EDIT: One has to explain why the scientific revolution didn't happen in one of the caliphates or Chinese dynasties, which you did. Good job!
I think I did that fairly thoroughly in section 2. I contrast with both. The Islamic world shared the same philosophical underpinnings and you had a protoscientific movement emerge at the end of the Abbasid caliphate but the schools lacked institutional independence and protections against the centralized state. In China, you lacked both the philosophical underpinnings (there was not a common desire to "understand the entire divine plan" via the understanding of natural laws) but more importantly, the institutional and cultural weight of the imperial exam system worked as a black hole of intellectual talent. Anyone of intellect could study the classic and pass the exams and be materially comfortable for life. There was little incentive for experiment or science.
This is all thoroughly cited in the article.
> but more importantly, the institutional and cultural weight of the imperial exam system worked as a black hole of intellectual talent. Anyone of intellect could study the classic[s] and pass the exams and be materially comfortable for life.
There are a few obvious problems with this idea:
1. It's not true that anyone of intellect could pass the exams. We have some notable examples of failures.
2. Relatedly, the number of spots available via this system was negligible compared to the population of China. Most people of intellect could not have been contained within it, because a large group won't fit in a tiny group. This re-emphasizes that it wasn't possible for anyone of intellect to simply study and pass the exams. But it also proves that the system cannot have been a black hole of intellectual talent, because the total demand for intellectual talent was very small.
3. It wasn't necessary to pass the exams to be materially comfortable for life. They were selective and influential enough that any member of your family holding a high position was sufficient to support the whole family.
No, I meant 'I believe it. One has to explain'--and so you actually did. I will edit the original post.
Sounds like Tom Holland's "Dominion" (which I have not yet read myself, mea culpa!) would be right up your street:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYkP46aYQIs
Sabine tells us how she really feels. NB, I mostly agree with her. It's not just the foundation of Physics, I've read so many crappy SARS2/COVID studies that I can't help but wonder if 90% of the Life Sciences are populated by researchers are just grant-sucking drones.
https://youtu.be/shFUDPqVmTg
With President Musk's cuts to science funding, I suspect that very soon we'll have lots of STEM PhDs applying for jobs in the private sector. Job hunting already sucks, and it will suck even more if you only have a Masters degree or less.
Also, we should expect the housing market in DC, Virginia, and Maryland areas to collapse as laid-off government workers are forced to sell their houses at fire-sale prices. I don't know if there will be a ripple effect across the entire US housing market.
I don't think that housing market is currently declining, but I can't find that last link I saw no that.
It will take a while before people start putting their homes up for sale and/or defaulting on their mortgages. On the other hand, there have been significant layoffs in Silicon Valley over the past year and half, and it hasn't affected housing prices here. Of course, on the third hand, the majority of these are probably H1-B visa holders who are likely renters and not owners.
I wouldnt get your hopes up, housing took decades to break this bad; it may require a decade to fix and that if trump actaully attempts to; I know of nothing of him saying "zoning bad"
It takes 10 months to build a house, so that likely the earliest drastic change could happen
Zoning is a state/local thing. Not sure what the President can do.
god emperor trump, could shame the sinful red state governors, amen
Is it just me or does the letter she reads sound kind of fake?
"You are right about everything, but you must stop because we all profit from the corruption you will expose"
It doesn't sound like a real person.
Sabine is very smart in her area of research, but she is much less rational outside of that. She has a big ax to grind related to academia, but has a poor understanding of the issue outside of physics departments.
I think that letter was specifically about the field of particle physics, which is her specialty (along with astrophysics) – unless I misremember?
It was from someone in physics but was about the way political aspects influence academic research. The examples were about physics, but Sabine has had other videos recently talking about this subject unrelated to physics as well.
Same. The letter begins with how it's necessary to keep the people employed in academia and ends with how those that left are better off. I don't believe it's genuine or honest.
That could be a translation thing, possibly. She is very fluent in English, but it's worth remembering that she's German, and whether the letter came to her in English or German, it's possible the language of the letter wasn't the writer's first, either.
Honestly, I've often imagined that if I were in a position of power doing shady stuff, I would intentionally write messages that I don't want to get leaked in the most comically villainous way possible, just so that if they get leaked, nobody would believe they were real.
"Job hunting already sucks, and it will suck even more if you only have a Masters degree or less."
Beware the lump of labor fallacy.
Lump of labor does apply to specific industries, especially when they are largely funded by grants or a certain fraction of spending in that industry.
There will be jobs for the MS holders, but it will be in whatever random jobs they can find, not the research field they trained for.
I wonder if the economy will get less brown nosey
I havnt been doing well in this society; rolling the dice in a new regime tho? Something like 80% of gdp is in categories id regruad as fake("fire economy"); if burning the old system to the ground changes that to 50%, maybe things get allot better.
What is your evidence that the economy is "brown nosey"?
(there is ample evidence that the new regime loves brown nosing so not sure why you would expect that to change)
If you haven't fared well in the greatest economy in US history, that sounds like a you problem and one that is highly unlikely to be helped by destroying the US economy.
> What is your evidence that the economy is "brown nosey"?
The existence of linked in
"how my ex cheating on me made me better at syngerizing b2b ai hr solutions"
> If you haven't fared well in the greatest economy in US history,
Gas lighting will convince no one, enjoy your political lost
I hope you get the help you need.
There are infinitely more ways for things to be worse than for things to be better. Large random shocks almost always make things worse. This is just the law of increase of entropy.
We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet (besides micronations), indeed the most prosperous society ever to have existed on the planet. It may suck in many ways, but all the other societies that have been tried have sucked worse.
"There are infinitely more ways for things to be worse than for things to be better."
...some see the glass as half full, some as half empty. I see it as not yet broken in a thousand pieces and trampled forever by an iron-clad boot.
> not yet broken in a thousand pieces and trampled forever by an iron-clad boot.
Hey, give us a chance, mate! - it's only been a few weeks; we're working on it as fast as we possibly can!
>We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet
Many Americans may believe this, because the US has high GDP per capita. But this is a flawed metric - those rents one can barely pay and healthcare costs that bankrupt you are "economic growth".
US life expectancy sits between that of Panama and that of Estonia, per Wikipedia, for a total of 55th worldwide. Its wealth GINI is incredibly high, a total of 0.850 sitting between Congo and Algeria as of 2021 - 25th worst.
Other developed nations you would compare the US to also suffer from high housing costs. And healthcare costs are a nebulous, difficult to compare statistic because of such different regimes in different countries.
Both of the problems you cite are very clearly a consequence of poor government policies. Policies that are at the state and federal level and are due to actions taken by both political policies, so it's not a one side partisan issue.
The continued existence of bad things does not prove that this isn't currently the best.
If lower life expectancy is a result of the diseases of prosperity then maybe countries shouldn’t try to get more prosperous. Eventually we will be living as long as people in the Middle Ages spending most of it in a pre diabetic coma.
But of course it isn’t. A disease of prosperity can’t just be confined to countries, it should apply across social groups and regions. Within the United States are the rich dying sooner than the poor, are the richer states worse off than the poorer states? Are richer people dying of drug abuse more than the poor.
> like drug addiction, obesity, driving everywhere instead of walking, etc. People in poorer countries can’t afford those things.
People in the kind of poorer countries where they can’t afford cars do in fact have lower life expectancy, but cars are common in middle income and rich countries. Of course European countries have more walkable cities but that’s a political choice.
> Lower US life expectancy is due to diseases of prosperity, like drug addiction, obesity, driving everywhere instead of walking, etc.
Hmmm. The national life expectancy is calculated using life tables, which estimate the average number of years a newborn is expected to live based on current mortality rates. The US happens to have a higher infant mortality than any other of the developed countries — 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births. As a comparison, Norway's rate of 1.6 deaths per 1,000 live births is the lowest among high-income nations. The US infant mortality rate is roughly that of Croatia despite having a much higher GDP per capita.
The U.S. would see an improvement of about 3 to 4 years in life expectancy if it reduced its infant mortality rate to Norway’s level. That would bring the adjusted U.S. life expectancy to around 80–81 years, making it more in line with other high-income nations.
Certainly, we could do better without the diseases of prosperity, but it's a myth that those are the largest factors in our shortened US life expectancies. NB: The RFK crowd seems to be promoting this idea recently.
Would need to see the underlying data you are using, but "infant mortality" is not defined the same way in every country. The US's definition infant mortality often makes the picture look worse than it is. However there are many populations that suffer very very high infant mortality when they don't have to.
But, infant mortality alone does not prove "t's a myth that those are the largest factors in our shortened US life expectancies".
Infant mortality is infamously difficult to compare across countries because of differences in what is considered infant mortality versus miscarriage.
> There are infinitely more ways for things to be worse than for things to be better. Large random shocks almost always make things worse. This is just the law of increase of entropy.
Only if it was well selected. Given a random point and random move is 50/50; given Moloch selected point, it could have better odds.
> We are living in the most prosperous society on the planet (besides micronations), indeed the most prosperous society ever to have existed on the planet. It may suck in many ways, but all the other societies that have been tried have sucked worse.
I see a effectively bloodless regime change as the success of the american project, especially a rural favored one. Civil war is still on the table, but trump has named his successors, and at work on his bible; dying from old age will weaken his effect on history now.
[Edits made: removed some typos/inaccuracies in expression from the earlier version, but the content doesn't change].
Question to the liberals/democrat supporters (sorry if this has been asked before in these threads).
(i) Do you find the ebullience levels in the resistance against Trump to be milder than you expected/milder than in 2016 -- from the media, and secondly from the people?
(ii) If your answer is "yes" to both, could "left" media have "tepidified" the public response by taking charge of it and then "milquetoastifying" it?
(iii) If your answer to (ii) is yes, does that update your priors about how far you might have been influenced by the media/oligarchs/some version of the deep state in the years before? Does it warm you up to the notion of a deep state, though just not in the manner conservatives have been complaining about?
I. People are demoralized and media outlets are a mixed bag. Some obviously have chosen to go in different directions than others. Wired seems to be all over a lot of stuff, though.
II. I really don't know what this means precisely but I don't think that's the issue.
III. No, I think the overwhelming distinction here is that people feel hopeless. We had a first Trump term and for a lot of people it seemed really bad, he ran again on a generally-more-extreme "I am your vengeance" / deport everybody / oh by the way Jan. 6th was great actually platform and got voted back in anyways. If you think everybody experienced that the same way you did as a typical liberal then it feels very crushing that your fellow citizens decided they wanted an unrepentant fascist whose first term was a total clusterfuck.
Now, in practice I don't think that's what the average Trump voter or especially swing voter experienced, but I can see how it would be real depressing if I did think that. Plus he's doing a very obvious "flood the zone" thing which amplifies the sense that his opponents are powerless.
(i) milder than 2016, yes
(ii) IMO it does relate (partly) to the media. Not because of what you say, but because the media not making a big deal out of things gives people a feeling that protesting won't make a difference.
(iii) No, for several reasons.
First, there's no "deep state". There is a government bureaucracy, and sometimes it doesn't do everything the people at the top want, and even have their own agenda, but that's a feature of basically any big, complicated organization. I've never thought it would be good for the entire government to do everything the president wanted, and the situation right now is proving it, where what trump wants is to go after political enemies, be corrupt, and is neutral on things like the safety of the water supply or planes not crashing and anti-vax.
To go farther - if you do the most anti-deep-state thing possible, and implant a brain chip into every executive branch person to make them do everything trump ordered down to the letter without question or delay, the consequences would be absolutely calamitous.
Second, if there's anything like a conspiracy/oligarchy/deep state, it's what's going on *right now* to *benefit* trump. The biggest media orgs/social network heads, and more broadly billionaires and influential people in finance/silicon valley, not to mention the supreme court, are all on trump's side.
Third, the reason I gave above doesn't have to do with people being brainwashed by the media or anything. Every actual individual I know, for whom I know their political leanings and was anti-trump in 2016, is anti-trump now, with the exception of one Republican who was against him because they thought he'd be an unreliable conservative. The obvious media "influence" going on is the opposite direction.
"Deep state" doesn't necessarily mean a coordinated body of bureaucrats conspiring to resist whoever's at the top (or whoever's against them). It's enough that it's naturally incentivized to resist big change. This is pretty easy to bring about by making that organization (1) big and (2) complicated - precisely as you noted.
What should also be noted is that the bureaucrats who've worked in the DC area for decades are mostly big-state Democrats. I won't say they're 90% like the election results suggest, but it seems safe to say they're around 75%. If they're working for Trump's benefit now, that's big news to me.
The original meaning of "deep state" was very much "a coordinated body of bureaucrats conspiring to resist whoever's at the top". In fact not just any bureaucrats, but specifically ones in the national security apparatus. The original meaning is from Turkey where it meant people in the military secretly carrying out politically motivated murders.
The fact that people are saying "well actually it's just mundane midlevel bureaucrats incentivized to resist big change" is a massive motte-and-bailey switcheroo.
If that's all it means then the takeaway should be that "deep state" claims are wrong and serious use of the phrase is laughable.
How many people do you think are thinking "deep state" and automatically thinking of secret Turkish bureaucratchiks?
The meaning has drifted, and without fanfare or concerted switching of castle metaphors. Consider a 2013 book by Marc Ambinder literally titled _Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry_. It's not required that the state apparatus be consciously aware that it's preserving itself, even if that is its apparent behavior.
Right now - and I can say this from experience, living in that area - that apparatus is (mostly) resisting Trump, not going along with him. Their #1 concern right now is not being laid off.
I agree that the meaning has shifted ... but that doesn't change my point. It has shifted from meaning a specific thing about Turkey, to being a vague motte-and-bailey concept.
"Second, if there's anything like a conspiracy/oligarchy/deep state, it's what's going on *right now* to *benefit* trump"
This is pretty much what I was asking: namely, do you find the theory that there is something called a deep state slightly more credible now than you did earlier, now that you find the biggest media orgs etc. to be more pro-Trump/less anti-Trump than in 2016?
> This is pretty much what I was asking: namely, do you find the theory that there is something called a deep state slightly more credible now than you did earlier, now that you find the biggest media orgs etc. to be more pro-Trump/less anti-Trump than in 2016?
No. There is still no "deep state", and the fact that the closest analogue is pro-trump people doesn't make the allegations of an anti-trump "deep state" more credible.
That would be like saying that January 6, and all the related stuff, proves "the existence of presidents trying to overturn elections" and therefore validates earlier claims that Obama tried to overturn an election.
"doesn't make the allegations of an anti-trump "deep state" more credible."
I **did not** ask about an anti-Trump deep state; I just asked about **some version** of **some deep state**, be it pro- or anti- or neutral towards Trump. As a matter of fact, I have come across people who believe that there is a pro-Trump deep state, and that was part of the motivation for my comment. But that is okay, I think I understand your view now.
Look, I don't begrudge any opinions people have on the matter, and in fact am thankful to you for sharing yours, especially the crisp point-to-point response in your first response, but I would request you to refrain from putting words into my mouth.
"I just asked about **some version** of **some deep state**, be it pro- or anti- or neutral towards Trump. "
This is incoherent. "The Deep State" (as used in U.S. politics) was a *specifically* a right-wing conspiracy theory, *specifically* about people working against Trump. If you remove the phrase from all of the context that gives it meaning, it no longer has meaning.
If you go out and mingle with similarly flaky people on the left, you'll find they have their own conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theory-adjacent beliefs. But they won't be the same ones and they generally won't be descended from the "deep state" conspiracy: most of them will be quite a bit older.
If you want to ask people about their belief in shadowy, behind-the-scenes groups, simply *describe* what you want to ask about[1]. Don't try to repurpose a name that already has a contradictory meaning.
[1] i.e. "Do you believe there's a clandestine, coordinated effort by [people], to achieve [result]?"
Look up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
Of late, only conservatives have used the term, for reasons having to do with recent political developments. That doesn't automatically narrow the scope of that term to the one context that you have seen it used in (I have seen it used in others).
Now it is understandable if someone is only familiar with the connotation/scope that they are fixated on (for entirely understandable reasons), but in that case all they have to do is read my comment properly: I was specifically asking about media *helping Trump*, and my text contained numerous other disambiguating pointers. If even after that it still sounded incoherent, you could always look up and broaden your understanding instead of language-policing me.
The Epic Bacon version of Resistance, pussy hats, etc. is done, we won’t see that version again. We’ll see something eventually, though.
I can’t understand your question about the Deep State, the term is nonspecific and just points to a bunch of conspiracy theories.
(i) Yes to both. I think people are scared. I think the toxification of masculinity on the left drove off a long time ago all the people who would have seen continued resistance as an act of courage and now everyone's engaging in 'self-soothing'. You get nothing on that side for being macho anymore.
(ii) As Chastity says, the leftists are angry and the centrists are rolling over. I think to some extent the MSM did do as you say, though I think (as Lomwad said) they're genuinely scared. And I wouldn't rule out a few of them being happy to give DEI the boot if it means they don't have to put demographics above everything when recruiting and promoting anymore.
(iii) I'm not a full liberal, but I always assumed there was a deep state and the media was telling people what they wanted them to believe, especially pre-2000 or so when alternative media were hard to find. At the present time I support Trump's war on DEI and illegal immigration, but I don't like the way he's alienating and bullying our allies like Canada, cutting research funding, putting antivaxxers in charge of HHS, or trying to shut down the CDC or climate tracking.
i) Milder than 2016, sure. From the media, no. From the people, yes. Less than expected? Probably, given what he's spent his first month doing (making sure babies die of AIDS and causing all the airplanes to fall out of the sky).
ii) No, the left media is generally howling in outrage that Democrats aren't doing enough. If you mean mainstream/centrist media, they are just being cucks like when they jerked Trump off for bombing the corner of a Syrian airfield.
iii) People are less energetic because he won the popular vote. The media can only swivel your head in a certain direction, the idea it has some mind control powers is just nonsensical, particularly in the day where people get their news from TikTok and Twitter and other cesspools.
Thanks, appreciate your and Anonymous Dude's point-by-point responses.
If you wouldn't mind a bit further on that, let us look at NYT (mainstream), which I assume you are categorizing under "just being cucks", and "... for bombing". At least superficially they appear to make a show of being anti-Trump -- e.g., just today they have come up with https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/opinion/eric-adams-trump-justice-department.html .
How do you view this? Are they trying to keep their anti-Trump readership happy, while not seriously resisting?
I don't think the Adams thing is a good example. Obviously, it is bad, but more importantly, Adams is the mayor of NYC, and the NYT is located there; I feel particular antipathy for stupid GOP decisions here in Texas (e.g. Ken Paxton), and I feel less about obviously-worse decisions in neighboring Louisiana (e.g. stopping support for mass vaccinations).
Compare to, say, how they write about Canada becoming a 51st state, one of the first non-NY articles I spotted where criticism of Trump is warranted: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/17/us/politics/canada-trump-51st-state.html
This is literally an article about Trump potentially conquering an ally, close trade partner, etc, for no apparent reason other than mappainting, and it treats the subject with a very sedate and neutral tone.
Thanks again, I appreciate that your responses pointedly address precisely my question. But this example still sounds more in the direction of apathy/lack of appetite for the good fight than your earlier description of "...like when they jerked Trump off for bombing the corner of a Syrian airfield."?
The New York Times is, for all its faults, fairly principled. Obviously all those principles ain't worth much if it just gets you killed, though.
Also, the cynic in me wonders if the Democrats' current strategy is inspired by the quote "never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - if, perhaps, elected Dems are standing by and hoping Trump digs his own grave so deep that when they bury him the fascist movement won't rise again for another century.
I disagree with the cynic framing, at this point I see any scenario in which Democrats have an agreed upon plan as optimistic.
I see the Democrats as trying the same thing again because they are unable to conceive that it didn't work before. So they didn't try hard enough last time.
The lack of audience this time is because their crowds were... funded..., and now they aren't being.
I suppose you have... evidence... that a significant people were paid to protest Trump in 2017? And also... reasons... why that alleged funding dried up?
Speaking as a leftist (but not a liberal and not a supporter of the Democratic party) I completely disagree with your unstated premise. You appear to be looking for confirmation that the negative response to Trump is due to a conspiracy by the liberal media and "deep state" and not due to Trump's words and actions, and the impact of those words and actions on people. No one on the left - not liberals, democrats, and certainly not leftists - is going to give you that confirmation.
In 2016 people were crying (literally in tears) on Election Day because the American people elected Trump - a man who we all heard on tape bragging that he grabbed women by the pussy and got away with it. Trump went on to nominate Brett Kavanaugh - an accused rapist - to the Supreme Court. Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations and threw away thousands of tips about Kavanaugh's conduct, and Kavanaugh - the credibly accused rapist - went to Congress and committed blatant and obvious perjury, even to the extent of lying about the meaning of well-attested slang terms - but was still confirmed. Then, as a SCOTUS justice, he and Trump's other picks voted to remove women's right to abortion.
So to be clear, the order of events is: 1. Hillary Clinton, and many others, warned that Trump would take away women's rights - warnings that the media did not take seriously, 2. women cried after Trump was elected, fearing that those warnings might be true, and then 3. in fact those warnings were true and Trump did go on to strip women of their rights.
What this episode demonstrates is that, if anything, the media failed in their duty to inform the American people of the stakes and consequences of a Trump Presidency the first time around, because the response to SCOTUS overturning Roe was that the Democratic party performed historically well in the midterm elections. People clearly did not want Roe overturned, and after it was they punished the Republicans for overturning it. Perhaps if the media had done a better job, all those voters would have turned out to defend Roe in 2016, rather than after the fact in 2022.
Leading up to this election, the media again failed to communicate adequately about the dangers of a Trump presidency. Now we see Trump supporters belated googling what "tariffs" are and reaching out to their representatives for help after Trump and Musk's Project 2025 and DOGE cuts hit them personally. We are already seeing massive buyer's remorse from red states where the economy is already taking a hit from the policies that we all knew Trump would pursue but that the media somehow failed to adequately communicate to the public beforehand. This time, the resistance is coming from the Republican party as much as the Democratic party - from the Republican Danielle Sassoon refusing to weaponize the Justice department for Trump's political gain (https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-us-attorney-0395055315864924a3a5cc9a808f76fd) to Republicans in Congress trying to push back against the policies hurting their constituents (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/pain-hits-home-republicans-balk-trumps-spending-cuts-tariffs-rcna191832).
Meanwhile, many on the left are criticizing Democrats *and* media outlets for failing to stand up for our rights, failing to lead, failing to vocally resist Trump/Musk, etc. - in other words we'd like the "deep state" to do a lot more, or rather, we really, really wish there actually was a "deep state" in the sense that conservatives think there is, because if there were, we wouldn't be in this mess. But there is a lot of organizing going on behind the scenes right now, and Democrats are urging patience to see if the courts and institutions successfully resist what's going on (I have little confidence they will), and just generally I think that people know that marching didn't work last time, but also don't know what *will* work, and so the response has been slow to gather steam.
So to sum up:
1. No, the media isn't responsible for anti-Trump sentiment - that's Trump's words and actions, which are gross and unappealing to normal people and harmful to the country
2. Resistance to Trump from the media has actually been woefully insufficient and inadequate
3. Resistance to Trump from the state is functionally non-existent and if your "priors" indicated that there was a "deep state" in the sense that QAnon claimed, you should probably be the one updating.
I'd just like to say thank you for righting all this, and keep fighting. As many gross opinions as I often see here, I genuinely believe that if you make good arguments and bring evidence, you're more likely to change minds here than almost anywhere else on the internet.
"Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations and threw away thousands of tips about Kavanaugh's conduct"
Do you accept that many of those "tips" were malicious efforts to smear Kavanaugh and stop his nomination? There was a lot of investigating done when every crazy person decided to ring up and say "yes, I know about Brett Kavanaugh and a friend raping a woman in a car that happened sometime somewhere, trust me".
"During the hearings, another accusation of rape surfaced in a letter by "Jane Doe" from Oceanside, California, addressed to Grassley but mailed anonymously to Senator Kamala Harris on September 19. The Senate committee interrogated Kavanaugh about this claim on September 26; Kavanaugh called the accusation "ridiculous".
On November 2, 2018, Grassley announced that a woman named Judy Munro-Leighton, from Kentucky, had come forward by e-mail on October 3 as the anonymous accuser, and admitted that her accusations were fabricated. When committee staff managed to talk with her on November 1, Munro-Leighton changed her story, denying that she had penned the anonymous letter while stating that she had contacted Congress as "a ploy" in order to "get attention". She was referred to the Department of Justice and FBI for making false accusations and obstructing justice."
Apparently some cockerel from Rhode Island got up to crow on his dungheap and was reported in the papers as genuine Tru Fax! re: cover-ups.
https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/whitehouse-unveils-report-examining-failures-of-supplemental-background-investigation-of-justice-brett-kavanaugh/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/08/trump-brett-kavanaugh-investigation-fbi
What angers me about this entire affair is that if Kavanaugh had been the "Biden and Pelosi we love abortion" type of Catholic, he could have raped fifty women in fact and nobody would have made a peep about it.
"Do you accept that many of those "tips""
Irrelevant.
First, the FBI can't be said to have conducted an investigation by assuming that all allegations were false before investigating them.
Second, no amount of examples of false accusations contradict an example of a true accusation. If you kill someone, you can't just say "ah, but here's an example of a guy who once falsely accused me of murder" and then be absolved of the murder you did commit.
"What angers me about this entire affair is that if Kavanaugh had been the "Biden and Pelosi we love abortion" type of Catholic, he could have raped fifty women in fact and nobody would have made a peep about it."
File this under the genre of "Conservatives mad about things they made up themselves". Al Franken, a promising and influential Democrat, was driven out of office *by other Democrats* for even the suggestion of impropriety. Anthony Weiner, same story. Neither was accused of rape. Meanwhile your man Trump endorsed Roy Moore even after other Republicans called for him to drop out due to the allegations that he was a child molester. So yeah, you're angry? Good for you. Keep being angry about the lies you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about supporting rapists at every turn.
>Trump's FBI failed to investigate the rape accusations
It is difficult to investigate a rape accusation about events which transpired last week. It is absurd to even try to do such thing for stuff that happened 30 years before.
It's not all that difficult when you have thousands of tips! Least you could do is actually look into them. The FBI instead *forwarded them to the White House*.
Per The Guardian: "Thousands of tips came through the FBI’s tip line, many of them corroborating the detailed, credible testimony that Ford and Ramirez had already given. The White House threw these tips away. “On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI’s tip line,” the Whitehouse report reads. “Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/10/brett-kavanaugh-fbi-donald-trump-investigation-sham
Whatever about Ford, Ramirez was credible? "We were all drunk at a frat party and I had to ring my friends to ask them 'hey was it Brett who pulled his dick out or someone else'?"
And you're believing the dear old Grauniad about an American judge they disapprove of politically. Well, sure, why not? But here's that notoriously right-wing publication, the New York Times, for one which ran a story casting doubt on the credibility:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Kavanaugh_Supreme_Court_nomination#Sexual_assault_allegations
"On September 23, Deborah Ramirez made a second allegation against Kavanaugh relating to sexual assault. The alleged incident occurred in 1983 when Kavanaugh was 18 years old (the U.S. age of majority). Kavanaugh and Ramirez, both freshman students at Yale University, are described as joining a dorm-room party at Lawrance Hall, in Yale's "Old Campus". In The New Yorker reporting of her account, an inebriated Kavanaugh "thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away", before pulling his pants back up and laughing at Ramirez. The New Yorker also reported that four people that Ramirez had identified as eyewitnesses explicitly denied that Kavanaugh had been involved in the incident (2 male classmates identified by Ramirez, the wife of a third male student, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy) The New York Times reported that Ramirez contacted some of her classmates and said she could not be certain Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself."
Here's the FBI links to the tips, if you want:
https://vault.fbi.gov/supreme-court-justice-brett-kavanaugh-supplemental-background-investigation-and-related-tip-records
It's my understanding that tips and accusations were forwarded to the Senate Judiciary Committee who handled them.
I found Ford the most credible, in "that could have happened" way, but even that wasn't rape. But a lot of commentators just ran with "he's a rapist, a rapist!" because of political partisanship.
Okay, let's suppose that Brett Kavanaugh was completely innocent.
Is the optimal outcome that the FBI fails to investigate tips, Brett Kavanaugh lies to Congress, and the Supreme Court has the appearance of partisanship and criminality hanging over it for the rest of Kavanaugh's life?
Or is the optimal outcome that the FBI legitimately investigates Kavanaugh and clears his name, Kavanaugh comes clean about his drinking and partying habits but says he's never committed rape and anyway he's different at 50 than he was at 17, and then is confirmed to SCOTUS in a bipartisan vote?
This leads me to two further questions:
1. Why, if everyone really thought Kavanaugh was innocent, didn't they opt for the second outcome?
2. Why, given the obvious suboptimal outcome here was chosen *by the Republicans*, do Republicans persist in blaming Democrats for what happened? After all, Democrats didn't instruct the FBI to conduct a sham investigation and lie to Congress about it, and Democrats didn't make Kavanaugh lie about the meanings of the phrases written in his yearbook. If you - a totally innocent person - behave like a guilty person, you can't then be upset about people assuming that you are in fact guilty.
I don't know if Kavanaugh is guilty of rape. I do know that he's an emotionally incontinent liar whose nomination was forced through under false pretenses and who perjured himself on at least two topics during his confirmation hearings. And those facts are not due to anything Democrats did or any false accusations - they're due entirely to Kavanaugh's and the Republicans' behavior.
Are you pretending that the FBI investigation wasn't just a delay tactic to stall the confirmation vote till after the midterms, in the hope that the Democrats win the Senate?
I do think the mainstream media spent a lot of time criticizing Trump. It just didn't work because a lot of people, particularly on the right, don't trust the media anymore.
There doesn't have to be a 'deep state' turning children's adrenal glands into elixirs for there to be a large corpus of government workers that persists from administration to administration, leans overall left, and resists change. I don't think businessmen are trying to do anything more than make money, but they're happy to buy politicians who will look the other way as they poison the air and water, for instance.
I live in a rural area in the south. Fox is "the" media here. I don't think people that live elsewhere understand how it pervades everything. Fox is the mainstream media, and people believe trust it without question, even making it part of their Sunday religion.
I've heard that occasionally, enough times to be credible. Maybe it's worth at least checking the Fox News website periodically to know what the other side thinks. Thank you.
oh no, an accused rapist! where one of the accusations was later denied by the alleged accuser! yes, let's say that accusation alone means guilt, that surely cannot come back to haunt us.
The democrats have found someone to accuse every man in recent memory who applied for the job of SCOTUS Justice. They all “just remembered” from 10-20 years ago and waited til their candidacy to bring it up.
I wonder what sort of circumstances would cause someone to remember Brett Kavanaugh's SCOTUS nomination but not the nominations of Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, or Samuel Alito. Did you crawl out of a 12-year-long ketamine-induced stupor on April 11th, 2017? Do you generally have problems with memory loss? Or is this just a shockingly glaring example of tribal epistemology?
I mean, it does benefit women at the expense of men, because it's usually women accusing men. That's all a feminist needs to know. And if you're a Democrat, since women usually lean more Democrat, it's to your advantage to promote that norm.
> "Trump - a man who we all heard on tape bragging that he grabbed women by the pussy and got away with it. "
You should probably pick a better damnation than this one (but don't go with "very fine people," as it's even easier to dismiss).
I don't know what you heard, but I actually listened to the entire transcript of the "grab them by the pussy" tape (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhsSzIS84ks), and it begins with Trump saying about someone, "I moved on her, and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married."
And a few moments later, the full context of "grab them by the pussy" is, "And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything....Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
Which is a statement that's often simply accurate for Trump and for other famous men! When a man is a star, a lot of the women seeking to be around him will indeed let that man both figuratively and literally grab them by the pussy!
Well, except for the unnamed woman who Trump says that he "failed" to seduce (presumably *she* didn't let him grab her pussy).
Everything to do with Trump "University" is far more egregious than the willful misunderstandings and/or exaggerations of the "very fine people" and "grab them by the pussy" lines. Ditto soliciting election fraud, and the hundreds / thousands of other Trumpisms.
If you want to "gotcha" people with how bad Trump is, don't go with the lines which are easily dismissed even by people who might otherwise mostly agree with your other points.
Here's what he said:
> You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
The word "let", just as a matter of the meaning of the English language, isn't describing desire or consent. It's describing not physically resisting. As for why a woman would not physically resist, there are a lot of reasons, obvious ones being shock at the situation, being intimidated by someone bigger/stronger than you, and thinking that there's no point in trying to get a rich/powerful person in trouble over this, better to just pretend it didn't happen.
People would all agree with this if it was abstractly about an anonymous famous person without any political valence.
> Everything to do with Trump "University" is far more egregious than the willful misunderstandings and/or exaggerations of the "very fine people" and "grab them by the pussy" lines. Ditto soliciting election fraud, and the hundreds / thousands of other Trumpisms.
I can't tell from this whether you're saying soliciting election fraud et al is "egregious" or a "willful misunderstanding".
I genuinely don't understand how you think this explanation constitutes either a defense of Trump or a response to my argument.
"(but don't go with "very fine people," as it's even easier to dismiss)"
The "very fine people" were protesting the removal of a Confederate statue, so if you can dismiss it easily it's because you are a morally repugnant individual. I do not believe that any person who wants to celebrate or commemorate those who fought to keep human beings enslaved is "very fine".
Well, I consider the people who prefer to focus their outrage on flashy, sexy media bites rather than on the suffering of boring but materially damaged living victims to be morally repugnant.
There. We're even.
Well, we're not even, because I'm judging you based on what you said, whereas you're judging me based on something you made up.
Oh, brother. I don't agree with a lot of Christina's positions on things, but you're calling her by implication a morally repugnant individual?
Might want to take a look in the mirror before your next stone throwing at people who don't uncritically agree with your every take.
Sorry, let me clarify. I'm not calling her "by implication" a morally repugnant individual. I'm directly calling her, and any other person who supports Confederate statues being displayed in open public spaces, a morally repugnant individual.
Again, sorry to be so negative, but if you cannot agree that all Americans deserve to be able to walk through public spaces without seeing monuments commemorating people who fought to keep their ancestors in chains, I truly believe that no society should accept you or your moral code.
American chattel slavery was so evil that any society which commemorates it as anything other than an atrocity should be utterly destroyed. You are free to disagree, but I do not and cannot accept your disagreement as anything other than evidence that you are a moral failure.
*pats seat* Hey, Christina, come sit by me on the bench of "Neal thinks we are horrible", there's plenty of room!
Yeah, I thought he was saying he had consent too.
The Trump University thing does seem to be a scam though.
I was just thinking about cocktail names today, and is it any wonder that the era of the "grab 'em by the pussy" tape was also the era of names like Sex On The Beach, Screw Against The Wall, and so forth? Who calls a drink a Pornstar? Invented in 2002, the Access Hollywood tape comes from 2005. The "Slow Screw" family of cocktails, deriving from the original Screwdriver but capitalising on the sexual innuendo:
https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/969/cocktails/slow-screw-family-of-cocktails
A period of increasing vulgarisation, where those of us who objected were mocked as prudes and wetblankets. Sex was fun, baby, and we were letting it all hang out! And Trump was of that era. And then the new puritanism which was appalled to hear a man engaging in vulgar talk about women, just imagine!
Yes, well I'd be more heartened by the swing to modesty were it not coming from people who would also still mock the religious prudes and bigots, and who would champion sex positivity. You mustn't say "whore" anymore, but "sex work" is real work and good.
Forgive me if I find it very difficult to believe in the shock and horror.
Maybe if Trump had coupled the line with a reference to Doritos, all would have been kosher.
I'm sort of your perfect opposite, but I arrive at a similar conclusion.
I spent the bulk of my mid-teens through early 30s mostly with straight young men who were perfectly comfortable saying deeply "vulgar" things in front of me because I was likewise saying deeply vulgar things. A lot of it was in the form of jokes; not all of it. And now I moderate one of the largest social groups on Fetlife, so I encounter quite a few extremely graphic and detailed vulgar fantasies every day and see even more dick pics.
I can't think of anything which would legitimately shock me, and it's probably impossible to offend me. When I heard the "grab them by the pussy" line - a line which was party of a joke-filled conversation and which Trump was under the impression he was speaking in private - I merely shrugged, because I've heard - and *SAID!* - much, much worse.
But I haven't defrauded low-income people with a fake university scam, nor had my non-profit decertified for just cause, nor bailed on my real estate partners, nor done any of the other hugely horrible things Trump has done.
That's why I likewise don't really believe the shock and horror about what he merely said, and try to redirect to some of the horrible shit he actually *did.*
I think the whole raunch era is late 1990s-2000s, which is a little after when Trump's ideals would have been formed. He grew up in the 80s and early 90s which were a little more puritanical. He definitely developed an affinity for WWF and that whole working-class barstool conservative culture though.
Why do people seem less upset this time around though? Fatigue from the first time?
Which people seem less upset to you? Personally I'm a lot more upset. Like... radically more upset. Questioning the pacifism I've believed in for over 20 years levels of upset.
But sure, disaster fatigue might be a thing. Flu deaths are surging, wildfires are hitting places out of season, hurricanes are more destructive than ever, people are suffering from long covid, we've just spent 15 months watching videos of Israel blow up hospitals and shoot children while Joe Biden paid for it with our money, and now all the rights we've won since the Civil Rights movement are under direct assault. I think there's so much going on that people don't really know how to express it anymore. I know I certainly don't.
But also, like, in 2017 we'd just had eight years of Obama, and young people who grew up with that "Yes We Can"/"Audacity of Hope" vibe were totally shocked that someone like Trump could be elected. People my age, who lived through the Republican crusade against Bill Clinton, were also surprised. How could the party who preached dignity and decorum in the White House and impeached Clinton for banging his intern vote for a guy who bragged about sexual assault on tape?
Now, on the other hand, none of this is shocking. People in their 20s today grew up with Trump 1 and the Pandemic and just watched a genocide live on TikTok. They're a less optimistic cohort. They expect politics to be like Game of Thrones, only worse. So like... this sucks, on an absolute scale - but on a relative scale, compared to the last eight years, it just seems like a natural and fitting conclusion to the shit sandwich we've all been force-fed. It's worse, but maybe it's not as much worse as the Obama to Trump transition was.
"How could the party who preached dignity and decorum in the White House and impeached Clinton for banging his intern vote for a guy who bragged about sexual assault on tape?"
Not a voter in any American election, but I'd read the feminists bragging in online articles about how they'd strap on the kneepads for the Presidential blowjob if that meant keeping abortion legal and expanding access to it. The same feminists who had been vocal about sexual harassment, rape (this was before the term rape culture) and the rest of it, but now power-differential workplace harassment was cool if Our Guy was doing it, so just shut up Monica.
After that display of hypocrisy, what blushes were left to spare?
So your weird nutpicking argument justifies the Republican party completely abandoning its professed values?
I honestly don't want to get into rows with you, but our views are so clearly at odds that both of us will only get angry if we keep swapping increasingly heated opinions.
So I'm not trying to dodge you, but I do think I need to step back and cool off before engaging again.
Trump didn't remove abortion rights. The Republicans and the Supreme Court did. They stacked the court partly by luck and partly by the Republican controlled senate refusing to confirm Merrick Garland.
Trump's Supreme Court appointees are relatively moderate compared to Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Other Republican presidents weren't appointing more left-leaning justices. If Trump never existed, we'd be in the exact same situation under Mike Pence or any other Republican president.
"Trump didn't remove abortion rights."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-was-able-kill-roe-v-wade-rcna84897
"The Republicans and the Supreme Court did."
The Court removed abortion rights because Trump put three conservative ideologues who were willing to lie to Congress on the Court. The point is, if Clinton had won, Roe would have stood.
"If Trump never existed, we'd be in the exact same situation under Mike Pence or any other Republican president."
Assuming that's true, and the counterfactual situation in which Pence or Bush or whoever was the nominee resulted in a Republican victory, then the same argument applies, but just slot in their name instead of Trump's. In other words, women would have been upset over the expected loss of their rights, and justified in that expectation.
> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-was-able-kill-roe-v-wade-rcna84897
Trump bragging is meaningless - the man will take credit for almost anything. He also takes credit for ending the war in Gaza.
> the same argument applies, but just slot in their name instead of Trump's.
You shouldn't be slotting "Pence" for "Trump". You should be slotting in "the Republicans". Trump or Pence or whichever Republican becomes president is little more than a warm body with regards to Roe v Wade. The sum total of their contribution is not going against their party and appointing a left-leaning justice. No Republican president appoints left-leaning justices.
Absolutely pro-choice women (and men) would be upset under any Republican president winning in 2016.
The problem is that you picked abortion as your main example why Trump in particular was terrible in 2016 and why the media didn't disparage Trump enough. There are a thousand ways in which Trump is particularly bad for a Republican president, but abortion is not one of them. He angered his own party by refusing to endorse a national abortion ban. Pence called Trump's statement "a slap in the face to the millions of pro-life Americans who voted for him in 2016 and 2020." Compared to his party, Trump is a moderate on abortion.
The media acted as if Trump were the worst president in history (which in many ways he is). If you want to argue the media understated this, at least use an example where Trump isn't left of your average Republican in Congress.
" three conservative ideologues who were willing to lie to Congress"
There is no such thing as a right to abortion, because that is trying to claim a right to murder. Happy now, Zealot Neal?
I am happy, yes. I enjoy watching my political opponents descent into incoherent ranting because they lost an argument.
The “deep state” traditionally has roots in the left of the 70s post-Watergate so… yes? Most people on the left have their own (more accurate IMO) version of a deep state thesis.
I have heard this theory (though a few even seem to trace it to the JFK assassination), but does the left buy it?
The left does; idk that your average MSNBC liberal does.
Horseshoe theory strikes again
Interesting, thanks, though the article linked below seems to say that the left did embrace the Watergate and found it politically useful, but were also afraid that it would distract from the more important concerns of the left.
https://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/06/did-the-left-think-watergate-was-a-distraction/
The linked article seems to find a dissonance RE: the left’s knowledge of the deep state and prioritization of that knowledge in their politics. It’s really not that surprising; the left doesn’t have almost any formal political power in the system, and its main objective is to gain that power through labor organization and electing politicians who have to answer to a power base with material interest in supporting economic left projects. A conflict with the deep state would only arise in a situation where the left already has that power and is being opposed by the deep state; because the left doesn’t have power it’s a hypothetical concern at this point.
The right’s version of the deep state, like the right’s version of almost anything having to do with politics, is confused, non-analytical, and ad hoc. I have problems with the left’s theorizing about deep state, but it’s not hobbled by these problems.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're asking here and it's nagging at me on purely a linguistic level - I'm not American so probably not your target audience for the question, and maybe I'm just dumb, but I'd really appreciate hearing it rephrased just to let my brain move on
What @Alex Power has given is pretty much my question, except that rather than just "suggesting" an answer I am open to different (contravening) readings and curious for alternative explanations. ChatGPT is trying to pin me to what it thinks is my motivation for asking the question :P
Sorry there were indeed a few inaccuracies in my expression; my brain was kind of muddled since I was in a hurry; I have edited my earlier comment. I hope it is better now.
I asked ChatGPT to translate: << The person is asking whether the reaction to Trump’s 2024 victory is less intense than expected, both from media and individuals. If so, they suggest that "left" media might have intentionally moderated or co-opted resistance. >>
Thank you.
You’re not the only one.
I was considering joining an old-school social/charitable organization, but one of the requirements is that I have to profess a belief in either god or a higher power. As an agnostic, this bugs me. OTOH, I spent most of my school years reciting the damn Christianist version of the Pledge of Allegience. Should I just bite my tongue and lie about my believing in god to join?
I'm with you on the squeamishness. I tell people I'm non-religious, but the truth is I'm anti-religious. Nothing wrong with fibbing, though, so long as once you're a member you don't have to have conversations about "god" and pretend to take them seriously.
I always thought Habitat for Humanity sounded fun, but of course maybe it's not. And it's not also a social organization, though I'll bet there are regulars who get to know each other. Also sponsoring refugee families (they live at their apt, but you help them learn to navigate the US, find jobs, etc. ). In Canada there are groups of people who do this, each sponsoring one family, but the sponsors keep in touch and collaborate on things.
Einstein always just said that he "believed in Spinoza's God" when asked. Spinoza's God was simply the natural laws of the universe.
I like that answer! Thanks!
Honestly, yes.
Nobody knows what's in your heart, and it's probably worth the extra social contacts/chance to do good.
I don't really worry that much about AI x-risk but I go to rationalist meetups to learn about how to use chatGPT, drink beer, and talk to right-of-center nerds. Half of them make fun of Yudkowsky too. ;)
Higher power than what? If it’s not specified, choose your own low reference point, say a bug, and don’t lie. If it’s specified as you, well, the government has power over you, doesn’t it? Still no lie. What’s the big deal about lying anyway, if you’re not a strict deontologist?
Isn't the traditional solution that you just think of "the Universe" or "science" or "the unknowable" as your higher power?
Or, "the laws of evolution", or "the laws of game theory"... ("Hail Moloch!" ...nah, that's not going to go over well)
There was an episode of the podcast Philosophize This on which the host, in a rare editorializing moment, opined that secularists were really abandoning the field to theists to define "god" in potentially very conservative ways. Secularists could and should contest and liberalize the definition of "god" to mean things that they are more comfortable with.
or even "my left foot"
That's only a higher power of you're doing a handstand.
Theres a shortage of good social leaders, if your willing to work for free maybe start something new.
Can't you get more-or-less the same out of service orgs, like Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis?
LOL. But the Elks have a great bar! ;-)
Broader impacts in NSF grants are not a new thing, but having woke criteria in their evaluation is... though I can't say these criteria are particularly widespread or universal, seeing that I was never asked to tailor my "broader impacts" to them in mathematics.
Something I've been thinking about lately: is the present moment an unusually inopportune time to have children, if you believe the "AGI/ASI imminent" harbingers? The basic argument is, if it turns out poorly, you run the risk of not only dying/ being oppressed yourself, but also having that happen to your child, which most agree is one of the worst forms of suffering around. But if it goes well, you'll have access to eg all kinds of embryo selection/enhancement, life & fertility extension, etc, which makes waiting not problematic and in fact positive. So in both situations, you're better off waiting.
Some counterarguments I could imagine would be if AGI/ASI fails to materialize and thus you waste time / potentially miss your opportunity window, if things plateau at roughly human level and gains in biotech don't reach eg menopause reversal, or if the outcome is some kind of benevolent overlord situation where humans are allowed to continue existing but not to reproduce. Any other thoughts on why you shouldn't wait? Note that this isn't a pro/anti-natalist argument in general, it's an argument for pro-natalists to "wait and see" through an arguably singular moment in history.
I don't see AI causing extensive suffering as a likely outcome. Relatively quick death seems much more plausible - AI has many reasons to kill humans who might threaten its power, few reasons to expend effort torturing them. And I kind of think that even a short life before an AI apocalypse is likely preferable to no life at all - while generally speaking I would not choose to have a child knowing they would predecease me, if the entire human race will die simultaneously then even a short life has whatever meaning life in general has.
And of course if there is no transformative AI in the end, or if there is and its results are positive, then of course I wouldn't wait to have kids.
Not really. As Humphrey Appleby says, we had this sort of discussion back during the Cold War with nuclear war. People still had kids.
I whiffed on it because I don't trust anyone, but people seem to like having them. So, IMHO, if some weird theoretical thing that nobody knows how to assign the probability to and gives numbers from 1 to 99% is your worry...just do it anyway.
My wife doesn't want to make the sacrifices involved in having/raising young children, and my belief we are probably not going to get beyond that stage is a significant source of tension in our marriage.
I always assumed that the point of marriage is to have children together.
I guess spending a life together with someone you love is also nice, even when you don't want to have children, but such things should be communicated *before* getting married. And if the plan is "let's have kids 10 years later", then maybe it also makes sense to only get married 10 years later.
Well, to late for this advice, I guess.
You probably should figure out whether it is "later" or "never" (while understanding that "later" that doesn't come with a specific timeline is often just a polite way to say "never"), and then it's up to you whether you are okay with that. Realistically, it probably depends on what other options you have.
(Hypothetically, there is also this thing called polyamory, but that's not for everyone.)
Is there a reason *you* can't take on enough of the sacrifices involved in raising young children to get your wife over the line (I assume you aren't a fertile lesbian or you wouldn't have mentioned the "having" part)?
Pregnancy and opportunity cost of traveling the world are ~80% of the consideration. She'd be fine with say adopting a 12 year old.
Surrogacy is an option, and we have moderate means. But kind of assumed that it's super hard to find an agency/surrogate if you don't have a medical reason you can't have kids, you just 'don't want to'.
If someone has references for surrogacy, I would be very interested.
I wouldn't assume there's a fertility means test to fail before you can hire a surrogate or adopt! I'm pretty sure that "we'd like to adopt" or "we'd like to hire a surrogate" is all you have to say.
In fact, "why didn't you have biological children?" is actually an extremely rude question, as it's likely to cause a lot of pain to people with fertility issues. So you're unlikely to be asked that by either an adoption agency or a surrogate.
And if you are, you can always reply, "that's a very personal and painful question." It won't go farther than that.
I have two children and have similar thoughts about climate change, geopolitical struggle, etc. I think in the end I always talk myself out of my stress by reminding myself "the alternative is that the next generation would be composed entirely of the children of parents who didn't care about such things". To some extent one of the most effective things we can do to advance our values is to have children that we raise with them.
It's still going to be disproportionately them, if not entirely.
> The basic argument is, if it turns out poorly, you run the risk of not only dying/ being oppressed yourself, but also having that happen to your child, which most agree is one of the worst forms of suffering around.
I am of the opinion that my child would prefer to be oppressed, than to not exist at all, so I have zero compunctions about bringing more life into a tragic / doomed world even if UFAI was *certain*. Especially because, if it turns out I'm wrong and my child would prefer to be not-alive than oppressed, well, there are many bridges she can throw herself off, so the mistake is easily remedied.
> But if it goes well, you'll have access to eg all kinds of embryo selection/enhancement, life & fertility extension, etc, which makes waiting not problematic and in fact positive
This line of thought seems to discount the obvious workaround: one can have kids now AND have embryo-selected superkids later. To repeat my earlier logic, it's better to be alive with a much smarter younger sibling than it is to be not alive at all.
> Throwing yourself off a bridge requires real courage and is not something people normally do even if in the objective light of day their lives have negative utility.
You are making extraordinary claims and I would like some extraordinary evidence. Specifically, I find it implausible in the extreme to believe that someone who really, truly believed their life had negative utility (e.g. living every moment in agony and with no realistic chance of reprieve) would find the small terror of a 10 second fall from a bridge too unpalatable to go through with. Your every waking moment is already torment, why are you gonna worry about a fall MORE? Their unwillingness to go through with it is a revealed preference that they don't actually have *no* hope.
> Plus a truly malevolent force that wants to enslave us would also make it hard to commit suicide
I believe in Roko's Basilisk as much as the next book-burning schizo, but I don't believe in it (or its omnipotence at preventing one-way bridge trips) *enough* that the expectation value of my kids' lives still comes out as negative.
You need "extraordinary evidence" that people with depression aren't jumping from bridges in droves?
> negative utility (e.g. living every moment in agony and with no realistic chance of reprieve)
It's quite a big jump from "negative utility" to "literal hell". Your life can be miserable, you can be utterly hopeless and fully convinced that life isn't worth living, and yet your brain doesn't let you take that small, final step. Millions of years of evolution is funny in that way.
> Their unwillingness to go through with it is a revealed preference that they don't actually have *no* hope.
That's circular reasoning. Your argument boils down to "they don't kill themself, therefore they must have hope, because if they didn't have hope, they'd kill themself."
> That's circular reasoning. Your argument boils down to "they don't kill themself, therefore they must have hope, because if they didn't have hope, they'd kill themself."
An isomorphic argument is accepted for every other instance of revealed preference, why not this one? "Consumers buy apples more than grapes, therefore they can't prefer grapes, because if they did, they'd buy grapes". You are isolated demand for rigor-ing me.
> You need "extraordinary evidence" that people with depression aren't jumping from bridges in droves?
I need extraordinary evidence that the reason they're not jumping from bridges is because they decided that the unpleasantness of the first 10 seconds is so... extraordinary... that it outweighs the unpleasantness of the rest of their natural life.
"Revealed preferences" alone can't carry an argument. At best, they provide weak evidence, in part due to the difficulty of pinpointing the source of the preference. Maybe the customers would buy a lot more grapes if there wasn't an angry bulldog sitting in front of the grape stand.
In this case here, if someone doesn't take the jump from the bridge, is it because their life actually doesn't suck as much as they pretend? Or is it rather because one of the most basic instincts, deeply ingrained in the animal brain since the first fish fled from a bigger fish 500 million years ago, is fighting an abstract, rational though process?
You could have made a substantially similar argument at any point during the cold war
...rather: You could have made a substantially similar argument at any point in human history.
And, of course, from 80s on the argument was that you shouldn't have children because they'll live in climate change hell. Before WW1 there were already fears of a global war and a Malthusian catastrophe etc.
Good point!
Embryo selection exists now.
Who knows? One of your kids could be the future John Connor who saves humanity from the oppressive AGI. :-)
Clarification on Cruz makes so much sense. Thanks.
Lots of ACX readers seem to have really hated their time in school. There's a whole lot of discussion of how miserable school is for advanced students, how it's basically a prison, and how many people intend to homeschool their own children in order to escape these issues. I am philosophically sympathetic to these arguments, and would also support radical changes to the school system, but personally, I really enjoyed school. I'd be interested to hear from really anyone here: did you enjoy school, and why or why not?
I think a large part of my enjoyment was that I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends - maybe ACX readers were more likely to be bullied, or were autistic and didn't get along well with other children, and this is why you all hated it so much? There also seems to be a lot of frustration about school being too easy, which I did feel at times, but mostly this didn't bother me too much. I didn't bother with pointless homework, and used the extra class time to do harder problems from the back of the textbook or read whatever I felt like. In fact, from observing other students and kids that I've tutored, I would've guessed that smart students enjoy school more, as they generally find the subjects more interesting, have an easier time concentrating, and feel less stressed because the work is not difficult. Did other people not have this experience?
It depends. I didn't like the school much, though I wouldn't say that I literally hated it. My wife seems to have happy memories.
Whether you get bullied or not, can make a lot of difference. Or whether you have friends in your classroom (and the school is an opportunity to meet them every day) or whether you have friends outside your classroom (and the school is a waste of time that you would rather spend with them). Also, when the classes are boring, is it possible to read a book?
The meaningful part of my school years were the after-school activities.
My misery was a big part bullying and ostracization (I suspect I am a bit autistic), and classes being so boring, speech is a terrible way to transmit information, and I never paid attention in any class. Oh, and waking up early, definitely needed more sleep.
I enjoyed school a lot, but suffered from gifted-kid develops zero work-ethic syndrome. I thought I was bottoming out in high-school, and my memory of it was teetering on the brink of failure. I found my transcripts a few months ago and it turns out I had straight A's, so I guess how one remembers school is sometimes different than it actually went.
I'd imagine a lot of people are selectively remembering a few things, as there honestly is a lot of room for independent learning if you're motivated for it. I think a lot of the desire with making schooling cater to advanced children is making it convenient for them to learn at a faster pace, when school isn't actually making it that difficult for kids to do so already.
I sat on the floor by myself during lunch. I couldn't wait to get out and get a real job. I regarded school as a giant waste of time.
I don't relate to the abuse/prison angle, but then I wasn't really bullied at school. (I didn't have much in the way of close friends, either, but that's partly a personality thing.) I didn't really enjoy it either, though. With a handful of exceptions, I was bored in almost all my classes and got very little out of having to sit through them or do the attendant homework. I'd have much preferred to be homeschooled where I could work at my own pace and based on my own interests, or (even better) to go to a school with classes designed for someone like me.
In contrast, when I managed to get into academic environments that were more on my level --- Mathcamp and college --- I loved it and thrived.
I did enjoy school. I wasn't bullied, even though I am not a friend-making-person (got on fine with my classmates but we didn't hang out together after school), I'm not hugely academic but it suited me, and I had a lot more access to materials to learn from than if I had been at home (out in the country, no easy access to library and this was way before the Internet).
I also generally had no problem with following rules, as that is my nature, and by the sounds of it a small (in American terms) Irish secondary school is nothing at all like American public schools. I might well have been miserable in an American school under American school system (PE is a subject and you have to pass it????).
Ironically, school was fine. Mine was pretty hippy-dippy and I wasn't popular but nobody really bothered me. It was failing to make friends in college, when I thought I would finally find my people, that turned me into the bitter alienated person I now am. ;) At that point I just gave up on fitting in and focused on the path that I thought would maximize my long-term income. (This is elided because, well, I don't want to make myself any easier to doxx.)
It kind of worked. I didn't get rich, but I could theoretically retire now if I wanted to. Didn't become happy, but I had always sort of written that off as a goal anyway.
I feel your pain, I have felt a lot of bitterness and alienation, but been making progress on it, I think I can see the other side of it.
"maybe ACX readers were more likely to be bullied, or were autistic and didn't get along well with other children, and this is why you all hated it so much?"
Some of this is what happened to me, I didn't have enough emotional intelligence to go through school. In school, one needs to keep learning social lessons, but also unlearning recently learnt lessons as the entire batch is growing up. I didn't have enough neuroplasticity for that: by the time I learnt a lesson it would be time to unlearn it, and so it would be a burden. I feel it messed me up.
There were several aspects of the school experience that I enjoyed. Everything happened according to a set schedule. While teachers were not unbiased or omnipotent or anything, their conduct was predictable and often rules-based. Grading and feedback was for a large part merits based; the "teacher's pet" fudge factor may have affected your end-of-year final report card grades but not exam results and test scores, so it was legible part to your "compensation". All the problem sets and other tasks had well-defined correct answers or criteria for acceptable outputs, which could be produced in reasonable amount of effort. Actually, there was little opportunity cost to making a good or mediocre output to very good one.
All of the above may have been ultimately a disservice, because very little of the above applies to contemporary adult careers and real-life work problems met therein.
"I think a large part of my enjoyment was that I had a lot of fun hanging out with my friends"
Kids getting to hang out with their friends should be a given imo. There should be other ways of facilitating that other than making them be somewhere that's extremely autocratic and forces them do pointless make-work all day.
>forces them do pointless make-work all day.
I would think that the decline in test scores following COVID remote learning would put the rest to claims such as this.
I say make-work because I think education is mostly a signalling game, for reasons like The Case Against Education argues, not because they don;t boost test scores.
If you think schools mostly teach useful stuff, then fair enough, they're not totally illegitimate and I'm being unreasonably critical. Even in that case, schools could still be massively liberalised and more efficient imo, and we should still be outraged by how needlessly oppressive they are.
Wasn't The Case Against Education largely about higher ed? I am referring here to K-12.
>needlessly oppressive
People say this, but I have no idea what it means. It seems that some consider it oppressive to have to sit in an assigned seat, or to raise your hand before speaking, as "oppressive", but even if it is, why is it "needless"?
"Wasn't The Case Against Education largely about higher ed?"
Most of the evidence Caplan gathered was for higher ed but I think the argument holds more broadly. A lot of what goes on lower down the education system is preparing kids to get into university. Scott's complained about being made to make collages about the meaning of respect or something like that, I'm assuming that was aimed at pre-university level ed.
I think education has to be oppressive because the average kid won't voluntarily sit quietly listening to lessons or doing practice questions, so if you've decided it's necessary for them to do that you have to employ some degree of coercion, and most countries go beyond even that minimum necessary cohesiveness imo. Because kids have low self controll, even that minimum level is insanely high compared to what adults would tolerate or how kids used to live before mass education. Scott's talked about the burrito test for example, in his review of Fredie de Boers book.
I think that's needless to the extent that education doesn't serve a useful purpose for signalling reasons or because it's inefficient, and to the extent that it's more oppressive than it needs to be evn to achieve it's stated goal. Like nordic countries achieve good test results with a more liberal system.
Like nordic countries achieve good test results with a more liberal system.
Nordic schools don't require kids to sit still? Seems unlikely. And, besides, the US outscores all Nordic countries on PISA reading scores, and all but Finland in science. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
>even that minimum level is insanely high compared to .what adults would tolerate or how kids used to live before mass education.
Yes, because children behave differently than adults, so if you want them to learn, you have to have more structure. Again, see the results of at-home learning. And, even assuming children were more free before mass education (a dubious assumption, given that they generally worked), they were also largely illiterate and/or could not do basic math. So, again, you have not shown that the coercion is needless.
I hated school so much. The single largest jump in my QoL was finishing it.
I'm a very happy person today. I'm extroverted, have close friends, a girlfriend, a good job.
I'm a well adjusted member of society. It feels great.
School basically brought the worst in me. I was an introvert, slightly bullied, shit friends, no girlfriend or even female friends, and I was barely scraping by.
I changed schools to a smaller and better one in my last years, the school sent me to a psychiatrist basically from day 1 because it was obvious I had ADHD.
The school environment is basically designed to kneecap me or kids like me.
Note that university was different. I did extremely well there. But if I was homeschooled or even just told to study for a GED-like thing I'd have years of my life back + have a headstart on life
My experience was very similar. I liked school. It was often easy, but I would still listen during classes. I was actually autistic, but at the same time very agreeable, so I wasn't bullied, and probably that's the most important thing.
Kindergarten and elementary was great, middle school sucked a great deal of ass but was Not Literally The Worst, high school...uh...well that's when my 5150 happened, so, yeah. I think a lot of it had to do with tracking...we had a GATE program in elementary, so lots of enriching extracurriculars, involvement from community volunteers, field trips, cultural awareness stuff (not in a woke way, more like one a day a year where the Japanese family demonstrates a tea ceremony, the Jewish family cooks latkes, etc. super fun!). That was also the point in my academic career where I was just miles and miles ahead of peers in almost every subject...challenging the 10th-grade math textbooks, not even bothering to join the Reading Circle for phonics (busy reading novels), doing well in prepubescent PE due to martial arts and sports outside school. Even during recess we had a gigantic campus with no real boundaries, you could literally wander off into the woods. (Or hole up in the library or computer lab, where many other adventures awaited.) In a lot of ways it was like living Harry Potter James Evans-Verres' life. School's a lot of fun, as long as you don't have to hang around the stupid people and there's exciting new stuff to do every day! So cool!
Of course, everyone reverts to the mean eventually, and the farther along you go, the more things like "discipline" and "conformity" are prized over...actually being intelligent. Going from being one of the most popular alpha kids in school to a bullied awkward teen (and having lots of friends migrate to other schools) was...Not Great, Bob. Kept my head down, got lost in academics and videogames. Parents getting for-all-practical-purposes divorced during this period didn't help either. I still did well academically, but it started feeling a lot more hollow because so much of it was what I'd now call Guessing The Teacher's Password. All those years where teachers would let me literally skip regular homework because "I know you already know the material, it's just pointless legible busywork for admins, don't worry about it" was both an ego boost and also an early-life introduction to Bryan Caplan's thesis. Scales falling off eyes and all that. But if academics is one of the only things keeping you interested in school, and it seems increasingly pointless, then...Solve for the Equilibrium, ya know? I got a near-perfect SAT score and went to a just-below-Ivy private college, and yet now I bag groceries for a living to pay off my student loans. No one fucking cares.
College was several very expensive years of going through the motions, pretending to believe in Cultivation of the Mind when I'd already lost faith years ago. Having to finally compete with (inter)nationally also-smart people instead of the podunk pendejos I grew up with was also an unpleasant shock. (Somewhere offscreen, FdB gestures at a big chart of relative ability bands where my datum slowly drifts into irrelevance.) Hadn't even wanted to go in the first place, it seemed pointless not to just go get a jerb. Friendless, increasingly isolated from family, no hobbies or interests outside videogames, struggling with mental illness (parents only later told me they'd thought I was autistic since childhood but never bothered getting a diagnosis "because you do well in school", the irony...that plus depression, suicidality, also whoops you're trans). Shamefully living with parents while peers I grew up with moved out. Eventually I just gave up the ghost entirely, fudged through a fake associate's degree to "graduate" for the family, and left unfinished school behind for good. Almost 200 college credits and ~nothing to show for it. Optimistically I guess I could say I used those college years to "find myself" and grow into adulthood, but...well...lol. Coulda learned better, faster, more cheaply by just going into the workforce outta HS. So it's at least a bit of retroactive vindication to be surrounded in the ratsphere and rat-adjacent by so many intelligent, successful people who likewise had a contentious relationship with academia. DoE delenda est, joking but not entirely joking.
"Having to finally compete with (inter)nationally also-smart people instead of the podunk pendejos I grew up with was also an unpleasant shock."
That's what the "doing homework" bit is about, your teachers did you a disservice by letting you presume "this is just pointless busywork for admins". Sometimes (a lot of the time) it is indeed, but the practice of "I have to put my head down and do this" does help when you hit "hey, I can no longer just skate by, other people are as good or even better at this than I am, I have to *work* now" level. If you don't have the habit of "I have to read the textbook instead of just skimming, I have to practice the work", it's very hard to pick it up later.
Oh, not a presumption, that is literally what they'd tell me sometimes. (Some artistic license employed for fuzzy decades-ago recollections.) Same thing with summer homework or other long-term assignments where I didn't bother turning it in by the official deadline, but would then bang out the whole heap in a couple days and hand it in later, and they'd be like...wellllllll...The Point is to demonstrate conscientious conformity, not to actually know the material, so instead of an A+ I gotta mark you down to a B. Wink wink nudge nudge ratemyprofessor.com. And I'm like sure, whatever, grades are kayfabe, I can play my part.
This worked a lot less well in college, where the sheiks had way more ego riding on the line of protecting their fiefdoms and would (seemingly almost gleefully) fail you anyway for technical reasons unrelated to knowing the material. Like wrong size font or Judean People's Front instead of People's Front of Judea bibliography formatting. But by adulthood, if you haven't figured out that's a lot of the point, then it's kinda hard to sink the lesson in without such consequences.* And I do think especially to your point, acting this way is an...expeditious...way to get fired at most kinds of entry-level jobs. Doesn't matter if you're running circles around everyone else performance-wise, if you don't jump when Boss-man says jump, and in the way he says to do it, you're not getting Employee of the Month. (What? You thought it was a meritocratic award? Pull the other one!) Everyone's gotta pay their dues and bend the knee. Same when tangling with Governance and other authority figures, of course. So, yes, a well-intended disservice that I generalized too hard on.
*part of why the whole grade inflation and failing-students-forward push of the 2010s was so personally enraging, I can't imagine how much worse my life trajectory woulda been without such humbling while I was still young enough to change my ways
...Trust me, actually doing your homework does not prepare you for any of that.
I was really good at school and enjoyed it (still do when I'm doing online learning etc). I think my problem was that I enjoyed it too much and was basically raised and trained to adapt myself to the scholastic framework so that I didn't really know what to do outside of it. I was raised a classic "smart kid", i.e. I was praised for intelligence, not work, so I got my dopamine from effortless success, and didn't know what to do when I finally had to buckle down, study, and work hard. It was a rough transition.
Mate, I didn't even graduate high school. Not all of us are mentally stable enough to deal with all that crap.
Middle school was, not quite hellish, but very ungood for me in what you are seeing as an ACX-stereotypical way. Hanging out with my friends? I think I had all of two sort-of-friends my entire time in middle school. And nobody cared about that; so long as I was quiet and obedient in class, my isolation was of no concern. Possibly I should have been noisy and disobedient, but mostly I just endured boring lectures on things I either already knew or didn't care about, but which were to distracting for me to focus on anything I did care about.
The time I was able to spend hanging out in the library was the one exception. It helped that the library had a dumb terminal to a Prime 350(?) minicomputer and a BASIC programming manual or two.
High school was somewhat better, and not just because they upgraded the Prime to a 500-series and eventually brought in a few Apple IIs. There was a much bigger diversity of classes, and more flexibility over what classes I could take, so maybe half of them were actually somewhat interesting and a couple were very good (9th grade English, AP Physics both stand out). OTOH, some of the classes I couldn't opt out of were still kind of hellish (9th grade social studies, 12th grade English, and of course gym). And with a larger student body better sorted by intelligence and interest, I was actually able to manage half a dozen or so friends by the end. That was mostly dumb luck, not anyone caring whether or not I had any friends.
Also the library had a much bigger collection, and I was allowed to spend more time there.
I posted this in the last Open Thread, but a few days late. I'm posting it again in case people are interested. This video makes the case that the development of modern caulk may be a unifying explanation for many features that people don't like about modern architecture - it enables seamless smooth facades with no local touches to deal with local weather conditions, and removes the need for craftsmanship to make pieces fit together:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBOXF-FION4
I could see it. "A tube of caulk and a lick of paint, turns you in to the carpenter you ain't", as they say.
I think it's a bit cart before horse-y though; the reason buildings look like they do is the complete dominance of capital and the failure of every other governing institution.
Caulk enables stuff to look like it does, but it gets used the way it is used because of Incentives. Wow, such revelation.
Thus the popular sentiment that one should not go off half-caulked.
I hope this refers to some industrial grade caulk, because caulk for the homeowner* is like snake oil you often have to buy anew, with the fun property that the snake oil will never stick to itself.
*It allows for "movement" lol. Oh indeed it does.
Technical explanations don't cut it. At least they cant explain all of it. We've seen similar uglifying trends in all other visual arts too, and they don't have the same technical constraints.
I saw this a few days ago, and I hate it. He had, effectively, the same piece about "gang nail plates" a few months ago.
The thesis, as I understand it: Modern conveniences in construction are bad, because they discourage the human touches of independent craftsmen.
Also, if you watch any of his videos about Chicago, you’ll see he is a big supporter of modernist architecture generally, just not the bland placeless aspects of it.
I don’t think he says that either of these is *bad*. He says they enable a bunch of things that aren’t human touch of independent craftsman, and many of us like those touches, and that these thus explain part of what we don’t like about certain architecture.
I thought it was notable that these were actually opposed in a certain way - caulk enables seamless and flush facades with fewer lines, while the gang nail plates enable unnecessary numbers of eaves and rooflines.
My impression is that he thinks both of these are good innovations, but a lot of what people have done with them is not aesthetically great.
Cool! Thanks.
Although I somewhat agree with this guy's thesis, an architect I follow on TwiXter pointed out that in Europe, there were so many buildings destroyed during WWII, that the agencies funding the rebuilding opted for quick solutions rather than fancy solutions. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier coined the term "béton brut", meaning "raw concrete", from which we get the term brutalist (turning an architectural term into an epithet). In Europe it was an economic necessity.
I get that people like or support Trump (or see him as better than the Democrats), but especially given recent actions and words (well encapsulated by the Saturday tweet "He who saves his Country does not violate any law") is it that you: 1) think he doesn't represent a threat of dictatorship or authoritarianism (i.e. breaking laws and norms); 2) thinks he could install a dictatorship but his good policies are preferable to Democrats for their bad policies; 3) thinks he could install a dictatorship but that's the same likelihood as Democrats installing a dictatorship; 4) some other fourth thing that's not occuring to me.
I can explain my perspective further and I want to keep it polite despite me knowing this topic often devolves into tribalism and name-calling.
I'm a conservative who dislikes Trump but views him as preferable to Democratic hegemony. I broadly support his anti-woke anti-progressive agenda, as I view them as a much greater threat to a free society than Trump himself is. I think he poses ~0 plausible threat to our political system. He'll be termed out in 2028 and would be too old to matter then anyway. Nothing he's doing is challenging constitutional norms in any substantive way. He's re-asserting the power of the executive. That's fine. Our system is adversarial by design and he's entitled to test its limits. He's incapable of breaking them.
In my view American progressivism is a cultural evil on par with early-20th-century Russian Bolshevism. Trump is an objectionable leader but I'm happy to give him a fair bit of leeway if he's actually effective at rooting out the progressive cancer in our institutions.
I've spent way too much time debating people here about this and they always seem to fall into two camps, once pressed enough: voluntarily uniformed, fascists (or at least completely unprincipled conservatives/populists). I am only a slight bit hyperbolic. They are either in full support of the US turning into a democracy in name only, or they take everything the trump admin says as true and aren't interested in investigating further.
I also think people just project anything they want for their government onto trump. to the point they will think he is going to do the exact opposite of what he says he will do.
However, for the general public i think we have to remember that the vast majority of voters are barely informed about any topic and don't make up their mind until very late in the process. These voters can swing from party to party every election.
I struggle to understand how giving the executive branch the power to fire people hired under executive branch agencies is a slide towards dictatorship.
It's ignoring very clear laws and constitutional powers that is the slide towards dictatorship.
There are laws about who the president can hire and fire and how those hirings and firings can occur. The Constitution's intent is that the executive branch *executes* the legislation passed by the legislature. They authorize the executive to have cabinet level positions. The positions must be confirmed by the legislature. They do not authorize him to hire or fire any employee at an agency.
If you disagree with these laws, that is one thing. But the way to change that is through the legislative process not by ignoring them.
The laws about controlling executive hiring were passed in 1946 as a middle finger to FDR's presidency. A sufficiently motivated supreme court would overturn them.
Expecting the legislature to agree to curtail its power is naive.
What does it matter why or when a law was passed? Are they no longer active? Do you really believe no other laws regarding hiring have been passed in the last 80 years?
>Expecting the legislature to agree to curtail its power is naive.
This is a core principle of the US government and is the stated purpose of the Constitution. Rejecting it is un-American. The executive is not supreme, all there branches of government are equal and can check the power of the others.
A bunch of laws have been passed regarding hiring. Pretty much all of them struggle to justify their existence under actual scrutiny.
You are arguing that the legislative branch should be supreme, by not allowing the executive branch to manage its own organizations.
It's funny, usually conservatives use FDR's authoritarian tendencies as a gotcha, rather than citing them with praise.
Apparently one needs to be as authoritarian as FDR to undo his changes, else Congress will throw a fit.
I think people want leadership* and they know it's not going to come from Mitch McConnell.
No need to overthink.
*On certain issues that 99% of the political class *did not* want leadership.
I recommend the Canadian philosopher Joseph Heath's recent take on this question:
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/observations-on-the-us-constitutional
From the content:
As Juan Linz pointed out (in a justly celebrated article), presidential systems tend to suffer from a particularly acute version of the impasse problem. In a parliamentary democracy, legislative supremacy is a pretty stable arrangement because only members of parliament are able to claim democratic legitimacy. Appealing to the sovereignty of the people, along with the representative principle, is usually enough to get the executive and judiciary to back down in a confrontation. In a presidential system, by contrast, both the head of the executive branch and the members of the legislative branch are able to claim democratic legitimacy. This is one of the reasons, Linz suggests, that presidential systems are so unstable. When an impasse develops between the executive and legislative, neither side may feel any need to back down. This often leads to the intervention of a nondemocratic force – perhaps the courts, or in the worst case the military – to break the impasse....
...The key thing to recognize is that Trump is challenging a constitutional convention. If successful, his actions may create a permanent realignment of power between the branches of government in the U.S. The fundamental problem, I should note, is that the U.S. has a completely dysfunctional legislature. Since power abhors a vacuum, the rise of judicial power in the 20th century was driven by this legislative weakness. People wanted certain outcomes, and since Congress was unable to deliver, they were happy to have those outcomes imposed by the courts. But judicial supremacy has a number of pathological effects on government, including a near-complete disregard for questions of cost and efficiency. The current play by the Trump administration to expand executive power is a response to both of these issues — the absence of an effective legislature and the accumulated inefficiencies of judicial rule.
All of this seems likely to further exacerbate the tragedy of the Democratic Party in America, which has basically painted itself into a corner on these issues.
Is the US legislature really completely dysfunctional? Exactly what vital potential law has a broad degree of support yet cannot be passed because of the legislature's supposed dysfunction?
The US political system is famous among political scientists for its large number of formal and less formal "veto points", which makes it rather more difficult to pass new laws than in most, perhaps all, other Western democracies.
Many veto points is great if you want to make it difficult for a ruler with an autocratic bent to do anything dramatic.
It is not so great if you should want to do something more than incremental reforms once in a while.
One of Heath's points is that these difficulties have led to the Supreme Court becoming a much more politically active player in the US than in most other democracies. (I recommend to read the whole article.)
"Dictatorship" is the wrong thing to be afraid of here; neither party right now is on a way towards it. The actual negative scenarios are uncontrolled authoritarian oligarchies on both sides. Trump's blob would be smaller than Biden's/Kamala's, but still without anyone specific in charge.
Trump (less sure about Vance) has a casual disregard for democratic norms that is similar to that of the present Democrats but less dangerous to non-political life in America. Of two evils, choose the lesser. At least this is the way I would have justified a potential vote for Trump; in practice I'd have voted Kamala for Ukraine's sake, though reluctantly and tightly.
I think it's a grave mistake to consider the situation under the 1990-2010 liberal-conservative dichotomy. The liberals are no longer liberal, and the conservatives are no longer conservative.
It's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants a fascist authoritarian regime, but it is clear that many of the people he has appointed, such as Elon Musk and Emil Bove, do. They have no real concern for the law or for supposed-conservative principles, and often feel that violating the law is an affirmative benefit to them.
Meanwhile, as various commentators such as Nate Silver have pointed out, the Left is no longer particularly liberal. https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly
Ultimately, a control faction of the Republican Party blindly supports Donald Trump, and the majority of the American public opposes the Democrats. This leaves only one option, which is where we are at. It's not good, but until an alternative presents itself, it is what it is.
I agree with the rest of it, but I don't think the majority of public opinion will necessarily oppose the Democrats after a few years of Trump. How effective the GOP will be at retaining power with public opinion against them and Trump over 80 but having gotten a lot more dictatorial in the interim...your guess is as good as mine.
> It's not entirely clear that Donald Trump wants a fascist authoritarian regime, but it is clear that many of the people he has appointed, such as Elon Musk and Emil Bove, do
No, I think you're using words incorrectly in a way that is counterproductive for the point you're trying to make. Elon Musk wants something, but a "fascist authoritarian regime" isn't it, and the moment you use those words you box yourself into arguing about the definitions of those words, rather than the useful discussion you could be having about the actual thing that Elon wants.
What is the actual thing that Elon wants? It probably looks like a smaller government with lower taxes and balanced budgets, secure borders, and everyone having the social values of, like, a 1990s Democrat. He also wants a Mars base and self-driving cars which bypass traffic by going through tunnels. I think that's a closer characterisation of what Elon wants than "fascist authoritarian regime".
The problem with what Elon wants is not what Elon wants (which all sounds pretty nice) but the extent to which he might be willing to ride roughshod in order to get there.
Maybe 2015 Elon Musk wanted that. Current Elon Musk obviously doesn't, both per his words and actions.
His interest in Mars seems to have dried up, he views space as merely a way to exert political power on Earth. The "trans" situation seems to have shifted his social views back hundreds of years. He seems to go out of his way to endorse every far-right party on the planet, and in fact criticize them for not being fascist enough.
And then there is the quasi-Nazi salute? The aggressive violation of both norms and laws, to accomplish things he could have done legally? The complete unwillingness to tolerate any dissent (his "free speech" on Twitter is now "free speech as long as it supports Elon Musk).
Elon Musk is a fascist, and trying to make America fascist. You're either in denial or have stale opinions if you think otherwise.
> He also wants a Mars base and self-driving cars which bypass traffic by going through tunnels.
It's been a long time since Musk spent significant effort on these goals. I fully believe that a colony on Mars and electric self-driving cars were once on his top-3 list of dreams, but now he'd rather spend 43 billion USD on a website than on SpaceX, and he'd rather spend his time on DOGE than on countering the increasing threat from Chinese electric car companies against Tesla.
Classically fascism includes collectivism, militarism and race purity ideas in addition to dictatorship. Doesn't seem to apply to musk.
See eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Great article, thanks! Did you read it?
"Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."[28] Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow.[29] "
I am curious as to what you think defines a "fascist authoritarian regime" if not the extent that its leaders are willing to ride roughshod in order to get what they want.
The proposed punishments and deportations were almost entirely directed at people who had committed actual physical crimes independent of their messaging at the time. Crimes that had traditionally been left unprosecuted so long as they were committed by people espousing approved liberal causes, but does anyone doubt that if any large group of people had engaged in e.g. anti-black or anti-gay protests with the same scale and tactics as last year's campus anti-zionist protests, the bad actors would have been very promptly expelled and/or arrested?
It's not freedom of speech if one side is allowed to punctuate their exclamations with violence and the other is not.
I think there's a 4): When reminded of bad aspects of what Trump is doing -- eg, dismantling things in a way where there's lots of collateral damage -- people think mostly about how much this is going to bother the malignant simpering assholes they imagine every single person on the left to be. They lapse into enjoying the vengeance, and never return to considering the real disadvantages and dangers of Trump's approach.
I agree. I've even done this myself a few times. On balance I'm anti-Trump (the anti-climate/science/vax stuff and the bullying our allies I find very concerning) but I enjoy reading the liberal tears in the NYT and Slate. Oh, you spent the 2010s telling me what a piece of crap I was because I have external plumbing, huh? Made me afraid to talk to the opposite sex in my teens and twenties? Enjoy your pussy-grabbing president.
Ironically I support abortion rights, so for me the ideal scenario would be for abortion to be legal but nobody tell the NYT editorial board so I can watch them continue to seethe. That will never happen of course, but if we're talking fantasies...
I think this is somewhat unfair - while it’s true that there are those on the right who have been personally shamed/cancelled/destroyed by the left and salivate over the idea of vengeance, there are also a lot of reasonable Joe Rogan-esque people who just think Trump is better than the alternative. He’s already ending wars, stopping the border crisis and demolishing woke and it’s only been three weeks.
I agree that there are people who like or support Trump for one or more of reasons 1-3. Why is it unfair to point out that some who support Trump do it for reason 4?
I guess! You’re not wrong, it’s just that a) it’s not a big percentage in my (admittedly subjective) opinion and b) the left too often disparages Trump voters to avoid having to engage with their valid concerns. It’s doubly unfortunate because in the end it’s their loss; you don’t win people over by telling them repeatedly how racist and intolerant they are, and too many people on the left seem to think it’s some kind of virtue to not speak to MAGA. Now they’ve lost public opinion and all houses of Congress and their reaction is to tell each other in their shrinking media bubbles that the sky is falling and it’s the end of the world and WHY WON’T MAGA SEE THIS WE TRIED TO TELL THEM IT’S ALL THEIR FAULT.
Strikes me you are doing just what you're complaining about the left doing: You have this ugly, infuriating picture of what people who voted against Trump are doing now. They think it's a virtue not to speak to MAGA. Instead they play ain't-t-awful in their media bubbles, and agree this is MAGA's fault, and look for chances to holler "I told you so" to the MAGAs. They are not a differentiated bunch, as you point out the people presently supporting Trump are -- some supporting him for reason 1, some for reason 3, or 4. No the anti-Trump people are all exactly the same, and they all do the exact same mean-spirited, entitled shit.
You are doing what you complain about the anti-Trump people doing: avoiding engaging with the other side's valid concerns. Why is it not a valid concern that Trump has dismantled things in a rapid, sloppy way that causes far more collateral damaged than is necessary? Scott's post about the NSF grant proposals getting yanked for supposed Wokeness when many were not infected with Wokeness at all points out one instance of this. Or what about Pell grants now that the Dept. of Ed has been shuttered? How hard would it have been to put info online for educational institutions answering some of the immediate questions they would have about whether certain things, Pell grants being one, are suspended going forward, or canceled retroactive to some date, or are still going to be allowed to continue as usual?
You're also, of course, just wrong in your mental picture of those who did not want Trump as president. Obviously they vary in how vehement they are, how willing to talk with people of the other persuasion, how worried about Trump's present actions, how much time they spend on Twitter playing aint-it-awful. Any time you think millions of people who have one thing in common are pretty much the same in having a certain cluster of dumb, obnoxious fucking stupid as shit attitudes and behaviors that you and yours do not have you can be certain your head is up your ass.
Oh I’m not infuriated by them - far from it. I’m very sympathetic. I used to be on the left and believe the stuff the media told me about Trump. I genuinely hope that people do not suffer under this administration, even while I also think that electing Trump was one of the most important decisions that America has ever made and he will go down in history as the greatest president since Lincoln. I hope you come to see this too, and I hope the anxiety you feel about the current state of the world will get better.
1) Why do you jump straight to dictatorship? The President used to wield a lot more power without being a dictator. This was a more effective method of governance and I think the US should go back to it. Trump has been the only viable option in many decades who has a chance of doing it. I am happy that the next Democrat will be a more effective President because of it too.
"Why do you jump straight to dictatorship? The President used to wield a lot more power without being a dictator. "
Would you care to elaborate on this? That is NOT my impression of American history at all. Presidents have often been the focus of historical narratives (on presumes because that makes them easier to tell and digest), but the presidents wielding more formal power in the past is not something I'm aware of.
FDR maybe?
Hah, I did think of him when I was pondering this question. Did he wield greater formal power than a modern president? I'm not nearly enough of a historian to say for sure.
From what I recall his first two terms[1] were mostly about trying to fight the Great Depression and that he was--at least at points--restrained by congress and the courts. And that his second and third terms were almost entirely during the period the U.S. was engaged in one of the biggest wars in its history, which changes the face of the question considerably.
I think many people (myself included) are OK with the executive wielding more broad and immediate power in the midst of a sufficiently severe crisis, provided that there are still sufficient guardrails in place against the obvious failure modes, and well-defined points for congress and the courts to weight in.
[1] I will note that having an official term limit IS a clear-cut case of modern presidents having their powers (for a slightly loose definition of "powers") more formally limited. Though the pedant in me feels inclined to point out that it's still to early to say whether the term limit restriction will *succeed* at restraining Trump's attempts to accrue more power to the executive.
The lefts current criticisms are largely... insane and ahistorical; A president decreasing the size of the state is not going to convince the right trumps a dictator. I dont care if he puts a horse in power, if income taxes decrease 1% the state has gotten less tyrannical. I have extreme doubts about him following thru on all his promises, but the promises are preferable then any president Ive seen.
Vetos are limits of power, and constitutional. If a president doesnt use money allocated by congress, thats *less government* and not dissimilar to the 12th jury member refusing to find giulty.
What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diverse" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?
(That's barely a hypothetical, by the way - the Department of Education has threatened to pull funding from any school system that has "DEI" programs, and if they define "DEI" the way Ted Cruz defines "woke science," then a lot of perfectly ordinary school programs are going to get deleted at random.)
If federal programs get money based on "does the President like you personally?" rather than "does the law say you should have this money?", then that is corrosive to the rule of law, regardless of what your tax rate is.
Also, while the impoundment thing is definitely the biggest constitutional crisis, Trump has done plenty of bad things that have nothing to do with money - for instance, the recent decision to drop the corruption case against Eric Adams in exchange for his support on immigration enforcement. That move made six DOJ lawyers resign in protest, and didn't lower your tax bill by one dollar.
> What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt
...then you've gotten two wins?
"What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diverse" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?"
Then the locals will have to... build their own schools.
"Also, while the impoundment thing is definitely the biggest constitutional crisis"
The president doing what the president has been allowed to do for centuries until Congress passed one law against Nixon is a constitutional crisis?
Well, yeah. What do you think a constitutional crisis looks like? The basic framework is that we have three supreme bodies and they're supposed to work together in defined ways. When they don't agree on what those ways are, that's a constitutional crisis - two equal powers have different views of the constitution.
Is having a crisis bad? It doesn't have to be; at some point you're going to have disputes and those will need to be resolved. We have 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 resolved constitutional crises by saying that everyone must defer to the Supreme Court, but that's clearly not the solution the constitution contemplates, and it's had some sharply negative effects.
A good reason to oppose federal funding for local public schools in general is precisely that it gives the federal government a mechanism to exert power over what all school districts in the country do.
I'm also personally libertarian enough to think that it would probably be a good idea to entirely abolish public schools and dispense with the idea that running a school system is something the government rather than the private sector ought to do. This is not currently politically realistic in the US, but in any case it definitely doesn't lead me to be very concerned about the federal department of education using its funding power to work against local public school DEI programs rather than in favor of them.
> What if your taxes decrease by 1% but also your local school district goes bankrupt because Elon Musk saw the word "diversity" in their marketing materials and pulled all their federal funding?
> then that is corrosive to the rule of law
> biggest constitutional crisis
Maybe I should have clarified my politics preemptively; Im not in anyway a moderate; these seem to be for a bush era conservative who trusted the state not that long ago.
Id be for all schools being shutdown tomorrow; I want blue states to react, threaten to secede; I want every state employee to lose their job, the all contractors, then the entire "fire" economy.
"rip and tear until its done"
Everything recently has raised my hope for the future. Change was nessery and enviable, its better if real drastic change happens without blood in the streets, the more chaotic trump is now, the less blood I see in the long run; if trump redesigns the americain empire as drastically as fdrs new deal the future is possibly as bright as I can imagine.
> Im not in anyway a moderate
"Goldwater extremism."
"If income taxes decrease by 1% the state has gotten less tyrannical".
Can you explain why you think this is true? I see this sentiment a lot in libertarian-focused forums.
One immediate counter-example that comes to mind would be a tyrranical state with no taxes, but instead subjugates (parisitises) other nations to support its government spending.
Also, wouldn't everyone having 1% (or x%) lower taxes generally result in higher prices for everything? I mean, hear so much about raising minimum wage causing inflation, but nothing about lower taxes causing it. Or is this more something that goes along with "abolishing the Fed" and establishing deflationary policies?
Its understood that "sin taxes" work, a tax of 500% on cigerattes, makes vapes or patches or something else.
A tax on income make being economically productive a sin, preferring worse forms of income such as stealing, fraud, gambling. Its one thing to tax luxerys, I may go without, inflation, I may buy gold; labor, its all I have.
Id have to find a spooner quote(abolishist when that mattered; anarchist) comparing taxes to slavery, an tax on labor is the most direct version.
> Its understood that "sin taxes" work, a tax of 500% on cigerattes, makes vapes or patches or something else.
This isn't really understood; in reality, if you set the sin taxes too high, you get smuggling.
The USSR had 13% flat income tax, no sales tax, no property tax. Do you think it was a libertarian paradise?
Only if there was a horse of a senator; perhaps I should have clarified my statement was about animal rights and no taxation without representation
----
Fine, you and the china guy win a point. I should have said the point that I dont care about court politics when compared to actual effects more tractfully.
Much appreciated.
If income taxes decrease by 1%, but borrowing increases, is the state more or less tyrannical? The state can only borrow at such favorable rates because of its presumed tyrannical ability to confiscate wealth. Is implicitly flexing that ability by borrowing an increase or decrease in “tyranny”?
> If income taxes decrease by 1%, but borrowing increases, is the state more or less tyrannical?
If I split up the list of types of taxes into 8 categorizes, income taxes are last place. Maybe 1% of incomes are worth 10% sell taxes or something; but theres something vile about being poor the whole unfairness of working to eat is a law of nature, but kicking the poor when down is pure violence on top of it.
I wont take it as far as kulak, but "libertarians opposing tariffs are traitors" is preferable to the historical discourse.
> Is implicitly flexing that ability by borrowing an increase or decrease in “tyranny”?
Its still a tax(inflation), but its a tax I can dodge legally
So you'd be in favor of a progressive income tax system that exempted the poor?
If it happened; yes. The law that claimed it happens, no. The income tax started "tempory and only for the rich".
It be very very hard to design a system that didnt end up only paid by the middle class down.
But should we pursue tax policy that disproportionately favors high earners while increasing the deficit, as Trump's proposed tax plan does, or should we make some kind of effort to not do that? Is taxing high earners less better over all because it means a bigger total reduction in tax revenue?
I’m having trouble understanding your point. Is it that income taxes are particularly bad because they tax the poor?
They tax the poor in a way they cant avoid; lotterys are a tax on the poor but its not a chain of violence; i.e. mugging that makes poor people play lotteries.
did winnie the pooh put the donkey in charge of something?
Basically 3)
Most people who support Trump are basically OK with him centralising executive power and becoming “king of America” for four years. They trust him more than they trust anyone else in politics. I saw a MAGA tweet recently - “the American government is experiencing a hostile takeover by the American people.”
The American government is experiencing a hostile takeover by a minority of the American people. I'm not one of them, and I'm not pleased, and I am going to push back against anything that suggests Real Americans(tm) are all aboard on the Trump train.
I mean, the 2024 election felt like a giant argument over which minority would get to try its hostile takeover.
Part of me is wishing there was a large contingent of Americans willing to organize under a slogan of "thanks for getting those groups out of our way, Mister/Madame President; we'll take it from here".
> “the American government is experiencing a hostile takeover by the American people.”
This is a good line.
This is also why this authoritarian stuff from the left is failing to land. The left is like “it’s a coup, ahhh.” The right is like “it’s a coup, great! This is exactly what I voted for.”
To make matters worse for the left, Trump is delivering on key election promises like the border crisis in a rapid and effective way that makes it clear they could have done the same, had they cared/wanted to.
He could make the promise and deliver on it because he blew the “border crisis” out of proportion in the first place.
The immigration figures, if I recall correctly, had been shrinking (from an admittedly very high place) since 2022, and Trump’s only action regarding the border has been this tariffs thing with Mexico – which Mexico got out of by promising to send 10,000 troops to the border, whereas there already were 15,000 of them.
Trump is undoubtedly sending a strong message to putative migrants. That probably counts for more than the details of enforcement in the medium term at least.
Although I could be wrong, I don’t think that’s how it works for several reasons:
1) there’s no reason why putative illegal immigrants to the US should have the same media diet as US citizens,
2) they may interpret messages differently. After all, many were in situations where the threat was much closer to them than a POTUS talking tough on immigration.
3) the border is 3000 km long and there are a lot of putative illegal immigrants. This is not the kind of physical problem whose nitty-gritty details you can afford to overlook if you want to enact your preferred outcome.
(Also, I’m surprised – I thought Trump had been elected for doing stuff, but calling messaging “action” is hardly the hallmark of someone who gets things done?)
In this case, he sent the same message for his first term, so we can just look at what happened then.
What happened was that would-be immigrants were initially intimidated and inflow slowed by a large amount. Then they realized the whole thing was bluster and inflow picked back up to usual levels.
So... the messaging does work, but it needs to be backed up by actual policies.
But the point isn't just to stop new immigrants from coming in, it's to remove the ones that are already here.
It's landing exactly where it's targeted. That messaging is not for the right.
Question. A mega sun storms hits the North American continent, frying the grid. At the same time, an asteroid wipes out all the oil fields is Saudis Arabia. Communication satellites start crashing into each other.
My question is this. Are physicians who were trained over the last 30 years and who rely almost exclusively on test results from lab and imaging companies for diagnosis, going to be able to treat their patients. Do they receive sufficient education to be able to improvise alternative ways of getting the information they need to be effective.
How much direct experience do you have with doctors doing diagnoses, especially in an emergency or ICU setting? The lab test and imaging a big part, but so is physical examination of the patient.
There are some diseases that require labs or imaging to diagnose. Those were not being diagnosed at all 100 years ago. There wasn't some magical knowledge that has been forgotten to history. Lab work and imaging makes treatment much easier but is not required. Infections, traumatic injuries, many cancers can be diagnosed with no labs or imaging, for example.
No. You're going to have a lot of deaths.
I mean, that wouldn't wipe out energy production or medical device manufacturing globally. But assuming it did: we could build it back.
The real danger would be mass casualties among skilled workers and economic degradation to the point they couldn't be supported or retrained. But so long as they survive they could bootstrap their way back up. I'm nothing particularly special and I could probably make a primitive computer, a basic steam engine, etc out of raw materials that were available in Ur. And then those tools can be used to make better tools and so on. Even more so because I know the end point we should be aiming for.
On the other hand, if a lot of these specialists die and the economy radically shrinks such that there's not enough spare food to keep them working on making computers again then you would lose the knowledge largely within a generation or so.
This amuses me because I've had a decent number of lab tests and whatnot done in recent years, and the only test out of all of them that produced useful, actionable, apparently-accurate results was an allergy test that took a few minutes to perform, and could be read simply by looking at my arm. (Obviously my results aren't typical of everyone, and many tests to produce useful results.)
In a scenario like this I'd be much more concerned with supply chain disruptions and the availability of medicine. A LOT of people take one or more medications on a daily basis. Supplies being disrupted could cause a lot of serious problems.
I think diagnosis quality will degrade but not to apocalyptically poor levels.
If it's a short disaster (months), I think most ER physicians are already pretty good at this stuff (they sometimes have to act before complicated test results can come in), and primary care doctors are mediocre but can probably dig out their old textbooks and get by. There are some things where you can't know absolutely for sure without fancy tests, but before the tests were invented doctors took their best guesses, were right more often than not, and accepted some unnecessary surgeries or misdiagnoses as inevitable. Some of the really hard stuff (eg a slow-growing brain tumor where you need to know exactly where to operate) can probably wait the few months until the disaster is solved.
The US has many foreign-trained doctors, including doctors from poor countries without as much technology. These people will be more used to the situation and can advise others.
If it's a longer disaster (years), then the few doctors who remember the low-tech techniques can retrain the others, but also, people will have to do something about the slow-growing brain tumors and that kind of thing, you simply can't do as good a job without imaging, and we'd have to accept the lower success rates.
In this doomsday scenario, whether your physician can accurately identify critical aortic stenosis from a physical exam alone will be the least of your worries! Medical education is one of the slowest moving fields and is still proudly stuck in the mid 20th century; aspiring physicians are still graded on whether they can accurately percuss the top of a pleural effusion, measure liver size etc, even though in real life they will use imaging for all of these indications (and would probably face legal liability if they did not. “Your Honour, I opened his chest to perform the operation without an echocardiogram beforehand because I was confident in the slow rising carotid pulse and soft second heart sound I heard with my stethoscope.” That wouldn’t fly in court.)
Failures of nominative determinism:
General Kevin D. Admiral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Admiral)
Humble artist Fang Rending (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Rending), who was once compared to a "caged chicken rebelling".
And I am guessing this guy sometimes rendered unjust decisions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wayne_Justice
I am very happy to hear that Scott and his wife are planning on having another child. Good luck to the whole family.
Having kids is the best decision I ever made.
Agreed. It's harder than I thought it would be, but they also they bring me previously unimaginable amounts of joy and purpose.
I’ve been thinking about memory lately. Are we sure that everything we’ve experienced isn’t still in our brain, and that we are simply unable to recall most of them? It seems awfully random what we remember and what we don’t, obviously some important moments are available for recall but there are so many other seemingly trivial memories that are available. And if an entire lifetime of experiences are still in our brains, have there been studies or attempts to learn how to access them? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I think it’s curious
I'm reminded of how deleting eg photos on your phone doesn't actually delete them, just marks them as free and available to be written over. Organizing and accessing data is half the game of memory.
One of my frustrations with one of Scott's recent-ish posts about the usefulness of education was exactly that it treated memory as a binary thing. Either you remember [fact] when somebody asks you, or [fact] is completely gone from your brain.
This has not matched my experience with regard to memory and academics specifically. On a couple of occasions I've had to re-learn skills that had gone unused for years. At the point I would start relearning, I'd remember next to nothing. But it always came back MUCH more quickly than I learned it the first time. I'm not sure I could believe that *everything* we experience is still in our brains, but I do think brains clearly have a very quirky storage-and-retrieval system for which you can't necessarily treat "stored vs deleted" as a strict binary.
Totally spitballing here, but you might model it as (almost) everything being stored via lossy compression algorithms, but ones that get lossier and lossier the longer the thing goes without being accessed. On the flip side, when you *do* try to access something, your brain tries to fill in the details that had been lost by the compression. If there's enough left, it will either get them actually right, or at least get them consistent enough that you won't notice the patch. Only if the memory is degraded enough will you notice gaps. But if something "jogs your memory," i.e. fills in some of those gaps with external information, your brain might suddenly be able to use that to fill in other gaps that were previously intractable. This would neatly explain why things like music and poetry are easier to memorize than unstructured information, and why mnemonics can be useful despite actually increasing the amount you need to remember: the structure works neatly with the pre-existing compression-and-decompression algorithms, allowing things to be stored with less effort and retrieved with less loss.
You will find this interesting: https://www.science.org/content/article/are-your-earliest-childhood-memories-still-lurking-your-mind-or-gone-forever
An additional point that any 'minimalist' take on memory has to deal with: the well-documented existence proof of the ability of some idiot savants to memorize extremely large amounts of data, like books after a single read.
But reading something is a very special cognitive experience. I doubt that remembering what you saw all over last 6th of May is as easy as remembering what exactly is written in a book. Not that the latter would be easy for me.
Edited, because of a convoluted sentence.
Also dreams, those most ephemeral of memories. While you're asleep, a dream can appear as real as life, but you can't remember it within like 5-10 minutes of waking up. Still, I get flashbacks to one-off dreams I've had decades ago, and those flashbacks can be years apart themselves.
I'm a firm believer that it's still all there, everything that ever crossed your mind, and that there must be a good reason why most of it is sealed away most of the time.
That doesn't make sense to me as evidence for your idea.
That you remember 5, 50 or 500 views that you once had and are now surprised to remember, doesn't mean that all the 500000000 views you actually had but don't remember are all there too.
It doesn't, but it does prove that the brain has the capacity to remember at least some dreams far beyond their usual lifetime when it "wants" to. I can remember some conscious things (like my phone number or how to put on socks), and fractions of dreams as described. Maybe there are people, like the idiot savants gwern mentioned, that can remember all their dreams forever as if they were waking experience? It sure doesn't seem impossible to me.
My colleague Elizabeth Loftus has done some really surprising work on memory over the decades: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB2OegI6wvI
Surprisingly, what she shows is that we can actually "remember" many things that never happened, which suggests that our memory doesn't actually store most things, but instead stores "traces" of these things, that we then use to re-construct the memory in much the way we construct imaginations of the future or of alternate possibilities. These re-constructions often go wrong in the same sort of way that AI "hallucinations" do.
Very likely, there is a lot we could learn to do to better extract traces of events and facts we have trouble recalling. But we also don't have full storage of any of them - just reconstructive storage.
Whatever she has done (no Youtube right now) is certainly respectable, but isn't this consens? That memory works like this? I was under the impression.
Has anybody come across for-profit AI alignment and alignment-adjacent startups? If yes, please share.
PatternLabs perhaps?
Trump gets three noble peace prizes. Gaza, Ukraine and a 50% cut in defense spending agreement with China and Russia. (I know he has no chance of getting even one... even if he does all that.)
Let's at least wait until the end of his term before judging. I actually do think he was better than a lot of recent presidents on foreign policy--fewer wars and so on.
His current plan for Gaza would seem to put him in line for the Bizarro Nobel Peace Plan.
Have you checked out the list of previous winners? Like, say, Yasser Arafat? It's *already* the Bizarro Nobel Peace Prize; they just don't call it that out of respect for Alfred Nobel.
Yasser Arafat was not given the award for committing terrorism. He was given the award despite previously committing acts of terrorism, not because of it. That would not be the case for Trump (substitute ethnic cleansing or the like for terrorism).
Giving the Nobel Prize to people like Arafat is legitimate, because it incentives people to end conflict and renounce violence (which he did as part of the Oslo Accords), which is consistent with the purpose of the award. Giving it to Trump for doing what he claims he wants to do would incentivize behavior that is inconsistent with the purpose of the award.
Arafat won the prize for A: running a murderous terrorist campaign for decades and then B: stopping and saying "look how great it is that I negotiated this deal where I stop being a terrorist". If he'd never been a terrorist, he'd never have won the prize.
I do not expect the Nobel Committee to give Trump the prize until he has finished ethnically cleansing Gaza. And really, I don't expect him to ethnically cleanse Gaza or even remember that Gaza exists six months from now.
>If he'd never been a terrorist, he'd never have won the prize.
Then why did Rabin and Peres share it?
Regardless, rewarding terrorists for renouncing terrorism is a good thing.
>or even remember that Gaza exists six months from now
Or six weeks.
Are you familiar with the cobra effect?
Yeah that “Peace Prize” has long lost whatever moral authority it has ever had. Awarding it to Obama in 2009 for basically not being a Bush was the final nail in the coffin.
There can be no war if there is no one left to fight.
Yes, obviously. But perpetrators of ethnic cleansing do not generally get Nobel Peace Prizes.
We can always distribute our own Nobel Peace Prizes. Doesn't seem fair that Norway gets to be sole arbiter of who's deserving of such a prestigious reward.
Although, in fairness, there's always Henry Kissinger (not that "ethnic cleansing" is the right description of the stuff he did).
I should have said the award is not given for committing ethnic cleansing. As for Kissinger, giving the award to those who enter peace agreements incentivizes the creation of peace deals.
What has he done for Gaza?
What has he done for Ukraine?
When did he sign a 50% defense cut agreement?
Look, we already had an American President getting a Nobel for literally nothing, we don’t need another one.
Oh he has to do all that first. It could all not happen.
Oh I see. Well, I’m sure he’ll get one in physics too after inventing a room temperature superconductor and creating a unified theory. He hasn’t done it of course, but any day now.
That is unfair. He has some chance of doing these peace related things. Would you not want any of this to happen? And ask yourself if the reason you'd be against it is because it gives a 'win' to the other side?
Yes, yes yes, North Korea has disarmed already, Hamas got scared of the Feb 15 deadline and released all hostages, Christ is here again.
How do adults who seem to otherwise function normally have a Trump amnesia? Why on Earth do you think Trump is some kind of a peacemaker? In his first term he attacked Syria and Iran. He unilaterally tore up an agreement with Iran, making their hardliners wettest dreams come true. He totally botched negotiations with North Korea, making everything worse in the process. Just because the man says "I will stop wars" doesn't mean he has any idea of how to do this short of rolling over for Putin like an obedient little doggy. Which he and his drunkard moron Sec of Defense are about to do.
Trump is an ignorant morally bankrupt coward who likes to hurt people, so forgive my skepticism. Yes, it's easy to stop a war when you force the victim to accept the aggressor's terms, "might as well relax and enjoy it" says Trump to the rape victim, definitely peaceful.
Gaza ceasefire was negotiated during Biden admin and went into force before Trump's inauguration.
>How do adults who seem to otherwise function normally have a Trump amnesia?
I am skeptical of the "leaded gas poisoned everyone" theory but there's got to be something causing this. It's just astounding.
I don't think the 50% defense cut agreement is plausible.
Why not? I mean he has to convince congress to go along, but that could happen.
I don't think even he could get Russia and China to go along with it.
First, they're both spending a significantly smaller fraction of their budgets on defense than the US already, and so stand to gain less by halving it.
China also needs to arm up if it's going to take Taiwan, and Russia needs to keep up its spending to defend against a Ukrainian invasion of its western republics.
A better offer would be to cede them Taiwan and Ukraine in exchange for them recognizing the US annexation of Canada and Greenland.
No I don’t think that is feasible. It would mean unilateral disarmament in front of Russia and a growing aggressive CCP.
All it takes is one… commenter… suggesting an utter idiocy, and off we all go discussing it…
In case you missed the news, that trilateral agreement to halve defense spending was an actual proposal by Trump.
Oh that proves my point even better! One Truth Social commenter in this case. 😉
No not unilateral, tri-lateral.
Between PPP adjustments and cost disease we almost surely get less bang per buck than either Russia or China, and we have global commitments which they don’t. An America that unilaterally slashes its defense budget in half is almost surely one that is unable to continue to uphold the Pax Americana, or even honor its treaty obligations (to eg Japan, or Poland, if the SHTF).
Bear in mind also that a lot of the defense budget is pensions and benefits to veterans which is politically very hard to cut. Weapons are easier to cut (they don’t vote). An America that unilaterally cut its defense budget in half could easily end up in a few years with an army like the bundeswehr - soldiers with excellent benefits training with broomsticks because there are no guns or ammo available. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/19/germanys-army-is-so-under-equipped-that-it-used-broomsticks-instead-of-machine-guns/
> Between PPP adjustments and cost disease we almost surely get less bang per buck than either Russia or China
PPP adjustment for defense spending is not unreasonable, but it has to be done carefully: militaries do not buy the same basket of goods as the civilian economy. Russia has lower labor costs, for instance, but probably faces higher prices for certain sorts of high-end technological goods in virtue of having worse economies of scale.
Congress would never pass that, but Trump could impound the funds. Then it would go to the Supreme Court.
I’m pretty sure that one would be a bridge too far for even the supine Congressional GOP. That is so dangerous that near unanimous impeachment would occur.
Lol. Half of Trump's executive orders in the last month are unconstitutional abuses of congressional authority. Good luck finding a single Republican willing to go on record against them, much less impeach over them.
Huh, why wouldn't congress go along? I'm talking out my ass, but I kinda feel we could cut our defense budget in half w/o much loss in utility.
What are you going to cut? According to Wikipedia, 40% of the DoD budget is salaries and benefits, and another 10% is healthcare. Are you going to stop paying the soldiers? Welsh on their benefits? Or are you going to cut literally everything else, so that we'll have a well paid military with excellent benefits, but no actual weapons? (You know, like the current day Germans).
And are you intending to honor our far flung treaty commitments, or are you intending on retreat to fortress America, leaving Poland, Japan, Australia etc to fend for themselves?
Yes less soldiers, but you can do it slowly.
"And are you intending to honor our far flung treaty commitments, or are you intending on retreat to fortress America, leaving Poland, Japan, Australia etc to fend for themselves?"
If only there was a way to strike targets all over the world with forces present in the United States...
The reason there's that kind of slack in the defense budget is that Congress votes for that slack. Why? Tons of pork in the budget.
Right and everyone in congress knows this, and with a wink and a nod it continues. But hate him or love him, Trump is a generational figure who stands outside of parties (as much as is possible, he still has to keep the R's happy) and I remain hopeful that real change could happen. The voters are not stupid, we mostly need someone who isn't lying to us. And call me a rube, but I'm taking Trump at his word.
Why wouldn't congress pass it?
Sounds like a great idea to me!
You are not a congressman. Many things that sound like a great idea to you, will sound like very bad ideas to the median congressman.
Congressmen are much more invested in state capacity and power than you are; they have by definition devoted much of their lives to taking the reins of that power. They are not going to look favorably on anything that greatly reduces that power. And the ones that normally would favor at least a modest rebalancing in favor of soft vs. hard power, i.e. liberal Democrats, are going to be skeptical of any proposal that comes from the desk of Donald Trump. Or Elon Musk.
Congressmen are also heavily invested in the health of the defense industry. In part because of all the campaign contributions, but in much larger part because of all the high-paying jobs the defense industry supports in their district, which are very easy for congressmen to take credit for. Or be blamed for if those jobs go away.
Congressmen are also very sensitive to the opinions of voters. Donnie and Elon may think the military is a giant waste, but most of the people who wear "MAGA" hats count America's overwhelming military might as a big part of that 'G'. And really, a whole lot of non-MAGA Americans are also kind of proud of that, or fearful of what could happen without that. When they see half a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen being tossed out on the street and told to get jobs or starve, when they see storied regiments being stricken from the rolls, when they see aircraft carriers being cut up for scrap - and they *will* see that, quite regularly on e.g. CNN - they're not going to vote for the people responsible.
And congressmen have professional staffs who will keep them informed of the actual consequences of whatever it is they are being asked to vote on. You may be ignorant enough to believe that we can cut defense spending by 50% without scrapping half a dozen aircraft carriers, just "getting rid of the fraud, waste, and abuse", but congressmen are going to know better.
If we were to enter an era of prolonged global peace - real peace, not "Putin and Xi told Trump what he wants to hear, and now Trump tells us he has secured Peace for Our Time" peace - then you might be able to convince several successive congresses to engage in an attritional drawdown of ~50% spread over a period of a decade or more.
As something Donnie and Elon are going to do in the next four years, this is P<<0.05 territory.
Thanks for the long thoughtful reply. And yes I know all that. And in the same vein I probably don't have to name all the benefits to you. Loosening the grip of the military industrial complex (and big pharma) on our economy would be a very good thing. Less weapons in the world looks like a good thing. In fact if we start spending less other countries may start to spend more and some of that money could flow to US defense companies. We clearly need to do this slowly, like a decade or more as you say. Give the defense companies time to move into different areas of commerce. (Real competition!) And yes close some military bases (at home and abroad) and scrap some aircraft carriers. Near (~60 miles) to where I live is Niagara Falls Airforce base. It's been on and off the chopping block for years and should be closed. And if another big shooting war does starts how important do you think aircraft carriers will be? Seems like missiles will take 'em rather easily. And finally congress has to go along. Trump seems somewhat unique in being able to possibly break this gordian knot. And sure there is not much chance of this happening. But even just having the conversation would be very useful. (Thanks again)
It would decimate employment in their districts. That’s the whole basis of the military industrial complex.
Does anyone have tips for young adults with BA degrees struggling to find jobs? I’ve really applied to so much (particularly on Idealist as I’d love a humanitarian/nonprofit job) and haven’t gotten anything; hardly ever get emails back. I’ve had people look at my resume and cover letters and those appear fine.
Are there any marketable skills that are particularly desirable currently? I’m someone who graduated with a cognitive science B.A. and recently did an americorps program working in city government. I don’t have much to show, like projects etc. I could link to.
I am just about to start a LinkedIn course on PowerBI but would love more suggestions.
Apply to local companies/municipalities that need operators for different types of work.
After doing some BS remote job for a year I quit and now am a plant operator at an oil refinery. It’s fucking awesome.
I get paid less (currently making $45/hr), but it’s like the all-stars of blue collar work, that most white-collar people could get into.
It’s basically dudes who have very high IQs but didn’t go into engineering (although some operators do have engineering degrees but prefer to work outside a bit more).
Many operator roles require an IQ test of some sort before getting an interview… that’s your spot to shine.
If you’re a smart dude/gal who likes to work on real shit in creative ways, be an operator.
What is an operator? The word itself isn't helpful; it just means "someone who does something".
On the main topic, I can share a tangential anecdote: there was a period where my sister was trying to find work in the hospitality industry (that is, hotels) because her goal was to have a job that let her travel. She found that all jobs in that industry, except the very most basic and unskilled, require a lot of experience in the field. So, she took an entry-level receptionist-type position - the only way she could find to develop the experience that every job she looked at claimed to require - and figured she'd just have to tough it out for a while.
The hotel where she was working quickly noticed that she wasn't like the people who generally apply for those jobs, and bypassed their stated requirements so as to promote her more quickly. I was told that this really offended the rest of the workers at her level.
(But she then left the hotel for a position in the Department of State.)
LOL at your operator comment because that's exactly what it means! your sister's story supports that view. She got in as a low level operator that was recognized as competent (a strangely rare trait!) and was given opportunity.
That mirrors my experience; except it was restaurants, and now I do restaurant tech because my natural inclination towards tech was recognized by middle managers and they gave me opportunity.
TLDR: get a basic job like serving tables or tending bar; receptionist at a hotel, barista, etc and start showing people one's competence and opportunities follow.
I was in a similar position. What I did was find the most frictionless way to apply/search for jobs, created a filter designed to pull in only jobs that fit my criteria, tailored my resume to echo what a reasonable sample of these postings were looking for, and then applied to all of the jobs that were frictionless to apply to in the entire United States (in my case, I created an Indeed.com profile and applied to all jobs that allow me to apply by just clicking the “Apply Now” button). At the beginning of my search I had similar results to yours; by applying this method I was overwhelmed with offers and got to pick out of my favorites.
Quantity > quality in job applications; getting to the interview is the most important element and then it’s all charisma and luck from there. Even if you don’t think that you’re charismatic, you’re an attractive candidate to someone! And being good at interviews is a learned skill; being in a large number of interviews will make you better at them 😁
Good luck, feel free to reach out if you want someone to take a look at your resume or some more info on how I was able to do it - it’s been very helpful for quite a few people in my life.
You left it unclear exactly what it is you want to do. A quick search on jobs for CS gives me the impression that this education, like most Liberal Arts degrees, is not geared to any specific domain. Nonprofits can be an employer, but that doesn't describe your job.
Decide on a direction and skill up. That may mean going back to school. If not, you'll have to create a pretty impressive portfolio, and/or *aggressively* network.
Yes this is why I’m deliberating my next path forward. I would love to go to onto grad school if it would lead to a real career and not just more job rejections. I’ve seen many reddit posts on folks with master’s and even PhDs who can only find minimum wage service jobs.
I considered data science but have heard that’s oversaturated. I’d still like to learn R and Python, though I would have to be highly self motivated to make solo projects I can show off. I am fantastic at working under deadlines, useless when it comes to motivating myself with something that might be completely fruitless with zero guidance.
I didn’t want to write a whole novel above but I also just took the LSAT and would love to get into legal work or compliance (though not litigation).
I have a huge fear that literally every field is saturated now. Even law schools have seen their application rates go drastically up this past year, which is terrifying thinking of committing to something so time consuming and possibly expensive and being unable to find a job at the end of it.
I believe a large part of it is because I’m (undiagnosed) autistic and not the type that seems extremely smart. I’ll be honest that I’m scared even if I manage to finish some impressive solo projects to showcase, my “vibe” will keep interviewers from hiring me. I have a vibe of not being *unaware* socially, but just very stilted and awkward. I think the ideal path for someone like me would be to be self-employed but I’m not very talented in one particular field.
Interviewing is a skill like anything else that you can improve upon, and gets easier the more you do it. Clubs like Toastmasters can get you comfortable with making speeches too, but you needn't go this far. Practice with someone ready and willing to help. People on platforms like reddit have reached out to offer helping me prep for interviews (on the cscareeradvice sub and the like).
The market is rough across the board in tech, Data Science may be no more saturated than anything else. That said, you're competing against people with Computer Science degrees and a portfolio. If you focus on an intersection of certain skills that are sought after in related positions like Data Engineer, that might give you a leg up, as a candidate that knows a bit about everything. Cloud is big now in all of tech, you could integrate AWS/Azure in your projects.
If you're considering education, a Master's in Data Science or Computer Science can make up for the fact that you don't have that B.A. There are also post-graduate certificates that some schools offer, but go for the Masters. These have some clout, the certificates and "bootcamps" don't so much. Self-study is an option, but if you go that way you might as well do it cheaply, and then use that knowledge to build something.
And all that aside, if you aren't married to the idea of Data Science, don't need to be constrained to that. Find out where there's demand, and retrain. Hell you could do the trades.
I cannot help you - just writing to commiserate. I've been looking for a job for years now with zero success. Not a single interview. (was looking while working at jobs I knew I wanted to quit as soon as I found a new one). Circumstances that led to both proper jobs I have held were unusual, and neither occurred through an online job application.
All companies I have worked for have really liked me - I did lots of good work for them. I am pretty confident that I am actually a valuable / high quality hire. But I just absolutely cannot get through the first stage filters on the internet application systems. I have various theories why, but won't go into personal details here. I am clearly not good at picking up what kinds of things I need to put on my resume and cover letters, but it is extremely frustrating to try to figure out what I am missing with zero feedback. I am getting pretty forlorn / hopeless / depressed at this point.
I think something about the online job application system is just deeply broken. Something something lack of personal connection. My only advice to you would be to do what I am desperately trying to pull together the willpower to do: just show up at places and ask to see if HR will talk to me. I've met people who have told me this worked like a charm for them. This establishes that you are a real person that is polite and presents well, and is motivated enough to make the effort, which is hopefully at least enough to get them to talk to you a little.
---
There are a couple things that I think could help me. One would be attending career fairs / hiring events. I've heard that these exist. I live in Los Angeles, so surely if they exist I should be able to find some in my area. And yet I cannot find them online. Admittedly my google-fu seems to be terrible - I often find myself struggling to find useful information online these days. I can find lots of references to hiring events in the past. Even the recent past. But the only postings I can find for future dates have been on military bases which I assume I cannot access. Does anybody have any suggestions for what magic words I have to use to find postings for these? Or did humanity collectively decide to stop hosting these in the last few months?
Second would be a reverse recruiter. I understand how normal recruiters work, but the problem is I can't seem to get them (or more likely the machine filters they use to scan millions of profiles on linked in) to spend the time to realize that I might be a person worth working on placing. If I could hire somebody to place me, that would be ideal. Thing is, I have talked to lots of people who say this is super obviously a thing, and that they should be easy to find, and yet again, my internet skills have been unable to uncover any. And I have also been told by plenty of other people that reverse recruiting is a scam, or that there is no market for it. For what it is worth, I'd be willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars (not that I can afford that right now, but I could if I got a job) to get placed in a quality position with a decently high salary. Again, I'm pretty sure I am highly placable. But I have been unable to find a way to make it happen.
Third would be if companies were willing to interview candidates for just... some job at the company. Not a specific role, necessarily. Interview me, see if I might be a good fit for something. I might be an excellent fit for some task you don't even realize you could hire somebody for! I'm more interested in some job at your company, rather than this particular job right here. I find it so difficult to choose between any of the hundreds of similar listings at many large companies, but you know better than I exactly what you are looking for, and exactly what I may and may not be qualified for.
I understand that that last one is a much harder sell, but perhaps somebody out there could help with the first two?
The first thing I would try before showing up at a business is attending a trade show, conference, or other industry event where people might be looking for people like you. Some have discounted rates foe job seekers.
Yeah, I've been thinking this too. Big one I am familiar with isn't until September, though since I am not working, I guess the opportunity cost to travel is lower than usual, so maybe I should be more willing to travel long distance. I will look into this.
> All companies I have worked for have really liked me - I did lots of good work for them. I am pretty confident that I am actually a valuable / high quality hire. But I just absolutely cannot get through the first stage filters on the internet application systems
You know that people usually get jobs through connections rather than through internet application systems, right? Have you tried hitting up all your former colleagues?
Yeah, this is good advice, and I have tried this a decent amount. First company wasn't the right kind of place to do this. It was a small operation, with most people either too loyal to the owner to quit or move on, or people I wouldn't want to work with or who wouldn't be good references. The one good person from there I have reached out to. He quit shortly after I did and has been struggling even more than I, mostly doing freelance work. We have been discussing starting a business though.
Second company was a much better place to network, and I did a much better job. Most of the ones I networked with there are still there, and many have been there so long that they might not have many good connections from their previous lives, though I suppose I could try asking. A couple I have talked with about starting a business, same as above. Another is one who, while I don't really blame them, due to the circumstances they were in, kind of screwed me over multiple times, and I don't think I would feel comfortable asking them.
I agree that the job application system is deeply broken. I mean seriously each job gets hundreds of applicants, many of which aren’t even in the same state or country as the job. I don’t know what the solution should be, but it’s so dysfunctional. I can’t even look on LinkedIn or any job board nowadays because I just know dozens or more people have already applied.
I’ve written some fantastic cover letters and “essay responses” for jobs only to get an email two days later saying the position isn’t actually being filled, or that they’re moving on with more qualified candidates. I’m just so envious of my parents and future generations who could go walk into a place and hand them a resume.
I’ll be honest that I don’t think that method would even work for me and hasn’t so far. I was on a roll of attending a few networking events or just talking to people I volunteered with/was part of a committee with. They all seemed kind of like condescending or just… not helpful when I mentioned I was looking for a job in the field.
Like I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I think it’s partially because I just don’t have tangible skills. I can’t be like “oh I’m a really good coder” or “I’ve raised millions of dollars in grant funds” or anything like that. I really regret not choosing a different degree.
But I also think it’s just because I don’t have a likable personality, which is v depressing. I’ve really done a lot of work on myself. I used to be the mute kid who almost never talked in school. Now I do make jokes and go up to people and ask them questions. But I’ve just always felt like many of the people who’ve met me sense there’s something off with me (which I suspect is autism) and just dislike me, which is why I can’t get past the interview stage. I’m like genuinely really surprised I’ve ever gotten past the interview stage in the past. This shit is really fucking with my head lately.
Sorry for the long rant. One thing I plan to do when I get out of the winter funk more is get more into my local nature/foraging clubs and just do more in general and see if that leads anywhere.
Yeah, I have gotten lots of bad or non useful advice about job searching over the years. There are also a lot of condescending attitudes that revolve around the idea that, "companies are desperate to hire good people. If you can't find a good job it must mean there is something wrong with you." Which, while I am not perfect, is also ignoring what is in my opinion the more salient issue: It is really difficult to credibly signal real value. I've done lots of difficult things successfully, but how does an employer really know that? How to get them to believe I can actually do hard things? Just because I put it on my resume? Lots of people lie on their resumes. How do they really know I am not lying. This has not been made any easier by my relative inability to build up a portfolio. Both companies I have worked for have been secretive / paranoid, and would not be happy about me, say, taking pictures of the things I have built and showing them around. And a lot of the work I do is pretty intangible and difficult to document anyway.
Degree choice is difficult. I have grown more and more to think schools / universities are exploitative over the years. One the one hand, I don't think universities should be condescending and prevent students from committing to degrees that are overabundant and won't lead to good work outcomes. But on the other I think it is exploitative and cruel to burn up so much of young peoples' time, energy, and money to give them a low-demand degree. I don't know how to solve this issue. And at this point worrying about it really won't help anybody.
Personality is difficult to judge. I don't know you, obviously, but I feel similar: somewhat autistic, and for most of my life I thought of myself as un-charismatic, un-talkative, bad at socializing and making friends. Never thought of myself as somebody who could succeed in a business environment, handle office politics, etc. And yet, as time went on and I got a little older I found that just wasn't true. I don't even think my personality changed, really, I just got more comfortable with myself, stopped worrying too much about what other people thing, and perhaps most importantly, realized that everybody has problems and insecurities and is struggling with things. I'm not sure I can offer any practical advice, other than to stay self aware, always work on improving yourself, and try to not worry too much or overthink things. Though I understand that last one is very difficult, I am still not very good at it myself.
Let me know if you think it could be helpful to try to collaborate in any way on the job hunt. I feel like it could be helpful to have somebody to hold me accountable and keep me on track, but I also doubt it would be practical. But you won't know until you try.
If linkedin doesn't work quickly, leave; its NOT real networking; masturbation that isnt even fun. The statistics of linked in applications turning into jobs are not great.
We'll see what happens economically in the next year; but if things are being ripped apart at the seams, the "normal plans" will be planning for failure so you need to do anything else. Business started during the great ressesion grew rapidly in the fertile soil afterwards.
> I’ve really applied to so much (particularly on Idealist as I’d love a humanitarian/nonprofit job) and haven’t gotten anything; hardly ever get emails back.
I can't speak for other sectors, but in tech, any decent position that gets publicly listed anywhere will get *hundreds* of resumes within days. Depending on just how hardly "hardly ever" is here, it's either completely unavoidable or a sign that you might be being screened out automatically. In either case, your odds are far better if you can find a way around the normal resume submission process altogether. Getting a referral from someone you know is ideal, of course, but even cold-emailing people and asking to talk about their work over coffee will probably have a higher success rate.
I did try to have a handful of “informational interviews” with people a few months ago. I also was volunteer grant writing for a company I liked. I was hopeful these avenues might lead somewhere but they haven’t. It’s honestly really shot down my self esteem.
I’m hoping it’s because I just don’t have 1-2 skills that really “stick out.” Like if I were really talented at graphic design or GIS or something.
I know I would be great specializing at whatever I’m able to put my mind to, but I feel like I haven’t been given the chance to. I know that sounds very self-pitying. I’ve wanted to find a path and have something to show for it, whether that be a paralegal certificate, GIS classes with a portfolio of maps I created, or python coding with a portfolio. Anything like that where there’s tangible skills I can showcase. I just haven’t been able to decide.
I would stay away from GIS. That is a more mature niche field than the data-wrangling positions more in vogue now. The map-making is more trivial than ever, and teams will only get smaller. Your average data analyst can quickly learn how to create a crude map. Most companies do not need maps, and those that do are refining their process and finding ways to cut cost.
In a job search, 2x as many results come up for Data Science over here. 3x as much for Data Analyst.
There's also the two different types of geospatial positions. The one you're thinking of is cartographic in nature, where the goal is well designed aesthetically pleasing maps created for a certain audience. Very competitive and comparatively rare. The other more common position deals with analysis, ETL / conversion and projections, georeferencing, and procedurally churning out maps that convey essential information, e.g. engineering data. You could have an entire GIS career having only spent a collective 60 min "designing a map".
Are there any good AI/ML related podcasts that are at least somewhat technical (like not just total popsci and hype)?
I haven't found a great one that only does AI/ML. But more generally, for the hardware side anything with Dylan Patel or the SemiAnalysis guys is a good bet.
Dwarkesh Podcast often has some good ML guests.
3Blue1Brown has a nice short (8 segment, each segment about 15 minutes) course on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDNU6R1_67000Dx_ZCJB-3pi . It goes through the math (including backprop and attention) in an easily digestible way. Would that interest you?
I was surprised by the comments on reddit for the Cruz Woke Science database write-up (https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ip1a66/only_about_40_of_the_cruz_woke_science_database/), and how many people there were taking the stance of "Scott dared to take these claim at face value, rather than just call republicans evil and repugnant?! I've lost respect for him and may stop reading altogether."
It made me feel a lot like I imagine Scott feeling when writing https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-kavanaugh-on-fideism
I'm not even American and these takes seemed to be wholly against the general ethos of the blog to embrace mistake theory and respond accordingly, even in the face of conflict theorists.
American progressives are secular cultists. They have little regard for principle or intellectual consistency and view the world through a semi-fanatical ideological lens. Don't waste your time with them.
Forget it, Jake, it's Reddit.
People are people, so that's why it should be--blue and red should get along so awfully.
Rationalists try to get away from it but we're still apes and we like to form tribes and fight each other. I do think rationalists are a little better at it than most, but monke gonna monke.
I think this is a misread of what most people were saying, though I will say I didn't read every comment in that thread. My read was that many people were assuming that Cruz was not truth seeking, and were surprised that Scott seemed to approach the topic as if Cruz WAS truth seeking. This is more cynicism about politics and about Cruz than it is "how dare you not call the reds evil without thinking". Scott could've written the same post but opened with "Cruz is a motivated actor and this database is likely just a stunt but I'll analyze it anyway" and a lot of those comments you're referring to probably would've disappeared
It could have been I was just reading it too early and that coming from other subreddits I was in the wrong mind. I went back to the thread and the top comments seem a lot better now than my memory, though statements like "Scott has been a tad too charitable to the maga crowd for a while now. Not by that much, I appreciate a measure of nuance, but they have escalated things to the point that it feels unreasonable to extend even the most basic charity." still stand out to me.
Perhaps some of the now deleted comments were what stood out to me as unusual.
What the hell do they want him to do anyways? He's not going to accomplish anything by turning against the administration. Endorsing Kamala was already a completely unnecessary risk, and they still want him to dig his own grave?
I'm sure this has been asked before, but what's a good financial hedge against the scenario where AGI leads to enormous increase in returns to investment? I'm moderately early in my career, and in the long run (assuming my job isn'e replaced by AI) I have pretty good financial prospects, but by virtue of being fairly young, I'm nowhere near peak-savings. So I'm thinking maybe I should invest a significant fraction of my portfolio in something that will have high returns in the event of AGI. If AGI doesn't pan out in the near future, I can take a loss since I'll have 30-some years of high income to compensate.
Please take my one-question survey:
Q.: In the proverb "a rolling stone gathers no moss," the action of rolling is:
a. Good
b. Bad
c. I've never heard of this proverb
d. Something complicated that you should just type out
Also feel free to say why, or just explain the proverb as you understand it.
a. Good
You don't want to find yourself covered in moss. That implies one is stagnant, not moving forward, stuck. I'd be surprised to hear people that took the opposite learning from this.
Yeah, I had the same interpretation you did, but older books are unanimous in asserting the proverb means something like gadabouts will never achieve success, and my surprise at reading these are what prompted this poll.
Interesting!
My instinct was (a).
However, on looking into it, I can report two major conclusions, plus some fiddly details.
First, wiktionary reports two opposite senses of the proverb: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a_rolling_stone_gathers_no_moss
Second, as you might expect for a phrase of no certain meaning, this proverb is never actually used. There are a total of 18 hits for it in COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English), ranging from 1992 to 2014. This is few enough that I'll analyze all of them.
There are two duplicate entries, so only 16 samples. There are four samples in which rolling is good. There are zero samples in which rolling is bad. In the remaining twelve samples, the proverb is merely cited as an example of a proverb, with no meaning provided. (In one of those cases, one character provides this proverb as an example of a proverb that a mentally retarded person might struggle to define, which seems ironic.) In one of those "no meaning given" samples, a direct analogy is drawn between the ability of a rolling stone to avoid growing moss, and the failure of a sloth to avoid growing algae; you could fairly interpret this as a fifth case in which rolling is good.
So: the proverb is never used to imply that rolling is bad.
25% of the time, it's used to imply that rolling is good and people need to do it.
75% of the time, it's used to display the fact that you've heard of this proverb.
This is not a healthy state of affairs for a figure of speech. Nobody uses it or knows what it's supposed to mean.
English (and presumably other languages) is full of dead idioms that rise ghost-like under false pretenses—no one says “the cat’s pajamas” naturally any more, bit every once in a while someone has to blurb a new Garfield movie or make a punny greeting card featuring a kitten, and cranks out “the cat’s pajamas” as though it were an everyday phrase. It’s interesting if the rolling stone proverb becomes a dead proverb, an example of a proverb that is never proverbially cited. Certainly although I am someone who often tells my kids “many hands make light work” or “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” I’ve never once told them about rolling stones or moss.
I appreciate your research very much and my only counterexample is what is probably the most famous relatively recent (within living memory, although before I or may of us was born) use of the proverb—not in full, but as a clear reference: Bob Dylan in “Like a Rolling Stone.” In the song the rolling stone is clearly someone who both shirks attachment and lacks money (“without a home like a complete unknown”) and the song is critical of such a person. I knew (and possibly misunderstood) the proverb long before I knew the Dylan song.
But all the data people have given is very helpful. At the very least I am glad that I (whose instinct was also (a)) am not a party of one in my understanding of this ambiguous phrase.
(a) Good
a
In my country this almost always gets paired with another proverb: "Wer rastet, der rostet" which translates to "He who rests, rusts". Moving or action is the virtue here, while standing still is considered bad. But maybe these are just remnants of german work ethic.
B. GK Chesterton (Heretics): In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.
b
I have never heard the phrase be used by someone who is advising you to KEEP rolling, they are always using the metaphor extoll the virtues of not rolling, so in context the speaker of the phrase means (b).
a
A. -I had never really considered that it could be ambiguous but i would have only used it positively
I had always used it like that (in a "no flies on me" sense), but I kept reading in proverb books that the proverb indicated that gadding about leaves you with no cash. The moss is cash. This is not how I had interpreted things.
I guess it's true that Bob Dylan uses it negatively.
d. Neither good nor bad necessarily, but the result of being untethered and moving on, rather than lingering and making connections.
d.
My understanding is that it used to be a bad thing, but now considered neutral to good.
I take the proverb to refer to someone without attachment to place or community, "rootless cosmopolitans," if you like, but the recent cultural trend towards deëmphasis of such attachments now makes the connotation neutral-to-positive. (It may also be just be due to people encountering moss much less out in nature, and thinking of it as basically mold that you definitely don't want to gather.)
So the moss in this proverb would be attachments?
The moss would be the (mostly intangible) benefits that come with that kind of attachment.
The action of rolling is neutral. It is a metaphor for accretion; a person who moves around rootlessly may be a vagabond, or they may be someone free and unburdened by what has been. They may have no ties or loyalties, or they may have broad sympathies because they are free of parochial ties. Poverty or riches, it all depends.
If you are trying to judge if the person will stick by you and be dependable, then the absence of ties and permanence can be a warning sign: this is someone who moves on, who shakes free of any encumbrances. They may not be likely to stick around when you need them.
Very interesting. Older books (the kind I usually read) seem unanimous in viewing moss as just money (as older slang dictionaries gloss "moss" anyway).
I hadn't heard it as money, specifically, but that the 'moss' is attachments, roots, and the kind of success that comes from staying in one place and building upon that so you have a house, family, etc. which would include money, but as one result of becoming prosperous.
This is the answer.
b
this is a prompt to write a book
Why did this comment lead to a suspension? Was it mentioning the type of trauma, referring to politics, not being clear?? I'm confused about the hard handling of what seems to me to be just a confused question
There were something like 8 spammy comments (or one-line non-sequiturs) from this commenter earlier. The one with the suspension announcement appears to be the only one that wasn't deleted.
I see, thanks for the explanation
The “center for Education progress” is one of the worst cases of Americans Forgetting Other Countries Exist (TM) I have seen recently.
There are already many countries that track and divide students. I can’t think of a European country with only one type of “high school”, in most there are several types with some being academic, others vocational. In Germany kids are already divided into these different tracks at age 12 ish. Yet all they link to on their reading list are a handful of expensive experimental private schools in the Anglosphere.
Also, not a single mention of Finland, the education system regarded as best in the world?
Not looking what is done outside your borders just seem to have you shoot yourselves in the foot.
To be fair, tracking/streaming/sorting out kids by level of academic ability has been attacked in Europe as well. But yes, it does seem that this is a case of "too young to have experienced it himself" in action.
> But yes, it does seem that this is a case of "too young to have experienced it himself" in action.
Not at all; there's an extensive history of tracking within the US. Referring to other countries might be nice but doesn't provide anything we don't already have.
It's not a matter of forgetting other countries exist. They're around, we want to look at them, we want to understand the best. But yes, we're starting with the Anglosphere. Why? First, because as a policy-focused group, we have to focus somewhere for policy, and America is the place we're most interested in changing. Second, because the resources we link are the ones I can personally vouch for after examination. Third, because others know a lot more about the details of their countries than I do, and I want to do more than just gaze from a distance.
I love looking outside American borders. I reference eg Singapore constantly: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/book-review-from-third-world-to-first?s=w -- But when it comes to this, I started with America and the Anglosphere for a reason.
As for Finland, you should catch up with the postscript: https://www.educationdaly.us/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-finland-mania-347
That sort of empty celebration of the systems of other countries is one reason I pause before diving headlong into them. Yes, there is plenty to learn from Europe, from Russia and China and Iran and Singapore and elsewhere. And yes, I want to distill the best lessons from all. But no, I'm not going to lead off with them when examining American policy—nor should I have.
I liked most of the post, but specifically the part about hall passes bothered me - I've never heard of them being used outside america, they feel super weird to me and I don't see why you would want them in a good education system.
(More cynically, they're probably useful for enforcing discipline on the low end of students while the high end don't need them and you guys are trying to help education across the spectrum while I mostly just care about the high end).
Yeah, hall passes are the kind of thing when explained sound like "what the hell?" but I suppose if American schools routinely have pupil counts in the high hundreds to low thousands, you need some sort of disciplinary structure.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/pesschools09/tables/table_05.asp
But gosh, all the same. All I had to learn when I was four was the phrase taught to me by my father: an bhfuil cead agam dul amach go dtí an leithreas? No "you have to get a hall pass to go to the bathroom which may or may not be given out due to the whimsy of the teacher" (the one time I was told to wait and wasn't allowed out, I promptly threw up all over my desk, which at least demonstrated I wasn't pretending in order to get out of class).
Sticking to the Anglosphere, have you looked into the various public selective school systems in Australia?
100% selection effects
Your first task is figuring out a way to manage your goals in such a way that you can get funding without getting sued, and I'm not sure it exists.
Can you explain why getting funding would get him sued?
Yeah, that was sloppy. It's not the funding that gets him sued, it's a goal that won't instantly be identified as a disparate impact lawsuit waiting to happen--and thus he won't get funding.
Literally everything Trace wants is going to be a problem. He's basically saying "start a school that's only for smart kids and they've got to be smart kids who want to work fast and brag about how smart they are" and any such effort with public funds is going to be a walking disparate impact lawsuit.
If he does it as a private school fine, but his gameplan is one that expressly appeals to Asian culture (speed and transcript without depth) and Asians, they prefer finding public schools they can apply to and get for free.
I think what Trace doesn't quite understand is that as a rule, Americans (and I mean Americans of any race) really don't find his educational vision attractive.
> I think what Trace doesn't quite understand is that as a rule, Americans (and I mean Americans of any race) really don't find his educational vision attractive.
Wha? Different worlds - everywhere I've lived, if tracking has a .001% higher chance of your tracked kid getting into Harvard, every single parent will be vociferously demanding it, even if it costs 2x as much.
I think you should read more before you respond.
That's a funny take when Americans seem to be heading away from the disparate impact stuff
The laws, and the courts that apply and interpret those laws, haven't changed yet and don't look like they're going to be changed any time soon. This isn't a problem that can even theoretically be solved by firing executive-branch bureaucrats, because the bureaucrats have little to do with the process by which people wind up facing ruinous lawsuits for no good reason.
And I'm not saying that crippling fear of lawsuit is justified in this case; the problem may be overhyped and exaggerated in this context. I don't know. But to the extent that it was a problem last year, it's still a problem this year and will be next year.
Of course. A major part of the priority for our legal team is mapping out the specific details of the current legal frame and building a legal framework for excellence. The legal landscape has plenty of challenges but it's not hopeless by any means.
YOu tend to focus on acceleration. If that has changed, great. If not, I fear the legal issues will be overwhelming. Plus, I think you'll find most parents don't want it.
If most parents don't want what I want, I won't ask them to accept it, but I will absolutely work to carve out space for it so those who share my preferences can find space for them.
As for what most parents want—whatever people say they want, the Mastermans and Stuyvesants and Lowells of the world have never been short on applications from interested families. Excellence speaks for itself.
Actually, the interested families for Stuyvesants and Lowells are overwhelmingly Asian and most of the whites applying are likewise immigrants. There's a reason that Harvard and other elite schools discriminate against Asians--not a good one, but a reason--and the reason is "whites no like, elites no like".
the more Asians apply, the fewer whites--and also Hispanics and blacks--apply. the trick is to become excellent in a way that doesn't reward grinding and does reward intelligence and creativity--and creating a school about here's how fast we can learn really isn't it.
Not really. Would one-on-one tutoring be theoretically optimal? Sure. Am I primarily interested in solutions that require more funding or place unrealistic expectations on teachers? Not really. The "many kids to pay attention to" line was an aside to note that it's not something I expect individual teachers to be able to fix.
Ability grouping allows teachers to understand and teach to the level of the students they actually have much better than heterogeneous grouping; acceleration allows students to progress appropriately to higher levels rather than waiting at low levels. Neither requires additional resources.
I don't think it's about 'gifted programs' so much as having one class for those who can learn calculus and another for those for whom arithmetic is an aspiration.
Why not? Put 100 students per year in the smart school, 200 students in the medium school, and 100 students in the dumb school.
Small schools can pull off tracking by mixing grade levels. In my small rural school, students could start Algebra I in 7th, 8th, or 9th grade, depending on the results of a test in 6th grade; classrooms were often mixed-grade. Individual students could (with some parental prodding) start the series two years early, ending with college courses in 11th-12th grade.
Meanwhile, a friend in a large suburban school nearby had trouble taking calculus early because the classes were full and older students got scheduling priority.
Many rural states have residential magnet schools, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_School_of_Science_and_Mathematics . North Carolina, Alabama, Indiana, each have a population that is at least comparable to that of New York City.
Student:teacher ratio is mostly a distraction, in truth. The big effect sizes haven’t panned out, and curriculum is overwhelmingly more important. While schools like Stuyvesant aren’t the solution for everywhere, they’re a good idea in many places where they currently face regulatory barriers. Tracking is effective for more than just gifted programs; splitting students by ability first rather than age is beneficial for many more than just the top 2% of any given age cohort.
I’ll make a strong claim here: a school with a teacher:student ratio of 30:1, using sensible ability grouping and adjusting curriculum appropriately by group, would do much more to help students at all levels progress than one with mixed classes and a student:teacher ratio of 10:1, following an age-locked curriculum.
"curriculum is overwhelmingly more important"
Cognitive ability is more important. Curriculum is largely irrelevant--as is student teacher ratios.
THere's no such thing as "sensible" ability grouping. You do test-based ability grouping until you get sued.
For god's sakes, don't tell Trace that. He'll block you.
Trace is one of those people who think going through the curriculum = learning. I wonder if he read Michael Pershan's most recent article. Probably, since he and Michael wrote the winning collaborative article mentioned.
But it just drives me crazy to read people going "look, some kids can learn the second grade curriculum in six weeks. Why do they have to spend a year?" It's not that I disagree, but the answer is not "go on to third grade" but "kick their asses learning how to use and reason with the second grade curriculum for another six months".
I understand that there is some tension between acceleration and depth, but I do not think that they are the opposites either.
For example, you can do some extra exploration of "addition up to 100" beyond the standard lessons, but the entire year is probably too much. And yet, that's apparently the amount of time the average children need to learn how to calculate 46+37 reliably. One of my kids could do that before school. And it's not because we spent too much time learning math together (I actually regret not spending more time with my kids, but after work I am usually quite burned out). It's just, one day I mention "you know, 20+30 is kinda like 2+3, only with tens instead of units", then a week or two later "to calculate 21+36, you may want to calculate 20+30 first, then 1+6, and then put it together", and a few more weeks later "it's more complicated with 27+38, but maybe do 7+8=15 first, and when you do 20+30 remember that there is also the extra +10". That was all it took. It made a lot of difference that the child was actually interested in numbers (the other one is just as smart, but not interested in topics like this).
Also, if you do the elementary topics faster, then you can have more depth with the more complex ones. Or you can introduce topics that otherwise would not be mentioned.
My worry is the opposite: if you tell teachers "don't ever accelerate, only add more depth", you will probably end up with... not much depth added.
I probably share some of your concerns. But here's the problem: teaching depth requires smart teachers. Not geniuses, but smart teachers. Or at least really good ones. Acceleration can be done by any teacher. Just teach the same topic with all the shallow speedy coverage that is done now.
And most Americans *don't* want that. (Asians tend to, on the other hand.)
the problem is that it's easier to diversify with acceleration and easy versions of the classes and you won't get in as much trouble with the racial representation crowd.
Another problem is that kids who accelerate might hit a wall and there's nowhere to go. They go from As to flunking, and there's nowhere to put them.
"you know, 20+30 is kinda like 2+3, only with tens instead of units", then a week or two later "to calculate 21+36, you may want to calculate 20+30 first, then 1+6, and then put it together", and a few more weeks later "it's more complicated with 27+38, but maybe do 7+8=15 first, and when you do 20+30 remember that there is also the extra +10".
This is *exactly* the type of teaching that is derided by most of the people pimping acceleration today. (not Trace, but generally)
> This is *exactly* the type of teaching that is derided by most of the people pimping acceleration today.
Interesting.
When I teach my kids something, I try to balance two concerns. On one hand, they are clearly much smarter than the school expects from them. It would be a waste of a good brain not to tell them something more. On the other hand, the school still gives them a lot of tasks and takes away a lot of their time, so I don't want to create an additional burden. I definitely don't want to make them *hate* math, or learning in general. (If I remember correctly, the "Tiger Mom"'s daughter hates her.)
> Acceleration can be done by any teacher.
Ah, now I think I understand your point: "do the same thing, but twice as fast" is the lazy solution that anyone can imagine, but that is not the right approach. I mean, some speedup between 10% and 30% would probably be okay, but the real benefit comes from better internalizing the knowledge and applying it to more situations, and maybe including a few more things that didn't fit in the standard curriculum but which are not really more complicated.
For example -- this is a stupid example, to make it short -- you could have kids in 1st grade solve sudoku (the 4x4 version, with only rows and columns). This is not normally done, but it is not fundamentally more difficult than the things they already do, and it invites further exploration. (Such as "how many ways are there to put numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 in a row?" Which, of course, I would only expect them to solve by trying to enumerate all possible combinations, probably as a collective effort.)
"kick their asses learning how to use and reason with the second grade curriculum for another six months"
You seem to be making the exact same error that your imaginary opponents are making, which is treating the "standard" curricula as if they were God-given facts of the universe.
There is, of course, no such thing as "the second grade curriculum". There is only whatever curriculum people choose to use when teaching some seven-year-olds. There is no reason to suspect that a good curriculum for gifted seven-year-olds would look anything like the standard curriculum currently used for seven-year-old children --- nor like the standard curriculum used for eight- or ten-year-old children either.
(I rather doubt that the optimal curriculum for *average* seven-year-olds looks much like the standard curriculum, either, but that's beside the point.)
While some people do make the error of trying to optimize for blowing through the standard curriculum as fast as possible, as far as I'm aware it's mostly an error at the individual level, a goal of parents and students who are naive to the actual depth of the subjects. I encountered the same underlying error mostly from "normies" who used to ask me what "comes after" a certain math topic, as if all of mathematics were linearly organized into some standard set of courses which started with counting in kindergarten and ended with some sort of super-calculus sometime in college. And, of course, from the current school system itself, which seems to know no way of serving gifted student other than "skipping grades", a remedy which it is nevertheless loath to employ.
I have never seen this error made by any serious advocate for gifted education, and I don't see TracingWoodgrains making it here either. In fact, he cites Art of Problem Solving below as a (remarkably successful) attempt to actually design a curriculum around the needs of gifted students.
The reason people talk about acceleration and speed is that:
(a) while it's not *ideal*, it's better than the status quo of *effectively nothing*,
(b) it's plausible to do acceleration within the current school setting without investing in developing entire new curricula, which makes it *less* of a tough sell,
(c) the current sorry excuses for gifted programs at many schools think they are providing suitable "enrichment" with nonsense like one hour a week of pullout sessions, and it needs to be emphasized that this is not what's desired, and
(d) a good gifted curriculum *will* be "accelerated" relative to what's being taught to average students. It won't just be "go through the standard stuff as fast as possible", that's stupid, but it will cover more advanced material than what can be taught to average students.
I suggest that you actually take a look at the Art of Problem Solving curricula to see what Trace is advocating for before you slander him. Your proposed "solution" will be *worse* than pure acceleration through the standard curriculum, which is --- and I am sure Trace will wholeheartedly agree --- already a massively suboptimal second-best compromise.
Banned for this comment.
I didn't just read it, it was one-half of the product of another sort-of-adversarial-collaboration on our parts. My own review will be forthcoming shortly; unsurprisingly, I think he badly misrepresented the program and wholly failed to do it justice.
Acceleration and depth are not incompatible. An ideal curriculum for the strongest students can and should provide both. There's no iron law of education that the amount of material provided in any given school year is the ideal amount for any given child to engage with.
I won't drag my Twitter drama here, but re: blocking, suffice to say that I found our Twitter interactions more frustrating than productive over a long period of time, even when we were ostensibly on the same side of a topic. I still read and respect your output elsewhere.
"Acceleration and depth are not incompatible."
They don't have to be. However, I have never seen anyone focus on acceleration who is interested in depth. They are always talking about how much further they or kids could get. ALways. Always always. And here I'm not just or even primarily referring to you.
I focus on both. Art of Problem Solving isn't a radically accelerated curriculum, it's a radically deepened curriculum, and it's the state-of-the-art for math; I sing its praises constantly. Depth and pace are both part of getting further into any given subject. I'm interested in the nuts and bolts of building expertise, not party tricks.
"it's the state-of-the-art for math;"
Please. There's no such thing. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying you really see education as so dramatically simple, and it's not.
Are you being willfully obtuse? What TracingWoodgrains is saying is that AoPS is state-of-the-art as a *gifted* curriculum for math. Of course, "gifted" is a wide enough range that the optimal curricula for different subgroups will be different, but AoPS is by far the best extensive curriculum on offer; there's no other real contenders.
And his point in citing Art of Problem Solving is to rebut your nonsense accusation that what he's advocating for is mere acceleration through the standard curriculum -- a point which I notice you ignored.
I know I’m being uncharitable, and they did mention they didn’t want a world of “gifted haves and non gifted have-nots”… but this really smells like a bunch of rats wanting to make Einsteins out of their offspring in an “optimised” rationalist way, and little else.
I'm totally uncharitable (in no small part because Trace blocks me because he wants sympathy), but I totally support actual tracking. We need it. What we *don't* need is acceleration.
And there's no way for Trace to get what he wants without identifying the kids who want to learn fast for bragging rights without ever actually having to integrate their knowledge and no, Trace isn't snotty, but that's who will qualify.
Do you really think the reason Trace blocks you is that "he wants sympathy" rather than because he doesn't like interacting with you on Twitter?
Why join in the soap opera? Trace knew well enough to delete.
I doubt Trace thinks what he wrote merits deletion.
The pronatalist cause has suffered quite the setback over the past few days, IMO.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/conservative-influencer-has-been-working-privately-on-how-to-co-parent-child-with-elon-musk-rep-says/
The parent comment is surely tongue-in-cheek. But, I am sure that Elon Musk is quite fine with people who say "Elon Musk is having kids so I won't have kids", not having kids.
Amazing, less than a month as VP and he's already reducing the number of future leftists. #VANCE4PRES2028
And reducing the number of future rightists as people don't want to be associated with Jerry Springer nonsense.
Those are RINOs, and I'm not sure why you think they aren't on the chopping block as well.
I'm one of them. Starting to prefer Laura Loomer to the ACX commentariat.
https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1891341639894921244
Maybe I missed something that happened in the past few days, but it was already last year that JD Vance started polarizing the Democrats against pro-natalism (unfortunately, in my opinion, because I'm a strong supporter of the Democrats and strongly pro-natalist). I haven't heard anything specifically about pro-natalism in the past few days, amidst all the other constitutional chaos, so I assume you're just thinking that in the past few days Elon Musk finally turned Democrats against him, but that seems like a misread to me.
I think this is stuck in the six-months-ago-world where having the liberal media mad at you is a huge setback. Maybe it would be for certain things where you need the liberal media's buy-in, but those are getting less and less, and I think the two things pronatalists want (government support, support from the average child-considering couple) don't.
I do think if you're pronatalist for anything like eugenicist reasons you eventually need to convince elite human capital, who do listen to the liberal media a lot, but I think you can work in the long term on that one.
I agree 100%, but the one thing pronatalists want to do the most they can do without any government support at all!
I don't agree. You're not taking into account people's reaction to Trump's approach to government re-design. Most Democrats are horrified by, for ex., Trump's shuttering of the Dept. of Education. Even those who think it's unlikely education is going straight to hell and staying there are alarmed by how badly planned all these shutdowns are -- how there's no effort to reduce collateral damage and chaos, which in many cases would have been simple to do (just as it would have been simple to identify the research proposals that actually had Woke agendas).
And I now know 3 people whose lives are changed for the worse, or might well be, by Trump policies. One is a trans man who cannot renew his passport because his new one will show his biological gender, female. There is no way this guy could pass for female when he flies. The second is a young guy who is working on a Comp Sci degree at Harvard Extension School. He got a Pell grant for the coming term, then a call from Harvard saying they may have to cancel it because of the shuttering of the Dept of Ed. The third is my daughter, who has an engineering degree and works for the. Dept. of Environmental Protection. While she works for the state, not the fed, there is concern at her workplace that they may be shut down.
So I am seeing worsenings happening to well-educated white professionals. None are for sure or awful, but the situation's going in a bad direction and really got my attention. If I were now at the age where one has children, I am positive I'd be less likely to do it than I was 25 years ago. Would also be looking for ways to leave the country, something my daughter and her boyfriend are presently considering.
Did you mean to write "student" instead of "patient"?
I don't blame you, but those all sound like people the right would want out of the country (except your daughter if she went to work for someone other than the department of environment protection).
I mean...if more liberals leave, the country goes right, right?
Being less likely to have kids because a trans person might have an uncomfortable conversation at the airport and someone might have to take out student loans in place of a Pell Grant is ... kind of an overreaction IMHO.
Yeah, if anything you should be having more kids. Gives you more second chances.
"Would also be looking for ways to leave the country, something my daughter and her boyfriend are presently considering."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict they won't actually do it.
Yeah, they probably won't. I would retire and move to the Netherlands or New Zealand with them, but they'd have to leave behind her boyfriend's family and lots of friends. I'm sure that of the people considering leaving the US, most will end up staying.
Still, what's your point about this phenomenon?
Hang on, your daughter would leave the country rather than try and find a new job, like everyone else has to do when/if their employer shuts down or has rounds of voluntary redundancies/layoffs?
I'm going to assume you mean she means that the general tenor of how things are going distresses her to the point of "I don't want to live here anymore", but if she emigrates to New Zealand, she's going to have to apply for all sorts of jobs and indeed prove in the first place that she's a skilled worker who can help with their shortage of specific skills:
https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/preparing-a-visa-application/working-in-nz/qualifications-for-work/green-list-occupations
"Search the Green List to see if your role is Tier 1 for a Straight to Residence Visa or Tier 2 for a Work to Residence Visa, and what qualifications, registration or experience you need to apply. "
The main point of my mentioning daughter's potential job loss was that her situation was one of 3 I have heard of in my fairly small circle where someone's life had or might soon hit a road block as a result of Trump's dismantlings of things. I did not intend it as an explanation of why she was considering a move to New Zealand. The point was that presidents come and presidents go, but mostly my life and those of people I know isn't greatly changed by new policies. This guy has been in office a few weeks and already 3 people I know have been negatively affected.
Yes of course my daughter can get another job. That doesn't even worry her all that much. But her skills can be used for environmental protection, or for helping companies get around protection requirements. If we have fless enforcing of environmental protection laws, she thinks most jobs available will be of the other sort.
My daughter's (and her boyfriends') thinking about moving was set off by the stuff that is freaking out a lot of people -- the very high levels of hatred between groups, the godawful presidential candidate (who is now the godawful president), plus a general feeling that New Zealand is better governed. I have not looked carefully at info about that, but every so often I hear something and like what I hear. For instance, kids are not allowed to have cell phones at school, not even to use during lunch.
My daughter and her guy have thought they'd be pretty hirable in NZ, and when I checked the site you linked turns out they were right. Both have jobs here that are Tier 1 there.
Some friends of mine just moved to France. "They just let you in?" I asked. They applied for long-stay visa and they got it. They were told they'd need to wait 3 months to get the visa, but the French seem to be expediting visas for US citizens who want to leave after Trump got elected. Then I asked, "What about your Medicare? You can't use it in France." They're paying some absurdly low amount into French healthcare system to get healthcare. Wow!
Well, healthcare in France is cheap for *everyone* (and if you’re from the US, you don’t even compensate with French taxes).
You might not necessarily get the best possible American stuff (that a great US insurance might pay for), but it’s still pretty good and much less of a headache than what most Americans seem to have.
What are you referring to?
elon
???
This is stupid take on my opinion; but elon is seen as a unprecedented pronatalist by the young perma online left. Elon is being attacked(and sure, in power), qed "no one will want children"
>elon is seen as a unprecedented pronatalist by the young perma online left
Not just perma online left. Many normies have only recently heard what "pronatalism" is. Associating it with Jerry Springer nonsense is not Good or The Cause.
Elons drama will not effect the amishs birth rate
Single-handedly solving the TFR crisis by himself?
Associating pronatalism with low-class behavior.
https://nypost.com/2025/02/15/us-news/conservative-influencer-has-been-working-privately-on-how-to-co-parent-child-with-elon-musk-rep-says/
I dunno man, if the richest man in the world is low-class then I'm just giving up trying to understand what Americans think they mean by "class".
There is a saying, money can't buy class.
I got into a row with Alexander over this before, but broadly his view is that having lots of kids is low-class behaviour and the way to go is to encourage lower middle-class people to emulate their betters, so as to (1) go to college or get a skilled trade (2) marry but don't have more than two kids after you plan out your career (3) don't marry too young, don't have kids young, don't have kids outside of marriage, don't have lots of kids - this is how high class, upper class people do it. Make sure your daughters (and sons, but more importantly daughters) know that you won't support them having babies outside of marriage at the wrong time, and if one of them is stupid enough to be careless and get pregnant while in high school/college, immediately schedule the abortion and make sure she's properly ashamed of herself so she won't do anything like that again.
Elon is certainly having lots of kids outside of marriage, so the rest of it (he's rich, he's not young, etc.) doesn't count. It's low class behaviour.
The left is no longer in a position to define what "low-class" is. I don't see what you think is the problem.
We airnt that lucky yet; finger crossed, but not yet.
"The left" did not make the behavior described in the NYPost article low-class. That behavior has been low-class since the day our ancestors learned how to walk upright.
You might have Online Politics Brain.
Hmm... Personally, I'm childfree, but this doesn't seem very different from any number of celebrity paternity scandals. Between DOGE, xAI/Grok 3, Tesla, and SpaceX, just in the category of "things Elon Musk is involved with", there are far more interesting and important options.
I'm a bit confused, because if you want the US to have more kids, it's mostly going to come from low-class behavior. And why is that bad?
>it's mostly going to come from low-class behavior
What makes you think this?
Shower thought: if malaria was just as prevalent, but spread by rats, it seems like there'd be a lot more within-EA turmoil between animal welfare advocates and public health advocates about the ethics of wiping out the transmission vector.
I don't think so. EAs are pretty good at not focusing on the most controversial example. There's probably some win-win bargain where you can kill all the rats that transmit malaria and fund better habitats for rabbits somewhere else.
Also, EAs tend to be less concerned about animal death and more concerned about animal suffering; while some ways of killing rats make them suffer, there are always alternatives.
There’s a lot of rat killing now that no one bats an eye at, no?
EAs would probably try to run some numbers on it.
I actually saw an EA post on Twitter about that within the past week.
Last man on Earth scenario: suddenly you have one man, 4 billion women, how do you organise things to minimise the genetic catastrophe?
Obviously you mate the guy with as many women as possible for the rest of his life, but where do you from there?
Are there gains to be made in screening/sorting the women you choose?
How do you organise the mating of his kids and grandkids?
Does there come a point where it's feasible to let anyone involved have free will again and if so, how far off is it?
What is the best possible outcome in terms of final species-level genetic diversity/robustness/etc, and how achievable is it?
I'm surprised nobody's brought this up, but the guy should try to mate with as genetically diverse women as possible. Different ethnic group every day. Intentional race-mixing of the offspring.
Probably the most realistic thing about this scenario: with the fate of the species hanging in the balance, everyone's first priority is making sure we aren't being racist.
Actually, no. I've been pretty critical of wokery elsewhere, but I can't expect you to remember the history of every single commenter on a substack where threads stretch into the hundreds.
My thought was, you have a catastrophe. You want to maximize genetic diversity with one man and 4 billion women. Easiest way to do that, given the way the human family tree forked and only recently recombined across long distances, is going to be to have the guy mate with women carrying as wide a variety of genes as possible, i.e. women from different parts of the world.
Diversity usually isn't strength; it's potential division. But if you're talking about avoiding inbreeding, for once, diversity *is* strength!
(And yes, I laughed.)
I would actually ignore this. We already have a mandate to maximise genetic fitness (ie minimise health complications due to inbreeding) and we should let the maths of that govern the selection/matching process. If the geneticists' models happen to predict that diversity is our strength - which does seem likely to me - then that's what we do. If for some reason it doesn't, oh well, at least in 90years there'll be no one left to call us names about it.
> We already have a mandate to maximise genetic fitness (ie minimise health complications due to inbreeding) and we should let the maths of that govern the selection/matching process.
That begins and ends with telling the one man not to mate with members of his own family. He already doesn't want to do that and, since he's spoiled for choice, there's no way it will happen, so that advice means literally nothing. Once he's mating outside his family, the inbreeding coefficient is zero, and you're done avoiding inbreeding.
Anonymous Dude is correct that there is value to be gained by going for racial diversity.
What are you talking about? You have 40 years before every single viable option is someone from within his own family!
> Anonymous Dude is correct that there is value to be gained by going for racial diversity
I didn't say he wasn't. I said that we shouldn't make that the primary motivation in the task of effectively breeding a successor species that must be fit to survive in a far smaller, meaner world than ours.
If the best thing for that species is pure genetic variation than racial diversity will come along for the ride. If for some reason the geneticists come back and say there's a better algorithm that increases the chance of fit, independent people at the end, then their word should carry the weight.
Hopefully some of those women can figure out how to substitute a Y chromosome from the man in clones of the women. Then the only genetic diversity lost will be on the Y chromosome.
The man (let's call him Adam) would be producing enough sperm each day to impregnate 5-10 women a day. This isn't sex, which ejaculates more sperm than IVF, this is extraction and IVF. You have about a one in two chance of getting pregnant if all other factors are ideal. Since you're trying to save the human race presumably they would make it as ideal as possible. But keep in mind one part of being ideal is being in your late teens to early twenties. Let's say 18-28. And let's say they pump Adam full of hormones to keep sperm production on the higher end. That means, on average, about five new pregnancies a day.
Let's say (for legal reasons) Adam starts at 18 and dies at 78. So 60 years, 21,900 days. Assuming he never gets sick, every pregnancy is successful, and so on. That's 219,000 children 50% of which are boys. Each of whom can repeat this when they turn 18. But that takes 18 years and the population would rapidly age as there are no new births other than from Adam. This means you only get to do this for about 40 years until the only childbearing age women are also Adam's children.
This means the world population is rapidly trending toward a few hundred thousand people. This is both a practical problem and a relatively limited genetic pool even if you can make it so they don't start as highly related.
Honestly, I'd probably look into cloning sperm ASAP. And once you can do that adding some genetic randomness shouldn't be too hard.
I think we can forget about waiting for 18 when the fate of the species is at stake, but I also think it won't change the numbers by that much (you still have to wait for 13-ish so you only get a five year difference - wouldn't turn it down but it's not going to add an order of magnitude.)
So if we're looking at a resulting population of ~100,000 then what we need to be doing in the meantime is planning for a society that can work at that scale. Which means high tech approaches like sperm cloning have a very short window to git gud before the lifeforce goes out of the effort.
It would be good to know what fields we can expect to support in a society of that size.
You can subsistence farm with one family, because that plot of land has everything it needs to get up and go to work. But you can't modern-farm like that, because you're dependent on seeds, chemicals and equipment that have long supply chains involving millions of people.
I'm wondering if anyone has done any studies on the minimum viable size of an industry in that sense. Not necessarily the current size, but the size you could get away with if you have to.
Freeze his sperm. Find out whether there are still functional sperm banks with sperm from other men.
I think with current technology you could genotype all the resulting kids and match the ones who coincidentally didn't get matching genes from their father.
These were the lines I was thinking along. But with the added dimension that you're basically trying to create a new species via artificial selection. As Erusian points out above, you're looking at an eventual population of ~100,000 people, and they'll need to be fit for the much smaller world they'll be born into.
This might be enough for well-staffed hospitals but probably isn't enough to support a bountiful pharma industry. So you'd want to engineer the future humans to be as healthy and un-dependent as possible.
Requirement #1 is probably women with childbearing hips who can give birth with as little risk or reliance of medical intervention as possible - even though for the first two generations these women will have all the world's maternity staff at their beck and call.
Put the 4 billion women to work on artificial gametogenesis to make sperm.
I mean, if nine women can have a baby in month, surely four billion of them can solve artificial gametogenesis in a generation!
Make clones of dead men who aren't related to the living man. Use genetic engineering, or at least genetic screening, to remove defects in the living man's sperm. Use artificial insemination to increase how many children the living man can have. Try to make his descendants so numerous that lots of them avoid the problems from inbreeding through sheer luck.
I am blown away by the recent to me discovery that Mark Everett the singer songwriter rock star is the only son of Hugh Everett of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This seems to me to prove the theory in that you would expect him to be an accountant with people explaining the theory by saying There's even timelines in which Everett's son is a rock star.
For those unfamiliar with ME try the autobiographical song Mr E's Beautiful Blues.
See also, Olivia Newton-John, the granddaughter of Max Born.
How many descendants does he have so far?
#nominativeDeterminism
Could someone guide me on creating a great curriculum to teach myself AI? I have a background in computer science, but from a long time ago. I'm a decent programmer but am a bit out of touch. I think my foundation is strong enough to be able to pick this up. I want to be able to build something simple using quickly, as a way to teach myself AI, rather than build a theoretical background first. That's the type of curriculum I want. Thanks.
Statistics
functions that are take floats between 0 to 1 and return other floats 0 to 1
nd math
matrix multiplaction
implement a nn from scratch that can solve xor
Maybe check out Jeremy Howard's Fast AI courses. Here's some general information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast.ai
He talks about his courses and teaching approach in this podcast interview: https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/gradient-dissent/reports/Jeremy-Howard-The-Story-of-fast-ai-and-Why-Python-Is-Not-the-Future-of-ML--Vmlldzo2MzM2MTc
Perhaps ironically, AI itself (o1, Claude, etc -- or should I say et al?) is uniquely good at this. AI has moved so fast that textbooks and courses are out of date by the time they're released, but you can be 100% sure that all of Arxiv is in every AI model training run. I would probably start up by asking for an up-to-date curriculum or syllabus on AI for a person exactly like you (detail your background, skills, and so on), then start with "ok today is lesson 1: basics of supervised learning, let's begin" and just rinse and repeat through the curriculum / syllabus.
I'll second that. And I would add Gemini and Perplexity to the 'faculty'. Also, just Googling for MOOCs and other online courses. I would start with The Stanford (or other) course on deep learning first, to get some experience with Pytorch platforms.
Remember last year when we learned that a single Boba Guys tea contains 1.2 *years* of safe BPA consumption according to the EFSA?
For people interested in avoiding plastic chemicals in the food supply chain (eg the PlasticList.org research referenced), I've launched an MVP that lets consumers collectively fund standardized lab testing through accredited facilities. All the results will be published openly *regardless* of findings (think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on measuring endocrine disruptors in food and drinks).
Especially given new challenges facing regulatory authority there's growing need for independent, market-driven product testing that isn't beholden to industry or political pressure.
Looking for feedback on the model, introductions to anyone interested in plastic chemicals specifically or food testing generally, or leads on grants that could help scale independent product testing. Thanks!
http://laboratory.love/
"He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114009179225169296
I have a feeling this is going to be one of the most important sentences written this century. This is a once in a lifetime event. Enjoy the show, ladies and gentlemen.
>one of the most important sentences written this century
I'd take the opposite bet. That quote will not be considered important by 2099.
I don't think it will be going down as one of the most important sentences written this century, since for one thing it was written in 1838, by some guy who attributed it to Napoleon.
Dictator on day one probably is a better quote, but the second Trump presidency will probably be remembered more for his numerous extremely bad policy decisions. Right as the Second Cold War gets started, you undermine state capacity by filling it with cronies (who will then have to be replaced by the next administration, hopefully not with their own cronies), threaten to invade your allies, and damage your own economy with idiotic tariffs.
Oh yeah, and putting an antivaxxer in charge of HHS, and firing a bunch of FAA employees right after having five lethal plane accidents in your first month in office.
What, really? A Donald Trump tweet, or "truth" or whatever?
Your "once in a lifetime event" is something that has happened so often I don't even keep track any more. Donald Trump makes an offhand comment in some forum that, if it were the defining policy statement of his administration, would be a Really Big Deal. But then he makes a half-assed attempt at follow-through, and when things don't go his way he moves on to something else. Which will be announced in tweet that will get certain people talking about "once in a lifetime events", approximately once every fortnight,
You're right that it will be an enjoyable show, if you're in a certain frame of mind. Not really what I want in a President, frankly, but not the apocalypse you are predicting either.
"Man Attempts to Change History by Citing Santayana Quote About People Who Fail to Learn From History"
--not the Bee
Enjoy the show?? Wait, are you Q??
If something really bad happens, I think saying he would be a “dictator on day one” will be what they talk about in 50 years. He told us what he wanted and a majority voted for it.
Sure, but that's not as catchy. And also nobody believed that because they're morons, but they can't make that excuse anymore, right? The people really do want this.
>"He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I’ve seen the quote attributed to Napoleon. If Trump himself had come of with it, it would read something like
"He who saves his Country ‘totally’ does not violate any Law."
The toad has the feral cunning of a Huey Long or Joseph McCarthy populist but please don’t give him credit for eloquence.
It was a tweet :shrug:
Considering how many times I've heard Trump is going to end the world; Are you going to own up to being wrong when this turns out to be nothing?
except it's also JD Vance saying that the courts shouldn't be able to rein in the president (at all seemingly) and the entire Republican media apparatus (from Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire to Fox News to Tim Poll to Joe Rogan to all in between) saying "yeah true the president can do no wrong".
Your post is infected with an error that perpetuates stuckness and angry disagreement: You're assuming that the people posting skeptical & cynical and mocking responses think Trump is going to end the world. You are thinking of them as people whose views are way far down at the very end of the anxious-about-Trump scale. Got good grounds for believing that's where they are? I'm pretty sure you don't, though correct me if you've read multiple posts about Trump by any of them. Unless you have, you are almost certainly wrong about their views.
You also portray them that way in your post, which is quite likely to irritate them. But just in case it doesn't, you add in a little fantasy about a time when these hysterial idiots turn out to be dead wrong about Trump ending life as we know it, and them humbly apologizing to you for their takes on the tweet in question.
So overall you were inaccurate, unpleasant and harmful. It is really not hard to recognize that you've written something that is guaranteed to increase irritation and lower the chance of people's grasping each other's points, considering info the routinely disregard. Why fucking act that way? It's dumb and harmful.
Oh, no need to defend me here. They're completely correct. Well okay, technically a few billion deaths isn't the end of the world. Humans are stubborn little critters, I'm sure they'll make do.
I admire your clarity, but regret your cynicism.
It’s the best of all possible worlds, don’t you think?
I personally don't see it as cynicism. It's more of a when-life-gives-you-lemons kind of deal. This is going to make for some damn good entertainment, that's for sure.
i know somebody who left home partway through college because his parents were crazy and violent. Has spent the last 5 years doing the kinds of work you can get without a college degree, and sometimes spending more money on his old dog’s food than on his own. He managed to get into a good program where he can finish his degree and is now working full time and taking 2 course a semester. He got a Pell grant this term, and that’s allowed him to pay off some debt and take better care of himself. He just got word that this terms
Pells may be canceled because the Dept of Ed is shuttered. There is nothing even mildly entertaining about this story. There are lots of stories out there like his.
True, but with too much audience participation perhaps. Lemonade! My favorite…
Isn't this same as saying "Just trust me"?
It's just vague enough to allow multiple different interpretations, but I think a valid (and in my opinion the most likely) interpretation is a restatement of "the ends justify the means", saying that anything done in pursuit of "saving the country" can't be illegal.
Or "the end justifies the means"?
"A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means." - Thomas Jefferson
Sorry, anything Jefferson said without a Jeff Spicoli ‘totally’ just doesn’t apply to Trump.
That’s the key word to let us know ‘this applies to any future dunce that we can’t even imagine now too.’
Or "History is written by the victors".
"The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
"In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized."
Also, "people with golden toilets can do any shit they want"
"Might is right"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWPQUi2Rw5A&t=644s&ab_channel=RobertSapolsky
People with congenital cognitive blindness don't get schizophrenia. It's a very rare sort of blindness, and means being completely blind from birth.
No one knows why this is, though Sapolsky suggests that the remaining senses are more tightly linking to make a model of the world, so hallucinations can't seem plausible.
I think people with congenital cognitive blindness should be asked how they think they're different from other people. There might be some clues in there.
Or there's some other gene going with the congenital cognitive blindness that protects from schizophrenia. I fee like the samples are too small to tell.
I remember looking at the actual data from the australian study.
No one in the sample had schizophrenia but the sample size was simply too low to actually determine that people with that condition dont get schizophrenia.
He mentioned the Australia study as inconclusive, but then there was a much larger American study.
This is a really interesting topic. Can you give me a lead on finding the American study? Just zoomed around quickly on Google Scholar and it did not pop up. Any detail would pin it down-- year of publication, name of one of the authors, etc.
Checking over the transcript, I'm not sure there was an actual study, Maybe just observation of the number of people with schizophrenia and the number of people with congenital cognitive blindness, and an observation that there don't seem to be any known people with both.
From a paper with a hypothesis about the two don't seem to go together. "The brain is a Bayesian inference machine"
Unfortunately, the video doesn't have links to the papers.
I think I found the stuff you're talking about. It was a reply by the authors of a paper about a small study to critiques that the study was too small to make judgments about the correlation of 2 disorders with low base rates. The whole thing is here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00157/full
Here's the relevant part:
The conclusion that there are no C/E blind people with schizophrenia is based on a small number of studies that involved relatively small samples. Clearly, this argument would be strengthened by larger, population-based studies. This is because, as a simple calculation demonstrates, a case of congenital blindness and schizophrenia would be extremely rare even if there was no protective effect of blindness: if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.0002% or 2 out of every 1 million people. Although this is a low prevalence rate, it is equal to or higher than the rates for several other well-known conditions (e.g., Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, hereditary spastic paraplegia, Hermansky-Pudlak Syndrome). Based on this estimated prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with schizophrenia. When cases of blindness with an onset in the first year of life (i.e., early blindness) are taken into account, the percentage would be larger. Therefore, it is remarkable that in over 60 years, and with several investigations [including several before DSM-III (1980) when criteria for schizophrenia were broader than at present], not a single case of a C/E blind schizophrenia patient has been reported. Moreover, several published studies, and our experience as well, included surveying Directors of agencies that serve large numbers of blind people, and none of them could recall ever seeing a person who had both conditions. It is also interesting that rates of C/E blindness are significantly higher in developing, compared to industrialized, countries. Therefore, if C/E blindness did not protect against the development of schizophrenia, comorbidity would be more likely to be reported in such countries. However, this has not occurred. In short, available evidence, probabilistic estimates, and the striking contrasts, within the same domains of cognition, between superior functioning in C/E blindness and impaired functioning in schizophrenia, combine to suggest a protective relationship. If the conditions did co-occur at chance levels, reports of such cases should appear at least somewhat as often as those of many other rare medical conditions, especially since reports of an absence of schizophrenia in C/E blind people have appeared since 1950 (Chevigny and Braverman, 1950). The absence of such reports is noteworthy.
One research strategy that could generate further evidence on this issue is the study of schizotypal symptoms in the C/E blind. These subsyndromal psychotic symptoms have a higher base rate than schizophrenia itself (i.e., 10–15% vs. ~1%) (Fossati and Lenzenweger, 2009), and people with these symptoms share some of the same cognitive and biological impairments as people with the full disorder (Aichert et al., 2012; Cochrane et al., 2012). Studies of schizotypal symptoms would allow for the determination of whether C/E blindness protects against the full spectrum of schizophrenia-related illness or just schizophrenia itself. If no schizotypal symptoms were observed, this would be evidence for the existence of protective mechanisms against all schizophrenia-related psychopathology. If, however, schizotypal symptoms were found, samples of C/E blind people could be studied to gain insight into the neurobiological changes that protect against the development of clinical psychosis. As such, expanding the schizophrenia phenotype studied in the C/E blind holds potential for increasing our understanding of the mechanisms involved in schizophrenia.
In addition to these points, we noted in our original paper that other congenital sensory impairments have not been associated with absence of schizophrenia, that congenital deafness and later blindness, such as found in Usher Syndrome, whose prevalence has been estimated at 0.005% (Rosenberg et al., 1997) has been associated with psychotic disorders at rates between 4–24% (Waldeck et al., 2001), and that non-psychotic psychiatric disorders are observed in C/E blindness. These data suggest a unique relationship between C/E blindness and schizophrenia. However, we acknowledge that the absence of evidence (of people with both conditions) is not evidence of absence. That said, given the potentially important lessons for understanding, preventing, and treating schizophrenia that brain reorganization in C/E blindness provides, we believe it is useful to pursue this line of thought. At the very least, if C/E blindness did not prevent schizophrenia, then in light of the cognitive changes secondary to C/E blindness, it would be informative to determine whether it mitigates the associated cognitive impairment. Finally, we hope to raise awareness in the psychiatric community of past literature relating to C/E blindness and schizophrenia, so that if people with both conditions exist, their cases will be reported.
I do think the things they point to strongly suggest they're onto something. There's lots of indirect evidence that congenital cognitive blindness and schizophrenia don't co-occur.
Trump has surprised us with his seemingly endless barrage of executive orders.
What are your recommendations for additional executive orders? What would you suggest next?
Resign
I saw some meme photo of Trump holding up an executive order that said, "Gay men aren't allowed to do that voice anymore." Unmitigated popularity boost if he did that irl.
Just pick a couple of random pieces of federal land and Shenzhen SEZ the shit out of them.
Quit taxing US citizens living overseas
Yes! Also, state income tax shouldn't apply to people living outside the state (the only state income tax should be to the state you live in).
Why? The US government is still going to help bail them out when they get caught smuggling drugs into Russia or whatever.
Yes!
He's shit talked about things beyond my wildest dreams
ending income tax and making new cities
And annexing Red, White, and Blueland; Panama; Canada; and Gaza.
I cant imagine a worse idea then making some middle east sand labled america
Taxing unrealized capital gains? :D
You're not thinking far enough ahead. Yes, it will invite some foreign aggression, but it would also incite domestic terrorism that you can then crack down on.
Do you think we’re currently being particularly soft on terrorists here?
American world police support is winding down and 90% of the ocean is easier to police, and far more important to actual american interest; nuking gaza is more in line with american interest. No american solider should be in any middle east country
Ending daylight saving.
We already tried that in the seventies and it was quickly rolled back. The northern latitudes end up with 8:30 am sunrises and school buses taking kids to school in the dark.
They did it the wrong damn way. Daylight savings time is in the summer, not the winter. If you're messing with winter clocks, that means you're doing daylight savings year-round, rather than getting rid of it.
The problem is that the northern latitudes then lose out on something they really enjoy in the summer: it being light until nine or ten at night. Instead it starts getting light around 3:30 in the morning, which doesn't do anyone but the very early birds a lot of good.
Fundamentally the problem is that broadly humans want to be awake during the day, but tacking wake/sleep times to a mechanical representation of time doesn't allow for this.
Surely it should be possible to wake up earlier without changing what time one's clock says it is?
What's the latitude where you live? 43N and I like daylight savings.
47N, fuck daylight savings
I know I don't agree with much of what President Trump is doing, but if he does this my hat's temporarily off to him.
Is Trump administration's DOJ asking prosecutors to drop charges really as unusual as claimed? Is it meaningfully different from the Biden administration doing the same thing with the Yale racial discrimination lawsuit?
From what I understand, the Yale thing is because they disagreed with the lawsuit, i.e. with either the alleged actions or the legal theory that said those actions constituted something illegal. Similarly, under trump the EEOC has dropped several lawsuits because they don't think that the cases constituted illegal discrimination.
Trump et al don't think that Adams is innocent. Nobody thinks they seriously doubt the allegations of what he did, or that they constitute corruption. They are dropping the charges (without prejudice) as a quid pro quo for him to do other, unrelated stuff.
It would be like if the Biden administration dropped the lawsuit in exchange for Yale making Hunter Biden a professor or something.
I'm not aware of any other situation like the one with Adams, and one tell is how a number of DOJ appointees, including the acting US attorney, lifelong Republican/federalist society member, appointed by trump to this very position less than a month ago, resigned in protest.
Yes it it extremely unusually and highly unethical. Believing it is ethical is anti-American.
Please bargains are done to get a bigger fish. This is just trading justice for policy.
I understand this differs meaningfully from a plea bargain. That wasn't what I was comparing it to. I'd say the Yale lawsuit was also dropped for policy reasons, and this is basically the same thing as that.
1. The Yale case was not a criminal prosecution
2. The Yale case seems to be a case of different administrations having different priorities or different views of the law. Which is perfectly ordinary. https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trumps-doj-voluntarily-dismisses-case-challenging-virginias-voter-purge-program/
1. Wasn't it? I thought it was being prosecuted as violation of the Civil Rights Act. That's only civil?
2. So the DOJ just has to say they're moving to dismiss the case because the priorities of the new administration are different from those of the old? That's seems doäble. And true!
The case no is 24-cv-01807 . The "cv" means "civil."
There are such things as criminal violations of civil rights laws, but this wasn't one of them.
I see. Thanks.
They have been very clear that this isn't about priorities, though. There's a quid pro quo, and a bunch of (Republican!) DOJ lawyers resigned because of the quid pro quo.
I think some Republicans tend to be high-strung when it comes to this kind of thing, so I don't take them resigning over this all that seriously. I expect they (very reasonably!) have a fondness for the Romans who stood in defense of the Republic against Caesar and are overly eager to reënact it in miniature.
"this kind of thing" being "not doing corrupt unethical things".
They have a fondness for rule of law which is why they work(ed) for the DOJ. Dropping charges as part of a plainly corrupt quid pro quo is antithetical to the rule of law.
Executives have had pardon power since before the common law was names and prehaphs before rome in unbroken linage
Then he should have pardoned adams instead of ordering them to drop the case in away that would allow them to bring it back if adams didn't do what they wanted. Its corruption.
"There is no law specifically preventing the President from ordering this" is different from "this is normal for the DOJ."
Okay, but if the claim is that this isn't literally unprecedented because, say, Saladin did something similar, I'd still consider that pretty unusual.
Using criminal charges to coerce totally unrelated political concessions is a thing that the DOJ has never done in my lifetime, as far as I know. It's so far outside the norm that the woman Trump appointed to run SDNY resigned sooner than do it, and then a bunch of other Republican DOJ lawyers resigned too.
It is probably completely illegal to hold criminal charges over a politician's head to coerce them to support your favored policies, as Danielle Sassoon's memo to Pam Bondi noted.
The standard stuff is
(1) dropping charges entirely (i.e., dropping "with prejudice") and
(2) dropping charges in exchange for concessions narrowly related to the crime in question (e.g. testify against your accomplice to get charges reduced, plead guilty to get charges reduced, etc.)
That's all true, but you do have to admit the Democrats' prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels payoff was politically motivated and kind of legally dubious, which is probably a big factor in a lot of Republicans going "well, now it's our turn".
It'd be analogous if the NY governor offered to get charges dropped in return for Trump ending his presidential bid.
But there was no quid pro quo, offer like that (express or implied) and in fact the charges stuck and they got a conviction.
It's not purely analogous, and Trump did plenty wrong.
But I do think trying to get him on Trumped-up charges kind of gave the other side carte blanche to pull crap like this.
If you're desperate to justify Trump behavior, you can and will find some perceived wrong against him that you can say gives him "carte blanche to pull crap like this", for any value of "crap like this"
The point remains: Trump's effort to corrupt the DOJ by using it to extort political concessions is neither related to nor analogous to Trump being tried and convicted for campaign finance fraud.
(The analogous thing is the charges against Hunter Biden. Trump and Hunter both committed victimless crimes and were only prosecuted because they're high profile figures.)
I'm pretty sure that DOJ's decision to not pursue charges against Luke Ravenstahl in Pittsburgh is because he dropped out of the mayor's race - so i wouldn't say it never happens.
Also, i kind of thought don't DoJ did this sort of things all the time in issues related to public corruption - make enough stink that stops short of a prosecution, and then let the trash take itself out.
The decision to file charges at all is to some extent a political decision about executive branch prosecutorial priorities. That is inevitable -- prosecutorial resources are limited, not all crimes can be investigated and prosecuted. But once the case is developed and charges have been filed, priorities have been decided, and the case is (supposed to be) run on the merits.
Also, you just can't have a quid pro quo for deciding who to prosecute (!!!).
I believe the main difference is that they are dropping the charges _without_ prejudice. This leaves open the possibility that they can refile the charges later. Many both in and out of the DOJ believe that this is the Trump admin explicitly using the DOJ as a weapon ("if you don't do what we say we'll refile the charges"), and many within the DOJ resigned over this. In fact, iirc, so many people refused to sign the necessary orders that they had to put everyone who hadn't resigned into a room and gave them an hour to figure out who was going to sign under threat of firing the entire department. They did eventually find someone to sign the document, but some might reasonably claim that this is happening under duress for very questionable purposes.
I view it more like that Western movie where they need a team to do a dangerous job, escort somebody into or rescue somebody in Indian territory (can't recall) so they assemble the old "ragtag" bunch of volunteers which includes the Irish drunk played by Scarlett O'Hara's father and some other guys in the Cavalry post clink and looking to get out.
The Yale lawsuit was also dismissed without prejudice, so that's not it.
It is that.
Are you saying it differs from the Yale lawsuit in that it was dismissed without prejudice, just like the Yale lawsuit was? Yeah, okay.
I do not think the Yale lawsuit has any bearing on the legal or ethical nature of the charges against Adams. The charges against Adams were dropped without prejudice specifically to act as a knife hanging above Adam's head.
Dropping charges in a federal corruption case is a big deal. The evidence against Adams is very clear. Adams is a democratic mayor of the larges democratic city, he is not a trump ally. The only reason for dropping these charges is extract something from Adams. Communications within the attorney general's office and statements made by the Trump admin make it very clear there was a quid pro quo going on where Adams would support immigration raids in exchange for dropping the charges.
Politics has always been a dirty business. Stuff like this happens all the time. Doesn't bother me at all. I sorta like that it's out in the open, actually.
Maybe the main difference is that team Trump can't help but indicate that this is explicitly a quid pro quo all over national news?
> “If he doesn’t come through,” Homan said of Adams’ promise to allow federal immigration agents to operate at the city’s Rikers Island jail, “I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is the agreement we came to?’"
Whereas with Yale it's pretty obviously not a quid pro quo of any kind?
I think it’s pretty unusual to ask prosecutors to drop corruption charges against allies with not even a pretense of innocence, yes.
I'm looking for a particular kind of employment counselor. Someone I know has a law degree, and did 2 years in big law, which was a very grim & stressful experience for her, and is now thinking about what to do next. She is clear that she does not want a highly stressful job, and would consider interesting non-law jobs where pay is low compared to what she could now earn, so maybe things around $150 K. It seems quite possible to me that there exist jobs of this kind. The woman is extremely competent -- got a very high LSAT score, did well at a top law school, and did well at her big law job, where they had her do a lot of writing because they discovered she's extraordinarily good at it. But she is someone without a big friend network and without broad interests, and has no idea what sort of jobs are possible.
She needs to talk with someone who has good general knowledge of the professional world and is flexible and inventive in their thinking about employment options. Someone who could say, what about working for this senator -- becoming the legal counsel for this kind of organization -- being a legal journalist at this place -- spending 6 mos getting basic expertise at X, because then you can do Y.
Anyone know of an employment counselor of this sort?
Contact a legal recruiter from a reputable firm - Robert Half or the like. They're in a position to understand the hiring landscape and might be able to put her in contact with the type of position that she wants. My gf has actually been a legal recruiter for 20 years. Let me know if you'd like her contact info. She has a lot of experience dealing with situations exactly like this.
The classic thing is to go in-house somewhere that aligns with her expertise. An ex of mine was a land use attorney at a top-5 firm and left for a 9-to-5 job at a utility. Her sister was an IP attorney who left to do trademark stuff for a fashion brand. Another friend went in-house at a law firm working for the GC doing ethics and conflict management.
Thank you! I'd like to contact your gf to ask a coupla questions, via email, to help me figure out if her approach is likely to match what this person wants. Could you give me contact info using Chat?
What do Claude , ChatGPT or other LLMs recommend - was it useful?
Note that while everyone here has given me job recommendations, which is somewhat helpful, what I am searching for is a *coach* who can focus with someone on finding a job that's a good fit. I can find the names of thousands of coaches online, all of 'em saying they're great. What I need is a recommendation from somebody who knows of a good one. AI's are not useful for that sort of search.
Is it possible that the fact that no one can recommend one personally means that a really good career coach does not exist? I ask as someone who would also really love a dedicated career coach who will put the the real time and effort of helping me figure out what's best for me. But I've also never found one. And all college career counselors I've spoken with have been terrible. Maybe they just don't exist.
It's certainly possible. Good coaches definitely exist (coaches are sort of like psychotherapists, except their focus isn't fixing what's wrong, but sort of optimizing the person.) Problem may be locating them. That is certainly the case with psychotherapists. I'm a psychologist myself, and am always reading and hearing accounts from people who had something for which solid cognitive-behavior therapy is likely to be helpful, and instead saw somebody who just had unstructured how're-ya-doing kinds of conversations with them every time they went. Meanwhile I know many people who work in a much more planful way, using empirically validated approaches. So situation may be the same with what I'm calling an employment coach.
Well, if you find one, please let me know. Also, as someone who's has a lot of "how ya doing" therapists, what do you recommend for how to find one who is not like that?
I recommend you try cognitive-behavior therapy by someone who takes the approach seriously. Lots of therapists in Psychology Today say they use CBT, but they practice a diluted version, mixed together with lots of other approaches, and it all tends to slide downhill to planless howzit going this week. To find a bonafide CBT therapist, look at these 2 organizations, both of which, I think, offer a way to search for therapists who are members:
https://www.nacbt.org (https://www.nacbt.org/)
https://www.abct.org (https://www.abct.org/)
Another good place to look for a therapist is iocdf.org. While organization focuses on OCD, any therapist who lists there would also be able to do CBT treatment of any other anxiety disorder — phobias, panic attacks, social anxiety, etc.
If you do not suffer from anxiety, but from depression, look for a therapist at the first 2 links. If you think whatever is making life hard fo ryou is mostly high functioning autism, I don’t know of an organization to send you to, but here probably is one. Try googling it.
Very few psychiatrists are trained in real CBT. Psychologists are most likely to be, social workers second most likely.
Many states let therapists licensed in another state do virtual sessions with someone in their own. But Massachusetts, California and New York and a few others do not. If you are anywhere in the US but one of those states you can probably see someone from another state, which gives you many choices.
My job probably doesn’t count as “interesting,” but I’m an underwriter at a title insurance company. I graduated from a top-100 law school and worked for a medium-size firm for 8 years. The pay is close to the range she’s looking for, and I rarely work more than 40 hours per week. I’m home for dinner with my family every night and weekend work is uncommon. Find something in-house or tangentially related to the field she worked in. There has to be plenty out there.
A friend is very happy in this job: https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/lasc/classspecs/49917
Sorry to laugh, but dear oh dear. "Yeah, I'm open to take on a low-paying job, you know - something that only brings in about 150 grand per annum".
My heart bleeds.
EDIT: I realise this sounds unsympathetic because, well, it is - but she can have a nice, non-stressful (though there are stresses there too in the voluntary world) job that pays buttons working in the world of not-for-profits, or she can have a good paying job that will mean "you have to grit your teeth and work on through". Not a lot of people get the dream job of "I love the work, there is little stress, and I have tons of money".
So if she's willing to work for low pay as long as the work is enjoyable, forget the six figure salary. If she wants/needs that range of remuneration, she'll have to accept that it won't be 24/7 waking up each morning full of joy at the anticipation of the new work day.
EDIT EDIT: Well, not unless she has pull or some kind of an in where she'll get a cosy sinecure, but you say she doesn't have much in the way of networking. No friends of friends, Dad's old golf buddy, etc. to get her a soft job?
That’s not a ton of money in the US, it’s less than 2x the median. Good, but totally attainable to a talented and credentialed person.
$150K individual is in the 90th percentile. Not stratospheric, but certainly high--you'd consider yourself upper middle class.
The median's actually about $50K, $60K if you work at least 40 hours a week (as she likely does).
The *average* is about $75K.
Interestingly, the average is at about the 67th percentile overall, which means there are theoretically 1/3 of people who would be a constituency against redistribution on purely selfish grounds, which is a problem for any earnest socialist!
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
That's just not true for people with degrees from good law schools, at least not in the US. This person made $250K straight out of law school at her big law job and by doing some extra things she could get a bonus. I believe she got a raise her second year. And if she had stayed longer she would have earned more every year. $150K is very low for a lawyer in the US who went to a top law school
And the stress was nothing to snicker at. She worked far far more than 40 hours per week, and it was not rare for her to have to stay up all night finishing something, then go to work the next day. Also was not rare for her to be expected to attend meetings at 3 am US time with clients in other time zones. When she talks about a non-stressful job, she's talking about a job without the double-sized work load and the expectation of being available 24/7. She's not talking about something where she can be scrolling through Amazon during her work day.
And I know someone who had a law job with the government and made $160K. He worked 9-5, with only occasional job situations that required additional time. During his 9-5 hours he worked quite hard, and worked on things where nobody could be stress-free. He was handling things where people could be badly harmed if he did not do a good job, and also where he can could in lots of trouble if he cut corners or was sloppy. So the sort of job the person has in mind exists. The guy had one.
I feel protective of the person I'm talking about, because she really has had a bad time of it, and is very far from being the sort of lazy entitled asshole you are imagining.
I think 'lazy entitled' is the wrong phrase. Certainly 'lazy' is. She's obviously very hardworking and intelligent and doing the whole 'is-$200K-worth-selling-my-soul-for' tradeoff common among the upper middle class in this country.
There used to be a lot of government jobs as you describe, but I think they are going away now with the new administration, and salaries are going to be lower and stress is going to be higher. Just because the job exists doesn't mean you'll get it--most of the really good jobs are gotten through connections. Other people here have suggestions that may prove useful.
One of the problems is that you often can't just do 'OK, I'll do 2/3 of my crazy job and get 2/3 the pay' in many careers. You want a normal life, there's a significant drop-down in money and often benefits.
Everyone's angry because a lot of people can't make $150K no matter how hard they work. I mean, I gave up most of my adult life, wrote off romance, and did a career I dislike to make about $400K a year. So when I hear some laid-off banker whining about how they can't find a job for over a million a year...well, I feel the same way a lot of people here do.
My previous advice would be in house counsel to a federal agency that doesn't do much litigation, though it's on the low end of your salary range. Now? Corporate counsel, probably.
There's surely lower-stress and lower-paying jobs outside of BigLaw firms? Or dropping down the rungs of the status ladder: consider being a legal secretary, for instance.
My sarcasm is about the desire to maintain the status of a job, even if taking a pay cut. Working for a senator as one of the suggestions? Never mind that is likely to involve stress and pressure too, but the notion that 'well yes it would be easier to sell to my parents that I'm working for Senator Nobbs at a mere $150 grand a year rather than working in the same field but as a lowly secretary' is what makes me smile wryly.
https://www.indeed.com/career/legal-secretary/salaries
You can have low stress, but the corollary of that is low pay (much lower than 150 grand) or you can have the pay that keeps you in the middle to upper middle-class lifestyle you expect, but you'll have to put up with hard grind.
I do think going for a medium-tier law firm would be more suitable, but that does depend on where the job is, and if the person would be willing to move to a different (lower cost of living) city.
https://www.sonderconsultants.com/articles/a-closer-look-why-lawyers-are-transitioning-from-top-tier-to-mid-sized-law-firms
Yes, it sounds unsympathetic, and utterly unnecessary. Like, do you have to? Could you just ignore this, you are not even trying to understand the context, nor you seem to be familiar with American/Californian pay structure. You don’t need to chime in with your sarcastic shit every time.
"Yes, it sounds unsympathetic, and utterly unnecessary. Like, do you have to?"
Skeleton at the feast. A reminder that not everyone lives according to a Californian pay structure, including lots of people living in California (or what is all the fuss about losing illegal immigrant labour for farm work about?)
Did anyone ask for a "reminder"? What does "illegal immigrant labor" have to do with the original question? If you have nothing useful to contribute, you don't have to say anything, this was a specific request, not a philosophical discussion, nor a feast requiring skeleton presence.
Your gears got ground, did they?
Yes. Was that the goal?
Some free advice--under no circumstances should she ever say "I was too stressed out and want a much less stressful job in the low six figures." Because people will laugh at her. I'm not saying her goals aren't possible. they're just not speakable.
When speaking to an employment counselor of the kind she is looking for she certainly should be saying it.
We're not talking about her saying that at job interviews.
Eh, I'd be cautious when speaking to an employment counsellor. I wouldn't mention stress. I'd say something like look, I want more of a life and I'm a hard worker and committed to remaining so. But I'm not looking for partner track at 30 or whatever. Can I do this in law as a specialist, or should I be looking at another career?
I'm not talking about a headhunter, I'm talking about a specialized kind of coach. People who use coaches disclose the relevant details about their inner state. For instance, top athletes talk in detail with sports psychologists about performance anxiety, failure to keep up training regimens, dark fantasies about failure, jealousy etc. They are there to get advice about how to manage that stuff. Maybe regarding the perrson I'm talking about it would be better to be using the word 'coach,' to make clear I am talking about a helping professional with whom the client can have confidential conversations with no need to do impression management.
Got it. But that's going to be really expensive, so maybe someone less expensive with less honesty is another option to consider if the full-metal version is too pricey.
The full-metal version is not too pricey.
re woke grants, it seems not implausible that while technically the system was already there, the way it worked such that adding woke sentences was a good strategy was a biden era phenomenon
Proposals are reviewed by other scientists, not Biden admin officials. So having a little extra DEI sprinkle *might* have gotten you a slightly better broader impacts score to the degree scientists were captured by the current zeitgeist (I say might because it wouldn't work on me, for instance). The way DEI is manifesting at the institutional level has been more programs created with a DEI "flavor". My feeling is that this grew a lot in the last four years, but I don't have numbers to confirm.
You might think that if you had never met a scientist. But if you've been involved in writing or reviewing grants at any point in the last few decades, you'd understand that you always wanted to include some sentences that might sound nice outreach to the broader public (and particularly the parts that are far from academia) to the average academic who knows nothing about your research area.
This just isn’t true. The better answer is more the Richard Hanania thesis: it is “woke” because it was required by legislation.
Source: personal experience. I am a professor at a research university with NSF funding. One of my grants related to polymer crystallization got flagged in Cruz’s list. I have participated on review panels, etc and am *currently a reviewer* for NSF grants.
So what happened? Did you promise to study polymers of color rather than white ones? ;-)
Ha! Exactly.
The grant I got was an NSF CAREER award, which necessarily includes an education plan (it is for pre-tenure professors and it is supposed to include a vision of future research and how this will integrate with education). In my education plan, I proposed to do various mentoring activities including visiting K-12 schools, mentoring undergraduates doing research, and producing a podcast. Because of the NSF BI, I included a few lines about making sure to have mentoring opportunities for women and minorities. I'm sure this is what got flagged.
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-368/comment/92403413.
9 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from February 10, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
32 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (down from 34 % on February 10, 2025).
59 % on Ukrainian defeat (up from 57 % on February 10, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
This update is brought to you by the fact that Trump administration just commenced what looks an awful lot like an attempt to browbeat Ukraine into accepting defeat.
What mildly surprises me is how many people in the EU and also apparently in Ukraine appear to be surprised by this. I am not (see relatively trivial movement in the forecast).
Unlike, with, say, threats to the territorial integrity of Denmark, Republicans clearly signaled before the elections they are likely to do this, so they have a clear political mandate for it. No one who pays attention should be surprised, regardless of whether it is a wise policy from the point of US national interest (which is very much debatable, though I am not actually interested in debating it).
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
I'm surprised you haven't updated more strongly on Ukraine defeat. I'd say 90% that peace is going to happen soon, and that Ukraine is getting the short end of the deal.
I read 91% weight assigned to that outcome in this estimate. Are you treating the 32% "sort of compromise, if you spin it enough" as somehow overstated? I think the current noises make this outcome seem even more likely.
I’m curious as to why you classify only the most optimistic outcome as Ukrainian victory, while classifying outcomes far less favorable than Russia’s initial goals as a Russian victory rather than a compromise? Maybe I’m not well enough informed, but I was under the impression the Russian government’s line was still that Zelensky is a Nazi who must be deposed. Is that not their public position?
I don’t mean to undercut the value of your forecasting, by the way; I really appreciate it. This is just a question about framing of the results.
Well, Putin, unlike Zelensky, has been smart enough to make his goals intentionally vague, but mainly because I am thinking about it from Ukrainian perspective.
If, for example, there would be a ceasefire tomorrow on the current line of contact minus Ukrainian, um, conquests in Kursk region, without any sort of guarantees of Western military involvement in case of another Russian attack, Ukrainians would largely see that as a defeat. Certainly it's light years away from goals announced by Zelensky (https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/ukrayina-zavzhdi-bula-liderom-mirotvorchih-zusil-yaksho-rosi-79141).
Fair enough I guess. I think their different situations go pretty far in explaining their different levels of communication: Zelensky leads a democracy fighting a defensive war, whereas Putin controls a state that, ultimately, does not need to know precisely what he wants in this war. I would feel comfortable intuiting Putin’s goal based on the start of the 2022 invasion, but I understand if you don’t want to make that a center point of your analysis
Honestly I think better explanation is that Zelensky is just brave but dumb (while Putin is evil but clever). The fact that he was democratically elected does not mean he has to be bad at diplomacy.
Agree.
> Zelensky leads a democracy fighting a defensive war
This might be a better look if elections were allowed in Ukraine.
It would be very challenging to conduct fair elections in Ukraine when large part of the country is under occupation, another large part of its population is abroad, and also polling places could be attacked from the air.
Theoretically this could be solved by remote elections, but that has its own huge problems.
So what? If having elections is difficult to do, does that mean not having them is the same thing as having them?
Clever. As much as I’m not a fan of this system, it’s in their constitution, and renewals of martial law have been continually passed by the Parliament with the approval of Ukrainians. I’m sure they have better people to blame for many of their current problems, including a guy who recently won an election in wartime!
The Ukrainian state is also imprisoning people for political dissent or even possession of left-wing literature
Does it matter to you that it's in their constitution? Is it true that, as long as a constitution somewhere describes any system, that system is a democracy?
When Napoleon was elected Emperor of the French, was that a victory for democracy?
I like reading these! One suggestion, I would enjoy seeing longer trends than change since last month, maybe “change from 6 months ago” as well?
Thanks, I did something like that way back in August 2023: https://aleszieglerenglish.substack.com/p/special-military-graph. Perhaps its time for an update?
Many Thanks!
a) Does anyone have any information on whether any of the major AI labs is _currently_ running recursive self-improvement? OpenAI's o3-deep-research (or, more precisely the internal successor system that achieved 50th best competitive programmer ranking while presumably retaining all of the other capabilities) seems like it is at least "within shouting distance" of being able to usefully do this. Anyone know, or see relevant information, for OpenAI or for other leading labs?
b) Sam Altman has publicly stated that he expects GPT5 to be smarter than he is. Has he made any statements anywhere about how he intends to control it, particularly to control any sub-goals it generates in the process of attempting any top level goal he sets for it?
Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness? Or is it a matter of just doing more of the kinds of special training (reinforcement learning etc etc), or of using the various familiar tweaks and trainings in a more efficient sequence? It seemed to me from what I read about DeepSeek that their training methods were the familiar ones, but the developers did them in a different order, or in different proportions, and so got more fine-tuning with less time and effort.
On the other hand, it does sometimes seem like we need a different paradigm in order to get an AI that can plan or speculate in the deep natural way we can, rather than via following a series of specified steps.
(I hate these things, yet can't help being fascinated by the challenge of improving them.)
> Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness?
I'm not sure whether inventiveness is *required*, but it is definitely not in short supply. I was very impressed by the recent Stanford work resulting in the s1 model [https://arxiv.org/html/2501.19393v2]. What they did was to create a quasi-synthetic mini-corpus of ultra-high quality *step-by-step reasoning* text. Adding that material to the training of an off-the-shelf Chinese open-weights non-reasoning model based on Llama resulted in o1 level performance on a math benchmark. And the cost of the extra training was $50.
Imo, further inventiveness in the curation and synthesis of training data will continue to yield big returns
>get an AI that can plan or speculate in the deep natural way we can<
Random association…different for everyone.
Many Thanks! I think that there is always a blurry connection between inventiveness and combining known options. In the extreme limit, in the realm of natural language, (almost) any inventive step can be replicated by taking all possible sequences of words and then choosing (by whatever means we use to _judge_ inventiveness) the best one.
Of course, this is spectacularly infeasible, but, say, taking triples of ideas from a set of a thousand and picking the best triple _is_ feasible. So, in that sense, I think automating inventiveness is feasible. And there are strategies sort-of like this: Pick partial sequences, discard the least promising 90% and try all extensions of the most promising 10%.
A _lot_ of inventiveness is just doing the usual generation of possibilities, but being willing to hold off on discarding "unpromising" ones just a little longer than usual, and spending just a bit more effort evaluating a wider set than usual.
A lot of the "increased test time compute" extensions over the past year seem to be somewhat along these lines.
> Do you think self-improvement at this point requires inventiveness? Or is it a matter of just doing more of the kinds of special training (reinforcement learning etc etc), or of using the various familiar tweaks and trainings in a more efficient sequence?
There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that's on the order of hyperparameter optimization, architecture tweaks, Mixture of Experts ordering, communication hyperparameters, and overall weights.
To the extent that extant State of the Art models can help automate exploration of those spaces, it can drive noticeable self-improvement without inventiveness. You can't just grid-search these things because of combinatorial explosion, so you need smarter ways to judge and evaluate the results. There are various mathematically bounded and implementable techniques (bandits, bayesian methods, meta-learning), but their relevance is highly contingent, and what you'd really like is a mind smart enough to try different things and note where things are generally headed, and we're probably just about getting there with o1 Pro levels of thinking now.
If we assumed that Anthropic and OpenAI have a model one generation better internally than they've made public, I think it's a pretty safe bet they're using that model for self-improvement.
Many Thanks! BTW, when you say "bandits", do you mean multi-armed bandit optimizations?
>I think it's a pretty safe bet they're using that model for self-improvement.
It is going to be a wild ride.
Yup, bandits and BOHB and the like.
Many Thanks!
“Sam Altman has publicly stated that he expects GPT5 to be smarter than he is.”
I can’t think of a more hilarious self-indictment.
Many Thanks! I disagree. The accuracy of reasoning in SOTA AIs is decent, but could use more improvement (which is an active area of work) and the _breadth_ of knowledge is enormous. I don't know how much improvement over o3-mini-high (the latest that I have access to) there will be in GPT5. I will try it out when I get access to it.
> recursive self-improvement
The strongest case of it existing is the 1% matrix multiplication improvement a year or so back
Many Thanks!
Why is it that hardly anyone talks about non-college educated white women as an important voter demographic?
Non-college educated white women just aren't part of the narrative. They don't fit into categories. Are they good or bad? Are they oppressors or oppressed? They're white which makes them bad, but they're women which makes them good, and then they're non-college-educated so nobody is sure whether they're supposed to be victims of a system that doesn't take proper care of them, or whether they're mouth-breathing violent hicks that need to be put down. They're just too "in-between" a category to ever appear in the New York Times.
I would argue this is a lot of the MAHA demographic
It is a swing demographic, no?
I think it doesn't fit the stories the media wants to tell. It goes against the 'Trump represents patriarchy' story (because a lot support Trump) and sort of implies bad things about the women because they're not college-educated. But I could be way off.
I've heard people talking about them about as much as you'd expect based on that level of specificity (they're not as clear a narrative as "non-college educated voters" in general, but they are a group campaigns talk about winning).
They mostly live in Trump country.
Lotta Trump country is in swing states, Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc.
Because moderately educated white men are the main swing demographic. They decide elections because they're just about in the center so which way they break tends to be the 50%+1.
It's a bit late to be talking about voter demographics, isn't it? Regardless, they don't seem like a meaningful demographic to target, seeing as they're just going to vote for who their husband tells them to...
College-educated women have higher rates of marriage than women without such degrees.
Most people still reasonably believe there will be midterm elections in 2026.
Is there a prediction market for “Will Trump declare a state of emergency before 2026?”
I'm not that familiar with prediction market websites but I wasn't able to find anything on Metaculus or Polymarket. Do you have a better idea of where or how to search for that? Were you joking?
I was wondering and ruefully joking at the same time. It’s not a ridiculous proposition imo.
Women are going to college at a higher rate then men and are more conformist then men
"Women are going to college at a higher rate then men"
Even so, the white female no-college demographic was larger than the white female college demographic:
https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0
Oh you meant all ages; I thought you wouldve meant young voters
What happened decades ago, while it of course will matter, the brain washing should have faded and its probably less cleanly modern democrat; a 60 year old hippie may have caught Bernie in a lie 2 decades ago and was friends with an *gasp* antivax before corona.
Its likely more predictive to count their children and if they own a house.
Young voters aren't an important voting demographic, regardless of what other demographic factors they have.
They didn't need to indoctrinate anyone to get vaccinated, it was considered obvious back then that you listen to your doctor for medical advice rather than some video game streamer or washed up MMA guy.
It used to be left wing to distrust pharma/chemicals; so a 60 year old women may have swapped as politics moved faster
> its not indoctrination for all the soviet economists to be for communism
Talking to a fish about water; its only not indoctrination if everyone is rational and thinking from first principals; public service announcements even for seatbelts or anti smoking are using manipulation not logic
>chemicals
They put dihydrogen monoxide in the water supply.
How are you preparing psychologically and otherwise with AGI coming?
I'm trying to balance living what little life we have left well with making a minimal effort to stop it from happening, and also a bunch of other things in case I'm wrong about everything. It's very scattershot. Also I just woke up from a bizzare nightmare where I told a group of AI researchers it wasn't worth killing everyone and they told me it was a beta move to not risk awesomeness.
I think AGI before 2035 is bullshit. I'd drop $2k on a charitable bet against it, if I thought anyone would let me give an AI tasks like "notice when one of my direct reports is having a rough time over several weeks of conversation and address the problem without being told this is the task" or "complete a day of work as a residential plumber with above-average results".
That being said, I'm preparing for narrower AI success by holding a bit of ASX:VTS and ASX:VGS. I'm also considering ASX:VAE.
Remember that CS Lewis essay on `living in an atomic age' that was doing the rounds in the early days of the pandemic? It seems apposite. If you somehow missed it, go ahead and google it now.
I alternate between all the different views on this thread. Sometimes I think it's going to be a huge issue. Other times I think it's mostly just a problem for software engineers, who just happen to be the people who panic about it the most.
Maybe the profession of "software engineer" goes the way of the profession of "typist" and all the other professions carry on except slightly more efficiently.
I actually wrote about this just today - I think that we're not going to so much get AGI as get a better idea of the concept of intelligence that bifurcates pretty strongly on eternal vs contextual knowledge - https://desystemize.substack.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-cant-you-die
Poorly.
It seems to me that once AI becomes smarter than an army of Einsteins (something I think will happen during Trump’s term), our online financial records are screwed. I think organized criminals will immediately get AGI to clean out many of our accounts and do so virtually overnight.
"clean out many of our accounts and do so virtually overnight"
Can you elaborate? There's no "clean out the account" option in banking. Which currently existing money transfer option do you propose they will use?
Mostly I've been grasping for other moments in history where there have been massively disruptive innovations, trying to do some pattern matching to make sense of the wave. I wrote about it extensively here (https://open.substack.com/pub/theahura/p/meditations-on-ai-and-the-future); tldr I think we're going to see a lot of labor shocks, followed by a period of decentralization as software (and everything) becomes more varied and increases in production quantity.
I'm just hoping so far that any ASI is kind. That, and reading a lot of interpretability papers to see what kind of controls we've found (steering seems pretty good!)
When did you stop beating your wife?
AGI bros say AGI is coming but they would say that, wouldn't they? They are all, all in on LLM as the route to it. My view is that "hallucination' is nothing of the kind, it's a symptom of fundamental uselessness, and we are in 1900 with Big Zeppelin desperately selling us the idea that they hold the key to commercial air travel.
More generally, we have always lived with the possibility of war or fatal illness or The Rapture being just round the corner. Keep calm and carry on is the best response, and hold an index fund.
Not coming anytime soon, nothing to prepare for.
(Repeating my answer from the subscribers-only open thread)
Starting a Substack. Questions I'm hoping to get a better handle on in the process:
1. How soon is AGI coming?
2. How can we make the disaster scenarios more concrete and intuitive for normal people to understand? (This feels critical for achieving the political will to pull the plug in some way.)
3. How likely is disaster?
4. How can we better think about the huge uncertainty we're facing?
5. And I guess also, what are the coolest toys and use cases in the meantime?
Number 4 ended up being my post for this past Friday, talking about Scott Aaronson's Five Worlds and Nate Silver's Technological Richter Scale.
I think it AGI is inevitable (95% confidence) and likely within the next decade (90%).
I think the worst thing we can do is sit by and watch as others make the inevitable real. The best we can do is leverage this emerging intelligence. But I am not smart enough to say how we do this, other than ask our rising robot overlords how we can improve our game.
My intuition tells us that humans are already too powerful and too stupid — a bad combo. Disaster is inevitable unless we (humans, culture, institutions and AI collectively) get a lot smarter and a lot more moral. I also suspect morality and intelligence are strongly correlated, so that gives me room for optimism.
Glee at people playing stupid games getting stupid prizes; ai isnt coming but I think the continuous bubble of tech may finally actaully pop; the "crash" of the dotcom still was slightly diversified pigs probably getting some stock in amazon, also 2008, shitcoins etc.
It be nice if someone doing a model of a zero infomation investor over this time period; but I suspect they still over preformed inflation and working with the knowledge add to society being "computer good"; it needs to hurt.
Corporates drinking thier own koolaid and "experimenting" with mass firing for chatgpt subscription will die on mass; "the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return"
I do not think it is in fact coming so I am not too worried. Machine Learning will impact some jobs of course, but I suspect we are starting to see the limits of the technology. AI is still useless even for stuff like answering customer support questions. A couple weeks ago I asked ChatGPT some questions about a book. I know it’s remarkable the AI can answer them at all, but it wasn’t even close to the same level of conversation with a halfway intelligent person (although it didn’t help that the AI kept hallucinating parts of the book).
The current models are way worse than humans in some respects, and, honestly, already superhuman in others. There is something of an art to posing the right questions when you have a superhuman genie to answer them.
relativity.
Obviously they can process information quickly, but in what other respects are they superhuman?
To put it another way, if AI was really a superhuman genie would you need to phrase a question in a very specific way in order to get the right answer?
Any AI need to know what you want in order to give you it. If you can't accurately express what you want, that's a lacking in you not in the AI.
AIs are already superhuman in that they 1) they have "read" and "remember" thousands of times as many books and other writings as any human has, 2) the kinds of writing they do, they can do thousands of times faster than a human can.
For what it’s worth, I often spend considerable in formulating the right questions when I’m going to ask a human expert.
I see what you mean, but I think there is a difference. If you ask the “wrong” question to a human expert you’ll still get a good answer, just not one that fulfills your need, but asking the wrong question to AI gets you a completely useless answer. Or at least one that isn’t very useful.
To put it another way, if you give the wrong question to the human the answer is still valuable, while for AI it is not the case.
fabulous
How did you upload the book & which ChatGPT?
It was Invisible Man…the AI seemed to know about it but got a lot wrong.
One important framing: it's useful to think of AI as reasoning machines, not search engines. A reasoning machine may not know everything about everything, but given the correct context will figure it out. A search engine may "know" everything about everything but can't reason about what it "knows". There's a lot of work in putting these two things together, but the reason gwern is asking how you uploaded the book is precisely because, on face, you're using it like a search engine instead of a reasoning machine.
Well, even aside from the stuff it got wrong it was not a good conversation. Like I said, any half intelligent human would have been infinitely more insightful. In fact the only use the AI had was the ability to instantly recall events from the book (although of course it didn’t get it all right).
How would the average person who hasn’t read the book in a year or two perform?
You’re expecting ChatGPT to be able to search the book for information about it, when it really only has loose information about it. It will probably get the character names right, and plot, but unless it’s an extremely widely discussed book like the Bible, it’s not going to perform well at that task.
You’re using it the wrong way, which will give you inferior results.
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